A slow examination of my conscience in the course of which I will try to keep my temper

[rozk]

Clearly I am not the free speech fundamentalist I sometimes think I am, because, as my friend Shutters points out in his comments to the Sacranie post of a couple of weeks ago, I do seem to think that people have some sort of duty - albeit not one to be enforced by law - not to offend gratuitously in polite society.

As biascut points out, the idea is being pushed in some circles that free speech advocates are fundamentalist secular liberal believers and morally and intellectually equivalent to Islamists and fundamentalist Christians. Now, clearly, inasmuch as liberal humanism is a slowly evolving work in progress rather than a set of ideas carved in stone, it is always possible to point to failings on the part of secularism that make this plausible - I'd welcome some comments to this effect, because I think them highly relevant. In what follows behind the cut, I don't define secular liberal humanism for precisely that reason. I would argue, however, that what I mean by it is a set of thoughts and behaviours that are sceptical, rational and humane, in which we examine not only ideas but also their practical consequences and question our own motives as much as those of others.

I would suggest that that secular liberal humanism tries to derive its precepts from rational thought based on simple premises, whereas almost all actually existing religious thought, and certainly all fundamentalist thought, bases any rational thought it goes into on the far more elaborate premise of sacred texts which are either inerrant, or even the word of God that existed in their current form before time and were only written down by the prophets. This means in turn that, where slh tries to link its treatment of other people in something like Kant's categorical imperative, itself merely an elegant formulation of something said many times before, not least by some of those prophets, the equivalent for religious believers is a) valid because a prophet said so rather than because it is a good idea and b) likely to be subordinated in a variety of actual cases to other things stated by the prophet.

Thus, while Christians acknowledge that Christ told them to love the Lord thy God, and love thy neighbour as thyself, they have on occasion decided that the first duty obliged them to interpret the second duty as obliging them to stick said neighbour on top of a bonfire for the good of their souls and the souls of those around them.

At its best, secular liberal humanism is profoundly aware of the depth of human ignorance and thus unprepared to move to options that close off further argument, whereas much religious belief is a total system in which everything is already known and has only to be interpreted in practical terms. If it is known that there is a god, and that there are souls which are eternal, and that the mind of god in respect of the fate of those souls is already laid down in a book, then it is possible to lay out your duty clearly whatever the consequence for short-lived human bodies.

This is, of course, the point at which people chip in and say what about the Nazis and Stalin? To which I return the remark, what about them? The reason why I talk of secular liberal humanism quite specifically is because I refuse to take any responsibility for atheisms that derived their dogmas from half-assed interpretations of non-religious but sacred texts. The Nazis were obsessed with pseudo-scientific claptrap like racism and the world ice theory, and Stalin's particular take on Marxism-Leninism led to equally bizarre obsessions like Lysenkoism. Neither belief system included much place for rationalism or indeed rationality - they had no taste for sceptical enquiry or for the slow working out of what justice might aspire to be.

And of course all religions with the possible exception of the state religion of the Aztecs produce a lot of believers who lead moral lives of loving-kindness towards most of the people around them most of the time. Until, that is, they decide to vote for a completely immoral adventurist imperial government because their pastor tells them to, or until they decide to disown their children because their scripture tells them that their children's sexual orientation is a damnable choice, or until they murder their neighbours who are leading moral lives in accordance with the views of a different prophet.

There is a sense in which we cannot check whether the moral lives of most believers are a product of that belief, or what human beings are like anyway. You might argue that the average lives of ordinary godless Britons and Europeans might be a test, though I would point out that those lives do not include any great degree of commitment to secular liberal humanism either. Those lives, though, are not especially immoral or especially depraved - their besetting sins are those of the leopard rather than those of the lion or the wolf.

(Digression - that's a distinction Dante makes in the Inferno and it is rather a useful one. He distinguishes between sins of the flesh, sins of anger and violence and sins of cruelty and treachery. Everyone in the Inferno is damned, of course, but it is clear that the violent and the treacherous are considerably more damned than everyone else. And, of course, the lesser the sin, the easier the repentance - in the Purgatorio, we meet far more of those who sinned in the flesh but repented.

One of the things that perpetually amazes me about believers is how much more tolerant they are of such sins as spiritual pride and downright hatred than they are of minor sexual offenses. I don't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, but I am constantly amazed how most fundamentalist Christians neglect the simple spiritual wisdom contained in the gospel accounts of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.)

Which leads me to one of the bottom lines of this discussion. Precisely what can I, as an agnostic, and a secular liberal humanist, say about religion that some believers somewhere are not going to find grossly offensive? When I talk about the prophets, I may manage to refrain from personal abuse of them, and may bend over backwards to acknowledge the good faith in which they spoke, but, when it comes to the question of whether they had the direct and privileged access that they claimed to the mind of the god in whom I do not, as such, believe, I am obliged to say that I think they were mistaken. Not mad, not lying, just wrong.

I am at least moderately well read in the spiritual writings of many religious traditions and I don't reject all the wisdom that is contained therein. I find the personality of Jesus Christ at least moderately congenial - his snappy comebacks and parables resonate with good sense. Parts of the Koran as inadequately translated from the Arabic resonate for me with spiritual intensity, as do the Psalms and the writings of some Buddhists and Taoists. Do they in any way move me? Yes they do. Do I for a second think that they are the product of a privileged access to something beyong the human in a way that, say, the Ode to a Nightingale or Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132 is not? No,they are not.

I say these things, not to cause offense, but in the sure and certain knowledge that some will be offended by my saying them. Am I obliged to be silent about my own convictions for fear of causing that offense? I do not think so.

There are, furthermore, many believers who would be offended by my agnosticism, which is pretty militant. I do not believe that there is a god, though I do not regard such belief as inherently irrational, merely inadequately documented. I further believe that, if there were a being vaster and better than us, we could not possibly come to any conception of who that being might be without hideously constraining that conception by purely human preoccupations and prejudices. If there were a god, any human discussion of tha god would be impious, any worship of that god would be idolatry. To treat the abstract constructs of the human mind as more important than mere ordinary human life is wrong; to wreck other people's existences because of one's misconception of god is to go into a burning house and save the ming vase and not the crying baby.

I would expect believers to be as offended by my position in this matter as I am by their cocksure certainty that the sublime and the ineffable can be clearly linked to a specific point in time and space. Moreover I do find myself questioning their apparent preparedness to tolerate each other. I mean, either Christ was the Son of God, or he wasn't; saying, as Muslims do, that OK, he was an important prophet just not what Christians think, really shouldn't cut it. Similarly, either Mohammed was the Messenger, or he wasn't; most Christians presumably think most Muslims wrong. All religions cannot be true, because they contradict each other; they can, however, be equally false. Given half a chance, they kill each other and anyone else who gets in the way. As well as those they can agree to hate, like us queers.

And then there is that degree of offense likely to be caused by my pointing out the crimes of believers.
I hope and trust that I am not Islamophobic in the sense of using hostility to Islam as a cover for racism, any more than I am anti=Christian because many Christians are not white. However, just as it is not anti-Christian to point to the crusader mentality of Bush, the folly of the Reagan administration in regarding environmental issues as irrelevant in the face of the end time, the murderousness of the Orthodox Serbs, the lies of the Catholic Church about the efficacy of condoms, and the idiocy of preaching creationism in the face of all scientific evidence, so too I am forced to condemn the idiocy of preaching Islamic creationism, the brutality of sharia punishment of women in Nigeria, the racist and sectarian persecution of the inhabitants of Irian Jaya by the Indonesian state, and the extent to which the Iraqi insurgency has become an occasion of the murder of Shia by Sunni, and vice versa ( a bit ). When talking about false prophets, Jesus said intelligently that we would know them by what they produce, and the mass murder, calculating cruelty and wilful ignorance of both his followers and those of Mohammed looks pretty bad in the light of those remarks. Lazy secularism produces booze cruises, porn videos and Big Brother, perhaps, but there is really no comparison; it also produces great art, good science and feminism.

I think that some of the Danish cartoons were stupidly rude - no-one ever talks about the cartoonists whose response to the Danish editor's request was to draw cartoons whose text was a refusal to cause offense, which are several of the twelve - and in a world even of rational belief they should have been mentioned briefly, condemned in passing and then ignored. Once people regard that sort of offense as so important that people have to die over them, and half the world goes into uproard, both giving and taking offense have become an idolatry, a placing of the trivial above our real humane duty.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

So much good sense I want to quote the lot. I think two things are widely being lost sight of:

(i) there is no right, that I know of, not to be offended. That's life; by its nature many things will happen, and be done by others, that offend us; we live with it in the knowledge that we offend others too.

(2) respecting people's right to believe as they wish does not also oblige us to respect the actual beliefs involved. I must respect the right of others to believe in certain creeds which I myself regard as pernicious nonsense. I don't think I should be debarred from thinking that, nor saying it, as long as I do so civilly and without incitement to violence.

[redbird]

Well put.

I would add to the previous comment that if there were a right not to be offended, it would silence all the anti-gay and anti-feminist preachers who are condemning us out of hand for the basics of our lives, loves, and beliefs.

There's a seldom-questioned approach in which any religion may attack non-believers, and any monotheism may attack polytheists, and not be called on it even when the attacks lead to physical violence, but criticism in the other direction is "offensive."

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I haven't read all the way through yet, but are you sure that was me? I don't recall saying that explicitly, though I suppose I might have implied it another comment if you could link to it. But I think you might be crediting me with someone else's point?

[biascut.livejournal.com]

And having read it all the way through: hm. It does feel to me that your definition of secular liberal humanism falls rather into the trap of claiming everything nice and excluding everything distasteful as "not really" SLH. I mean, regardless of Stalin and Hitler, if secular liberal humanism is to be anything more than just a vague "hey, we should all be like, nice to each other, dude," then you have to date it from the Enlightenment and include Whiggish ideas like progress, perfectability and individualism. Which means you're pretty much up there in the dock with Northern European Protestantism for free market capitalism and colonial expansion, aren't you?

It strikes me as rather like herbal remedies: it seems absurd to credit anything with a power for good without also acknowledging that it have a equally powerful detrimental effects.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Whiggishness is a fair accusation, as is the diagnosis of the debt secular liberal humanism owes to the Protestant Enlightenment, but the colonial expansionist stuff was anything but secular, and veers over into the social-darwinist territory and perverted modernism that gave us Hitler.

As for free market capitalism, that seems to be compatible with extreme religiosity and with militant atheism. I say it's an orthogonal issue.

[matildabj.livejournal.com]

Pointed here by hafren, and what you say makes a lot of sense. Two things in particular stood out to me:

One of the things that perpetually amazes me about believers is how much more tolerant they are of such sins as spiritual pride and downright hatred than they are of minor sexual offenses. I don't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, but I am constantly amazed how most fundamentalist Christians neglect the simple spiritual wisdom contained in the gospel accounts of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.

I quoted this in full because I was nodding and nodding as I read it. I don't have anything to add, because you said it perfectly succintly.

either Christ was the Son of God, or he wasn't... All religions cannot be true

Again, I was heartened to hear this from an agnostic. For me, as a Christian (one who follows the teachings of Jesus because a) they make a lot of sense and b) I believe he was who he said he was), I struggle with this tolerance issue. If I say I believe that Jesus' claim to be the Son of God is true, by default this means I believe other religions to be wrong, but this is un-PC and other bad things. The problem is, as you point out, I have to believe it's true, otherwise there's no point. Do I hate Muslims/Buddhists/atheists/anyone who disagrees with me? Of course not. Do I think I'm better than them? Again, definitely not. So I come to:

if there were a being vaster and better than us, we could not possibly come to any conception of who that being might be without hideously constraining that conception by purely human preoccupations and prejudices.

And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. It's impossible to grasp the nature of God, because we just don't have the mental faculties. And so for me to say "my God is the true God" is very difficult, because all I'm seeing is one little tiny corner of infinity, and I can't possibly extrapolate the whole picture from that.

*rambles*

Thank you for your thoughtful, informed and insightful post.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

In re opposing the sins which are more fun to think about: It seems to me that the ninth commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness" gets much less attention than it deserves.

[aberrantangels]

either Christ was the Son of God, or he wasn't...

Ah, the old "lunatic, liar or Lord" argument beloved of C.S. Lewis. Even he admitted it was predicated on his assumption that the Christian God is the One True God. Let overwrite, let override. I believe that if there was a "historic Jesus" (which itself is hotly debated in some circles), he was enlightened in the same sense as Buddha and Laozi. Was he the one and only capitalized Son of God? "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." (Romans 8:14 [KJV], quoted by Robert Anton Wilson, The Earth Will Shake)

I have to believe it's true, otherwise there's no point.

"Well, unless you believe in God, there’s really no future."

[matildabj.livejournal.com]

"Well, unless you believe in God, there’s really no future."

That's not what I meant. What I meant was, I have to believe it's true, otherwise there's no point believing it.

And the 'either Christ was the son of God or he wasn't' argument was used by rozk in her post above. If he was simply 'enlightened', then I'm not interested, for the reason I just stated.

[aberrantangels]

What I meant was, I have to believe it's true, otherwise there's no point believing it.

So, you have to believe it in order to... be able to believe it?

And the 'either Christ was the son of God or he wasn't' argument was used by rozk in her post above.

Quite frankly, no matter whom it's coming from, I still think it holds about as much water as a tissue-paper sieve.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Having come over her by way of supergee, I can also add a bit to your ruminations about the nature of faith.

One of the things that has been missed by many is that faith is like courage. A courageous person is not a fearless one; it's a person who can recognize fear, but act in spite of it. Similarly, faith is not the same thing as being certain; it is the ability to act in the face of uncertainty.

"Doing the right thing here would leave me vulnerable, and I'm not sure it's the best thing to do... nevertheless, I have faith in righteousness for righteousness' sake. I'll do what's right."

You're right... part of this comes from the inability of humans to adequately understand something other-than-human. Part of it should simply come from humility... realizing that we are human, and fallible, and that we can be selfish, short-sighted, or too wrapped up in our own thoughts/needs/desires to process what we should.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The problem with all religions (including atheism) is that they begin with the idea that they know the answers. Unfortunately some free speech advocates seem to fall into the same camp, the belief that any control of what is said is automatically evil. There's a middle ground called "tact" that is sometimes overlooked.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Au contraire on the lumping in of atheism with religions -- in the absence of evidence of a God, assuming that there is a God is a remarkably unjustifiable leap of the imagination. Atheism isn't a religion so much as the positive absence of a religion.

Speaking as another humanist agnostic, when they're at the stage of burning heretics in effigy and calling for a holy war, calls for tact are way behind the curve: acts of violence motivated by any ideology -- be the ideology faith-based or political -- demand an armed and active response. It doesn't matter whether the ideology is Christian, Moslem, Nazi, Communist, or Pastafarian -- the followers of any doctrine forefeit their right to tolerance at the point where they assume the right to impose their beliefs by force.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

In case you hadn't noticed, this whole incident redlined my tolerance meter around the point where Moslems started calling for a ban on our freedom of speech, and broke the needle when the riots and deaths started.

I'll defend to the death your right to say what you believe -- right up until the point where you try to force me to believe it. At that point, you have defined yourself as my enemy. And I'm not a Christian, or descended from Christians, and "turn the other cheek" isn't part of my cultural heritage.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Atheism would get my vote too (I'm agnostic with very strong atheist leanings) if it wasn't for the fact that so many people people give credence to religion. While most of this is cultural conditioning, I think that there is also something hardwired into the human brain that makes us susceptible to this type of thinking. Now I'm 99.9% sure that this is an artefact of our brains made up of elements such as being dependent on parents as children, pattern recognision and extrapolation, and wanting others to take the blame, but there is nevertheless a part of me that refuses to rule out the possibility that our brains were literally designed to have this capability. I think that it's as unlikely as all hell, but since the atheist viewpoint can't by definition prove its case I have to regard it as no more proven than any religion.

Re tact - The original cartoons were pretty bloody stupid, and the initial Islamic response was remarkably restrained. What happened after that was a textbook example of making a mountain out of a molehill, and could have been pretty much avoided if people on both sides had exercised some tact and a sense of proportion.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose it depends on where you start. The scientific basis for testing effects/non-effects that I was taught in college was that, in the absence of evidence, one should adopt the null hypothesis (and I'm not a scientist--this is really just what I remember from college), so for me, the burden of proof is on those who claim a positive effect--that a god of some kind exists.

Myself, I can't give a whole lot of weight to many people giving credence to religion--so many people have espoused so many stupid and downright vile things over the years (I guess racism is a good example) that I've stopped having any faith at all, if you'll pardon the phrase, in such commonly held beliefs.

[redbird]

The key difference is between self-control and preventing other people from speaking or acting.

Tact has a lot of value--but it should not be imposed by force. I don't want the government telling a local imam that he may not proclaim that there is only one god, and that those who believe in multiple gods, or none, are deluded or evil.

Law comes in, reasonably, at the point where someone decides that because I am queer, or an unbeliever, or a woman whose arms and head are exposed, they are justified in harming me. Putting up posters urging me to cover my head, fine. Attacking me for ignoring that urging is assault, no matter that someone believes their god wants it that way.

I would like the religious fundamentalists to extend as much tact toward us heathens as they expect as their right from us.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I really liked and appreciated this essay. Thanks very much for writing it. I have only the addition that the atheism of the Nazis is, as far as I am aware, a canard perpetuated by the Christian right in at least my country (the US). For one thing, the...SS, I believe, wore belt buckles saying "God is with us," and for another, (and this is second-hand, as I have not read Mein Kampf, but I have read an essay which quotes it extensively--it is an essay on an atheist website, but I don't think that means that they are untrustworthy) Hitler apparently wrote about how by killing Jews he would be doing God's work.

As well. I am an atheist who strongly is of the opinion that if there were an all-powerful god, he/she would have a lot to answer for, and the last thing I would do is worship him/her.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Most of the Nazis appear to have been theists of one sort or another. Some of them, possibly including Hitler, wanted to claim to be Christians, but Christians of a very odd sort in that they wanted to claim that Christ was not a Jew and that Jewish thought had no relevance to his ministry. Others of them, like Himmler, wanted to preach a neo-Norse religion and had to be sat on very firmly by Hitler, who had no intention of picking any fight with the Churches until after he had won his war. If there was a god on the SS buckles, most people that wore them thought of that God as Odin.

Some of them were atheists, but not many.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

You wrote, "Clearly I am not the free speech fundamentalist I sometimes think I am, because ... I do seem to think that people have some sort of duty - albeit not one to be enforced by law - not to offend gratuitously in polite society." But the problem disappears if you maintain a firm distinction between the rules of law and the rules of etiquette. That distinction also, I think, cuts the knot of mixed reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy.

Besides, I don't think you consider the rules of etiquette controlling, because you also write, "I say these things, not to cause offense, but in the sure and certain knowledge that some will be offended by my saying them. Am I obliged to be silent about my own convictions for fear of causing that offense? I do not think so." In other words, to treat the rules of etiquette as if they were rules of law is to gratuitously muzzle.

Elsewhere, you write: "the equivalent for religious believers is valid because a prophet said so rather than because it is a good idea." I've noticed that the law of God as promulgated and interpreted by ruling classes does tend to favor the interests of those ruling classes, whose response to this is to say, "It's not my fault it says this; it's the rule of God." Watch C.S. Lewis defending the Christian rule that the male is the head of the family, for instance.

But at the same time, Lewis was aware of the general problem. On the one hand he says that you can't derive goodness from first principles; you have to derive it from a declaration by God. But on the other hand he asks, if good is good because God says so, then could God have declared what we call bad to be good? Lewis's answer is no, which is to his credit. But he doesn't follow this up.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Brilliant.

I further believe that, if there were a being vaster and better than us, we could not possibly come to any conception of who that being might be without hideously constraining that conception by purely human preoccupations and prejudices. If there were a god, any human discussion of tha god would be impious, any worship of that god would be idolatry.

That is very much the viewpoint that I came to some years back (subject always to change with new evidence and experience). I call myself a nontheist because if there is any being worthy of the title God, it is beyond human ken and therefore irrelevant to me, just as my opinion of its existence is irrelevant to it.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

the lies of the Catholic Church about the efficacy of condoms and the idiocy of preaching creationism in the face of all scientific evidence,

Putting on my copyeditor's hat: It isn't clear whether the pairing is "lies" and "idiocy" or "efficacy" and "idiocy." I think it's the former (that is, you are not identifying this particular idiocy as one of the lies of the Catholic Church), because usually you don't use the serial comma (for example, "it also produces great art, good science and feminism"). However, you do use it at least once ("the idiocy of preaching Islamic creationism, ... the extent to which the Iraqi insurgency has become an occasion of the murder of Shia by Sunni, and vice versa"), so I'm not certain.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Pointed here by supergee...

Personally, I have very ambiguous religious status, so I really appreciated this post.

A fairly conservative Jewish friend of mine and I recently got into a discussion about religious tolerance. I had pointed him to a website that had among other things, Wiccan ritual materials. He laughed at said materials, saying they were silly looking. I responded that tfillin were silly looking, too. I don't actually believe that, I just wanted to make the point that one religion's sacred objects were another person's point of amusement. He patently refused to take the comparason, saying that Wicca was a silly religion practised by ignorant high school goth kids. I'm paraphrasing heavily, but he refused to accept even genuinely practising Wiccans.

Now, comparing Wicca to Judaism is absolutely ridiculous, but I think comparing religions at all is ridiculous.

All religions cannot be true, because they contradict each other; they can, however, be equally false. Given half a chance, they kill each other and anyone else who gets in the way. As well as those they can agree to hate, like us queers.

Extraordinarily well put. It's this problem that prevents me from actively pursuing the whole religion thing. I have so much religious contradiction going on within my own blood that it's difficult to parse at all. I was raised Jewish, but my mother never converted, so there's entire factions of Judaism that wouldn't accept me at all.

I also have too much respect for religion in general to treat it like auditing a course in college--"Hmm, maybe I'll like this one..."

Another problem is that there are some people who are willing to be open-minded. There are many who aren't. The ones who aren't seem to get the power and influence and muck things up for the rest of us. Curse our easy-going ways!

"An it harm none, do what thou wilt" and The Threefold Rule are good ones to live by, I find. Sadly, many people are either ignorant of them, or don't feel they're enough, and it turns into a giant Reese's Peanut Butter Cup: "Hey you got your religion in my free will! You got your free will in my religion!"

Basically, I find it comes down to people who are tolerant, people who say they are and aren't, and people who just aren't.

[shutters-i.livejournal.com]

it may be no more than an exercise of self-regarding intellectual purity, but i seem to find it helpful to adopt a kind of E-prime when considering the concept of offence, a lexicon in which the matter must be expressed in certain ways rather than certain others. i try to think/speak/write of offence as being taken by B rather than given by A, of something as being the occasion of offence rather than the cause, of people being offended at something rather than by it. merely to be aware that offence will be taken is not the same as giving that offence; even intending offence to be taken is not the same as giving offence - what if one's malice is stymied by the unexpected and inconvenient serenity of one's target?

of course, in practice the effect of this is usually just to absolve myself of culpability in situations where others take offence at something of mine. but it also helps in those instances when it's the other way round: after a few occasions of finding myself thinking that the offence must have been intended, i begin to realise how grandly paranoid are the edifices i'm constructing.

and, as in all these matters, tolerance may be little use in the face of unpersuadable intolerance. which does not - must not - mean that it is either altogether futile or the product of an invalid morality. another of my self-conditioned responses is, well, if we're supposing ourselves to be better than these other folk, then let's be better, not simply more efficient at being in crucial respects the same.

(i also take great pleasure in reciting in public, when i'm dropping litter through a plastic ring on a tube station platform into a plastic bag which is no longer there, or when i'm refusing a prohibition on taking my satchel into a theatre, blair's "we must not allow the terrorists to change our way of life!")

(oh, and i won't be cowed by the LJ spoil chicken's refusal to countenance the spelling "offence" either.)

[bencurthoys.livejournal.com]

i hadn't heard of E-prime before - it makes so much sense.

i had been intuitively crawling towards the same kind of ideas, especially for reviewing or talking about plays and films. it always struck me as wrong when i heard someone say "that movie was crap", when all they meant to say was "i didn't like that movie".

[shutters-i.livejournal.com]

yes, ben - i've recently caught a lot of flak in another online forum we both visit, where people have been screaming at me "THIS IS WRING!" when what they mean is, "i don't like this"; i tried through persistent questioning to get them to notice that their reasoning was just "BECAUSE!", but it didn't get through. apparently i'm the stupid one. ho, stop me if you've heard this before, hum.

[bencurthoys.livejournal.com]

which thread is it on the noff forums? i had quick squint, but couldn't find anything, because i don't really keep up with them that much.

and good to see you on LJ. a far more convenient medium than a poxy web message boards.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I'm not offended by anything you say in this post, or anything I've seen in comments. I am offended, not personally but abstractly, by the underlying assumption (which you explicitly disclaim at one point, but which seems still to be there) that only atheists are capable of rational thought. It is a fundamental misconception about religion to suggest that it provides *all* the answers and makes rational thought unnecessary--any Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu, etc) scientist would have something to say about that, and yet it remains the basis of all discussions like this, the thesis that once you have a religion you can pack your brain up in polystyrene chips and stow it in the attic because you don't need it any more. "The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand." And many do.

As for not being able to grasp the nature of God, well, I'm really sorry, but says who? I'm fifty and I haven't found the limits of my mind yet. Yes, I have preconceptions, but fewer than I used to have, and most of them yield to new information. I think there is nothing in the universe, or beyond it, that we cannot learn to understand, given time and the will to try. I also don't rule out the possibility that God may not be that much "better" than us: the only qualities s/he needs to have are existence outside our universe and the ability to create. All the rest is PR.

For myself, I believe that some people have an innate sense of the presence of God, and though I don't share it myself I trust these people enough to believe that that sense is valid, as, if I were blind from birth, I would trust people enough to believe that colour exists: as, having no sense of smell, I do trust people enough to believe that odours exist. I do not infer any more from this than the bare premise--"God is there." Whether any religion is divinely inspired I don't know: if one is, then all the others are going to look pretty silly.

But my belief in God (or gods, or Goddess, etc) is the result of rational thought about information received from a trusted source, just like many people's belief in the conclusions of science. Is it possible that some people adopt atheism as a belief system because, once you've ruled out God, you don't have to think about the possibility of his/her existence any more? Or because they have decided that all religion is bad, a decision which has nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of an object of religion? In other words, is it always automatically true that the reasons for becoming an atheist are "better" than the reasons for becoming a Christian, or a Muslim, and so on?

If any of this comment has offended anyone, I sincerely apologise. I had no intention of so doing. I do feel that religion and its advocates do not have a monopoly on unquestioned assumptions, and sometimes I like to question some of them...

[rozk.livejournal.com]

These are good points which I will try to address.

Clearly, believers are capable of fine thought and many of the greatest edifices of human culture come from people of faith. However, what I am saying is that the foundation on which that thought is built is, to the extent that belief is central to their use of intellect, inherently flawed. Believers regard certain things as axiomatic because they are written in scripture, not because they are, in fact, axiomatic. They then reason logically, and often very persuasively, on the basis of axioms some of which may be true and some of which may not be.

The cliched example of this is Philip Gosse, who argued, in 'Omphalos', that if the universe appeared to be older than scripture stated, if the geological evidence indicated a greater age than his own literal interpretation of the bible allowed, if animals and plants - and he was a fine marine biologists - had traits that were consistent with natural selection across great spaces of time, THEN, since scripture was self-evidently the truth, all of these things must be how God chose to construct the universe. The universe was not as old as the evidence indicated, it merely appeared to be so, just as Adam had a navel, in spite of never being born. The crude statement of his position is that God put these things there to test our faith, but his views were actually somewhat more subtle than that. He also believed that Christmas Puddings were a satanic temptation and that the only reason not to believe that Shakespeare was damned for his plays was that there were many Puritans, and he might have made a deathbed repentance.

As to the ability of the human mind to comprehend a being infinitely old, wise and competent, if one existed, I am less convinced than you that any of us could ever arrive at more than glimpses and that those glimpses would be so imperfect as to be counterproductive. I envy you your belief in your competence.

I also feel that, if there were a god of goodness who was also the god of creation, human beings would not be well advised to bother that being with our worship until we had got our moral shit together.

As to the reasons for my agnosticism - and I am by no means certain enough of any of my views to regard myself as an atheist - they derive in part from a Catholic upbringing in which I had, for several years, a profound sense of the presence of the numinous especially when I received the sacraments. And then, one day, that feeling ceased to some extent, and transferred itself to loving my friends and loving art and loving the world around me.

One of the reasons for that cessation and that transferral was the realization that I could either be who I am, or be who my confessor told me to be. My faith was a product of a Catholic upbringing, and Catholicism tested it to destruction, and broke it. I had to accept living in an imperfect world as an imperfect person.

And my beliefs are, as I say, a work in progress, as are everyone's. I just don't think that I could ever again attach any significant sense of the wonder and glory of the world to the dogmas of organized religion, except in the form into which they are transmuted by great art. I do not believe that Christ was God made Man - however, when I hear a soprano singing Mozart's setting of 'Et incarnatus' in the Mass in C Minor, I am deeply moved by what Mozart was making the words and music say. Which had to do with the aspiration of belief, that wish to be part of something bigger and better than oneself, rather than with any dogma.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

But a blind person can test the existence of color, by say, taking two identically shaped blocks of wood, asking one sighted friend to mark one with green and the other with purple, carving individual insignias on the back of each block, and then showing them to another sighted friend without allowing him/her to touch them, asking him/her to pick out the purple one, and testing the result by feeling the insignia on the back.

Haven't got time to read this properly now but.....

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

It mostly seems god good sense. Can pick a lot of nits but that's me..
THE ISSUE over this crazy overr-reaction.is how to be a |rational Human being in a rational world. Juggling Ideals Good Mannners and trying not to be a wimp as well

[xopher-vh.livejournal.com]

First of all, this is a wonderful essay. It's a clear, reasonable, and polite expression of a much-misunderstood metabelief system. There are certain bits of it with which I profoundly disagree, much as I'm broadly sympathetic to the secular liberal humanist point of view and approach to thought.

Now, I'm a Wiccan, raised by an ex-Baptist agnostic-tending-atheist father and an ex-Catholic mother. I don't believe in any god whose name is 'God'. Certainly I don't believe in the YHVH of the Old Testament, and even if I did I would not worship him, because in my opinion so cruel a god should not be given additional power by worship.

I am, however, one of those people who perceive a divine force in my body, mind, and spirit. Not one necessarily outside myself, but certainly one greater than myself alone. I call it The Divine when speaking to people of other religions or none (it annoys me when Christians insist on calling it 'God', because it's BIGGER than that). As a person of heavily rationalistic bent, I'm often skeptical of this perception on my own part. Is it really the Divine, or am I just unconsciously processing subliminal cues and acting upon them? Or perhaps (for slightly different types of perception) does my medication just need adjusting?

Here's where I disagree with part of what you said: The Divine is, as you said it must be if it exists, too large and complex for humans to understand. So is the universe (not coincidentally IMO). But we strive to understand the universe as best we can, by doing science; and we can strive to understand the Divine as well, by a related process.

One of the keys to both processes is the creation of metaphoric constructs that allow us to understand better. These simplify into comprehensibility, by necessarily distorting some information. The map is not the territory, and MUST not and CAN not be, because if it were identical to the territory it would BE the territory, and not a map at all. The problem with monotheists (and, alas, many polytheists) is that they habitually confuse their map with the territory, and their religion stories with history. As long as I realize that "the Goddess" is an anthropomorphicization that I use to comprehend certain aspects of the Divine, I can be both religious and rational.

My belief in the Divine will not seem rational, until I tell you that I am a Radical Pantheist, that is, I hold that the Divine Nature of the Universe is manifest in its physical substance as such. Every atom, every proton, every quark, every superstring (whatever that is) participates in the Divine. The laws of nature are the Divine Mind. ARE the Divine Mind, not thoughts in it. "God is pure mathematics" as one friend has put it. Another person, less sympathetic to my point of view, called it "Atheism with spirituality."

This leads to remarkable places. It leads to the idea that science is an act of worship (or can be if the scientist CHOOSES that attitude). It leads to my identification of my ecstasy over the Mandelbrot Set as spiritual ecstasy...which also happens to match my perception that the feeling is the same as when I've been chanting "Jai Ma, Kali Durge Ma, Kali-Ma" over and over for an hour.

So my major disagreement (and O gods! have I been longwinded, sorry) is that any discussion of "such a god" is impious. I think it's entirely pious to attempt to stretch one's mind as far as one can, over as much of the Divine Nature as one can stretch it. It's not even impious to fail; it's inevitable. But the effort itself is worthwhile, and has astounding consequences.

That it is idolatry I will not dispute, though the image is not an image but the thing itself, and was made not by me but by itself, when it chose (so I believe) to do so by means of the Big Bang. But I'll ask you this: what makes you think idolatry (of the conventional sort) is necessarily a bad thing? (If it exists, which to my mind is dubious.) If I worship a sand painting of a heron, and really believe the sand painting itself is my deity, and never try to impose that belief on anyone or offer anyone the slightest harm...am I worse than a Crusader killing innocent civilians to free the Holy Land from the Saracen? I don't think so.

[(Anonymous)]

Beautifully argued and well written.

I find myself (a straight male) wondering why all the interesting people seem to be lesbians these days.

Except Neil Gaiman, of course.