851. Ruth Kelly, her hard-line church and a devout PM wrestling with his conscience

Comment #18460 by Russell Blackford on January 21, 2007 at 3:15 am

This is an issue that keeps coming up - how much are we, as a society, prepared to let religionists act in ways that strike us as just plain bigotry and as morally unacceptable? How much should we tolerate what we cannot accept in any way?

I'm going to take the unpopular line - in this forum - on this one and say that we should indeed tolerate the church agencies acting in this way, in this case, even though I don't like it or consider it morally okay. It's not as if theirs are the only adoption agencies. In a free society, resentful toleration is always a policy option if the actual harm involved isn't too great.

The important thing is to keep pointing out, over and over, that the religionists do not have the moral high ground here (or on so many other issues). The message should be that we are prepared to tolerate their irrationalism and bigotry in some cases, if it means so much to them, and if it's narrowly confined to certain areas where there are alternatives to using their services ... and provided that their so-called morality is not imposed on others.

But that's all they can expect - a resentful tolerance, based on Millian principles, and not accompanied by any respect whatsoever. I hasten to add that it should also not be accompanied by any public funding or tax exemptions.

852. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #18437 by Russell Blackford on January 20, 2007 at 8:04 pm

I like Andrew Sullivan - he's the kind of conservative, and the kind of religionist, that I can respect and even warm to. It's sometimes nice to be reminded that the world is not entirely filled with only two categories of people: those who agree with us; and dangerous enemies.

853. Religion's Real Child Abuse

Comment #18415 by Russell Blackford on January 20, 2007 at 4:49 pm

Once again, it's salutary to see examples of the mindset we are up against.

854. A Middle Ground for Stem Cells

Comment #18321 by Russell Blackford on January 19, 2007 at 5:49 pm

This is supposed to be the middle ground? What a joke. The middle ground might, for example, be an argument that some additional regulation is needed to protect women from donating embryos against their will, or without proper understanding. That might be a rational position to adopt, advocate, or give due consideration to.

Instead, we have the defence of an irrational, and simply ridiculous position: the claim that insentient entities, such as early embryos, are somehow the moral equals of fully-formed human beings. I'm just plain out of patience with this ongoing idiocy from socially conservative bioethicists.

855. Dawkins Delusion (3rd article, Same Stupid Title)

Comment #18238 by Russell Blackford on January 19, 2007 at 5:00 am

Ah, so the answers to my points seem to be along the lines of, "Of course I didn't mean 'fundamentalism' (or anything else I've been called on) in that sense."

856. Radical cleric sparks fury in Australia

Comment #18223 by Russell Blackford on January 19, 2007 at 4:31 am

I don't believe in any absolute rights - whether to free speech or anything else. I do, however, believe that governments should be very reluctant to stop people saying what they think, however abhorrent, and that we should be very reluctant to trust them with the power to do so.

In this case, I think that he should be allowed to speak his mind ... and show everyone else what kind of crazy medieval thinking we are up against with some of these militant religionists.

857. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17794 by Russell Blackford on January 16, 2007 at 1:26 pm

^JohmC, I agree - it really is a profound difference, and that's the point I was struggling to make. When I said "many parts of the world" I was especially thinking of the US.

But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, even here in Australia, religious morality has an impact on actual policy formulation, as seen in the debates about embryo research, euthanasia, etc. We can't afford to be complacent - not that I'm suggesting you were! I'm just reminding us all that we don't live in a completely benign environment, here in Australia, when it comes to religious influence on policy.

I also think that the relatively benign environment we do have makes a lot of progressive thinkers less willing to take the problems of religion seriously. I obviously don't mean you, given your participation here, but a lot of people whom I deal with from day to day seem to think religion is warm and cuddly, much like Terry Eagleton's picture of it.

On the other other hand, I taught some philosophy of religion tutorials at Monash University last year, and found that my 18-y.o students were mainly hostile to religion, so much so that I had to look after the minority of religious ones, despite my own views. Now, that is certainly not a problem that I'd expect any academic to have in (most parts of?) the US. It's a good problem to have.

Cheers, mate. I'm off to the Australian Open.

858. Creationism special

Comment #17772 by Russell Blackford on January 16, 2007 at 6:33 am

Kids should be exposed to basic science, including the basics of evolutionary theory, from a very early age. I was only about six when I started to read about it, and got a good grasp. I well remember reading an explanation, at about that age, of the difference between natural selection and Larmarckian theory (illustrated by the false idea that a giraffe stretches its neck to reach for hight branches and passes on the alteration to its offspring).

However, it's one thing that intelligent kids can understand the basic mechanisms of evolution when they are very young. It's another thing to think that they are equipped with enough background knowledge to be able to weigh up the arguments of ID advocates against those of evolutionary biology. It just take time to learn enough concepts and knowledge to do that.

In my case, what made me reject supernaturalism at a very early age was being exposed to ancient mythology and making the leap that, just as we no longer believe in Zeus or Thor, our descendants will not believe in the Christian god. I totally support exposing kids to good, well-corroborated science as early as possible, and also exposing them to a range of mythological belief systems, without trying to indoctrinate them in their own culture's favourite mythology.

859. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17770 by Russell Blackford on January 16, 2007 at 5:36 am

I'll vote for Rudd, for want of a better option. However, as far as I'm concerned, he's demonstrated himself to be just another irrationalist by voting against the recent legislative amendments in Australia to legalise therapeutic cloning within regulatory limits. Fortunately, the irrationalists lost that debate.

Yes, I guess we are lucky. Not that long ago, we even had a very good (IMO) prime minister who was openly a religious sceptic (I refer to Bob Hawke). That would never happen, in many parts of the world.

860. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17742 by Russell Blackford on January 15, 2007 at 9:55 pm

Veronique, I am not posting anonymously, either here or on my own blog ... and I'm as Australian as they come. :)

861. Dawkins Delusion (3rd article, Same Stupid Title)

Comment #17713 by Russell Blackford on January 15, 2007 at 4:00 pm

Well, Robertson's article managed to alienate me within the first few lines. I always try to give whatever I am reading a charitable interpretation, and to absorb the entire thesis before responding. In this case, I read as far as I could ... but found just too much dependence on slipping in prejuducial, unsupported claims.

The first one I noticed was "with you, or those who are your disciples". This simply assumes, in an illegitimate fashion, that Richard Dawkins has "disciples". The article soon goes on from there, to assume, illegitimately, that he has a "faith", is putting forward a "fundamentalist atheism", and so on.

First, I for one am not a "disciple" of Richard Dawkins or anyone else. I generally support him on this issue, but he seems to disagree with me on some other issues that are important to me. Let's be clear: people can agree on particular matters without some being disciples of others.

Second, faith is belief in the absence of evidence and rational argument. There is no basis whatsoever to accuse Dawkins or anyone else on his side of this particular issue of believing what they do on faith.

Third, a fundamentalist is someone who believes in the inerrant and literal truth of a holy book. No reputable scientist is likely to be a fundamentalist of any kind, because any body of scientific theory is only as good as its next observational test. Admittedly, some broad scientific paradigms are so well-tested by now that there is little prospect that they will ever be abandoned in their fundamentals. A good example is the overall picture in evolutionary biology of the historical development of life on Earth. This has been corroborated so many times, by so much convergent data from so many disciplines and sub-disciplines, that it would be irrational by now not to accept it. However, no one accepts it by having faith in the literal inerrancy of some text. Furthermore, no serious thinker, whether from a scientific background or not, denies the existence of God on the basis of faith in the literal inerrancy of, say, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.

Perhaps there really were some people who could accurately be described as "fundamentalist atheists" in the old Soviet Union, if their atheism was based on irrational faith in the works of Lenin, or some such thing. I'm not sure about that one way or the other. However, there is simply no such phenomenon as "fundamentalist atheism" involved in the current debate that Richard Dawkins is immersed in. Slipping in a loaded phrase doesn't make the world otherwise.

The trouble is that when controversial (and, indeed, false) claims are assumed, and insinuated into a text, in the way that Robertson does, rather than actually being argued for, it takes some time and energy to set the record straight on multiple points that require only a stray loaded word or phrase here or there in a long exposition. Dealing with this kind of material is almost more trouble than it's worth. Besides, if you give it intellectual scrutiny, point by point, you actually start to give it an undeserved aura of basic credibility.

Weaving in the kind of loaded language that I've pointed out may have given Robertson pleasure - who knows? Or maybe he just thinks it's a good way to score points - again, who knows? I won't speculate about what might have been in his mind when he chose to write in this manner. It is certainly frustrating to deal with, because it can be difficult to know where to start in exposing and challenging all the assumptions. However, Robertson's style of writing is unlikely ever to convince anybody who is not already on-side and prepared to make similar assumptions about "fundamentalist atheism" and so on. Whatever the intention may be, it comes across as simply insulting and intellectually dishonest.

862. Creationism special

Comment #17579 by Russell Blackford on January 15, 2007 at 12:03 am

Hi, Melisande. Nod, nod, good point, and I hadn't thought through what the cost might actually be. I guess I was automatically assuming that what would be involved would be something more attractive and elaborate than just a disk and a coversheet in plain packing (see JohnC's post).

I have had some experience with much smaller mail-outs, and I'd say that if TiS are sending anything at all elaborate to thousands of addresses that it will require significant resources in packaging, postage, and labour (which may, of course, be on a volunteer basis). I may be exaggerating the cost a little in my mind, if it's a fairly "plain wrap" package. But then again, I'd love to have the money and/or volunteer labour at my disposal, even for something minimalist, if they could be devoted to a better cause than this.

863. Creationism special

Comment #17568 by Russell Blackford on January 14, 2007 at 8:02 pm

The main thing I get out of this is the frightening fact that a bunch of British ... hmmm, fill in the blank with the expression of contempt of your choice ... have somehow raised enough money to send DVDs to every state high school in their country. This is what we're up against.

864. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17500 by Russell Blackford on January 14, 2007 at 6:14 am

Yeah, but it's fun to pretend to criticise it with a straight face. I thought I should give an irony warning earlier, because people often don't get my dry sense of humour. lol

865. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17477 by Russell Blackford on January 14, 2007 at 1:59 am

Btw, I do hope anyone reading my post above has a sense of when irony is intended.

866. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17472 by Russell Blackford on January 14, 2007 at 1:51 am

It's a good thought, but I agree that it's naive: although she acknowledges that it might not work, she just doesn't seem to give enough weight to that possibility. It's almost as if she intends the whole thing as a kind of black, satirical joke, rather than as a serious proposal.

867. Gentle Rottweiler

Comment #17319 by Russell Blackford on January 12, 2007 at 10:48 pm

With all respect, Dawkins' retort about fairyology is not circular. He says that theology is irrelevant except for consideration of whatever proofs for the existence of God are offered by theologians. Once those are dealt with, it is perfectly logical to say that that part of theology which goes beyond philosophy of religion, and attempts to explicate God's nature and will is, in effect, fairyology.

Dawkins doesn't even deny that some theologians may be doing useful work in areas like paleography and church history. He just thinks that the body of supernaturalist doctrine built on the assumption of God's existence is vacuous if God does not actually exist.

Where Eagleton might have a point, I suppose, is that some sophisticated concepts of the nature of God may not be as morally harmful as fundamentalist ones, and that it is difficult for unbelievers to say much about that without studying those sophisticated concepts. But Dawkins doesn't even really deny that point - he acknowledges that believers can be good people.

The trouble here is twofold. First, it's not ultra-sophisticated religious intellectuals like Eagleton's mates who are in charge of the US military and wield vast social and political power in many parts of the world.

Second, when the chips are down, even the most sophisticated believers have a tendency to approach some issues from viewpoints that are distorted by their metaphysical beliefs. E.g. they are likely to think that there is some special value in human nucleotide sequences, as opposed to the possession of such characteristics as sentience, self-consciousness, reason, and awareness of the future. In areas such as bioethics, religious belief of any kind is likely to lead you - by subtle means or less than subtle means - to look at the issues in ways that are, IMHO, harmful.

868. Homophobia, not injustice, is what really fires the faiths

Comment #17134 by Russell Blackford on January 11, 2007 at 4:51 am

Can someone from the UK tell the rest of us a bit more about this legislation? This is mainly just to satisfy my interest, but it might also help some others understand how it works. In my experience, these sorts of laws do not usually have the status of criminal law but rather provide for a process of conciliation over disputes where someone alleges discrimination, followed by some kind of tribunal being empowered to award civil compensation if that fails.

It may not matter much, and it wouldn't really affect my general support for such laws, but I would be grateful for a bit of clarification, just so I know a bit more about what I'm talking about if I have to debate discuss it with anyone.

869. Homophobia, not injustice, is what really fires the faiths

Comment #17107 by Russell Blackford on January 10, 2007 at 10:57 pm

Whatever I agree with or disagree with in this thread, I totally support the idea that religious bodies should be taxed exactly like other organisations and that donations to them should not be eligible for tax deductions.

870. Homophobia, not injustice, is what really fires the faiths

Comment #17092 by Russell Blackford on January 10, 2007 at 5:36 pm

On one of the other threads, a libertarian was opposing this legislation and saying that we should boycott bigots rather than prohibiting their supposedly private actions.

I don't agree with that, because I don't think your actions are private anymore once you start offering goods and services to the public. In a capitalist society, we all - whatever our sexuality, etc. - rely on so-called "private" industry to meet our needs.

However, I have more a bit more sympathy for the libertarian view than the view espoused by the religionists. What I might be prepared to go along with is something like this. If you want your business to be run in accordance with your "private" whims and bigotries, we won't give you the privilege of incorporation. Nor will we let you act in that way once you get beyond a certain size (say, three employees or a certain turnover). You are free to run a bigoted business if you are prepared to keep your business so small and independent of any public support that your actions look a bit like private decisions. Of course, if it becomes apparent that you are deliberately not incorporating and staying small to avoid legal responsibilities, then your bigotry might be exposed, but it's your choice.

Actually, I'm not seriously suggesting this - it is probably not a realistic or workable policy. But if the bigots want rights to run their businesses in discriminatory ways, then I think this is the kind of principled position they could put during the process of policy development. Now let's see them go and demonstrate in favour of that policy. "March for the rights of bigots in family business!" Hehehe.

871. Homophobia, not injustice, is what really fires the faiths

Comment #17073 by Russell Blackford on January 10, 2007 at 3:33 pm

Well, well ... good for Polly Toynbee.

872. Halting progress

Comment #16973 by Russell Blackford on January 9, 2007 at 11:07 pm

If it were a choice between sacrificing a few goats to some pagan god and putting up with the never-ending campaigns by monotheistic religionists against stem-cell research and gay rights ... well, I'm sorry for the goats but my answer is clear.

Until a few years ago, it looked as if the unstated social contract between secular intellectuals and religionists was holding reasonably well (at least outside the US). "We'll not subject the epistemic content of your supernaturalist belief systems to any severe public critique, and we'll try not to put you in a position where your ability to worship your deity of choice is compromised. You, in turn, will not attempt to impose your religious morality on us through the political process."

It was in February 1997, when the birth of Dolly the sheep was announced, that the religionists began en masse to abandon their side of the bargain, trying to get specifically religious morality back into public policy.

Then, five years after Dolly's birth, we saw on a monstrous scale what horrors religious belief can be used to justify with the extreme Taliban regime in Afghanistan and then the Sept 11 atrocities.

Well, I've long had enough. If religionists want their beliefs to be taken into account in the formulation of public policy, then those beliefs become fair game. They become open to the glare of public scrutiny. It becomes just as legitimate to try by all peaceful means to bring about the demise of religious belief as it is to attempt to bring about the demise of any other body of beliefs (political, economic, whatever) that is being touted as a foundation for policy.

This poltical demonstration described by Grayling is just one more example of how the religious mindset stands in the way of peaceful progress. I'm glad to see Grayling's forthright denunciation of it.

873. God-less

Comment #16841 by Russell Blackford on January 9, 2007 at 6:18 am

While we're emerging from our comfortable spider holes, it would help if we could somehow get all the divine command theorists to read Plato's dialogue The Euthyphro. It gets referred to often enough in secondary sources, but everyone really ought to go back and have a think about the original to see how incoherent divine command theories of ethics really are.

874. The Nodder

Comment #16776 by Russell Blackford on January 8, 2007 at 4:17 pm

Given that I'm not young anymore myself, dammit, I won't make any snide remarks about the writer obviously belonging to a stiff-necked generation.

(Stiff-necked and proud of it!)

875. Executing Saddam Hussein was an Act of Vandalism

Comment #15933 by Russell Blackford on January 3, 2007 at 10:37 pm

I'm not sure that the usual reasons do apply. It depends, of course, on what you think those usual reasons are. Jonathan Glover has the best and most balanced discussion that I know of about the rights and wrongs of the death penalty in these rather special cases (in Causing Death and Saving Lives). I actually think that these cases involve rather different considerations from those relating to the death penalty for ordinary murders and so on.

That said, I still agree with the thrust of the argument. I have tended to emphasise what I see as the hastiness and unfairness of the trial - which was a travesty in my view - but I agree with the point made here that killing Saddam also meant losing a vital source of information.

876. The Courtier's Reply

Comment #14981 by Russell Blackford on December 27, 2006 at 6:43 pm

If I had time, I'd love to study a course in hobgoblinology!

I expect that there's a vast field of hobgoblinlore to master, and much conjecture about the original versions and the cultural evolution of later variants. Hoblgoblinlore may throw much light on human psychology for all I know, and this body of lore may even contain nuggets of useful moral thinking (although it's unlikely that there would be a lot that is terribly useful to contemporary debates over bioethical issues, for example, since the creators of hobgoblinlore were not aware of stem cells, pre-natal genetic diagnosis, etc.).

All in all, I can imagine that a course in hobgoblinology would be interesting and possibly even of some practical application at the margins. If there are people who dearly love this field of study, far be it from me to denounce them for their frivolity.

The one thing that hobgoblinology could not do, of course, is establish that sightings of hobgoblins are veridical. We have very powerful reasons for thinking they are not.

Furthermore, if a cult professing belief in the veridical nature of hobgoblin sightings ever obtained a huge membership and wielded great social and political power - largely towards ends that merited severe condemnation - then I think it would be worthwhile standing up and stating in a clear voice that ... um ... hobgoblins aren't actually, y'know, REAL.

It wouldn't change anything if this was said by someone who was ignorant of some of the finer points, or of some of the more morally impressive teachings, enunciated by learned hobgoblinologists. It would have to be said, and it would not take a hobgoblinologistophile to say it.