From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 05:09:08 MDT
"We live in a wantonly irreligious age-at least at the level of public
discourse."
Given that US public life appears utterly saturated with the moral pronouncements of evangelical christians, typically from senior figures in the governing party up to and including the President, I find this somewhat difficult to believe. However, I am inclined to doubt whether the author does either, since he is patently referring to judicial implementation of the US constitution and wishes to engage in dishonest hyperbole so as to allow him to wallow in his own siege mentality. Properly speaking, judicial decisions regarding religious proclamations in court rooms or sodomy in bedrooms simply serve to reinforce secularism, a neutral territory that is as much in the interests of the religious as of atheists. That has nothing whatsoever to do with cleansing society of religion; it simply means thwarting attempts by the religious right to create a state that allows no space for other religions, sects or ideologies.
"Yet I often meet a, to me, curious sort of fellow who simply cannot comprehend what religion might be about. He is puzzled as distinct from contemptuous or haughty. He genuinely sees no different between religious faith and believing that the earth is flat."
Generally speaking, I tend to be wary of people who, to take a better analogy, have a passionate belief in alien abductions that is every bit as full of fervour as that of any conventional religion. The two might have differing degrees of social respectability but I fail to see why they are different in kind.
"(I'm reminded of Orwell's comment about "the sort of atheist who doesn't so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him."
My original reason for declining religion was that having read the Bible it seemed clear to me that the god it depicted was a vicious and sadistic barbarian. At that point, the question of whether such a being existed or not was indeed essentially immaterial; such a being was clearly no more worthy of veneration (appeasement) than any earthly dictator. With that in mind, I suspect the real question is why anyone would find such an entity 'likeable.'
"We do not know where we came from, and no amount of pious mummery about Big Bangs and black holes changes that at all."
One is tempted to ask why pious mummery about immaculate conceptions and eirenic gardens does anything to 'change that at all' either; if one is to interpret such phenemena one might at least seek to do so with the constraints of a formal system that offers such assurances as to the rectitude of such interpretations (i.e. the scientific method).
The answer to the questions of where we come from and why we are here, of course, is that the question itself is meaningless; since existence precedes essence none of the questions being asked are meaningful. Of course, if one wishes to remain agnostic on that particular point it is no consequence, since any such preceding noumenal essence would, as Nietzsche observed, be unintelligible to us. Incidentally, the fact that we have available to us the accumulated knowledge of past ages, the works of Sartre and Nietzsche for example, does indeed mean that we have certain advantages over Augustine and Aquinas. Or is the opportunity to stand on the shoulder of giants, a Newtonion phrase, of no consequence?
"Critics of religion say, correctly, that horrible crimes are committed in the name of religion. So are they in the name of communism, anti-communism, Manifest Destiny, Zionism, nationalism, and national security. Horrible crimes are what people do. They are not the heart of the thing. "
Given the implicit suggestion made elsewhere in the article that morality and religion are mutually dependent ("a moral scientist is thus a contradiction in terms") I am inclined to take this as another example of religious hypocrisy, since the author patently holds religion to have an improving character he would withhold from his other examples. While I would readily agree that utopian idealism in particular, manifested in any number of the above examples, is a volatile quality the fact remains that in historical terms religion has been the exemplar of this, particularly since it acted as the main facilitator for many of the above (it is very arguable that zionism and religion are separable in that regard for example).
"You cannot squeeze consciousness, beauty, affection, or Good and Evil from physics any more than you can derive momentum from the postulates of
geometry"
Albeit more crudely stated, this is simply the naturalistic fallacy discussed a few weeks previously. I don't really see the need to repeat the previous dicussion Hermit and I had on this topic, though I might suggest that one could argue that religion is simply an attempt to derive such ideas from a naturalistic starting point. Consider as an example JG Frazer's observations concening the natural history of religion in The Golden Bough. Alternatively, I might suggest that moral religion is smewhat of a contradiction; draconian moral pronouncements relating to a morals of abstinence have little to do with ethics in my view, but are all that religion has to offer.
"Similarly, those who believe in religions often do not really quite
believe. "
Strictly speaking, at least as far as christianity is concerned, I am inclined to suspect that no-one believes on that sense. I doubt that even the most fanatic of fundamentalists can honestly claim to follow mosaic law without some judicious selection (lessons in shoving camels through the eye of a needle etc). See: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bronwyn/drlaura.htm Inconsistency, as far as I can tell, comes with the territory.
"If there is an afterlife, then there is an aspect of existence about which we know nothing and which may, or may not, influence this world."
Sorry, no. If there is an afterlife it is not an aspect of existence at all, since it would be supernatural in character (and existence is defined in terms of its natural character; the supernatural refers to that essence I spoke of earlier). In which case, to adapt Wittgenstein, of which we cannot know we should not concern ourselves.
"Thus to believe in the absolute explanatory power of the sciences one must be an atheist-to exclude competition. Note that atheists as much as the faithful believe what they cannot establish."
Science is certainly not the only means of explaning phenomena; literature, history and philosophy all serve that purpose also. However, science is unusual in that it has a predictive capability regarding those explanations which is were the conflict with religion is present (philosophy also to a lesser extent, though the elements of oil and water are not quite as present there). Both religion and science have explanations as to the origins of the universe and life within it. Even while accepting the provisional character of truth that follows from Popper and Godel, are we honestly to accept assertions that are utterly without any means of verification? Incidentally, the problem with compartmentalisation is that it doesn't work. One cannot accept Darwin on the one hand and Genesis on the other; the explanations are competitive.
"Any ideology can probably be described as a systematic way of misunderstanding the world."
The one sentence in that piece I have some sympathy for., even if it does caricature atheism, which is more closely related to an absence of ideology.
"toward something more at the heart of life than the hoped-for raise, trendy restaurants, and the next and grander automobile. "
This strikes me as a defense of asceticism. By contrast I think I would say that small material pleasures are what life is all about; between good food and wine in a restaurant (trendy or otherwise) and grovelling on your knees in a dank and gloomy church, I think I know which is the more life-affirming.
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