Liberalism and Secularism: Not One And The Same

Yeah, that Alasdair Macintyre guy is such a wanker.

I keep on getting reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s quip, in response to his days’ equivalent of Hitchens, that a clever Jesuit could destroy the standard athiest argument in five minutes.

Seriously, I can understand the problem when athiests enter the public discourse. In the United States, flouride is put in water. Only the nuttiest of wing-nuts objected to this, on wingnutty grounds, but in fact most countries don’t put flouride in water and its actually a questionable practice. If you question the science behind this idea, you are marked out as weird, and yet it has real concrete public policy consequences. If you believe that there is no god or gods, it probably would drive you up the wall to see religious institutions get a tax exemption, for athiests to be effectively excluded from high political office, to see religious movitived terrorism, to see a good deal of education still in religous hands, etc., all on the basis of an incorrect belief. I’m a believer and I still object to all of the above.

As a result, athiests’ public arguments tend to focus on the problems with bad public policies and private practices justified by religious belief, rather than their stronger card, which is the unlikelyhood of religious belief according to current scientific method. And their arguments can therefore either appear petty, or can be refuted by examples of where religious belief has, in fact, had a positive influence on public police.

Stanley Fish is 180 degrees off the mark.

Almost all liberal ideas originiated as religious ideals. For example, the anti-slavery movement, the movement for political rights for racial minorities and the movement for women’s rights were first advanced in this country on religious grounds by Puritans, Quakers, and other religius movements and organizations.

Authoritarianism is the opposite and the opponent of liberalism. In Europe, the Nazi and Communist parties have been the vehiles of intolerance and authoritarianism. “Party descipline” and loyalty to the national leader and the fatherland were used to deny all legitimacy to those who disagreed with “THE AUTHORITY” (Hilter, the Party, Stalin, etc.)

In this country, Autoritarians have relied on the claim the “God is on our side” and that “if you disagree with our political position, you are not a Christian” (or otherwise a religious person) to deny all legitimacy to those who disagree with the Authoritarians’ political positions.

Where churches would not prostitute themselves to this raw polical power grab, some activists used political techniques to take over or attempt to take over churches and denominations (witess the use of UnChristian and ruthless political campaigns by Paige Patterson, Zig Ziglar, et al. to take over the Southern Baptist Convention and the attempt by the Creedal Movement to take over the United Methodist Church).

Deeply-held religious beliefs and religious movements and awakenings have, more often than not, led men and women to oppose injustice and intolerance and to work for social change and liberal ideals.

Unfortunately, a generation ago the Republican Party sold its soul to Southern (and Northern and Western) segregationist and ultra-right wingers because the Party was so desperate to become a party-in-power again. The segregationist and ultra-right wingers were authoritarian Christians who had historically opposed an end to slavery, later promoted Jim Crow, and then opposed civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities and opposed rights for women (with campaign slogans in the 1960’s of “keep ’em pregnant and barefooted”).

It is the ultra-right that is promoting revisionist history of the United States and revisionist history of Christianity (and other religions). They are the ones who are betraying the history and theme of religion in America.

A few years ago a colleague of mine in grad school was writing a paper for a sort of interdisciplinary humanities thing. He wanted to beat up on relativism, but as it turned out it was pretty hard to find relativists saying stupid things, stupid relativists being more creatures used to scare kids and the like than real dangers. But then he found what he was looking for, Stanley Fish, and everyone was happy. Here you had a big name saying first-class stupid relativist things. I guess if he didn’t exist we’d just have to invent him.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion.

I discovered, when I read past the first three paragraphs and swallowed my anger at the beginning, that Fish actually says just what you’re saying here. You just have to get past the stupid shit to discover it.

Fish always reminds me of the old grad school bit about how every philosophy paper has two parts: the part where you put it out and the part where you take it back. Except that Fish’s writings always take the taking back to absurd lengths, which is why I’ve given up reading his stuff. The first couple of paragraphs are always a lure that is stuffed with red meat in order to attract attention. By the last paragraph, little or nothing is left.

Oh, if only Lodge had had the foresight to give Maurice Zapp an op-ed column.

There’s a difference between religious faith and organized religion, you know. Most organized religions do deserve a bit of destructive passion, I think. You want religion – go Unitarian.

I like Dawkins because he demonstrates that the alleged “fundamental human need” for religion is not really a need for supernatural belief, but is actually just a specific expression of the fundamental human need to behave like a twat while pretending to be really virtuous.

Let’s see. Fish:

In saying this, I am not criticizing liberalism, just explaining what it is. It is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion – the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge – as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality.

Of course, every single strong religion holds precisely the same conviction about every other strong religion, apart from itself. A fundamentalist Christian deems “unreasonable and irrational” not just secular and religious liberals, but also fundamentalist Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Communists and every other non-fundamentalist Christian on the planet. Liberals are intolerant of Nazis, radical Muslim theocrats, and people who are holding knives to their throats; hence the circle of their tolerance is incomparably vaster than that of, say, Pat Robertson.

One thing we can’t do is appeal to some common ground that might form the basis of dialogue and possible rapprochement. There is no common ground, and therefore Lilla is right to say that “agreement on basic principles won’t be possible.” After all, it is a disagreement over basic principles that divides us from those who have been called “God’s warriors.” The principles that will naturally occur to us – tolerance, mutual respect, diversity – are ones they have already rejected ; invoking them will do no real work except the dubious work of confirming us in our feelings of superiority.

Clearly, the existence of a country composed of adherents of different and radically opposed religious faiths, as well as those who profess no faith at all, is completely impossible. Such a country would tear itself to pieces within a few short decades on the barbs of its own contradictions.

Oh wait. Experimental evidence shows that such countries boast the world’s most resilient and prosperous societies.

But while convincing in practice, such a situation is impossible in theory; so, it does not exist.

Religious people do seem to find it very difficult to handle the question “where’s the evidence?”. Which is really the only question Dawkins is asking.

Religious people do seem to find it very difficult to handle the question “where’s the evidence?”. Which is really the only question Dawkins is asking.

The trouble is that they give him the only answer that could possibly be given (ie, a non-natural answer involving something like direct revelation) and he can’t handle that either.

I’d have thought the question was the point, given that the answer is so important.

If Dawkins thinks that the existence or otherwise of God is not important, why exercise oneself so much as to which answer people believe? I can’t believe it’s just the method that concerns him.

I would have thought the answer was important, too, not least for the traditional reason that if I am wrong I am going to have to do some fast talking after my demise in order to explain some of my more aggressive statements about the deity.

I know enough about astrology to draw natal charts and explain them, and I have, and I know enough physics, astronomy, biology and psychology to convince anyone capable of entertaining an argument why astrology is a waste of time on the order of doing crossword puzzles.

Instead of going into detail I prefer to note that, as a Virgo, I don’t believe in astrology.

There really don’t seem to be very many supernatural events. Perhaps fairies and elves, gnomes and ghosts are limited to one-night stands and Thor somehow prohibited from striking lightning in the same place twice. With only anecdotal evidence to the contrary, practically speaking, there’s no downside to the assumption of their absence.

So why not say so?

Perhaps fairies and elves, gnomes and ghosts are limited to one-night stands and Thor somehow prohibited from striking lightning in the same place twice.

I saw a troll crossing recently, a spot where trolls cross the road; they have a special sign there. Not internet trolls like me but the real ones. Well, not the real ones but… ah, forget it.

With only anecdotal evidence to the contrary

See this is the rhetorical move which renders the whole dispute pointless. If you’re going to rule out people’s personal testimony of their religious experience as “anecdotal”, “subjective”, etc, then you’ve ruled out the only possible evidence they would ever be able to give. Which might be fair enough for all sorts of contexts (deciding on school curricula, etc), but which does actually mean that you’re not achieving the destruction of religion by reason which was advertised on the book cover.

If you’re going to rule out people’s personal testimony of their religious experience as “anecdotal”, “subjective”, etc, then you’ve ruled out the only possible evidence they would ever be able to give. Which might be fair enough for all sorts of contexts (deciding on school curricula, etc), but which does actually mean that you’re not achieving the destruction of religion by reason which was advertised on the book cover.

But that’s not what was advertised on the cover. What’s advertised is the demolition of the “rational” arguments for religion – design in nature, Pascal’s wager, the First Cause, etc. Dawkins fully admits that you can’t “destroy” by reason belief in a theologian’s God who has no empirical effects on the universe. He merely tries to argue that postulating such a God is unncecessary, and that the God(s) that billions of people actually believe in, as described in the Bible or the Koran or other texts, demonstrably does not exist.

If you’re going to rule out people’s personal testimony of their religious experience as “anecdotal”, “subjective”, etc, then you’ve ruled out the only possible evidence they would ever be able to give. Which might be fair enough for all sorts of contexts (deciding on school curricula, etc), but which does actually mean that you’re not achieving the destruction of religion by reason which was advertised on the book cover.

No rational criticism can touch a position so carefully defended against it; that’s not news (to Dawkins any more than to anyone else). But your description pertains only to the beliefs of a rather small elite. Especially so in the US, where by far the most prevalent, noisiest and most influential forms of religion are of the “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” variety.

I seem to recall that Berlinerblau’s article was bereft of even one example of one of these author’s actually “referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth….” (I suspect Fish’s piece suffers the same infirmity, but I’m not inclined to pay “select” prices to find out.)

I don’t know about you, but in school I was taught to show my work.

As to where’s the evidence, Christians think that God was a historical figure, who lived among us, and whose actions and claims to divinity were recounted by eyewitnesses. This is the most popular theistic religion.

Muslims think that God spoke directly to an undisputed historical figure. This is the second most popular religion. So the majority of theists have conceptions of God backed by historical events that either happened or didn’t happen, and can be examined in light of the evidence. Another problem with the athiest critique is the assumption that everyone believes in the Jewish God.

Since those events quite clearly didn’t happen in the way that Christians and Muslims believe (which is why the 19th-century advent of the “higher criticism” caused such consternation among Christians, and why attempts to apply the same methods to the Koran result in death threats), how is that “[a] problem with the athiest [sic] critique”? And the reasons for not believing in other gods (apart from the vaporous non-personal “god” with no observable effect on the universe) are pretty much the same as for the God of th Abrahamic religions, so there’s no “problem” there either. (A focus on Christianity and Islam is amply justified by their numerical preponderance and correspondingly powerful influence.)

So the majority of theists have conceptions of God backed by historical events that either happened or didn’t happen, and can be examined in light of the evidence

The majority of believers in evolution think that man was descended from apes, which is a historical event that didn’t happen. The majority of believers in electrons think that they are little objects orbiting the nucleus, which they aren’t. The majority of believers in gravity believe in something like Newton’s Law, which isn’t accurate. C’mon, for Dawkins’ sake, you argue against something based on its strongest and most defensible case, not on “what most people believe” (which itself is a sociological claim which ought to be substantiated).

In any case, it’s not like Dawkins or Dennett give any more slack at all to New Agey types who believe in undifferentiated “spirituality” without support from false historical claims.

My main horse in this race, by the way, is that the kind of thinking that starts people trying to call themselves “Brights” needs to be combatted right from the get-go, and this is where it has its root.

Fluoride “has no real concrete public policy consequences”? How about the public health benefit of keeping teeth in people’s heads?

“A compilation of 120 fluoridation studies from all continents (Murray & Rugg-Gunn, 1979) showed a reduction in caries in the range of 50 – 75% for permanent teeth and about 50% for primary teeth, in children, 5 – 15 years of age, following life-long consumption of fluoridated water… [C]ontinued exposure to fluoride ions has a caries-protecting capacity in adults… In addition to the reduction in enamel caries, fluoride ions will also significantly reduce the prevalence of cemental caries… This fact is of importance for middle-aged and old people whose root-surfaces are often exposed by gingival recession.”

Report produced jointly by the UN Environmental Health Program, the ILO and the WHO, 1984. http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc36.htm#SectionNumber:6.1

Here in the US, most people of all economic classes have reasonably strong teeth. Visibly bad teeth here are a sign of poverty. In England, many ordinary working and middle class people have terrible teeth. The difference is fluoridation.

A large part of his argument – as expressed for example in his recent TV show – is that the method by which we come to knowledge is all important.

Well, we don’t get the TV show here (and if we did, they’d only dub it) but surely it’s integral to what Dawkins argues that a consequence of poor method is that you end up with things like belief in God, which he manifestly has a problem with?

the kind of thinking that starts people trying to call themselves “Brights” needs to be combatted right from the get-go

I agree with this to a large extent – it’s no way to make friends and influence people – but on the other hand is there a nice way of saying “look, you’re making this stuff up and it matters”? And can we expect everybody who makes a rational point to make it in a rational manner?

I’d much prefer the “Brights” stuff to be shelved, it’s not very bright. But I do have something of an old-fashioned solidarity function which says that I should defend and understand the people who are on the side I’m on as well as criticising them.

Muslims think that God spoke directly to an undisputed historical figure. This is the second most popular religion. So the majority of theists have conceptions of God backed by historical events that either happened or didn’t happen, and can be examined in light of the evidence. Another problem with the athiest critique is the assumption that everyone believes in the Jewish God.

God is speaking directly to me right now, and is telling me you are full of shit. Use evidence to disprove it, if you don’t believe me.

Things look a bit different on that score in George Bush’s America than they do in the much less religiose UK. (And western Europe arguably became less relgiose in the first place because of people in past generations who were willing to “get up in people’s faces”. )

the general project of getting up in people’s faces about their imaginary friends

Thing is (a Catholic writes) their imaginary friends are in our faces all the time and this does matter. You don’t have to say “everybody who believes in God is a cretin” and of course should not do so: but there is, I think, a lot of value in shouting “STOP!”. To my mind Dawkins’ great virtue is that he has brought the whole question of God-belief out into the open, to be discussed and argued over, for the first time I can remember.

If he doesn’t make the case in quite the way people would like him to – well, nobody’s perfect and other people may make it in a different way. But he’s opened a box that I think needed opening: and I do not see how we can deal with the question of “public policy” unless that box is opened.

“(and potentially pernicious in itself, as there are plenty of “Brights” who apparently want to pass laws telling women what they can and can’t wear in public).”

Laws (rather, school board rules) applicable to children, both sexes, in public schools. Not emancipated women. So this is an unnecessary slur. Or maybe you refer to reactions to extreme versions of Hijab, which is it?

#57 – and I suspect that a number of those who are keenest to bang on about democracy in the context of Middle Eastern invasions will be less keen to do so in this one.

Hmmm, all that space spent by Mr. Fish, et al., whining about what other people are saying, but not making a case for religion.

I wonder why?
.

Humanism… whether it’s secular or not doesn’t seem to make much difference.

humanism noun 1 a system of thought which rejects the supernatural, any belief in a god, etc, but holds that human interests and the human mind are paramount, that humans are capable of solving the problems of the world and deciding what is or is not correct moral behaviour.

Whatever, engels. I don’t really understand why rejection of “any belief in a god, etc.” should be a requirement here. And what’s behind that “etc”, btw, can one believe in, say, homeopathy or lucky numbers (or something) and remain a humanist?

Dawkins militant atheism is derived from militant theism. He’s a foundationalist who’s as terrified of relativism as any priest. His defense of science is that it’s not man made.

As I’ve said before the problem isn’t religion it’s faith, and that will never go away. You want an example read Chomsky. His assumptions are his faith. Every time you gloss over an illogic to defend what you believe it’s an act of faith; and how are you going to banish that? The only way is to pretend that you never slip up. The only way to do that is TO LIE.
Dawkins is also as terrified as a priest of the transformation of thought into historical document. He wants absolutes. There are none. In the end in human experience we’re all subject to ethnography.

Dawkins militant atheism is derived from militant theism.

Care to defend this bizarre proposition rather than expecting us to take it on your say-so?

Dawkins is a scientist. He is extremely well aware that science deals in provisional truths and in probabilities- indeed, he is at pains to emphasize that as a vital way in which it differs from the false certainties of religion. Only the most incompetent reader of his works could claim that he’s some kind of frustrated foundationalist.

Sorry about the borked blockquote tag. Note to self- use the damn preview!

For the first one, define your terms, for the second, it’s not as thought atheists haven’t addressed this question.

Natural law in its contemporary formulation as human rights or universal rights are fine and dandy as an expression of how some of us would like the world to be, but you’d have a hard time providing evidence for their existence beyond their being a manifestation of human imagination and aspiration. Yet, they are immensely powerful concepts that guide our actions. In the case of the self, we seem to have the irrefutable evidence of first-hand experience, but on closer inspection we see that this doesn’t amount to much in terms of objective evidence. The same can be said about concepts such as consciousness, free will and morality. They are vital to our understanding of the world, as well as to our social interactions and our legal system – yet when we examine these concepts and their evidential basis, we see that science still can’t tell a whole lot about them. We use these concepts out of convenience and necessity, but we haven’t even understood yet what a scientific explanation of these phenomena might possibly look like. Science might significantly alter our understanding of them, render them obsolete or we might find out that a scientific explanation will ultimately miss the point and we will never be able to give a comprehensive scientific description of them.

I am an atheist myself and am not saying that religious explanations will help us much in this regard. But considering the scientific status quo, I think demanding that all our concepts be based on hard evidence is a clear non-starter.

P.S. I’ve read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and found it very banal and disappointing; he just kept burning strawman after strawman while evading the hard questions. So I don’t expect much from him anymore on this matter, but if you say the Freedom Evolves is worth it, I might give it a try.

…history of pogroms, inquisitions and holy wars…

But that’s mostly politics. The elites certainly do use religion to motivate the masses, but they’ll use anything else as well: nationalism, fear, greed, even concerns about human rights; anything.

Why would it be such a big problem if some Thomas Jefferson or Mahatma Gandhi believed that the universe was made by ‘Creator’ instead of ‘Big Bang’, that’s what I don’t understand.

You can, of course, argue with faith. Arguments are not only for the immediate moment: what you say now can have an effect in the future even if it is not listened to now. Indeed, I suspect most arguments work that way.

Is there actually much proof that militant atheism is in fact counter-productive? Or is that argued against as a matter of faith?

[Note, trivially, being aggressive always has a downside somewhere – but I get the sense that the objections are not exactly evidence-based]

Abb1-
“Why would it be such a big problem if some Thomas Jefferson or Mahatma Gandhi believed that the universe was made by ‘Creator’ instead of ‘Big Bang’, that’s what I don’t understand.”
The place where it becomes a problem is at the focused locus, the endpoint, the raisonne d’etre, of whatever moral/ethical system you’re using to hold your society together.
The idea that moral systems have actual definable and discussable goals is a little heretical, but there they are, they do.
In a neutral-background universe, where we’re pioneering everything, the survival of “us” is the only goal, the sole raisonne. The tenuousness of that gets real obvious when you dig into the fossil record and see how wide-open change in species is, pretty much the continuum from shrew-like early pre-primate mammals to Thom Yorke is an “us” so the moral/ethical stuff evaporates when you look too closely. That’s the ground for the accusation secular atheism has no real moral basis except what it inherits culturally from the various theocracy start-ups.
As used in these dialogues “us” is pretty much an average/median of whoever’s around at the moment, so the contest becomes being/staying around, and that’s about as refined as your moral/ethical goal’s gonna get in that context.
Robertdfeinman’s “why we have had a history of pogroms, inquisitions and holy wars…”
is far more easily answered as biology, nothing more complicated than nature red in tooth and claw, competing organisms struggling for dominance and survival.
This is outside the human social contract, dressing it up in political costumes as if it were is evasion and denial. Within the social contract we’re supposedly all about none of that shit. Thus international law and universal condemnation of so-called war-crime etc.
The facts consistently tell another, starker tale.
Some of us are insisting that without the sticky glue of made-up morality nothing will hold us together at the degree of cohesion necessary for all this neat stuff to keep appearing before our delighted eyes. Others agree but don’t see that lack and disintegration as a problem.
The believers’ position is much simpler:
Having a conscious and semantically active “creator” outside the local system means, for those who intend to co-operate with it, no need to rely on local survival modes for moral/ethical weight and direction.
Most of the time the two sides don’t conflict and it won’t matter. Keeping everybody in line and reproducing, with a steady accumulation of resources and refined utility etc.
Until the population’s insupportably large, then having a passive socially-instituted cull based on mindless blind obedience to unprovable beliefs starts to make a lot of sense, for those with enough local power to guide and shape the immediate genome, cultural as well as physical. Not a transcendence of the biological imperative but a reconfiguration of it.
The pseudo-conflict between “Creator” and “Big Bang” – choose one – masks the larger more germane one, between “infinite, impossible to comprehend much less manipulate universe” and “locally-invested anthropocentric/locally-invested centerless universe”.
If we leave Edinburgh, Scotland in a van, headed south, and some of us think we’re going to Rome, Italy, others that we’re going to Barcelona, Spain, it won’t matter all that much – until we get to, say, Paris, France.

“If you’re going to rule out people’s personal testimony of their religious experience as “anecdotal”, “subjective”, etc, then you’ve ruled out the only possible evidence they would ever be able to give… which does actually mean that you’re not achieving the destruction of religion by reason which was advertised on the book cover.”

I’ve think you’ve missed the depth of the modern atheist case. Step (1) is the traditional takedown of the objective case for god. Step (2) is to show why the case from subjective experience is bullshit.

When I look at a Hermann grid my personal testimony of my experience is that I see grey blobs at the intersections. There aren’t any. I can have evidence that there are grey blobs – my subjective experience. You can dismiss this as “anecdotal” and “subjective”. But you also have another card up your sleeve – you can show that my personal experience is misleading and should not be relied upon.

Personal testimony of religious experience is “anecdotal” and “subjective”, but these guys don’t only rule it out on that basis. They also claim it’s delusional, and make a positive case for that.

There’s nothing remarkable about this. There are plenty of examples where science has shown that people’s personal testimony of their experience is wrong and worthless. I’ve ‘personal experiences’ I know to be false and to not have happened. You can destroy the value of personal experience by reason, and that’s what these guys think they can do to religious experience.

That’s why the New Atheism is causing such a stink, the traditional theist fall back position of personal revelation is under threat.

That’s why the New Atheism is causing such a stink, the traditional theist fall back position of personal revelation is under threat.

I’m not so sure- the final fallback position is simply to disclaim any connection between those “revelations” and the observable physical universe. That position seems to me impregnable, albeit the general run of religious believers would find it rather unsatisfying. Certainly such an exiguous variety of religion is not going to exert any theocratic claims on the rest of us, so I for one wouldn’t be concerned to wasted any breath in opposing it, however pointless I might find it.

“What’s the purpose of religion? To give a foundation to law.”

This one of the oddest and most academic (in the bad sense) explanations of religion I have ever heard. Religion may be used in specific cases to justify different sets of prohibitions and proscriptions; however, it is hopelessly reductive.

My Great Aunt Fanny, for example, used religion as a reason not to do her self in after the rhumatis got so bad.

Some guy or another used religion as a justification of treating well the least amongst us, your remember long hair? crazy ideas about stuff? Joe Ferguson?

” spend enough of my time lecturing the academic dumbasses at this site for being scholastic formalists. . . . The gobbledygook doesn’t matter, except as how it describes the culture. Talk to a fucking anthropologist, he’ll explain it to you.”

So wait is that anthropologists arent scholastic? dumbasses or academics? I’ve met a few who are all three, some even use religion to justify the wearing of wigs when clearly they are bald, using Lombard’s Sentence.

“It’s not odd at all. It’s standard.”

For whom? Exactly?

tom bach:
My Great Aunt Fanny, for example, used religion as a reason not to do her self in after the rhumatis got so bad.

Some guy or another used religion as a justification of treating well the least amongst us, your remember long hair? crazy ideas about stuff? Joe Ferguson?

Err… you just provided two examples supporting Seth’s point.

The laws are, in these cases: “Don’t commit suicide” and “Love thy neighbour as thyself (and by neighbour, I mean everybody)”.

steve labonne:
That position seems to me impregnable, albeit the general run of religious believers would find it rather unsatisfying.

Why? The belief that God rewards believers in this life, rather than the next, is actually not that common, though it does seem to have a high number of adherents in the US (perhaps it ties in nicely with the manifest destiny thing). It’s certainly not Catholic doctrine.

As the Irish comic Dara O’Briain once quipped, the general response of the Catholic Church to jokes and mockery at its expense is “haha… very funny… but you’re going to hell.” This world’s expected to suck – the next one’s the good one.

All you want you do is replace one foundation with another.

And belief in God provides a foundation for morality how exactly?

Atheists are in no position to moralize. No-one is.

Why?

Does moral ambiguity frighten you? Is that it? Is it something you spend your life running away from? You think your hands are clean?

What has being an atheist got to do with rejecting “moral ambiguity”? And why would someone who believes there are certain moral truths be less likely to experience guilt than someone who doesn’t? I’d have thought the reverse was true.

At least as I understand this some folks use religion as a basis for decisions absent law’s guiding hand. It is obviously true that religion is used in some cases to support law (the two tables); however, in other case religious folks ignore laws they see as violations of religiously justified moral codes, which cannot be limited by the man-made law. You, or one, might insist that these codes can be reduced to laws or law-like statements, but this is ruductive and ignores the placticity that attends dealing with situations as they occur based on a set of beliefs derived from a set of beliefs in higher powers.

For myself, I would argue that belief in God(s) is a waste of time; but, not that belief in God or a religious sensibility, as matter of standard understanding, is only a justification for laws.

But then again, I, no doubt, am scholastic, dumbassed, and academic, unlike the subtle, clever-booted, and non-academic (which suggests that many of them work at McDonalds or, perhaps, DC Comics) anthropologists who understand religion in a standard way as justification for law etc.

I didn’t say our laws, I said LAW and was referring to the idea of law, or custom, the elements that draw a society together. The separation of religious and secular law is a pretty recent phonomenon. The history of secular law begins in religious law.
And in religion the legal and the social functions, the storytelling function, are more important than mysticism, which is always on the periphery.
Again, nothing new.

And just to be clear: “Smokescreen” refers to religious fundamentalists’ discussion of science. They’re not interested in science and there’s no reason to discuss it with them. Cut to the chase: go straight to moral philosophy, that’s all they care about. And considering that moral philosophy to most liberals is a byproduct of functionalism, I can see why they’re pissed.

My Irish ancestors were fairly early converts to Christianity. My Swedish ancestors came around much later, only about a thousand years ago. It’s my understanding that they actually had laws before they converted to the One True Faith. It may well be that their pagan laws were to some extent based on their heathen beliefs, perhaps likelier that their enforcement was entangled with religious observance – but laws tend to have common elements across cultures.

If you kill my brother or rape my sister or short me on a business deal I’m going to come after you. If we both belong to a sufficiently competent society I might seek justice according to our commonly accepted norms before crawling through your bedroom window to slit your throat, if only because I have to take into account the likelihood that tomorrow night your brother might just do the same to me.

We start making up rules as children. It comes with the language, and with the sort of rudimentary understanding of game theory that life experiences impart. Even dogs exhibit a conception of fairness (though they cheat shamelessly).

The very idea that we get morality from religion begs the question. It assumes that we were lawless before some revelation. We weren’t.

Laws and religion appear simultaneously in the historical record because both were written down when writing was invented. We might as well assume that we hadn’t yet invented recreational sex.

dsquared: “You’re not allowed to make public policy based on things that you can’t prove without non-natural evidence”

There’s no way to pass that as a public policy without making quite a paradox – it’s itself based on a value judgement which can not be proven without non-natural evidence.

Like pretty much everything else in politics.

In particular, the Guardian newspaper, whose political views I share, normally has at least one article or more a week deploring religion

Gosh, one a week?

It’s a tidal wave of hate.

A tidal wave of hate – no. A drip-drip-drip of hate, in the same way that some other newspapers get at gays or blacks or women. (Would you say an article a week in one newspaper criticising them was negligible?) In a culture where you’re a minority (and practicing Christians are a minority in the UK) it gets wearing.

Something relevent HERE
Summarized by Brian Tamanaha. Switch out militant atheism for positivism etc.

In a characteristically thoughtful essay (found on Solum’s LTB), Steven D. Smith observes that in an era when law is flourishing, “jurisprudence—the activity of theorizing or philosophizing about law, about the nature of law—seems close to moribund.” Smith asks: “is jurisprudence a dinosaur that has outlived its time and is being artificially kept alive?”

Smith observes that the classic debate between legal positivism and natural law over the nature of law now seems “quite pointless.” Most natural lawyers today recognize that governments enact laws according to their own criteria of validity (and hence immoral laws can have legal status), and most legal positivists recognize that we are not obligated to obey immoral laws or legal systems. Hardly anyone debates these issues anymore. According to Smith, jurisprudes have thus drifted off to take up questions in ethics, economics, contract law, tort law, constitutional law, and so on, but there is “nothing in this sort of question that is peculiarly within the province of jurisprudence.”

In science, it really doesn’t matter what non-scientists believe.

20th-century eugenics?

What I meant (and yes it applies to political science or any other highly professionalized scholarly disciplines) was that outside, non-professional input, except in very rare circumstances, is not effective in influencing the internal development of the discipline. I intend that more as a descriptive than as a normative observation and indeed I think that’s not necessarily a good state of affairs in 100% of cases (as #112 points out, eugenics- though it really went far, far beyond anything that could legitimately have been supported even from the primitive genetics of the time, and I would really not call eugenics per se a scientific discipline- could have used a lot more outside interference.)

A drip-drip-drip of hate, in the same way that some other newspapers get at gays or blacks or women.

Oh really? Would you like to quote some comparable examples?

So if you have a degree you’re an officially designated Very Serious Person (“VSP”) I guess Max Boot more serious than me.

It’s not off topic at all, it goes to the reasons people hector each other over ideas and beliefs. I don’t want scientists dictating science policy for the same reason I don’t want generals dictating military policy. You extend your ability to reason in your field to a general principle. Democracy, even representative democracy is not the rule of self-appointed experts. Democracy is not technocracy.
I blame Dawkins et al. (and our technocratic elite in general) for the Weimarization of our culture no more or less than I blame fundamentalist christians.

A drip-drip-drip of hate, in the same way that some other newspapers get at gays or blacks or women. (Would you say an article a week in one newspaper criticising them was negligible?)

A more rational comparison, of course, would be as if there were one article a week in the Telegraph criticising socialism or socialists – that is, taking issue with a set of ideas and the people who hold them.

Interesting that the same arguments that have been batted back and forth for 2000 years keep getting an airing.

What is true is that the current principal religions are organized along the lines of an elite group who knows the “truth” and a bunch of followers who are instructed in it. The details differ, but this is the essential element. To further their case the elite point to a variety of devices which only they are privy to. This can be the reading or interpretation of certain documents, or even getting direct information from a higher power. Since their authority rests with these devices and since normal people don’t have access to them, the result is that the leaders must be obeyed and not questioned.

That’s the core – obedience. It is why the founders didn’t put religion in the constitution. The constitution depends upon the people ruling themselves. There is no higher authority. There are no privileged people, neither religious nor royalty. Democracy is the antithesis of organized religion. The founders were sensitive to the recent history of the US and Great Britain to realize that many people were strongly invested in their religious beliefs, so they made allowances by promising that religion wouldn’t be controlled by government.

The idea was to protect religion from government, not the reverse. Once one religion becomes associated preferentially with government it leads to civil strife. You can look at the English Civil War, the behavior of the Massachusetts Colony or to more contemporary cases in the Middle East.

It is also a fact that as societies become more advanced, and as democracy becomes more entrenched, the degree of religiosity declines. There are parts of western Europe where the religious are less than 10% of the population. The societies do fine. They don’t have rampant lawlessness, nor do they have to invoke dogma to come up with a set of ethical principles on which to base laws.

The US appears to be an anomaly, in that a large group of people profess a belief in a supernatural being, but they don’t act like they mean it when one examines everyday life. The incidents of misbehavior is not lower in those who profess strong religious beliefs. In fact things like divorce are actually higher.

I don’t think there really are any significant number of people who believe absolutely as many did before the Reformation. This would require a single dominant religion with no alternatives. In this country we have over 1500 denominations. People shop for one that fits their values, and sometimes move to another one if they have disagreements. Even people who stick with a specific religion decide what parts they will follow. The issue of Catholics and birth control is a perfect example. The percent of Catholic women who use birth control doesn’t differ much from the general population.

So, what is the religious faith that people profess to have? Is it something that is in the core of themselves or is just a convenient peg on which to hang whatever collection of beliefs the individual has?

In spite of all the fear mongering, I think the importance of Islamic fundamentalism is overstated. Once again there is lots of visible adherence to the ceremonies, but this doesn’t seem to affect how the majority of the population deals with their personal lives. It does make a good bogeyman for use by the conservatives to short circuit any in depth discussion of the issues.

101:

I believe that most recent examples of such culls, and of the bright lines behind them, involved no deity – the Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s purges, the Khmer Rouge.

I don’t think the line is between “Creator” and “No Creator”, since people on both sides of that line have performed those culls. As you said, I think it’s dogmatism, or in particular the dehumanization of people based on their beliefs. It’s those who believe that the people thinking different from them are less human, or less worthy of proper treatment. To use 82’s terminology, the line is between those who support the reconfiguration of the biological imperative, and those who wish to transcend it.

And another thing, that guy with the long hair and the weird ideas, didn’t he say render unto Ceasar (odd he gave that kind of authority to a pizza place)? Doesn’t this suggest (rather clearly) that in at least one spokesman (or spokes 1/3godman) for Xtianity was against the notion of intermingling things of that world with things of this world?

This argument is a little bit like the “framing” debate that flares up at ScienceBlogs.

The framers, Mooney & Nisbet, point to evidence that so much of the American public is wedded to their religious beliefs that they simply reject scientific evidence to the contrary, even though they hold science in high regard. From this they conclude that, when the issue is one of educational standards or public policy, it’s counterproductive to attack religion directly. Hard to argue with that.

Contrariwise, the same evidence demonstrates to Myers & Dawkins that religion is itself the problem, and I’m disinclined to disagree.

It’s primarily, but not entirely, an American argument. Here, we few proud self-identified primates are fighting for the science of biology, and we’d certainly find our continent more congenial were more of our countrymen godless. I apologise on behalf of my fellow apostates, atheists and agnostics if, in our thrashing back towards the more fearless Enlightenment precepts of our predecessors, we’ve knocked anyone’s noses out of joint.

I’m in 8eijing and on a blackberry.
As someone once said I’ve got other priorities at least at the moment.

I try to take my secularism lightly
The biggest threat to democracy is extremism and like produces like far too often.

You don’t see many “militant atheists”[sic(k)] rushing to Iraq to convert muslims by the sword, do you?

But did militant atheists make the sword?

I personally think any ideology – religious or atheist is to blame for atrocities committed in its name.

An interesting question (which I’m still thinking through myself) is if people are going to argue that religion should be abolished in favour of science, should the role science has played in facilitating the wars and atrocities of ideologies be examined?

Science is generally portrayed as morally neutral, but I’m not sure if the “brights” are portraying the following of science as a moral good in and of itself. If so, examples such as the atom bomb and the maxim gun really need to be discussed.