I have to join with my colleague Revere in saying that I am pro-abortion. Furthermore, I find the willingness of the devout anti-choice mob to distort the evidence so appalling that I would not join with them in anything.
It’s a month gone, but now ABC has a summary (and you can go straight to the MP3 here).
The Huffington Post now has a post up from some guy named Rory Fitzgerald reacting to the suggestion that the Pope be arrested for crimes and conspiracies of his organization by urging that Richard Dawkins be arrested for “atheist crimes”…such as those committed by the Nazis and Stalinists. I had no idea that Adolf Hitler was a member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation! You learn something new every day.
But, you know, he’s right. If RDF staffers were running a child-porn ring, and Dawkins was moaning “Oh, this will ruin the reputation of my foundation, I must do what I can to hide these crimes,” then yes, I would agree: arrest Richard Dawkins! No excuses!
Reality interferes, however. Such a crime has not been committed. I know Dawkins well enough that he would be outraged by such wickedness, and that his wrath would fall on the perpetrators, not the whistle-blowers. It’s all very, very silly. In fact, there’s more absurdity there than I can possibly dissect — it’s like an awesome concatenation of every stereotype and ill-founded damning claim about atheists ever made. I thought about linking to it, but the stupid was simply to intense for me, especially as my time is limited as I’m about to brave Chicago traffic again.
So go read Jerry Coyne for his take.
Oh, and I know it’s very inside baseball, but when I saw that Fitzgerald thought Dawkins was a microbiologist, I practically did a spit-take. He’s not. He’s an evolutionary biologist trained as an ethologist. The amusing thing, too, is that I’ve often seen creationists do that — for some reason, they think “microbiologist” is some kind of special term for any biologist who studies the fiddly little details of evolutionary mechanisms, instead of a specific branch of biology that studies the dominant form of life on the planet. (Hint: not people).
We had a fun evening on Friday—a crowd of a few hundred people sat down to consider the problem of a morality at the University of Chicago. At the front of the room we had Bob Bossie (a very liberal Catholic), Sunsara Taylor (a very articulate Communist) and me to make a few opening remarks and open the floodgates of questions from the audience. It was interesting and thoughtful, and nothing at all like this incredible session on Fox News.
Let me emphasize that Bob was not that crazy priest in the video, declaring that godlessness meant the death of hope and the decline of your money making ability, that socialism and secularism were a failure, and capitalism was the only economic philosophy that could possibly lead to morality. That is, Bob was not freaking insane. He does believe in God, but his God seems to be a superfluous entity bobbing on top of a core of very humanist values, and when he talked about what he really cared about, it was communities of people.
Taylor’s position was very similar in a lot of ways — that we need to change the world through liberation of the oppressed, and the way to do that was through revolutionary Communism. In her case, though, the philosophical justification wasn’t at all superfluous — Communism was the best strategy for bringing about change. We had a little set of questions we’d worked out before the event, and she had the advantage of us all in providing the most coherent answers to them…I just don’t think she’s entirely right. I don’t like the idea of a revolution led by a vanguard, I’m more of an evolution driven by the education and inspiration of the masses kind of guy.
Here are the answers to our guiding questions that I gave (sort of) in my opening remarks.
1. Can science provide a morality to change the world?
NO.
Science merely describes what is, not what should be, and it also takes a rather universal view: science as science takes no sides on matters relevant to a particular species, and would not say that an ape is more important than a mouse is more important than a rock. Don’t ask science to tell you what to do when making some fine-grained moral decision, because that is not what science is good at.
What science is, is a policeman of the truth. What it’s very good at is telling you when a moral decision is being made badly, in opposition to the facts. If you try to claim that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural, science can provide you a long list of animals that practice homosexuality freely, naturally, and with no ill consequences. If you try to claim that abortion is bad because it has horrible physiological consequences to pregnant women, science will provide you with the evidence that it does no such thing, and also that childbirth is far more physiologically debilitating.
If you want to claim that homosexuals should be stoned to death because the Bible says so, science will tell you yep, that’s what it says, and further, we’ll point out that the Abrahamic religions seem to be part of a culturally successful and relatively stable matrix. “Science”, if we’re imagining it as some institutional entity in the world, really doesn’t care — there is no grand objective morality, no goal or purpose to life other than survival over multiple generations, and it could dispassionately conclude that many cultures with moral rules that we might personally consider abhorrent can be viable.
However, I would suggest that science would also concede that we as a species ought to support a particular moral philosophy, not because it is objectively superior, but because it is subjectively the proper emphasis of humanity…and that philosophy is humanism. In the same way, of course, we’d also suggest that cephalopods would ideally follow the precepts of cephalopodism.
So don’t look to science for a moral philosophy: look to humanism. Humanism says that we should strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans; that we should look to ourselves, not to imaginary beings in the sky or to the imperatives written down in old books, to aspire to something better, something more coherent and successful at promoting our existence on the planet.
Science wouldn’t disagree. But it would be a kind of passive agreement that says, sure, nothing in that idea is in violation of reality, go for it. It would also be egging the cephalopods on, though.
2. Are science, religion, and communism complementary, conflictual or mutually exclusive of one another?
Science and religion are definitely in conflict. Again, science is only acting as a policeman, though: it’s firing up the sirens and flashing lights to pull over the priests and tell them that claiming authority on the basis of an imaginary man in the sky is fallacious and discredits your entire paradigm. Rethink the basis of your beliefs, and maybe we can get along.
I think science and communism are also in conflict, but perhaps less dramatically so. There, we have to point out an empirical problem, that communist societies haven’t fared so well. The concession I would have to make is that communism is a young philosophy, unlike religion, so it can be excused to some degree for being at the start of the learning curve. I find it a little hard to excuse some of the human costs of communism, but then science also has had human costs.
But science isn’t a moral philosophy. I’ve proposed humanism as our tool; are communism and religion in conflict with that? And that’s where the answer gets murkier, because more progressive versions of those philosophies all seem to converge on humanism, anyway. The quest for social justice is a humanist ideal, and it’s also front and center in communism and liberal religion; you can be either of those and also be a humanist. I wouldn’t exactly call them complementary, but I would call them compatible.
3. How will we motivate people, and with what moral paradigm to change the world?
As I’ve said repeatedly, science doesn’t provide a morality. What it does provide, and what I optimistically and subjectively think will motivate people, is that it provides rigor and a path to the truth of the world. I know, I could be cynical and suggest that what people really want is delusions, distractions, and reassurances to help them hide away from reality — but what I’ve noticed is that people who accept reality seem to be better able to deal with it, and are often happier and more content. And further, they are better prepared to change the actual world, rather than burying themselves deeper in their fantasies.
All three of us disagreed on many things…but trust me, this wasn’t Fox News. It wasn’t a coterie of flaming idiots, for one thing.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has won a significant court case: the National Day of Prayer has been declared unconstitutional. The judge made a cautious and conservative judgment, but you know the right-wing is going to freak out.
Crabb wrote that her ruling was not a judgment on the value of prayer. She noted government involvement in prayer may be constitutional if the conduct serves a “significant secular purpose” and doesn’t amount to a call for religious action. But the National Day of Prayer crosses that line, she wrote.
“It goes beyond mere ‘acknowledgment’ of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context,” she wrote. “In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”
This is going to be so much fun.
Lots of people send me essays they’ve written, asking if I’d like to post it on Pharyngula. I usually don’t, simply because I’d be inundated (so don’t take this as an invitation!), and in most cases, those people ought to start their own blog and put it there. I thought I’d make an exception, though: this one is from Kelly Meagher, who is 14, and living in Florida, and writing this for a school essay.
Don’t nit-pick over it, although I know there are pedants here who will anyway. Read it as representative of a growing attitude among our young people — an attitude I find very encouraging. It’s also an example of a junior high school kid being unafraid to come out about their godlessness, even in a place with a painfully conservative reputation.
The country we live in now is a strange one. Essentially, it is the melting pot of the entire world. People from across the globe come together here to live the “American Dream.” The American Dream is different from person to person. Some say it’s money, others say the ability to have a nice house and raise the perfect family in it. I say, it’s the right to love whoever, and marry them if you want to, and being able to practice your religion without being rejected for it, or not being rejected for not practicing a religion at all! I would make these happen if I were president.
I live theater. I spend my time either memorizing lines, learning choreography, or going thru the notes of a song. I meet a lot of different people in theater. Some of these people are gay or bi. Sometimes, when we sit down during a break and just talk, I will hear the horror stories that their lives lead. One of my closest friends told me of how when he first came out to his parents by introducing his boyfriend to them, they responded ever so politely by kicking him out of the house. Others tell of how they received hate letters from people at their schools. And still more talk of friends who committed suicide because of those letters.
I would change that in several different ways: one would be making taunting and bullying an actual and true crime. And second would be by making gay marriage legal, in every single state. If a straight person like myself can marry and love whomever I choose, why can’t everyone–especially including gays–be able to do the same?
Not only am I a theater dork, I happen to be an atheist. Now your first thought, if you didn’t know this already, may be, “How can she be an atheist, she seems like an okay person!” If you just thought something along those lines, I’m not surprised, I get that a lot. But if you thought, “She’s an atheist? Okay I’m ignoring her,” then that is religious discrimination. It happens all the time. Most people are brought up thinking we are evil Satanists that try to break into people’s minds and rewire them so that they worship a demon. This is a huge misconception. I want to break down this wall that people have been building since the B.C. years, and create a place where, no matter if you an atheist or a Muslim, because this happens to them too, you can worship who or what you want.
Creating gay rights and abolishing religious discrimination does no harm to anyone. It is only beneficial. By giving gays the rights they need, they can finally be a true part of society. And everyone’s rights are protected by the Constitution, so gays can finally be included in the category of “everyone.” By having people not give someone a hard time just because they are Atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or even Christian, people are able to be more open. They don’t have to hold back on an interesting part of themselves to avoid being a social taboo.
When I hear my friends talking about people they know that took their own lives, or I overhear people saying how bad someone is because they worship something different than they do, it makes me pretty sad. These people don’t realize how they can change that. But I have. And, if I were president, this is what I would do.
…except that you wouldn’t find me in a foxhole.
Atheists don’t believe in God. We deny the Holy Spirit. Jesus was just a man, at best, as were Buddha, Mohammed, and every other prophet and religious figure in history. That much everyone seems to be able to pick up on, but I think there’s something even more important that we reject.
I was a bit suspicious of this story that Dawkins and Hitchens were going to “ambush” and “arrest” the Pope when he showed up in England. It was just a little too sensationalistic, too out of character. I was right.
Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.
What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article here: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5341
Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made the brilliant suggestion of Geoffrey Robertson. He approached him, and Mr Robertson’s subsequent ‘Put the Pope in the Dock’ article in The Guardian shows him to be ideal:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5366
The case is obviously in good hands, with him and Mark Stephens. I am especially intrigued by the proposed challenge to the legality of the Vatican as a sovereign state whose head can claim diplomatic immunity.Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it.
