There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the West could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.
I can see why people are upset about these comments, it's like praising a heroin addict for "sticking to his habit until the bitter end" or like chiselling on the tombstone of the Yorkshire ripper the epitaph "at least he was consistent". Mr Venner clearly lives in that twilight zone of reality where he's never had to perform any kind of critical thinking in order to make a living, he thinks that blind faith to bronze age magic is to be "admired".
It is interesting and perhaps not unrelated that the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams also said in the papers recently that he thought that Government ministers felt religion (presumably his religion?) was no longer relevant to society, he went on to say to the Telegraph that,
"The trouble with a lot of government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it's an eccentricity, it's practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities."
And so spake the peculiar bearded Welshman from the magic palace, in his long cape and pointy hat.
In a equally logically baffling apology today Mr Venner said that what he really meant to say was that we shouldn't "demonise" the Taliban, kill them absolutely no problem, but equating them to invisible evil spirits no that would be ungodly. What happens when "love thy enemy" meets "martyrdom is holy", any thinking person can see that introducing "faith" into this war is unlikely to make it a) simpler politically or b) reduce suffering.
Faith is a problem, it's certainly a huge problem in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and it's a problem in America and Europe albeit in less "fatal" ways, in fact it's hard to stick a pin in the globe and not find that "faith" is a problem there. Faith may well provide motivation and an emotional sedative to the individual human brain, that much is evident from everyone's experience of the ups and downs of life; however when uncritically followed at the community or national level it is often divisive, dangerous and very easy to exploit. Faith stultifies the most powerful and useful tool that 4 billion years of evolution has given us, our ability to reason, and as in Goya's famous painting, "the sleep of reason brings forth monsters".
11 comments:
Ha ha, your description of the archbishop made me laugh out loud at the office. A great post (as usual).
BTW, congrats on your blog climbing up in the rankings over on OJ's site.
Thanks E, I'm sure my ranking is just a flash in the pan!
"Bishop to the forces"?? Is that a real title? Does it have something to do with Star Wars?
Hi Lisa, yes apparently our "forces" need a Bishop, although at the rate this one is going he may not last too long!
Oh come on... there are plenty of people who like dressing up on the weekends - it's just that it's mostly for saturday night rather than sunday morning!
Interestingly, it seems the statistical correlation for churchgoing in Britain is strongest between people of lower economic classes, which would explain Williams' upper-middle class description of Labour's religious initiatives as targeted at foreigners and immigrants. A bit of snobbery on his part and a bit of inverted snobbery on their part.
I want to pick you up on your final paragraph.
You start by saying A)"Faith is a problem" (which is a justifiable position), but then you go on to weaken your point by inserting the caveat that B)"when uncritically followed at the community or national level it is often divisive, dangerous and very easy to exploit" (which IMO is a more justifiable position), from which you appear to draw the conclusion that C)"Faith stultifies the... ability to reason" (which is a potentially tenuous generalisation).
Now the way I read this B->A->C is a logical progression from which the conclusion can be fairly drawn and disputed, but A<-B->C proposes a logical inversion in order to create the appearance of an indisputable conclusion.
So rather than starting with a statement for which facts can be provided (ie B - the invasion of Iraq, the Ugandan law against homosexuality etc) before proposing a testable hypothesis (A) to reach a reliable conclusion (C), you've avoided the scientific method and assumed the facts are inevitable without providing any base line to measure properties or conditions of the facts.
So in this case to start from 'Faith is a problem' is to argue from assertion and therefore fallacious.
That said, these religious nobbins don't half get themselves tangled into knots when they try to be interesting, insightful or profound. It's not surprising they cant keep hold of their flocks when as teachers the level of their education in the humanities is beneath the general populace at a basic level.
OP, (pedantic?)
Religious faith creates problems for people around the world, this is a fact and I have observed it firsthand in places like N.Ireland, Egypt, Jordan, America, Israel, Africa etc.
Blind Faith in anything, religion, Stalin, science, whatever can be divisive, dangerous and easily corrupted this is a fact I have observed it firsthand.
Faith can stultify reason; again, I have observed this phenomenon many times, YEC's are a good example of this.
So, we have three facts, of course anyone can draw whatever conclusion you like from them but mine is that faith is a problem, you haven't shown otherwise. To do that you would need to show that faith isn’t a problem (at all) in these scenarios and you can’t do that; what you can do is show that faith isn't a problem for *some* people in *some* situations, so my conclusion still stands and is not "fallacious".
To start with "faith is a problem" is not to imply a causal relationship between the facts as you are suggesting, it's simply a grammatical construct of the form, conclusion, fact1, fact2, fact3. You make the claim that this isn't a "scientific" approach, I agree it isn't but a) not for the reasons you state and b) its not supposed to be, it's my opinion not a peer reviewed paper?
As you say, on your blog you stick to assembling and listing facts, that's fine but I don't, I prefer to state my feelings, robustly, and my deductions based on the evidence I have, like the three facts I state here. I don't doubt there are other interpretations but testing those out is kind of the point of the blog really.
Oh, and young earth creationists don't understand evolution because they refuse to look at the evidence for it, this is evident from their writings and claims, it's not a complicated metaphysical discontinuity, it's plain ignorance or plain mischief from what I can see.
Pedantic? Only if by that you mean asking you to live up to your own standards.
You say you've presented facts, but you've not provided any evidence for them, except to say that we should believe you because you've observed it to be the case... I would like to point out that the difference between a fact and an assertion is that facts are backed by evidence.
I haven't questioned your conclusions, I've merely tried to show how your methodology in reaching them is unreliable and that therefore we can't trust any conclusions you have drawn. I'm not saying you are wrong, but that you have not made a case.
So if you want to criticise me for being pedantic that's fine, but I suggest the rationalist surely demands levels of intellectual rigour are met before attempting to prescribe any answers. So if you are willing to make that criticism then you simultaneously admit you are abdicating any claim to presenting a rational case.
OP,
"Pedantic", more of a question than an accusation, is your critique a fair one or is it an attempt to push my range of possible responses in an unrealistic "academic" or "pedantic" direction?
My temptation is to simply say what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence (I really believe that is true BTW), but I know your point is tangential to that i.e. about eating ones own dog food etc.
Herein lies my confusion, this blog is full (to the brim) with "evidence" of situations where a faith based approach to understanding the universe has caused many problems for people, it is full of stories about creationists who are stunted educationally, or people who let their kids die because they prefer prayer to medicine, or discriminatory laws that are based on ancient mythology ad nausea..
So, at the simplest level I want to ask you what more evidence do you need? since from my perspective it seems that if this is not enough then perhaps none is sufficient to break the spell, but then I guess that answers my own question?
In terms of personal evidence of these things, I am sincere and serious about all these examples, however It is somewhat difficult (effort-wise) and perhaps inappropriate to expose at length individual stories that aren't already in the public domain, especially when there are so many other examples already there.
Maybe I'll write a book and these anecdotes can be given a proper airing, tales of social and workplace inequality in Northern Ireland, childhood indoctrination, workplace discrimination and cronyism in mid-Western America, racism and sexism in the Middle East all rooted in faith based thinking even if not enacted under that banner.
So, will you put this down to lack of rigour on my part (I'm not trying to be an investigative journalist so it's probably a fair one) or perhaps a "category" error, it's all just politics maybe? I don't really understand the point of such a redefinition, to me it seems like deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room?
Now we're entering interesting territory.
I don't necessarily agree with you from a logical standpoint.
First off, I contend that the anecdotage and hearsay on this blog is not evidence of the flaws in faith-based reasoning, but of the stupidity and cupidity of humanity.
The effect of what you call faith-based reasoning may equally be described as immature and irrational, but this does not change the nature or object of that faith.
If we're talking about christian faith here, the odd thing would be that your position is supported by the words of Jesus in the gospels.
In other words what you seem to be arguing is that faith is not an abstract concept (it does have a strong influence on individuals life choices and thereby the world) and that it must be based on fact or it is a perversion from the truth.
I'm making the point that an argument from authority (such as many so-called christians use, which you describe here) is an example of the negative impact of certain types of political thought processes.
Centralised religion stultified when it became integrated into the official establishment as it became used as an instrument to support the status quo and civil order rather than question the justice of the existing system.
But that's not what christian scripture supports. Christian scripture questions the basis of society and tries to offer a better way forwards.
Put simply if Jesus were alive today he'd be a scientist - but this does not undermine the necessity of religion, it only increases the importance that people are not given a perverted education about what religion is.
It is a striking indictment of the state of our education that people do not have sufficient context to enable us to undertsand properly.
We need to have a deep knowledge of history and society to understand the philosophical and political shifts which have forced religions to evolve over time and the process which are involved which determine how they do so.
In today's secular society the scientific elites of the Royal Society and the major chairs in university departments hold the position of high priests of yore.
There is no real difference in form, only in content.
As far as I'm concerned I think both provide a valuable function to enable those of us in the real world to argue that they are talking about different causes and effects, and thereby explain that there isn't only one answer and that we must disentangle the problems ourselves to discover what the choices we face are and how individuals go about deciding.
So while I agree with you in attacking one of the bases of conservatism in society I think you are misguided in thinking it is a productive course to wish it swept away into a corner when instead it can be reinterpreted and used as a progressive force.
History also provides no evidence that the suppression of religious instincts has ever worked. It has always encouraged violent extremism and resulted in massive bloodshed (choose a century, any century) which had inevitable counter-productive effects and cause more bloodshed.
So I'll remind you again of Seneca (or Peter the Great of you prefer).
Truth and lies are less important than what you can do. While the facts of the matter determine your course of action the means to act remains paramount.
You might take Blair and Bush as an example.
They lied about the reasons to invade Iraq to provide false justification for doing so and the consequence of this pattern of reasoning resulted in more deaths and less political support, which ultimately undermined any personal legacy or historical reputation they hoped to achieve.
The job got done gradually, but we still face questions about whether the price was worth paying.
OP, many thanks for the detailed reply I really appreciate the time you take explaining your point of view here, even though we may disagree on some things I still get a lot from it as do I hope you and all the other readers do too.
I don’t think you have a strong argument WRT cupidity, for example it doesn’t explain people burning their retinas at Knock or praying for their children rather than sending them to the hospital. Also, all but a few of these stories are just “hearsay” they are as documented and corroborated at least as much as anything else we read about and use to form opinion.
Irrational thinking is pretty close to “faith” based thinking in my book, so if you prefer to use the word “irrational” rather than the perhaps overloaded term “faith” then that’s fine with me, believing things without or in contradiction to the evidence being a bad strategy to base action upon is what we are talking about here, not what it might “mean” to individual human brains to have faith.
If Jesus said something like, don’t listen to mystical hand wavers like me and trust your own human powers of reasoning and innate morality to decide how the universe works and what to do about making a fair society then I would say he supported my point of view, otherwise this is stretching things too far IMO.
I completely agree that religion represents our earliest attempts at philosophy and science, I respect it and the study of it from that perspective, however it’s time has passed and we have better methods to achieve these things now. Raking it over and over in ever more elaborate and contrived “interpretations” and outlandish assignations of “wisdom” only serves the egos of those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of the past in my view.
You talk of religion as if it’s a monolithic body of wisdom and knowledge (like science actually is); this is not true is it. Religion is fragmented and divided; it varies from the utterly insane to the modestly sensible, and to claim that we “needed” religion is the same as claiming we “needed” evolution, it’s an obvious but unenlightening statement; the more interesting question is “what for”.
Scientific elitism does exist and will do so long as humans have egos and do science, but comparing professors with priests is hopelessly simplistic in my view. You are ignoring the overwhelming and obvious difference between them, i.e. their objectives.
Your comment about the historical evidence for violence whenever religious instincts are suppressed is a very good point, I think this is by far your strongest point against my position and one for which I do not have a good answer. Atheists by definition do not have anything to “replace” religion with, if you are correct and humans do have some kind of psychological need for Deities then even though we might agree on balance that faith is a bad strategy, to marginalise it may be fraught. Science (much as you would like to relabel it) is not a replacement for religion; it is simply a better way of understanding how the universe works than religion. All I can say is that majority atheistic countries like Sweden seem to do OK, if not better than many majority religious ones like Iran (to pick two extreme examples), can we honestly say that any country or system of government in the past has been “too rational”?
Steve,
I agree I like debating with you, so even if I get into an occasional pique of temper don't think I don't appreciate it - otherwise I wouldn't be here.
My basic point is that rational arguments need to be more surgical and I don't think yours are sharp enough to cut to the bone.
Firstly we agree that religious thought has historicity on its' side as a stage in human evolution, but I could not disagree more strongly that religion should be consigned to history or that there isn't a valid space for it within the greater whole of social life - do you support actively exterminating pandas because you don't see they are interested in evolving further?
Furthermore theology is a highly valid form of enquiry which continues to offer new contributions to current debates that can only be supported with vibrant religious communities.
Secondly, your basic lack of theological and historical knowledge about religion is stunning for such a strong critic of religion as you.
I'd like to point to the discourse between Jesus and Pilate in the course of the trial as massively significant precedent in the development of legal proof - you accuse him of being a 'mystical hand waver', and it is up to you to prove this is the case before the charge begins to require a defence, as he argued there and then.
It is completely right that society remembers the first incidence of logical propositions and the practical circumstances which surrounded them.
In this the trial and death of Jesus is comparable to the trial and death of Socrates as a foundation case of modern concepts of justice, without which modern social human development would not have occurred.
I find it horrifying that society is largely incapable of understanding the historical context within which individuals such as these lived and the political pressures they were subject to, thereby attempting to judge them according to our own selective contemporaneous values.
So I also fully repudiate the criticism of a comparison between priests and professors.
To say the primary objective of priests is to promote 'god' is like saying all scientists wanted to build the atomic bomb. That is/was/always will be a matter of political choice.
Which brings me back to Socrates - Plato's socratic dialogues are an unrivalled exposition of the problem of defining truth which are unavoidable as a starting point for anyone who seriously wishes to take a strong stance on the subject - just as all religious scriptures provide lengthy justifications which scholars must understand in their entirity.
So can I encourage you to investigate epistemology as a branch of philosophy in parallel with the histories surrounding the personalities and events you so object to retaining an influence?
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