The British museum is full of relics, really interesting ones, Egyptian mummies, Chinese ceramics and Mayan gold jewellery etc. The museum is a fabulous resource that lets us appreciate the contribution to Humanity that all the civilisations of our planet and (all) their peoples have made over recent millennia. This Month the British Museum is helping to kick off preparations for next year's LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) History Month with a special event for teachers and youth workers. The event, will include LGBT-themed tours for local people in the morning with a training session for teachers and youth workers in the afternoon. Politicians attending the reception include Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Ben Bradshaw MP, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Michael Cashman MEP and Cllr Keith Moffit, leader of Camden council.
In a fairly predictable response to this event another kind of relic has reared it's less interesting head, Stephen "
birdshit" Green of the Christian Voice has
written a scathing piece clearly buoyed up by a recent ruling by Lord Waddington that
criticising homosexual conduct is not, in itself, a crime. I am actually quite glad that this ruling clarified the law on this for a couple of reasons, first and foremost I am pro free-speech and I believe we should be free to criticise any idea, secondly it give us "militant" atheists plenty of legal precedent to attack the kind of religious ignoramus who would attack innocent people on the basis of Bronze age ignorance and superstition, and lastly listening to the rabid frothing of Christians like Mr Green about subjects like this is such a rich source of irony and humour.
17 comments:
Bronze-age peoples were surprisingly enlightened when it came to homosecuality.
Are you being Ageist?
What I'm not comfortable with is the 'gay community'. We do our best to integrate gay people into the mainstream and then they go off and segregate themselves in 'communnities'. Irrational!
CB, Clearly I'm being "Bronzist"..
I've always had problems with what it means to be 'gay', since that's my mum's name (Gabrielle, since you ask).
I also question that religious thought or only religious thought is behind the hate-mongering over sexuality.
It's only since the pecular form of Augustinian doctrine which attempted to regulate sexual behaviour through imposition was introduced that this was formalised, and that interpretation of scripture can easily be dismissed for directly political reasons.
So you won't thank me for arguing that no individual (whether it is Stephen Green or the pope) can be representative of the whole religion. You're building up straw men again, Steve.
A more accurate and appropriate target would be the process by which social conformity is encouraged rather than any institution or individual who engages in it - but perhaps it's not surprising that you miss the target since you mirror the behaviour of those you criticise.
Hmm reading back that's harsh and gives a bit of a false impression of what I wanted to say.
Let me make clear that I'm not judging your conclusion, only your methodology.
I think you could make a stronger argument by being more rigorously logical and that would make for a more interesting point which could actually progress the debate - unify and convert, rather than divide and conquer.
OP, rubbish.
OP, I honestly don't think we have the time for that approach, anyway, apologetics has been tried before and it has generally failed.
Logic doesn't work with such people, by definition, they place faith higher in their spectrum of thought.
PS. Augustine is a red herring, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Kings all contain warrants for this kind of irrationality, long before Augustine.
Then there is Islam..
1)Augustine is one of the doctors of the christian church responsible for deciding which books were included in the bible, how they were arranged and how they should be interpreted. The texts he cited are inseparable from his exegesis.
2)Augustine was born over 2 centuries before Muhammed and could not possibly have been influenced by him. In fact the reverse is not only possible, but likely.
3)Augustine was an apologist for and unifier of the heretical movements, who I am attacking.
4)You accusing me of apologetics, but you dismiss Augustine as a red herring.
5)Your actions do more to defend religion than mine.
6)You openly, freely and without prompt admit to abnegating your own argument.
Do the ends justify the means? even where they are hindered by them?
Frankly your current position is incoherent and looks increasingly like self-denial, so I feel justified in feeling highly sceptical that your faith in 'atheism' could accurately be described as a non-faith.
So I'm sorry Steve, logic demands that you either reassess the methods and terms of your argument or start going to church.
OP,
Sorry, I don't follow most of this, let me try to claw it back to relevance.
This is an article about Stephen Green, the Christian Voice and irrationally prejudiced Theists (like) Stephen Green who base their world-view on scripture.
From that simple premise you are concluding,
1) I'm saying ALL religious people are frothing fundamentalists wrt. homosexuality, I said no such thing (classic apologist straw man)
2) There is no link between such views and Abrahamic scripture (Augustine is irrelevant, please explain where the Christian & Islamic prohibition of homosexuality comes from.. which was my point)
2) I can't criticise an ideology unless I know the mind of every single follower of that ideology (BS that's just an argument from authority)
3) I am incoherent (ad hom)
4) I need to go to church. (WTF?)
Sounds just like apologetics to me.
Steve you're babbling.
Let me take your point 2.
You say Augustine is irrelevant, and ask me to explain where the Christian & Islamic prohibition of homosexuality comes from.
The plain fact is that it comes from Augustine - which makes him far from irrelevant!
Augustine is universally credited with originating the doctrine of original sin.
It is from this doctrine that opposition (prohibiting is an incorrect statement) to breaking a predefined sexual morality is constructed.
So it seems you've completely misunderstood what is meant by the word ideology, by conflating it with doctrine.
You have then transposed one particular doctrine which is adopted by some sections of a diverse organisation held together by a set of ideas and deduced that those ideas determine a prespecified outcome.
Such logic is fallacious.
It is the prime means by which prejudice arises and as a conscious political technique it is often described as 'conservative' following the argumentum ad populum.
If you are going to attack religion it would help if you knew something about it.
You claim to be attacking the church from a scientific position, but you are clearly either ignoring or ignorant of some very basic facts.
Augustine's 'Confessions' remains a major modern philosophical text for believers and unbelievers alike, so if you aren't prepared to go to church to learn about those you condemn then you would do well to to read it instead.
He comes across as a very human person even if not exactly my type, and it seems clear that he reacted to his own youthful hedonism (it's fun to speculate - maybe he caught an STD or saw his aristocratic friends struck down after their orgies...).
Still, while I disagree with some of his foundational concepts, as a philosopher he is hugely important and a model of clear thinking and he has yet to be proven wrong.
Frankly, you won't get far by writing him or his contribution to the debate out of history. He is and remains one of the principle figures in this area.
I'll also mention the Bible.
You seem to be historically unaware of what it is and what it represents.
The contents of the Bible ('book') are considered the canonical original historical tracts from which public law and morality was promoted in a pre-state culture.
The tracts provided the case precedent for religious courts to make decisions according to the outcomes recorded by historians.
Essentially the compilation of the biblical texts marked the beginning of western recorded history.
During their compilation (which covers over a millenium) the content of the biblical canon was highly fluid and contestible - even today different sects argue over the King James version etc.
Anyway the great theologians we remember were the top scholars who were sponsored by the church to make the case for the contents of the canon.
Augustine was one of these people, and his arguments for which books should be included, on what grounds and with what consequences remains one of the greatest.
That doesn't mean they are uncontested, nor that they ever were, but only that they have held up to the greatest levels of scrutiny according to the means and methods available. Neither does that mean what he promoted is unblemished.
But it does mean you've got to work a lot harder to knock him (or what's left of his ideas) down.
OP, from one babbler to another ;)
I am vaguely aware of Augustine and his role in Christianity, but in claiming that he originated this particular "opposition" (“prohibition” if you live in the Middle East today or England in the 1950s!) and focusing on that, I think you are craftily ignoring the main point, which is about the fallacy of believing in the inerrancy of scripture.
So enlighten me, why exactly are homosexuals still executed in Iran, fashion sense? If reality is as you claim how did Augustine establish Shia doctrine on this matter when he was dead? Wouldn’t you think that a hypothesis based on the evidence that there is an older tradition upon which all of these religions are based which instantiated this prohibition prior to Augustine and his ilk is more likely?
Was the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah written by Augustine?
Did Augustine author the oldest books of the Old Testament Leviticus, Deuteronomy or Genesis?
When Leviticus says "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. " and "For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people." how would you interpret that, I know how Mr Green does, he explains it clearly on his Web Site, in fact he lists all 50 or so warrants against homosexuality in the Bible.
When the Pope promotes to Bishop a man who said that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for homosexuality, you think it's just a philosophical mix up?
One can find hundreds if not thousands of Christian resources, including the Christian Voice, never mind Islamic ones that use these passages to dictate their understanding of Biology. The evidence is overwhelming. Even the official Catholic Church doctrine is that Homosexuality is a "disorder", why do they say that OP?
It’s much more likely IMO that the prohibition on homosexuality by Abrahamic religions stems from the world-view of ancient patriarchal clans (especially desert based ones), like the Israelites, upon which all the main faiths were based. Where homosexuals were exterminated because of perceived worthlessness (they don't have children) and weakness (un-manliness), i.e. they displease the "warrior father". It’s certainly not a human universal as gay people were highly valued in some ancient American cultures for example.
This debate is not about what Augustine did or didn't say that’s utterly irrelevant to my point, and you are introducing a red herring, a diversion, it’s about believing things to be true in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What is Mr Green's motivation?, I cannot read his mind and neither can you, but I can read what he says he believes, which is based solely on authority and tradition i.e. the Bible and Christian tradition. This is the “ideology” (i.e. a set of ideas that characterises the thinking of a group) I am criticising and you are defending.
Hi Steve,
I'm sorry to take an aggressive tone, but it has paid off with a better response.
I agree that the attitudes towards control of sexuality formulated by Augustine had historical precedence, and I agree that they have a strongly politicised component, but I think there is a much more powerful, if subtle, point which underpins our discussion.
I think we have yet to highlight historical contingency of societies as a major factor.
You touched on it where you refer to patriarchal desert societies, but it's worth considering more widely.
Religious, or canon law, attempts to decipher universal laws which are based on natural states. The enforcement of which is a means to shape society.
The principles which go into shaping a society create the culture in which people exist and come to understand the world around us. And from these norms we derive our behavioural choices.
But they are imperfect and can break down and evolve.
The problem arises from extrapolating general rules from the particular instances.
The enlightenment gave us secularism and the important principles of distinguishing between natural laws and human laws.
We might also say this was not original as it built on ideas from classical antiquity (those greeks were notorious buggers) - the period of which Augustine lived at the end of (he was a neo-platonist, after all).
Anyway the historian argues that there is a certain inevitability to cyclical fortunes within society, but while some argue it is up and down others argue continued progress.
Still, as a scholar Augustine is highly significant as a principle figure in the era of written records.
Today we find ourselves in a similar state of flux because digital technology is replacing written records (as writing replaced oral traditions beforehand) and the same intellectual battles are taking place.
But the communicative ability of more advanced technologies enable us to scrutinise the arguments better, and in so doing spread the import.
The story of sodom and gomorrah may have been a basic morality tale to assert 'sexual pleasure is socially destructive, don't do it', but this clearly contradicts the experience of productive marriages and the rabbinic texts from the following period to indeed argue in favour of sexual compatibility in marriage. The greeks developed this to the next level by spreading the legal component of property.
However in understanding that Augustine's reaction against his own hedonism we must accept that it created a more equatible state of rights between the sexes. But in creating this equality he traded off equality between behavioural types.
So it's not quite as simple as it first appears.
Augustine's ideas were given expression by the Augustinian order and largely absorbed through the Chaldean Church which had it's base as the Church of the East in Baghdad (from the early fifth century onwards). It's possible to argue that the development of Sunni Islam was influenced by exposure to the Augustinian doctrine and this explains the ongoing schism there.
But I'm beginning to lecture and I hate that.
Final point for tonight.
You described ideology as 'a set of ideas that characterises the thinking of a group'.
I don't think this is an accurate definition.
I'd argue that is more of a comprehensive vision which is built from a foundational concept and is used as a means to direct and inform individual goals, expectations, and actions.
It is often taken to mean a prescriptive doctrine, but it is a systematic conception - from the greek idea+logos - and which I translate literally as the 'symbolic properties encapsulated within the word'.
This gets me back to an earlier argument about the liguistic problems of transporting ideas across time...
OP, thanks for the taking the time to clarify your position; history and philosophy are such fascinating topics, worthy of much more serious research on my part. However, consider the following for a moment.
Certainly I would agree that history is an important component in understanding modern people's motivation. However, the crux of this debate is about something at a much more fundamental level in conciousness than religion or society in my view.
In Biology we have the gene and the phenotype (the body); the phenotype is a vehicle that carries the gene, protects it and ensures it's survival long enough to pass onto the next generation. Religion is like a phenotype because although it is the entity that we see and has the most impact on our lives (like bodies!) it is not the fundamental essence; the essence of the religion (at least the ones we're discussing) is faith, faith is like the gene it has the same relationship with religion as the gene has with phenotypes.
Up until the enlightenment (unfairly ignoring the Greeks!) this relationship between faith and religion was the only vector we had to understand the world. So I agree with you, religion attempted to decipher reality as we see it using faith as the origin of its vector.
Since the enlightenment, Bacon, Newton, Hume et al we have science which is a much better starting point for our vector, it is more reliable, more accurate and less prone to hijacking by fraudsters because of falsifiability.
The key point to all this is that science does not replace religion, it replaces faith as an origin for our knowledge vector.
Now, back to my original point, what we are discussing (I think) is the veracity of religious history and the role religion has played in society, interesting, but not relevant. My main interest is about faith and science being opposing starting points for our knowledge vector, for example the biological, sociological and evolutionary basis of homosexuality vs. the Bible.
Hopefully I'm making sense.
I have to ask a more fundamental question about how you define faith.
In every reliable definition I've ever found it is not, as you argue, "an origin for our knowledge vector".
To argue that for faithful people their faith is a substitute for science is to completely misunderstand them. It is a fallacious argument based on a false premise: science and religion are not binary opposites by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a political prescription made by those who subscribe to a particular agenda (from either side). In doing so they ascribe blame on the opposing camp for policy errors (particularly which have resulted in masses of deaths) committed in the name of their opponents' doctrinaire approach.
Looking at Russian history for a second, Stalin's purge of the orthodox church directly evokes Ivan the Terrible's purge of the faithless and this reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy by different factions for control of the institutions which constitute organised popular culture.
It is easy to label dissenters from the current orhtodoxy as apologists for the atrocities of former instance, but that way madness lies. Carried to their absolutes, the logical conclusion of all ideologies is as justification of atrocoties.
The other historical point I was making is that although one view becomes prevalent at any particular moment it is never universal and we layer on our own interpretations in order that we can understand them by our own terms.
For example the Greeks of classical antiquity were not uniformly anything. Some forms of judaism are atheist (Jews are notorious for arguing). Many of the main figures of the Enlightenment were Deist.
None of this sits easily with prescriptive definitions.
For me this is because no individual can possibly acquire universal knowledge, partly because of subjective experience, but also because knowledge is constantly evolving.
So hope do we as individuals cope with the gaps in our knowledge?
What we do is to depend on other people.
That is faith - it is the activity of belonging to a community (not merely a religious one) and participating in the practices which bind it together. It is not the knowing, it is the doing.
Admittedly this causes problems when proselytisers come to professing themselves in order to win converts to their sect because knowledge is a communicative resource.
So maybe it helps to see science and religion not as separate equations, but as two sides of an equation which can only be used productively when it balances.
I remember I did ask you to consider the biblical miracles. I think these are good examples of actual events which go beyond our understanding, but which nevertheless did happen.
It is impossible to simply ignore the evidence provided as this only creates distance between us the reality they describe.
The term 'miracle' has become devalued as it is adopted by the cargo cult built up around them and charlatans who profiteer from simplicity, but this only makes it all the more necessary to provide a rational explanation for how 'the blind can be made to see again', 'the lame be made to walk again', 'the dead rise again' or for how a 5,000 can be fed in one sitting etc.
Demolishing the myths perpetuated on all sides is imperative, and if we do not then we are no better than those we presume to oppose.
Post a Comment