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Fundamentalism by Proxy and the Guilting of the Godly

09 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, atheism, Christianity, Doctrine, Faith, Fundamentalism, Islam, religion, Unbelief

A general suspicion of religion comes to mind easily enough. Hell, even religious people frequently exhibit this suspicion (tempered as it is with whatever thoughts they’ve assembled into their own beliefs). There is something about the whole range of religious beliefs as such that invites a degree of doubt, even contempt. It would be easy to believe religion could be refuted.

Easy.

Just like nailing jelly to a wall.

What makes this seemingly easy task so frustrating is the sense that any generalization one might make about religion will most certainly have its counterexamples, and most of these exceptions are anything but marginal. Even belief in God or gods which seems such a no-brainer falls apart when we consider various branches of Buddhism. Belief in the supernatural is rather complicated by those who think of spirits as part of the natural world. Some of us may regard the notion of spirits in a mountain top as falling outside the natural world, but it doesn’t really work to maintain that belief in a supernatural world is a defining feature of religion if that belief itself isn’t all that universal. The particulars just don’t rescue the narrative. …and so-on with any other effort to sweep the lot of religious beliefs into the same been-there-refuted-that bin. What is religion? Hard to say. Harder still if you’re answering that question in the midst of a polemic moment.

Luckily, this problem is easily solved by focusing on one set of religious traditions instead of trying to drop a truth bomb on the lot of them. Can’t nail down every faith out there with one stroke of the hammer? No problem. Just pick one. Specificity will save us all!

…except that it won’t.

Let’s say you think the God of Abraham is a right cruel bastard, and so that’s your main objection to the whole of Christianity (along with Islam and Judaism). You can even throw in a few scriptures to back this up (cause that seems to be how the Biblical game is played), and we non-believers are often happy to play along, arguendo, so to speak. The godless corners of the net are filled with various references to God’s more dickish behavior, all documented nicely in the ‘Good Book’, and wielded well, these can form the basis for reasonably compelling arguments. We can even extend the critique into any number of horrible things Christians have done in the name of the great big bastard in the sky. We can work up a real parade or horribles and say ‘that’s it1’ That’s why the God of Abraham isn’t welcome in our lives and our thoughts. We can do this. Hell, I have done it. I”ve made this argument quite a few times since going godless many decades ago. And I will say, that I think this approach can be used to skewer a particular brand of believer, one I’m pretty sure I’ve met in person more than a few times.

But what about those Christians who seem to find in the Bible a story of hope, love, and kindness? No, I don’t mean the footnote kind of godly affection that accompanies homophobic politics, paternalistic family norms, or just plain idiotic theodicies. I mean the kind of compassion that actually does put some believers in the streets fighting for the rights of others and defending the dignity of all manner of people. Those Christians do exist and they have their scriptures too, their theories, their angle on God, the universe, and even that annoying wasp nest under the front porch.

What are we to make of these Christians?

The Christian left was once a powerful force in American life, and we could do worse than to see it rise again. Don’t get me wrong; at his best Jesus is an ambiguous story for me, and not one containing a lot of factual weight, but if i was to pick a fight it wouldn’t be with the peace-love-dove set of Christians. When it comes to the things that matter most to me, I am as likely as not going to count them as allies. Damned good ones at that!

For the present, though, the question is what to make of the Christians who don’t fit the yer-a-jerk-and-so-is-yourGod narrative? How do we sort their significance in relation to the buggers who actually make life hard for those ‘sinner’s they claim to love after all. If the notion that God and his fan club are all a bunch of jerks is your go-to argument when explaining active resistance to religion, then these guys are actually kind of a problem.

…which is ironic to say the least.

A believer may have an out for this problem. She can tell us one version of Christianity (presumably her own) is genuine and the other is just bullshit. How we may ask? And scripture, she may answer, which theoretically means the whole issue stands or falls on those passages Christians are find if quoting at each other and the rest of us. A believer can insist that the right answer is contained in those scriptures (or something else in her faith), and that the rest is simply noise. Whether she is right or not about the nature of that correct view is another question, but so long as someone affirms a particular faith, this approach isn’t glaringly inconsistent. But as a man who denies the authority of scripture (among other religious authorities) I’m not really in a position to do that. Sure, I can formulate ideas as to whether or not any given interpretation of scripture is plausible given the text and its historical significance, but I can find no authority with which to say anyone oughtta give a damn about that assessment.

More than that, I see no reason to believe there is any consistency to scripture with which to settle questions about what is and what isn’t a truly Christian take on the subject. Really, I think it far more likely, that the whole mess of scripture really is just that full of contradiction because what the hell else would you expect if a giant text cobbled together from a vast range of different authors writing at different times and places?

…which reminds me of one of those teachable moments a high school student once handed me. (In this case, I was the teachee.) I can’t remember how the subject came up, but I asked an orthodox Jewish kid something about how he viewed some particular theme in the Bible. He responded by telling me that there is no ‘the Bible’. To him, that phrase denoted an odd collection of texts, some of which might bear some relation to those his own people valued and some clearly didn’t, but the notion that the whole collection could be meaningfully referenced as though it were a single book seemed rather foreign to him.

It should have been foreign to me too.

We unbelievers give up far too much ground by speaking about ‘the Bible’ in this way.

This is of course a very incomplete account of the variation, even within Christianity. The whole mess gets meta-messy when we start adding differences of opinion as to whether or not scripture is the sole source of authority on what is right and what isn’t. What do we make of those who recognize the authority of the Pope? …of the Mormon Prophets? …or even the notion that one must be filled with the Holy Spirit to interpret scripture properly? All of these can turn the tables on any attempt to arrive at a fixed notion of just what it is we are rejecting when we say ‘no’ no God.

In any event, I see no reason to believe we can find a consistent message in the myriad scriptures folks are prone to cite in the effort to decide what a Christian ought to believe. For me, there is no ought to the matter. There is only what different believers do in fact believe and the mix of reasons and choices that go into their professions of belief. (Hell, I’m not even sure how much to make of beliefs, to be honest. What counts as doctrine on Wednesday is easily forgotten on Thursday. …on Friday it r-emerges as the subject of debate.) Anyway, I don’t see any hope of resolving questions about which is the true nature of Christianity.

…or of Islam.

…or Buddhism.

…or even pastafarianism for that matter.

I’m not saying the critique of Christian cruelty is a straw man. I am saying its relevance to any given believer depends on assumptions any given Christian may or may not hold.

This is often frustrating for an unbeliever. We have the goods on Tom and Jack, so to speak, so it just seems unfair to let Alice and Eric slide on account of a few disclaimers. But of course mere disclaimers aren’t the issue. It’s the very real possibility that someone’s faith may genuinely differ from that for which we have a ready critique. Of course we can ask any number of questions to see if someone really does envision Christianity in positive terms (as opposed to those who merely parrot the rhetoric of love and compassion all the while wielding the Prince of Peace like a well-balanced weapon, but at the end of the day? Some folks escape the criticism. Some folks really do seem to see in Christ a message that genuinely inspires love and compassion.

So what’s a godless bastard to do?

Unfortunately, I think the temptation exists to force the issue, to pretend we have some way of sorting the real thing from the imitation believer after all. It should come as no surprise that this rhetorical strategy usually means declaring the least defensible version of Christianity that we can imagine to be the real thing. All other variations, and in particular the more palatable variations on belief are then the product of personal whim. The kind Christian, so this narrative goes, is the one who really hasn’t read her Bible. She is the one who hasn’t really thought her doctrines through to their logical conclusions. I expect this kind of narrative from conservative Christians, but it’s a little more odd to hear it coming from the godless. It’s odd, yes, but it’s not rare. Unbelievers often take the view that Christians liberal in theology and politics aren’t the real ones.  Thus, we turn virtues into vices and snub allies away into likely resentment. (Who could blame them?) At worst, the effort to delegitimize moderate or liberal believers may well nudge one or three of them the other direction. It’s a kind of proxy-fundamentalism, a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of people whose views don’t fit the vision of Christianity we mean to attack.

A variation of this approach can be seen in the oft-repeated refrain that the only real Muslims are the militants. Those Muslims (indeed, the vast majority) who seem to get along with the rest of us haven’t got their own faith right, so the argument goes. And thus peaceful Muslims and violent extremists all falter beneath the weight of the same criticism. We can treat every Muslim as a would-be terrorist, so it seems, because those who haven’t come around to it simply aren’t doing their religion right.

Once again this approach assumes an objective limit on the range of legitimate variation within the faith in question. And once again, no such objective limit exists. You can haul out whatever quotes you want in support of it, but once again, the significance of those quotes rests on a number of assumptions, assumptions that just aren’t uniform throughout the Muslim world. So, why advocate for the bastards when we could support decent folks who just want to get through the day.

There is simply no way around it. If ever there was a term for which ‘family resemblance’ provided a more suitable account of its meaning I don’t know what that is (maybe ‘culture’). Religion as a whole can take many different forms, as can just about every individual religion. We can respond to each individual variant as we like, but there is no use shoring up the authority of those who serve as the main targets of our criticism. We certainly shouldn’t be helping the greatest assholes in God’s many fan clubs to marginalize decent people. The plasticity of religion is itself a potential objection in itself, at least to those who think it a bastion of objective morality, but that too is just another subset of believers out there. My point is simply that the variation is there, and that those of us who say ‘no’ shouldn’t be too quick to add our own voices to those seeking to impose orthodoxy on the faithful.

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“The Faith of Christopher Hitchens” …In Which I Read Snake Oil

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Books, Religion, Uncategorized

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Anthony Flew, Apologetics, atheism, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Death, Faith, Larry Alex Taunton

I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t the fate of prominent atheists to end up with Christian apologists for spokesmen. Okay, I don’t literally believe in fate (either), but let’s just say the pattern is starting to look a little too common.

Yesterday, I came across this charming little tweet from professional bigot, Matt Barber.

MattBarber3

Barber’s link connects us to an article discussing an account of Hitchens’s personal life, as related in The Faith of Christopher Hitchens by Larry Alex Taunton. Who is Taunton? He is one of the Christian apologists whom Hitchens debated in his later years. According to Taunton, the two had become close friends in those years, close enough for him to be present throughout much of Hitchens’s struggle with terminal cancer. According to Taunton, Hitchens gave serious thought to converting in those years. Taunton doesn’t say that Hitchens did convert, but he spends virtually the entire book exploring the possibility that Hitchens might have. The author of the article in Barber’s link, Al Perretta, contributes his own 2 cents by telling us that Hitchens own preemptive remarks about the possibility of a deathbed conversion indicate just how much he was thinking about it. If Taunton is content to imply the possibility, Perretta wants to make damned sure we get the hint. And then of course, we have the likes of Matt Barber who sees in the whole thing an opportunity to taunt unbelievers.

It’s a bit like a game of telephone. What Hitchens actually said and thought in private moments before his death we will never know, but we do get to see how Taunton’s account of it takes on ever more polemic significance as others proceed to recount the story. Honestly, I don’t doubt that Taunton and Hitchens were close friends, but I do think Taunton serves his friend poorly by using him in this manner. Damned poorly! Taunton may think his efforts restrained, even respectful, but he has made Hitchens into a commodity of sorts, a chip those in his own camp will now use shamelessly to promote their own views. Whatever respect Taunton may think he has paid Hitchens in writing this, it’s fairly gone by the time we get to the likes of Barber. I somehow doubt Barber will prove to be unusual.

The story is hardly without precedent!

***

I remember when Anthony Flew changed his views on the existence of God. As an active participant in Christian Forums, I lost track of the number of times someone came into the open debate forums to announce Flew’s ‘conversion’. More than a few would-be apologists really seemed to think this odd sort of authority argument would (or should have) swayed a number of unbelievers. A popular atheist had changed his mind. Shouldn’t we do the same?

The full story in Flew’s case would prove far more complicated than the conversion narrative continually promoted by Christian apologists. It doesn’t appear that Flew ever came to believe in the God of Abraham, though he did seem to adopt a Deist position on the existence of God, but this distinction was often lost in the words of sundry believers proclaiming the miracle of Flew’s conversion. Questions remain to this day about just how much some of Flew’s final work, There is a God,  really is the work of Flew and how much of it is really the work of Christian apologists. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that something was wrong in Flew’s very public change of position. Flew, a lifelong atheist thus spent his final days voiced, as it were by Christian apologists, his final position on the existence of God communicated by others, many of whom were all to happy to treat Flew’s newfound Deism as a victory for Christianity itself.

Had the Anthony Flew whose writings we all knew become a Christian, he certainly would have made a far more eloquent Christian than his latter-day friends made him out to be.

This sort of response may seem harsh, even disrespectful, but Flew’s final days certainly produced a number of red flags. We don’t normally learn the views of professional philosophers from their long-time debate opponents, and a  professional philosopher writes his own material. For reasons which may or may not be understandable, this did not happen in There is a God, and it isn’t entirely clear that he understood the full contents of that work. Whether or not Flew was clear about what he was doing in those final days, most of us will never know. That many in the Christian community were all-too happy to milk Flew’s shift of position for all it was worth and more is plain to see. Flew’s “conversion” left us all with more of a scandal to ponder than a novel argument on the age-old topic.

As with many public debates, I often found the terms of this one rather oddly skewed. I have often wondered if it is really appropriate to call the mere decision to believe in God a ‘conversion’. When people convert to a faith, they do a lot more than simply change their mind about the truth of a claim. They say prayers. They go to church. The embrace doctrines. They nest, as it were, in their new worldview. For his part, Flew seems simply to have decided that a God of some sort was an essential part of any explanation for the world as we know it. Yet, Christians still proclaim the truth of Flew’s conversion, seemingly immune to the fact that he didn’t end up in their camp either.

***

…and of course there is always Lady Hope!

My first exposure to this story came in some college classroom, a history class I believe. We were discussing Charles Darwin when someone interjected the comment that he had recanted toward the end of his life. The comment hadn’t been at all relevant to the discussion, and the instructor simply didn’t bite. So, we were back on topic in no time, and I found myself wondering what little story I had missed.

That little story was the story of Elizabeth Cotton, or ‘Lady Hope’ as she was called. She claimed to have spoken to Darwin near the end of his life wherein she found him reading Hebrews. Darwin expressed regrets about his scientific publications according to Cotton and discussed plans for holding a congregation in his summer house. If her account is true, then Cotton appears to be the only person to whom Darwin expressed these views. He didn’t tell them to his wife, a devout believer who might well have been quite relieved to hear of his newfound faith. Neither did he communicate them to any of his children or colleagues. But he did communicate these views to Elizabeth Cotton, according to Cotton anyway, and this fact was interesting enough to earn her a little bit of fame among Christian speakers near the end of the 19th century.

***

So, you see this latest bit about Hitchens is hardly without precedent. It seems that when unbelievers become believers, Christian apologists are often the first to know. Hell, sometimes they are the last to know as well. And sometimes they are the only ones to know at all.

I gather the rest of us are supposed to take their account on faith.

***

FaithofHitchensSo, how does Taunton pay his respects to his former friend? Consider the quotes he uses to open the earliest chapters of his book:

“Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear that it is true.” – Blaise Pascal.

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins have you never had the courage to commit.” – Oscar Wilde.

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C.S. Lewis

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.” Shakespeare.

…you get the idea.

These are the pithy little one liners that Taunton uses to frame each of his opening chapters. Yes, the point of each quote is every bit as obvious as it may seem.You might expect a book about a deceased friend to use quotations illustrating something admirable about him, even to outline qualities one might find worthy of praise. Taunton is of course using these quotes to take Hitchens apart.

In “A Requiem for Unbelief,” Taunton relates his personal history with Hitchens and explains his decision to write the book. He describes Hitchens’s life as one of rebellion against God (thus establishing from the beginning a narrative that refuses to take Hitchens’s atheism seriously). Taunton also describes Hitchen?” With this remarkably disrespectful tribute to an old friend, it is no surprise that Taunton would lead the chapter with a quote suggesting that people such as Hitchens must know deep down that he is wrong.

The notion that atheists really believe in God after all is a pretty common theme among Christian apologists. Taunton clearly means to use Hitchens’s life to provide an example of this, an anecdote to show us what so many apologists take for granted, that deep down the most strident atheist is really a frustrated believer of some sort. Thus, Taunton transforms Hitchens’s life into contemptuous dismissal of the very views Hitchens proclaimed throughout that very life. Hitchens didn’t really mean what he said, so Taunton would have us believe, and no-one knows this better than Taunton.

Next Taunton proceeds to tell us that Hitchens’s atheism is rooted in youthful rebellion (hence the line about courage to commit sin) and goes on to explain that Hitchens’s love of learning was little more than an effort to improve his skills in verbal sparring (hence the suggestion that an education was wasted on him). He then borrows from Hitchens’s own allusion to ‘keeping two books’, so to speak, to set aside virtually everything Hitchens ever said in public. Taunton extends this metaphor to suggest quite simply that Hitchens’s public atheism was a false front and that he held other thoughts in private. Who would know those private thoughts?

Taunton, of course!

Taunton’s friendship with Hitchens thus becomes an interesting authority claim, a basis from which to shred everything Hitchens told us about his own life and thought.

…and if your getting a little ill at this point, then I’m right there with you.

This is not the sort of book one writes about a friend. It isn’t even the sort of book one writes about a respected opponent. It is the sort of book one writes about an individual one has already dismissed. It is also the sort of book one writes about a bit of personal capital, an investment ripe for returns. In these opening chapters, Taunton sheds sleight on Hitchens character at every turn. The exercise is as crass as it is dishonest.

Toward the middle of the book Taunton’s narrative softens, but why shouldn’t it? He has already dismissed everything Hitchens ever fought for with a few condescending narrative themes. Having established the sad truth about Hitchens’s personal motivations, Taunton can afford to be more subtle in the later chapters. Following 9-11, Taunton wants us to believe Hitchens embarked on a long trajectory toward faith in God. He began to struggle with moral principles and to explore scripture. This, Taunton seems to suggest was the root of their friendship, and the basis for their many private conversations about Christianity.

Taunton recounts many of these discussions in extravagant detail. One could perhaps wonder how he remembers those details so vividly, but I’m more interested in the transition from argument to story-line. The conversations with Hitchens that Taunton describes are full of disputation, point and counter-point. They are discussions in which two men contest with each other over what is and what isn’t true. But of course, these arguments come to us within the larger frame of a story told by Taunton himself. Not surprisingly, the course of each argument flows nicely into the story-line Taunton has chosen to provide us. It is a story-line that resolves each of the disputes quite unsurprisingly in Taunton’s favor.

Taunton’s single-minded handling of the issue is hardly subtle. He consistently gives himself the final word and of course Hitchens concedes a number of things to Taunton, but only in these private conversations. Hitchens accepts arguments without rejoinder, at least in the chapters of Taunton’s book, and he takes correction without rebuke. The final chapters of this work are a record of debates clearly dominated by Taunton, at least according to Taunton himself. And of course each of these arguments provides another step in the story of  Hitchens’s transformation toward a believing Christian. Taunton stops short of claiming the transformation actually occurred, though he wants us to believe it may well have, that Hitchens might have made it to the one true faith as Taunton understands it. Hell, Taunton even assures us that Hitchens would never have converted to Catholicism. If he converted, Taunton would have us believe, it must have been to the right kind of Christianity.

If Hitchens never said anything about his conversion, what are we to make of that? Perhaps it means he didn’t convert at all, but perhaps, the story-line here seems to suggest, it is because he can’t. Hitchens was too committed to his own public personae, or so Taunton would have us believe. he couldn’t afford to tell us if he really believed in God after all. He was already too invested in a godless public personae. So, Hitchens couldn’t tell us how he really felt.

What are we to expect of a man who kept two books?

One of the more striking features of Taunton’s narrative is the pe-emptive arguments he lays out in the course of the book. Hitchens lack of an explicit statement of faith is easily explained by his allusions to keeping two-books of his own life. Will atheists object to this account? Well of course, but that is just because we are fighting over Hitchens body, as Taunton describes the issue. Atheists skeptical of claims that Hitchens either embraced Christianity or came damned close to it are just too busy keeping score. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of projection than that, but it seems to be par for the course in this book.

Taunton seems to regard his friendship with Hitchens as unimaginable in the eyes of many, especially in the eyes of unbelievers. That he also takes Hitchens’s willingness to become friends with a Christian to be evidence of interest in conversion suggests that if anyone has trouble wrapping his mind around such a friendship it is Taunton himself.

It seems clear enough that Taunton doesn’t really take the possibility of a meaningful life as an atheist seriously. We can’t even tell a child from a piglet, as he suggests. Our worldview denies the possibility of meaningful moral scruples, according to Taunton. So, if he encounters an unbeliever with a profound sense of moral values – if Taunton allows himself to see this in such a person – it can only mean one thing, that that atheist isn’t really an atheist after all. He is a Christian waiting to get out. Short of an actual conversion, this is the best Hitchens could ever be to Taunton. And so Taunton’s own inability to imagine his own friendship becomes proof positive that his friend’s character must really be as Taunton would make of it.

***

Hitchens, it would seem, wasn’t really an unbeliever, and the only people who know it are the Christians whose faith he denounced publicly throughout his entire life. All in all, it’s a pretty shameless production. Once again, we find an unbeliever really does believe in God after all, or very nearly so. The trouble is that he only told a believer about all of this, at least according to the believer.

Taunton may think this is a novel story.

I think it’s a rather tiresome cliché.

 

 

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The Problem with Deepak.

05 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, CNN, Deepak Chopra, Faith, Law of attraction, religion, Skepticism, Story-Telling, Unbelief

I consider skepticism a way station on the way to a higher, more fulfilling kind of spirituality.

Millions of people have walked away from organized religion to become more spiritual, not less. They call themselves seekers; their disbelief is a starting point for starting their own investigations.

121021131717-deepak-chopra-medium-plus-169Deepak Chopra wants something from atheists. I somehow doubt he knows what that is anymore than the rest of us do, but his efforts to feign dialogue with unbelievers are among the creepier things one can encounter on the net. If you’re not careful you may encounter his particular brand of word salad on the #atheism hashtag at twitter, but don’t try too hard to make sense of his posts. That way lies madness!

And then the man lays this egg just before Easter weekend. It purports to be a critique of atheism, but of course it isn’t. What Chopra is doing in this post is passing off a story for a criticism, and it isn’t really a story about atheism at all. It is a story about the heroism of those who struggle with skepticism and in the end emerge victoriously with some sort of faith intact. What that belief is, or even how much the hero of his story is supposed to believe it, Deepak does not exactly tell us.

…but they will surely believe in something.

…kind of.

What does atheism have to do with this story, you might ask? Well we are one of the monsters to be encountered along the way. Near as I can tell, we represent a kind of undead to him. We are people who lost the struggle. Somewhere along the way, it would seem that we gave up all religious beliefs and thus fell into outer darkness, condemned to haunt the world of spiritual questers for the balance of our lives (or at least until Aragorn releases us from our obligations after helping in some epic battle). It is our role to test the faithful, and perhaps to bring down the champions of bad beliefs, but not to taken too seriously in our own right. Those on Deepak’s spiritual quest must ultimately get past us.

Okay, so Deepak didn’t mention Lord of the Rings. I know. But what he did do is tell us a story in which organized religion (presumably conservative Christians) and unbelievers both simply fail to meet his ideal. What that ideal is, Deepak doesn’t say. And given insistence that beliefs fall upon a sliding scale, it seems fair to suggest no answer will be forthcoming, or at least that no answer will take the form of a definitive belief. It isn’t a straight forward belief that interests Deepak so much as a kind of belief, well-hedged, and almost asserted, kind of. This belief is something about which people are not quiet certain, but certainly haven’t given up altogether. He can describe this state in the third person, but cannot assert it directly without contradicting himself (or at least in some sense preserving the option to disavow it at some point or another). Thus, it is easier for Deepak to tell us a story about the quest for this state than it is to outline the features of the beliefs in question.

One might suggest that those beliefs reside somewhere in the space between the hard problem of consciousness and current state of modern science. (We could call this land Adignorantia!) Alternatively, it could lie somewhere in that layer subatomic mysticism in which Deepak imagines Quantum Mechanics to have found a playground for wishful thinking. Either way the place in which Deepak’s beliefs reside is a place in which his word salad will actually mean something, so we are invited to imagine. It lies at the end of a never-ending quest, and if we can’t quite make sense of it today, well then that is because we aren’t there yet.

Keep trying!

One of the more amusing aspects of this game is that everyone can play it. The secular version is at least as old as Auguste Comte and his stages of progress (in which man progresses from theology, metaphysics, to positivism in every branch of study). Modern unbelievers play it every time they call religious beliefs superstition or speak of secularism as something that arises naturally from scientific progress. Conservative Christian variations are usually more personal (and hence far more interesting), but of course the tradition goes back far in the history of apologetics. The process of coming to believe appears in the all-better-now narratives of Christians throughout history (from St. Augustine or C.S. Lewis to – I’m sorry about this… Kirk Cameron). Some of these stories are profound. Some of them are damned trite. Either way, it is a common enough gambit for folks to ensnare their opponents in their life stories, the passing off a story in which unbelief appears quite as a matter of fact to be a plague in one’s life for a direct criticism demonstrating that it really is so, or even that it is simply wrong.

…or better yet, that what one actually believes is correct.

Whether it be an argument from personal biography or faith in some universal arch of progress, stories in which the happy ending takes the form of what one chooses to believe are a dime a dozen. If Chopra has anything unique to add to this it is little other than his own unique brand of obscurantism and pseudo-science. he is otherwise, treading in tired waters. It’s an easy enough game to play, telling a story in which someone else’s way of thinking is but a stage on the way to some higher calling. There was a time when I once enjoyed telling such stories mys… Oh wait a minute!

So, in the end what is wrong with Atheism according to Chopra? It would seem to be that it’s simply our role to be wrong in his script.

Meh, …I can live with that.

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Cognitive Bias Goes to Church: Irritation Meditation Number 4 (This Time With Smilies!)

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Irritation Meditation, Religion

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Actor-Observer Bias, atheism, Cognitive Science, Faith, Fundamental Attribution Error, Judgement, Memes, Psychology, religion

atheist-reasonsI found this piece on Stumbleupon, I believe. As far as Memes go, I actually kind of like this one. And by ‘kind of” I mean ‘really’ …kind of.

You see, I look at this meme, and a part of me wants to shout; “Yeah Boyeeee!” (…preferably in the face of some believer who has just suggested one of the alternatives). It’s damned frustrating to deal with that kind of commentary. You know how it goes; “The only reason you don’t believe is blah blah, blah…” …Blech! Seriously I’ve heard that line way too many times (and apparently so did someone else). So, it’s nice to see a bold affirmation that one’s own judgement really is the basis of, …well, ones own judgement!

…as opposed to some dismissive third person narrative.

Still, I wonder, would this look any different from any other religious perspective? If I asked for ‘Reasons I believe in God’, used the exact same sentence for the red color, and then made just a few strategic changes to the decoy list (Peer Pressure, Social Conformity, Afraid of Death, Raised That Way, Mental Disturbance, Haven’t Really Thought About It), I imagine we could present this to a few believers and generate exactly the same sense of vindication that I feel looking at this meme right now. “Damned right,” I can just hear them saying about that red line. …some might even add a “Praise Jesus!” or something like that, but my mind’s ear just doesn’t really want to go there.

Seriously, …yuck!

My point is of course that trivializing generalizations are a stick in the side of lots of folks, not just atheists. This is just the tip of the iceberg, a larger problem looms beneath the surface. And no, I didn’t just choose that image, because I live in Alaska; I actually thought about it and decided that it would be the best metaphor I could… well, anyway… the point is that this is part of a larger problem.

In the classic formulation of the problem, humans seem to possess a nearly universal tendency to explain other people’s actions (particularly those we don’t like) as a function of some consistent feature of their own personality while explaining our own actions in terms of situational factors. This tendency has generally been described as the Fundamental Attribution Error, or alternatively, as a function of Actor-Obeserver Asymmetry. What does this mean? Well, it means the reason you didn’t pay your bill on time this month is because of those unexpected medical expenses, the repair bill for the car, and well, it was little Johnny’s birthday, and you had to get him something… (You know the story). The reason your friend didn’t pay you the money he owes you? Well, he’s just a lazy bastard!

Okay, so that’s classical attribution theory, at least if you add a little salt to the vocabulary. Recent studies have shown that this basic contrast between situational versus dispositional explanations doesn’t quite explain the full range of data on this topic. Not to worry, a replacement theory is available, and it seems to illustrate the same point, albeit with a little less flair. The folk-conceptual theory approaches this same phenomenon by suggesting that people apply a range of different folk models to explain their own behavior and those around them. Depending on just how much one identifies with a person whose behavior they seek to explain, he/she is likely to adopt radically different descriptions of the behavior in question. One of the variables, for example is a difference between offering a reason for a behavior as its explanation and offering a history of reasoning as its explanation.

Case in point?

Saying; “I don’t believe in the Christian God, because the problem of evil renders this notion incoherent,” or conversely, saying; “I believe in God, because aspects of DNA coding appear to be irreducibly complex, and hence they require more of an explanation than chance evolution could provide.” What both of these explanations for a belief have in common is that each serves to explain a belief and at the same time to advance an active case for it. Conversely, saying “That guy Johnny, well he believes what he believes, because he has a deep fear of death (or Hell).” This latter sort of explanation describes a stage in a causal chain of behavior, one which doesn’t actively make much of a case for Johnny’s beliefs. In fact, the explanation undermines his credibility. The bottom line here is that we are looking at two different types of explanation, and the choice of which type to offer depends an awful lot on the disposition of the speaker towards the behavior/belief in question.

People thus have different ways of explaining behavior that they value and behavior that they don’t, and those differences serve more to shift the narrative around our feet than they do to set up a straight-forward evaluation of the issue. I really do think this is the key to the problem addressed in that meme above. People use dismissive explanations for beliefs they don’t identify with while presenting the reasons for beliefs they do identify with in terms of their own judgements.

You can see this consistently in the sphere of religious and philosophical discussions wherein you and I can supply all manner of thoughtful reasons for the judgements we’ve made, but that guy over there? Well, you know where he was raised and how his parents are! And all those people in the church on the corner? Well, they just have to believe in something; it fills a void somehow; they really are just brained washed aren’t they!?!

…and so on.

I’m including you in the good and thoughtful narrative of course, dear reader, but that’s just because you are reading my blog. When you’re gone I’m going to tell my other friend that you just had a traumatic experience.

😛

The bottom line is that it’s difficult to disentangle the full range of human motivation, and when we do this for religion, the tendency is to do it in a way that privileges one’s own judgement while trivializing that of others. Folks we identify with can enjoy praise by association, and those that we don’t, well damn them anyhow, right? They really need to learn to think for themselves!

So, why do I like this meme? Well, it took me down that path just now, and lucky you, I brought you along for the ride. I guess this is yet another instance of ‘liking’ something not quite meaning that I agree with it.

This meme is a good answer to half of the actor-observer bias.

…and it’s a damned good illustration of the other half.

I suppose that is something of a win-win situation.

😕

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Meeting Your Maker in a Ridley Scott Movie: Once Again As Farce (Spoilers)

12 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Religion

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Blade Runner, Faith, Film, God, Movies, Origins, Prometheus, religion, Ridley Scott, Science

Prometheus

Prometheus opens with great promise delivered on a grand scale. It is a quest to find the origins of life on earth, a journey to meet our makers. I had entered the theater primed with expectation (the promos for this film were brilliant), and upon learning where the story would take us, I smiled and settled into my seat. Seriously, I couldn’t wait to see what new directions Ridley Scott might take with this wonderful theme.

Sadly, the answer was right into the ground.

Because the big crash of a spaceship at the end of this flick was the perfect metaphor for the movie as a whole. It was just one big train space-ship wreck.

…complete with main characters running directly away from the rolling wheel-like space ship instead of jumping to the side. Yes, they actually did that. Seriously, how does a movie studio spend so many millions of dollars on special effects and star power only to miss the fact that they put a Loony Tunes gag in the middle of the dramatic climax of the story? Or do they just think we are that stupid?

Maybe we are. …Damn!

Don’t get me wrong. I like really cool special effects as much as the next guy. But I also like an interesting story. Is it really too much to ask that they appear in the same film?

Ridley Scott has produced such films! Alien was such a film. More to the point, Blade Runner was such a film. And one of the best things about Blade Runner was its use of the very same theme.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner was a classic Philip K. Dick story. Few authors could make something so fantastic speak to people in such personal ways, and Ridley Scott transmitted that to the screen brilliantly. Do you remember Roy’s encounter with his maker? Do you remember watching as this replicant interrogates his very creator, trying desperately to wheedle extra time out of the very man who had chosen to the hour of Roy’s demise? And do you remember how easily the story acquired its deeper significance, that moment when a simple plot point about a creature trying to extend its life acquired philosophical significance?

For all his artificial nature, Roy stood before his maker asking questions about the very meaning of mortality. They were questions we could all recognize. Questions that touched deeply on what it means to be human, what it means to live for only a little while.

And in that moment when the character of Roy stands before his maker and demands to know the reason for his imminent death, he became so very human.

…still more so in the moment of his passing:

What makes Roy’s story so compelling is not merely that we can see the metaphor, but that the metaphor is used to tell us something about our own humanity. It is not merely the loss of personal life that Roy mourns. It is also the passing of his experiences into oblivion, experiences that could be of real value to someone. He is a remarkable character, to be sure, and the world will lose something as he passes.

…just as it does with the passing of each of our loved ones.

…just as it will for each and every one of us.

Roy

Roy meets his maker to confront his own mortality, and he takes us along for the ride. We are there, not just to witness the action, but to share in the meaning of that encounter. …perhaps even to share in the crime of deicide when Roy executes his own verdict on his maker.

And what of Prometheus?

Grandfather?

As Roger Ebert tells us, Prometheus raises questions about the origin of human life, presenting us with a version of the panspermia hypothesis in which all of life on earth is begun through the apparent suicide of a pale muscular alien. In the opening scenes that alien appears alone on a barren plant, his spaceship leaving without him. With all the solemnity of a priest performing a great ritual, the alien consumes a mysterious substance, and it ravishes his body. As the mysterious alien falls into a rushing river, his body disintegrates, releasing the seeds of life into a new world.

Was this earth, as Roger Ebert suggests? Ridley Scott tells us that it could be any planet, but of course the point of the scene is to raise the possibility. This might have been how life on earth started, so we are asked to believe. More to the point, it may well be how life on planet earth will begin anew, if the “engineers” as these aliens are called, should choose to return.

That is the possibility uncovered by our main characters in Prometheus. They set out in a quest to find the engineers, to speak with our very creators only to find them bent on our destruction. And thus the a question about the origin of life on earth transforms into a question about the possibility of its imminent demise. The two questions are really the same, because each is essentially a question about the motives of the engineers.

Why?

Shaw

This SHOULD have been a brilliant movie. What makes it so sad is the inattention to narrative detail. The scientists do not act like scientists, especially the geologist who’s rabid anti-intellectualism belies his choice of career. Seriously, didn’t someone on set know that geology is a science? But of course this is a side character, and his flaws are forgivable. What of the main characters?

Three people drive the quest to find the engineers in Prometheus. Two archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (played by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall Green) initiate the quest to find the engineers as a result of the result of their own findings. Holloway is so intent on speaking with the engineers that he engages in reckless actions upon landing. Believing the engineers to be dead, he drowns his sorrows in a bottle. I suppose we are meant to appreciate the irony of a scholar lamenting the greatest archeological find in the history of the field, but I for one could not get past the absurdity of it. Shaw could almost have served as a voice of reason were it not for her complete irrelevance in the lead-up to the final conflict. No-one listens to her (least of all her husband and partner Holloway), right up until she ends up as the sole human survivor of the expedition.

…which is to say that no-one ever listens to her.

And then of course there is Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce). A wealthy old man facing the end of his own life, Weyland funds the expedition for the sole purpose of extending his life. How he came to the conclusion that the engineers would extend his life is beyond me? I think it was beyond the writers themselves? Whatever its origins, Weyland holds onto this assumption despite all evidence to the contrary. Long after it has been made clear that the engineers bear no goodwill towards their creation, Weyland chooses to speak with one of them. It was a foolish mistake.

…and it was his last one.

And here we have the crux of the problem.This movie doesn’t really raise any questions about the origins of life at all. The prospect that life on earth might have its origins in the stars is simply a premise designed to kick-start the action. Nothing about the unfolding action sheds any light on the significance of that premise, nor does it begin share that significance with anyone in the audience.

Space Lab

The central meaning of the encounter with the engineers rests on the irrational presuppositions of Holloway, Shaw, and Weyland. Each of them has loaded the event with significance particular to their own stories, their reasons for doing so barely explored in the course of the film. This sort of approach might have worked with some earnest character development, but Prometheus was too busy wowing us with majestic visuals and sudden moments of terror. In the end, this film attaches no genuine meaning to the event at all.

And so the encounter with the makers of humanity does not quite resonate the way it could have. The encounter with the engineers is an intrinsically interesting moment, one spoiled terribly by the lack of a meaningful storyline to carry us through it. Unlike Roy, these characters bring no great questions to their creator; seeking instead to learn whatever he chooses tell them. But he tells them nothing, electing instead to begin smashing up its creation.

…which actually sums up this movie pretty well.

***

I have to thank my friend Michael Kucan for helping me to remember some of the more irritating details of this movie. I would also like to recommend aknittysociety blog, which contains a wonderful analysis of race and gender in Prometheus. I should also say that in my thoughts about Blade Runner were rather strongly influenced by entry in Roger Ebert’s Journal, I Remember You.

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Jesus and Religion: A Distinction in Search of a Difference

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Circular Reasoning, Distinction, Faith, Jesus, Jesus versus Religion, religion, Spirituality

This poet (whose name is apparently Jefferson Bethke) loves Jesus and hates religion. In fact, he literally resents it.

(Sigh!)

Okay, so how do you tell the two apart, Jesus and religion? That is a tricky question, all the more so because the terms normally seem to travel in each others’ company, so to speak.

Luckily, the poet offers the helpful suggestion that:

One is the work of God, the one is a man-made invention.

One is the cure, the other is the infection.

Religion says “do.” Jesus says “done.”

Religion says “slave.” Jesus says “son.”

Religion puts you in bondage, but Jesus sets you free.

Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see.

And that is why religion and Jesus are two different clans.

Religion is man searching for God, Christianity is God searching for man.

Listening to the poet rattle through these distinctions, one cannot help but think that a lot is riding on the matter. But of course all of these individual distinctions assume we already know the difference between the two; they comment on the difference as though it were already clear.

The poet is talking about things that seem to go together in the collective understanding of “religion.” One might, for example, describe as religious some of the arguments once made in favor of slavery as well as those advanced by Abolitionists against it, thus putting the “religion” of common parlance on both sides of the poets juxtaposition. Likewise, talk of Jesus is normally expected from those engaged in one particular religion.

But of course the poet here assures us that these are really two different things, even that talk of Jesus is (or at least should be) wholly different from religion. He divvies up a range of themes normally associated with religion, carefully placing them in different piles, so to speak. All the good themes that make us smile go in the “Jesus” pile and the bad ones end up in the “religion” pile. Yet, he provides no independent means of telling us which goes where. At the end of the day, the difference between the two is little more than the collective contents of the two piles.

To say that this is circular reasoning is putting it mildly. Who wouldn’t prefer the Jesus of this video to the religion?

Seriously, who would not prefer freedom to bondage, son to slave, sight to blindness, or a cure to an infection?

And if the answer is “no-one” or even “almost no-one,” then who keeps producing all the bad things, the ones that seem to go in the “religion” pile? Does the poet in this video imagine that it is people who have consciously chosen them?

Or is it just possible that it is people who thought they were actually choosing Jesus?

The internal logic of this kind of rhetoric always fascinates me. Some of the poets distinctions (such as that between man looking for God and God looking for man) are too fantastic to construe in terms of a specific moral choice. Others are downright intuitive. The notion for example that religion makes you blind whereas Jesus makes you see is wonderfully vivid.

On hearing the claim that religion makes you blind, one cannot help but to imagine some form of religiously motivated bigotry. We want to say, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” The second phrase must arouse similarly vivid thoughts for most believers. How easily might one imagine a moment when thoughts of Jesus could have inspired one to overcome a prejudice! That particular pair of options must arouse thoughts of a real difference.But of course the important question is whether or not there is anything about Jesus (or more importantly references to, thoughts about, belief or faith in…Jesus) that guarantee the one and precludes the other.

It’s a valiant effort.

It is tempting to go along with the poet on all of this. When I see him separating the good from the bad, I could almost choose to join in, to help sort everything into the right piles. It would be lovely to affirm the wisdom of this poet and all the others who assure us that “religion” is distinct from faith in God or a personal relationship with Jesus. I could almost stand with those who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” Hell, even without faith in God I can affirm the value of many things associated with Jesus’ name. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those good things really were of a wholly different order than those bad ones. …if the difference between Martin Luther King and Fred Phelps were as easy as telling the difference between which of two words to use, “religion” or any of its better dressed counter-parts.

And yet the question remains, when people talk of Jesus, what distinguishes the good from the bad?

This poet offers no answer to that question, though he seems to think otherwise. And in that respect, he has one foot firmly planted in the “religion” pile.

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