Reference

checkski · May 2012

I couldn't agree with you more, Rainbow, in this thread, if not the other. Dawkins asks us how we would react if we were to describe a child as a Socialist, or a Tory, just because his parents were. Unthinkable, isn't it? And yet we - unthinkingly - describe a kid as Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever. We are conniving at pernicious indoctrination, which, speaking as a teacher, I find appalling.

andy · May 2012

@checkski - I think we're actually agreeing with each other. Belief and Hope are different. I was using it as an analogy because the formulation is the same. Even if the odds are against you, you can still have hope. You wouldn't believe you can persuade someone not to have hope. I think faith of this kind follows a similar model.<div> </div><div>Your reasons for scepticism are about justifications for belief, not its truth value. The justifications for the truth of faith get weaker and weaker as science explains stuff. The odds get longer (the chances of catching the bus go down), but maybe just maybe in light of all the reasonable justifications, there's a chance there will be a bus. You can show someone all the reasons you have justified your belief (strikes, etc) but you can't test the truth value in the same way.</div><div> </div><div>Attacking the truth of faith is like telling people things are hopeless. They might agree with you, but it won't change what they do if it works for them. As someone who just voted for Ken, this should be an easy point to grasp

</div>

Idoru · May 2012

@Arkady<;br>"My suggestion is that you are allowing your dislike of his tone to sully your analysis of his argument." You may well be right. I came across The God Delusion on my shelves last night while searching for a completely different book - a sign I should read it maybe?

Arkady · May 2012

@Idoru: “I came across The God Delusion on my shelves last night while searching for a completely different book - a sign I should read it maybe?” Yeah I’d recommend that you read it again, especially the chapter I mentioned. I‘m not going to rise to your question about it being a sign though! @Miss Annie – the evolution of the giraffe is very well attested to in the fossil record. The giraffe family was once much more extensive than it is now, with a range of different neck lengths depending on the local flora. The giraffe neck is a good example of an ‘evolutionary arms race’. I can send you some links if you’re genuinely interested. You say that ‘it’s fine’ whether people believe in a god or not, but presumably you agree that that is dependent on whether it has a positive affect on their life and those of others? And that if can be shown that it usually does not (and I’d wager that this can be shown) then it would *not* be fine, right? I’m pretty sure that you don’t regard all behaviour as being equal in merit. @rainbow_carnage – spot on, especially with the schools business. It’s enormously unethical to indoctrinate children before they reach the age of reason. It’s been shown that children are ‘natural creationists’ – i.e. they tend to regard all objects as artefacts. For example, ask a child whether a lake is still and tranquil because a) there is no wind or b) so that the animals can drink from it easily, the vast majority will answer b). If you teach children that this is in fact the case, and that in some sense at least a god made the lake for the animals, then their intellectual development is permanently hobbled. @andy – the truth test. For the philosophical materialist/physicalist (for those less boring than me, read ‘atheist’ for the purpose of this exchange) something is true of it can be demonstrated to be true *objectively*. i.e. you can’t just choose to say it’s true; it has to be agreed to be true by other people independently scrutinising the evidence. In this sense ‘true’ and ‘justified’ might be the same thing? I think I’m also with Checkski (or I’m misunderstanding in the same way) – hope is an *attitude* that one does or not take relative to the facts. One can be hopeful (I hope I catch the bus) while also being realistic (I doubt I will catch the bus). Faith does not work in this way. One chooses to believe in god despite the absence of evidence, and sometimes in spite of the evidence.

ADGS · May 2012

Alain de Botton is a moron. I've long given up reading full articles by him, because life's too short, but when I see one I like to start somewhere in it at random and see how long it takes me to find a demonstrably false statement. Never more than three sentences. This week's was in Stylist, which had bafflingly decided to solicit an article about sex from the world's least sexy man. Two sentences in to my random sample, he claimed that the Internet was rife with footage of the sort of depraved acts not dreamt of even in the sick mind of the Marquis de Sade. Thus demonstrating that he either knows nothing about the Internet beyond tabloid rumour, or nothing about de Sade. Or more likely, nothing about either. His argument that religion has social uses is true at the most banal level. What he doesn't seem to grasp, though, is that plenty of other activities can fill that social/shared belief gap (football teams, fandoms, clubs and societies), and so you really don't need some kind of Church of Nothing In Particular.

miss annie · May 2012

Thank you ADGS, I might take a copy of the Marquis's works as a gift for Mr De B. The party is a launch for the School of Life series of books, so far the bestseller is the one about sex. Mostly to thirty something men.

ADGS · May 2012

I doubt he'd approve. He seems to like the sappy, platitudinous philosophers, not the ones with any bite or truth like Nietzsche - and de Sade, for all his tediously overdone sex scenes, is definitely in the latter category. I don't trust anyone who takes any more from Boethius than the 'fortune's wheel' image - and de Bottom borrowed Boethius' title for his breakthrough book! And then, unlike his predecessor, didn't have the good grace to get executed by Goths upon its completion.

checkski · May 2012

De B also wrote an entirely unnessary book on Proust.

checkski · May 2012

Unnecessary. Sorry

Roy · May 2012

I remember reading a letter on a newspaper website* in response to the atheist bus campaign, and it was one of the most interesting justifications of religion I have ever read. The author essentially said that it doesn't matter whether religion is true or not; that for him** it was important to believe that people are fundamentally good, and that he found himself unable to do so on the evidence alone. Religion was the tool he used to allow him to believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity, despite the evidence being equivocal at best. It's an interesting piece of meta-reasoning; a rational decision to choose to believe something irrational. I wish I could find that letter again. I've realised over the years that I do something similar: I choose to believe things that aren't true, too, although I manage to do so without using religion as a tool. There are many heinous acts that I choose to believe are things that no human being could or would ever commit. My belief is clearly and painfully contradicted by reality at times, but I choose not to change my belief because to actually believe that human beings are capable of these acts would be even more painful. roy * the Guardian, I think ** or her, I forget I started writing this using the gender-neutral 'they' but the clumsy language got in the way of the argument

ADGS · May 2012

That's particularly baffling logic if the religion he chose was christianity, which emphasises the fundamental sinfulness of humanity...

andy · May 2012

I thought the various posters on this thread would find this article interesting:<div> </div><div>The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/05/120305crbo_books_gopnik#ixzz1uIJQCmrO" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; ">http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/05/120305crbo_books_gopnik</a></div><div> </div>

gardener-joe · May 2012

Back in the 1730s, Bernard Picart's wonderfully illustrated, seven-volume 'Religious Ceremonies of the World' transformed European attitudes toward religious toleration by demonstrating the similar human impulses behind all religious movements. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2010/09/13/the-book-that-changed-europe/religion/ I recently had the joy of browsing a mint condition first edition in the medieval library at Queens College, Cambridge.

Arkady · May 2012

Two very interesting links. Here’s something of a counterpoint to andy’s link (or rather it deals with religion’s conceptual content rather than form): http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/ritual-reason-revelation/ It’s from a fantastic blog dedicated to scrutinising the work of Historian Arnold Toynbee, who was well ahead of his time. The main text is Toynbee’s, the indented text is commentary. For the lazy, it can be summarised as follows: Ancient, ‘ritualistic’ religions did not clash with reason or philosophy – or only did so for political reasons. This was true of China, Greece, Egypt, India, etc. Rituals were regarded as functional, and without spiritual content. In China, where philosophy and ritual co-insisted, one philosopher – Confucius – ‘explained’ the meaning of the rituals by referencing them in his philosophy, creating the ‘religion’ that we see today. A different process occurred in the Middle East, where a series of religions arose legitimated by revelatory authority and demanding *faith*. They ‘swept up’ some rituals in the process (from Yule to blood-drinking), but clashed with reason and crushed philosophy for a millennium.

ADGS · May 2012

I'd broadly agree with that, except that there were a few other mad bastard religions around the place, most notably in Mexico. For all that christianity is a pernicious and destructive force, while it was contributing to the destruction of the Aztec cults it was briefly on the side of right.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

In this Discussion

Top Posters

Reference

Comments