Irrational rationalists?

The world appears a bit weird when Man Utd lose 6-1 at home to Man City. Wonderful (says the Scouser who is worried that two Manchester clubs now rule the Premiership).

But, more interesting is the response by atheist academic philosopher Daniel Came to the refusal by New Atheist academic biologist Richard Dawkins to debate with William Lane Craig. Dawkins gave his reasons in the Guardian here – and then got a response from Came. (Paul Vallely has also contributed in yesterday’s Independent.)

Not surprisingly, I am with Came on this. The New Atheists give atheism a bad name by substituting assertion for argument. Watch this space – the debate between Dawkins and Came might be even more interesting than debates between the theists and the New Atheists.

 

Pope on a rope

Do you remember them? I dredged it up from my rather worryingly selective memory – a soap in the shape of a pope on a rope so you could hang it conveniently in the shower.

Reading some of the stuff about the imminent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the UK later this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that lots of otherwise reasonable people would be quite happy to see the Pontiff suspended from a rope. The nature and degree of the personal venom directed against him raises other questions about what it is that fires such vindictiveness.

Cards on the table: this Pope is a PR disaster and, while being as brainy as one could hope for in a spiritual leader, seems to have little or no grasp of symbols or gestures or how these work in relationships or communications at any level. I disagree with some elements of his social ethics (contraception and condoms being the obvious target), but I do know how he gets there. I don’t like the way he has taken the Roman Catholic Church back towards a pre-Vatican II map in which Rome sits bang at the centre and everything else revolves around it.

But, on the other hand, I respect a man who refuses to go along with ‘contemporary’ cultural and ethical mores simply because he is expected to. Benedict has a brain. His arguments need to be heard and understood before a response is offered. What we are reading this week doesn’t show much of a rational grasp of what all this is about.

Sorry to pick an easy target, but the sheer sloppiness of Polly Toynbee‘s tirade (yes, another one) in today’s Guardian is breathtaking. Let’s be clear: a rational, reasonable, informed, credible critique of the Pope and his assumptions should be achievable and might even be welcomed by Christians (among others). Get the argument going. Tackle the philosophical and theological assumptions which then shape the Pope’s doctrine and ethics. Prove him to be flawed, stupid, wrong, misguided or dangerous – if that’s appropriate – but just to throw things at him from your pram is both inadequate and sad.

Here are some examples from Polly Toynbee’s piece (which seems to have been rather uncritically welcomed by many readers whose sentiments she articulates):

…sex lies at the poisoned heart of all that is wrong with just about every major faith.

Er… and at the heart of nothing else? Sex and how we handle it (so to speak) is a human issue, not just a religious issue. It is not self-evidently true that ‘sexual freedom’ sets us free and improves human relationships or well-being. Everyone wrestles with sex (if you see what I mean…).

Women’s bodies are the common battleground, symbols of all religions’ authority and identity. Cover them up with veil or burka, keep them from the altar, shave their heads, give them ritual baths, church them, make them walk a step behind, subject them to men’s authority, keep priests celibately free of women, unclean and unworthy. Eve is the cause of all temptation in Abrahamic faiths. Only by suppressing women can priests and imams hold down the power of sex, the flesh and the devil. The Church of England is on the point of schism over gay priests, women bishops and African homophobia. The secular world looks on in utter perplexity.

So, let’s pick on the worst elements of religious expression (which millions of religious people also find weird and/or dodgy), shall we, and ignore the rest? What response would I get if I used Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and the other usual suspects as the epitome of secular atheism? Like everything else in this world – the real one in which most of us live – religious institutions or movements comprise huge ranges of agreement and dispute with just about everything the institution or movement lays claim to. There is no objective monolith – not even when leaders pretend there is.

And, just to be really clear, (elements of) the secular world looks on with utter perplexity at all sorts of religious motivation, belief and behaviour: self-sacrifice, humility, generosity, etc. (There I go again – generalising…) The mere fact that ‘the secular world looks on with utter peplexity’ tells us nothing other than that some people are perplexed by other people – it says nothing about the subject of the perplexity itself.

But the Vatican still talks of a few bad apples requiring internal discipline, the pope refusing to hand rapists over to secular law.

The Vatican might not want me as its defender, but that is simply nonsense. But why let reality intrude into a good rant?

The other dominion the religions control is death. Were it not for the faiths with their grip on hospices and palliative care, the law on assisted dying would be reformed.

Good grief! Clearly the assumptions behind Polly Toynbee’s view on the ethics of assisted dying are self-evidently true and the development of palliative care through the hospice movement (which is also concerned with the whole person in the context of the whole family, etc) is clearly a destructive fraud on dying people. Oh, right. No need to argue that point, then.

Where once secularism and humanism were relics of a bygone religious age, its voice is important again. But pointing out the blindingly obvious need to keep faiths in their private sphere has united religious gunfire against secularists.

Now, that really is breathtaking. It seems ‘blindingly obvious’ to some of us that Polly Toynbee has not bothered to listen to any challenge to her root assumption that her world view is self-evidently true – and therefore needs to have privileged place in the public square – while that of religious people is self-evidently stupid and dangerous and needs to be confined to the private sphere where it can’t do any harm. This nonsense has been knocked on the head in the last twenty years even by atheists.

All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death.

No, not all atheists are being called ‘militant’. That’s ridiculous. That’s like bleating that all religious people are being labelled ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘brain-dead’. It might apply to some, but not to all. Please give us the rational atheists (of which there are plenty) instead of this sort of unthinking tirade.

And, actually, you are ‘wanting to silence’… by insisting on religion being confined to the private sphere (like an unmentionable hobby or embarrassing habit). You can’t have it both ways.

Religion deserves its say, but only proportional to its numbers.

Really? We all know how to play with numbers and proportions. Add the membership of the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Society together and ask if they would have any voice anywhere in proportion to their ‘numbers’. And, if the argument is that many more people are secularists than belong to the formal societies, then the self-same argument can be made for religion. Which gets us nowhere.

No privileges, no special protection against feeling offended.

At last, I agree. But it is amazingly easy to offend those who object to the ease with which religious people are offended. Watch this space…

Anyway, there are reasons for objecting to the Pope’s visit and the basis on which it has been set up. But, Polly Toynbee’s argument isn’t one of them.

 

The Dawkins meltdown

The blogosphere has been alive this last week with the outraged Richard Dawkins hitting back at outraged people who had hit back at the outraged administrator of his website. There is outrage everywhere.

Now Richard Dawkins has apologised and explained himself. The subsequent thread is forgiving (‘we are all only human, after all’), but makes some rather odd claims that the apology demonstrates the best of reason and rationalism. Er…

Well, I want to put on record that I’m glad they have sorted themselves out and found a way forward for Dawkins’ site. I think it is excellent that he has apologised to his offended former friends and that the relationship seems to be back on track for some of them. I also would be pleased if the new Dawkins site achieves what he wants (and what any reasonable website hopes for), which is to screen out all the unreasonable, irrational crazies who think internet access gives them permission to spew abuse wherever they like.

Good on Dawkins for re-setting his site to moderate/approve comments – we will all benefit from threads that encourage proper discussion, reasoned debate and keep out the bilious nutcases (both religious and atheistic ones).

Just one plea to Richard Dawkins, however. Now you know what it feels like to be on the end of the bile, can you try to empathise with those whom you ridicule irrationally? We need to cultivate a reasonable debate between all people of faith (both theists and atheists) and we would get more light than heat if we were able to know we will not be misrepresented by the other.

So, three cheers for an end to outraged expression, genuine apology and the possibility of reconciliation.

 

Doctors haven’t got a prayer?

Apparently some Christian doctors  are fed up with the nonsense about health workers not being allowed to pray or offer spiritual care of patients. Or are we supposed to call them ‘clients’ now? Stories have emerged in the last few years of nurses getting into trouble for offering to pray with sick patients.

Well, according to the BBC website:

Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them. Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively. The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.

The problem is, according to the doctors:

The General Medical Council code suggests that discussing religion can be part of care provided to patients – as long as the individual’s wishes are respected. But at the start of this year the Department of Health issued guidance warning about proselytising. It said that discussing religion could be interpreted as an attempt to convert which could be construed as a form of harassment.

The debate goes a bit further before (inevitably) the tiny National Secular Society gets invited to put its oar in:

We have to be very careful about how we tread on this issue. If we say it is ok for doctors and nurses to provide spiritual care and pray for patients it can all too quickly get out of hand and we will have staff preaching on the wards. The risk is that it makes patients feel uncomfortable. They may feel compelled to say ‘yes’ thinking their care will suffer. Really, it is an infringement of their privacy. I think we should be very clear that patients should have to ask for this, not offered it.

But Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern said:

Most complaints from patients are about being on a conveyor belt of care. They don’t rate with staff as real people. Offering to say a prayer is a warm and kind thought. Most patients will accept it as such. It is no more offensive than being offered a sleeping pill. You can say thanks but that sort of thing isn’t my cup of tea. But if Christian doctors see this as an opportunity to promote their faith to people at a time when they are particularly vulnerable, that is totally unacceptable.

Two things spring to mind here. First, proselytism in such circumstances has never ever been advocated by any Christian with a shred of sensitivity or good theology. But for doctors or nurses to hold back from taking seriously the spiritual needs of patients is a nonsense of the first order. That is like treating a patient as ‘the cancer in bed one’ or the ‘broken leg in Ward C’ instead of a fully human being whose spirituality influences their mental and physical wellbeing.

Secondly, the NSS just doesn’t get the blindingly obvious fact that negation of a religious worldview does not leave some neutral territory occupied by atheists or secularists. This nonsense really needs to be knocked on the head. Take away a religious/Christian perspective and you are left with a particular perspective on life, death, illness, being human and so on that is positively shaped by particular assumptions  – that are no more valid or invalid than Christian /theistic assumptions.

Of course doctors and nurses should be free to pray for patients where such is requested or where the appropriateness is evidenced by the case history and what is known about the patient. Of course no one should be forced to accept prayer inappropriately. Of course the patient should be protected from mad people – be they religious or atheist. And of course Terry Anderson and the NSS should realise how out of touch they are – speaking only with the authority of a few thousand people on their register.

I would love to see a National Secular Society response to the article by Paul Vallely in June 2009′s Third Way (which doesn’t seem to be available online just now) entitled Being Reasonable. In it he questions why bodies like the NSS ‘spend almost all their energy on rubbishing religion rather than telling us what distinctive insights humanism has to offer contemporary society.’ He decries the ‘false polarity between an intolerant rationalism and an oppressive religiosity.’ He concludes with an appeal for ‘an articulation from the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society of the distinct contribution that humanism can make to modern moral dilemmas.’ He goes on:

The challenge to them is to set out that vision in entirely positive terms which can be comprehended in common by those of all faiths and none. They must do it without constantly resorting to negatives, statements of what they are against or contrasts of the things their vision is free from.

Any offers?

 

Here we go again…

I have just been pointed towards the latest statement by the National Secular Society about what they call ‘de-baptism’. Oh dear. You would think that they would pay just a smidgeon more attention to accuracy on the grounds that it is always wise to (a) know your subject and (b) get your facts right. Otherwise you risk looking a bit stupid. It begins as follows:

‘Despite a letter from Lambeth Palace telling the NSS that it would not sanction any form of official ‘debaptism’, one diocese is bucking the trend. The Diocese of Croydon…’ It later goes on to state: ‘So now John Hunt is the first person in Britain to be officially debaptised by the Church of England. But the “in this particular case” rider in the Church message seems to suggest that he might also be the last.’

Firstly, there is no Diocese of Croydon. Croydon is an Episcopal Area in the Diocese of Southwark.

Secondly, John Hunt cannot be the last to be ‘officially’ debaptised because he isn’t the first either. ‘Debaptism’ is not possible. From the point of view of Christians, baptism is something that happened and there is no way of ‘un-doing’ it. From the point of view of atheists, nothing happened at baptism anyway and therefore there is nothing to ‘de-do’. Sticking John Hunt’s note in the register is not ‘de-anything’; it is simply a note in a register that has no effect whatsoever other than to make him feel better that he has been heard.

Is this really so hard to understand? We truly need to put the reason back into rationalism.

 

The myth of neutrality (again)

The media have been running a range of variations on a single theme during the last couple of weeks. It is time it was realised that it is a non-story aimed at getting lots of publicity for a marginalised minority. Some people want to be ‘de-baptised’ and the media are lapping it up. Well, by ‘lapping it up’, what I really mean is that they have re-hashed a story put out by the BBC for which I did a half-hour interview resulting in a seven-second broadcast and there is even a marked similarity in the wording in several of the printed or online versions I have read. In other words, a single non-story is turned into a story by one media agent milking another – and so it goes on. Exactly what Nick Davies is questioning in his Flat Earth News.

The campaign, being promoted mischievously by the National Secular Society, is to put pressure on the Church of England to allow people to be ‘de-baptised’. You can read the details elsewhere, but there are several matters arising from this debate that need a more cogent airing. So, here goes.

1. If an atheist believes baptism is just a load of voodoo and that nothing happens, what is there to ‘de-do’ (if you see what I mean)?

2. One of the criticisms of the Church is that babies or children who are baptised without their consent are somehow being indoctrinated into something sinister and that this infringes their human rights. Apart from the obvious retort that we do lots of things to young children without their consent (like feeding them, dressing them, cutting their hair, making them go to school, telling them off, not letting them play on the motorway, etc), this betrays a pile of dodgy assumptions. For example, it assumes that life is neutral and children are born as blank sheets. Apparently, if you bring up a child in a family shaped by a ‘religious’ world view, you are damaging them psychologically; but if you bring them up in a ‘non-religious’ context, they will grow up free and able to make their own mind up about the meaning and purpose of their life.

What utter nonsense. The atheist assumes a worldview and brings up the child in a non-neutral context in which certain views of the world, meaning and morality are being represented – and into which the child is being indoctrinated. That is to say, the atheist’s world view is not neutral and, therefore, not inherently preferable to that of a theist. Both assume and construct world views and bring up their children within them; but neither is neutral.

So, the atheist does not simply protect the child from something ‘extra’ that is dangerous to an otherwise neutral way of seeing and being, but is shaping that child’s world view according to other assumptions about the way the world is and why it is that way. I fail to understand why people who claim to be ‘rationalists’ become so irrational that they cannot grasp this obvious fact.

3. I am hearing allegations that the EU is protecting the ‘evangelical noises getting louder and louder’ by its legislation and that this is a bad thing. Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know (because I was marginally involved in it) that there was a long and protracted attempt by elements in the EU (France in particular) to remove from the putative European Constitution any reference to the Christian history of Europe. How stupidly irrational and illiberal is that?

As I have observed elsewhere, it is impossible to understand the history (and, therefore, the present – to say nothing of the future) of Europe without understanding its Christian history – for both good and ill. Germany – including Hitler, etc. – cannot be understood for one second without an appreciation of the Reformation. I could go on, but I begin to lose the will to type at this point…

So, we need to challenge the so-called ‘myth of neutrality’ – not on privileged religious grounds, but on grounds of intellectual and rational consistency. And theists need to be more confident in seeing off the arrogant assumptions of the campaigning atheists who betray a little more blind faith in their own assumptions than is healthy for their own internal consistency.

 

Atheist bus – it just keeps getting better!

I just picked this up from Bishop Alan’s blog - you can make up your own atheist slogan and see it on the side of a bus! Wonderful!

 

Atheist bus(es)

Mark makes a good point and I apologise for what looks like a lack of charity. But I have thought long about what he said and I offer the following in all seriousness:

1. Should Paul have apologised for 2 Corinthians 10-13? Maybe there is a place for sarcasm or plain speaking (something bishops are constantly being accused of avoiding). Robust language is sometimes necessary, but rarely welcome. Bishops are on the receiving end of a great deal of robust communication, much of which could be called abusive. This does not justify reciprocation, but it raises a question about who decides when strong challenge is appropriate or otherwise. It seems to me that people who assume the right to use strong language with those with whom they disagree are the first to apply the double standard and complain when on the receiving end.

2. If a practice is stupid, what should I have called it? I recall the language Mark used about Palestinians and wonder if they, too, deserve polite respect.

3. For whom did Christ die? It seems to me that Christ also died for the Palestinians – as well as for the atheists and agnostics who have launched the advertising campaign. Do you know why they did it? There have been Christian advertising campaigns on London buses (and elsewhere) for years and some are straightforward – Alpha, for example. But one campaign saw the words of Jesus accompanied by a phone number which, when called, told you you were going straight to hell. Hence the atheist campaign and the terms in which it has been done. I might think the atheists are both misleading and silly, but at least I understand why they have done it. And that makes me impatient with the response by some Christians. I might be wrong, but there it is.

4. Would Muslims be offended? Guess what? I asked one this morning if he would be offended and his response went along the lines of: ‘It is a bad advert, but is it any worse to ride on a bus with an advert like that (which speaks only of the ‘probability’ of God’s non-existence) than one for a film involving almost naked women – or a Christian advert making claims for Christ that I think are wrong?’

The point is that we need in our culture to find creative and robust ways of engaging such atheists. Shouting louder is both ineffective and stupid. (Oh no, I’ve done it again…) It makes me think that an equivalent would be going to Athens (Acts 17) and, instead of listening, learning and engaging appropriately, we simply demolish the altar ‘to an unknown god’ and throw their poetry in the bin. London is not Texas (or Nigeria) – and we have to engage in ways that are appropriate and effective here. My job compels me into such engagement every day of the week, so this is not simply a notional matter. (Incidentally, when I engage in robust argument with atheists in the media, the most frequent response from Christians  – usually by letter or email and often anonymous – is abuse and criticism of what I didn’t say… when just occasionally a bit of encouragement or support would help!)

I have further reflected on Mark’s reference to Jerry Springer – the Opera and the response to it in England. Without going into great detail, I would offer this response: I think the protestors hit the wrong target. The Jerry Springer Show had for years exposed vulnerable people to the most horrible public humiliation in the name of cheap entertainment. Did I see any protests about this dehumanising abuse of often vulnerable people? Er… no. But then the Opera says something pathetic about Jesus and suddenly the Christians are up in arms about being offended – as if Jesus is some weak, pathetic cry baby who needs to be protected from the world’s abuse. And my problem with this? Precisely that it is the similar failure to get the point  in the Gospels that leads religious people to crucify Jesus. If we were truly being ‘Christ-ian’, we would have been objecting to the Show, not the Opera. (Or, maybe, both – but only the latter if we had done the former.)

I don’t think Jesus needs to be defended in this way. The baby of Christmas grew up. The cross was about him being subjected to the worst the world can throw at him and defying it in being raised from death by the God who is not threatened by this stuff. I believe in apologetics and imaginative challenge to those who oppose God and the faith; but that does not mean simply shouting loudly about ‘being offended’ or colluding in the ridiculous hierarchies of victimhood that can be seen everywhere.

So, I apologise for injudicious or ‘uncharitable’ language. But I offer the above for further consideration.

 

Toynbee versus Parris?

Having launched a broadside against Polly Toynbee’s unintelligent rant in last weeks’s Guardian, I now read Matthew Parris’s unlikely article about the Afrcian challenge to his own atheism in today’s Times (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece).

Any chance of a debate between the two of them?

 

Sneers, jeers and cheers

Mark B thinks I am too generous to Polly Toynbee whom he writes off as ‘just another rich secular leftist (in a rather crowded field) – like Marghanita Laski but without her brains – who loves the sound of her own voice and blows hot and blows cold, oblivious of her own inconsistency: Polly puts the kettle on for her beloved Tony Blair, then takes it off again, delares her love for Gordo, then it’s off again, on again – la donna e mobile!’ He then delights in her ‘hypocrisy’ being skewered on the telly. Well, thanks, Mark. The trouble is that I can’t see either you or me escaping from some charge of hypocrisy or blindness to our own inconsistencies.

I agree that Polly Tonybee is exasperating when she gets onto religion, but her writing on Labour’s ‘New Deal’ and the ways in which some policies follow the laws of unintended consequences has been both compassionate and passionate as well as provocative. The problem is, however, that she seems to do this from an analytical distance. And she is not alone in working in a profession that happily skewers  people ontheir hypocrisies whilst maintaining immune from the same sort of consistency. When was the last time a newspaper editor (responsible for the public humiliation of other people) resigned in shame over their own hypocrisy? And yet they adopt the role of a sort of new priesthood: moderating public morality and claiming a sort of righteous neutrality for themselves. It stinks. But they only get away with it becasue the reading public keeps allowing them to do so.

It could be argued that the media, constantly looking for novelty in order to keep the audience awake, foster precisely what the Archbishop of Canterbury was exposing and embarrassing in his Christmas Day sermon. He set about debunking the fantasy that there is some ‘saviour’ or system out there that will sort out the world’s problems and make everything alright. I began my working life in a divided Europe working for the British Government as a Russian linguist, paying very close attention to the Soviet Empire that proposed just such a totalitarian system. And history repeatedly demonstrates that such hopes are indeed fantasies: the ‘golden age’ cannot be reclaimed because it never existed in the first place. Augustus, Hitler, Stalin and many others have offered total solutions. We are now asking our politicians to come up with the panacaea for the global economy. Barack Obama comes into office in three weeks’ time with a weight of unsustainable expectation on his shoulders.

We should grow up and realise that we create our history now as we make decisions in the small things of life for which we are responsible. Growing up means losing our fantasies, not fostering them and then humiliating the people who don’t fulfil them on our behalf.

Rowan spoke of ‘signs of salvation; not a magical restoration of the golden age, but the stubborn insistence that there is another order, another reality, at work in the midst of moral and political chaos’ – that is, the God who took flesh and transformed the world’s possibilities from unimaginably small beginnings by asking people to try it his way.

This thinking needs to be applied also to the Christian world itself where there is a constant yearning for the ‘thing’ that will sort everything out and solve all our problems. Billy Graham was followed by John Wimber who was followed by the Torronto Blessing which was followed by Willow Creek and now we have a proliferation of panacaeas for evangelism, revival, etc. In the Church of England there are those who suggest that if only everyone could buy into New Wine, Spring Harvest, Reform, Anglican Mainstream, etc. (choose which one most closely aligns with your own prejudices or confirms your own convictions), the Church would grow and revival would come. It is fantasy.

It seems to me that history teaches us (and, funnily enough, so does the Bible) that we need to develop a ‘godly’ perspective on time, responsibility and accountability – recognising the relativity of much of what we do. In my old church in Rothley I used to baptise in a Norman font (1000+ years old), drink wine from an Elizabethan chalice (400+ years old) and look at a plaque bearing the names of every vicar of Rothley from the eleventh century – to say nothing of the Saxon cross in the churchyard. God’s witness continues down the ages by people being faithful to their bit of the story and living real lives in a real world of injustice and joy and handing on the task to successive generations. This perspective produces inevitably a bit of humility when we consider our successes and achievements.

In my book ‘Finding Faith’ I praise John Lennon for being a hypocrite of enormous proportions. He never let his hypocrisy stop him saying what he thought was true. Mark might be right about Polly Toynbee, but I recognise my own limitations  and inconsistencies and – whilst wishing she’d grow up a bit in some areas – still want to affirm her right to say what she does. But I would also hope that she might consider the possibility that her irrational anti-religious prejudices might need to be rationally re-visited.

So, I won’t sneer at her. I will jeer at her nonsenses and anyone who castigates the hypocrisy of others while ignoring their own. And I’ll cheer the Archbishop of Canterbury and those who, despite being sneered at by people like Polly Toynbee, still manage to articulate the real questions and expose the superficiality of our collective thinking.