Respecting Religious Believers

conservatives and some libertarians

That sounds like a careful and deliberate formulation– ‘libertarians’ qualified by ‘some,’ ‘conservatives’ not so. [though the whole set is going to be limited by the way they hold their beliefs; the implication seems to be that even some libertarians who hold their beliefs in the right way don’t receive your respect.] But a few sentences later, ‘some conservatives and libertarians.’ Any particular reason for the first phrasing?

It isn’t clear to me why you treat false religious beliefs differently from false political beliefs. I assume that in the latter case you would prefer (as per Blackburn) that the friend whom you repsect for other qualities, should rectify his or her false political beliefs and I am betting that you make some amicable attempts to persuade them to your (correct) point of view. This does not mean that you do not hold your beliefs lightly, just that you hold beliefs you consider to be correct (although that could change) and are temporarily at least committed o them. So why not prefer that your friend changes his or her false beliefs on religion? What makes this sort of false belief a special case? Is it not always the case that your friend would be better off holding correct rather than false beliefs?

Matt’s comment also reminded me that I probably should make a distinction between different kind of religious beliefs: religions tend to incorporate statement of facts in their credo (Catholicism certainly does) so that no one, according to the official profession de foi of the Catholic church can be a good catholic and not believe that Jesus accomplished miracles and resurrected after three days. Such religious beliefs merit no respect in my opinion, as they are self-evidently false, and it doesn’t strike me as immoral to gently chastised people holding them for intellectual laziness.

Just to say, Harry, that the Blackburn line is repeated endlessly on lots of blogs (I’m thinking Butterflies and Wheels, and Oliver Kamm off the top of my head) and I’ve long wanted to write a rebuttal. Now I won’t have to.

Harry,

I’d be interested to know what you think of Feldman’s essay in the same volume.

“I am myself an atheist, but I don’t see how my atheism makes me better off than my believing friends and acquaintances.”

You do not think you are better off having true rather than false beliefs? What motive do you have for investigating beliefs that you hold unless you believe that you would be better off having truer rather than flser ones? Why not hold beliefs regardless of their truth value?

Matt (#1),

Much (probably most) religious belief is held because one was raised in a tradition- one is a Christian (or sub-branch there of) because of where one was born and who one’s parents are. If the same person had been born elsewhere her religion would have been different. This makes religion more like culture, and I can enjoy various cultures, appreciate facts about them, and be glad they are around but I don’t normally respect them unless they are distinctive in some ways. (We might say we respect a culture because of its great achievements, but it would still be a bit funny, I think, to say we respect a bearer of the culture for that reason.) Now, not all religious belief is like that, but much is and when it is I cannot say that I respect it, even if I don’t have negative attitudes towards it.

There’s a lot to unpack in your claim(s) here. Let me attempt a couple of points:

1) You seem to be suggesting that the “accidental” occurence of belief (such as receiving it from one’s parents due to the culture/environment they’re part of and raised one in) is in some manner an argument against respecting those who hold to it. Why? Can or should we assume that all beliefs–all beliefs worthy of respect, anyway–about morality, ethics, whatever, ought to have grounds of purely formal reasons supporting them, grounds that believers ought to properly seek out for themselves? This seems like stacking the deck in favor of a certain kind of hyper-rationality, a way of viewing the world which Hume devastated a couple of centuries ago. It seems to me that invoking cultural or environmental reasons for affirming a belief is as common and as legitimate an element in moral argument as any other.

2) What do you mean by “distinctive in some way,” and what qualifies as a “great achievement”? An alcoholic, perhaps one who grew up in an environment of alcoholism, would very like consider the ability of Alcoholics Anonymous or some other similarly religiously grounded support group–like the one provided weekly in the basement of dozens of churches you and I could both name–to strengthen him in his struggle with his addiction to qualify as a thing of greatness, one that quite distinctly shaped his life. Ditto for Promise Keepers, ditto for the Salvation Army, ditto for Catholic Charities, etc., etc. I’m not trying to pin you down here unfairly, but might it not be that your gesture towards some occasional respect offered to cultures (and therefore presumably some culturally shaped religious believers) reflects a bias towards certain kinds of “great” cultural achievements, as opposed to the countless little things that cultural and religious acitivites make possible every day?

Z (#6),

Religions tend to incorporate statement of facts in their credo (Catholicism certainly does) so that no one, according to the official profession de foi of the Catholic church can be a good catholic and not believe that Jesus accomplished miracles and resurrected after three days. Such religious beliefs merit no respect in my opinion, as they are self-evidently false.

On the one hand, a claim to “self-evidently” true arguments about the impossibility of certain specific faith claims; on the other hand, Harry’s conviction that there is no “decisive proof of the non-existence of God,” an acknowledgement that at least “some things not excluded by straightforward canons of rationality” may deserve elements of respect, and in general a gesture in the direction of “the gap between certainty of one’s own infallibility and very-close-to-certainty that one is right.” As a religious believer I have a dog in this fight, obviously, but I can’t help but think that most people, religious or not, would intuitively see the point of Harry’s humility here. I mean, we’re only talking about “respect,” after all.

“…once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it … We would prefer them to change their minds.” Blackburn seems, to me, to be a very narrow-minded person. I think, for example, that to any reasonable person the LDS doctrine is out there on the edge of loony. But I’ve also known many Mormons, and on the whole found them to be virtuous, admirable people. How presumptuous it would be of me to wish they would change their minds. How could I calculate how much of who they are is owed to their Mormon upbringing?

re: 12 (john m) You do not think you are better off having true rather than false beliefs? What motive do you have for investigating beliefs that you hold unless you believe that you would be better off having truer rather than flser ones? Why not hold beliefs regardless of their truth value?

The religious case is not necessarily generalisable: we may prefer true to false beliefs in principle, and we can easily cite examples where harm attaches to the holding of false beliefs, but in the specific case of a choice between believing or not believing in a Judeo-Christian God, where’s the harm? Note: I am not asking (as none of us are in this abstract argument) if there is no harm in the practices of various Christian denominations, only in the fact of belief.

“but in the specific case of a choice between believing or not believing in a Judeo-Christian God, where’s the harm?”

Yes, you are right that it is somewhat different to believing that the blue wire is the live one, but we often usually know in advance the value or the harm that might accrue from false world views held over time, can we? And although a particular false belief may not kill you or obviously harm you now, it may endanger you at some future time physically or psychologically, so don’t we usually assume that we are better off without them? And if we don’t enlighten a friend who holds a false belief, aren’t we in some way treating them at best high-handedly (not knowing what harm may come from the false belief)and at worst with contempt? At very least we are patronising them, arn’t we, if we allow them to continue in ignorance because we, from a position of knowledge, have decided that ignorance is better for them? In any other sphere we would think it beholden to at least express the correct view even if it is emphatically rejected in a way that makes us think twice about broaching it again. Certainly many believers take this view (and I think it is logical of them given their beliefs). Most of them knock on my door every couple of weeks.

“but we often usually know in advance the value or the harm that might accrue from false world views held over time, can we?”

Should be:

but we can’t always, or even often, know in advance the value or harm … etc.

22: we, from a position of knowledge, have decided that ignorance is better for them

This might be patronising and/or prejudicial to absolute equality between interlocutors, but (a) hopefully, as atheists or agnostics, we have a sense that we’d better not make concrete claims for ‘our own knowledge and their ignorance’ unless we can deploy some clear evidence and (b) maybe a bit of perceived inequality doesn’t matter. I’m not at all sure that the flat field of discourse you propose is possible, anyway.

What makes a political or moral belief true?

I don’t respect anyone who falls in love for a good reason and I don’t respect people who don’t fall in love.

Belief in God is not a “political or moral belief.” It’s a belief in a fact about the Universe. The only reason we cabin it off as a special kind of fact is that when people refuse to do so they wind up killing each other.

I’m not sure whether this is off-topic, but doesn’t Blackburn come off as an ill-mannered, self-righteous prig for accepting an invitation to a seder (when all concerned were aware he wasn’t Jewish) and then refusing to participate like the rest of the invited guests?

Russll Arben Fox #16. I respect too much your insights to risk being misunderstood by you. Literal belief of religious statement of facts, I can’t respect too much (in fact, at all), lest I’d fall in a complete solipsism, as they very much clearly contradict each other and are more often than not ludicrous. I mean, I am sure you don’t spend too much time carefully thinking about how long Ameratsu shut herself in a cave or whether it was Isaac or Ismaël that was supposed to be offered in sacrifice. I am sure you accept the symbolism of it all and concentrate on the moral teachings. Am I wrong?

I’m having a hard time with Lindsey’s “You go, atheist!” position.

Unless confronted with faith – which is quite rare where I live – atheism simply isn’t a part of my life and makes no demands on me. It’s nice that I get automatic respect and all, but it’s like getting respect for not wearing antlers.

Matt (#21),

I’d insist that “respect” is a feeling towards something that implies an achievement of some sort….(“Respect” here might mean ‘not denigrate’ or “hold in esteem” or something like that. I’m using it exclusively in the latter sense- in the large majority of cases I don’t think we should denigrate people’s religious beliefs.)

Ok, this is helpful in grasping your argument. For “respect” you mean an appreciation of a (presumably active and/or conscious and/or difficult) accomplishment or achievement; an “inherited” or “accidental” belief therefore doesn’t qualify, because it doesn’t necessarily involve an effort that you can acknowledge as worthwhile. I can follow your point there, though I still see a problem–specifically, the fact that everything is going to be tied at least in part to culture and/or environment, somehow. (Someone comes to believe in political egalitarianism at least in part because of a poor person they became friends with; another person turns to atheism after being exposed to the horrors of war; yet another person embraces religious faith because of the example of schoolteacher; etc.) This is the point of bringing up Hume: what we think we can conclude (“achieve,” perhaps?) rationally is actually, for the most part, just inherited habitual assumptions. So anyway, if I take your point seriously, than doesn’t that mean you’re not sure if any belief or conviction–or any individual practice that follows from a belief, for that matter–whether political or moral or religious, can ever properly be deserving of “respect,” as you are using the term?

You don’t need to maintain that religious beliefs are false to be able to subscribe to Blackburn’s position. It’s enough to maintain that they’re irrational.

Z (#33),

I appreciate you kind words, but I’m fear I’m going to have to disappoint you.

Literal belief of religious statement of facts, I can’t respect too much (in fact, at all), lest I’d fall in a complete solipsism, as they very much clearly contradict each other and are more often than not ludicrous.

First, you’re of course correct that many different religions’ takes on the “facts” about the world are contradictory; it would be bizarre if this wasn’t the case, as those religions teach different things about what God’s or the gods’ relationship to the world is, what He/She/It/They have done and/or are doing, and what we should do to get right with He/She/It/Them. But I don’t see how that’s an invitation to solipsism; it’s an invitation, if you’re a believer, to choice. (I choose not to believe that Hare Krishna will save you; I do not think it is a correct religion. Note that I can still appreciate and learn from and be bettered by and therefore “respect” Hare Krishnas, using the term here in a somewhat broader way that Matt does above.)

Second, are they really all ludicrous? Equally? That all religions worth being called such are at least minimally ludicrous is a given; they involve the supernatural, those things beyond (but, as Harry says, not necessarily excluded by!) the “straightforward canons of rationality.” That’s why they say it involves faith. But I think it also involves some acknowledgement of those “pre-theoretical judgments” that Damon mentioned above, and some religions, I think (but again, of course, I’m biased in this regard) do fewer and less “ludicrous” things with those judgments than others, and that isn’t always irrelevant to choosing between them.

I mean, I am sure you don’t spend too much time carefully thinking about how long Ameratsu shut herself in a cave or whether it was Isaac or Ismaël that was supposed to be offered in sacrifice. I am sure you accept the symbolism of it all and concentrate on the moral teachings. Am I wrong?

Um, I’m afraid so. I actually treat a great many of the claims made by my own religious choice as involving metaphorical and/or symbolic matters, probably more so than some of my ecclesiastical supervisors might appreciate. But, well, when I talk to my kids about the Book of Mormon, or teach Sunday School about it, I’m treat a lot of it as more or less straightforward facts. God and Jesus appearing in a grove of trees, ancient records inscribed on metal plates, the whole nine yards (or at least seven of them). Sorry.

Russell- of course all of our beliefs are tied back to basic belief that we accept as “bedrock”, to use Wittgenstein’s term. We (mostly) just accept those- it’s necessary to do any reasoning at all. But, surely we don’t “respect” those beliefs in others, we would merely find them crazy or unintelligable if they didn’t have them. But also, surely religious belief isn’t like this- it’s open to evaluation in a way that “basic” beliefs are not. (I know some philosophers want to claim that belief in God is “basic” in a somewhat similar way but I find those arguments very week, and don’t think they show much about particular religious beliefs anyway.) Even for beliefs that we ourselves endorse, does it not seem funny to “respect” others for holding them or respect their being held if they are held for bad reasons? We can be _pleased_ that someone is an egalitarian even if this is because they lived next to poor people, but it seems awfully funny to me to _respect_ them for holding that belief. So I guess I’ll just insist that in order for it to make sense to respect someone for holding a belief, or to respect their beliefs, the beliefs must be be caused in the right way. Many, perhaps most, religious beliefs don’t seem to fit here to me, though this applies to many other sorts of belief, as I’ve said.

Next, of course there’s a sense in which the types of evaluative standards we can use depends on our cultural history- it would be funny to hold people who have not developed science to the scientific standards in deciding whether their beliefs warrented respect, we might think. But this doesn’t mean that our standards are not good ones or that it’s not reasonable to apply them. I don’t think Hume’s valid points here help the believer at all. (He’d find it funny to think so, surely, since he thought religious belief was both open to rational criticism and deserving of it.) So, I don’t think your final point applies- when someone holds a particular belief for good reasons, where these are determined by our best standards, that belief is worthy of respect, even if we disagree with it. Lots of beliefs are held for such reasons, and not just by philosophers. It’s anti-intellectualism to think otherwise.

“Of course, if I believe, as I do with some conservatives and libertarians, that their beliefs are really rationalization of self-interest, I do not respect them, or their holding of their beliefs, at all.”

Why are progressives so frequently worried about this possibility? My political beliefs are not really an instrumental good; I will never have any appreciable influence on the political process, so why should I jerry-rig my beliefs as if they were?

For my part, I have no problem assuming that progressive beliefs are always held in good faith.

I think you and Blackburn are arguing past one another in a sense, because he predicates his statement on the condition “But once we are convinced that a belief is false,” whereas you seem to constrain your own discussion only to those religious beliefs that are not demonstrably false, but merely require faith as justification. I suppose you are directly contending with his “or even just that it is irrational,” clause, but even there I find some trouble. You seem to imply that there are virtuous reasons to believe something that has no rational justification, but I’ve never seen one, nor do you explicitly state any examples.

So to the extent that I assess a religious belief to be false, I agree with Blackburn. This is true of things like disbelief in evolution, the belief that having sex with a virgin cures AIDS, or the belief that women are beholden or inferior to men. I can’t imagine a virtuous reason for holding an irrational belief, but I agree with you that to the extent that they exist, they are worthy of respect.

Finally, I wonder about your claim that a belief in gods “is not excluded by straightforward canons of rationality,”. Isn’t one of the canons of rationality that we shouldn’t believe that which is unsupported by any evidence? Could you respect someone who genuinely believed they had been abducted by aliens, or that they were made of clay brought to life by a magic spell? You can’t disprove these things readily, so is it enough for you that a person holds their beliefs sincerely and that they stand up to your cursory inspection?

Righteous Bubba (#43),

Why two positions?

Um…I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you taking from my comment that there is the way that I understand my own beliefs, and then there is a way I explain them to my children or in a Sunday School class? I didn’t mean to suggest that I take qualitatively different positions at those different times; I was just acknowledging that that sometimes I dwell upon what I believe in a moral/symbolic mode, and sometimes upon what I accept in a more literal vein. Different audiences, different contexts. Is that not what you were getting at? Because if not, I’m sorry, but you kind of lost me there.

Matt (#44),

I’ll just insist that in order for it to make sense to respect someone for holding a belief, or to respect their beliefs, the beliefs must be be caused in the right way.

I think I understand you, but it may be that we’re going to continue to talk past each other a little bit. It would seem to me that even under your terms, one could speak of a certain belief being “respectful” if it was achieved/accomplished in the face of opposition, hostility, an absence of support, etc. That is, I can admire–“respect,” maybe?–the religious faith of a Scientologist (who are, if I may make my honest prejudices known, a bunch of nutcases) who may have endured all sorts of discrimination and abuse will their faith intact. Causation–a question of sources–would have nothing to do with it. Or then again…maybe what I’m respecting there is some virtue of courage or conviction that their religious faith contributed to, but not the faith itself? You make me wonder. I’m going to have to think about this more, but I still suspect that your invocation of respect as a feeling properly tied only to beliefs that are achieved or caused “in the right way” leads us back to bedrock, to formal reasoning–to something that has been evaluated, without cultural influences, in a rational way. And I’m just not sure what kind of belief would really qualify under those criteria.

Blackburn’s point may be a strand in the motivation one sees among some atheists to do missionary work. I’ve always found that curious – the idea that not only is there no God, but I must convert people to the idea that there is no God.

If you think that belief in God is different than the belief that certain facts are true – if you take it that this belief is integrated into the way some people are – then I think the conversion impulse, at least on the part of someone who is an atheist or at least a non-believer in a personal god, is stifled. While there are derivative beliefs that a person might have from his or her God belief that I’d argue about and try to convert that person away from, I’d distinguish that from the central God belief. There is a core of truth in the notion that it isn’t good “manners” to talk about religion. That truth is that one has to be careful about trying to change a person’s fundamental beliefs.

This is what I like about old fashioned atheism – the non-missionary kind. It had a nice asymmetry to the conversion religions – well, massively in the U.S., Christianity. Christianity shows little respect at all for anyone’s fundamental beliefs outside of Christianity. Instead, the Good News was very much like News – intrusive, aiming to get inside people and colonize their thoughts. It succeeded, brilliantly. Non-missionary atheism, on the other hand, was never going to be socially successful.

The set of your beliefs is a product of your environment; you have about as much control over it as you do over the color of your eyes. You are what you are, it’s silly to respect or disrespect people for their eye-color or shoe size or their beliefs.

People’s beliefs are directly under their control, but people’s belief-forming processes certainly are.

I can choose to acquire beliefs about the origins of human life on this planet by studying science, or by uncritically accepting ancient mythologies.

If I knew someone who actually believed in the existence of God on the basis of evidence, that’s a belief I can respect. The diversity of life on earth was some evidence for the existence of a God, until Darwin and others came up with a better explanation. Of course, I think any such evidence was/is misleading. If I didn’t, I would abandon my atheism.

And I can respect philosophers who have believed in God based on subtle but fallacious philosophical arguments. (Not so much now that the fallacies have been explained, but historically.)

But belief in something that you’ve been raised to believe, just because one is too intellectually lazy or timid to consider the alternative? That’s not a belief I’m willing to respect.

No, Brock, you don’t acquire beliefs by studying, you acquire information. Studying may, indeed, change your beliefs, but it wouldn’t be intentional; you still have no control over it, it’s not a deliberate act.

You can study atheism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism and then you might (though unlikely) end up believing something you didn’t believe before, but, again, obviously it’s not because you’ve chosen to, it’s just something that happened to you.

No, a summary of the disagreement between Blackburn and Harry would be “Harry doesn’t believe religion is false in the same sense that Blackburn does. For Blackburn, the truth or falsity of religious claims is of the same character as the truth or falsity of any other claim. For Harry, religious truth values are softly bracketed.

Harry in no way disagrees with Blackburn’s rule, just its application in this context.”

…belief in God is different than the belief that certain facts are true…

This reminds me of an exchange from some Soviet novel (“village prose” kind) circa 1960s. It goes something like this:
A: there’s no God.
B: how do you know?
A: why, Gagarin flew in a spaceship, orbited the earth, didn’t see any gods out there.
B: ah, but have you ever seen Gagarin?

Simon Blackburn states he “deplores the features of humanity…”.

It seems irrational to deplore a fact. Values and emotions and morals and dignity and free will are all so obviously irrational that it hardly seems worth the time to try to separate the cases.

Righteous B.

I scanned the first 20 hits. I’ll turn up the rhetoric.

It seems irrational to deplore a fact. Values and emotions and morals and dignity and free will are all so obviously irrational that it doesn’t at all seem worth the time to try to separate the cases.

Blackburn gets so very close to taking himself ironically, but just can’t quite do it. His ability to deplore is so sincere, so convincing, so undeniable, that he must write against those deplorable humans with all their “cheating” land and respect grabbing existential poses.

He’s so deplorably beautiful! He’d approach the sublime if he could just add a little Tammy Wynette “Stand by your Humanity” to his grief at those cheating religious hearts.

Roger at #55 has already said much the same thing, but I’ll have a go as well. It seems to me that “respecting religious belief” here does not mean “admire” but “respect the right of people to hold whatever beliefs they do”. As the song has it “You go to your church, I’ll go to mine.”

This obviously entails legal toleration of “all beliefs and none” but goes beyond that to imply that vigorous attempts at conversion are a bad thing, particularly if they take the form of attacks on the current beliefs of the hoped-for convert.

Long experience suggests that this is a sensible view in relation to religion.

Roger #55 and John #69: I agree. I’m a proponent both of freedom of and freedom from religion. Unless someone is actively trying to curtail my personal freedom (as in legislation), or getting up in my grill (“you believe X? you are wrong, and a poopyhead to boot) it’s none of my business what others believe or don’t believe.

Or, simply put: “don’t be an asshole.” What a better world we’d live in if everyone followed that little belief.

There is no purpose and no telos, and the scientists’ grand and endless search for facts, hyperbolically referred to as “truth,” is silly.

Please continue typing on your magical thinking machine.

Well actually bubba if you think of the computer in terms of telos, then you’re the one indulging in magical thinking.
To me it’s just a tool: a faster ball point pen and a faster post office. It’s nice, but not meaningful in itself unless I choose to fictionalize it as such.

can you hear now?

“The US alone has a population of 300 million people and waterborne diseases are virtually exterminated!”
And enlightened reason says we should spend money on water treatment plants around the world, to the point of cutting finding for super-colliders, space exploration, high-tech gadgetry, and diseases that kill only a few thousand people a year. But political and economic realism says otherwise.
So is the short-sightedness of humanity an absolute truth or merely a temporal one?

hey, my job is to help various groups of Southern Californians have safe, affordable and reliable sources of potable water. They pay me; I provide legal advice. Requesting God’s help get perchlorate out of groundwater that’s 400+ feet below ground level is unlikely to satisfy either the State Bar or the clients. Building brand-new water treatment plants with sexy new technology, by contrast, will do both.

Oddly enough, my faith (or, more accurately, complete lack thereof) plays no role whatsoever in developing legal, engineering and political solutions to difficult water contamination problems.

You were the one who said that water treatment plants aren’t glamorous. Maybe so, but living without them substantially reduces aggregate societal glamour. So let’s split the difference and recognize that, by reducing diarrhea and infant mortality among other things, water treatment plants contribute to glamour.

Here’s another reason to respect people of faith: diversity is a social good.

No doubt there is a limit beyond which we should not be tolerant of difference. But inside of that limit, I think it would be a very bad thing if everyone thought the same way as everyone else.

It would make the world far less interesting — in itself, a very regrettable result. But more significantly, it might also lead to an intellectual equivalent of inbreeding. It would become very difficult to break through to new intellectual paradigms, if everyone’s thoughts mirrored everyone else’s. On this topic or any other.

Therefore, even if I think atheists are wrong (I am a Christian), I am grateful that they have a perspective different than mine on the world and our place in it.

I’m sorry for you son, rilly I am.

I’m pleased to gain sympathy from the person I’ve gathered is the CT clown, and I’m happy your relatives have done something worthwhile.

D² has me at a loss, as usual. The utter absence of evidence for supernatural phenomena doesn’t suggest to me that there might be something out there that we aren’t taking into account.

As a practical matter, I rarely engage other people in theological discussions. I know two Episcopalian ministers slightly. One started a homeless shelter in my town and I run into him occasionally at fundraising events and elsewhere. The other presided over my sister’s first wedding, one of his daughters is always at the opening of a new exhibit at our art museum, and her sister is my brother’s girlfriend.

It would be about as reasonable to discusss God with them as it would be to explore homosexuality with my mother’s accountant: an invasion of privacy, a crossing of boundaries. What has art or money to do with God or sex?

My late sister-in-law once asserted, to my dismay, that biblical inerrancy was not batshit looniness. I loved her so much that I didn’t contest the issue.

Respect, I think, is something we owe to the boundaries of social intercourse rather than each other’s conduct or beliefs.

Deck is stacked? I suppose that’s one (not very apt) way to put it. In Bayesian terms, damn straight my prior for “divine experience” is one hell of a lot lower than it is for “hallucination”. The latter are, you know, quite common. (And often have readily identifiable physical causes, by the way.)

If I happened to believe in gods and angels, there would be no way you could logically prove me wrong, is there?

Therefore, this is a matter of judgment. And, of course, one of my (and everyone else’s) beliefs is that my judgment is sound.

Noone has ever had a direct divine experience, although a lot of people claim to have had one, in some cases sincerely…

Fish n chips?

“What would you say to someone who had had a direct divine experience? ”

Well first of all you’d want to know a little bit more about what he meant by ‘divine experience’, but if it just meant a feeling of the numinous when listening to Bach, or a vision of an unearthly creature, or any of the usual sort of thing like that, I’d say there were other, more parsimonious ways of explaining the phenomenon without having to posit the existence of an all-knowing immaterial super-being who had created the world, and ask him why, therefore, we should prefer his explaination.

The history of religion is the history of “divine experience” socialized, ritualized, and told as story. Religion itself is the story not the experience itself. Revelation is the McGuffin. Individualized religious experience is problematic.
Talk to Hobbes.

“The history of militant atheism covers the last century and much of its violence.”

Don’t be daft. There may have been cases of ‘militant atheism’ but I find it hard to think of many. In any case, the idea that Dawkins and company are ‘militant atheists’ when their militancy is restricted to writing books and talking, is absurd. By the sme token JK Rowling would be a ‘militant fabulist’.

Now now, mds, you may be required to look “telos” up as opposed to “non sequitur” and seth’s dad can beat up your dad.

…because they know The Truth, you see, and they know what’s good for you.

Honest self-introspective historians look back at every age with wonder.
Facts are the elephant’s body parts under the hands of the blind wise men. They have to be, they’re mere pieces, not entireties. “Truth” separated from its context has to be partial. In context it’s part of the totality. All else is incomplete and inherently “untrue” by virtue of being incomplete, separated for purposes of examination.
There’s a Xenic aspect to the accumulation of facts toward the whole, because it’s infinite you can’t get all the way there without a categorical leap, an infinite one. This is why current theories of theoretical physics and astrophysics start sounding like religious speculation and myth. Multiple dimensions, other worlds, simultaneous temporal non-linearity, states of being counter-intuitive to mundane thought. Religion and science as practiced today are carrying shards of a greater truth that refutes them both.
Dawkins and Co. seem militant because they dare to violate the smug complacency of organized religion. They challenge the thuggish dominant squat of religious power on the face of the body politic.
Said challenging has to perforce be done militantly, because there are lots and lots of rabidly delusional defenders of the faith(s) out there, not all of them even semi-rational. One imagines Dawkins as at least the target if not the direct recipient of some very bizarre and threatening hate messages from the darker sub-levels of Judeo-Christianity’s current architecture.
Which is where respect and tolerance comes in. Also the idea that progress is some kind of linear inevitability, rather than a burst of profusion, means enlightened atheists are free to disavow the massive presence of religious scholarship that preceded them. But if you look at it in that linear way you can transpose the same process, project it forward, and out of these constrictive puritanical idiocies and bogus world-views could come another Enlightenment, whose force and trajectory are directly caused by that constrictive pressure.
The benefits of the quantitative gathering of facts that leads to understanding and application, to technology, fall on human beings who aren’t shaped by those facts but by the murkier, wetter conditions of their social contexts. Better men may rise from the coming Dark Age, who wouldn’t have otherwise. Who couldn’t have.
Out of the chaos and awful confusions of revolution, etc…

I’ll ask one more time: In Turkey, who are more delusional, and less modern, the secularists or the Islamists?.
Answer: The secularists.

Empiricism, dig it.

Can anyone think of a test that would rule out the former possibility?

A verifiable trip to hell to visit Richard Nixon ( or dear old dad/mom/whoever you know) might be one.

Half-facetious. When I hear dear old dad moan out his crimes I’ll know it’s him.

Anyone who has that kind of advanced virtual reality technology – playing the trick on me in plain sight of others – might as well be a god anyway.

Or maybe you only think it’s in plain sight of others. Maybe your memories have been edited.

Maybe that’s going on now. Not worth bothering about.

But stick with your scenario. That sounds like a holodeck episode in Star Trek TNG. I’d hardly call the characters ‘godlike’.

But they are. The holodeck is a great moral crime.

But would that really constitute proof for you? Or would you demand something more than extreme prowess at the technical arts?

How would I know they were technical arts?

I can’t articulate this very well, but it seems there must be more to the god trade than complete and absolute mastery of the environment. Would you say this is a category error?

I’m not sure what categories we’re even talking about.

Let’s say without worrying about the methods that something’s convinced me that it has the power ascribed to the god of Abraham. Does that fill me with religious feeling? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe I’d ask it to make me have that if it was determined to lord it over my life in some asshole manner.

But this is all fantasy. Like it or not I have to deal with the fact that people are religious and I think they always will be. I catch myself performing little rituals like most people – urging a sports team on with wild gesticulations like the TV is going to show me my will in operation – and geeking out on knowledge in the way Seth seems to despise and which I agree is more or less religious. And this is all without worrying about myth and storytelling. This magical thinking and religious awe is part of what makes humans do interesting things; while I think a lot of the particular details of the more persistent outgrowths of supernatural thinking are risible and sometimes dangerous bullshit I wouldn’t want to trade away whatever it is in people that makes those leaps. Along these lines I am surprised and somewhat disappointed that there is no temple of Babe Ruth. Elvis got his.

A world in which there is a yearly change of religion would be kind of funny. You’d get your prayers out if you wanted and then before orthodoxy made things too ridiculous and too many questions were asked it’d be on to the next one.

scentofviolets @#110: you’re right, I keep forgetting that nothing but mathematical theorems with well-defined axioms can be conclusively proved or disproved. (As James Randi put it, I can’t prove Santa Claus doesn’t exist.) I hereby amend my statement at #99 by changing “prove” to “offer substantial evidence for”.

it seems there must be more to the god trade than complete and absolute mastery of the environment. Would you say this is a category error?

My faltering attempt to answer this is that we’d have to examine the claims made for godhood, and also the usually unvoiced expectation of veneration that attaches to gods in general. Those are bigger tasks than I’d want to take on in a blog comment/lifetime.
For YHVH and its derivatives, there is a claim to have made everything. Making more things (like another Earth on the other side of the sun that we could go and visit, for instance) might be counted as evidence, or supplying some observable data about what’s already made, especially ourselves, that fits into existing doctrine: unique serial numbers or some such, or repeatable interaction with a disembodied soul, might convince large numbers of atheists. I don’t think there’s anything you can do to break through the shell of anyone who saw The Matrix or read existentialist philosophy or the works of al-Ghazzali at an impressionable age, however. These works question (and sidestep) the whole concept of evidence, so evidence won’t be useful in countering them.

But since gods on the YHVH model can do anything, they must be able to tackle this, and, consequently, there’s some kid of error in asking what evidence they could provide.

FWIW I think an actual encounter with a verifiable, bona fide god would be absolutely terrifying – like being in a room with a sabre-toothed tiger that can not just subject you to a violent, painful death at will, but could do anything else to you as well. Perhaps the most impressive trick pulled by all ‘benevolent’ gods is that their followers think they’re good, even when they threaten stuff like eternal damnation. That might be the ultimate test of godhood – the ability to soothe away anxieties of the soul with a kind of metaphysical valium.

I will respect your atheism when you show me why you hold it and how you live by it. Many (militant) atheists forfeit their respect because they can’t be bothered to do just that (and the same goes for the more militant brands of fundamentalism, and I hate to say).

So the argument is that ´militant´ atheists tend to be (a) less rational and (b) less moral in their behaviour than the good kinds of atheists, like Harry, and Christians like Lindsay? What it be too much to ask for some evidence for this particular smear?

“For all you or I know, Colin McGinn feels the same way. Why don’t you ask him?”

I’ve tried, but he’s a “bright” and you can’t argue with brights.

I’m sure McGinn agrees about human rights, but they aren’t his focus. His focus is “reason.” Mine is democracy. I’m interested in rationality as result, he’s interested in it as a cause (in both meanings of the term). He doesn’t understand the difference, and neither does the Turkish military.

Richard, another thing about that quote is that it embodies the idiotic but evergreen “atheism itself is a religion” meme. Sorry, being an atheist simply means that I don’t believe in the existence of “divine” beings (because I don’t see any good reason to do so, and moreover I’m not even sure the very concept is a coherent one- there’s some discussion about that above). It’s not some kind of metaphysical system by which I live, any more than is my a-toothfairyism.

125: why yes. “how do you live by your atheism?” The same way you live: respiration, eating, stuff like that.

126: I know I probably should care more about this, but I don’t feel qualified to spot infallibly when these laws have been broken. I am also easily bamboozled by quantum mechanical effects and imaginable science fiction ultra-tech. Faster than light travel should also break physics as we know it, shouldn’t it? And yet it’s almost a given for any “sufficiently advanced” alien visitor.

Richard, another thing about that quote is that it embodies the idiotic but evergreen “atheism itself is a religion” meme.

Yup, ass-backwards, and still really has nothing to do with respect except in consideration of Lindsey’s position. I apparently have to have grappled with what Lindsey believes in order to be taken seriously. UFO nuts have the same position.

Who wins respect when Lindsey deals with an atheist? Lindsey does, given freely to herself for her own position, and the atheist may receive leftovers for having taken her seriously for no good reason.

To engels,
My use of militant is perhaps unfair, but it designates an attitude (an attitude quite easily found in the comment thread around CT) that you are right and everyone else is a buffoon. Those ‘militant’ believers or non-believers don’t engage in reasonable (and open) discussion with their counterparts because they feel above it, and that’s ridiculous and not very productive. It’s the sort of attitude that’s found on both sides of the atheist/theist divide, and it’s a way of holding those particular beliefs that I don’t respect.

And richard,
So what if it’s labor intensive? Respect (in the deeper sense, this is obviously not talking about mere toleration) is never automatic. It’s earned. And I think it is important how you live out your beliefs. If you tell me you believe that men and women are equal but then turn around and discriminate against women, then I won’t respect your “professed belief” in equality. It’s a combination of being intellectually honest with yourself and others and then being consistent. We’d be better off if people did put more labor and thought into examining what they believe (and for that matter, how they vote).

I’m going to repost this since the it’s been caught in moderation limbo. I posted it using my initials and that seems to have triggered the filter.

I’m sure McGinn agrees about human rights, but they aren’t his focus. His focus is “reason.” Mine is democracy. I’m interested in rationality as result, he’s interested in it as a cause (in both meanings of the term). He doesn’t understand the difference, and neither does the Turkish military.

That’s the key. Democracy is formal. It’s about means, not ends. Under the rule of reason the guilty go to prison. Under the rule of law they may go free if the state didn’t follow the rules regulating arrest. At that point actual guilt or innocence is irrelevant. The rational defense of democracy is the rational belief that there are more important things to worry about than absolutes. At some point contempt for “illogic” or “unreason” segues into contempt for formalism and democracy and the drive for “progress” becomes the opposite of what it claims. The title of this post is “Respecting Religious Believers.” My question is whether we should respect people who focus on that question, especially if the discussion is in terms of politics.
I can’t.
Democracy is not utilitarian. It’s strength is in the constant redefinition of “utility.” When utility has one meaning, when the press or any of the branches of government chooses reason over the defense of it’s prerogatives, republican government falls apart. Reasonable government is the result of formalized adversarialism and institutionalized skepticism. Whether its “true” or not doesn’t really matter. Science geeks who want to run the world logically don’t seem to understand that.

#132- “La Ginestra”, in Tony Kline’s translation:
http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/Italian/Leopardi.htm#_Toc38684164

#130:

I don’t believe in the existence of divine beings, but I don’t believe that not believing in the existence of divine beings is the foundation of the rest of my beliefs.

Neither do I, nor does Dawkins, nor does McGinn. Can we have done with this silly strawman now?

Here’s what I think. I believe there is such a thing as a religious cast of mind. If you have it, you will be powerfully drawn to some religion or quasi-religious totalizing system (there are certainly some non-theistic and even non-supernatural ones, including those aptly described by that much-abused word “scientism”.) Some who have it are able, by education and mental discipline, to free themselves from subjection to such a system, and become “soft atheists”. But they can’t help but remain conscious of the resulting void, and this gives them the ability to empathize with religious believers.

On the other hand, those of us who were born without this faculty- and I readily admit that we seem to be very much in the minority- were able easily and painlessly to slough off whatever childhood religious indoctrination we received, and we have very great difficulty in understanding what the fuss is about.

People of these quite different temperaments are bound to talk past each other in discussions like this one. I’m afraid I don’t see much remedy for that. But there’s not a great deal of harm in it, either.

“I believe there is such a thing as a religious cast of mind.”
Are the assumptions of the Turkish military based on anything other than faith? Is that not an example of a “religious cast of mind” Have you registered none of the foundational assumptions in McGinn’s writings on consciousness, or is it just that you share them?
Weinberg on Zionism? Faith.
“I believe there is such a thing as a religious cast of mind.”
Yeah. People like to believe things. Stupid, but inevitable,

Here’s what I think. I believe there is such a thing as a religious cast of mind.

There are religious disorders of mind. One of the PBS pop science shows with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran had a guy whose optic nerve became [technical garbage I don’t remember] and as a result whatever he saw became profound, pregnant with meaning no matter what his intellectual mind told him. I don’t recall if there was a resolution or if it’s the case that he’s the same today.

It would be interesting to identify a case of brain damage that turned someone into an atheist. Not actually trolling there.

I believe there is such a thing as a religious cast of mind.

I don’t. I believe it’s indoctrination. Or sometimes indoctrination that failed originally, later gets resurrected and reinforced by some psychological trauma, like death of a child, or ‘miraculous’ recovery of a dying child or something like that.

When and where have I defended McGinn’s body of work as a whole? I know only a little about it, and the minor part of it that intersects my interests at all, his notorious “mysterianism” about consciousness, strikes me as profoundly silly. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all to be told that he’s written or uttered any number of silly things. (He’ll have to work overtime to catch up with you, though.)

Sounds like the stereotypical pothead.

Sure. Crap about holodecks misses the obvious: messing with the brain of a person can severely alter personality, perception, morality and religious feeling right here and now, creating in some cases a literal religious cast of mind. Does that imply anything for those who assert divine experiences?

messing with the brain of a person can severely alter personality, perception, morality and religious feeling right here and now, creating in some cases a literal religious cast of mind. Does that imply anything for those who assert divine experiences?

Implying that as long as we don’t “mess with it” our brains allow us to experience reality exactly as it is.

Still, arguing the truism that there is interpretation to information can get a little crazy.

My point precisely.

If I come to your house, tie you to a chair and steal your TV I think we may both later agree on what occurred

Well, maybe we’re both delusional!

It’s no good saying that the malleability of brains explains one way of thinking, but not another. It implies one side has some kind of escape clause from the relational aspect of knowing, which is logically impossible.

It’s no good saying that the malleability of brains explains one way of thinking, but not another.

That isn’t what I said.

Atheists are impossible!

Nothing to it. I just decided quite firmly around the age of 12 that all that stuff was obviously pretty silly, and I never looked back. (As a cultural heritage it certainly comes in handy for appreciating Dante, among other things.) Yet I continued to be exposed to plenty of indoctrination- in order to spare myself from listening to a lot of BS from my Mom, I allowed myself to be dragged to Mass every Sunday without argument until I left for college.

My data point doesn’t seem to fit your hypothesis very well. And since I know plenty of stories like it, I’m not so sure I’m an outlier.

Well, it’s not just the family; it’s the whole environment: your school, your neighborhood, and the whole Zeitgeist thing of the period.

#136:“…serious issue, for example, with the (more or less unconscious) modernist metaphysics that the world is ‘made’ of passive inert stuff, reducible to particles, subject to ‘laws.'”
Actually that’s just late 19th/early20th c. physics. Professor David Deutsch, no slouch on the physics tip in his own write, is convinced and pretty convincing that there are many “other worlds” than this one. In their own universes.
He spreads it out as a kind of linear and parallel thing, but obviously if you have other worlds and universes especially many of them, you can easily have a meta-organization to which all those worlds belong. Must have, pretty much. And then there’s lots of room in that larger picture for all kinds of beings, divine or otherwise. Because its boundaries are infinite, or nearly so.
Those reduced-to “particles” are just the places where the antique instruments began to lose their resolution, bestowing an inaccurate and opportunistic finality on what they found.
“Quarks! The final particles!”
“Whoops! There’s more!”
And more and more, because it’s as infinite, or nearly so, down there, as it is above and beyond.
An assumption in many of the main critiques of religion, and in things like the rejection of telepathy by people like The Amazing Randi et al. is there’s nothing outside the laboratory but noise.
And since there are no such things anyway critics feel they have no responsibility to conjecture pre-existing conflict around them, resistance – opposition to the public explication.
No tension other than between scoffing and credulity.
If telepathy is a real capability in human beings it’s probably been around a long time, and probably developed into and among groups of the like-minded, behaving the way contraband economies or repressed sexual minorities do, and the lack of mainstream verifiability and examples may have more to do with occult business practices and weaponization than dipshit chimeras and delusional fantasies.
The Scots especially, and Gaels generally, have a long tradition of second-sight and prophetic dream, Native Americans as well. Polynesian kava-visions recorded the Europeans coming before it happened. No accident perhaps these cultures were broken violently.
The facts and hypotheses we’re getting now from the front lines of physics seem as weird and counter-intuitive as anything analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ever carried. It doesn’t take much more than an open mind to project that weird wonderfulness into some kind of much bigger than human reality, with much bigger than human players working in it. The Matrix being only one fairly mundane example.
Not that I’m saying that’s exactly what’s up, but the anally-clenched rationalism that refutes the childish beliefs of the religious won’t stand up to the blowback from its own team’s illuminations. There’s either other dimensions out there, or there’s something even stranger. No going back to the Edenic world of simple things.
The rationalists demand reasons to alter their views, which makes sense, as does the reliance on faith by believers. The conflict’s really about survival isn’t it? Or is that a diversion?
Faith abets the surviving of the faithful, as sceptical reason abets its adherents.
What everyone wants is insurance against being scammed. My personal experience is that the louder and more obvious sellers of that insurance are generally scammers themselves, and make dubious allies at best.
There’s something tender and open in the public faith of people like Lindsey. Something vulnerable that gets chopped up in the jaws of logic. Even though I don’t believe her view of things is accurate enough as it stands, I’ll insist it’s no more inaccurate than most rationalist worldviews. Just less rational, which you’d expect.
Rationalism gets its eminence from its immediate utility, and that gets reinforced in an educational system that makes it central to success, which constantly rewards logical patterning in the young, and all too often discourages and trivializes the intuitive and imaginative. By the time most of us get out of university the primacy of rational thought is asseverated like dogma, it’s in the air we breathe, even though most of our experience and behavior most of the time has little to do with conscious logic.
In the Church of Logical and Rational Positivity, as with any system of tenuous and unsupported beliefs, heresy gets met with scorn and violent denunciation, and given enough political strength, outright persecution.
Calls for humility and tolerance become brave in that context.

America is religious, but if you live, say, in Berkeley, CA you may not not notice it. And from there you’ll find a whole spectrum of levels of religiosity down to Hicktown, Georgia.

Did I read you wrong? Because I could replace the word “divine” with just about anything, and it would still obtain.

I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been, sure.

What I meant to address was scales-falling-from-the eyes or religious ecstasy or what have you, the uncommon religious experiences that have resulted in, well, religion. It was not meant to imply that all religious people are brain-damaged (although again I think imaginative and mystical leaps are part of the wiring of most of us).

And it could be that I’m somewhat ignorant here: it’s my impression that most religious people are believers but do not have the brushes with the numinous that various saints have had, unless you count “COOL! AWESOME SUNSET!” in those experiences.

…

One morning I was waking up just post-dream and in something of a haze. I opened my eyes slowly and there was a glowing white form in front of me, floating and slightly changing in consistency. I waited a bit and it didn’t go away, at which point I screamed my lungs out.

When I gathered my wits I realized that I just hadn’t focused my eyes and I was looking at a patch of sunlight on the wall.

If I’d, say, run out of the room and not come back maybe I’d believe in the supernatural, because I well remember how terrified I was that this impossible thing had come to visit me. I don’t want to pretend I have infallible logic behind me and that’s that.

Your conclusions about what Dawkins would think about a god struck me as awfully sure for someone who is not Dawkins.

No, ScentofViolets has made a trite point that is easily dismissed. I don’t need to meditate upon the degree of proof an allegedly supernatural being would have to offer me before I would stop searching for nonsupernatural trickery, because to date, every allegedly supernatural being has utterly, totally, 100% crapped out when asked for proof.

ScentofViolets is attempting to use a hypothetical case that is completely divorced from reality or human experience so as to push questions of “proof” so far back that we end up discussing foundational questions like “how do I know that the world around me really exists?” And once someone admits, “ok, technically, I cannot PROVE that I don’t live in the Matrix,” ScentofViolets is primed to say, AHA! You have faith just like religious people! Its all really the same! Your belief that you don’t live in the Matrix is EXACTLY LIKE someone else’s belief in a supernatural universal consciousness that guides their daily life!

So. Trite.

I find this rather bizarre and a complete misreading of my point. (I guessing Patrick didn’t know this, but I’m an atheist myself.)

I am saying that there doesn’t seem to be a good agreed-upon standard of proof for the existence of God, and that should one appear to make the claim, He would have some pretty high hurdles to jump over.

I’m asking, in short, what a god would have to do to prove himself in your eyes. Speaking only for myself, it would not be enough to demonstrate Vast Cosmic Powers. Sagan makes this point in his novel “Contact” when he has the human protagonist converse with beings literally billions of years old: even though they can quite casually move entire suns millions of light-years in the blink of an eye, they are still looking for evidence that God exists. To them, it’s not enough to be able to do what they themselves do so easily, though to a human these aliens appear, well, to be if not precisely gods themselves, godlike in scope.

Which suggests to me that either the notion of being a god is just silly to begin with, and thus nonsensical to ask if one exists(that’s my personal belief, actually.) Or there is some sort of quality of the numinous that is very hard to pin down with words.

And thus my original post: I think most people who are atheists, even atheists who are in some sense scientifically literate, would have a tough time seriously coming up with a standard of proof they would find acceptable.

Discussions on this blog (indeed, most blogs) don’t show much respect for opposing points of views. So I’m not surprised that a thread on respecting religious belief has plenty of examples of disrespect (if not outright contempt).

I find it quite hard to pin down what “respect” consists of, exactly. Accusing your political opponents of being mentally ill, or having covert motives, seems pretty disrespectful, but you can’t very well outlaw saying these things, because sometimes people do have mental illnesses, or hidden motives.

There’s a separate discussion that could be had on whether mental illnesses exist at all, but if we pass that by and accept that (e.g.) schizophrenia exists, it can be legitimate to ask if a particular person’s religious beliefs are a sign of of the onset of schizophrenia (sometimes they are), or investigate the connection between religious experience and mental illness.

I think it’s disrepectful to play on the religion mental illness angle when you’re not being serious about it – when all you’re trying to do is discredit your opponent (“He is mad and therefore his arguments are of no merit.”) and you don’t really think he has schizophrenia.

This is what I was think of:

In the summer of 1978 I swam through the dip vat at the John Wayne Red River feed yard as a stupid publicity stunt. Doing this provided a great boost to my career and got me several speaking engagements. However, coming in contact with the chemical organophosphates had a devastating effect. The feeling of awe that I had when I thought about my beliefs just disappeared. Organophosphates are known to alter levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, and the chemicals also caused me to have vivid and wild dreams. But why they affected my feeling of religious awe is still a mystery to me. It was like taking all the magic away and finding out that the real Wizard of Oz is just a little old man pushing buttons behind a curtain.

(Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, chapter 11).

It WOULD be interesting to find cases where brain injuries caused someone to become an atheist.

Frankly, this is a fight that atheists automatically win. If a brain injury causes someone to become religious, that implies that the origin of religious feeling is in one’s brain chemistry. If a brain injury causes someone to stop feeling religious impulses, that implies that the origin of religious feeling is in one’s brain chemistry.

Bubba, funny.

Patrick, the fact that you view a sort of Vulcan-esque uber-rationality as baseline human cognition than can only be corrupted by faulty wiring (or, maybe: MEMES!) says a lot more about you than it does about brain chemistry.

Patrick,

If there is a religious teaching that says that understanding it requires a non-naturalistic brain state, I am not aware of it. (Perhaps you’d like to cite something?) Even so, this is not a claim that most religious teachings make.

There’s no logical reason why natural and supernatural need be mutually exclusive. I see your point about gaps, but most Christian theologies do not make use of this argument. Swatting it down is a little like using a crude, one-gene one-trait genetic determinism to reject Neo-Darwinism.

More proof if any were needed that what ‘seems to [abb1]’ to be the case very often isn’t. Also, this–

Their [Dawkin’s and McGinn’s] militancy is restricted to writing books because they have no power, just like militancy of the neocons was restricted to writing letters, magazine articles and websites before 2001. Had they had power, I’m sure they would’ve given Supreme Leader Khomeini a good run for his money.

–is truly pathetic.

But the real problem I have with your (and Harry’s) position is more basic. This part (quoted approvingly by Harry) seems to be the nub of it

Personally, I respect a person (and the part of that person) who I think legitimately came to believe what she did, or is being sincere and honest about what she believes and for what reasons she believes. That sort of belief I can respect, regardless of whether or not I agree with it.

The exclusive focus on legitimate procedure and individual motivation seems dead wrong to me.This is because it is possible for someone to come to hold beliefs that are wholly unworthy of respect despite her following legitimate procedures in good faith. For example, Shakespeare was an anti-semite, let us say. He was a reasonable man, entirely honest and well-intentioned in forming his beliefs, yet he was infected by the pervasive anti-semitism of his time and culture. Does this mean we respect Shakespeare’s anti-semitism? No, and neither do we respect Shakespeare for his anti-semitism. His anti-semitism is an aspect of him which we may understand, or forgive, or overlook (or perhaps not, as we choose) but we regret it, and we do not respect him for it.

Richard Dawkins (I don’t know the other guy) denies any legitimacy to his opponents’ views. He knows The Truth, he is comfortable with The Truth and he refuses to see any other angle, any redeeming qualities that might be there. If that’s not “refusal to engage in reasonable and open discussion”, then I don’t what is.

Richard Dawkins (I don’t know the other guy) denies any legitimacy to his opponents’ views.

Not at all. He is perfectly happy to concede points.

@185 Not at all. He is perfectly happy to concede points.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig’s observation that “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion

Does it sound like he’s trying to “engage in reasonable and open discussion” with religious folks?

And please, try to imagine the most moderate, most reasonable, most rational non-atheist person you’ve ever known or heard of; Albert Einstein, for example. He calls him “delusional” – and obviously one doesn’t engage in a discussion with delusional people.

Do you see what I mean here?

To engels,
About your two points. Harry and I both think it’s okay to feel pretty “close-certain” about some things… like 99.99% sure. But the important thing is that there is that .01% room for doubt, and that’s the gap that makes you realize that no matter how certain you feel about your belief, you really can’t be 100% sure (this in particular for the question of whether God really exists). That doesn’t mean we don’t feel damn certain about it. It just means we recognize that even if we feel pretty certain, we can’t be 100% sure. That’s an important recognition to have before engaging with opposing beliefs, because without it I think the 2nd point becomes a problem.

The 2nd point was pretty much what I wanted people to realize, and it’s one not taken well by people here (scan the thread, there is a lot of straight up religion bashing where there should have been discussion about the issue of respect –case in point). Also, did I ever once name names of any militant atheists? No. You know why? I don’t know any of them well enough to know if they would indeed have an honest and open discussion with me about my/their beliefs. For some I have an idea of how they might respond, but honestly, I don’t follow them closely enough to be sure. I’m sure most other people following CT would be a better judge than I would on this account. So no, I made no claim about any of them. Judging from some posts at CT, however, I’m sure a few people here would fall under that category (though I’d like to think that people are more difficult online than in person, so maybe not even then).

You are right that Harry and I didn’t make a distinction (on our two posts) about beliefs that clearly don’t deserve respect, regardless of how you rationalize it. I didn’t write about that because it wasn’t the question at hand (though I guess that makes my post even more incomplete than it was). The question at hand was a belief you don’t agree with but one that others reasonably could adopt. I suppose I don’t think you could really rationalize anti-antisemitism or racism or misogyny in a satisfactory way. But if someone did try to, then no I wouldn’t respect that belief anyway (though it could be rooted in their lack to really justify why that belief is reasonable to hold). Does that answer your question?

beliefs that clearly don’t deserve respect, regardless of how you rationalize it

Hmm, I remember reading all those race/IQ discussions recently and it seemed that the strongest anti-racist argument went like this: ‘we don’t think there’s a causal link, but we just don’t have enough information to know for sure.’ If that’s true, it certainly falls into your ‘1% uncertainty’ category.

abb1,
Take the post for what it was, a blog post with some random thoughts I had one day about a random paper I found online. If you want an air-tight-dissertation-style argument, you’re looking in the wrong place. The point was to get some stubborn people on either side of the ideological divide to simmer down and listen to each other. Perhaps then they could find some common ground and (gasp!) lose the animosity. People clearly missed that message. Maybe I’m naive in thinking that’s even possible.

I’ve been searching around all day for some genuine hippie sloganeering but everything that came up was so clearly just media-generated cliches I had to let it all pass. God only knows what dreck “pseudo-hippie sloganeering” would turn out to be.
Oh.
I like Dawkins more than any religious adherent in his weight class. I feel championed by him in many ways, defended. Yet I believe in the infinite nature of reality, that its perceived boundaries are all illusory, the same way the tactile surfaces of things are real to us only as a pragmatic compromise, between our sensory apparatus and that infinitely complex reality. Given that, it seems pretty much inevitable that there’s a lot more going on, in the sense of orders of complexity and magnitude and being than we’ve cataloged so far. And that’s where the rationalists/atheists/scientificalists all run away screaming. Or really just turn away in disgust. Because you can’t prove it. Even as people like Duetsch come back from the front lines with pictures that are weird and unimaginably complicated. Still you can’t prove their existence without the cooperation of those purported beings. And believing in things you can’t prove is rationally indefensible.
What you can prove is how easily an institutionalized moral focus on something as nebulous as powerful beings who exist in other dimensions but can invisibly influence things in this one, can be bent to serve the aims and desires of that institution’s elect. This is what I take to be Dawkins’ main motive in attacking the illogic of religious dogma. That’s one of the ways I feel defended by him.
But because the context of Dawkins’ effort is an already polarized field, it can’t help but intensify that polarity. This hardens the sides, and further obscures and drowns out the not-so-adamant unpolarized, where I believe the truer frequencies originate.
Respecting someone else’s religious beliefs or not is a moral choice.
Moral choices occur within moral systems.
Every moral system has an identifiable goal as its reason for existing, whether the participants can identify it or not.
Moral systems center on their goals. For an individual to be able to clearly comprehend and articulate the goal of a moral system he or she subscribes to it has to be able to fit inside his or her head. Consequently the default moral system for contemporary humans is a refined hedonism, a more or less socially functional greed.
It takes all kinds of work to get us up to anything like a deferred reward as a conscious moral direction, unless that focus is pre-existing, institutionalized, traditional, inherited.
Most religions place the center of their moralities outside the mundane and immediate, in the divine plan, the mysteries. In some ways this isn’t much different from and at its best is aligned with getting people to consciously and actively place the interests and well-being of not-yet present generations ahead of their own – behavior that reflects the needs and interests of unseen and essentially imaginary beings.
Rationalists don’t mind that so much because of the nearness of those fictive beings. They’re close enough to what we are already as to warrant recognition.
When it comes to “spirits” and “deities” etc, the rational or atheist position is the inverse of Pascal’s wager, there seems to be no percentage in believing. I respect that as a belief, though its logic is less an inevitable progression than a hunch, based on the odds. It’s honest, sincere, legitimately come by. I don’t share it, and I see a danger in it of ommission, much like that of ignoring the needs and well-being of future generations
“The exclusive focus on legitimate procedure and individual motivation seems dead wrong to me.This is because it is possible for someone to come to hold beliefs that are wholly unworthy of respect despite her following legitimate procedures in good faith.”
If anti-semitism means an irrationally negative and unjustly prejudicial attitude toward Jews then it seems by definition to be excluded from “legitimately came to” and “being sincere and honest about”. These are important qualifiers.
If we’re just going to defer the determination of Shakespeare’s attitude toward Jews to Engels, then of course if Engels says Shakespeare’s an anti-semite, he, Shakespeare, is an anti-semite, and his beliefs in that regard will not be deserving of respect, because they’re irrational and illegitimately come to, and unnecessarily harmful besides. But if we’re not going to defer that to someone else then we’ll have to make our own minds up about Shakespeare’s beliefs, and their honesty and legitimacy.
Another example might be, let us say, Iago, who is disliked. But Iago says that the people that don’t like him don’t like him because he’s smarter and more noble and honest than they are.
Maybe he believes that, but since we can see that Iago is doing and saying things that are causing people not to like him, we can say his beliefs are not honest even if they are sincere, and they were not legitimately come to, and thus are not worthy of respect.
That’s how it works in the abstract world.
Out here in the real world things are breaking everywhere strange, and anything that calls to and confirms humane qualities like tolerance and understanding, especially of profound and even potentially volatile differences, is a kind of treasure and should be preserved and defended.

Roy – I don’t think you right to say that it is impossible for someone to be an honest and sincere bigot. I also don’t think the issue of whether someone can arrive at bigotted opinions by following rational norms of belief formation is–at the very least–as obvious as you think it is. Bigotry might well be irrational in an ideal sense (as indeed I think religious belief is), but I think that one can arrive at mild forms of bigotry by following everyday norms of rationality, if such attitudes are prevalent within one’s society. Surely it is easy enough to think to think of examples in history, and perhaps today, of people who have held mildly bigotted views but whom we would not wish to describe as irrational, in the everyday sense…

(Some free advice: if you care so much about “tolerance and understanding …of… differences”, perhaps you should reconsider your habit of talking about people whose views you object to in the third person? Some people could find it a little bit insulting and creepy…)

Anyway I wasn’t trying prevent people from “making [their] own minds up” by suggesting they “defer” to my opinions on Shakespeare’s attitudes to Jews, or trying to indoctrinate anyone with my “dogmatism”, fun though all that would have been. Believe it or not, I was hoping to have an argument about a difficult issue which interests me and to which the solution does not seem to me to be obvious.

or that it is logically inconceivable that I be mistaken (it is not)

It’s not that you are mistaken necessarily, but someone could claim that 2+2 is equal 10 or 11 and they would be correct too.

engels,
I’ll leave it at this: when I said militant (for both believers and non-believers) I had in mind people I’ve met in my own life. Of course everyone assumes I mean the big wig atheists, but I really was referring to actual acquaintances I’ve had and the condescending way that they’ve treated me. So you couldn’t really defend them if you wanted to. That’s not to say the more famous folks wouldn’t fall under that category, it just means I don’t really know if they would or not.

And I’ll admit I’m not sure how to respond to your last point. It was, after all, just a blog post, not a full blown theory of respect (in other words, I have my intuitions, but nothing that would satisfy you I’m sure). Maybe if I pursue that in graduate school I’ll get back to you :)
In the mean time, try and be charitable and take the post in the spirit it was meant, or not, it’s up to you. I think that’s enough from me on this thread.

Also, I agreed with parts of your second post, about wanting to protect aspects of humanity that tend to get “chopped up in the jaws of logic”, as you put it. I actually think the conclusion of Blackburn’s essay gets it pretty much right:

So in the end, should I have behaved differently that Friday night? I fear the matter is indeterminate. Was I being asked to express substantial respect for an ontological self-deception whose primary purpose includes protecting arbitrary attitudes and customs from the scrutiny of reason? Or was I being asked to show minimal respect, not much more than toleration, for remembrances and pieties that it is human to have, and that desperately need protection against the encroaching world of cost-benefit analysis? I fear that the somewhat unaccountable state of mind of my host may be interpreted in either way, and no doubt in yet other ways again.

But would you at least admit that my comment on 2+2 being equal 10 or 11 was extremely clever?

If not, I’ve gotta tell ya: you’re obviously as biased against me (in a completely irrational way) as Shakespeare (allegedly) was against the Jews. And that seriously undermines your reputation of a rational individual.