Religion

Via Lindsey, I read this paper by Simon Blackburn (pdf) which appears, again, in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life edited by Louise Antony, and containing essays by 20 or so atheist philosophers. The collection is well worth reading. Its not as though it can have been difficult to find atheist philosophers who are willing to talk about their views, but netween them the contributors display a nice range of attitudes toward religion, including deep respect, envy, and outright hostility.

Blackburn’s chapter is, for the most part, an argument against versions of respect for religion that hinge on interpreting the claims of religious believers as not being the kinds of claim that can be true or false, and he makes that argument rather well. The point in dispute, though, is whether we can truly respect people who have what we regard to be false beliefs. He thinks not:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But 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—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

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Rowan Williams doesn’t need me to defend him, having, preumably, better placed and more powerful friends (one in partiuclar). But here goes anyway. One of my several Anglophile (and this one a rare Episcopalian) in-laws just sent me (approvingly) this piece from the Sunday Times, and added the following, rather lovely if a little unlikely, quote, recommending a different version of multiculturalism from that to which he takes the Archbishop to be committed (which, I gather from googling, comes from Mark Steyn):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

”You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

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“The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org writes about an experiment on people’s perceptions of photos of a young woman wearing a headscarf and without one. I don’t see any information on how careful the surveyors were to ensure randomness, whether they carried out statistical tests of significance etc etc (this appears to have been put together by a general social research firm, rather than academics). Still, if the results don’t have major problems, then they make for interesting reading. Not all the inferences that people make about the veiled, as opposed to the unveiled woman, seem unreasonable. Unsurprisingly, more people consider the woman to be more conservative when they see the headscarf photo (this seems to me to be not an unreasonable inference; people who display overt symbols of religiosity often are more conservative). But there are some other judgements that are a little bit less pleasant.

Subjects displayed considerably more aversion to the covered woman. Specifically, they were less likely to want to live near her. While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

More “here”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/01/headscarves.html.

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Thanks to recent developments in the Democratic primaries, trivialization of Martin Luther King’s legacy is off to an all-time early start this year. But Christopher Phelps has just published an excellent overview of recent historical work on MLK that knocks some of the ceremonial tinsel off — the better to see the real figure, who would never get a word in edgewise today.

The latest volume from the King Papers Project, for example

comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

The volume’s assiduous editorial annotation permits us to locate King in lived dialogue. We discover, for example, that his 1952 sermon on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, prompted a letter of retort from Melvin H. Watson, a Morehouse College professor and Ebenezer congregant, who attempted to set King straight on the virtues of Stalin. Watson, a holdover from the Communist-led Popular Front, helps us place King’s democratic radicalism in bold relief while providing a concrete illustration of how black communities retained a strong left-wing presence even after the 1940s.

The whole article is available online from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Looking over the passage just quoted, I had a flashback to various hopeless arguments with Chron copyeditors — for it is singularly absurd not to have capitalized the “c” in Phelps’s line mentioning that King “opposed communism as materialistic.”

The international Communist movement (corporate world headquarters in Moscow, later with rival franchise based in Peking) was indeed materialistic, yes. But would King have opposed communism, tout court? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?

I doubt that very much: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

One of the commenters to my post below suggested that Mike Huckabee was unlikely to do well among Catholics. “Philip Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics.html (who is really blogging interesting stuff on the races) has some county-level data from Iowa suggesting that this is true.

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GOP caucus results (counties won by Huckabee in blue; by Romney in red)

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Distribution of Catholics in Iowa (the redder the county, the more Catholics)

An eyeballing of the graph suggests that the parts of the state where Huckabee had most trouble were indeed, more often than not, those places where there were more Catholics. Klinkner runs a regression testing how percentage of population religious, percentage of population Catholic, percentage of population evangelical, and percentage of population rural affected voting for Huckabee, and finds that the coefficient for Catholicism is negative, high, and statistically significant.

Update see “here”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics-again.html for Klinkner’s response to some of the methodological criticisms.

Via Lindsey, I see that Christianity Today has an interesting interview with Philip Pullman; the extended interview is at Peter Chattaway’s blog here. Well worth reading. My favourite quote is the same as Lindsey’s (no doubt because I can identify with it pretty well, and it helps explain why I liked HDM so much; though my atheism is more of the low-CofE-veering-on-Methodism kind):

My answer to that would be that I was brought up in the Church of England, and whereas I’m an atheist, I’m certainly a Church of England atheist, and for the matter of that a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. The Church of England is so deeply embedded in my personality and my way of thinking that to remove it would take a surgical operation so radical that I would probably not survive it.

I can’t argue with most of the selections in “The Nine Most Badass Bible Verses” — except for thinking that at least one violent episode might have been cut in favor of something from the Song of Solomon booty call.

Plus it’s a problem that the list implies a ranking, because no way Elisha and the bears (2 Kings 2:23-24) should come in at a mere number 8:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

And what do we learn from this? Valuable lessons for today:

Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today’s kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It’s a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.

It should be pointed out that even after his death, Elisha continued to kick ass. II Kings 13:20-21 tells us that when a dead body was thrown into his tomb and touched Elisha’s bones, it sprang back to life. It’s unknown whether Elisha had this power in life, as well as death, but we like to think he did and that he had the habit of killing his victims with bears, resurrecting them, and then promptly re-summoning the bears to kill them, again. He’d just repeat the whole thing over and over until he got bored.

via Ralph Luker

Sometimes I try to deny my nature, but then Chris goes and posts about a conversation in which someone says something silly. And it turns out I used the silly bit as a major premise myself just last week. Oy.

A real conversation among analytical philosophers:

A: You know Hitchens’s _God is Not Great_ — doesn’t that title convey an existential commitment?

B: Not necessarily, “God” might be the name of a fictional character.

A: Well, the name of several different fiction characters actually.

B: Yes, but some of those fictional characters _are_ great ….

I’m just back from Arizona (big thanks to Kieran and Laurie btw), where I had a great time. My purpose in going there was to deliver a paper on “public reason and immigration” and a couple of conversations I had on the trip concerned how some Americans see the European issue. In both of them (one with a grad student, one with the guy next to me on a plane) my interlocutor referred, in almost identical terms, to Europe’s problem with immigration by “fundamentalist Muslims”, and seemed to believe that this was an accurate depiction of the Islamic population of Europe. Meanwhile, back home, my partner had arranged for a Muslim colleague to accompany her to watch Bristol thump Stade Francais in the Heineken cup. Needless to say, the woman in question is about as distant as it is possible to be from the Muslims who feature in the imagination of my two conversation partners. At Heathrow, I bought a copy of the Guardian to read on the bus, and was reminded by Ronan Bennett’s excellent article, that such blanket stereotyping is also practised by many people here in the UK, who don’t have the excuse of lack of familiarity. When the stereotyping is done by a major British cultural and literary figure and is mixed with a strong dose of sadistic revenge fantasty, it is all the more deplorable. But as Bennett points out, Martin Amis has largely got away with it and a lot of the commentary has been more critical of Terry Eagleton for calling him the bigot that he is. (Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa also linked the other day to some more on-the-money kicking of Amis, in which the great writer’s grasp of the history of technology is examined.)

Suppose there were an Iranian cult combining Islamism and Stalinism, with a history of terrorist attacks, that had enjoyed friendly relations with Saddam’s regime, back when.

Why, that’s something that the American right would fund a special TV network just to denounce 24-7, isn’t it?

Not so fast. Daniel Pipes and Max Boot think the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is just sadly misunderstood. Get the backstory at the Campaign for America’s Future.

So Laurie, the lucky duck, got a copy of the Atlas of Creation, the amazingly large-format, glossy-photo-laden, funtastic creationist slice of life, courtesy of whoever is bankrolling its author Adnan Oktar. It’s a fantastic educational resource for our three-year-old: she’s already excited about cutting out the photos of the bunnies and fishies, etc, and making them into collages, puppets and so on. Strongly recommended.

Those interested in John’s post below should also take a look at Cosma Shalizi‘s long awaited, long heralded, post on econophysics, which went up yesterday. Following quickly on the heels of part IV of “dsquared’s Freakonomics review”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/09/freakiology-yes-folks-its-part-4-of.html, this is surely a sign that End Times are upon us (biblical authorities seem to disagree on what the Third Sign is going to be; I leave plausible speculations thereon as an exercise for the reader).

There’s a lot of “excitement”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/21/16478/6735 in the netroots over a piece written by Bobby Jindal in which he tries to persuade Protestants of the benefits of Catholicism. After reading the “piece in question”:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1609536/posts, I’m at a loss to understand what all the fuss is about. It seems to me to be a standard – even banal – exercise in Catholic apologetics. That the Catholic church considers itself to be the one true church, to hold the apostolic succession, to believe that works are important as well as faith etc etc … isn’t news. Nor is it news that a conservative Catholic politician would believe these things It might be mildly politically awkward – but given that Jindal explicitly _isn’t_ arguing that Protestants worship a different God, and is merely asking them “to consider seriously the claims of the Catholic Church,” I don’t think that there’s very much traction in this (there seems to me to be a tacit deal among conservative Christians whereby fundamentalist Protestants are softpedalling the Whore of Babylon stuff in return for Catholics not pushing their line on the magisterium too hard).

But if the netroots are blowing it out of proportion, the ‘Jindal on Religion’ “website”:http://www.jindalonreligion.com/ and accompanying TV ad, put up by Louisiana’s Democratic Party, are actively dishonest. The website says that Jindal argues that

Jindal states non-Catholics are burdened with “utterly depraved minds” and calls individuals who ignore the teachings of the Catholic church intellectually dishonest.

The actual quotes in their proper context are:

the alternative is to trust individual Christians, burdened with, as Calvin termed it, their “utterly depraved” minds, to overcome their tendency to rationalize, their selfish desires, and other effects of original sin.

and

I trust I have provided enough evidence to indicate that the Catholic Church deserves a careful examination by non-Catholics. It is not intellectually honest to ignore an institution with such a long and distinguished history and with such an impressively global reach.

The first rather obviously _isn’t_ a claim that non-Catholics are utterly depraved. It’s a mildly clumsy attempt to hoist Protestants on their own petard, building on earlier discussion of how Reformation Protestants believed people to be depraved, and saying that it’s a bit odd then that Protestants should trust them to interpret religion on their own. The second is a claim that it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore the Catholic Church, and that Protestants should consider converting to it very carefully. This manifestly isn’t a claim that those who don’t follow the Catholic church’s teachings (which is the everyday meaning of “those who ignore the teachings”) are ipso facto intellectually dishonest.

I don’t know very much about Jindal’s politics, and I imagine that there’s a lot that I would disagree with. He may indeed have taken political stances that I would find absolutely reprehensible. That doesn’t change the fact that this is an obviously dishonest attack.

[modified to correct a stupid error following an email from a reader]