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.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
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?
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?
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