1351. Onward Christian teachers?

Comment #87675 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 7:25 pm

Just another version of my usual spiel about the state of learning in the Middle Ages. Nothing worth missing a cup of tea for...

1352. Onward Christian teachers?

Comment #87643 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 4:54 pm

Please don't get me started on the origins of the Universities Oxford and Cambridge...

1353. Holy communion

Comment #87471 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 7:58 am

I also note the parallels with the Danish Mohammed cartoons fiasco. Quite ironic given that, in the very same November / December issue of New Humanist to which that cartoon forms the cover, there is an article by Tzvetan Todorov about this vile event.

I think it a sign of our cultural maturity and civility that we can laugh along with such things, while our bearded, Koran-toting opposite numbers call for violence and hatred.

1354. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87319 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 7:49 pm

Another delicious irony - where did he learn about social compromise and the give-and-take of integration that he so espouses? That tissue of plagiarised nonsense he reads in the mosque every friday? The oh-so-progressive values of the muslim society he comes from? Or maybe from secular enlightenment values and modern European pluralism?

1355. Holy communion

Comment #87309 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 7:10 pm

Well, it looks like we'll have to disagree on the impact of and intent behind this cartoon. Short of asking the artist himself I don't see how we're going to resolve the issue.

At least I'm not the only one who takes it for a swipe at Dawkins's exaggerated sense of wonder.

Actually, yes, I do think that it is acceptable to mock the atheist OUT campaign by comparing it to the gay rights movement, but not for the reasons you describe. There is nothing funny about the aims of the gay rights movement at all, but that's not the point. The humour here comes from flagging up a false analogy and hinting at its absurd consequences. Atheists are NOT a persecuted minority in England. We never really have been. We don't lack for basic human rights. Atheism is not something English people have ever been ashamed to display. It has never been illegal to be a practising atheist. There is no disparity in the atheist age of consent. Atheists are allowed to get married and adopt children. Atheists are protected against discrimination by legislation. The idea that, in this country, we have anything like the grievances that the gay rights movement had is so palpably absurd that it IS a source of humour. I repeat that New Humanist is a British magazine with a largely British readership - perhaps the struggle is a lot more similar in the states.

In this sense the cartoon could be seen as actually confirming the validity and importance of the gay rights movement - by pointing out that it did have real social ills to contend with while Dawkins's OUT campaign does not, at least not over here.

I also think that we should laugh at the camp gay stereotype, because that's just what it is - a stereotype, and a somewhat outdated one. We all know what the stereotypes are, racial or otherwise - Chinese people are hard working and inscrutable, the French are arrogant, spineless and stink of garlic, the Jews and the Scots are tightfisted, gays are camp, promiscuous and obsessed with frivolities. Just because we recognise that these stereotypes exist does not mean we buy into them. Their very outdatedness can be a source of amusement, and they are all exaggerated comic characters anyway. Laughing at something is a powerful way of showing how ridiculous it is - that's precisely why so many gay people in the seventies and eighties took the stereotype to heart and parodied it mercilessly. Isn't it rather hypocritical saying that we can do this but others outside the club are denied that opportunity? Seems precisely what the religious are objecting to when they claim special privileges against us mocking their beliefs. Haven't we reached the stage where the validity of homosexuality can stand on its own merits and the gay community no longer need fear humour as damaging to its stability?

Maybe we have, maybe we haven't. It seems that Steve99 and I disagree on the state of acceptance in England at the moment, and hence on whether the gay community has the confidence to embrace mocking humour from without as well as from within. Perhaps it is a generational thing - I am certainly very encouraged by the confident, unfazed and shamelessly self-parodying attitudes of my gay students and see in them a security about their sexuality that I could never claim for myself (and I'm only 24!). Maybe it's a regional thing - my haunts of Oxford, Surrey and Somerset are all fairly middle class areas, perhaps it's different in the dilapidated inner cities of the freezing north. I honestly don't know the answer to that one.

1356. Holy communion

Comment #87212 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Actually my best mates pass round cartoons of me looking retarded all the time. My brother draws most of them. They're quite good actually...

1357. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #87026 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 3:13 am

steve99, comment #36

Hmmm... well, maybe that interpretation does occur to some English people after all. (It's difficult to synchronise with this topic occurring on two threads at once)

To restate my opinion on the original thread where the cartoon is posted, I do not believe that Dawkins is being presented as a gay stereotype, rather his characteristic exhuberance and sense of wonder are being exaggerated.

There are, of course, gay rights overtones in the cartoon too however.

I'm not sure the race and sexuality cases are entirely analogous myself. The overt gay community has for a long time courted controversy and indulged in shameless self-parody. It's not every gay person's cup of tea, but camp comedy and ridiculously over-the-top portrayal of gay stereotypes have been some of the best weapons in the fight for acceptance. It seems there is definitely a sense that we can laugh at ourselves now and have avoided, for the most part, the kind of paranoia and persecution complex that often goes with such minority rights endeavours. We can afford to do this, in the main, because we are not a self-perpetuating community and our "culture", such that it is, is rarely central to our own identities in the way ethnic or religious communities' cultures are to their members' identities. We are also able, where they generally are not, to blend in quite easily if we so choose. Actually mature and confident ethnic communities do parody and send themselves up quite extensively as well - remember the Indian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me in the nineties? It's a complex phenomenon, and one over which an awful lot of ink has been spilled by queer theorists and their nutty postmodern ilk, but undoubtedly distinctions deserve to be drawn. In fact there is a debate among gay rights people in the uk at the moment over whether maintaining the otherness of "queer identity" is a valuable thing or not, and this is where the philosophies of groups like OutRage! differ from those of groups like Stonewall.

As far as the atheist Out campaign goes, I think that such a conscious borrowing from the gay original does make it a legitimate target for humourous comparison. In the UK and US public gay rights marches and so forth brashly display the camper, more frivolous aspects of gay "culture" such as drag queens, fetish wear and men in ridiculously small shorts - one cannot get away from this. The idea that atheists could or would want to indulge in anything similar is frankly preposterous, in Britain doubly so because we simply are not discriminated against and simply do not have the same sort of vibrant, over-the-top visual culture to put on display. Go somewhere like Latvia and the gay rights marches are sombre, serious affairs with none of the pomp and glamour. The battle is still very much in its opening stages there, a battle which we have largely won.

In short, to my jaded, bourgeois eyes at least, the gay community and its various tropes are pretty much mainstream cultural property in Britain these days and thus need no special treatment. I think it a sign of maturity that we can laugh at aspects of them now without feeling it threatens their very existence - that's why our predecessors were so voiciferous and unrepentant about them in the first place. The main thrust of this cartoon comes, I think, not in saying "gays are worthless, so militant atheists are worthless by analogy" but rather in saying "gay rights campaigning is important for gays, but it's a bit silly saying that the atheist movement is the same".

Likewise, Dawkins is a hugely respected and serious figure among the British humanist community. A bit of mocking him can be taken tongue in cheek and does not affect his credibility in the slightest. I see it as mildly affectionate even - portraying him as a daft, batty old uncle figure, a harmless, sandal-wearing innocent enthralled by the wonders of nature in a very child-like fashion. I would not see that as a terrific disservice to the man. It certainly makes a change from the shrill, ranting demagogue of popular myth.

Or maybe that's just what I read into it - I am on record in this very thread as saying we bring our own preconceptions to any text we read.

1358. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86990 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:21 pm

As I say, to my eyes it does come across as merely friendly ribbing.

1359. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86988 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:10 pm

Punch did far more biting and insulting satire for decades. Private Eye is much more cutting. I suspect it's a British thing...

1360. Holy communion

Comment #86986 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:05 pm

I'm not sure there's any real anti-gay bias in the cartoon. I'm certainly not offended by it in that way. Possibly the worst you could say is that they've tried for a striking disjunct between the obviously heterosexual Christopher Hitchens and the "out and proud" message of his placard. Maybe there is the hint of a suggestion that drawing such parallels is inappropriate - it certainly is here in the UK where New Humanist magazine is published. I was closeted on the sexuality issue throughout my teenage years, but I've been openly atheistic since I can remember with absolutely no trouble. The two situations are just not comparable on these shores. The gay rights issue is far more advanced over here too (patronising sops to the religious lobby in the House of Lords notwithstanding) and the British gay community is generally sufficiently secure in its confidence to laugh along at parodies of itself.

Dawkins seems to be portrayed not as a gay stereotype but as a woolly, sandal-wearing liberal dancing and frolicking with the birds in a dopey haze of wonder. I suppose this is just an exaggeration of the exhuberance he does actually display on matters of science. Maybe a little knocking, but hardly libelous.

Maybe we just expect this in our press to a far higher degree in England. I am constantly amazed at how little proper satire there is across the pond.

1361. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86981 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 8:48 pm

I thought the cartoon wasn't all that bad really. Grossly and exaggeratedly parodic perhaps, but then again that's what cartoons, and indeed satire in general, are for. Political cartoons are usually far worse than this. Maybe it's just me being of the Spitting Image generation, but I think it's something of a compliment to a public figure if they are the target of such light-hearted fun-poking.

1362. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86977 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 8:26 pm

The author, comment #13,

"Surely, the sources lie in ancient greek philosophy, yet they were transmitted to Europe by the humanists. What's wrong with that?"

Well, it depends what you mean by "the humanists". The word was only really used in its modern context in the nineteenth century, the word umanista used in fifteenth century Italy simply meant a teacher of classical literature. Yes, it is true that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did see the development of significant new cultural forms that acquired the name "Renaissance", and this is where the traditional model of historical development has seen the origins of "humanistic" thinking. In Jakob Burckhardt's classic nineteenth century formulation these were the "discovery of the individual", the appreciation of nature and aesthetics and the move in scholarship from a narrowly logical focus on patristic and biblical works to a more literary appreciation of the Greek and Latin classics. It is "humanistic" because it glories in the abilities and achievements of human cultures, human individuality and the human mind rather than in the "medieval" or scholastic preoccupations with societal hierarchy and the divine universal.

This model began with Petrarch's coining of the term "dark ages" and a conscious rejection by renaissance thinkers of a self-defined medieval "other". Their enlightenment and victorian inheritors perpetuated the antipathy of the European intellectual elite toward the middle ages, casting them as a period of sterile godbothering backwardness, and it remains the distorted stereotype we encounter all too commonly today. Serious medieval intellectual history is actually a comparatively young discipline that began in the early decades of the twentieth century with men such as Charles Homer Haskins.

Anyway, a century of study into the history of the period has confirmed that the traditional division of history into ancient, medieval and modern is far too simplistic. As far as the transmission of Greek philosophy is concerned the process most certainly did not begin with renaissance humanists. Historians now point to earlier "Carolingian" and twelfth-century "renaissances" when significant translation activity took place and the intellectual climate of europe was changed drastically. In the twelfth century for instance almost the entire aristotelian corpus was recovered, as were Plato's Phaedo and Meno, all of Ptolemaic and Arabic astronomy, the late antique medical tradition, Euclid's mathematics, the neoplatonic writings of Proclus and Plotinus and several other works. The Burckhardtian themes can be traced back well beyond the fifteenth century too - individualism, aesthetics and literary appreciation did not spring ex nihilo from the mind of Petrarch or the letters of Cicero he rediscovered. Just ask John of Salisbury, Walter of Chatillon, Suger of St. Denis or even Anselm. Of course medieval "humanism" (a term coined by the late, great Sir Richard Southern) differed from its quattrocento version, but there was no great moment of sea-change, no magic cut-off point when everyone suddenly realised what fools they had been for living in the middle ages, cast off their threadbare peasant smocks and started walking round in slashed pantaloons discussing republican theory and inventing gunpowder.

Instead it is better to see the development of ideas as a gradual change throughout the middle ages and renaissance periods. Of course there were times of quickening, but to ignore the medieval roots of humanism, science, or any other item of European and, I suspect, world culture is to unconsciously buy in to generations of uncritical anti-medieval self-definition. The truth is far more complicated than all that.

Finally, the idea of "sources" has to be treated in a more sophisticated manner. Simply having access to a new text is only a part of the story - people read these texts in very different ways depending on their cultural background, preoccupations, aims, wider reading and so forth. Similarly, people actively went out and found these texts - you don't go looking for such things unless you feel a pressing need for them which, by definition, cannot have come from the texts themselves.

1363. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86898 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 11:51 am

I think Myers' dislike for the term "humanist" is almost entirely semantic actually - it is, after all, a very broad term that has different meanings to different people in different contexts. From his writings it is abundantly clear that most of the values he espouses would be recognised by the majority of humanists as a part of their own moral philosophy.

The squid comment is clearly a joke - PZ is obsessed with marine cephalopods and they form an ongoing comedic trope on his Pharyngula blog - but from the context it seems also to be a nod to the perceived speciesist overtones of the term "humanist". Dawkins alludes to these in several places too. For someone who is so deeply involved in animal biology, rather than someone taking his cues directly from the history of renaissance and enlightenment thought, it is perhaps a natural conclusion to arrive at.

I don't really use the term humanist to describe myself either, but it is probably the label which best fits in many circumstances, and I'm happy to be identified with it in opposition to those for whom god, not man, is the primary object of our moral, political and philosophical contemplation.
As a medievalist I am of course legally required to point out that the traditional view of the emergence of humanism in Renaissance Italy is a misleading and outdated piece of Burckhardtian Victoriana, so consider yourselves told.

1364. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86853 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 10:12 am

Bravo PZ, exactly what I was thinking!

Though I do find it a somewhat delicious irony: a humanist claiming that we can only further the goals of humanism by ignoring the very argumentative contentiousness that he flagged up only a few paragraphs earlier as a cornerstone of our human nature...

1365. Same Flea, Different Name?

Comment #85958 by Cartomancer on November 7, 2007 at 3:23 pm

Well, I've been sitting on this for some time now, but I thought it might be appropriate. Best Gilbert and Sullivan voices please oh choir of atheists to whom our good Professor is preaching:

He is the very model of a major modern atheist
Accreditations as a writer, humanist, and scientist
He knows the works of Darwin, and can quote from verse poetical
To peddlers of religious faith his thought is antithetical

He's very well acquainted, too, with matters cosmological
He understands the theories of beginnings biological
About the book of Genesis he's keen to point out that it's tripe
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype

With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenophenotype

He's very good at pointing out the flaws of fundamentalists
He knows the answer to the claim that any sort of god exists
In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

He gives the lie to theists on their frankly loopy moral claim
He answers the apologists who bring up Adolf Hitler's name
He quotes in measured sentences the crimes of child labelling
And points out that the moderates are merely faith-enabling

His works inspire charlatans and liars to cacophonies
He treats with great bemusement all the writings of the lot of these
Their arguments a fugue of which we hear a hundred times a day
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say

An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to, own to say

He wants to rid our lives of morals writ in ancient cuneiform
And show we might as well believe in pastel-coloured unicorns
In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In fact, since he knows what is meant by Russell's flying crockery
Since he can tell at sight a valid argument made properly
Since he renounces theists, be they pope or seminarian
And since he knows precisely what is meant by "pastafarian"

Since he has learned what progress could be lost to ID flummery
and since he sees the child abuse that goes on in a nunnery
In short, since he exposes many dangerous hypocrisies
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!

You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrasocrates!

Our much beloved Dawkins, light of Oxford's University
encouraging us atheists to come out universally
Indeed, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

Indeed, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

1366. Same Flea, Different Name?

Comment #85829 by Cartomancer on November 7, 2007 at 9:33 am

The Dominicans have always had too much time on their hands. Wasting parchment is just about all they've ever been good for. Deep Fat Friar Thomas Aquinas and his endless stream of verbiage anybody?

1367. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #85692 by Cartomancer on November 6, 2007 at 9:27 pm

I see... so The God Delusion reaches its conclusion because of the intractability of the problem of evil does it? I must have a copy with misprints then, because mine has a passage where Richard Dawkins says he has never been impressed by this argument and finds the argument from improbability much more persuasive. Oh, and I've lost all the smug, shrill and harsh bits too, but I think they deliberately missed those out of the special print run for atheists that we all seemed to get hold of.

And are we really back on the tired old "you can't get consciousness from unconscious matter" line? You might as well ask how you can get omelletes from eggs when there is no trace of intrinsic omelletosity in any egg you can find...

1368. Science owes its origins to Christianity or Religion

Comment #84496 by Cartomancer on November 2, 2007 at 7:15 am

I've dealt with this one at length several times before in many other threads.

We're supposed to keep things concise and to the point here, but in my experience the best way to refute the theist on this point is to demonstrate an extensive and sophisticated understanding of the history of ideas, particularly in the high and central Middle Ages when the apparent religious origins of modern science are really based. Supplement this with an explanation of historical development in the abstract, being sure to point out that counterfactual speculation of this kind is an amusing parlour game and little more, then rinse and repeat until the theist crawls back down whatever sordid little hole they came from.

It's probably unbecoming, but browbeating them with one's erudition is a lot of fun...

1369. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84313 by Cartomancer on November 1, 2007 at 5:56 pm

"To regret religion is to regret Western civilization"

Three prominent misunderstandings here.

(i) Funnily enough "Eastern" civilization has religion too. Well fancy that...

(ii) The implied equation of religion with civilization is facile and overly deterministic. It is probably not intended so strongly as that, but if not then it is just cheap provocation.

(iii) We as atheists do not 'regret' that religion ever existed. Most of us, it seems, view it as a perfectly explicable cultural phenomenon that has shaped our past and recognise that we cannot change what has already happened. We also recognise that it is no longer necessary or helpful, and we are trying our hardest to point this out to others in the hope that it will not shape our future.

1370. Believe it or not, courtesy counts

Comment #84309 by Cartomancer on November 1, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Russell Blackford, comment 25:

The thing about the writings of Augustine and Aquinas is that they are not considered "sacred texts" in the same way that the Scriptures are. The saintliness of these writers actually has nothing to do with how trustworthy their works are in the eyes of most Catholics.

The arguments of Augustine and Aquinas stand on merit alone - the merit in question being their basis in neoplatonic and stoic philosophy on the one hand and rampant scholastic aristotelianism on the other. You would be hard pressed to find a sensible Catholic these days who believes anything Aquinas says as fact without further corroboration, indeed you would be hard pressed to find a Catholic who has actually read anything he wrote. Insensible Catholics are of course beyond rationality and our scorn will do little good for them.

The reason nobody in their right mind has read Aquinas is that his works are both mind-rottingly recondite and so unbelievably long that even the prospect of doing so would inspire suicide. His magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae, is well over two million words long. No human mind can suffer that much pedantic logic-chopping without collapsing in on itself, and the summa is just a tiny fraction of his total output. It's a wonder he had any time to stuff pies down his distended Dominican gullet at all...

Actually Aquinas' arguments were being knocked down or flagged up as inadequate even before the vast corpulent hulk popped his clogs. His immediate successors, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Scotus and Ockham all took him to task for what he says about the philosophical underpinnings of Christian theology. As for Augustine, well, the fallible human nature of his literary output was made plain for all to see when he published his 'retractiones' - a list of addenda and corrigenda revising certain opinions he espoused in previous works. Credit where credit is due to the uptight sexual hypocrite from Hippo, he certainly knew the dangers of putting contentious theological opinions into the public arena.

Though nothing can excuse him for making me wade through De immortalitate animae last Wednesday. Now there are four hours of my life I'm never going to get back...

1371. Pope's 'morning after pill' speech criticized

Comment #83676 by Cartomancer on October 30, 2007 at 9:36 pm

It never ceases to amaze me how the Catholic church these days focuses, with monomaniacal obsession, on a few very minor pieces of dogma they came up with not very long ago. All we ever hear from them is abortion, contraception and gay rights - since when were these the most pressing social issues of the day?

And although gay rights have always been opposed on pretty solid scriptural grounds the whole abortion / contraception thing never used to be an utterly settled issue. The issue for the Catholics has always been when the human foetus acquires a soul and thus becomes a person.

During late antiquity and the middle ages this was far from a settled question - many notable scholastics recoiled from the idea that the soul is transmitted through the semen (a form of the traducianist heresy) because this would make the soul in some way corporeal. Furthermore spilled semen would result in hundreds of wasted souls, something a perfect and benevolent god certainly wouldn't entertain. As such the mosaic law from Exodus 21:22, which states that compensation for striking a woman with child shall be less if the child has not acquired a soul, was highlighted as evidence that the foetus is not alive before about forty days. Of course there were disagreements and alternative paradigms which did posit a soul from the beginning, but this was a somnewhat rarefied academic matter for the most part and there most certainly has not been a Catholic injunction against abortion from the beginning. In fact, just like most other late Romans, the first Catholics cheerfully exposed their unwanted infants at birth.

The modern Catholic obsession with abortion and contraception is really just a paper-thin veil for their more deep-seated obsession with having sex for pleasure. It is a fatuous justification after the fact because they cannot think up anything better to convince people not to sleep with each other - their usual guilt trip tactics are weak and feeble in the face of biological lust. The obsession with homosexuality is similar - we don't get pregnant, so the abortion / contraception thing doesn't work to stop us having sex for pleasure. There really is no other option than to call us unnatural and objectively disordered.

The roots of this obsession with sex for pleasure are undoubtedly deep and very sinister. Freud would have a field day...

1372. Tests of faith over 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #83300 by Cartomancer on October 29, 2007 at 2:54 pm

"The "Golden Compass" movie is set in a parallel universe similar to Oxford, England, where everyone's soul is physically manifested as a "daemon" or talking animal counselor. Witch clans patrol from the skies and warrior polar bears do battle. The malevolent governing body "the Magisterium" -- also referenced in the book as "the Church" -- is racing to decipher the true nature of the mystical particles known as "Dust" by kidnapping children and cutting away the invisible thread that bonds them to their daemons, which, in essence, removes their souls"

So what fantasy elements does he introduce to differentiate it from the real University of Oxford then?

1373. Prejudicial concerns

Comment #80893 by Cartomancer on October 23, 2007 at 11:47 am

Bravo Professor Grayling! Rem acu tetigisti with a vengeance!

1374. Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #80890 by Cartomancer on October 23, 2007 at 11:41 am

And at length when ye complain,
With a murmur weak and vain,
'Tis to see the tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you:
Blood is on the grass like dew.

Then it is to feel revenge,
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood-and wrong for wrong:
Do not thus when ye are strong.

...

Thou art Wisdom-Freedom never
Dreams that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue,
Of which priests make such ado

...

Oh turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy beloved sake,
On wealth and war and fraud: whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

Science, and Poetry, and Thought,
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

...

And these words shall then become
Like Oppressions thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again--again--again.

1375. Help Counter the New Atheist Crusade to 'Evangelize' America!

Comment #79529 by Cartomancer on October 17, 2007 at 3:12 pm

Evangelize - from the Greek Eu- meaning good or beneficial (Eulogy, Euphemism, possibly what Moore was thinking with [E]utopia) and angelidzo, from angelos meaning messenger (whence 'Angel').

So basically it means to spread the "good news".

While I have some sympathy with the idea that we ourselves are spreading much better news and so should like the evangelist label, I actually prefer to think about it the other way around.

We're not spreading good news. We're spreading the word about BAD news. Religion is most definitely bad news, and we're telling everybody just how bad it really is. Given this we're actually Kakangelists or some such. Of course, we all hope that once the deluded have realised just how bad their own news is they will start looking for something better, but we're primarily a consciousness-raising movement and our gift is to set things in perspective and allow the arguments to speak for themselves.

1376. God Hates the World

Comment #79194 by Cartomancer on October 16, 2007 at 12:25 pm

Wow, this is something of an honour. I can only affirm what steve99, Corylus and oxytocin have already said. We welcome you with open arms.

I've read the in-depth account of the hell made real that is the Westborough Baptist Church posted on this thread, and if even a fraction of the things said about your childhood are true then I cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like. I started out thinking I would simply find some twisted reasoning behind Fred Phelps' nauseating homophobia campaign, but the lurid atrocities of this abusive monster have sickened me to the core. Words fail me...

1377. Report on Hindu god Ram withdrawn

Comment #79113 by Cartomancer on October 16, 2007 at 7:16 am

The problem with the Indian situation and the image we have of it in the west is that it's so self-contained. There's the violence in Kashmir of course, but that can quite easily be chalked up to Muslim vs. Hindu clash of civilisations. And most people in the west tend to regard Hindus as peaceful, traditionally-minded eccentrics with minds buzzing full of benign spiritualist nonsense, so it's probably all the fault of those nasty militaristic Muslims anyway. Otherwise what we see is an established culture quietly getting on with its own business, not really doing anything overtly reprehensible such as genocide or savage repression of women. We fret a bit about the caste system maybe, but we've got a class system too and surely it must be an awful lot better than once it was? Right? Indian emmigrants we meet in our own countries are generally hard-working, law-abiding folk who don't stoop to lecturing us on why they think we're wrong and who are more than happy to coexist with us in peace. Given all this, we think, what right do we have to stomp in with our imperialistic boots on and tell them they can't make offerings to a flaming space monkey and a guy with eight arms? It just seems far too paternalistic and interventionist to tell another culture that it is backward and needs to change -to get in line with the modern world which we defined. Change, we think, must come from within (now there's an ironic Buddhist reference for you) at a pace determined by the Indians themselves.

India doesn't have much by way of oil reserves for us to steal either ...

1378. Report on Hindu god Ram withdrawn

Comment #79103 by Cartomancer on October 16, 2007 at 6:00 am

I can remember making little stick puppets of Hanuman and the monkey army in primary school when we were doing some multicultural awareness thing, then doing a little production of the story. I thought it was a pretty cool idea at the time.

It never occurred to me at this point that some Indian folks actually took all this stuff seriously, I mean why would they - we in England don't think that Jesus had real magic powers and rose from the dead do we? Those Greeks can't have actually thought that all their gods and monsters were real could they? It's all just funny ancient stories with lots of exciting heroes and battles and magic - brilliant stuff! I was very fond indeed of religion at that age.

I really wish my naive seven year old self were right on this one...

1379. John Templeton's Universe

Comment #79098 by Cartomancer on October 16, 2007 at 5:39 am

It's too early in the morning to paraphrase Cato the Censor... It's always too early for that...

1380. A Revelation

Comment #78729 by Cartomancer on October 14, 2007 at 3:19 pm

I think you misunderstand what I am trying to say. I would never argue that the Christian church was a necessary precondition for the development of scientific thought - that would be to engage in very unhelpful counterfactual speculation indeed. I approach the issue as an historian, which means that I am concerned to explain how the situation we see today actually did get to be the way it is, not to speculate how things might have been were certain factors different.

I can just about imagine a society developing a scientific mindset, from scratch, from atheistic or polytheistic beginnings, although since no society on earth has ever been without religion it is a stretch to imagine what it would be like.

Were we able to run the universe again from the beginning several times, removing all trace of Christianity as and when it arises, and at the end of this experiment see whether European society developed scientific thought as quickly, less quickly or more quickly, then maybe these speculations would be valid. As it happens history is not an experimental science. I don't go to the lab every morning, rustle up a patch of synthetic twelfth century and then examine what it does under controlled conditions. I cannot isolate one variable, in this case religiosity, and assign it an absolute mathematical value in the production of scientific thought. The impact of Christian values, the institutional church and religiosity in general on the shaping of Western thought is very complex, multi-faceted and impossible to circumscribe absolutely. Counterfactual history is an amusing parlour game but nothing more - the evidence we have simply does not admit of that degree of precision in our calculations.

I'm not playing the "let's rate Christianity's moral worth as a cultural force in history" game, because history is not about points scoring. It happened. We can't change that. It doesn't matter whether Christianity was entirely responsible for the birth of science in the middle ages or not responsible at all as far as the modern world is concerned - it is quite demonstrably opposed to science now and that, first and foremost, is what we should be worrying about.

I think you draw too absolute a distinction between "coming up with evidence to support a pre-existing theory" and "trying to understand the universe". There is an implicit assumption in what you say that people were implicitly able to tell the difference. As Polydactyl says, we know now that the earth goes around the sun but this is a counter-intitive idea and in order to figure it out you need to have some quite recondite observations under your belt made with the aid of a decent telescope and some advanced maths. The sun rotating around the earth was not considered a theory at this time, it was considered a fact. Likewise before Einstein the idea of absolute time was not considered a theory but a fact. Sometimes, quite often in fact, it is only when new evidence emerges that you feel the need to question the validity of your underlying assumptions at all.

Likewise, when pretty much everybody believes there is a God who wrote the scriptures - and the science of the day backs up this hypothesis - scriptures become a bona fide source of scientific fact. The mistake you make is to think that they were viewed as an alternative source of ideas from nature and did not have the backing of scientific method. Consider the state of science today. If it were demonstrated, irrefutably, with scientific evidence, that the contents of the Bible were indeed written by some infallible divine agency then modern science would HAVE to treat them as a specially valid source of information on reality just like the medievals did. If the book says Virgin Birth then there must have been one. If it says there's a hell then that must exist too. If they don't exist then the Infallible Magic Book Hypothesis doesn't hold up. Which then is more fantastic to believe, that the book is wrong and so there is no God (i.e. the only plausable metaphysical system contemporary science has dreamed up is wrong), or that Virgin Births are possible through a slight kink in the operation of reality? There is not enough evidence to warrant a paradigm shift, so why complain that there isn't one?

How easy is it today to write an academic paper in biology arguing against Darwinism? Very difficult indeed. Why? Because there is an evil Darwinist Conspiracy that suppresses all attempts to argue otherwise? No, it's Because there isn't any evidence you can find that contradicts Darwinism. Should any such evidence actually come to light in the future then yes, Darwinism might become an untenable paradigm, but we have not discovered that evidence yet and cannot be called to task for not having done so. This is exactly the situation the medievals were in with regard to the God Hypothesis, and if you can't argue against the God Hypothesis then you pretty much have to take it as scientific fact.

Yes, the role of the church was to enforce dogma, but it was also the role of the church to promulgate dogmas based on what wasconsidered to be the truth. That's what all these libraries and universities were FOR - so that theologians, philosophers and scientists could research the truth as best they might and so their dogmas would be correct. You seem to be under the impression that theologians are a specialist wing of the church in the middle ages and subordinate to a class of evil, anti-intellectual censors whose only job is to cackle maniacally while prohibiting independent thought. This isn't the case at all: pretty much all the major policy-making church bureaucrats held theology degrees and their primary concern was exactly what they said it was - to teach people the truth about God as they understood it. We have professors of the public understanding of science - are they evil conspirators working to stifle intellectual freedom too?

1381. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticizes popular atheist writers

Comment #78583 by Cartomancer on October 13, 2007 at 4:41 pm

Catharism eh? Funnily enough I'm writing a paper at the moment on certain thirteenth century English theologians' responses to dualist heresies (one of whom, John Blund, was actually Archbishop of Canterbury in 1232) and the tone adopted by some of them reminds me of nothing other than our very own Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion...

1382. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticizes popular atheist writers

Comment #78579 by Cartomancer on October 13, 2007 at 4:31 pm

Oh, and last time I checked Swansea was in Wales, not England...

1383. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticizes popular atheist writers

Comment #78575 by Cartomancer on October 13, 2007 at 4:23 pm

Rowan Williams is a wonderful Archbishop of Canterbury. Ticks all the boxes - big beard, soothing authoritative voice, so woolly and liberal that pinning him down on an issue is harder than nailing an ocean to the wall... If all faith-heads were genuinely nice, dotty old avuncular figures like him then I'd have no trouble living in a world full of them.

I'm just waiting to see him in the grand final of the world eyebrow jousting championships against Sir Bernard Ingham...

1384. A Revelation

Comment #78481 by Cartomancer on October 13, 2007 at 6:32 am

Furthermore, medieval-bashing is divisive and confrontational. It paints another us good them bad picture rather than presenting the more appealing notion that, yes, the theistic mindset had its day and made its contribution to our societies but now it has been naturally superceded and don't you theists really want to move with the times and learn some really neat new stuff? We were all theists once, so history tells us, and there's no shame in it when you don't know any better. Today it is possible to know better, but not everyone does - education is the only way to solve this problem, not scorn on its own. I have nothing but contempt for those who wilfully resist education in this manner, but surely we should be doing everything we can not to put off those who would otherwise welcome it?

Perhaps these are just the rants of a Medieval Historian trying to make a case for the value of his subject among scientists who usually tend to look down on it, but I genuinely think that ignorance of medieval history is just as much to blame for persistent pseudomedieval attitudes among the religious as ignorance of modern science. If they only knew what a different world the medieval centuries were to our own, and how its concerns shaped its thoughts, they would be far less inclined toward trying to transplant medieval notions onto the fabric of modern existence. Likewise they would be far less willing to oppose modern science if they only knew that the very medievals they look up to did no such thing in their own day.

1385. A Revelation

Comment #78478 by Cartomancer on October 13, 2007 at 6:17 am

As do I miaka, as do I...

prettygoodformonkeys: I'm not saying that medieval science and modern science are exactly the same, obviously they are not. What I am saying is that you can't suddenly draw a line somewhere in the fifteenth century and say "aha, by Jove they've started doing science now!" then write off everything that went before as crude, superstitious nonsense with nothing to contribute to the development of the scientific mindset.

Yes, 99% of the science was very wrong indeed. Yes the method was not completely in place so the errors could not be systematically pruned in the same way scientists prune them now. Yes we would laugh at their ideas from a modern perspective. But this is how 99% of all the cleverest people on the planet thought about things for many thouands of years and to write it off as a great big church conspiracy to suppress what everyone sort of knew anyway (which would require the complicity of pretty much all the religious authorities on the planet) is so utterly fatuuous it hurts. These people WERE making intellectual progress. Even technological and social progress. Clocks, spectacles, windmills, halter-ploughs, trebuchets, gothic architecture, steam organs, universities, guilds, theories of just war, typographic indexing systems, tremendous economic progress and yes, the development of at least some of the scientific method. All these things and more come from the middle ages. You can complain if you want that the advances were slower and more sporadic then, but that's how cultural progress is made - when it reaches critical mass and the right elements fall into place together a quickening occurs. This happens in evolution too so I gather.

Think about a culture that has maybe ten or twenty learned books in common circulation and a literate, intellectual community numbering at most a couple of thousand. This is Europe at the beginning of the middle ages. These intellectuals are fully aware that the ancient societies which preceded them knew far more than they do - the ruins surrounding them and the books they have inherited stand testament to this. Books are special, rare, expensive and fetishised things. The written word is a powerful arcane language used for transferring secrets from one wise man to another. How easy it is for us to scoff at this attitude surrounded as we are by words and books multiplied to ruinous excess! Nullius in Verba might be a sensible motto for the royal society to adopt once Europe has undergone eight centuries of intellectual quickening and got over its book fetish, but can we really blame the early medievals for thinking that books, by virtue of simply existing, hold value? From this world, jump forward to the twelfth century with the return of Aristotle and the arrival of the Arab scientists in the west. Suddenly the paltry pickings of your science are swamped by a feast of ideas from the distant past in a sophisticated, complex philosophical system. What's the sensible thing to do, grapple with these ideas as thoroughly as possible to extract all the wisdom you can, or throw your hands in the air and say "I'm going to conduct my own experiments and to hell with what the learned men of the past thought." With hindsight we have a different perspective, but it would be the equivalent today of Richard Dawkins saying "Stuff that Darwin fellow, and that bore Newton, I'm going to start from scratch". And actually some people did start to conduct their own experiments while at the same time grappling with the Aristotelian framework. As I said before the great achievement of medieval thought, upon the recovery of ancient science, was not the discovery, as they had hoped, that it could adequately explain the entire universe but the discovery that it could not. Why condemn them for giving Aristotle a fair hearing before eventually abandoning him?

You seem to assume that it is natural and logical, whatever your cultural and intellectual background, to conclude that atheism and modern scientific method are self evident. Thus whenever they do not predominate there must be some kind of conspiracy holding them down. I get the distinct impression that in your world all the medieval popes and cardinals and bishops are sitting there thinking "oooer, they've rumbled us. If this gets out then all this silly religion nonsense we're peddling purely to control the ignorant masses is going to fall flat on its face and it's no more big dinners for us anymore." That's not how these things work at all. The conspiracy theorist's fantasy of the educated elite who know better taking shameless advantage of the oppressed is almost never accurate. The medieval clergy, for the most part, ACTUALLY BELIEVED this stuff. Christian doctrine and the philosophical underpinnings it was given genuinely did seem the most logical and coherent explanation for the universe at this time. The "oppressors" were just as wrapped up in the system as the "oppressed".

Lucretius did indeed posit an Atheistic metaphysics in the first century, and among the ancients he was not alone. His work was only barely known in the middle ages but that's not the point - Lucretius' ideas were never considered mainstream and, crucially, did not explain a vast multitude of phenomena that have only comparatively recently been explained by modern science. I repeat that for the classical or medieval mind the God Hypothesis is not a blatantly ridiculous one, while the No God Hypothesis very much is. Take just the examples given in the God Delusion of arguments for the existence of God - our own rejoinders to them would not have worked in the middle ages. Anselm's ontological argument is silly because it relies on the idea of absolute ontological excellence as a real property of things. Everybody in the middle ages and most of the ancients thought this was incontrovertably true - by their very natures some things are just better than others. Likewise how do you account for the complexity of nature without Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection? And without modern cosmology - facilitated by telescopes that work on principles derived from classical optics transmitted via arabic and latin sources in the middle ages - the prime mover argument suddenly seems very plausible.

Furthermore, what of the competing claims of all those world religions that lead so many of us into Atheism? Imagine living the entirety of your life in a small village and never meeting anyone of a different race, religion or culture. The only information you are ever likely to get about other religions comes either from classical texts which less than one per cent of the population can read (and if they are able to read them they will almost certainly be doing so with Augustine's account of classical religion as demonic parody from City of God ringing in their ears) or from reports of the crusades in the Holy Land, the reconquista in Spain and the Jewish communities in Europe (which were mostly expelled in the twelfth century). Nothing but nothing but Abrahamic monotheism then...

Overall the lack of Atheists in the middle ages (indeed up until the nineteenth century) is perfectly explicable without the need to posit conscious oppression from religious authorities. This is where we came from, this is where our culture came from, this is what we have advanced beyond. But we could not have evolved from classical to modern thinkers without becoming medieval thinkers in the meantime. Or maybe we could, but as it happens we most certainly didn't. Medieval-bashing in this context is just as helpful as shouting at a primitive mudfish and thinking it backward because it hasn't evolved proper legs and lungs and come out on land all at once. Every stage in its evolution has some survival advantage, just as every stage in our intellectual progress has something to contribute to the stage after it. Our ancestors took millions of years to slowly crawl from the sea - a couple of thousand to crawl from the darkness of religion is positively miraculous!

1386. A Revelation

Comment #78425 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 7:41 pm

Also, from the medieval perspective, arguing that a virgin birth is impossible is a much harder proposition than arguing the same thing in today's intellectual climate. How would you do it? Of course it's biologically impossible under normal circumstances, but with an all-powerful god on the scene anything is possible. You either have to argue that God does not exist (very difficult without sufficient rejoinders to Anselm's ontological argument, the argument from design or the Prime Mover argument) or that the scriptural account is wrong (also very tricky given the state of knowledge on philology, textual criticism and transmission - these people still believed that the septuagint was translated word-perfectly by all seventy of its translators in Ptolemaic Egypt at exactly the same time).

These people did not have Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russel or Kurt Godel or Charles Darwin or Pierre Laplace or Isaac Newton or even William of Ockham. They barely had Aristotle for that matter. Is it really fair to condemn them for assuming that the God Hypothesis is easily the best one in town and anyone arguing against it is deluded? Even a Ricardus of Dawkins, Regent Master of the Public Understanding of Natural Philosophy at the recently founded University of Oxford would have a tough time believing anything else...

1387. A Revelation

Comment #78423 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 7:31 pm

Well, given that the only conferences one could attend were the various church councils held to formalise points of doctrine you'd probably get invited and told to recant or have copies of your works ritually burned (this happened to Abelard twice, at Soissons in 1121 and Sens in 1141, both at the instigation of his nemesis St. Bernard and Bernard's nasty little bootlick William of St. Thierry). The closest thing to "publishing" that existed was having your works copied out by university stationers or the friars of your own mendicant order, and you wouldn't get that far if you weren't largely orthodox in your thinking. Your ideas might be ridiculed and argued against by other authors who did circulate widely however, as those of the Cathars were. Tenure at Universities was again done by co-option, some chairs belonging to the mendicant orders and others to 'secular' masters. You wouldn't get the required theology degrees if you consistently espoused heretical ideas, so that too was out.

As for burning at the stake, yes, technically that was the official prescribed punishment for heresy after the Synod of Verona in 1184, but in practice it almost never happened to an academic theologian. Sigier of Brabant, for instance, was detained under indefinite house arrest, not executed. Even Copernicus was only detained in such a way much later on. In any case a simple recanting of your errors was almost always enough to secure pardon. Popular heretical movements were of much greater concern to the church authorities for obvious political and economic reasons.

1388. A Revelation

Comment #78418 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 6:59 pm

I think I presented something of the case for the Western scientific tradition stemming in part from medieval scholasticism on another thread some time ago. Posts 114-116 of

http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,1499,Arrogance-dogma-and-why-science---not-faith---is-the-new-enemy-of-reason,Melanie-Phillips,page3#comments

Bonzai is slightly misleading when he says that the Catholic church promulgated dogmas based on Aristotle or ever considered the Stagirite an infallible authority. From the thirteenth century onward Aristotle's physics and metaphysics were afforded great respect (and some of his simpler logical works, translated by Boethius, were similarly respected from about the sixth century), and became the paradigm by which scientific endeavour was conducted. Respect for ancient written authority was indeed much greater then than it is now, however, at best Aristotle was considered to have achieved all that was possible without divine revelation and so his theories were by necessity incomplete - the extra data provided by revelation had not been taken into account. As such, for example, his ideas on the human soul (essentially that it was just the substantial form of the body) had to be reconciled with those in Augustine and the scriptures to take into account the properties a soul would need to store sin and achieve full bodily resurrection at the end of time. Similarly Aristotle's universe was to all intents and purposes eternal, while the Christian universe most emphatically could not be.

In 1210 and 1215 the University of Paris banned the teaching of Aristotle's natural philosophy until these recently translated works could be purged of error. Such a purging never took place, though they were back on the curriculum by the middle of the century (when Oxford masters such as Roger Bacon had to be brought in to teach them). In 1277 a list of 217 propositions based on excessively Aristotelian ideas were condemned as heretical (including, amusingly, some proposed by none other than Scholastic lard-bucket superstar friar Thomas Aquinas and more by his Franciscan disputant Sigier of Brabant, who was killed while under house arrest by his mad secretary with a pencil sharpener). This moment has been seen by some as a great step forward in scientific thinking because it prevented western thought becoming little more than dogmatic aristotelianism. I'm not quite that deterministic, but it certainly demonstrates that Aristotle's dominance in the medieval schoolroom was easily circumscribed.

As far as official dogmas were concerned the church merely asserted certain facts that Christians should believe, never how those facts must be explained. You could come up with your own very off-the-wall philosophical justification for something like the virgin birth or the resurrection of the body, and you could use whatever principles of physics you liked in that justification. And your opponents were free to pick your theory apart and expose its flaws or inconsistencies, often by bringing up evidence that it does not adequately explain. This is not really all that different from modern science except that the facts which needed explaining in the first place come from scriptural assertion as well as observation and (occasionally) experimental test.

1389. The benefits of 80 million years without sex

Comment #78265 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 10:26 am

These things make me feel hopelessly inadequate. I've gone three years without sex and I don't seem to have adapted to my environment one bit...

1390. A Revelation

Comment #78262 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 10:19 am

I should also like to register my displeasure at prettygoodformonkeys' scurrilous misrepresentation of medieval intellectual culture, though I fear he is simply retailing the usual stereotyped picture of the Middle Ages we have all inherited from their Renaissance and Enlightenment detractors.

The precise relationship between the church and scientific endeavour in the Medieval centuries is neither a simple nor a monolithic one, and it would take me far more time and space than I have here to do it justice. Suffice to say that while Christian doctrine had a profound effect on scientific thinking in these centuries it was no more restrictive than, for example, Darwinism is now. You can't just come up with any old theory today unless it fits with the accumulated evidence and theoretical background of modern science, just as back then scholars had to take their own theoretical background into account. The fact that their physics and metaphysics were wrong is immaterial - Newton's physics are in many ways fundamentally wrong but scientists until Einstein had to take them into account and don't receive flak for doing so.

It is with the end of the middle ages, with Renaissance humanism, the counter-reformation and the reaction to the Enlightenment that the church really becomes the enemy of science. Copernicus and Galileo are the examples everyone tends to think of when religious oppression science comes to mind, but in fact they are products of a rather different intellectual climate to the one which produced Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and William of Ockham. It has become too fashionable these days to label everything repressive and backward-looking as "medieval", or worse to conflate "medieval" with "dark-age", which are in fact two distinct periods in European history. The "dark ages" refer roughly to the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west (c. 350-450 AD) to the seventh or eighth centuries when the Frankish, Anglo-saxon and similar stable kingdoms emerge. They are so called not primarily because of their cultural backwardness but because there is hardly any written evidence on which to base their history - they're dark because we can see only very sketchily what was going on. The ancient Greek "dark age" from the collapse of the Mycenaean empire in c. 1200 BC to the emergence of the classical city states in about 700 BC gave us the epics of Homer and the didactic poems of Hesiod, so it is not entirely fitting to call these periods culturally backward - often they are evidence of changing and developing culture and give rise to unprecedented new cultural forms when history writing re-emerges.

1391. A Revelation

Comment #78258 by Cartomancer on October 12, 2007 at 9:56 am

What, might I ask, does a "Deputy Taste Editor" actually do? Presumably the Wall Street Journal thus has a fully-fledged Taste Editor as well. I have images in my mind of somebody munching page after page of slipshod journalism and commenting on its piquancy, saltiness and flavour...

1392. Muslims tell Christians: 'Make peace with us or survival of world is at stake'

Comment #78078 by Cartomancer on October 11, 2007 at 6:29 pm

Yes, a wonderful idea. Why don't the Christians and Muslims all get together and focus on their similarities rather than their differences. Then they can put up a united front against the rest of us instead...

Seriously though, I don't know why nobody has thought of this before. I mean, if we had known eight hundred years ago that just writing a letter asking everyone to play nice and get along was the answer then we could have avoided that whole nasty crusades thing and everything that went with it. Maybe we can write to the North Koreans to stop oppressing their people and trying to acquire nuclear weapons too? Then we'll send a letter to the Indians and Pakistanis asking them to forget all that nasty Kashmir nonsense. Why not write to Fred Phelps and the homophobes of middle america asking that we all get along? How about sending out a raft of letters to big multinational companies asking them nicely to stop polluting the atmosphere and exploiting workers in third world countries? Maybe we could post a missal to all the career criminals in prisons asking them to stop committing crimes and do something productive with their lives?

Now where did I put all my stamps...?

1393. The New Atheism: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen

Comment #78015 by Cartomancer on October 11, 2007 at 1:44 pm

Locri, post 12,

Yes, I have often wondered why such things as Atheism are generally allotted to the left hand side of the political spectrum while things like homophobia are the preserve of the right. Of course, this is just shorthand and in principle it is possible to be a right-wing atheist or a left-wing homophobe but traditionally they very much do go together. I suppose you can be an economic conservative, fond of competitive big business and opposed to state subsidies etc, while remaining a social liberal on gay marriage, the welfare state, etc. or vice versa.

I suppose it is because right-wing values are conservative values that tend to place emphasis on tradition, established institutions and the interests of the powerful whereas left-wing values place emphasis on equality, progressiveness and reform. Religious institutions tend to be the biggest, most conservative and most established patriarchal institutions in our society and so they are naturally the sort of things right-wingers are drawn to conserve. Similarly, the only objection that can be raised to homosexuality is a silly religious one - naturally right-wing territory - and it speaks of non-traditional family structures and lifestyles which get the uber-conservatives jumpy.

Ultimately it's where the battle lines have always traditionally been drawn...

1394. Dawkins - what can't he be blamed for?

Comment #75214 by Cartomancer on October 2, 2007 at 4:06 am

It is a well known fact that Richard Dawkins invented the common cold, causes global warming, started the bubonic plague and secretly runs the governments of at least fifteen countries.

Transubstantiation does not work within ten feet of Richard Dawkins.

Evolution happens three hundred times faster wherever Richard Dawkins walks.

Richard Dawkins's bike can circle the earth in a matter of hours and one touch from it is deadly to all religious people.

Richard Dawkins only wears glasses to conceal the laser death rays that shoot from his eyes.

And of course he causes religious fundamentalism, kills puppies and gave birth to Hitler.

More to the point his books have made me late for more deadlines than I care to name...

1395. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #75039 by Cartomancer on October 1, 2007 at 12:25 pm

Now, as to the historical tradition of teaching theology at universities in general, and Oxford in particular, it must be said that Professor Dawkins's suggestion is the very height of iconoclasm. It would not be going too far to suggest that the theology faculty has been absolutely central to the development and function of most European universities from their beginnings in the late twelfth century until the great reforms of the nineteenth.

Apart from a few specialised places like Bologna (Law), Montpellier (Medicine) and Salerno (also Medicine), pretty much all medieval universities had a theology faculty and it almost always took centre stage as the highest and most prestigious of the faculties. The origins of the university are obscure, but they undoubtedly developed from high medieval cathedral schools and independent schools, in part to gather the diverse disciplines of scholarly endeavour into one institution (the medievals were generally obsessive systematisers and organisers) and in part to afford legal and political protection to the masters and students gathering in university towns in rapidly increasing numbers. The smallest universities generally only had the arts faculty (which offered a preliminary training in the trivial arts and quadrivial sciences) and the theology faculty, while the larger ones generally boasted one or both of the other two "higher" faculties of medicine and law (canon law and civil law). Oxford, Cambridge and Paris all specialised in theology. Ironically, under the fully developed thirteenth century system, one had to have completed a bachelor's degree in arts and a master's degree in arts before even beginning study at the theology faculty, and sometimes a higher degree from one of the other faculties as well. Theology students in the Middle Ages were never younger than 35 years old and inevitably had teaching careers behind them in arts, so it seems that in following his proposed theological studies the good Professor Dawkins would only be following a very old tradition indeed!

One of the most common maxims used by medieval intellectuals to describe the relationship between theology and philosophy (generally meaning natural philosophy and grammar) is "philosophia ancilla theologiae" - philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. She is subordinate to and can help to shore up the claims of her mistress, but she cannot achieve the highest insights into the truth all by herself. The system of a preparatory arts faculty and an exalted theology faculty reified this idea very effectively. Since the main career path for medieval graduates was to run the bureaucracy of the church and minister to the pastoral care of the people, theology degrees were actually considered supremely vocational and very useful in highly practical ways.

Mind you, the "lucrative arts" of medicine and law often attracted the lion's share of prospective arts graduates because they were seen a quick way to wealth and prosperity - they were the MBA courses of their day. Walter of Chatillon wrote some very telling satires on this subject, and little has changed it would seem - nichil novus sub sole...

The reason the earliest universities have theology faculties is because they have always had them, and those faculties have a tremendous entrenched institutional presence. They have built up huge libraries, manuscript collections and vested interests over hundreds of years. There was a University of Oxford long before there was a Church of England, before there was a Parliament or a Cabinet or a Prime Minister. Before there was a Renaissance or an Enlightenment or an Industrial Revolution. Before there was a United States or a Commonwealth or even a New World at all. Tradition reigns supreme in England and such things are very very difficult indeed to shift even a little way.

As for the future, well, I'll leave that to minds better equipped to think on it. We historians tend to shy away from speculation about what has not yet come to pass - it's thinking in the wrong direction as far as we're concerned. Having said all that though the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have not remained at the forefront of world academia by clinging blindly to tradition in the face of modernity. We have, in fact, embraced science and rationalism with as much gusto as anywhere else and we have not been afraid to make sweeping changes where they are necessary. The list of great innovators from ancient universities is a very long one - let us hope we can learn from their iconoclasm and make that list even longer. We are Robert Grosseteste, we are Roger Bacon, We are Francis Bacon. We are Isaac Newton and John Wilkins and William Harvey. We are Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell and Isiah Berlin. We are Francis Crick, we are James Watson, we are Steven Hawking.

We are Richard Dawkins...

1396. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #75022 by Cartomancer on October 1, 2007 at 11:37 am

Careful now Dr. Benway - the addled principal of Wycliffe Hall does not speak on behalf of the Oxford Theology Faculty. In fact he is on record saying that the faculty are the ones with the problem, not his rancid mock-gothic house of frothing loonies.

I can report that most of them are far more liberal and sophisticated than he is. In fact pretty much all the theologians I have had contact with freely admit that their beliefs are merely a personal choice and cannot be objectively valid to those who do not choose them.

1397. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #74982 by Cartomancer on October 1, 2007 at 9:29 am

Bonzai - actually it seems you do agree with Dawkins on this one. Surely studies like the one you detail are precisely what the good Professor means when he talks about "excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects." Actually your friend's studies sound like they would be right at home in any faculty of history, oriental studies, anthropology or philosophy.

1398. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #74941 by Cartomancer on October 1, 2007 at 7:32 am

A "school leaver" is someone who has finished secondary education. Legally you're allowed to leave school at 16 here but most people, and almost all of those who want to go on to University, stay on and do A-levels (advanced levels) until 18. The confusion probably arises because over here we don't call university "school". School for us is everything up to but not including university level, though many sixth-form colleges and FE colleges will be referred to as "college" rather than school. To us school has implications of childhood and immaturity, when you get to 18 or so it starts to rankle somewhat and you feel the need for a more grown-up term.

1399. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #74938 by Cartomancer on October 1, 2007 at 7:19 am

I tried defacing the sign in front of Wycliffe Hall today by writing "now with added bible-thumping evangelical craziness" below the crest. Unfortunately it was raining and my biro didn't work...

1400. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74745 by Cartomancer on September 30, 2007 at 8:13 am

Indeed Wilk1978, but surely if the monks have always had this moral authority then it should have been incumbent on them to protest sooner rather than waiting four decades to express their displeasure? The whole reason we're talking about the monks at all is because their contribution seems to be making a real difference where purely secular popular protest has not. With power comes responsibility, and those in positions of self-appointed moral authority ought to hold themselves to a higher standard.