1401. 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.

1402. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74641 by Cartomancer on September 29, 2007 at 7:21 pm

If Theravada Buddhism is such a force for good, irrevocably opposed to oppresion and tyranny, then why is it that the monks only came out to protest after recent government attacks on activists protesting over hikes in fuel prices rather than back in 1962 when the military Junta first took power in General Ne Win's coup?

Why is it, incidentally, that Burma could remain a military dictatorship for forty-five years if its people are so religious and enamoured by their egalitarian, peace-loving monastic traditions? It is worth noting that the monks' first actions before hitting the streets were to withdraw all spiritual services from government military personnel. This of course indicates that they were providing such services in the first place...

Of course what they are doing now is laudable, but are they doing it because they are Buddhist monks or because they are just as fed up with tyrannical misrule as the rest of the Burmese citizenry? Sure they are icons of morality and legitimacy to these people, but doesn't that mean they are at least tacitly complicit in shoring up the regime by not speaking out sooner? One wonders whether their comparative apathy over the last four decades has not discouraged citizen disobedience, given that their current action is now encouraging it. Might Burma be a free country today had these saffron-wearing ascetics given more thought to their social responsibilities and less to their mystical mumbo-jumbo?

The bottom line is that religion does affect how people behave. It makes some people do bad things and other people do good things - either at random or at least in a far from rationally coherent manner. Do we really want our most important moral conversations held to ransom by archaic myth? Do we really want the incidence of good and ill in our world to turn on the capricious whims of demented prophets?

1403. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73778 by Cartomancer on September 26, 2007 at 6:36 am

Hmm... you know, you might just have something very interesting there Dr. Benway.

I have always wondered at this strange phenomenon of religious ecstasy, the heightened common feeling and sense of extreme interpersonal joy that accompanies most god bothering groups these days. I have seen people in the throes of it and it frightens me. I used to think it was they who had some kind of deep mental problem, but it turns out that maybe I had it backwards.

I was recently diagnosed as having a mild form of Asperger's syndrome, which apparently means that I can't process emotional responses in quite the same way as most people do. I have always found that I lacked most of the instinctive engagement that others display for reading emotional situations - instead of just knowing when others are sad, angry or whatever I have to consciously process the external signs and come to some tentative judgement. I also find myself somewhat obsessive over order, symmetry and neatness - if there is no logic or pattern behind it then I am often unsettled by it and generally seek to shut it out of my thoughts. I have never been able to understand why some think blind faith is comforting because for me it is so disquieting as to be positively terrifying. I'm not saying you have to have an unusual mental template to think this way, but whatever the reason, I do.

If these sorts of raw emotional responses to group behaviour are indeed a most powerful draw for religion then it seems that my condition has in some way innoculated me against them! I'm biologically predisposed to be an atheist! Of course my upbringing by atheist parents in an all but atheistic society surrounded by atheist friends helped a lot.

This puts me in a strange position with regard to other atheists and especially with regard to atheist converts. I see little virtue in my freedom from religion just as I see little virtue in my abstinence from alcohol - neither has ever tempted me so what's the big deal in not doing either? I do not have to struggle with an emotional yearning for comforting lies because I do not find such lies comforting, and I can only imagine what it must be like for those who do.

1404. Root and Branch

Comment #73522 by Cartomancer on September 25, 2007 at 7:29 am

Aw shucks! I'm flattered...

I doubt my supervisor will be though when he finds out that this is what I've been doing all summer instead of working on my thesis...

1405. Keeping the faith at school

Comment #73521 by Cartomancer on September 25, 2007 at 7:27 am

Yeah, I learned all my childhood lessons in morality by watching Transformers, Knightmare and He-man!

1406. Yes, it's a Hobbit. The debate that has divided science is solved at last (sort of)

Comment #73503 by Cartomancer on September 25, 2007 at 5:58 am

Leeobee:

My uncontrollable fantasy geek gene eventually got the better of me. The one you're looking for is Eru, called Illuvatar in Elvish. Actually Tolkien considered this being as a fantasy alternative history for the monotheistic christian god rather than a separate fictional entity. It even has its own orders of angels and daemons in the form of the Ainur, Valar and Maiar spirits. He got into some quite obscure debates with fellow Catholics about whether this position was blasphemous or not.

I should probably stop now before I get too carried away. Atheism my precious, it's atheism we talks about on here...

1407. Root and Branch

Comment #73308 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 4:58 pm

Also, is anyone else even remotely concerned with their own theistic background credentials? I ask this because I seem to be in something of a minority as a third generation atheist who had no religious upbringing whatsoever. For me atheism was not something I came to as an adult - it's the culture I was raised with...

1408. Talking Action Figure Jesus

Comment #73301 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Dear Santa (or Dan Dennett as you go by these days),

I have been a good little atheist all year and so for the midwinter festival of ritualised gift exchange I would like:

Richard Dawkins bobblehead and bicycle clips,
Christopher Hitchens doll with real smoking action, authentic US passport and plastic wall of separation accessories,
Sam Harris Lunchbox,
Plush AC Grayling toy,
New Adventures of Bertrand Russell Annual 2007,
God Delusion Fridge Magnets
Membership of PZ Myers Children's fan club

Thank you very much,

Cartomancer

1409. Root and Branch

Comment #73295 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 4:37 pm

I think what we have here is a very good piece on the history and inanity of anti-darwinist movements spoiled by a massive case of sour grapes over the noble efforts of Dawkins, Hitchens et. al.

I have a strong suspicion that Mr. Hacking has read the God Delusion etc. with strong preconceptions as to what it must contain. I say this because many of his points on the nature of scientific endeavour sound almost Dawkinsean in tone - the enthusiasm for raising fresh questions and debating the details, the value placed on explanatory analogies, the disdain for simple answers and meaningless controversies. And yet he accuses Professor Dawkins of being an arrogant know-it all, a "religion-baiter" and of presenting evolutionary theory as a cut-and-dried package without controversy.

Anyone who has read Dawkins's marvellous piece "Why I don't debate creationists" will know just how mendacious that portrayal of him is. In fact I think Dawkins rouses far more admiration for the living, breathing work that is evolutionary biology today than Hacking's terse words of praise ever will. I was a bit puzzled as to where the charges of arrogance come from until I saw the clues. The overly lavish praise of Genesis as poetic allegory ("Those who think that Genesis is just another old book should marvel that its authors got it right, in the very beginning, planting the tree of life in the human mind."), the just-a-bit-too-keen dropping of names like Popper and Kant and Hegel, the move to establish credentials in a theistic background (Episcopalian for his sins, don't you know?). It seems to me that Mr. Hacking is a classic non-confrontational liberal intellectual who has an instinctive aversion to statements of passionate intent and especially to people who try to point out that, sometimes, yes things really are that simple.

He's not quite a believer in belief, but he certainly comes across as a believer that the only way we're going to solve the world's problems is if everyone suddenly starts thinking in a nice, accommodating, woolly fashion and nobody makes any sudden moves. I think he probably associates determination, confidence and bold statements of ones position with the opposition rather than with our side, and jumps to the conclusion that because a statement is made in such a fashion it must necessarily be arrogant, narrow-minded and ignorant of all the subtleties at work here. John Humphreys' mawkish praise of not really being all that sure about anything springs to mind here too.

It's high time people like this realised that a) the common herd they at once praise for its skepticism and backhandedly damn for its apathy is a lot more switched on than they imagine, and b) confident bombast is often a far more effective tool in changing people's minds than the mealy-mouthed multiplication of subtleties of which they are so fond.

1410. A problem for Israel's farmers: The seven-year hitch

Comment #73253 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 3:03 pm

So, we've got one lot of Zionist crazies who think that it's their religious duty to farm the land as profitably as they can, and hold onto it because they think their god gave it to them, and another lot of Ultra-Orthodox crazies who want to stop farming every seven years and cause massive economic damage to their country because they think their god doesn't want them to.

And this is a serious political and economic issue in the twenty-first century? Words fail me...

1411. Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Comment #73247 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 2:47 pm

Actually even eighth century scholars recognised that there were four accepted ways to analyse scripture - the literal, analogical, anagogical and metaphorical senses. You'd be laughed out of a medieval schoolroom if you suggested that everything in the scriptures must be literally true...

1412. Keeping the faith at school

Comment #73239 by Cartomancer on September 24, 2007 at 2:37 pm

So gay people are to be respected and slurs against us aren't permitted, but they're still teaching that there's something wrong with the way we live our lives and the natural biological desires we feel? How condescendingly patronising! How blatantly hypocritical! How dangerously repressive!

I feel very strongly that schools like this should not be permitted anywhere. Freedom of choice has its limits. Would it be permitted, much less condoned, if some fascist group like the BNP wanted to set up a Nazi school which taught that, while you can't make slurs against non-aryan people, they are biologically inferior and should not be allowed to breed? How is this any different from what is going on in this vile travesty of a school?

Private companies have legal restrictions on the way they operate, why are private schools exempt from this kind of regulation? No, the only option worth considering is a complete ban on faith schools of all descriptions, public and private, and a stringent code of practice on ensuring that what is taught in schools is actually true and helpful rather than crazy and damaging.

1413. Religion advances despite science (and thanks to Dawkins)

Comment #73033 by Cartomancer on September 23, 2007 at 9:58 pm

We have an MSt. course in Science and Religion? Wow, they kept that one a secret - I did my MSt. thesis on a topic that falls easily under that definition and I have never encountered it before. Says a lot about the credibility of this particular branch of studies that people doing proper academic degrees haven't even heard of it doesn't it?

I'm still appalled that someone calling themself a historian of science could so blatantly oversimplify to make a cheap point... I guess no discipline is immune.

1414. 1996 Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Comment #73028 by Cartomancer on September 23, 2007 at 9:35 pm

Not enough material for a weekly television programme about atheism? We seem to get enough to fill this website every week. And magazines like The Humanist get by pretty well. Even if there was nothing at all to say and we had to just show a blank screen for thirty minutes it would still be a damn sight more informative than "The View"...

"Being Richard Dawkins" eh? Like "Being John Malkovich"? Now that I would pay good money to see. "Richard Dawkins and the Meaning of Life"? "Richard Dawkins and the Holy Grail"? "Richard Dawkins's Life of Brian"? "Pharyngula Actually"?...

1415. Religion advances despite science (and thanks to Dawkins)

Comment #72984 by Cartomancer on September 23, 2007 at 5:18 pm

As someone who does postgraduate research on the history of creation doctrine I begin to wonder just what this John Brooke character has read on the subject.

First of all he talks about "classical creation doctrine" as if there has always been some fundamentally orthodox, approved way of looking at these ideas. There has not. During the Middle Ages there were occasional papal pronouncements on one or two things that it was orthodox or not orthodox to believe (such as the condemnations of Paris in 1277, which even then only really affected the university of that city). There still are on occasion, but these only apply to the Catholic church and are certainly not detailed discussions of theological minutiae. As for all the other denominations it's pretty much open season.

The point he makes about creationism historically being a mere overarching appeal to god within all physical processes has some validity, but is far from the complete picture. It is certainly not the case, as has been pointed out in earlier comments, that evolutionary processes have played any part at all in Christian thinking until after Darwin. That's just theology struggling to reconcile itself with science. During my period, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theologians tried to reconcile the biblical creation account with the scientific orthodoxies of their own day. Thierry of Chartres for instance (in his Heptateuchon) attempted to reconcile the creation account in Plato's Timaeus (virtually the orthodoxy in the twelfth century) with that in Genesis, remarking on such things as how the creation of light and darkness on the first day was actually effected by the separation of the fiery and airy layers of the Platonic plenum, the formation of celestial bodies on the fourth day from the friction of these two layers against each other etc. In the next century Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas all wrote commentaries on the Hexaemeron using an Aristotelian framework - Grosseteste even went as far as explaining how the physical properties of light can account for the shape and diversity of the universe, a simple fiat lux being enough to effect all creation.

However, these centuries also saw a distinct move AWAY from occasionalism in the mould of Rupert of Deutz and Manegold of Lautenbach (the idea that all causal processes are actually done by god directly and their regularity is only incidental) to a view of the universe as a regular, predictable, mechanical thing - a machina mundi in the words of John of Sacrobosco - created and set in motion by god then left to its own devices. It was a debated point whether god's will underlay and preserved everything in an immediate fashion.

Of course, try telling any of this to the average peasant in the field and you'd no doubt be met with a slack-jawed look of puzzlement or outright hostility. The point I am trying to make however is that Brooke's attempt to appear more knowledgeable and in possession of a subtler understanding of the facts is a sham, and in my opinion a significant misrepresentation and simplification of historical reality.

Dawkins on the other hand does not claim to be describing the nuances of historical reality with his argument, rather he is getting at the logical fundamentals behind the positions espoused in the here and now. Actually he does give fair time to the nuances in the many passages where he says that there are plenty of nice, ordinary people whose religion is subtle and nuanced and not nearly as stark staring bonkers as the creationists. Ultimately though his point is that both subtle, nuanced creationism and blatant eye-rollingly crazy creationism are erroneous positions to take because the evidence simply does not warrant them.

1416. Out of Thin Air

Comment #72915 by Cartomancer on September 23, 2007 at 1:56 pm

Out of Thin Air? Load of Hot Air more like...

I do so hope anyone going to this will remember their handy Pharyngula ID/Creationism Bingo card.

And is it just me who wants to punch the smug, grimacing presenter of this piece repeatedly in the face until he expires?

1417. Row Brews Over DUP Call for Schools to Teach Creationism

Comment #72598 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 8:22 pm

Hey, why do we even have to teach historically grounded nonsense in schools? Why can't I have equal time for my own invisible goblins on roller-skates theory of dynamics?

1418. The Dawkins Prize for Animal Conservation and Welfare

Comment #72587 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:41 pm

Slandering a Wren building is tantamount to heresy among Wadhamites! Tread carefully Flagellant!

1419. Oxford's Christian colleges 'are not suitable for school-leavers'

Comment #72585 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Far be it from me to raise the ugly suspicion of censorship, but I've tried posting comments on the Times site three times today about this article. None of them have appeared. Given some of the fatuous drivel the opposition have managed to get up there I very much doubt it's the tone of my comments that is doing it...

1420. Row Brews Over DUP Call for Schools to Teach Creationism

Comment #72584 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:29 pm

Mr Givan said: "I have never believed in the theory of birth by sexual reproduction and, like many people, believe in teaching that the stork is responsible. I believe science points to stork theory but our schools are teaching a very narrow remit and many exclude alternative theories to sexual reproduction. I have asked the Council to write to local schools encouraging them to give equality of treatment to other theories of the origins of life and how babies come into existence."

1421. Yes, it's a Hobbit. The debate that has divided science is solved at last (sort of)

Comment #72583 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:22 pm

Or maybe it is human but it got so religious that its brain shrank to tiny proportions and it couldn't look after itself properly...

1422. Yes, it's a Hobbit. The debate that has divided science is solved at last (sort of)

Comment #72582 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:20 pm

You mean the big pile of fossilised elves, dwarves and orcs they found with it weren't enough of a clue?

1423. The Dawkins Prize for Animal Conservation and Welfare

Comment #72461 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:06 am

Mind you, I do have to stick up for the scientific presence in Oxford right from the beginning - certainly compared to the other great medieval universities of Paris and Bologna. Reading of the libri naturales (scientific works) of Aristotle was actually banned in Paris in 1210 and 1215, while early Oxford had no such restrictions and lapped them up. In fact when the French finally did lift the ban they had to import English masters to teach these books of Aristotle...

1424. The Dawkins Prize for Animal Conservation and Welfare

Comment #72458 by Cartomancer on September 21, 2007 at 7:00 am

Yes. Keble is still here and does indeed look remarkably like a Victorian workhouse. The scruffy urchins frequenting its halls lend further credence to the theory that this is in fact what it is. Funnily enough their gigantic chapel building is mostly obscured from the Parks Road side by a massive tree - smells like ambivalence on the part of the architect to me.

Speaking of academic societies it was Wadham college that saw the original foundation of the Royal Society back in the seventeenth century with Warden Wilkins and his natural philosophy group. Our hallowed grounds also saw the very first intravenous injection ever to be administered. Sir Christopher Wren supplied the dog...

1425. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72331 by Cartomancer on September 20, 2007 at 6:47 pm

Has anybody seen the ID/Creationism Bingo Cards over on Pharyngula? We could probably do some for responses to TGD too.

"My God is beyond definition", "Theologians have been grappling for centuries", "God is beyond scientific evidence", "Dawkins hasn't read enough Theology"... BINGO!

1426. The Dawkins Prize for Animal Conservation and Welfare

Comment #72324 by Cartomancer on September 20, 2007 at 6:27 pm

We've been doing self-absorbed theology an awful lot longer than we've been doing modern science Scottishgeologist! Balliol indeed is one of the oldest colleges and languished for centuries in patristic nonsense before the light of science took hold. Their prefabricated chapel also looks like a battenburg cake and everyone who goes there smells. Except Christopher Hitchens.

Now Wadham, there's a college...

1427. Religious education

Comment #71630 by Cartomancer on September 19, 2007 at 11:29 am

Actually optical illusions and epistemological uncertainty have been a part of Christian apologetic for at least eight hundred years. Some of the late twelfth century texts I'm looking at for my doctorate are full of this sort of thing. Take Alexander Nequam (1157-1217) and his De Naturis Rerum et in Ecclesiasten for instance, which uses the deceptive nature of things seen through water as metaphors for all sorts of things, such as pride, satanic deception and the necessity of god for true understanding. This man lived before Roger Bacon, Kepler, Newton and Galileo. He didn't even have all of Aristotle's Physics to hand. He had an excuse. What excuse do these modern theistic reactionaries have?

1428. Oxford's Christian colleges 'are not suitable for school-leavers'

Comment #71607 by Cartomancer on September 19, 2007 at 5:33 am

Also, the OCCA is not really a part of the University proper - it's an offshoot of Wycliffe Hall bankrolled by insane dribbling missionary Ravi Zacharias (who, in all probability, is a vampire).

When Wycliffe Hall goes, this goes too...

1429. God Talk on 'The View'

Comment #71604 by Cartomancer on September 19, 2007 at 5:27 am

I'm frightened....

1430. Oxford's Christian colleges 'are not suitable for school-leavers'

Comment #71590 by Cartomancer on September 19, 2007 at 4:56 am

As another Oxford student (seems like we're crawling all over this site) I can say that I have a passing fondness for the Theology Faculty here. There are some very clever people in it, and they have very good lectures on historical, philosophical and ethical topics. Most of them, though unaccountably religious, are also secular, pluralistic and liberal to a most pleasing extent. Marilyn McCord Adams - a canon professor at Christ Church and international theological superstar by all accounts, as well as being an unfeasibly nice person is at the forefront of the gay debate in the church advocating total inclusion and harmony. She is not unusual. Whenever I need to know anything about scholastic thought it is to the theologians I go first, then the philosophers, and only thirdly to specialists from my own faculty - modern history.

That said, the students I meet from Wycliffe Hall and the other Christian halls (apart from those in holy orders, who generally know better) have without exception been narrow-minded, repressive and hostile to modern liberal values. One of them tried hi-jacking a lecture on Aquinas I attended with his ill-concieved homophobic bigotry and walked out when the dashing Dr. Richard Cross exposed the basis of his argument for the drivel it was. I for one will be glad to see the back of these parasitic godbotherers and their facile attempts to leach our academic credibility...

1431. Religious education

Comment #71200 by Cartomancer on September 18, 2007 at 2:52 am

Appalling. Quite simply appalling. I'm just glad I'm never going to have any children for them to teach...

Actually it is highly ironic that I was, for one year, acting head of Religious Studies at the sixth form college I taught at. I was actually a classics teacher, but the woman I was replacing for the year was also head of religious studies, so I got lumbered with that job too. We don't actually teach religious studies of course, which made my job considerably easier, but I did feel that the irony of the situation ought not to go unmarked and so made every attempt to put religious nonsense in its place during my classics lessons. This proved surprisingly easy to do.

The absolute killers were Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos (the third Stasimon is possibly the most powerful encapsulation I have ever read of the human epiphany that there are no gods and, scarily, we have to make our morals and our justice for ourselves) and the early Socratic dialogues of Plato - Euthyphro and Apologia. Funnily enough I had one rabidly christian girl who loved all of it until I pointed out that the arguments were just as applicable to her religion as to that of the classical greeks. The roundabout comparative approach really seemed to work where, I suspect, confronting the demons of Abrahamic monotheism head on would have roused too much hostility in this one. Last time I saw her she was buried in the copy of God is Not Great that I gave her and appeared to be sweating profusely - progress on that score methinks.

My lesson on classical greek homosexuality cleared up quite a few misnomers and prejudices among my students as well - elucidating the fact that pre-christian societies had radically different views and forcing them to examine whether there really is a basis for discrimination or if it all just comes from religious prejudice. Open mindedness and good education are the most powerful tools we have in this fight against repressiveness and ignorance.

Of course, I was in post-16 education and the comments of the article don't really apply with anything like the force they do to the compulsory bit. Let us hope fervently that the Gordon Brown administration sees sense in this matter and reverses the trend, and let us do all that we can to reverse it ourselves if they do not.

1432. Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

Comment #69973 by Cartomancer on September 13, 2007 at 12:34 pm

I seem to remember a certain professor Dawkins saying something very much like this in a recent book I read. Name escapes me...

1433. A Response to Jonathan Haidt

Comment #69972 by Cartomancer on September 13, 2007 at 12:31 pm

Theocrapcy, comment 50. - Some of us do it to impress the same sex and get laid...

And yes, your whack-a-mole analogy is so true....

1434. The Mix Tape of the Gods

Comment #67964 by Cartomancer on September 5, 2007 at 12:00 pm

Er, no. Radio signals are radio waves - i.e. the long end of the electromagnetic spectrum (with visible light in the middle and gamma rays at the short end). Sound waves are carried by vibrations in the air and other bodies. As such radio waves do go at the speed of light, more or less. Sound waves of course do not.

Not bad for a Medieval Historian eh?! This modern science stuff is easy...

1435. The Mix Tape of the Gods

Comment #67913 by Cartomancer on September 5, 2007 at 6:22 am

Maybe we could stick a gold-plated copy of The God Delusion on the next one?

1436. Like any half-decent atheist, I'm fond of a bit of religion

Comment #67911 by Cartomancer on September 5, 2007 at 6:08 am

It annoys me terribly that Linklater dismisses homophobic bullying in schools with a condescending wave of the hand and a "Do we really think this?". He clearly has not experienced the problem himself and does not understand how it happens.

The fact is that homophobic bullying is still rife in our society, although thankfully it is getting rarer. I experienced it myself in school six years ago, and I have seen it happen to my own teen-aged students now I teach part time. As with most kinds of bullying it's not usually the violence and verbal abuse that are the most damaging parts - it's the self-denial and self-loathing you generate yourself. If homosexuality is regarded as unnatural, immoral or sordid by established society - even to a comparatively minor degree - then young people struggling to come to terms with themselves will find it that much harder to reconcile their sexuality with their lives. Acceptance matters to young people, fitting in to society matters. Even treating the subject with kid gloves and getting a bit evasive or embarrassed when talking about it suggests to impressionable minds that there's something not quite right about being gay.

As long as religious people maintain even a shred of animus against homosexuals, and as long as they are credited with even a shred of moral authority while doing so, then this situation will persist. It was only last year that the new provision of goods and services regulations were opposed by the Lords Spiritual and the Catholic lobby because they wanted to prevent adoption agencies from being forced to treat gay couples equally when placing their charges. It was only four years ago that the nasty section 28 was repealed. The government of the United Kingdom has finally agreed to give gay people marriage rights in the last year, but as a sop to the religious lobby it has decided not to call gay marriage marriage, but "civil partnership" instead. I'm sure those familiar with segregation in the US or Apartheid in South Africa will recognise immediately how condescending and dangerous this "separate but equal" institution will be. Would we put up with it if they said that women were not allowed to vote, but could engage in "civil government selection", or if ginger haired people were not allowed to call their sons "children" but had to refer to them as "civil offspring"? No, you bet we wouldn't - but when prejudiced religious sensibilities are invoked as the defence then suddenly it becomes a reasonable proposition. The only reason there has ever been for discriminating against homosexuals is an entirely irrational religious one, which has deeply conditioned western societies for the last two millennia. The impending schism of the Anglican church is just a very recent example. When we finally wake up to our society's unconscious and unwarranted respect for the religious then the little policemen in our heads will stop telling vulnerable children to loathe themselves because society doesn't accept them fully.

1437. Hebrew Charter School Spurs Dispute in Florida

Comment #67505 by Cartomancer on September 3, 2007 at 3:58 pm

... non necesse esse, cur stercus pseudoreligiosus debet esse?

1438. In God we doubt

Comment #67369 by Cartomancer on September 3, 2007 at 6:19 am

Sigh... time to get out my old hobby-horse - the equivalence between religion and romantic love - again.

Humphrys is clearly suffering from the Love Delusion even though he has gone some way to getting over his God Delusion. By this I do not mean that he is actually in love (he might well be, but that's not the point), rather that he buys hook line and sinker into the unconscious, uncritical respect our society affords to romantic love.

I got through three sick bags reading the saccharin-sickly account of his friend's pre-nuptial infatuations. "Oh love must be so eerily special and transcendent, it can't just be a product of brain chemistry". The reason he thinks he can get away with this non-argument is that society has yet to wake up to the fact that romantic love, like the desire to believe in the supernatural, is a delusion. There are probably very good evolutionary reasons for both - direct or as the result of misfires in other systems - but that does not make the claims of either objectively valid. Until there is a slew of books called things like "The Love Delusion", "Your Beloved is not Great", "The End of Love" and "Letter to an Infatuated Nation" I fear society will continue to labour under this delusion. Humphrys is actually being very clever here and trying to salvage one rapidly crumbling delusion by tying it to a delusion we have yet to disabuse ourselves of or even realise that we need to.

To me however the association damns religion even more thoroughly than it was damned before. Some of us do not find our natural bio-chemical yearnings for love a wonderful, enjoyable, life-affirming experience. In my case they have caused nothing but anguish, misery and despair ever since I first gave thought to them. If love is as magical as its apologists would have us believe then it must be a dark sorcery indeed.

1439. A Matter of Faith

Comment #64764 by Cartomancer on August 21, 2007 at 5:24 pm

Re: the wall of separation

I thought Hitchens' slogan was about the wall of separation between religion and politics that Jefferson et al. incorporated into the American constitution, not the wall that separates the positions of the religious and the anti-religious in modern society. As such Noam Chomsky very much belongs on the political rather than the religious side.

1440. The age of endarkenment

Comment #64361 by Cartomancer on August 19, 2007 at 6:46 pm

Thirty per cent? Gaaah! I thought we were safe from this sort of infantile stupidity in England. I'm frightened. I think I'll just hole up in my room with a shotgun and as many tins of beans as I can grab to wait for the impending apocalypse...

1441. These preachers of hate must be exposed

Comment #63924 by Cartomancer on August 16, 2007 at 6:21 pm

Sadly I fear that Evan Harris (MP for Oxford East) will just put my letter in the same bin he puts all the other letters I have sent him on religious issues, gay marriage and university top-up fees. Still, that hasn't stopped me before...

1442. The Bible's literary sins

Comment #63268 by Cartomancer on August 13, 2007 at 6:25 pm

NormanDoering:

We've had more than that. We've had the opinion of every single person who has ever picked up or even heard about the bible for the last two millennia. Most interpretations simply haven't survived because nobody bothered writing them down. Any text will be read in innumerable ways - each reader brings with them attitudes and preconceptions based on their own life, what they've read previously, what they're expecting from the text and myriad other things. This is what gives the lie to religious claims that their special books are really special - ultimately there can be no such thing as a totally "literal" interpretation of a text because words and languages simply do not have such absolute meanings identical for each participant.

The two phenomena - Greek myth and Christian myth - are as you point out not entirely comparable on the level of the truth claims made about them by their cultural constituency. The Greek myths were far more honest in that people were entirely free and indeed encouraged to come up with their own interpretations of them - there was no orthodoxy to tell Greeks what they should mean. As such they were almost entirely in the realm of literature rather than of religious dogma. Most Greeks did in fact agree on roughly what the myths were supposed to signify but this is because they shared a common cultural and social mind-set with common values, preferences and agendas.

Christian myth is susceptible to this natural process of interpretation but the organised churches have tried to arrest the phenomenon and impose orthodoxy from above on a material which, by its very nature, is anathema to it.

1443. The Bible's literary sins

Comment #63236 by Cartomancer on August 13, 2007 at 3:52 pm

Actually you do get vastly varied interpretations of Greek myth. Their flexibility is a big part of their enduring success. The Athenian tragic theatre is perhaps the best place to see this in action - Euripides for example is known to have produced at least two interpretations of the traditional Hippolytus myth with radically differing slants and characterisations. Similarly with Sophocles' Theban plays. Greek myth is not really comparable since there is no official canonical version of any myth like there is with the bible.

And when you've got forty odd books of bible nonsense to choose from it's fairly inevitable that some good stuff will slip through the net. It's depressing to think just how bad the stuff they rejected must have been...

1444. The Bible's literary sins

Comment #63226 by Cartomancer on August 13, 2007 at 2:55 pm

I seem to remember saying something very similar in another thread a few days ago...

Can you imagine what a publisher would say if Athanasius and Irenaeus presented their badly cobbled-together manuscript in this day and age?

1445. Christopher Hitchens and David Allen White discuss the impact of Christianity on Western Civilization

Comment #63121 by Cartomancer on August 13, 2007 at 6:49 am

Yes, but for every Dante and Bach and Michaelangelo that Christian societies have thrown up, how many faceless, talentless hacks have there also been, churning out run-of-the-mill religious poetry, gratingly bad religious music and breathtakingly inane religious art?

Moreover, the religious content of the aforementioned artists is not necessarily the factor that makes their works so special. I would argue that the beauty of Dante's vision comes less from adopting the cliched and well-trodden theological semiotics of the medieval schoolroom than it does from imitating Vergil and the epic style of the classical poets. Its position as an early example of vernacular literature also helps - some of its freshness is conveyed precisely because it could get away from the tired latin of religious discourse and speak a different language. Similarly, we admire Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling not because it contains pictures of childish religious fable but because he too was adopting a classicising, realistic and impressive artistic technique. It could have been the flying spaghetti monster surrounded by invisible goblins on roller-skates up there and it would have been no less impressive. Michaelangelo's David is essentially Apollo with big hands and bears little resemblance to anything even vaguely Christian. His other classical sculpture groups bear the point out. Yes, the ideas taken from the classical world by medieval and renaissance artists were often religious ones, but they were not religious ideas that those artists themselves ascribed to. Religions are in this case simply common conceptual vocabularies describing something intrinsic to human thought and experience of the numinous and the transcendent. We have similar vocabularies today too from secular sources. Fantasy and Science Fiction literature are good examples I think - the idea of Big Brother from 1984 is an entirely secular one and still conveys all the crushing, stifling, de-humanising horror of any purgatory or limbo. We look to the Matrix as a metaphor to disabuse ourselves of the certainty of our perceptions rather than to the Veil of Tears or Through a Glass Darkly, and Frodo's ring not the Apple of Eve becomes a symbol of absolute power corrupting absolutely.

Note the intrinsic Florentine Renaissance bias in this article. This is typical of conservative scholars of literature and art, and indeed has become a cultural norm in western societies. Medieval art was usually far more religious in content than later stuff, far less classical and far less adventurous in many ways. Do the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the Bayeux tapestry and the sculptures on Chartres cathedral receive similar adulation from the masses? Nope...

And as for great art without religious inspiration, what about Shakespeare? True, he does recycle bible quotes at a fair old rate, but name me one of his plays on an overtly religious theme? Da Vinci anybody? Are the Mona Lisa, battle of Anghiari and those wonderful sketchbooks religious art? Or do they get their unique twist from a healthy dose of humanism, rationalism and science? Mozart? I don't recall seeing the gospel of Don Giovanni, the parable of the marriage of Figaro or the Book of the Magic Flute anywhere in the bible...

Cinema? all religious films I've ever seen are irredeemably awful, from that smug, grimacing idiot Charlton Heston as Moses in the Ten Commandments to the sick, pornographic violence of hateful Catholic moron Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Three films have won eleven Oscars to date - Ben Hur, Titanic and Return of the King, only one of which was religiously inspired. And bloody awful it got too when they started ladling on the syrup toward the end.

John Lennon's Imagine No Religion...? I didn't like it, but lots of people did...

1446. Christopher Hitchens and David Allen White discuss the impact of Christianity on Western Civilization

Comment #63007 by Cartomancer on August 12, 2007 at 8:58 pm

Does this gentleman seriously believe that the five internal senses of Avicenna (c.980-1037) and his Latin inheritors are a legitimate and helpful model of human psychology in the twenty-first century?! Ye gods!

1447. Interview with Richard Dawkins about 'The Enemies of Reason'

Comment #62993 by Cartomancer on August 12, 2007 at 7:52 pm

I've never been able to take Judy Finnegan seriously since I saw Jarvis Cocker lobbing small wax-wrapped cheeses at a giant rolling-eyed picture of her face with wobbly musical teeth all those years ago...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0QuG0fuNhQ

1448. The vanishing jihad exposés

Comment #62986 by Cartomancer on August 12, 2007 at 7:23 pm

Chilling...

1449. 'Delusion' Revisits Faith Vs. Reason Debate

Comment #62984 by Cartomancer on August 12, 2007 at 7:15 pm

Well, it's a broadly harmless review I suppose - Though I must take issue with the misunderstanding this reviewer has of Professor Dawkins' actual position on the sources of our morality. I seem to remember that he devotes less than a page of The God Delusion to utilitarianism of the John Stuart Mill variety, and then only as an example of a secular moral philosophy to demonstrate the sort of things that might fruitfully contribute to a grown-up discussion of morality rather than as the be-all and end-all of moral judgement.

Also, is it just me who finds this modern distaste for rhetoric so irritating? Personally I really enjoy a good bit of polemic and bombast in what I read...

1450. Believe it or not: the sceptics beat God in bestseller battle

Comment #62870 by Cartomancer on August 12, 2007 at 5:24 am

Funnily enough the conversation at religious parties is generally all about not having sex and what you're not allowed to have for dinner...