Mock the Meek

Someone called Barbara King interviewed Richard Dawkins on NPR, with a clear anti-ridicule agenda. She is concerned about the feelings of the faithful, I presume, and she thinks Richard's famed 'stridency' is counter-productive in any dialogue with them. 

This common refrain from some non-believers (as we've seen from Julian Baggini) perhaps stems from a misguided idea of how civilised discussion should be conducted. Obviously, gratuitous rudeness is not something we encourage, and it's clear that accommodationists perceive Dawkins's many blasts at religious beliefs, and those who hold them, as gratuitously rude. In fact, in this interview Dawkins says he's sorry if he's been rude about anyone, and that he really aims to mock their beliefs alone. This seems like an unnecessary apology to me; if someone mocks my beliefs I think that's much the same as mocking me, and would treat it the same. So they may as well mock me.

And so what? As one grows up one gets mocked repeatedly, and this has a formative effect on belief - how could it not? If ridicule is such a bad idea, then someone needs to tell every single one of my teachers from primary school to grammar school that their every sarcastic put-down was militating against their pedagogy. I suspect 'Pengy' West and Frank 'Hitler' Collins might disagree. And while I and my fellow pupils did not enjoy the put-downs at the time, it made their points memorable and gave the rest of the class a laugh to boot. If it's such a bad idea, then someone should tell every satirist, from Horace to Juvenal, Moliere to Voltaire, Swift to Hogarth, Dickens to Wilde, Dorothy Parker to Peter Cook, that they are simply wrong to do it. I would love to hear their responses.

Barbara King herself draws a distinction between those who are open to discuss evolution and young earth creationists, whose belief she does not respect. I suspect young earth creationists would find her lack of respect for their belief offensive and would treat it as an attack on their very person, just as the 'moderately' religious find Dawkins's attacks on their nutty beliefs offensive. (I put scare quotes around moderately just to indicate that there is nothing about religion that allows us to define someone as extreme or moderate - that metric is not determined by faith, but by reason and evidence).

So I don't think that King is behaving any differently in kind to Dawkins, by adopting what she has decided is a more reasonable approach, so why does she think she is behaving any better than Dawkins? The most obvious conclusion is that she is a victim of our cultural prejudice against non-belief, even while she is a non-believer herself. And this isn't so surprising, being a child of a society that places religion beyond criticism, into a sacred place where it should not be challenged. It's the only belief that we are criticised for the very act of criticising.

But as I hinted at above, even 'moderate' believers believe recklessly. If they are not applying critical thinking to their beliefs, allowing some of their beliefs freedom from the shackles of reason and evidence, then they are accidents waiting to happen. Three Christian MPs, Gary Streeter, Gavin Shuker and Tim Farron, have apparently sent a letter to the Advertising Standards Authority challenging the Authority's ruling against faith healing adverts. They say:

We are writing on behalf of the all-party Christians in Parliament group in Westminster and your ruling that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, in their advertising, that God can heal people from medical conditions.

We write to express our concern at this decision and to enquire about the basis on which it has been made. It appears to cut across two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible. Many of us have seen and experienced physical healing ourselves in our own families and churches and wonder why you have decided that this is not possible.

On what scientific research or empirical evidence have you based this decision?

You might be interested to know that I (Gary Streeter) received divine healing myself at a church meeting in 1983 on my right hand, which was in pain for many years. After prayer at that meeting, my hand was immediately free from pain and has been ever since. What does the ASA say about that? I would be the first to accept that prayed for people do not always get healed, but sometimes they do. That is all this sincere group of Christians in Bath are claiming.
It is interesting to note that since the traumatic collapse of the footballer Fabrice Muamba the whole nation appears to be praying for a physical healing for him. I enclose some media extracts. Are they wrong also and will you seek to intervene?

We invite your detailed response to this letter and unless you can persuade us that you have reached your ruling on the basis of indisputable scientific evidence, we intend to raise this matter in Parliament.

It's hard to believe that grown men, let alone Members of Parliament, could pen such a dreadfully thought out  letter, and I fear for democracy if they apply the same shambolic thinking processes to matters of state. Is it appropriate to respect their belief that praying works? Or should reason and evidence be applied to determine the truth of the matter? Of course, Gary Streeter does have reason and evidence for his belief, but it's a bad reason and it's poor evidence, and when we give the shorthand reason and evidence, we mean good reason and good evidence. How could this man have got to the age of 56 without being taught how to think? Is that too strident? I don't know, but, when he's liable to place lives at risk with such dangerous nonsense, I don't care, and I don't think Barbara King should either. The more often this man's laughable thought processes are called out the better, because it will save lives. To whimper about the evils of ridicule in such circumstances is to be complicit in the harm these beliefs cause.

I'm pleased to see that Martin Robbins throws the book at them:

The implication of prayer-healing is that special people can demand that God heals someone, and he'll just do it. That only makes sense if you believe that a) God is a bit absent-minded and doesn't really notice all the sick people until some clever human points them out to him, or b)God is the fourth emergency service (the AA come fifth in this world-view), and we're entitled customers who pay with prayer and should damn well get some service.

Either way, the message from faith-healers - and the hapless morons who support them - is clear: "Fuck God's plan, He's our bitch." I'm not a Christian myself, but if I were, I think I'd be pretty frustrated with this sort of selfish, arrogant attitude, and I'd laugh in the face of people who claimed to have some divine right over His powers.

Steady, Martin, you called them morons; we wouldn't want to alienate them, would we? But surely ridicule from all is exactly the appropriate response to this anti-scientific avalanche of bullshit. Should we say, yes, Mr. Streeter, because some chronic pain in your right hand disappeared after some prayer, we should all adopt prayer as a tried and tested principle, to be advertised for its efficaciousness? Is there no reason why this datum should not be taken at face value and treated as hard science? But if that's the case, I could write to the authorities pointing out that since I read their letter to the ASA there has been a dull ache in my head, but thankfully ridiculing  its contents has eased the pain. Therefore, please prescribe regular ridicule of religious idiocy on the NHS. At least there's a clear causal link in my anecdote compared with Streeter's.

But, of course, as Robbins points out:

The ASA quite rightly say in their ruling that "testimonials [are] insufficient evidence for claims of healing." To which I would add, "...and I am never going to vote for you, Gary Streeter, you utterly gullible buffoon."

Is Streeter gullible? Plainly. Is he a buffoon? I suppose it's possible he just hasn't had the gumption to investigate all the studies that have been performed on the efficacy of prayer, in which case he's a buffoon to write the letter, or he has seen them but prefers his own anecdote, in which case he's a buffoon to write the letter. 

Sorry to mock, but sometimes there's really no alternative.

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A Pitcher of Sneer

Pitcher - he's the one on the left

Eric MacDonald has posted a piece entitled The Emptiness of George Pitcher, pointing out the vacuity of Pitcher's slippery slope argument against assisted dying.

There is simply no logical connexion between my conviction that my life is intolerable in my condition, and the claim that anyone else in a similar condition must also be living in intolerable suffering. Yet every argument against assisted dying assumes that there is, and that, for that reason, we cannot permit people to make up their own minds about whether or not they should be allowed to receive assistance in dying. And so the suffering are forced to suffer.

I was listening to Raymond Tallis talking about the arguments against assisted dying, and I think he made a couple more pertinent points on the slippery slope:

When you're thinking about slippery slopes, you need to know how slippery they are, what the coefficient of friction is, and, indeed, what way they're pointing.

He then quoted John Harris's view that moving to assisted dying legislation would not apply skis, but crampons, to the issue, because informal procedures are more likely to be abused than formal ones. The crazy thing is that doctors are already on a slope, and there is no-one and nothing available to help them traverse it. The law can supply a foothold for these beleaguered professionals. For more on Tallis's views, see here.

On Wednesday night Pitcher pitched a loathsome performance on 10 O'clock Live, in a discussion which was supposed to cover the cultural and political relevance in Britain today of Christianity in light of the prayers offered by all and sundry for the stricken Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba. Instead of discussing the subject he was more content to hurl brickbats at Evan Harris, to whom he has become something of a troll. He seemed to revel in trolling him face to face this time. 

Evan Harris made some eminently reasonable and far from strident comments that praying was 'a nice thing' if people were genuinely asking for help from god, but that fact didn't justify religious privilege in the public sphere. To which Pitcher replied, demonstrating the wit we've all come to expect from him, 

That's bollocks!

For some reason he didn't expand on this, presumably considering it a better argument than anything that theologians have come up with to counter secularism.

He did however ramble on about a 'folk faith' that people in this country have, that surfaces in times of extremis. Well, this is true, and not just in times of extremis. Cultural Christians often use religious language, and that would include Dawkins, as his recent "Oh god!" testifies when he was trying to remember the subtitle to On the Origin of Species. It's hardly surprising when we've been force-fed religion since we were 3 years old. Harris pointed out that this doesn't mean we must therefore be a 'Christian country'. 

Harris re-iterated that secularism was about removing religious privilege, not religious persecution, which won a round of applause from the audience. The needy Pitcher, feeling the warmth accorded to the sentiment, then said he 'sort of' agreed with that (really?!) so could he have a round of applause too? Harris then spoke out against self-censorship of criticism of religious extremists, sensibly, and how no-one had a right to be offended. Pitcher took offence at this, and accused Harris of being one of the easiest people in the world to offend, and said that that was why he was thrown out of parliament, for taking himself too seriously - *nice*, again with the personal attacks.

Mitchell challenged Harris's contention that atheists could not be offended (a claim that is surely too strong!), but Harris clarified the point, and it's pretty obvious; atheists are simply less likely to hold certain beliefs, rituals and objects as sacred, so are more difficult to offend. Pitcher then suggested that atheism was a religion (does George think that's bad?!), and trotted out the tired old saw that Dawkins is the 'high priest' of atheism, and made a weak joke alluding to Dawkins's recent memory lapse.

(Mitchell's performance in this discussion was surprisingly weak, based on past showings; I'll put that down to a momentary aberration, and hope it has nothing to do with his forthcoming nuptials with faitheist Victoria Coren. Congratulations to them both, anyway!)

So apart from one small interlude where the topic was discussed, Pitcher spent the discussion playing the man not the ball. I cannot believe that any Christians watching would want to be associated with a religion to which this irksome, quarrelsome and militant priest was connected.

UPDATE: Here is an audio of the talk discussed above:

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The Evil God Challenge

Stephen Law's Evil God Challenge (EGC) is quite simple, and complex, at the same time (like some god concepts!). There have been many objections raised against it, but I think they mostly miss the very simple crux, which is, I think:

If they did not rule out an evil god for some other reason, do believers think that the evidence supports its existence?

(It's well worth reading the entire paper, linked above, to get the full flavour)

It's clear that some theists do understand the problems this poses for them, since much wriggling can be observed, amid cries of foul play. Now, plainly many do rule out the evil god for some other reason; some, no doubt, for long considered reasons. However, given how superficially many come to their god belief, through childhood indoctrination, for example, there's also a suspicion that some have simply not thought much about the possibility of an evil god, that it's simply not an idea that they would entertain, that it's evident that it does not exist. If you're a believer who thinks the idea of an evil god is obviously ruled out by one's experiences, then you have a serious problem with the EGC. You would need to show a significant asymmetry between the evidence for the good god and the evil one, and, whilst there is some asymmetry, I just don't think it's significant enough.

William Lane Craig, for example, can see that all his arguments for god, but one, are equally valid for an evil god as for a good god, so his entire belief in a good god rests on the very dubious argument from morality. He sees the danger from evidence inherent in the EGC (that the evidence rules out his god), so adopts a radical scepticism to avoid that disturbing truth.

Thomists, on the other hand, and as I understand it, have a notion of 'being' and 'good' that makes an evil god a contradiction in terms, effectively. That's fine, and if they really believe in these notions and definitions, there's nothing, in logic, to stop them. But there are any number of logical possibilities that fit with the world in which we live, and simple logical possibility seems a very low standard by which to judge one's belief. Why wouldn't one want to compare it with the evidential data to see how well it fits, compared to other scenarios, for example? After all, the only reason anyone believes in a god in the first place is because of the situation in which they find themselves, so their belief would not exist without the initial contemplation of evidence.

Law suggests, then, that the EGC can still be run, even though a concept is paradoxical. In other words, we say, OK, the evil god is nonsensical, but run the challenge anyway as if it were not. There can be no doubt that even Thomists would have to agree that the evidence rules out the evil god, and, therefore, so it must rule out the good god (unless they adopt a Craig-style radical scepticism). Thomists protest that the evidence is irrelevant because of their concept of god. Would Thomists accept a non-believer simply dismissing any discussion of the evidence for god because she found the concept incoherent? I don't know. So, is Law's a valid move, to run the EGC against an impossible concept?

I'm not entirely sure. It's right that there is little point in assessing the evidence for married bachelors or invisible pink unicorns, to give two more examples of impossible concepts - we can rule them out a priori. But does this mean that we cannot consider what evidence there might be if, defying logic, they did exist, via a thought experiment? Can we still identify attributes of these paradoxical beings and consider how a world would look with them in? We can look for evidence of bachelordom, and marriage certificates, so we could look for evidence of each attribute - a world with no marriage certificates would rule out anyone being married, for example. So it's tempting to consider this a valid move in the challenge. However, if one considers the evidence for the paradox in toto, I'm less sure. What evidence could there be for (married bachelors)? Well, none, I would think, because they cannot exist.

So, if we consider what a world would look like with a paradoxical evil god in it, and one without, there would be no difference between the two, because the concept cannot exist in either; this suggests the EGC does not apply. However, if we consider what a world would look like with an evil something, and then, separately, what it would look like with an all-powerful being, of unknown goodness, we would expect different worlds. This suggests the EGC does apply.

On balance, I'm inclined to think it can still be applied, if there are identifiable attributes, which there are in the case of the evil god. We are entitled to look at the state of the world and see if it comports with an evil something; and if that something is an extremely powerful being, we can expect certain consequences to flow from that. So, if this can be agreed, the EGC will apply even to incoherent god concepts.

Ultimately, of course, the Thomist god is not a concept worth entertaining because there is no evidence offered to support it among the infinite logically possible beings that might exist in our universe. Only a credulous mind could possibly commit to it, rather than simply note its logical possibility.

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As Good as Gnu

Julian Baggini has complained about new atheists before, saying:

In any case, my [negative] opinions are not so much about these books as the general tone and direction the new atheism they represent has adopted. This is not a function of what exactly these books say, but of how they are perceived, and the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews. All this, I think, has been unhelpful in many ways. In short, the new atheism gets atheism wrong, gets religion wrong, and is counterproductive.

He goes on to attack new atheism because it is anti-theistic, and parasitic on god-belief, whereas he proffers an atheistic world view. It seems obvious to me that these two are not in conflict with one another, and Baggini is simply mistaking his distaste for new atheism's political goals with a pertinent point. Later he says:

The practices of religion may be more important then the narratives, even if people believe those narratives to be true.

But those practices are not more important than the belief that the narratives are true, as his own investigations have shown, in a piece called The myth that religion is more about practice than belief:

My own research shows that the vast majority of Christians appear to take the orthodox doctrine at face value.

But now he makes another tone attack on a certain type of atheist, and one can only conclude he means the new atheists, given his form. He cites this article by Jeffrey Myers, to illustrate how atheists protest about being called out for their tone, and then says:

Accusing someone of being aggressive, nasty or shrill can be a neat way of avoiding the meat of the matter while also appearing to occupy the moral high ground. That's true, but tone does matter, and it's often more connected with substance than it might seem.

But the linked piece doesn't say that tone does not matter. It says "Our tone does not matter". This is a vital distinction, and gets to the nub of how very wrong Baggini is on this issue. Myers points out that:

Because the reality is that our tone is NOT the problem. Our tone doesn't matter. Because it doesn't matter how polite we are, how eloquent we are, how articulate or respectful we are. It is not our tone that theists reject - it is our existence.

And Baggini and other accommodationists should know this, because they themselves are regularly accused of the same crimes as the new atheists - just read the comments section to Baggini's attempts to bridge the gap between theism and atheism in The Guardian. In this latest article, Baggini notes:

"Tone" actually crops up in two guises in this debate. It not only refers to the mode of argumentation but also to the alleged way in which many atheists are "tone deaf" to religion.

Fair enough, it is 'alleged'. But is it true that 'atheists' are tone deaf?

(And which ones? Is that a trait that they have as a group? As often when it comes to this sort of accusation, no evidence is linked to support Baggini's position. To be clear, I don't doubt that the occasional atheist might make a tone-deaf pronouncement. I object that atheists are characterised as a group with this clumsy stereotype, and I object that the four horsemen, and gnus, are too)

In fact, the opposite is true, is it not? It is many theists who are tone deaf to atheistic writing because they respond no differently to Julian Baggini's supposedly nuanced approach than they do to Richard Dawkins's supposedly tone-deaf approach. Consider these comments:

Julian Baggini
I think one of the biggest obstacles to progress here is your inability to resist your obsessive-compulsive desire to use space in your own articles to denigrate religious belief and instead use them to propound the primacy of your own atheist ones. A lot of religious people may draw from that that your claims of respectful discussion are somewhat akin to a wolf in sheep's clothing. CatholicAndy

The most troubling thing about this piece is the aggressive idea of 'acceptable' religion; as if giving an ultimatum to all religious believers. Baggini doesn't reveal which authority gave him the right to define how religion should be in the 21st century, nor does he give any consideration to libertarian values, like the freedom of expression or belief.
With this article Baggini, despite all his claims to occuyping a middle ground, has shown himself to be as intolerant and supremacist as the militant atheists he claims to descry. iphedia

And there are many more - there we have it in black and white.

Russell Blackford wrote an excellent piece on this a while back:

The problem is likely to be that a lot of discussion of tone is just not very intelligent - how many reviews of The God Delusion have you read that show a tin ear for Dawkins' control of tone? Many reviews don't show any sensitivity at all for the varied tones: the humour; the quiet thoughtfulness and introspection; or the comical intoxication with language itself in Dawkins' famous denunciation of the Old Testament deity. Generally speaking, the reviewers just don't "get" it. But the cure for that isn't less discussion of Dawkins' tone; it's more intelligent discussion of Dawkins' tone. A hackneyed adjective such as "strident" doesn't cut the mustard.

Spot on. Dawkins's writing and pronouncements are thoughtful and witty and insightful - maybe not as profound as some of our better philosophers, but he's not talking to academia. He's talking to the general public, and his tone is entirely appropriate for that. The cry from gnu atheists is not that tone is unimportant, it's that the tone argument is being used dishonestly and prejudicially against them.

The response to Baggini's own writing shows that to be true. Whether he likes it or not, he's as good as gnu in the eyes of many a theist.

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The Negligence of Anti-Secularism

There's a curious doublethink prevalent in the world today. It calls tolerance intolerant and peace-making militant. It coddles views that are in violent and murderous opposition to each other and calls that constitutional. As Polly Toynbee says, about the faiths:

Each has their own divinely revealed unique truth, often provoking mortal conflict, Muslim v Copt, Catholic v Protestant, Hindu v Muslim or Sunni v Shia. But suddenly the believers are united in defence against the secular, willing to suspend the supremacy of their own prophets to agree that any religion, however alien, from elephant god to son of God, is better than none.

Secularism is the recognition that in a modern multi-cultural society we have these juggernauts of faith motoring around the body politic and, unless measures are taken to avoid it, they will collide. Not they might collide; they will collide. To argue against secularism in these circumstances is to call for a road system without traffic lights, roundabouts and Give Way signs.

Genuine secularism, not militant secularism, which surely doesn't exist, refuses to succumb to the privilege that religion demands, and the response to the Richard Dawkins Foundation Ipsos-MORI poll on Christian beliefs proves that we still have a problem accepting genuine secularism. Dawkins appeared on a couple of shows to talk about the results, which showed that those who self-identified as Christians have a wide-ranging set of beliefs. 49% of Christians polled don't believe that Jesus is the son of god, and 6% of Christians polled don't even believe in god! This means that government should be careful not to accept any lobbying from the religious to support a monolithic view of Christianity. Most importantly, perhaps, is that, of those polled:

Three quarters (74%) strongly agree or tend to agree that religion should not have special influence on public policy, with only one in eight (12%) thinking that it should.

So the majority of self-identified Christians, it would seem, advocates secularism. Some deride it, of course; here's the febrile Cranmer, talking about Trevor Phillips, Equality Tsar, who had the temerity to say that religions are not above the law:

Britain is not a secular state, and it is not for some trumped-up chairman of an over-inflated quango to make it one. All gods are not equal in the pantheon, Mr Phillips; all religions are not equally conducive to the common good; all faith groups are not equally beneficial to society; all beliefs do not equally save.

Here we see the self-righteous indignation which is the hallmark of the religious fanatic from Urban II to Pius XII, from John Calvin to Fred Phelps; the bedrock is their belief in the absolute truth of the revelation that has been granted them; of all people, of course, it has to be them, not the revelation of Johnny Foreigner, from the next village. The idea that their unevidenced belief trumps another's runs entirely contrary to the secularist project, which looks to allow people their beliefs, however wacky, but only allows them traction in the public square as far as they can be defended. No religion has any way of distinguishing its claims from any other, apart from reason and evidence, and reason and evidence shows religion to be a human construct. So the wilder claims and prejudices of the religious are thankfully binned. In so much as religious ideas make it into the mainstream, they are simply pale imitations of ideas that have been far better developed in secular philosophy.

Anyway, back to the response to the RDF poll, and the sclerotic theists and faitheists. The very fact that a poll of Christians is commissioned by Richard Dawkins, arch-atheist, throws them into a lather of risible proportions. Miles Fraser called him the high pope of Darwinism, as if being called a pope was an insult! Stephen Bayley calls him a fanatic disguised as a scientist!

Atheists seem to be very good at dogma. Dawkins seems not to understand that his own zealotry is itself a sort of religious quest.

These half-witted comments are self-defeating; is dogma good or not? If not, then don't be a theist. If it's good, then why accuse atheists of being good at it? Is a religious quest good or not?

Sure, organised religion has caused appalling conflicts. But it has also caused Michelangelo, Milton and Bach.

Bayley's smug complacency is breath-taking. Michelangelo, therefore, millions dead, and more lives blighted, is excusable. It's hard to believe that an educated man has typed this, sat back and looked down on the page with satisfaction. It speaks of a man with no heart, a soulless automaton, incapable of an empathetic response to the suffering and ugliness around him. Perhaps that's it; Bayley can only respond to things that he finds beautiful? Nothing else has value; any suffering is worth the small pleasure he gains from listening to the St. Matthew Passion or gazing at a ceiling. If so, the solipsism of the religiously minded strikes again. If not, well, I don't know what other conclusion we should draw from such a devastatingly insensitive argument.

Andrew Brown regularly posts terminally daft pieces, but nonetheless represents a constituency which wants to cast atheists who defend secularism as faulty in some way. Here he's keen to reinforce this prejudice:

...the militant secularist takes for granted that "the religious" have no access to reason. There can be no reasoning with his opponents. All he can do is to repeat himself more loudly until the idiots understand.

Well, if that's a militant secularist, then there can only be a handful, since many theists are secularists and most atheists have been religious themselves at some time, and I'm sure neither group would regard themselves as having "no access to reason". It is 'mendacious smears' like this, to use the phrase du jour, that show how anti-secularists like Brown fear the tide turning. And be assured that Brown is no secularist; he has fought hard for religious privilege in all his time at the Guardian, despite him self-identifying as an atheist.

And finally the execrable Stephen Pollard, in the Torygraph:

The militant secularists, however, have only one modus operandi – attack. 

The defensiveness is immediately apparent in this straw man, similar to Brown's.

Respect for others’ views seems to be entirely missing from their moral calculus.

Secularism being respect for others' views, and religious belief being the opposite of any such respect! Unless I should somehow conceive that death for apostasy is 'respect' for others' views. The irony of Pollard's statement breaks another meter, but it gets a double hit with the very next sentence, as Pollard continues, oblivious to his own incontinence:

They entirely miss the irony of their position.

You couldn't make it up. He tries to justify this high order idiocy:

Religious leaders who focus solely on a sectarian appeal to their own followers, and who seek to raise their own standing by diminishing the views of others, end up on the margins of serious debate. And as their noise drowns out the quieter, less confrontational majority, they act against their own religion’s interest.

Yes, religious leaders down the centuries have opened the eyes of their followers to the ideas of other religions. This thought, which is whatever the opposite of a truism is, Stephen Pollard thinks the British public will swallow. I shit you not! As Harry Rednapp might say.

That we have seen an hysterical outburst against the mildest defence of reasonable secularism, supported by the beliefs that many Christians themselves hold, shows us that the public square is sick and dysfunctional on this issue. Until such evidence is approached with equanimity, in a mature and reasonable manner, as a community we can't claim to have grown out of harmful magical thinking - the sort of harmful thinking that will inevitably result in fatal collisions if precautions aren't taken.

We will be driving the highways of public policy with no road management in place.

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Calling Cards

The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales is distributing one million cards to 24 dioceses including the Bishopric of the Forces and the ordinariate in order to cultivate evangelisation among Catholics.

So reports the Catholic Herald.

It doesn't seem to reflect all the things that Catholics are called to. Can I suggest an additional one, so the buyer can beware?

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Religious Goggles

Richard Dawkins has written a piece on Salman Rushdie's non-appearance at Jaipur, linking it to Nick Cohen's new book - You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. The article is excellent, and the last quote from Nick Cohen is bang on the money about the many accommodationists who complain about "Richard Dawkins and his ilk":

The complaints boiled down to a simple and piteous cry: “Why can’t you stop upsetting them?”

Some have compared faith to a drug, and it does seem to me that, just as some people don the beer goggles at the end of an evening in the pub, some set aside their reading glasses and replace them with 'religious goggles' when they read the new atheists. The goggles are available in a variety of styles, for believers and non-believers alike.

Ophelia Benson has been discussing a case which I think illustrates this inability some have to see vocal atheists in a reasonable light because of these goggles; the blogger in question misrepresents the atheist desire for theists to see the error of their ways as an insistence that theists 'convert' to atheism. During the course of his piece he conflates proselytising with forced conversion, and so pronounces it 'evil'. Accommodationists often compare new atheists to religious fundamentalists, which betrays a similar goggle-induced error. I would be surprised if anyone did not want others to agree with them; at least, I'm sure most of us think that, which, seen through some accommodationist goggles, becomes evil proselytising, on a par with the most aggressive religious fundamentalism. But the goggles are only worn, apparently, for religious discourse; similar arguments on political or cultural matters are enthusiastically joined. It's a genuinely barmy misfire of the brain, I think.

It's all the more infuriating because I think some incoherent accommodationist posturing might be coming from a good place. That good place is the value of diversity and a distrust of conformity to some all enveloping 'truth'. Through Mill, Orwell and Isaiah Berlin, for example, the Western tradition has become wary of an authoritarianism which tries to force an idealised truth on people for their own good. All fine and dandy - I value a diversity of opinion and debate too, as a method for uncovering the truth, finding better ways of living and resisting totalitarianism. But that doesn't mean that there are many truths, and we should all be relativists. And, more to the point, no-one is a relativist on most matters under discussion in the public square. It mainly rears its head when people reach for the religious goggles.

Coincidentally another 'accommodationist' of sorts, Julian Baggini, has just had an article published arguing his position against some critics of religion (I think it's safe to say he means 'Dawkins and his ilk'). He doesn't appeal to diversity or multiculturalism, but draws an analogy between religion and the family, to support a softly-softly approach:

I think there is a lesson here for atheist critics of religion. No one wants outsiders trying to break up their families, even when they recognise all its faults. Too often we heathens play the role of over-invasive social services, sometimes quite literally worried about child protection. But if we think a religion is a problem, we might do better to take on the role of family therapists, trying to lead them to see that certain members are behaving in unacceptable ways. Sometimes that does mean challenging false beliefs, but it never means treating doctrines as though they were free-standing claims that can be dissected irrespective of the role they play in the family dynamic. This approach won't necessarily make us the most welcome of guests, but it might mean we at least get a hearing at the table, and find some allies there.

The family analogy seems plausible to me, and goes some way to explain resistance to argument. I'm not sure this is any different to other families, however, such as political or footballing ones, and he wouldn't be shy about arguing with those beliefs, would he?

Leaving that aside, sure, many people don't want outsiders to break up their families. But some do, and for good reason. They're vulnerable and not in a position to assert their autonomy. If such people exist, then it would be our duty to intervene. The problem with disallowing a more vocal expression of disagreement with religion is that you are placing the value of this notional family above the individuals in it. That's not fair on them, in my opinion.

I approve a multi-faceted approach to combating harmful beliefs, and I've yet to read an accommodationist piece that has argued persuasively, with evidence, to make me think that vocal criticism of religion should not be one of those facets.

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