A serious case of reality disconnect

It’s Armistice Day, 2011. Ninety-three years ago the guns fell silent, ending four years of protracted slaughter that wiped out a generation.

Some years ago I was privileged to visit WWI battle sites in Belgium and Northern France. Before that trip, I’d heard the word moving used in various ways, but until that time I’d never really felt its impact. Standing there in those now-tranquil, breeze-blown fields, my overwhelming and lasting impression was of senseless waste on an unimaginable scale.

Millions of young men were cut to pieces by deadly accurate, high power machine gun fire, vapourised or shredded by heavy artillery, or burned alive from the inside by poison gas. And for what? A few yards of land, or, in most cases, nothing at all.

Many of those men had no choice in the matter. They were drafted, transported and annihilated. The entire war was prosecuted incompetently, occasioning an obscene casualty rate. That is what Eric Bogle means when he writes of ‘Man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.’

I believe it vital that we remember this dark stain on history, even though it happened long before our lifetimes. We must remember the anguish, the futility, the suffering, the pain and the loss. We must do everything we can to prevent anything like it ever happening again.

Would that we were unanimous in that sentiment. Some years ago, while listening to a cover version of The Green Fields of France, I came upon a set of alternative lyrics penned by one Stephen Suffett. At first I could not believe what I was reading. My stomach turning, I read to the end, the melody playing in my mind behind the lyrics. A dark shadow seemed to chill the room. I felt the presence of something I thought no longer existed: an adult who glorifies the foul obscenity of war, as though it were something admirable and noble, a path to be chosen by all who uphold the values of liberty and democracy.

Mr Suffett’s stance is, I believe, motivated by a local political agenda, rather than by a desire to see young people butchered and their lives terminated, but I think he has a nerve nevertheless. Willie MacBride, in Eric Bogle’s original lyrics, represents a six-zero number of bewildered, shellshocked boys whose futures were wrenched laceratingly away in a Dantean hell of choking gas, bone-shattering bullets, lung-crushing artillery bursts, slowly grinding gangrene and septicaemia, or landscape-altering subterranean caches of amatol. How many of those children, in their dying moments, retching up gouts of blood and trying vainly to hold in their own intestines, would have thought themselves privileged and noble upholders of global freedom? Suffett’s lyrics, portraying millions of obliterated Willie MacBrides as grinning, gung-ho action man dolls, are insolent in the extreme to the memory of those poor wretches. Mr Suffett, you are seriously disconnected from reality.

The last line is perhaps the most ironic. ‘And I’d do it again, says Willie MacBride.’ Mr Suffett, the whole point of Eric Bogle’s lyrics is that Willie MacBride will not do ANYTHING again. Neither will his contemporaries, on both sides of the conflict. Sir, your assumption that war is necessary to defend freedom is deeply flawed. Look to the local conflict to which you allude in your lyrics. Where did the violence get us all? Is the situation worse now that peace has replaced routine murder? I think not.

A N Wilson's attempt to hijack a brave man's grief

Tariq Jahan's courage and fortitude, in the face of his surely almost unbearable loss, are undeniably exemplary qualities. Unfortunately, A N Wilson has hijacked Mr Tariq's admirable appeal for calm, in pursuit of his own rather nauseating agenda.

Wilson thinks that moral absolutes come from religion, and that the 'bedrock' of morality is being 'steadily eroded' by secularism. Yet his own confusion is apparent: he points out that this morality, which he believes comes from God, needs to be instilled in children at an early age. Why so, when Wilson, after Immanuel Kant, believes in the 'moral law within me'? Why can't morality be placed in children before birth, along with their ability to feel hunger, pain, fatigue and love?

Once again we see indefensible, irrational nonsense published in a major national newspaper because it is based on the mutely accepted ideas that (a) religion is, at bottom, all about being good, and (b) any pap with the religion badge attached deserves automatic respect for no other reason.

Wilson claims that Mr Tariq is 'guided in his conduct by his religious belief'. What a disgusting insult to an honourable man. Surely, if Wilson's assertion were true, then if Mr Tariq had not been born into Islam he would be a thoroughly immoral blackguard. If you find that difficult to believe, then you must doubt Wilson's assertion also.

Of course there are many religious people like Mr Tariq. And there are many secularists like him, too. One does not need religion in order to be good (although, it seems, nothing leads potentially good people to do evil as effectively as does religion).

Wilson claims that Sikhs build gurdwaras inspired by their awe of Kant's starry heavens and inner morality. This is pure cant, as opposed to pure Kant. Sikhs build gurdwaras as a form of social control, elevating a textbook written hundreds of years ago by an overrated mammal to the status of immutable, unquestionable law which must be followed by all who enter the gurdwara. Check out any Sikh website for the list of admonitions and prohibitions forced upon any 'welcome' guest who sets foot in such a place.

Wilson admires people who 'go to the mosque and fall prostrate before the mystery' which so impressed Kant. Why should we be proud of behaving like abject serfs before a capricious, despotic master? What's so good about falling prostrate? If Wilson has ever flown on an aeroplane, or benefited from modern medical procedures, he has due reason to salute those who stood upright and confronted mystery head on. Yesterday's mystery is today's solution. The fascination with mystery comes from the bawling, terrified infancy of humanity, when there were no proper explanations and the authoritarian pronouncements of the witch doctor held unquestioned sway.

How dare Wilson write of 'the fundamental truths of the great religions' that have 'stood the test of time for thousands of years'. Religions far, far older than the modern few that inspire his pitiable awe have passed into history. The Olympian gods of Greece and Rome; Horus, Seth, the Aten and Osiris; all of these dealt in 'fundamental truths' for longer than Wilson might care to acknowledge, and those truths are dim memories in the wind.

Particularly evil is Wilson's implication that Jade Goody ought to be held accountable for the drug addiction and unfashionably sordid death of her father. Perhaps Wilson's inerrant morality extends to punishing children for their parents' sins to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5).

Hitler gets a mention, as a 'satanic Nazi dictator'. Wilson has forgotten the belt-buckle motto proudly displayed by every Gestapo sadist: Gott mit uns. Moreover, when Wilson bangs on about how morally pure London was 100 years ago, has he anything to say about 75 years ago when Cable Street cheered the Nazi Oswald Mosley to the echo?

Wilson cannot resist a sideswipe at the modern intellectuals Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Each of these men has more common sense in his little fingernail than Wilson demonstrates in his entire tradition-inflated ego, and both have separately steamrollered Wilson's tired arguments on many an occasion. It is ever likely that Wilson feels intimidated by such formidable debating opponents. Religion might not be responsible for all the world's evils but, where human beings are involved in perpetrating evil, you can bet that religion plays more than a minor role. Hitchens cites multiple examples from his own personal experiences in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel, Lebanon and India.

Religion, through centuries of shameful precedent, gives people like Wilson the confidence to spout the most outrageous tripe with impunity. God, the projected embodiment of humanity's darkest, basest, most sadistic, tyrannical nature, enfolds such whining pipsqueaks as Wilson in his leathery wrap, perhaps sniggering inwardly at the prospect of their horror when they discover his non-existence. Wilson and his kind will never understand the horror of the secularist, when contemplating those who would wish God were real.

Scofield gets the wrong end of the stick re. Hitch

Be Scofield has missed the point by a wide margin. Christopher Hitchens is no more a religious apologist than I am the Pope. Hitch's taxi-driver anecdote is intended to illustrate, by contrast, the point that religion inspires people to do evil. As Hitchens says, if all religious adherents consistently behaved like the taxi driver, taking pains to return property and to behave with humanity and decency toward all others, then the weird exhortations in their holy books simply would not matter. Scofield is in danger of thinking Hitchens meant that religiously-inspired bad behaviour would not matter, so long as some good behaviour arose from religion too. Hitch meant nothing of the sort. Scofield conflates the existence of way-out holy books with actions prescribed by, and carried out as a result of reading, those books.

I have followed Hitch pretty closely since the release of God Is Not Great, the audiobook of which is a favourite of mine, played many times. His position on religion is far from inconsistent. Check out the Four Horsemen discussion at Hitch's apartment, with guests Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. Hitch remarks that he would not wish to see religious belief eradicated, because he enjoys the dialectic arising from its existence. Now I don't doubt for a moment that Hitch, like most of us, would love to see the end of religious fanaticism, 7th century barbarism, genital mutilation, etc., etc., but he is enough of a realist to know that religion of some kind will pop up again, and again, and again as long as the human condition endures. I wish for things I can never have, and I can but wonder at how much happier I might be if I could stop myself wishing for those things. When Hitch says he does not wish an end to religion, I think he means no more than that. He accepts that it is here, if not permanently, then for a very long time to come. And he awaits with longing the time when all religious observants choose the taxi driver's path, not the suicide bomber's.

Dawkins owes nothing to Craig

A recent article in the Telegraph, implying that Richard Dawkins is answerable to William Lane Craig, has attracted reflexive nods from those whose condyles outclass their cerebral cortices. The nodders include one whose pipsqueak penchant for citing himself in the third person betrays his eminent compatibility with the asininely worshipful flock Gracing the rightmost column of his pretty, but intellectually pretty insubstantial, blog.

Let us be clear on this point. Professor Dawkins (the usage of this title is correct) owes Professor Craig nothing at all. Dawkins is not accountable to Craig, nor to anyone else who seeks to wield authority on the strength of wholly unjustified – and unjustifiable – claims. Craig purports to believe in an invisible, silent supernatural being that ignores prayers and visits calamities indiscriminately on mankind and other sentient creatures, condemning them to everlasting torture if they fail to propitiate it in the correct manner, while it simultaneously professes to love its victims. Such grotesque assertions demand at least a shred of evidence before being taken seriously, and there is none. Craig gets away without being laughed off the public stage simply because his views intersect with a currently fashionable delusion based on the still-popular myths of a bunch of wandering Babylonians, set down a mere instant ago in geological time. That fad will pass, as did much older and longer-lived crazes like the gods of prehistory. Craig has been spouting his so-called ‘proofs’ for years, and they have been roundly debunked. They do not even begin to ratify the baseless suspicion of existence popularly conferred on the God of the Bible.

William Lane Craig is a professional debater, whose set-piece speeches and logically barren numbered ‘proofs’ provoke whoops of delight from his devoted choir of cosy, secure followers. Convinced that his party games prove something, they rest comfortably assured that there is real evidence for the sky-god in whom most of them have passively believed since their brains became infected with the relevant memes in early childhood. Pretentious twerps who blog that one needs to ‘understand’ religion at some deeply significant, esoteric level of prior initiation before one can criticize it, add fuel to the fashionable fire but do little to uncover anything worthwhile. Understand this… if there were a reliable proof of God’s existence, communicable only to learned scholars, salient parts of that proof would have been translated a thousand times and more into lay language understanded of the people, as have the juiciest morsels of Andrew Wiles’s vertiginously highbrow vindication of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Until His Grace can find a more worthy source than the Telegraph, and can acquire the skill of doing his own thinking, may he find the Grace to remain silent.

The shallowness and dishonesty of theism

I doubt I’d get away, on Twitter, FB, YouTube or anywhere, with glibly and radically redefining words to make them fit something I wanted to promulgate. And the reason I wouldn’t get away with it is that I don’t seek to ratify my assertions through reference to a manufactured deity.

Around 8 minutes into the linked video, the issue of forgiveness is raised. Richard Dawkins asks why God needed to arrange a revoltingly violent killing before he could forgive the sins of mankind. The Right Reverend Michael Nazir Ali responds:

“Real forgiveness comes from restitution, from cost, from sacrifice.” (8:40)

This is utterly at odds with the definition of the word forgiveness, which is the idea of concluding resentment without demanding punishment or restitution. The bishop is not taken to task for his bare-faced re-writing of the dictionary in order to provoke brainlessly sanctimonious nods and grunts from the studio audience. Pressing home his point, the bishop adds:

“There can be no forgiveness without cost.” (9:20)

Ovine applause follows. The bishop justifies a public lynching by talking tripe about the definition of a word. Or perhaps he means that God simply chose to withhold forgiveness until he had exacted his pound of flesh with attendant suffering and anguish. Was omnipotent God forced into such a callous act, or did He exercise His divine free will in the matter?

Suppose a member of my family had been convicted of cold-blooded child murder, and I were to go public in the Sunday tabloids to the effect that his action was entirely justified. My argument? Murdering a child is fair, because there can be no fairness in the world without cost. Do you find yourself able to agree with my assertion? Of course not (although, please note, it concurs more closely with the accepted definition of fair than the bishop’s mangling of the word forgiveness matches its definition). Why, then, does the bishop get away with instant revision of the English language? He gets away with it because, in the minds of many, religion is, at bottom, all about being good. Many of those who profess no belief in a deity, and who pledge allegiance to no partisan confession, still think that the religious impulse is basically an admirable one. Hence, any silly assertion from a clergyman, provided it be delivered in pious tones and superficially varnished with shallow plausibility, stands a good chance of going unchallenged in the public arena.

This needs to change. It will not change by itself.

Postscript: I anticipate that some may respond by pointing out patiently to me, while kindly and inwardly sympathising with my moronic lack of understanding of the central message of Christianity, that the cost of forgiveness was incurred by God at the crucifixion. In other words, God had himself publicly tortured in order to demonstrate the 'cost' of his forgiveness. To borrow modern vernacular, EPIC FAIL on two counts. Firstly, since each sin committed by man is supposedly injurious to God, the cost had already been paid, and forgiveness could have been issued without bloody red tape. Secondly, if God is bound by rules (such as no forgiveness without 'cost' as the Bishop puts it) then where is his omnipotence?

Finished listening to Craig and Harris

Heard the debate to the end now. One thing became obvious during that most revealing part of any debate - the open questions at the end. Harris, who had spoken with spontaneity and sincerity throughout his allotted time periods, continued in exactly the same vein when responding to questions. Craig, no longer supported by his carefully rehearsed, set-piece speeches, came across like the proverbial fish out of water. A lady questioner pinned him down neatly and brilliantly, extending his analogy of light as an idea long described but only recently understood. The questioner suggested that light was once ascribed to a supernatural creator, and later its true nature became known. Perhaps, she offered, the same might be true of morality in our own future? Craig affected not to understand the question. When the moderator summarised it for him, he resorted to simple repetition of his analogy, and had the temerity to suggest that the questioner had misunderstood it. I believe that he knows that she did not misunderstand it.

Harris hit the nail on the head when he explained psychopathy in the sense of blindly receiving rules from an authority without distinguishing them on grounds of morality. This ranks among Harris's best taken points during the debate.

Another questioner pointed out that Craig's arguments are based on nothing, and Craig simply diverted his response onto repetitive definition of the terms ontological and epistemological. He also ducked the question about homosexuality, resorting to an ad hominem dismissal of the questioner on the grounds of insincerity. Oh, the irony.

More on Craig v Harris

I've heard more of it now. Craig repeats his assertion that he is not arguing for the existence of God, but then goes on to assert that moral rectitude comes from God because the difference between moral good and bad cannot come about without a lawgiver. If he's not arguing for the existence of God, then he must be simply assuming the existence of God, or whence his lawgiver? To try to divorce the debate from the issue of God's existence is a slippery act of intellectual dishonesty.

Craig attacks Harris for irrelevancy, yet he (Craig) holds forth at length on the distinction between ontology and semantics, an issue with little relevance to the question under discussion, and a blatant attempt to impress by obfuscation, blinding his audience with philosophical pseudo-intellectual rot. As it happens, Harris's argument was sharply relevant to the debate, since he was demonstrating how morality can arise without God.

Craig's assertions are baseless, and go largely unchallenged in public only because they are about Christianity and religion in general, a topic which still unfortunately carries its own free gate pass. If he were making similar baseless assertions on another subject, such as crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories, he would be laughed off the stage or required to produce evidence.

Harris is right to label Yahweh a psychopath, and to imply that his followers and promoters are psychopathic sympathisers. Yes, that includes all the paragons of virtue among the august assemblage of dignitaries at Notre Dame, and all who defend such a perverse, archaic world view as that propounded by Craig and his kind. Craig can play the 'insulted' card if he wants but he has asked for all the insults he gets.

William Lane Craig's opening remarks in his debate with Sam Harris on 7 April 2011

So far I've listened only to Craig's 20-minute speech but I want to comment while it's fresh in my mind. I'll listen to the rest of the two-hour program later.

Craig's opener was largely centred around his old claim that there would be no objective moral values without an absolute authority to provide them. That authority, he assumes and asserts, is God.

My problem with objective moral values - i.e., moral rights and wrongs that are independent of human minds - is that we have only the human mind with which to consider them. Craig seems to think we can observe and comment on things that are outside our minds, but in doing so he awards himself a kind of omniscience. Consider an example. You come upon a man in the act of cutting off a child's finger with a penknife. The child screams in pain and shock. Surely there can be no doubt that the man's action is wrong. But then we learn that the child had just been bitten by a venomous snake, and the man with the knife is a reptile expert who knows that the only way to save the child's life, in the absence of antivenom, is to amputate the bitten extremity as quickly as possible. He judges that the pain, risk of infection, and permanent mutilation are a better option than certain death, which is the only alternative. Please note that I am not defending cruelty to children here. My point is that in order to judge the man's actions as moral or otherwise, we need to know everything about his actions.

No doubt a theist would respond to this in two ways. Firstly, God knows everything, so he knows that the man's actions are not morally wrong. Secondly, the concepts of moral rightness and wrongness exist, and that in itself needs to be explained.

Both these responses are hogwash. The first is easily dismissed, for it is asserted without reason or evidence. The second is slightly more interesting, but disappears when it becomes apparent that the idea of moral rectitude comes from human responses to perceived situations.

If, as in the real world, our information is necessarily limited, then the best we can do is to make judgements based on what we have. Obviously those judgements will be affected by our preconceptions. If we have a preconception that people are more valuable than non-human animals, then we can expect to be biased accordingly. Such a bias may prick our conscience less if we can dump the responsibility for it onto an all-powerful, invisible absolute authority who just says it has to be that way.

To my mind there is nothing remotely moral about an all-powerful being who demands that his subordinates must love him with all their souls. This is the proclamation of a despotic tyrant, not a loving father. Besides, love which has to be commanded is worth little, as it is not genuine.

Echoing Pierre-Simon Laplace's remarks to Napoleon, we have no need of the God hypothesis to explain the human capacity to act morally toward other sentient creatures. Moreover, if God does exist in omnipotent form, we have every need for him to account for the plentiful immorality by which we are surrounded.