Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation online, and he’s a bit of a whacker — he’s one of those cranky apologists for religion, and he really, really despises those awful New Atheists, as you’ll see. He was recently in an intelligence2 debate, on the proposition that “Atheists are wrong” — his side, the affirmative, lost. He has just posted his position on the debate, titled The Unbearable Lightness of Atheism, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t fare so well. It’s a bitter diatribe informed only by his own ignorance and his deeply held conceit that god is real and religion is good, and therefore atheists must be wrong.
Roughly the first half of his essay is going for the angry biblical prophet angle: woe, woe, kids nowadays are so slack and loose, the whole culture is going to hell in a handbasket, we need to return to the good old days when everyone knew what was good for ’em, and it was Church and God and Theology. He comes out swinging like an Old Testament scold.
So desperately impoverished are our political and moral imaginations after decades of market fundamentalism and the creeping gains of a culture-corrupting liberalism – which has systematically replaced the Common Good with individual rights, education with skills-acquisition, obligation with self-determination, and a hierarchy of values and virtue with the fetishisation of mere choice – that we have mistaken the walls of our moral imaginations for the achievements of progress itself.
Under these conditions, to adapt Clausewitz’s famous definition of war, politics has become the extension of egoism by other means rather than an essentially moral and educative practice. On this point, Herve Juvin’s analysis of the collapse of the social “Body” and the emergence of the political reality of “bodies” is exemplary:
“Politics used to subject bodies and lives to a common destiny or ideal; politics now must submit to the varied, fleeting and capricious destinies we give to our own lives … the advent of the body legitimizes politics in the body’s service, places its satisfaction, its activity, its enjoyment over all that might only be means to those ends: law, rules, society, kinship.”
It’s kind of a shame that he’s so bald — he really needs wild hair and a great shaggy patriarchal beard to go with the sentiments…but then again, it’s so much more pompous than you’d expect from a ranting rabbi.
Just looking at it tactically, as a debate approach, though — it’s not wise to come on raving about how your audience is a bunch of wastrels because they don’t believe in the Bible as you do. And to do so with the theme that what everyone is lacking are good old cultural absolutes, like, say, Christianity is not a winner of a strategy. He also fails to make a case that living under the thumb of a god actually makes for a better, healthier, happier civilization — but he’d probably rant back at me that that’s my problem, that I think healthiness and happiness and trivia like intellectual satisfaction are just my namby-pamby, weak criteria for a vital culture. We’re supposed to live for a religious absolute!
Then he starts on <hack, spit> atheism. Atheism is a symptom of all that is wrong with society today.
There are few things today more fashionable, more suited to our modern conceit, than atheism. In fact, far from being radical or heroically contrarian, the current version of atheism strikes me as the ultimate conformism.
This is especially apparent in the case of the slipshod, grotesquely sensationalist “New Atheism” – invariably renounced by principled, literate atheists like James Wood, Thomas Nagel, John Gray, Philip Pullman and the late Bernard Williams – which poses no serious challenge to our most serious social ills and so has no other alternative but to blame our social ills in toto on religion.
Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not claiming that atheism is necessarily the cause of our modern predicament, much less that it is the root of all evil. To make such a claim would be to accord this variety of atheistic chic with too much importance, too much weight.
In a way, I think where atheism fits in our cultural moment it is more incidental than that. Our real problem today is the impoverishment of the modern mind, our inability to think properly about such elevated things as the Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, Life, Death, Humanity, the End or Purpose of things, even Sex itself, without such ideas being debased by an incurious and all-pervasive nihilism.
Ah, the Good Atheists ploy. Good Atheists are the ones who respect religion and denounce those Bad Atheists. These are the atheists who are sad that they don’t believe in gods, who demand as James Wood did that we should have a “theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.” No, thank you. I like the atheism that dances on the graves of gods and laughs at the folly of religion. It’s much happier, and has found satisfaction and joy in reality.
We also manage to think quite a bit about “Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, Life, Death, Humanity, the End or Purpose of things, even Sex itself” — we also consider more realistically “good, beauty, truth, law, love, life, death, humanity, the end or purpose of things, even sex itself” without reifying them into Capital Letter Ideals. Our sin is that we consider them as part of reality rather than a reflection of some imaginary super-being.
New Atheists are also most definitely not nihilists. This is simply a bog-standard stupid accusation Christians often make against anybody who rejects their personal deity, and it’s total nonsense.
And here we confront a desperate contradiction at the heart of so much atheistic hyperbole (accurately identified by Bernard Williams and others). The New Atheists rely heavily on the thesis that religion is the enemy of progress and human flourishing, and that once the last vestiges of religion are done away with, humanity will be far better off.
But they also claim that all religion is “man made,” and self-evidently so. This begs the question: if religion is indeed this all-pervasive source of corruption and prejudice and moral retardation, where do they believe that religion itself comes from, if not the human imagination? And so, as Bernard Williams puts the question:
“if humanity has invented something as awful as [these atheists] take religion to be, what should that tell them about humanity? In particular, can humanity really be expected to do much better without it?”
At least he didn’t claim that we think we’ll achieve Utopia when religion is gone — I don’t think that at all. We’ll have one monkey off our back when religion is reduced to irrelevance, which seems like a perfectly sensible goal to me.
The rest is bizarre. Of course religion came from the human imagination. Why is this so impossible to grasp? Humans also came up with war, and Ponzi schemes, and lynch mobs, and Light Swill Beer. We come up with nasty awful destructive ideas all the time; how is the awfulness of religion an argument against it being man-made? And why would the fact that an idea is man-made imply that maybe we wouldn’t be better off without it? Racism is a human concept, for instance — I certainly do think humanity would do better without it. And it’s the same with religion.
Look what he thinks atheism thrives on.
And this atheism, I believe, will continue to flourish to the extent that moral disintegration, nihilistic capitalism, anti-aesthetic liberalism and a kind of ubiquitous piss-taking cynicism remain the dominant forces in our common life.
See? That’s why atheists are wrong — they’re all immoral nihilists and piss-taking cynics! Case closed.
Never mind that nowhere in this debate did Stephens actually show any evidence that atheists were such wicked people. Oh, sure, he could have pointed to me as an example of a piss-taking cynic, but then the rest doesn’t match, and he didn’t even name any of us anyway. So this is the gist of his argument: atheists are wrong because they are bad people.
I’m not surprised he lost the debate.
Here’s his grand conclusion, the big zinger. Don’t laugh too hard.
I often hear atheists insist that they do not need God in order to be good. But if I am in any way accurate in what I have argued here, we are faced with a far more destructive possibility: that without God, there simply is no Good.
OK, I’ll be kind and treat this argument charitably, far more charitably than the cranky bastard writing it deserves.
Let’s assume that Stephens is right, and there actually is a god who somehow is the source of all good. One of the unfortunate qualities of this god, however, is that he’s unknowable: we have many religions on earth claiming knowledge of god’s desires and plans, but we have no way of determining which, if any of them, is right. Perhaps the congregation of some odd sect in a small town in Saskatchewan are getting clear instructions beamed right into their heads by the one true god, but we have no way of telling, and they look just as random as the Mormons or Buddhists or Jews or Muslims, who are just as adamant that they have the truth. Maybe we atheists are poor unfortunates who have our god-antennas broken off, so we don’t hear the celestial transmissions everyone else is getting.
What should we do?
I think it’s clear that one thing we broken receivers should not do is blindly accept an absolutist morality based on the authority of a religious source — that would be irresponsible, and given that there is absolutely no consensus on which one is right, and that there are so damned many of them, most likely to be wrong. We should, instead, do as we have been doing, and use reason and evidence to assess beliefs and choose to follow the ones that make objective sense and help us get the business of living done. That does kind of rule out Stephens’ penis-obsessed genocidal racist deity who believes in proxy sacrifices and magic chanting, though.
Alternatively, what if we assume we atheists are right, and there are no gods of any kind? Stephens is the nihilist here, because he believes that if that were true, there is no possibility of goodness anywhere — we’re just doomed, meaningless machines waiting for entropy to swallow us up. You could believe that, and go off in a corner and curl up and die, but we choose to enjoy this life we’ve got and do what we can to make it better for other people, as well.
Again, it’s a matter of playing the hand we’re dealt. Whether there’s an ineffable and uncommunicative god, or no god at all, there’s no significant difference between those two positions, and what we have to do is muddle through as best we can. Atheists choose to do so by trying to use their minds and experience to work out ways to achieve goals like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Believers seem to set their goals on lives of servility to an undetectable god because tradition and authority have told them what to do.
Atheists are right, and if they’re wrong, I don’t want to be right…and the theists can show me neither that I’m wrong nor that their interpretation of life is better than mine.
The horror is that scholasticism is dead.
But if we believe enough, Good and Beauty will exist, and we will be exalted for believing in these as ideals.
It’s Klinghoffer and the DI all over again, demonstrating a total contempt for what would have to undergird his exalted Categories, the Truth. Capitalized this time because they seem neither to believe in Truth or in truth, except as a meaningless (nihilistic) hope.
Glen Davidson
Funny, I read that whole piece, and nowhere did I see him present any evidence that god exists.
“There are few things today more fashionable, more suited to our modern conceit, than atheism.”
Yup. That’s me. I’ve always been a fashionista.
I like how “capitalism” keeps getting a bad rap from this guy, and it is lodged in with “liberalism” and “atheism”. Weird, that. He doesn’t sound like the typical right-winger, but seems to exclude himself from (possibly imaginary) aspects of the left.
I doubt it. That place spits out socialists like a farmer’s son spits chaw juice.
And, for the most part, they’re thoughtful, well-read socialists. Not at all the kind you’d expect to be produced by Damascus lightning.
From the link, the debate was supposed to answer the question “does god exist.” This guy’s entire position is a non sequitur. The other people involved, including the audience and moderator, should be upset that this tool wasted their time trying in vain to answer a question nobody asked.
Isn’t “Religion and Ethics editor” and “whacker” a truism or tautology?
The only reason I haven’t complained about Scott Stephens bias on the ABC website is I don’t read the religion and ethics section unless linked to it by the AFA. There might be a good article about atheists in there just like there might be water on the Moon and Mars.
The funny part of all this is Scott is American and from what I can tell a preacher. These are some of the least liked fellows in Australia because they ruin our days off with their preaching. Pretty much only Queensland listens to them the rest of us are putting prawns, Aussie beef, and Aussie offal on a barbie and watching 15 men stand around a former paddock for 5 days after Christmas. (they take a day off for new years and fly to a different paddock for another 5 days, ah test cricket.)
I think I’m getting better at translating these people.
This looks a lot like “oh noes, people accept that sexual orientation is real and not a chosen behavior like us good Christians know it is. Society is doomed!”
The comments section includes the best Courtier’s Reply I’ve seen in a while. I thought it was a parody at first. But no, this person really said this (my favorite part is bolded):
Given the doctrine of Original Sin, the Abrahamic religions don’t seem to have a real high opinion of humanity, either.
“where do they believe that religion itself comes from”
IMHO
Everyone at the dawn of human existence could see the shapes and faces in the clouds. It seems reasonable and more favorable for survival, to assume that a powerful “life-like” force was at work than not. Camouflaged hunters and prey in the jungle are similar to the fleeting views of the powerful sky dwellers. It would also seem reasonable that the best way to interact with the cloud people would be the same way they interacted with other tribes.
Life is dependent on finding and exploiting needed resources. The most valuable of all possible resources would therefore be the ability to barter and gain favor with the cloud tribe. From the sky all resources flow. The second most valuable resource is the ability to convince people that you are in possession of the first. Religion now comes into existence. Religion is the condensate of endless futile efforts to negotiate favor with the gods. Lacking a disproof of gods these efforts will endure forever.
There are many faces in the clouds = polytheism. The sky is everywhere = monotheism and “god is everywhere”. Clouds had the power to block out the sun, give rain, and hurl lightning = god is all powerful. Both good and bad things came from the sky = pleasing and angering the gods. Heaven is the place where all the resources that will ever be needed, are there for you.
These visible “cloud gods” appeared to them as an omnipresent part of their natural world very early on. Clouds and the night sky were the two biggest, ever present, pattern generators. It’s the ultimate entertainment system delivering a non-stop, life and death soap opera 24/7.
When a small baby sees something it doesn’t like it calls it a poopy-head. When a big baby sees something it doesn’t like it calls it a nihilist. “Nihilistic capitalism” is a contradiction in terms since capitalists value profits and that is contrary to nihilism (the central idea of which is to value nothing).
Josh #10: So the answer to the question “Have you read the Bible?” is “Well…not in ENGLISH…”
I have access to online translations, but believe me, you don’t UNDERSTAND it until you’ve read it in the original ones and zeroes.
I really hate when theist say that atheism is fashionable or chic right now. You think I reject religion because I want to be “cool”? Really? Do you really think atheists want to be “fashionable” so badly that they’re willing to be ostracized by friends and family and willing to risk their jobs? This is just another way that theist try to dismiss atheism without actually having to think about it.
Also, last time I checked conformity doesn’t mean becoming part of a very small, much hated minority.
I have to note that, put in its proper historical context, this business about “education” being replaced with “skills acquisition” is a horribly classist thing to say.
I understand — and to a certain extent, empathize with — exactly what he is saying. There is a difference between a truly well-rounded education involving a deep understanding of both the sciences and the humanities, vs. a turn-the-crank sort of institution where you learn just enough of your narrow chosen field to become eminently employable. I get that.
What this elitist fucknuts is missing is that, to the extent there has been a shift, it hasn’t been away from this glorious well-rounded “education” into a simplistic utilitarian “skills acquisition”… rather, it has been a shift from “the select few get an education, and the unwashed masses get jack shit”, towards “the select few (and a good deal more) get an education, and a non-trivial portion of the unwashed masses at least get basic skills acquisition (let’s ignore the sizable fraction that still get jack shit)”. How one can not see this as an improvement is beyond me.
What Stephens is bemoaning is not a watering down of education, but an extension (albeit an incomplete, imperfect extension) of education to far more people than ever had an opportunity before. The sort of person who would call that a bad thing is, well, exactly the sort of illiberal piece of shit who will freely refer to such bizarre concepts as “anti-aesthetic liberalism”. Asswipe…
I complained about his bias on religion over ethics almost as soon as the site went live. He’s also prone to moderating so slowly that no real debate ever occurs – comments are closed down after a few whackos post some word salad in response to real comments.
“Dear Humanity:
I’ve decided that the only people who can possibly live with me in heaven everlasting are humanities scholars.
For that reason, I’ve decided to encode my instructions to you in a tome that, for 5,500 years of the earth’s 6,000 year history, few of you will even be able to read. Those of you unable to study ancient Hebrew and devote your life to its biblical application, even if you’re otherwise literate and faithful, will be excluded from my special knowledge.
Enjoy hell.
Love, God.”
The more I learn about True Christians™, the more it seems they wish to convince me that both they and their god are despicable monsters, and there can be no duty to humanity more worth one’s life’s work than to figure out how to destroy both.
I was at that debate… and believe me, it was a lot harder to listen to in person.
Wait… this guy actually manages to, at least on a superficial level, encapsulate the atheistic worldview in a single sentence. It’s almost like he ‘gets’ it. So then, why all the theistic posturing?
Oh, that’s just comic gold. No wonder he lost – he makes statements on behalf of the opposition then affirms the claims of the opposition:
“But they also claim that all religion is “man made,” and self-evidently so. This begs the question: if religion is indeed this all-pervasive source of corruption and prejudice and moral retardation, where do they believe that religion itself comes from, if not the human imagination?”
Yes Scott, religions are all man-made and they do come from human imagination (and particularly dull imagination at that).
I would draw a parallel between religion and disease. Did moving from the demon caused theory of disease to the germ theory of disease immediately wipe out all illness? No but it made fighting disease a hell of a lot more effective and has resulted in significant benefits for all humanity.
In the same way religion is an ineffective means of living a good life. It may sometimes in a broken clock type of a moment hit on a good idea, but because its very precepts are at odds with reality then it’s less likely to come up with good answers.
Losing religion won’t immediately bring in a golden age, but it would be a significant step along the road of human progress, just like the development of scientific medicine.
Interesting to note the results of the debate. Over half of the undecided audience came out in favour of atheism while half a percent of the pro religious folk changed their minds.
Maybe these debates really are worthwhile.
Still we Aussies still have a lot of work to do to make up for Ken Ham…
I assume that PZ is using the term ‘whacker’ in the culturally specific Australian context of one who is prone to excessive masturbation. In this idiot’s case, public.
The inability to believe ideas without evidence is conformism to reality. Only contrarians choose to believe whatever.
:-)
QFT!!!
Outside the USA, conservatives are not particularly liberal on economic issues. They’re conservative about them: protect the rich, but keep everything under control; that which cannot be overseen, let alone predicted, is too scary.
Stephens sees capitalism from a Christian perspective, the one that says it is worthless to pile up treasure on Earth as opposed to metaphorical treasure in Heaven.
You’re talking about the USA. Stephens is talking about Australia.
You’re talking about the USA. Stephens is talking about Australia.
How does he explain the atheist movement in the rest of the world then?
Please correct me if I’m wrong (and I really mean that, I’m interested in how it is there), but isn’t atheism in Australia kind of just a thing? What I mean is, isn’t it just another belief system/ lack of belief?
Sorry, blockquote should go like this:
Stephens writes:
What he failed to add was this text from the bible:
Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)
Alternatively, what if we assume we atheists are right,
Which we are.
and there are no gods of any kind?
Which there ain’t.
Stephens is the nihilist here, because he believes that if that were true, there is no possibility of goodness anywhere —
Which there ain’t, at least in any metaphysical, transcendent sense that differentiates “good” from “desireable.”
we’re just doomed, meaningless machines waiting for entropy to swallow us up.
Which we are.
You could believe that,
And you should, and furthermore it will remain true whether you believe it or not.
and go off in a corner and curl up and die, but we choose to enjoy this life we’ve got and do what we can to make it better for other people, as well.
False dichotomy. We’re just doomed, meaningless machines waiting for entropy to swallow us up, but we (arbitrarily and capriciously) choose to enjoy this life we’ve got and do (a little of) what we can to make it better for other people, as well. Not that it matters.
Angle bracket quote slash angle bracket availeth me nought, as it turns out. My apology.
When Keats wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that’s all ye know on earth and all ye need to know”, he didn’t say anything about belief in gods as a prerequisite. For those of us whose “truth” is based in non-belief, the truth is truly a path to beauty, and to good, law, love, life and humanity as well. Stephens needs to take some quiet time, take a deep breath and ask himself why do I still believe in this stuff. It’s really getting tedious.
Let’s see the evidence that it’s “good for you.” One first approximation would begin by counting the number of Christians and the number of atheists in the nearest jail.
@18
Oh. I don’t think they actually WANT someone who knows the Hebrew though. To take an example, the word “herem” (and yes, that looks a lot like “haraam” for a VERY good reason) opens up whole new vistas of Yahweh’s sadistic and institutionalized cruelty that would not be so much as suspected by someone who couldn’t read Hebrew.
Reason being, “herem” is the word which is euphemistically rendered “devoted to the LORD” or “placed under ban.” And in its time, it meant savage and total warfare, complete destruction of the enemy forces, and offering them up as the equivalent of a burnt offering (holocaust…HMMM) to Yahweh.
Thom Stark goes into some detail (okay, a LOT of detail) about this in his refutation of Paul Copan’s simpering, special-pleading slop pile “Is God a Moral Monster?”
So, no, I think they don’t actually want to deal with people like me who can read and understand some of the original texts, because they’re all the more horriffic when you truly understand them!
PZ wrote:
Well, he basically did:
See, according to his simplistic straw man, new atheists blame ALL of society’s ills on religion. Ergo, we think we can live in a utopian society free from suffering if we could only get rid of religion. As you say, no atheist I have ever come across believes this.
I haven’t noticed that atheism is any trendier in Australia than it used to be and I’ve been an atheist my whole life (50y). I do think we’re getting noticed more which is probably what’s pissing Stephens off. Presumably the GAC next year will send him into a complete hissy-fit.
“do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” John Dunn
It would be nice if religious people started to take responsibilty for their beliefs, especially if they don’t work well for them.
If your religion is not bringing peace, justice and love to the world, it is not my fault, your religion does not work.
Stephens himself is left with an unavoidable choice: either the Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, Life, Death, Humanity, the End or Purpose of things, even Sex itself all make sense, all matter whether God exists or not — or his self-professed values don’t make any sense or have any value for their own sake. To him. Because without God, it doesn’t “count.”
If it’s the former, then atheism is irrelevant. If it’s the latter, then apparently only atheists are capable of the foolish, mad, extraordinary human capacity to pursue what is good for the sake of its fruits.
Stephens is himself advocating nihilism.
And I’ll echo what Skeptico said at #2: an argument that “atheism is wrong” ought to be a argument for the existence of God. That’s the point.
“To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.” T.S. Eliot
When I read essays like this I often wonder: would the writer think that it was better to follow the moral precepts of a false religion based on rules that were specially revealed to mystics in high religious fervor — rather than a humanistic ethics based on what is fair and reasonable here on this planet, in this life?
Would he put himself into the hands of a religious moral system without knowing if the system gets God “right?” Where and how would he make an appeal against a false God, if we are not to listen to “atheists?”
Stephens gives an unbearably light argument against atheism.
Advice: Do not invoke images of the classical ‘blinded by enlightenment and truth’ in your enemy during a debate.
“The horrible peace and love of Christianity!”
Studying the bible in any language will no more convince me of the existence of god or Jebus than studying The Hogfather will convince me of his existence, or studying the specifications and applications notes for an Atomic Powered Pansexual Rotoplooker will convince me that it exists (alas, & apologies to F.Z.)
Serious biblical scholarship certainly does seem to have converted lots of believers into atheists.
“… elevated things as the Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, …”
How is law an elevated thing? Is not law something we have in recognition of failures of things like good, truth and love?
Thanks PZ for finally bearing the greatest of all evils to the world. I am sure that one day, if we stand united and firm in our beliefs, we will rid the whole world of this scourge on society. You can rest assured that here in Australia your atheist brothers stand united and fight it on a daily basis. Only through constant ridicule of those who partake in such evil can we hope to prevail.
I spit on thee… light
beerswill … I spit on thee from a great height!“I like the atheism that dances on the graves of gods and laughs at the folly of religion. It’s much happier, and has found satisfaction and joy in reality.”
Awesome. Sometimes you manage to write stuff little bits like this one and most times it’s buried in the post, like it’s just hanging there all innocent-looking, like you just came up with it naturally, without thinking too much about it. It’s a pearl.
“. . . a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.”
I’ve encountered this from plenty of theists (and some atheists, too, unfortunately): the belief that atheism must be angst-filled at the great tragedy that is the loss of religious faith. The people who make this argument seem to forget that if God doesn’t exist, we’re losing literally nothing by ceasing to believe in him.
@43
Oddly, this is a good description of my state of mind. I got really into the research and study, morbidly so, to the point it’s left me a permanent shaking wreck. “Theologically interested” is a GOOD thing, isn’t it? It means we can go toe to toe with the Craigs and the Bahnsens and the van Tils, meet them on their own ground, and rip their bullshit apart on its own turf. I’ve never liked the “sola scientia” brand of atheist.
Hazuki,
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with studying theology, whether for polemical purposes or because, like any other set of ideas, it can be fascinating in its own right–but I have to repeat: if God doesn’t exist, what do we lose when we stop believing in him?
We don’t lose an objective basis for morality, because that basis was never there (if another basis exists, it does so entirely independently of God, and if it doesn’t exist, then there never were objective moral values). And so on.
I would grant that certain attractive rituals would fall by the wayside, and certain forms of artistic inspiration; but you can have ceremony without belief, and great art doesn’t need monotheism (see, e.g., Lucretius or Brahms or Verdi).
So, just what are we losing here?
He’s right. Sometimes yod is a vowel and sometimes it’s a consonant. It’s helpful to know this when reading the original Hebrew.
Those of you in the U.S. may be heartened to know that on the ABC website, the numerous responses to Stephens’ post are overwhelmingly and scathingly negative.
Probably because Stephens’ elaborately crafted spite has set off hair-trigger Aussie BS detectors.
Tell you what, let’s give it a shot and we’ll get back to you on it.
Aaron Baker said:
See PZ’s previous post; re Charlie Chaplin, in his lifetime he called himself an atheist and in his autobiography seemed to have vague deist leanings. Also, Buster Keaton, a person to whom religion just wasn’t important in his life.
Art don’t need no stinking religion.
Wait a minute… Phillip Pullman is anti-Gnu? Phillip “His Dark Materials” Pullman?
“Dancing on the Graves of Gods” — now there’s a book title.
Did he just admit that you need very good imagination to conjure up a deity ?
My thoughts exactly, Akira.
I immediately Googled “Phillip Pullman ‘New Atheism,'” but the first several hits were (gnubashing) essays that aligned him (and His Dark Materials, obviously) with “New Atheism.” So I’m curious if Stephens is referring to something Pullman has actually argued, or if Stephens is just (yet again) talking out of his ass.
Okay, Stephens, tell us how we’re damned and going to Hell because we don’t believe like you do. Come on, Stephen, you know you want to say “you dirty atheists are going to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire.” You want to say it so bad you can taste it. Go ahead, we won’t think any the less of you.
It would be difficult to think any the less of you as it is.
The ABC only keeps him on as the irrate responses to his regular inanities keep the hit rate up.
I propose that all intelligent Australians ignore him for a few months, and the irritating noise will slink back over the pond where it belongs.
Religion got its start as a way to explain the world. How did this thing and that begin? What was the origin of that? Unfortunately examples of “let’s suppose” became examples of “because this” and ultimately examples of “the Lord did say”. In short, guesses became doctrine and ultimately the Word of God.
I believe in freewill because we are limited in what we can know. We can come up with good guesses as to how the world works and what is happening in it, but we can’t truly know because of our limitations. It is that profound ignorance which leaves us free to make choices, good and bad.
It is our need for each other, and our need to have rules for how we treat each other which leads to ethics and morality. Our lives, our laws, and I don’t see the need for some agency to impose rules upon us. Best to to let us devise the guidelines, because we know better than any other being what works for us.
So I don’t see the need to foist responsibility for our behavior onto a being of our creation. We have free will, and that makes it our responsibility what ever we do.
Some people don’t like that, others accept it. I should hope I can live up to the responsibility explicit in this philosophy.
@Hercules:
Wow. Now it all makes sense. The Bible is now so self-evidently true I feel like I’ve been born again! I should find some of my old Chick Tracts, fill in the last page and send it in.
In all seriousness: if somebody thinks the Bible needs some special magic interpretation, you need to be able to roughly describe what I will get out of it. A proper understanding of how to please the Lord’s nostrils with a burnt offering? I really don’t care about that. Is it supposedly more consistent with this reading? Might be interesting but I’m dubious.
If you think that a courtier’s understanding of the Bible proves the Bible true, you’re going to have to explain in plain English how this works. It’s so beautiful it must have come from God? Wrong book, that’s the Qur’ran. If you can’t give me a summary that is coherent, then I’m going to have to disbelieve you and suggest you find somebody who speaks ancient *and* modern languages well to convince me.
‘Politics used to subject bodies and lives to a common destiny or ideal; politics now must submit to the varied, fleeting and capricious destinies we give to our own lives’
Ah… you mean democracy? Perhaps Stephens (or Juvin) would prefer the feudal system of Norman England, in which people’s ‘bodies and lives’ were subject to their overlord? And of course everyone worked in the service of a ‘common ideal’ – as long as no-one below a certain rank thought they had any say in what that ideal might be… No, no, no, we’re working in common. Or maybe Stalin’s Russia would be more to his taste. Again, it’s a common ideal – as long as no selfish individual dares to say that it isn’t.
‘the advent of the body legitimizes politics in the body’s service’
The advent of the body, eh? You mean people started realising that maybe it’s not ok for only a limited number of people to have access to the things that make life tolerable? Like, you know, enough food, leisure time and so on?
I’m not trying to say that what we have now is a utopia, that the loss of functioning local communities isn’t a loss, or even that current politicians always have the right priorities. But this is just post-modernist BS.
(Haven’t figured out block quotes yet, sorry.)
If you capitalise anything, it puts it into a super-special ontological category by which any resemblance to reality fades in comparison.
I seriously worry about this kind of argument, because if the believer truly buys it, then I hope they never lose their faith. If any sense of good in the world is dependent on the Good, for them, then lets hope they don’t fall into the nihilism they profess as the consequence. David Bentley Hart may find fondness in Neitzsche for grasping this, and be critical of AC Grayling for failing to, but really it’s just setting belief up to an impossible ideal; though given the nature of belief it’s one that few fall from.
Though then again, I suspect it’s little more than rationalisation on their part – and sounds good when trying to give the opposition a good hiding.
As can be witnessed by listening to the likes of Scottie Stephens. I’m glad I didn’t go to the IQ2 debate, if that was the level of discourse.
I read Tamas Pataki’s piece, that seemed pretty highbrow.
Near the end By Scott Stephens quotes Bernard Williams:
Now in that phrase replace the word “religion” (as a concept) with something more physical -like something from the long list of medieval torture devices- and ask the same question again.
In effect what this quote says is: as soon as mankind has invented something awful, it’s no use to recant and/or improve ourselves by getting rid of it. Better to just keep it.
Ya just gotta love religious logic :)
@vicarofartonearth #36
The citation actually goes like this:
“…send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
And the author is John Donne.
Hmm. “Nihilistic capitalism” and religion seem to go together quite well in the US. In fact the fundy right seem to be driven by both of them… I wonder if idiot boy has worked that out yet?
I have just done a blog post on this highlighting what I found disconcerting about the whole thing – he is seriously basing his argument against atheism on an argument against democracy.
He is seriously arguing for fascism, as an argument against atheism.
And he thought this would go down well in a debate in a modern, first world, largely democratic country. He is in a word, weird.
This just in! Dawkins says there is a god after all.*
Louis
* I LOLed, never read the Daily Mash and drink coffee at the same time. This bit “Dawkins said: “I have been a robust critic of intelligent design on the basis it sounds like the kind of explanation a five year-old might give as to why the living room is covered in crayon.
“But to say an arse like that could have happened by genetic accident is just mental.”” was particularly amusing. Tee hee IDC as naughty 5 year old….about right!
Has the FTB makeover disabled the comic sans, PZ? Stephens is in the top tier of my list of deserving idiots. No wonder Brother Blackford and compatriots handily won this ‘debate.’
It is important to note where Stephens is coming from.
Pete Moulton #68
Comic Sans is alive and well on FtB.
My #70
Comic Sans is apparently not alive and well. Our well-trained squad of technogeeks will have to look into this problem.
Attention, well-trained squad of technogeeks, we have a problem….
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this “argument” utterly fails for a particular reason: “good” is a word in the English language, and as such it has a meaning indepedent of the (in)existance of any Supreme Good(tm).
As with love, beauty, evil, hatred, etc, it is a word developed by humans to describe a human concept. The exact meaning may be fuzzy, and working out exactly what constitutes “good” may be a problem that has troubled thinkers for millenia, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or can only exist if defined independently by a god or God.
Josh, Official SpokesGay says:
15 September 2011 at 4:59 pm
Ironically, it was that that made me realise that Christianity (or “the religious way of knowing” in general) was worthless.
Because it ultimately depends on correctly understanding an ancient document, the original of which almost certainly doesn’t exist, and which is subject to all sorts of potential errors in translation.
And even if we did manage to get hold of the original edition, and translated it perfectly, we still can’t be sure we understand all the implications, or metaphors, or allusions, or in-jokes etc that only someone living in the 1st-century BC Levant would understand. (Even assuming that everyone there would understand them all the same way).
It’s not like science, where if all of Newton’s (or Darwin’s, or Einstein’s) works were lost we could easily reconstruct all their theories (or at least, the parts that are correct) by examining the world around us.
Regardess of the existance or not of God, the religious “way of “knowing” utterly fails, because trying to understand scripture is really just literary interpretation where you are trying to work out the intention of various anonymous authors who lived in an unspecified time in an alien culture and who have been filtered through various translaters and compilers (usually with an agenda, and/or preconceptions about what the originals were trying to say).
Claiming to be engaged in a debate and following this phrase with an actual question that is suggested or demanded means you automatically lose.
[OT]
Marcus, nah, it doesn’t; you’re assuming it’s idiomatic jargon, rather than straightforward English.
(And the word you’re fumbling for is ‘invites’)
John: unless you’re one of those laissez-faire descriptivist swines who just allows phrases to change meaning because the uneducated masses misuse it, “beg the question” has only one meaning (to assume the conclusion of your argument as a premise), and anyone using it otherwise in any context is just wrong (or rather, Wrong). Also, I’m not fumbling, I could have used any number of synonyms of varying force (requires, leads to, brings up…), any of which would render the phrase correct in the sense meant.
I was wondering how long it would take you to comment on that. I read it and just started counting back from 10. I think you had a comment up by 2.
If humanity has invented something as awful as totalitarianism, what should that tell us about humanity? In particular, can humanity really be expected to do much better without it?
If humanity has invented something as awful as the Inquisition or the auto da fe, what hope do we have without the Christian God?
…heyyyy, waiddaminnit…
‘Tis Himself, OM (#70, #71)
Looks fine.
I was listening to a debate recently about the loss of the sense of the sacred between philosopher Ron de Sousa and psychologist Jordan Peterson. It was interesting how the debate panned out, de Sousa arguing for more rationality, and Peterson decrying the relativity that doesn’t acknowledge that there are some things that are just wrong. He gave an example of Jews in death camps being forced to do arbitrary and demeaning tasks at the whim of their Nazi captors – and that being his line for saying “enough!” That was the point where we needed the sense of the sacred.
The interesting thing to note about the example was that the Nazis were acting with a sense of the sacred; and it was that very sense that led them to such dehumanising acts. I can agree with Peterson that it’s wrong, but I’d argue that it’s the sense of the sacred that led to that. The reason why to move away from a sense of the sacred (perhaps in light of Stephens I shall shorthand it as Sacred) is because it leads to atrocities through the righteousness of those who act to it. That a loss of the Sacred is a good thing, even if it’s not a Good thing.
To bring it around to this argument by Stephens, talking about what is good in terms of humanity by ideals is what leads people to cover up child rape. If we embody religion as Good, then all that religion does – good or bad – becomes part of that Good; what we have to do in order to maintain it. The cost, it seems, for preserving Good is to lose what it means to be good. Look at ethics committees for scientific experiments. There are ground rules set as to what scientists can or cannot do in order to achieve the knowledge. Yet there’s no sense of Good in that, according to Stephens. So if we can get together and make decisions about how we should behave in such a way that knowledge isn’t Knowledge (shorthand for knowledge at any cost), then why do we need the sacred? What do we need God for? We do just fine without…
…and also tells people to “get the hell of my lawn!”
It means we can go toe to toe with the Craigs and the Bahnsens and the van Tils, meet them on their own ground, and rip their bullshit apart on its own turf.
do you also plan to learn the ins and outs of flying spaghetti monsterism, in order to debate FSM devotees on “their own turf”?
can’t you see that the turf you want to tread on is at best quicksand?
Oh, I don’t think it’s trendy. I just think people treat it like in Europe – as harmless and as a private matter that is nobody else’s business. In US culture, religion and lack thereof are public affairs; in some states, “what church do you go to?” is considered smalltalk.
See, that’s one Thing i like about the german Practice of capitalizing all Nouns in all Contexts.
No. He doesn’t know enough about the US.
Probably not – that’s what all the “whoever has ears for hearing should listen” passages seem to be alluding to.
“Begging the question”, in the sense you want it to have, is a stupid translation of petitio principii. That’s what’s going on here.