151. Bankrolling Ali's Asylum

Comment #90995 by Russell Blackford on November 26, 2007 at 10:31 pm

Some of y'all are hypersenstive IMHO. We can't expect Sam Harris or anybody else to turn into a robot with no sense of humour or into someone who watches every single word for how it might be twisted.

152. Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion

Comment #90630 by Russell Blackford on November 25, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Philip, it depends on what you consider an advantage. RD said somewhere that it would fascinating to watch someone with your nuclear DNA growing up in a different environment. Then there's the classic case of the lesbian couple who want to have a couple of kids who have had genetic contributions solely from them, and not any outsiders. Also, there will be some cases where a heterosexual couple might decide to use it if the man suffers an extreme kind of infertility that can't be dealt with by existing reproductive technologies.

In fact, the people who do it may do so for reasons as varied as the reasons why people have children at all - and don't forget that these are extremely varied.

But the point isn't even that. The essential point is that there is no reason why the individuals concerned should have to justify it to anyone else, or to the state. In the absence of significant, direct, secular harm to others - or at least the clear and present danger of such harm - it's no one else's business and certainly not the state's.

153. Saudi gang-rape victim is jailed

Comment #90128 by Russell Blackford on November 23, 2007 at 5:28 am

Diacanu, you'll come across that sort of naive moral relativism all the time if you move in the right (it is usually left, actually) circles.

154. Saudi gang-rape victim is jailed

Comment #90127 by Russell Blackford on November 23, 2007 at 5:25 am

I did actually try to send a message to Arab News, but I keep getting an error message.

This is what I sent, but it appears not to have gone through. I'm happy to be quoted on it, but I guess there's not a lot more to be done:

It strains credulity that a young woman - particularly the victim of a horrifying gang rape - could be jailed and subjected to a physical beating with two hundred lashes simply for being in the company of a man who is not her relative.

The Saudi authorities should understand how the rest of the world views this episode. It makes the justice system of Saudi Arabia appear irrational, cruel, and barbaric.

Russell Blackford
Melbourne, Australia

155. Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law

Comment #90077 by Russell Blackford on November 22, 2007 at 5:49 pm

It is better to skirt a dispute
With a troll, even if it looks cute.
If the troll is well fed,
It derails the whole thread.
And that sure applies doubly with Ruht.

156. For the glory of God

Comment #89804 by Russell Blackford on November 21, 2007 at 6:58 pm

I think that he meant something like "a spectrum from rigorous scepticism to credulity". I don't think he was trying to say that atheism is a kind of faith or depends on some kind of faith.

Another way to look at it is to imagine a continuum, or call it a "spectrum" if you want, from 0 to 10. At one end, we might have none at all of whatever is being measured (e.g. religious credulity) while at the other end is a maximum amount. It doesn't mean that people at the zero end have "a kind of" whatever it is that is being measured. It just means they are at that exreme end of the continuum where they have zero, nada, none at all.

157. Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

Comment #89783 by Russell Blackford on November 21, 2007 at 5:31 pm

Hasn't Christopher Hitchens been debating with a few similar creatures of late?

158. Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law

Comment #89752 by Russell Blackford on November 21, 2007 at 4:14 pm

Ah, another thread where I see we're enjoying our Christmas fruitcake a bit early this year. I must go and find the sherry.

159. Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion

Comment #89446 by Russell Blackford on November 20, 2007 at 7:15 pm

Bonzai, the one thing we don't need is even more material from wing-nuts like Leon Kass, trying to rationalise their irrational aversion to cloning. There's already a vast literature of this kind.

What we actually need are more critiques of Kass, etc., in as much detail as possible, showing just how irrational and illiberal their views are. I'm quite proud to have devoted a lot of the past ten years of my life to that, but it's a never-ending struggle, because the forces of unreason are just so powerful in this area ... and they've already succeeded in enacting draconian laws in many jurisdictions, including the jurisdiction where I happen to live.

By the way, it's obvious once you look into it that much of their response is in fact driven by specifically religionist morality. It's not a coincidence that the leading bio-Luddite figures, such as Kass, Margaret Somerville, Francis Fukuyama, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Sandel, etc., etc., are either religious themselves or highly solicitous to religion in a "belief in belief" sort of way.

Some of the people involved are vaguely left-wing, but Kass and Somerville in particular are true representatives of the New Endarkenment. Somerville, of course, is Canada's leading opponent of gay rights (or at least one of them).

Kass has opposed every possible reproductive technology. He is on the record for opposing organ transplants - which, surprise, surprise - he has likened to cannibalism. He dislikes contraception, homosexuality, and many other things (including eating ice cream by licking an ice cream cone in public, which he sees as a non-human, catlike activity).

For Zeus's sake, we are way past rational consideration of these issues. These clowns have long lost the detailed intellectual debate in the bioethics journals, etc., but their views have prevailed in public policy. We should be opposing them fiercely, just as we oppose other irrationalists who want to inflict their miserable "morality" on us.

160. For the glory of God

Comment #89123 by Russell Blackford on November 19, 2007 at 6:38 pm

I suggest we have another meeting of CAPAC soon. We could have some fruitcake with our drinks, since it's nearly Christmas and there's a lot of it about.

161. For the glory of God

Comment #89096 by Russell Blackford on November 19, 2007 at 5:45 pm

Hey, Brian:

I'm sure that cockroaches, for example, will do very well out of global warming. The new environment will definitely suit some creatures, and given a few million years their descendants might bloom into a strange diversity of life forms. I'd like to have a time machine so I could go and talk with the giant cockroach-philosophers and all the other critters for myself.

I mean, look at the diversity we now have as a result of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

If not for that asteroid, and whatever else did it, we'd have none of the charismatic mammalian mega-fauna, such as lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, spider monkeys, polar bears, sperm whales, race horses, Tasmanian devils, WWE wrestlers, supermodels, Paris Hilton, Dinesh D'Souza, and Ted Haggard. The managerie would look quite different if the world was full of super-intelligent, feathered velociraptors herding their ceratopsian cattle across the plains, or whatever there'd be by now.

I just kinda don't think that should be the main consideration here. :D

The way I see it, there are a lot of things that we actually value whose preservation is not consistent with ongoing global warming on the scale that seems to be happening right now, and I do think that that gives us a pretty compelling reason to stop warming things up if we can.

PS. I realise you know this ... I'm just being whimsical.

162. Ofcom backs Channel 4 over mosque probe

Comment #89042 by Russell Blackford on November 19, 2007 at 3:00 pm

Thank Zeus for this outcome. But this just shows why we need to be very careful before we enact laws that restrict freedom of speech. However carefully framed they are, somebody in authority will start wanting to use them expansively to try to suppress legitimate or even useful speech.

163. Secular Fundamentalists: There is no such thing...and the AAI conference doesn't make atheism a movement, either.

Comment #88810 by Russell Blackford on November 19, 2007 at 2:51 am

Thanks for your courteous response, dialector.

I have a bit of a better sense of where you're coming from, now, but the trouble is that once you allow people to use words in some broad sense the precision of debate is destroyed, which is never helpful to the party of reason.

We criticise the fundies for being fundamentalist, in a quite narrow sense, with all that that sense implies. Next thing you know, it's tu quoque: we start hearing about how Richard Dawkins is also a "fundamentalist", that anyone who is passionately opposed to religion is a "fundamentalist", etc.

The point is that we oppose religious fundamentalism for quite precise reasons. If we lose track of those reasons, we'll lose track of why we are critical of fundamentalism in the first place, and we'll have no response when we are accused of being just as "fundamentalist".

And no, fundamentalist does not simply mean "irrational". The word for that is, well, "irrational". :)

It's a particular kind of irrationality.

I think it's important for people like Kelly to keep making such points, and I think it's unfair when they are then criticised as "semantic bluster".

What I will concede is that Kelly's point can be sharpened up a bit, in a way that can accommodate some of what you're saying, and I think my comment does that ... and see also here:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/10/fundamentalism.html

But she's not only on the right side: she's making an essentially strong point, and her writing is getting better with each piece she produces. I've been impressed (more than I expected to be). It looks like she will end up being a very good voice for doubt and disbelief.

164. Mind your manners

Comment #88764 by Russell Blackford on November 19, 2007 at 12:30 am

Let's try to tease this out.

MuNky82, you are comparing two quite different things. It's one thing for the state to provide some kind of material support for the poor, or even to pool economic resources to an extent for the not-so-poor. It's a completely different thing for it to make decisions about who is correct on matters concerning spiritual salvation.

The Enlightenment strategy for dealing with religious differences, which goes back to Locke, was not about refusing to support religion because it is a "viral meme", or some such thing. It was about tolerating the range of religious views, so as to conserve the political order and to take off the political table issues such as which religious doctrine the state would prefer. Ideally, that idea should include not giving support to any particular religious view, or to religious views over non-religious ones. At least that's how the idea developed after Locke, who was originally just thinking of mutual tolerance among Christian sects.

The Enlightenment strategy originally required identifying a distinction between what I think Locke called the "the goods of this world" and those of the next (which religion purports to look after). The "goods of this world", such as the security of our earthly possessions, are supposed to be the sole business of the state, in Lockean theory, while the (supposed) salvation of souls is the sole business of the various religious sects.

All this supports the idea of a separation of Church and State.

In the modern context, pursuing the Enlightenment strategy may well entail refusing to make donations to religious bodies tax deductible.

But that has nothing to do with whether the state should attempt to provide a secure safety net of the "goods of this world" for those who are poor or otherwise in need, for whatever reason. Secular politics is all about how far the state should go in doing this, and by what means.

In Locke's day, admittedly, the state had a pretty minimal role in this, but times have changed. The idea of a minimal state and a laissez-faire economy proved not to be tenable way back in about the 1870s. The outcomes of unchecked capitalism, with no redistribution of the "goods of this world", included insecurity and misery.

Locke thought that if we could meet people's basic needs, such as safety and security, it would lead to a softening of the fervour of religion. It looks as if that may be right - the countries where this is done best, with a strong social safety net, are those in northern Europe. Those are also the least religious countries in the world.

It's quite consistent to argue that the state should do nothing to help religion - which is essentially concerned with such unworldly, contested things as spiritual salvation - while also trying, through secular politics, to ensure that everybody can enjoy a degree of security from poverty, disease, and so on.

165. Secular Fundamentalists: There is no such thing...and the AAI conference doesn't make atheism a movement, either.

Comment #88739 by Russell Blackford on November 18, 2007 at 6:49 pm

dialector, the words "fundamentalist", "fundamentalism", etc., have a clear historical meaning. A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible. By extension, it can be someone who has that kind of belief about another holy book such as the Koran.

The problem with such belief is that it is sustained in the face of what is discovered through the processes of rational inquiry. As a result, fundamentalists often end up adopting such absurd, stupid positions as young earth creationism.

There may, by analogy, be such a thing as a "fundamentalist Marxist" (someone who treats the words of Das Kapital, say, as beyond any correction), or a "fundamentalist Objectivist" (someone who takes the same attitude to the works of Ayn Rand).

However, Kelly is basically correct: there is no such a thing as a "fundamentalist secularist" or a "secular fundamentalist" (as opposed a Marxist or Randian, etc., fundamentalist). There is no one whose mere secularism locks her into a body of supposedly inerrant doctrine that he or she will believe dogmatically in the face of whatever is discovered by reason.

People who talk about "fundamentalist secularism" or "fundamentalist atheism" are playing dishonest semantic games. It's a debating tactic that we must continually expose, though I'm getting sick of having to do, and comments like yours don't help. It is just wrong - and highly unhelpful - to accuse people of "semantic bluster" when they set the record straight.

More charitably, some people who use the tactic of talking about secular fundamentalism may simply be ignorant: they don't understand what fundamentalism is, what is actually wrong with it, or why we criticise fundies in the first place.

Well, that means we have to educate them, and kudos to Kelly for doing some of that.

166. Saudi gang-rape victim is jailed

Comment #88594 by Russell Blackford on November 18, 2007 at 1:57 am

Like any other sane person reading this, I'm outraged by the barbarism and cruelty (I've blogged on the same topic, as has Udo Schuklenk, and I imagine a lot of other sensible people).

I almost shot off an angry comment to Arab News, but before I do anything like that I wonder whether it's the wisest thing to do in the woman's own interests. A whole lot of public attacks in a high-profile forum in the Middle East, by outraged decadent foreigners, might just worsen her plight.

Does anyone know what would be the most effective way for us to help this young woman? E.g., does Amnesty International have any plan to try to assist? Is there some way that donations could help, and any place where they could be sent? Or should we just demonstrate that the outside world holds Saudi justice in abhorrence?

167. Secular Fundamentalists: There is no such thing...and the AAI conference doesn't make atheism a movement, either.

Comment #88285 by Russell Blackford on November 15, 2007 at 6:39 pm

Given that Kelly is quite explicitly developing a presence as someone who's new to writing this kind of stuff, but now making a real effort to do it in a concerted way, I think it's natural that we're watching how she goes ... and that she gets a certain amount of advice, constructive criticism, and similar comment. There's nothing sinister about it, and if a bloke did exactly what she's doing the same thing would happen.

I mean, she does cop a lot of sexist crap, but I don't think the comments on this site should be viewed in that light.

The negative comments are another thing: I'm not a great fan of negativity towards our allies unless it is for some very important reason, as when someone with a very high profile says something very controversial.

168. Mind your manners

Comment #88263 by Russell Blackford on November 15, 2007 at 4:14 pm

I like the new pic ACG is using. Not only more up-to-date (with the silvering hair) but actually more flattering than the old one. Sorry to be shallow.

169. Secular Fundamentalists: There is no such thing...and the AAI conference doesn't make atheism a movement, either.

Comment #88258 by Russell Blackford on November 15, 2007 at 4:10 pm

Kelly is getting better all the time - this piece is really well-written.

By the way, I see nothing wrong with getting together to gripe with likeminded people about all the prudes and prigs who are around these days - not just the religious nuts but also the lefty, middleclass wowsers who infest the media and the political process. Obviously, that's not the point of the conference, but if someone did actually run an anti-prudes-and-prigs conference I'd be there; I think it would be a great idea.

170. Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law

Comment #88251 by Russell Blackford on November 15, 2007 at 3:25 pm

Re Comment #88137, this "belief" thing must be an American phenomenon ... at least mainly. I certainly haven't encountered it anywhere else in the world. (However, maybe PsyPro is from France or Turkey or something ... or Australia. That would be interesting.)

Please, people, the word "believe" just indicates that some agent ... well ... has an attitude to a certain proposition of thinking it is true. It says nothing about whether the belief really is true, whether it is justified, whether the evidence objectively supports it, etc.

To use the commonplace example that I'm fond on, which I stole from somewhere, I might believe that there is chocolate in the cupboard. In moral psychology, the working idea is usually the Humean one that we are motivated by a combination of our beliefs (in this everyday sense) and our desires. Hence, if I desire some chocolate (my current attitude towards chocolate is that I'd like to eat some) and I believe there is chocolate in the cupboard (I think it true that "there is chocolate in the cupboard"), then other things being equal I will be motivated to go and open the cupboard door to look search for choccy.

I don't see how we could get by without this ordinary little word "belief" and its cognates ("believe", "believes" and so on). Nor do I see how we could operate socially without using a basic naive psychology in which we attribute beliefs and desires to people.

It's a real nuisance that some people (mainly in America?) seem to have elevated "believe" to mean something like "hold an opinion on faith as a personal commitment", or whatever. I hypothesise that this is tied up with America's religiosity and also with the hyper-emphasis in America on self-expression: kids seem to be taught at an early age that their personal opinions and ideas are of great importance, however ill-informed they are.

Don't get me wrong. I value self-expression and admire the way Americans always seem to be incredibly articulate, even when they are talking absolute nonsense. I'm not being sarcastic here. The self-doubt, self-deprecation, reticence, unwillingness to stand out in a group, etc., that we are taught here in Australia has its downside. That American way of doing things definitely has its attraction. No reflex anti-Americanism from me. But maybe there's a happy medium.

Anyway, my suggestion that the problem is a specifically American one, or mainly so, is hypothesis not theory. The main point is that the ordinary little word "belief" needs some rescuing, since we need a word with that everyday meaning and it won't be easy to revise such a basic part of our language to find a substitute.

171. Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law

Comment #88122 by Russell Blackford on November 14, 2007 at 6:51 pm

What Bonzai said.

I don't think there's an easy way out. We need to be doing the hard work of educating the public about such things as what "a theory" or "a body of theory" or "theoretical knowledge" actually is, in science. That's not necessariy easy, but changing the lingo at this stage of the game is not a substitute.

172. Allan Gregg interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #88114 by Russell Blackford on November 14, 2007 at 6:04 pm

steve99, you'd think so, wouldn't you?

I mean, for us secular types approaching the question from within the scientific image of the world, with all our neuroscientific knowledge, etc., you are exactly right. God is there creating universes and fine-tuning away, and whatever. It does seem very complex, and for us the question is what sustains all this complexity. We look for all those states and state changes.

Presumably the theist will just claim that a property of a spirit is that it doesn't need any kind of internal structure in order to think, create, have knowledge of things (of everything in God's case) and so on. I can't prove that this is wrong, but it seems awfully ad hoc.

My conclusion is that the theist view of the world, which among other things denies the kinds of assumptions behind the ultimate 747 gambit, is not falsifiable. Accordingly, the gambit is not successful against all comers. But the responses to it look awfully contrived once you step out of a supernaturalistic image of the world.

173. Allan Gregg interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #88089 by Russell Blackford on November 14, 2007 at 3:18 pm

I don't have much to say here - though I'll yammer on anyway - because I agree with Spinoza. There's nothing blatantly self-contradictory about either deism or theism.

The way I see the situation is like this. First, the real point is not to come up with a knock-down argument against religion that is successful in persuading anyone, regardless of her prior beliefs. We will never find that argument. The point is just to show why scepticism is justified. Second, doing that will require criticism of religion acrosss a broad range of issues.

There are multiple difficulties with the actual religions associated with theism. For example, in the case of Christianity, the blood sacrifice makes no sense to modern ways of thinking, and attempts to reinterpret it leave confusion as to what Christianity really stands for. Also, the traditional Christian morality looks too much like something that might have made some kind of vague sense in ancient and medieval times but has little applicability now. The whole thing just looks man-made, once you step away from it, and like the product of more ignorant times. Even the believers know that their morality makes no secular sense; where they go wrong is in thinking that no morality makes sense outside of their worldview.

There are also multiple problems associated with the Abrahamic deity itself, as it's described by the orthodox theologians. The main one is the problem of evil, but there are also more general difficulties fitting the idea of a providential God with the scientific image of the world - notably deep time and the long biological evolution of Homo sapiens. Again, the whole religious thing looks like the man-made product of an earlier time.

Unfortunately, theists can perform a lot of intellectual gymnastics to avoid logical contradictions within their position, or between their position and the scientific image. On the other hand, those intellectual gymnastics require them adopting some very uncomfortable postures.

To be clearer about that with an example, the Problem of Evil can indeed be "solved" in various ways, but every solution has a price. Some believers will find that they are not prepared to pay the price - it is simpler and cleaner and just more plausible to throw out the whole troublesome notion of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing deity that nonetheless has not eliminated suffering and allows so much suffering.

The kind of problem that Dawkins talks about, the fact that God would be very complex in some sense, is also not a knock-down disproof of God's existence or even a knock-down proof that God's existence is improbable. Theists will deny that God is complex in any way that should trouble them, since He's supposedly an eternal spirit (and, for example, spirits have no moving parts).

That's a good reply, as far as it goes, and it will comfort someone who already believes in God. But someone who is approaching the question with an open mind - or even a theist who is able to think her way into imagining what it feels like to have an open mind - will see this as ad hoc. It would be convincing if we lived in a world of full of disembodied spirits, but we never observe such things, or their activities.

Again, the upshot of the argument isn't that we can disprove the existence of an eternal, disembodied spirit that dwells outside of space and time. Rather, it's that this hypothesis looks like the product of another era, when our ancestors imagined that the world was full of spirits and that we ourselves were essentially spirits. If we could clear our minds of whatever religion we have been taught, and begin with a scientific picture of the world, we wouldn't end up postulating God as part of our explanatory framework - from that perspective, God is indeed an improbable.

No single argument destroys religion once and for all, but across this range of considerations it looks man-made and implausible ... if you look at it without the lense of faith.

Deism is an eviscerated form of belief in God. It does have some attractions, in offering easy answers to hard questions, but not enough to justify any commitment to it. At the same time, it's too austere to motivate much interest from most people. Still, I suppose a lot of people who have some vague belief in God are more deists than religionists or even theists.

My own betting is that the deist deity doesn't exist, and the answers to the questions it might deal with (e.g. the fine-tuning problem) will turn out to be more complex and bizarre than we can currently imagine. But that's another story ... and besides the social and political problem we face is religion, not deism.

174. Holy communion

Comment #88002 by Russell Blackford on November 14, 2007 at 5:01 am

I can't see it, either.

I doubt that many straight blokes would feel that they've been invited to laugh at Dawkins and Hitchens for being gay. The Dawkins figure looks like a star-struck hippie and the Hitchens figure looks like a stereotypical trade union thug at a demo.

The only reference to gay issues is the "Out 'n' proud sign" that Hitchens is carrying, but that reflects the OUT campaign. If anything, the juxtaposition seems to suggest an incongruity in a big, boofy, thuggish-looking union standover man carrying such a sign, or the incongruity of a movement with overtly heterosexual brawlers like Hitch at the forefront adopting language that echoes the gay rights movement. It might be interpreted as a dig at atheists for thinking that their situations is at all analogous to that of gays.

Maybe steve99 is correct in everything he says, but I suspect that the lack of anger over the image comes from the fact that most of us just don't "read" it as homophobic. That interpretation would simply never have occurred to me. If anything, it is anti-hippie and anti-union, as it seems to invoke demeaning stereotypes of hippies and trade union officials.

175. The good that comes from belief

Comment #87974 by Russell Blackford on November 13, 2007 at 11:40 pm

This story from a year or two ago in the National Catholic Reporter might give them pause:

http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006a/032406/032406h.htm

According to Pew Research, Christians, especially Catholics, were more likely than secular people to condone torture in some circumstances.

176. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87918 by Russell Blackford on November 13, 2007 at 4:11 pm

Well, without trying to retrace all my steps (I must remember to save the text of anything that took me more than a few minutes to write), I think it's unlikely that the British government will stop dealing with Dr Bari's organisation in a hurry. Ministers and bureaucrats love dealing with organisations that they can have meetings with, reach compromises with, etc. It doesn't matter whether the organisation "represents" doctors, gays, Muslims, Jews, car manufacturers, or whatever ... the same rule applies.

Part of the problem is that people in the centre of government - such as Ministers and their immediate advisors - have so much on their plates that it is almost impossible to work in any other way. I think that the better ones really would like to work with organisations that are genuinely representative, but they are prepared to work with whoever has the best claim to represent some identifiable interest, even if it's the "best" of a rotten bunch.

What to do? Well, it'll be a long time before the government stops dealing with the MCB. However, if it becomes apparent that Dr Bari is too out of touch with public opinion, or just too extreme, he may become less acceptable as someone to deal with ... and may lose bargaining power, or even find himself being undermined by the government, who might signal to the MCB that it needs to find a more acceptable leader at the risk of losing influence. That's a long way away, but not completely impossible. Such organisations and leaders have influence with the government only in proportion to their ability to harm the government's electoral chances by taking their views to the public. The more public backlash, the better.

So, make a fuss. Just don't think that the government will be in a hurry to stop dealing with this organisation in favour of some other organisation with no formal claim to represent the mosques and so on.

177. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87774 by Russell Blackford on November 13, 2007 at 4:42 am

Dammit, I just lost a long post in which I explained the practicalities of how government Ministers and senior bureaucrats think, and why they always want to deal with so-called "representative bodies" and "community leaders". Oh well, it will have to wait until tomorrow because I don't have time to do it again now.

Just don't shoot the messenger, folks. I'm merely giving you information based on a fair bit of experience with government policy-making processes (in Australia, but I bet it's much the same over there). I'm not saying it's a good thing, just pointing out what you're up against in the UK if you want the government to stop dealing with Bari and the MCB.

178. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87748 by Russell Blackford on November 13, 2007 at 3:05 am

Ian, when you say ...

Why can't the Government say that, henceforward, it prefers to deal with Dr Hargey and his organisation?

179. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87583 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 2:23 pm

More seriously, I take Bonzai's point. But we keep seeing books and articles from people who seem like genuinely liberal Muslims. We don't see enough of them explicitly repudiating views such as those of Dr Bari. They may be prepared to repudiate really extreme views, such as those of Sheik Hilali here in Australia, but an impression is created that views such as Bari's are considered "moderate" or "reasonable" because he doesn't actually want to kill anybody.

I just want to see some of the liberals who have access to the public, through newspaper columns and so on, say quite clearly, and without qualification, that they do not seek to curtail our freedoms or to promote the barbaric morality found in the Koran and the hadith.

180. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87576 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 1:57 pm

Leave his hair alone. Now, I'm quite enjoying the nice silver that I'm turning ...

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/11/laser-beams-from-my-eyes.html

... but that henna'd look might be worth a try. Baby boomers unite for the right to henna our hair! (As well as the right to shoot laser beams from our eyes.)

181. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87441 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 6:16 am

This man is certainly not a liberal Muslim ... at least not what I consider genuinely liberal. So, where are they when we need them? This would be a damn good time for some of those liberal Muslims to speak up and disown his views. If this is seen as the liberal end of the scale in the Muslim comunity in the UK, then it's no wonder if there's tension.

182. Free Speech

Comment #87418 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 4:23 am

I agree with StephenS and might even go a bit further in regulating certain kinds of speech that inflame violence or prevent people's quiet enjoyment of their immediate environment. On the other hand, Hitchens' heart is in the right place on this one. We really don't want to chill robust debate about religion, including the use of rhetoric, satire, and mockery. At the moment, we have scary laws where I live, and it's important to oppose such laws and try to get them repealed where they exist.

183. The good that comes from belief

Comment #87366 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 1:41 am

Well, it's a very good university. :) What's more, there may be something to it - a lot of the nicest and brightest teenagers are the ones who are serious about the meaning of life, blah, blah, and often they do explore religion. Or so it was in my day. I don't think it's especially embarrassing thing to concede that this may still be true.

But I wonder whether the research is not distorted by the researchers' value judgments. What is wrong with individualism and consumerism? I'm not saying that nothing at all is ever wrong with them (although I generally consider individualism to be a good thing): I'd just like to know exactly what is wrong with them, and why they are automatically considered to be disvalues.

It sounds as if religious young people may give some sort of support to the collectivist, self-denying values promulgated by religion, which is hardly unexpected. How do they fare on such values as individual liberty, sensuality, and self-expression? How do they fare on such disvalues as authoritarianism, asceticism, and self-abasement? Just wondering.

Edit: reading the posts by notsobad above, I see that there's a great deal of doubt as to whether the research results are accurately reported in this article. Sigh. I don't have time to dig into it and form my own view on that.

184. Excerpt from 'The Portable Atheist'

Comment #87356 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 1:10 am

Yes, nice ... although, speaking of deists and agnostics, I can't help wondering if he got a good quote from that wily old deist Antony Flew. ;)

185. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87346 by Russell Blackford on November 12, 2007 at 12:06 am

I really hope his daughter is lying on a beautiful sunny beach somewhere, wearing her topless string bikini, smoking dope, drinking French Champagne, and discussing the finer points of Salman Rushdie's novels with her lesbian lover. (Or if she's not quite old enough for all that yet ... may it happen at the appropriate time, Zeus willing.)

I have no time for these miserable moralists.

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

Comment #86973 by Russell Blackford on November 10, 2007 at 7:19 pm

The trouble is that the world hasn't moved on, and it's not just in the US that it's gone backwards. Look at what has been happening in Europe with irrationalist opposition to new reproductive and genetic technologies. Admittedly, the UK is fairly enlightened on this ... but go and have a look at the new laws in Italy some time. Religious and quasi-religious encroachment on the public sphere is aggressive, confident, well-planned, and influential ... everywhere you look.

For me, the turning point wasn't so much 9/11. Well, it was important. But the widespread moral panic over the cloning of Dolly in 1996 (announced in early 1997) was what really started to alert me that we're going through the early years of a New Endarkenment: that irrationalism of an essentially religious kind was making a huge comeback, and that liberal political principles were (and remain) under serious threat.

187. Antony Flew's Bogus Book

Comment #86691 by Russell Blackford on November 10, 2007 at 1:23 am

My reaction and some discussion (some of it off-topic) here:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/11/carrier-on-flew.html

188. Losing faith in Quebec

Comment #86289 by Russell Blackford on November 8, 2007 at 11:57 pm

Sounds good.

I think it's positive if kids are not going to be indoctrinated in any particular moral theory or religion. Let their parents teach them the basic virtues of kindness, loyalty, non-violence, honesty, and so on. On controversial issues, expose them to the range of views and let them make up their own minds. That's not relativism - at least not in any bad sense - just acceptance that these moral and religious issues are contested, and for practical purposes intractable.

189. The New Atheism rocks

Comment #86285 by Russell Blackford on November 8, 2007 at 11:46 pm

zarcus, I respect Harris and will always give some weight to his opinion, and in any event I don't expect anyone to be intellectually dishonest. All cats around here (including me), not sheep.

That said, I don't really agree with Harris: I think that "atheism" and its cognates are perfectly good words.

What I do think, however, is that we should be working as closely as we can with whoever is prepared to make common cause with us on important issues. That may mean working with a whole coalition of freethinkers, and even (genuinely!) moderate religionists, on such issues as church/state separation.

190. Fox News Discussion on 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #86218 by Russell Blackford on November 8, 2007 at 6:29 pm

Sorry to make a comment that doesn't really advance things, but I can't resist joining the chorus of hollow laughter at the idea that the Catholic Church would criticise anyone for introducing ideas about religion to children. Obviously it's okay, in the eyes of the Great Queen Spider worshippers, to brainwash kids with religion. But very indirectly introducing them to ideas critical of religion ... well, obviously that's a forbidden intrusion on childhood innocence.

191. The Turning of an Atheist

Comment #86213 by Russell Blackford on November 8, 2007 at 5:59 pm

I largely agree with walk and bonzai, and I'm not actually motivated to attack the faith of particular religious folk whom I chance to know or meet. They can find meaning or save their souls or escape the wheel of samsara however they want.

But I do think that we need to challenge religion in the public marketplace of ideas. I see no alternative to contesting its truth claims directly and openly, showing that they are dubious at best, tearing off the mantle of moral authority worn by presybters, pontiffs, and priests, and demonstrating that religion provides no firm foundation for public policy. But that's only because religion attempts to encroach on policy, with illiberal, irrational, miserable views.

I see it as a public struggle against the New Endarkenment. What particular individuals believe wouldn't matter to me if they didn't have the right to vote on policy.

192. The New Atheism rocks

Comment #86196 by Russell Blackford on November 8, 2007 at 4:26 pm

detox, what we do about it depends on our talents and skills. I'm a writer and a philosopher, and I'm also honed by years of work in courtrooms to be at least a moderately skilled public debater (but nowhere near in the Hitchens class). I do stuff with words. In philosophical mode, as in this article, I'm kind of honour-bound to examine the arguments dispassionately. The spoken version was a bit more colourful, with a lot more barbs and jokes.

Anyway, we all need to do what we can.

An important point that didn't find its way into the written version, but which I think must be stressed, is the one that Eddie Tabash made in the talk we all saw recently. In the US in particular, religious intellectuals have been trying to seize the intellectual high ground of constitutional theory and philosophy of religion (the point I made in my talk was only about the latter). For the last two or three decades, they've put huge effort into cultivating bright young religious scholars, and it's paid off.

One thing that some of us can do is simply participate in those areas and try to encourage young secular scholars to do so. If we lose the intellectual high ground, as we've been doing to some extent, we lose an enormous long-term strategic advantage. Yet, to take the philosophy of religion example, secular philosophers have been deserting this in the past thirty years or so for what they might have considered more rewarding fields. Partly out of complacency, we've been losing our stake in a field that should be a powerhouse of secular critique.

As a result, it's now a bit jarring to chance upon a statement, such as I saw a while ago in the 1990 edition of Kai Nielsen's Ethics Without God ... where Nielsen suggests that his own earlier works, and such contributions as J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism, were "essentially mopping-up operations in the wake of the philosophical and scientific developments since the Enlightenment." Nielsen couldn't have been more wrong. A quarter of a century after the publication of J.L. Mackie's book, things look very different in the academy; a distinctive Christian philosophy, represented by our friends Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and a host of others, is now well-entrenched, perhaps even numerically dominant.

So one thing that those of us who are more academic in our talents and skills can do is get right with Tabash on this point. The religionists' strategy of building up the intellectual powerhouse of Christian philosophy did not have a dramatic immediate effect, but it has paid off big-time in the longer run. We can try to counter it by challenging the Christian intellectuals right now, but we can also think strategically. If nothing else, we need to get out the message to bright young secularists that such fields as constitutional theory (particularly in the US) and philosophy of religion are enormously important.

Meanwhile, yes, there are more immediate activist things to do like forming political parties,creating YouTube videos, writing op.ed. pieces for the popular media, and on and on. Really, anything that challenges the truth-claims of religion and its encroachment on public policy is worth doing.

One beauty of the New Atheist books is that they provide a rallying point. Now we're all rallying and sharing knowledge, we can understand more clearly what has been happening over the past decades, how patiently the US religious right has been planning its assault on secularism, and how urgent it is for us all to do what we can to respond.

193. Same Flea, Different Name?

Comment #86010 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 8:17 pm

"OP" signifies the Catholic order he belongs to - in this case, apparently, the Dominicans. But it would be nice if it stood for "Order of Paramecia" or "Order of Platyhelminths" or something of the kind.

194. Atheists don't believe in anything

Comment #85985 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 5:05 pm

^In the EEA or now? If you mean now, I doubt it. In my experience, it's almost the opposite - the people whom I consider morally virtuous tend to have small families or even to be childless by choice. In the EEA, where there was no contraception, things were very different.

195. The New Atheism rocks

Comment #85973 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 4:24 pm

monkey2, you make a very good point about the importance of education.

But let me say something in fairness to the religionists. Back in Locke's time, the role of the state and the secular law was relatively limited. It was arguable that that role should be little more than one of protecting our lives, liberty, and property - whether from criminals or from external enemies. Since about, say, the 1870s the role of the state has grown markedly, partly in response to a need to ameliorate the harsh outcomes of unbridled capitalism.

There has been an issue about the relationship between corporation and state, as well as the issue about the relationship between church and state. I tend to call this the post-industrial role of the state (our Libertarian friends would oppose this role pretty much in its entirety, but I'm not with them).

In part (perhaps a relatively small part, but I'm interested in being fair, even if some of the religious folk are unlikely to return the favour), the current problems arise from the state doing things, for perfectly good secular reasons, that cut across the religionists' moral views. I disagree with those moral views - I consider them misguided, ungrounded, miserable, etc. - but I'm prepared to cut the religionists a bit more slack than some. Exactly how much, I'm honestly not sure.

I think Locke saw it clearly - the state has to do what the state has to do. It shouldn't be motivated by persecuting people with a particular religious belief, but if its actions, based on good secular reasons, have an adverse effect on someone who has a particular belief, so be it. I think it's now a bit more complicated.

But this is just another example of why there are grey areas, why the precise character and effect of a doctrine such as separation of church and state is always going to be contested, and why no amount of wrangling about separationism will ever be a substitute for direct critique of religious doctrine. We really do need both and it's important - and good - that RD and so on have challenged the taboo against the latter.

196. The New Atheism rocks

Comment #85951 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 3:04 pm

clodhopper, I'm keen to get material like this published in the UK and the US but feel totally naive about the markets there. Zeus knows, I feel naive enough about the markets in Australia. We won't clutter up the thread with the difficulties experienced by all writers in getting published in fields and localities where they have no reputation built up, but any tips about UK markets by way of pm, in the forum, on my blog, etc., would be very welcome.

Next year, I'm hoping to be a lot more publicly aggressive about these issues - and the bioethical ones that are my more usual stock in trade. I'm prepared to go out there and fight the fight, and look to get material published in traditional markets internationally. It's going to be difficult, though. The last couple of years, I was more focused on building up some respectable publications in academic journals - and had some success. This year has largely been devoted to trying to build up some presence on the internet - with a bit less success.

Flagellant and others, I also recommend Udo Schuklenk's blog:

http://ethxblog.blogspot.com/

Udo sometimes gets into these issues. He is of the school who thinks of the word "atheist" as having quite a strong meaning, and so calls himself an "agnostic", but he's as hostile to religion as any New Atheist, and it shows in his discussions of ethical issues. One of his pet peeves is conscientious objection rights for the religious.

197. The New Atheism rocks

Comment #85765 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 3:16 am

Thanks, folks. I'm also open to criticism of the thesis.

BAEOZ, I think you mean age and beauty before ... hmmmmm, youth and enthusiasm perhaps? Mind you, your hair isn't that far behind mine in the greying stakes. Give it a few years.

198. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #85760 by Russell Blackford on November 7, 2007 at 3:00 am

I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read the, er, wisdom from Pietro Siffi. You couldn't make this stuff up.

199. A House Divided: Hitch at Georgetown

Comment #85709 by Russell Blackford on November 6, 2007 at 11:08 pm

Tanglewood, what you're missing is this: the issue isn't whether a supposed God could or could not forgive whatever wrongs had been done to Him. The issue is whether the idea of blood sacrifice as a way of propitiating a vengeful deity is barbaric and, to modern people, wildly implausible.

I mean, if someone wrongs me - say by accusing me, in the pages of The Times, of having sex with a parrot - I might forgive her. However, I won't need to have any blood sacrifice performed to take away the sins of the world, or rather, of this particular person. I certainly won't have to conduct some blood sacrifice of part of myself to myself in order to remove the sin. There's no need for me to chop off my finger or to kill my cat, or my baby, or my parrot (if I had one).

No. I just forgive the person ... or not as the case may be. My decision will be based on rational things such as how much harm was really done, whether she is sorry, whether it was out of character, and so on.

The great embarrassment for Christian doctrine in particular is that it relies on our acceptance that there is something reasonable about the ancient idea of a need for blood sacrifice to propitiate for sin.

200. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #85695 by Russell Blackford on November 6, 2007 at 9:43 pm

RD does explicitly disclaim any reliance on the Problem of Evil in The God Delusion. I remember the point well, since it was one point on which I disagreed with him - I think it is still a very powerful argument and has never been answered satisfactorily. It doesn't prove that there is no god at all (perhaps evil or indifferent to suffering), but it does expose how unlikely it is that a benevolent god exists, and the debate about it shows the intellectual contrivances needed to sustain faith in the God of the orthodox Abrahamic theologians.