Tag: religion

Forward to the past

You can always count on the fact that some idiot in authority, somewhere, is going to try to destroy the fabric of civilization:

Lord Justice Laws condemned any attempt to protect believers who take a stand on matters of conscience under the law as “irrational” and “capricious”. In comments likely to set the church on a collision course with the courts, he claimed that doing so could set Britain on the road to a “theocracy”, or religious rule. His comments came as he dismissed a legal challenge by a Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked after refusing to offer sex therapy sessions to homosexual couples because it was against his beliefs.

The views expressed by the amusingly mistitled Lord Justice Laws are largely the same views previously expressed by every totalitarian leader or bureaucrat throughout history. For it is empirically and demonstrably obvious that what is capricious and irrational are the many vagaries of present UK/EU “law”, not belief systems that have been much more clearly codified and accepted by far more people for centuries.

Every intelligent individual, religious or irreligious, should be able to see the very clear danger involved in declaring the right of the state to override conscience and that “no religious belief itself could be protected under the law ‘however long its tradition, however rich its culture'”. This is overt totalitarian madness and is a direct conceptual strike at every cherished freedom of Western civilization. If there is no room for the law to respect religious beliefs, there is no room for it to respect beliefs of any kind and it rests upon a foundation of nothing more than the law of tooth and claw. It is not only absurd, but downright backwards to claim that respecting religious beliefs would put the UK “on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.” Most historical theocracies have been less autocratic than the current EU, and far less autocratic than dozens of the bloodthirsty anti-religious regimes of the 20th century.

Secularists should beware of celebrating this form of superficially secular form of jurisprudence, as it isn not indicative of a movement towards a rational and progressive secular humanist society, but rather the unlimited state power formerly seen in ancient pagan societies.

The intrinsic weakness of secular society

I was not a fan of Ross Douthat in the past, but I have to admit that he has really risen to the occasion more often than not and is rapidly becoming the most readable and interesting columnist at the New York Times. In today’s column, he succinctly points out something that I have less successfully been attempting to articulate for some time:

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons … in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam….

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy. For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

The intrinsic problem with secular society is essentially atheism’s warrant problem writ large. Just as atheism permits individual moralities, but no objective and universally applicable moral structure, secular society has no material foundations upon which to sustain itself. The attempt to manufacture theoretical foundations are fruitless, because the perfectly reasonable hypotheses of intellectuals working in the abstract have no connection to the way in which everyone else actually lives their lives.

Hence the irrelevance of those who suggest that morals “could be” based on a happiness/suffering metric or ask “why couldn’t” a society be founded on one proposed secular principle or another. Many of these ideas could, in theory, exist, but the empirical and observable reality is that they do not exist, they have never existed, no one abides by them, and no one is actually willing to risk anything to ensure their survival.

It is now eminently clear that those who are quick to criticize the Spanish Inquisition 176 years after its abolition would not have uttered a peep against it if they lived in Queen Isabella’s Castile. The ideals that the secularists have proposed to substitute for the Christian values of the traditional West are quite clearly counterfeit, and unlike Christianity, cannot survive in competition with more rigorous rivals. As can be seen in India, Africa, and parts of Asia, only paganism and Christian revival are capable of competing successfully with aggressive Islam, which is why it is increasingly apparent that the 20th century secular societies will turn out to be as unsustainable and nearly as short-lived as the financial system that made them possible.

There are already signs that secularism is devolving into pagan global Gaianism. I suspect that this new religion will become Islam’s primary rival in the post-Christian West, even as Christianity continues to grow exposively in the East and South. This is not to say that Christianity will not survive in the West, of course it will continue to be a significant influence, but it may not be the culturally dominant religion that it has been throughout previous centuries.

Water cooler conversation

This may explain a certain amount of workplace inefficiency. The context for this, as will no doubt be completely obvious to the casual reader, is firmware updates via USB.

MK: By the way, do you reject the doctrine of infallibility of the original scrolls of the Bible? Because, as the PUOSU states, I had assumed at least that of the reader, and if you reject it, there is no reason to even respond, because you would fall outside of the scope of the argument. In terms of forming an opinion with an evolutionary algorithm, this would mean a cost of irreconcilable conflict between two passages being similar to thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost. Without the doctrine, the costs are different, and one can reach an opposite conclusion based on the same information.

VD: I believe so, assuming that I understand what you mean by “doctrine of infallibility” correctly. My position on the overall message being correct and the various details not necessarily being correct is reasonably well-known at this point. The part that most people fail to understand is that we are not capable of determining the perfectly correct from the not perfectly correct, so we should regard it as being correct to the greatest extent possible.

MK: Right, but there is still a division between inerrancy and infallibility. The former means that all statements that are given with the “voice of the narrator” in the Bible are true, and infallibility means that all THEOLOGICAL statements are true.

VD: I think something can be true without being perfectly or even properly understood. So, I’m not sure I can say that I reject infallibility.

MK: Where the difference plays out in practice, is the cost of a conflict when interpreted according to the various doctrines. If there is an interpretation that resolves the conflict but feels a tad iffy (and the conflict is in a theological statement), the infallibility believer will always take it. Whereas the disbeliever may say “that’s just one verse, so it could be wrong.”

VD: Right, particularly when there are other verses pointing in another direction. In this context, I would say that I am not a subscriber to the infallability doctrine. If anything, I am a subscriber to the ineffability doctrine.

MK: Of course, I’m still interested to see the response, but just so that I understand that you assign the costs differently in the algorithm. You are the first person not to give the textual equivalent of a blank stare, by the way.

VD: I am not as technical as you, but neither am I an idiot.

MK: Just my frustration with how there are perfectly concise ways to describe certain theological issues, that would otherwise take like five sermons, but I can’t use them due to the “huh?” problem.

VD: Imagine how God feels trying to explain things to us… in fact, this tends to metaphorically support the ineffability doctrine.

MK: But God would be able to accurately predict when the problem is going to happen, and wouldn’t even take the trouble of saying it. Which would force us to conclude that when He does say something, it is possible to understand it…. Can’t BELIEVE I didn’t see your argument coming, though. Total sucker punch.

Mailvox: in which we hear from Densa

Clearly the world needs a club to honor those intrepid commenters who don’t let their possession of sub-68 IQs stand in the way of taking part in the grand democratic discourse that is the Internet. Here are three magnificent examples:

“I am extremely disturbed by your complete lack of compassion. I am cursed with the knowledge that all life is one, and it is terrible to know that there are people like you who believe that I will suffer horribly for eternity, and that you are okay with that. And you think of yourself as being ‘righteous’. And some people believe you. My tears will never run dry.”

First, this is absolutely false. One will search eight years of columns and 8,313 posts on this blog in vain for any evidence that I think of myself as being righteous or even ‘righteous’. As a Christian, I know perfectly well that I am not righteous because no one is or has ever been righteous except for the Son of Man. And more importantly, any righteousness that is achieved though him is on offer to everyone. It’s true, I am perfectly okay with people drowning because they are too proud to grab onto the lifeline and burning to death because they reject the idea that the building is on fire. Because if God has troubled to grant them free will, who am I to wish to take it from them? Why should anyone feel any compassion for those who are willfully, pridefully, and unnecessarily embracing their own destruction?

I am extremely sympathetic to the doubters, to the skeptics, and to those who seek and have not yet found. But I have only contempt for those who refuse to see the abyss yawning ahead of them because they are too busy looking back and down at their noses at everyone else, all the while crowing how stupid they all are for going a different way.

Jared Diamond’s argument makes perfect sense. Of course early humans living on what we now call continental Europe were the most environmentally advantaged in the world at the time by having more indigenous domesticable animal and plant species. Wild pigs and sheep were simply easier to domesticate than Africa’s lions or wildebeasts. How hard is this to understand?

It is hard to understand because it doesn’t align temporally with recorded human history. If “early humans living on what we now call continental Europe were the most environmentally advantaged in the world at the time”, it would be inexplicable how continental European civilization should have remained so stubbornly backward in comparison with various non-European civilizations such as the Sumerian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and even Mayan civilizations. Even if one cites Greek civilization, in which case one is primarily referring to Athenian society, the Diamond hypothesis doesn’t explain how Hellenic accomplishments eluded what is by far the greater part of continental Europe.

“The church wasn’t persecuting anyone ‘using a scientific or medical process’. No one. Not even Galileo.” …is one of the biggest pieces of nonsense I’ve seen in awhile. No, Galileo wasn’t put in a prison cell, but he was absolutely persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church for his writing in support of the Copernican model of heliocentrism and put on house arrest for the remainder of his life. This is well-documented. I’ve heard Christians do lots of revisionist history, but this is a new one to me. Holy crap.

Actually, that is accurate history, not revisionist. Notice how he does not cite a single example of an individual persecuted for using a scientific or medical process, mostly because there aren’t any. As for Galileo, he was not prosecuted for writing in support of the Catholic ecclesiastic’s model of heliocentrism, whose book had been in the possession of every major mathematician and astronomer for the 90 years prior to Galileo’s trial. Even Wikipedia is clear on the reason Galileo found himself in hot water.

The book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission…. Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo’s book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name “Simplicio” in Italian also has the connotation of “simpleton.”[99] This portrayal of Simplicio made “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio.

So Galileo disobeyed and betrayed the Pope, then publicly attacked him and made him look like a fool. The fact that Galileo wasn’t simply beheaded on the spot, as would have likely been the case if he had treated any other medieval ruler this way, is testimony to how reasonable the Roman Inquisition was. The most ridiculous thing about the attempt to cite the Galileo incident as proof that the Christianity is anti-science is that geocentrism was a pagan concept while heliocentrism was developed by a Christian canon who took Church orders and may have been a full priest.

Umberto Eco comes to Chesterton

Umberto Eco shows himself to be a moralist in spite of himself:

Human
beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go
through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by
religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th
century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in
rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and
tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently
meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are
superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to
be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps
a priest….

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing:
“When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He
believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed
to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous
credulity.

Eco, a non-Christian but a great humanist
in the best sense of the term, herein expresses the essence of
Voltaire’s point regarding the fundamental necessity of religion. Human
beings are not capable of maintaining a spiritual vaccuum and they will
fill that void with faith in something. In some cases, they will fill
it with something harmless, in others, something silly, in still others,
something actively evil.

I see Eco’s article as tangentially
related to yesterday’s discussion, which demonstrated again how decent
atheists and agnostics raised in a Christian culture parasitically and
irrationally latch onto the greater part of the morality they reject as a
whole, causing them to react in horror as their fellow disbelievers not
privy or more resistant to such moral indoctrination behave rationally
in the manner exhorted by Nietzsche and accepted with sardonic
resignation by the existentialists.

The essential point that
continues to evade most of these decent disbelievers is that regardless
of the ethical structure he erects to rationalize his subscription to
traditional morals imposed on his consciousness by society, he has no
logic beyond simple utilitarianism to offer anyone else. His definition
of good and evil – assuming he even accepts such things – is his alone.
He can say to the rapist “what you do is evil”, but he has no
effective response when the certainly rapist says to him “what I do is
good, because I define good as that which pleases me” or ” A living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength” nor does he have a
legitimate grounds for preventing or punishing the rapist.

Even
the ethical arguments based on utilitarianism can fail here. In a
demographically declining West, the rapist can quite reasonably argue
that he is committing an act for the good of society, even for the good
of humanity, in forcing himself on a woman who intends to remain
childless. Indeed, an honest devotee of “the greater good” would have
to at least consider supporting a policy of forcibly impregnating the
most intelligent women, accompanied, of course, with a revivial of the
historical eugenicism aimed at sterilizing the least intelligent.

This
is, of course, abhorrent to the Christian morality, which Nietzsche
rightly viewed as a defender of the weak. But on what grounds does a
utilitarian object?

There is no dearth of philosophical systems
of ethics, and they are all useless because they make no logical claim
on those who do not voluntarily accept it. This is why the atheist, the
agnostic and the pagan so readily resort to force as a substitute for
ethics, because their arguments are toothless. To be fair, one must
admit there is no shortage of Christians who do the same in their
confusion of government-mandated legality with Biblically-mandated
morality.

Eco quotes another lapsed Catholic, Joyce: “”What
kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is
logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and
incoherent?” I would add: what profits it an individual to forsake
a morality which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is
illogical, incoherent and inapplicable to others?

(In case it is not readily apparent, I did not translate this for The Telegraph.)