I was browsing through a book on Catholicism, as you do, and was struck by this description of one of the Spanish Inquisition's many interesting habits:
'Prisoners' hands would be tied behind their backs and their bodies then hoisted off the ground. They would be left suspended for hours or days until they were ready to 'confess' their sins. In another [torture method], the accused would be strapped to a trestle table, with their feet higher than their heads, while the priestly inquisitors would pour water down their throats.'
Go and see Moazzam Begg speak next week, I urge you.
I love the high-handed tone he adopts (it's not dissimilar to the tone I'm adopting, sharper readers will have noticed. But (a) I'm doing it to mock Nick, and (b) my reasoning skills are better than the ones on display in his column).
'Blessed be the atheists' he starts, with that intensely annoying, condescending attitude that some people have when speaking about a group you're determined not to address the actual arguments of. I use it myself sometimes - it's a time-saving exercise and it's frequently funny (at least, it is when I do it).
Thing is, if you're going to adopt this technique, you really need the argumentative chops in order to not look like a complete tosser. Does Nick have the chops? Let's see.
'Thanks be, then, to the atheists, who have this week launched their much-anticipated bus campaign. Religion in Britain has long been essentially a one-product market, "consumers" able to dodge the God question by scribbling "C of E" on various administrative forms and then forgetting all about it.'
Now, there are many things that religion can be said to be about. Religions are complex phenomena, immaterial and far from clearly objective. If it's about belief (which it isn't necessarily, a lot of it is about practice, and lots more is about cultural norms - which in itself brings in a whole host of other considerations like class, gender, ethnicity...) the sheer variation even within the same denomination can be remarkable - look at the trouble last year in the Anglican communion regarding gay bishops, for example. Religion defies easy categorisation.
But it is not a market. People, en masse, rarely choose a new one, and they certainly don't choose it like they would a fridge. Most people, I would say, do not, most of the time, seriously evaluate the coherence and implications of their professed faith. For example, I know many Muslims who drink. I know Catholics who use contraception and have pre-marital sex. Famously, Hitler claimed to be a Christian (of course, one of the interesting features of religion is that membership is largely a self-defined thing. A church may chuck you out, but since the ultiimate authority capable of making the decision is not usually contactable by phone, there's usually not much to be done if someone insists they are one. Short, of course, of calling out the Spanish Inquisition, or the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue to see if they can persuade you).
Sorry for the exegesis, but it does seem important. Let's move on.
To be fair, he has a point here.
'The truly wonderful thing about the campaign is that it does that most un-English thing. It mentions God in public.'
I knew it! compulsory RE until the age of 16, the 76% of people in the UK who identified a religious preference at the last census, Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day, Prayer for the Day, The Big Questions and its predecessor The Heaven and Earth Show, the National Anthem and the monarchy are beamed in from an underwater volcano off the coast of Belgium!
'If belief in God is indeed as transparently nonsensical as (some) atheists make out, if the faithful are such idiots, their churches and synagogues so dehumanising, and religion such a grotesque and malign virus, that is precisely what will happen.
'If bendy buses can help effect that demise, Richard Dawkins will have spent his money wisely and Theos foolishly. But somehow I doubt they will.'
Straw Man ahoy! Again he confuses God and religion. And who has claimed that religious people are stupid? I know of many people who have claimed specific religious ideas are stupid - literal interpretations of Genesis for example. But I think most people are aware that people accept religious ideas for a variety of reasons without making them idiots.He's right that the adverts will not really acomplish some mass rise in atheism though. Like I say, religion's just a bit too complicated to be defeated by the palpable absence of God(s).
*As an aside, I love that the buses are now considered atheistic. In what world does that make sense? The same world where there are PIN Numbers presumably. Heigh ho.
1) Hinduism has roughly 330 million gods
2) Jews consider the story of the clearly sectionable Abraham attempting to butcher and burn his own son a suitable topic for New Year sermons
3) Pilgrims to Mecca for the Hajj perform the S'ai ritual (running between two hills seven times in succession) along a specially constructed air-conditioned corridor
4) Judaism is younger than Christianity
5) In 1956 Dr B. R. Ambedkar led a mass conversion of more than 500,000 dalits (untouchables) from Hinduism to Buddhism
6) This
is in Neasden.
Tarski's solution was the object language and the metalanguage. That is to say that a logical problem could be formulated, and this would be expressed in the object language, and a meatalanguage could be brought into play to analyse it, thus satisfactorily resolving the problem.
Thanks to this notion of analysis superimposed on analysis, the internet won't have to eat itself with this article: The discussion of religious differences online is not a game.
It is an internet article about how people on the internet misrepresent and slander others about their religious viewpoints, in which the author misrepresents some of the proponents.
Just to be clear on this Andrew: there are no New Atheists. There are atheists, but there's nothing particularly new about them. Tom Paine was an atheist you know. And when you say
'But then Myers is also the author of the The Courtier's Defence, a little essay described by Dawkins as "brilliant" because it claims that there is no need for atheists to understand what theologians say because they already know that the theologians are talking about something that doesn't exist. This dismissal, in advance, of everything your opponents might say as meaningless is the hallmark of all popular philosophical or religious discussion on the internet'
Some might accuse you of missing the point, and considering the fundamental way that you've missed the point, you could even say you misrepresented it Andrew. You see, the Courtier's Reply is an argument ad absurdum about the fundamental lack of evidence for the existence of a deity. So in it, the reason you don't need to be familiar with every theological argument is because they don't refer to the existence of God(s) in an evidential way. If you're going to evaluate claims for the existence of God, that is not a theological task. That is a philosophical task. Theology is about arguments internal to systems of belief, not about demonstrating the basis for those beliefs.
It goes like this:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's 'masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. ... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.'
So like I say, thank goodness for Alfred Tarski, or I'd probably be picking bits of exploded internet out of my hair for a month.
I’m going to take Mark’s CiF rant piece by piece just to show how dumb it is. I’m doing this because there’s been quite a lot of this anti-rational stuff about recently, and Mark’s a prime example of why it’s really vital not to pay attention to it.
God is behind some of our greatest art
Richard Dawkins' secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration
Oookay. Here we go!
1) First things first, because you seem to be a little confused here, Mark. ‘The IDEA of God is behind some of our art’. Fixed that for you.
2.1) Richard Dawkins does not have an army of anything.
2.2) Richard Dawkins makes quite clear in The God Delusion that he is absolutely in favour of religious education. As he himself says,
A good case can indeed be made for the educational benefits of teaching comparative religion. Certainly my own doubts were first aroused ... by the lesson that the Christian religion in which I was brought up was only one of many mutually incompatible belief-systems. ... Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so. (Dawkins 2007, pp.382-3)
Now, I’m not saying that it’s a bad sign that the author of this article is wrong three times in just the title and abstract. I’m going to ask you to draw your own conclusions.
And so the stellar casting in Doctor Who continues with the news that Professor Richard Dawkins, biologist and bestselling author of The God Delusion, is to appear in the current series as himself. On Outpost Gallifrey, the definitive Doctor Who website, I read that Russell T Davies, the show's executive producer, and all the crew were delighted to see Dawkins. "People were falling at his feet," says Davies. "We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins that people were worshipping."
It's a great tribute to our age that a scientist can still be greeted with more adulation than a pop princess. But I can't help noting the irony of the imagery that Dawkins' reception has conjured up. Falling at his feet? Worshipping? It all seems oddly reminiscent of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the days before his Passion; a strange resonance for the scientist who has declared himself the champion of secularism in a world where, he claims, the delusions of faith are gaining an increasing stranglehold.
Riiight. It’s probably worth mentioning that Mark has actually checked out Outpost Gallifrey. This is the only actual research he appears to have done, so it would be a disservice to his scholarship not to note that he can successfully use browsing software. It’s just that for the most part he chooses not to.
3) If you’d bothered to do more than the most cursory research, for example Google would have brought you this, you would have found that Richard Dawkins holds quite some significance for Doctor Who fans because
(a) he was a close friend of Douglas Adams, sometime script editor of the show and
writer of at least 2 serials in its heyday.
(b) He is married to Lalla Ward, who played Romana II in Doctor Who whilst
Adams was script editor.
(c) why wouldn’t you like him? It’s not like he bears any resemblance to the bizarre
character you’ve painted in this piece.
4) It is not reminiscent of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. There are no similarities except that both are scenes in which someone is liked. You might as well say that my arrival at my birthday party is like the funeral of Bishop Romero. The reason you think it’s ‘strange’ is because it’s a completely unwarranted comparison. Have you ever noticed how bubblegum is kind of like that ball from The Prisoner? Isn’t that weird?
Christianity is a myth. But it's a myth that has helped us - and continues to help us - ask searching moral and philosophical questions. Ours is an age in which a lack of belief, at least in secular Europe, is prized. Before, having one overarching belief was central to life, guiding our choices.
5) Ho hum. Still, at least you’re conceding the ground about actual facts and truth. This way I don’t have to waste any more time pointing out how little actual reason to suppose the existence of god there is.
6) Actually, I think you’ll find that discussion about moral and philosophical questions was going on slightly before the Jesus myth. I believe it was Whitehead who said ‘all philosophy is a footnote to Plato,’ and although I don’t necessarily agree with that statement I think you will find if you can be bothered to look, Mark, that most post-Christian philosophy was built on the work of the Greeks – particularly Aristotle.
But now we're all supposed to travel light, be supple, so that we can swap jobs, partners or political allegiances at a moment's notice. But this perpetual state of agnosticism, this lack of commitment, must surely be corrosive.
7) This supposition about how we’re supposed to live is yet another straw man. Well done, you must have enough to keep the cattle supplied all winter by now. Who says this? Certainly not Dawkins, who you’re supposed to be attacking (if you can remember your own abstract)
Those who are able to locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief, be that religious or political, are surely making a valuable contribution to our times. We may not share their beliefs, but we should treasure them.
8) What does it mean to ‘locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief’? If a radical Islamist takes their ideological position to its logical end and starts a bombing campaign against Muslims who have lost their way, does that count as intelligent exploration? If not, why not? Shouldn’t you be wowing me with this Christian philosophy that helps you so much, rather than chucking ill-informed and poorly defined sophistry about?
9) Whose beliefs should I treasure here? There are plenty of belief systems that I’m actively hostile to. Fascism, for example. Stalinism. Capitalism. What is there to treasure here? I should also add that if it is my belief that I don’t have to respect someone’s Catholicism to respect their right to believe it, your philosophy requires you to treasure that, even though it is fundamentally incommensurable with your own belief system. Wow, way to tie yourself up in knots there. I’d love to know how you’d react if you saw a racially motivated assault – how are you going to hug the guy on the ground as well as the guy putting the boot in?
As a child, I had a few years of passionate interest in the church. I'm not sure I ever connected with the spiritual aspect of God.
10) Does this mean that you connected with the physical aspect of God then?
I went to a Methodist church, where we were more robustly pragmatic than metaphysical, but I loved biblical stories more than any other children's literature. The great, essential dramas of father and son, mother and child, brother and brother, were fought out on those pages and gripped my imagination. I loved the sometimes mysterious beauty of the King James Bible, and I loved singing along with the great marching, proto-socialist anthems of the Methodist church.
11) You liked stories when you were a child. Thank goodness you got the ones with gods in then, because clearly if you’d had Harry Potter instead you’d have turned out much much worse.
As my teenage years hit, so did disillusion, and I retreated into my bedroom with a stack of records and John Peel for company. But I'm sure the narrative, ritual and music of the church were an essential part of my education as a writer. I'm not alone. The late Sarah Kane acknowledged that her youthful Christianity was the single most formative influence on her playwriting. It's strange to think that her Blasted and my Shopping and Fucking wouldn't have been written without the Christian church. But that's the truth. There's something about their sharp iconography and intense language that suggests a youthful experience of Christianity on the part of the writer.
12) So what if Christianity influenced you? Are you really saying that you couldn’t have written anything without it, or that what you wrote wouldn’t have been as good if you hadn’t had that influence? How on earth can you possibly justify that claim?
And I resent the possibility that aggressive secularism would deny future generations this inspiration.
13) And just to drag your resentment down to boring old facts again, Dawkins is actually in favour of R.E. so if his will were done on earth, your kids would be able to learn about a variety of religious belief in school (rather more varied than Methodism in fact). They just wouldn’t be taught that it was true. Which, since you’ve already acceded that your religion is a myth, shouldn’t really bother you now should it?
The Bible - as literature, if nothing else - should be an essential part of every child's experience. And children should study the great Christian art of the past, too. We often have a revisionist view of this great legacy of paintings, music and literature. Of course, we can't help denying the beauty and resonance of the Sistine Chapel, Handel's Messiah, Milton's Paradise Lost or the York mystery plays. But we like to tell ourselves that their creators were covert humanists, who wanted to make art and had no choice other than to make it within the confines of a church that held all the power and money.
14) Oh, really? All of it? Including the bits that condone slavery, condemn homosexuality, and require you to kill people for planting different crops next to each other?
15) Oh, really? Just the Bible then? Not the Koran, or the Torah, not the Analects or the Shruti and Smriti? Wow. For that matter, since you’re concerned for the safety of post-Christian philosophy, why not the Meditations, or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding or Fear and Trembling or the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or The World as Will and Representation or The Critique of Pure Reason or Twilight of the Idols? Thus Spake Zarathustra is a great piece of literature, by the way.
16) I don’t know how many people attribute humanism to Michaelangelo. Certainly being gay in Roman Catholic Italy can’t have been much fun at times, but since humanism wasn’t invented it would seem really odd to attribute that to him. Let’s check your sources for this bold assertion. Oh, right. You haven’t given any.
This idea that all artists are essentially humanists is a comforting myth for an agnostic age. There is little evidence to support it. It is, if you like, the agnostic's delusion - because the very opposite is true. The greatest artists, from Matthias Grünewald in the 15th century to Benjamin Britten in the 20th, had a genuine Christian faith: complicated, questioning, agonised at times, as any intelligent faith should be, but a very real faith all the same.
17) It certainly seems to be a myth. A myth that you just started, right now. Well done you – let’s see if it lasts as long as Jeebus, eh?
The church continues to play a largely beneficent role in the arts ecology of Britain. It maintains and restores the legacy of church architecture - an important collection of beautiful buildings whatever your beliefs. And churches up and down the country offer, as any working musician will testify, a fantastic programme of recitals and concerts of both secular and religious pieces, often for free or for a low ticket price. Areas where there is little access to live classical music are having that provision met almost entirely by the church. The more enlightened churches are still commissioning work, from paintings to sculptures and music.
18) Landlords in maintenance of their property shocker.
19) You obviously haven’t been to visit York Minster recently then. I go to the city every 2 months and I still can’t justify the ticket price to go in and have a look. To get in there and go up the tower I’d have to part with the best part of a tenner.
20) Regarding the many beautiful buildings that you can see for free. Durham Cathedral for example. Good for them. What’s your point?
Of course, we have to guard against the aggressive and restrictive fundamentalism that has poisoned so much of America. In the US, evangelicals and fundamentalists have now strangled school curricula and stunted, if not actually dictated, the agendas of arts organisations, leaving the nation culturally poorer. But we're not America. Our Christian tradition is very different.
21) Ah, so you’ve heard of the Vardys then? On the off-chance that you haven’t, luckily Dawkins has. In The God Delusion, which you’ll obviously be familiar with since you’ve attempted a character assassination of its author in the national press, Dawkins notes a lecture given by the head of science at Gateshead’s Emmanuel College in 2001. Entitled ‘The Teaching Of Science: A Biblical Perspective’(Dawkins 2007, pp.373-4) Stephen Layfield says
Let us state then right from the start that we reject the notion ... that there are ‘Two Books’ (i.e. the Book of nature & the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for the truth. Rather, we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. ... the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments ... provide us with a true account of Earth history which we ignore at our peril (ibid. pp.375-6)
So it’s a good job you actually did some research before you leapt there.
We should celebrate the Christian legacy in western art and society - and stop the Dawkins army from denying us the possibility of drawing inspiration from faith to create the art of the future.
22) Actually Dawkins does like the bits of the Christian legacy that aren’t ideologically suspect. He says, for example,
Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to convince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage. (ibid. p.387)
So thank goodness you’ve not massively misrepresented his clearly stated arguments. And frankly, thank goodness that Dawkins is not a litigious man.
23) Create faith-based art if you want. No one’s going to stop you. The Catholic church and the C of E are both richer than Croesus so I suspect there’ll always be grants for you.
24) I can’t help suspecting that you’re not worried about an army of secularists, but that religious-inspired art is irrelevant to truth, at least as regards its religious content. Don’t worry though! If it’s good art, it will reveal the world of the artist regardless of whether they were right about their invisible friends.
25) Actually, I can’t help notice one other feature about yourself that has been revealed by this article – your monumental laziness. This has got to be one of the most poorly thought-out defences of religious thought that I have ever seen. Even John Gray went to the trouble to mis-quote Dawkins and use his words out of context – but that’s another story.
Dawkins, R. The God Delusion. Black Swan 2007.
Now, it's tempting to simply mock the man who's done more to radicalise Islam than anyone apart from Dubya for his apparently blissful ignorance, but I can't resist a bit of cod-psychologising.
If it's true that the true artist only ever paints himself, I think we can all agree that Our Tone is a bit of a Michaelangelo. So bearing that in mind, before we take him by the hand of history and lead him gently toward the social worker of fate, I'm tempted to see this speech as a final warning before he puts the underpants on his head, the pencils up his nose and says "wibble."
By 'extremism' I'm tempted to read his recent full-on conversion to Catholicism and away from new-age primal scream therapy. By 'irrelevance' ... well...
*ahem*
And it gets better. Here's Blair on why he doesn't talk about religion all that much.
"There is an assumption that before you take a decision you engage in some slightly cultish interaction with your religion. Third, you want to impose your religion on others. Fourth, you are pretending to be better than the next person. And finally, and worst of all, that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics."
Let's take that one at a time shall we?
1)slightly cultish interaction with your religion
As a Catholic who practices ritual cannibalism every week I don't know why he'd think that.
2)you want to impose your religion on others
Anthon Seldon notes
"Blair's Catholicism is different in one way to that of many of his new compratiots. He believes that all true religion can lead equally to God. His Interfaith Foundation, to be launched next year, will aim to bring together like-minded believers of all faiths."
Unfortunately because religion is entirely derived from authority that cannot be actually witnessed, 'true' is a rather flexible value. What it effectively means is 'I want to impose my value of true on you'.
3)And finally, and worst of all, that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics
Unlike for example, self-serving justifications for Iraq such as the 'hand of history'. I don't think God is special for Blair in his quest for legitimacy, it's just the latest in a long line of appeal-to-authority excuses. Hopefully others will also see it as such.
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