The Jesus Process

Following on from my previous post, and spawned by the recent furore over Bart Ehrman's attack on mythicism in Did Jesus Exist?, R Joseph Hoffmann has now posted three essays in what he calls 'The Jesus Process'. As a complete ignoramus on this subject (apart from reading Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus), I think this could provide some excellent resources. I've only skimmed them, but these are my initial observations.

The first essay, by Maurice Casey, is an attack on the internet mythicist phenomenon. Quoting Earl Doherty, he says:

The primary purpose of both site and book [Jesus: Neither God Nor Man] was to reach the open-minded ‘lay’ audience…[2]

This is as inaccurate as possible. The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian. Both groups consist largely of people with closed minds who are impervious to evidence and argument, a quite different world from the critical scholars among whom I am happy to have spent most of my life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious. We were not concerned by ‘peer pressure’ or the ‘constraints of academic tenure’, except that we were united by an absolute determination to oppose any threat to the academic freedom of people in our universities, regardless of status, colour, race, religion or creed.

Not a very auspicious start. This is an error of fact and judgement. Casey is foolish and plain wrong to label the 'internet audience' as closed-minded. Plainly many surfers are, but he would have some difficulty demonstrating that each and every surfer is not open-minded (are none of them members of the academy he lauds?), or that the 'internet audience' is some homogeneous whole that acts in a closed-minded way. So, a false and unsubstantiated statement, which is a shame. Perhaps he considers that most people are not open-minded, which may be true, depending on his definition of open-minded, in which case he could have moderated this claim by saying much of the internet audience is not open-minded, as far as it reflects the population at large, which would be easier to defend, and not obviously wrong.

He goes on to discuss the claims of Doherty, Dorothy Murdock, Tom Harpur, bloggers Neil Godfrey and Steven Carr, and Robert M.Price. Here I'm hoping he is on more solid ground, since it's his area of expertise. The essay appears to be well referenced, and I look forward to a discussion of the points he raises. Given his background, I take his criticisms seriously, so I'm bound to take his opinion on this difficult subject seriously too. As a layman, I would need to be given some extremely good reasons to disagree with his understanding of the consensus view of critical scholarship. I hope his reasoning is not infected by the sort of intolerant attitude to dissent shown by his initial outburst against the 'internet audience'. Needless to say, such obvious errors of fact and judgement do sway the reader's opinion of a piece.

Hoffmann himself has written an essay on 'the road' to an historical Jesus, countering mythicist claims:

The following remarks are designed as a kind of summary of what we know for certain about the conditions and the process through which historical tradition emerged. It is a preface of sorts to a more ambitious project on the myth theory itself and what we can reliably know–if anything—about the historical Jesus.

This looks closest to the sort of thing that will help a know-nothing like me to understand the process scholars have used to conclude that, yes, there is an historical Jesus. It appears well referenced and methodical, and Hoffmann eschews the intemperate language that characterises his wrong-headed attacks on new atheism. I look forward to reading up on his references and reading some of the background scholarship. Although he plainly disagrees (now, but not before?) with mythicists, I hope this is something that they can treat as a useful rebuttal. Maybe this is closer to the book that Carrier thought Ehrman was going to write? Hoffmann says towards the end:

And this brings me back to the starting point.  They [the gospels] preserve something, and I believe it is historical memory as well.  They might have gone off in all directions. The apocryphal Jesus story does just this, with tales of ascents into heaven, a divine brat who slays his playmates, and a revealer who descends to hell and puts demons in irons.[135] That is pure legend.  It “flies off in all directions.”  The Gnostic gospels do it too.  But the canonical gospels do not.  If a contrived mythology is the sufficient explanation of these literary artifacts, it is the job of the myth theorists to explain why they are such poor examples of the mythic tradition—not why they tell the tale of a man who ascends triumphantly into heaven, in some late accounts, like Romulus in the famous apotheosis of Livy–but why they begin with someone who bothered to touch the ground at all.

Why do the canonical gospels begin with a man who is far from divine? If this is true, then he makes a good point. If the purpose of the gospel writers was to tell the story of a divine visitation, they would start with those details. That they start with a more mundane story suggests the story of an 'ordinary' man is their message. However, I'm not sure how he was unaware of this in 1996, when he wrote, apparently sceptical of an historic Jesus:

...Why is the core historical episode of the gospel tradition, the story of Jesus's death on the cross, completely lacking in convincing historical detail, being rather a liturgical drama built up from the psalms and prophetic texts?...

And I'm still not sure how scholars know that a narrative is documentary and not fiction; much modern day story-telling deals with fictional characters who do not behave supernaturally, so presumably they did too 2000 years ago? Nonetheless, I'm grateful that he has given us, the non-paying public, the benefit of his many years of scholarship. This would be impossible in pre-Internet years, Professor Casey should note! I will invest in a Hoffmann book, as a form of thanks.

The third essay, by Stephanie Fisher, a pupil of Casey's, appears to be a critique of Richard Carrier's Bayes Theorem approach to Jesus historicity. Carrier is referred to as 'atheist blogger Richard Carrier' twice in the first couple of paragraphs, which seems to be an attempt to denigrate Carrier's standing, and is an unnecessary flourish, if so. Carrier is a published historian, which is more than one can say of Fisher at the time of writing, however flawed his arguments may or may not be. The essay also seems imbued with too much snark; odd from a protege of a man who seems to be forever railing against the the snark of the new atheists. The use of 'Dickery' in the title is calculated to insult Carrier, and, as such, is unnecessary; a scholarly approach would pay more dividends, I think. She starts:

Most analysts would say that Bayes’ theorem is not in the least amenable to complex and composite historical texts. 

I hope she supports this with a reference (none at the initial assertion); prima facie it seems an unlikely claim, but I'm no expert on Bayes, or history! So maybe she's right, and she's supported her case below. She goes on:

Bayes theorem was devised to ascertain mathematical probability. It is completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical occurrence and therefore irrelevant for application to historical texts. 

I'm not sure about the grammar here, but that Bayes is 'completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to[,?] historical occurrence' is quite an assertion, and needs to be backed up by evidence and argument below. After all, Carrier has written a whole book to support his view.

Carrier doesn’t have a structured method of application, but worse, he is dealing with mixed material, some of which is primary, much of which is secondary, legendary, myth mixed accretion. He has no method, and offers none,  of distinguishing the difference and this renders his argument a complete muddle. Effectively in the end, he can conveniently dispose of inconvenient tradition, with a regrettable illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific certainty to prior conclusions he is determined to ‘prove unarguable’.

This gets closer to some substance; Carrier has a problem with method, apparently, in particular with how to deal with mixed, primary and secondary, material. Here some examples are required to explain how Carrier's proposal lacks method, and how his approach would cause problems with primary and secondary material. Hopefully Fisher supports this, and her other objections to Carrier, in the body of her essay, which I look forward to reading in detail in the coming days.

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Hoffmann on Jesus's Existence

R. Joseph Hoffmann appears to exemplify the old philosophical problem of identity; am I the same person who went to Primary School, then Grammar School, and college, and passed those professional exams? Who married the wife? Is the wife the same person I married? Of course we change, but how sensible is it to call that younger person me?

Hoffmann's views appear to have changed on the thorny subject of the existence of Jesus to a remarkable extent. Here's what he said in the foreword to G.A. Wells book, The Jesus Mystery, back in 1996:

It is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus never existed as the “marginal indiscretion of lay amateurs” (to paraphrase a sentence once imposed on Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism by his theological critics). The direction of biblical criticism since Albert Schweitzer's day has circled back with dizzying regularity to the implied question of Jesus's existence but has sought without success to answer it.

And here he is 16 long years of scholarship later:

For those of you not paying attention, the New Atheism has a new postulate:  Not only does God not exist but Jesus didn’t exist either.  It is a theory that zips past Planet America every fifty years or so, like a comet, then fades away until a new generation of nutters tries to resuscitate it.

Every fifty years or so? Surely shome mishtake? He presumably means every 16 years or so, although it's odd that he would see fit to write a foreword for one of the 'nutters' 16 years ago. Although he doesn't describe Wells as a nutter in the foreword, as far as I can see, but I may have missed it! 16 years ago, the implied question of Jesus's existence had circled back with 'dizzying regularity', but now it zips past every 50 years or so.

To be fair, the foreword proceeds and gives an outline of mythicism arising from Schweitzer's work (although he says that Schweitzer argued against the Jesus of 'nineteenth century Protestantism' rather than Jesus himself), which he plainly sees as naive and misguided for the most part, and then an outline of the historicist response during the twentieth century:

The quest [for the historical Jesus] goes on with something close to the fervour of scientific discovery. At the risk of provoking controversy, it goes on mainly in Christian circles and among Christian theologians. The Jesus of 'history' has always been obscure to Jewish scholars whose enforced involvement in discussions of Jesus's stature is largely the result of the triumph of imperial Christianity in the fourth century, by which time no clear record of Jesus existed except that foisted on Jewish scholars by Christian teachers.

Quite a sceptical comment on the historical Jesus. He calls Wells "the most articulate contemporary defender of the non-historicity thesis" and then asks some questions that need to be answered 'at this juncture in Jesus research':

Why is Paul utterly silent about the historical Jesus?...Why is the core historical episode of the gospel tradition, the story of Jesus's death on the cross, completely lacking in convincing historical detail, being rather a liturgical drama built up from the psalms and prophetic texts? What role can the recovery and analysis of 'Q' (the hypothetical sayings source) play in deciding the matter of historicity? 

In the debate between Ehrman and Carrier, on which Hoffmann appears to side with Ehrman, these questions from Hoffmann sit better on the Carrier side.

Now, to be fair again, these questions may well have been answered in the intervening years to Hoffmann's satisfaction. Note, however, that they did not appear to be at the time of this broadcast in 2007, when Hoffmann said "I happen to believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist". Note that him saying 'Jesus of Nazareth' did not exist is not necessarily the same as denying an historical Jesus, however; 'Jesus of Nazareth' may be code for 'the Jesus of nineteenth century Protestantism', per Schweitzer, for example. We are back to the problem of identity. However, the blurb for the show says:

The goal of The Jesus Project, according to Dr. Hoffmann, is not to “prove” the non-existence of Jesus, but to take the theory as a “testable hypothesis” and use the best methods of critical inquiry to reach a probable conclusion.

...which does not suggest that a mythicist hypothesis is automatically nutty, and also suggests that he is at least sympathetic to the possibility, and maybe does not think that its proponents are 'nutters'. Which makes the quote at the top all the more puzzling in its intemperance. Rather hilariously Hoffmann says about Wells, presciently:

The arguments against it [Wells's mythicist thesis] have ranged from ad hominem attacks on his qualifications...to the familiar and often unargued proposition that the non-historicity of Jesus makes the rise of Christianity and the writing of the gospels all but impossible to explain.

Not dissimilar barbs have been flung at Carrier, too.

Whatever his thought processes are, it's good to see that he has launched something called the Jesus Process, which might throw some light on this fascinating, if infuriatingly distant, story.

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Do Catholics want their Children to Grow up Bigots?

I ask because that is what the Catholic Church want, and I don't believe any of my Catholic friends would agree with them.

Cardinal Vincent Nicholls has sent a letter to parishioners urging them to oppose gay marriage:

We have a duty to married people today, and to those who come after us, to do all we can to ensure that the true meaning of marriage is not lost for future generations.

The 'true meaning'? Well, according to Catholics:

The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, by its nature is ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring...

So because someone once, in a far off age, wrote down that marriage is between a man and a woman, for the procreation of children, so it has to be for ever, regardless of facts and changes in mores. This sort of brutish intransigence is a perfect demonstration of the evil of religion.

And now they want to infect children with the same despicable bigotry; the Catholic Education Service has sent this letter to all Catholic secondary schools, where it has been read out in assembly in at least one school, and the pupils urged to sign a petition against gay marriage.

This is the reality of faith schools, as Andrew Copson highlights in today's Guardian:

But, with the evidence mounting, the government should be investigating not just the incidents of the last fortnight, but also the whole principle of allowing such discrimination within our state education system at all.

I cannot stop grown-ups from being bigots (and believe me, I've tried!) but faith schools deliver in-built discrimination to our children, by definition, even before we consider the bizarre and irrational tenets that can infect each individual faith. Discrimination should not be state-funded, if we want a society which values equality for all.

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Dawkins's Ultimate 747 Gambit

This argument, from p. 187 in my Kindle edition of The God Delusion (I lost my print copy, lending it to light fingered theists!) is commonly cited by philosophers and theists as particularly poor, and it certainly doesn't stand up as a syllogism:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a ‘crane’, not a ‘skyhook’, for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
5. We don’t yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer... 

...God almost certainly doesn't exist. 

It's plainly not the sort of argument a philosopher would want to put up, but Dawkins is not writing for that audience. He's not writing another Miracle of Theism. He's addressing the ordinary person and telling us why he thinks a god is improbable. To that extent, it's always seemed fine to me. I want to explain why it has always seemed fine to me. This doesn't mean, of course, that this is what Dawkins meant, or that the concepts I discuss are entirely accurate (I'm bound to be wrong about many people's god concept, for example). It's an explanation for why it has appealed to me, to perhaps explain why it appeals to others.

Points 1 and 2 summarise how many people approach the 'god explanation'. Point 3 borrows from Daniel Dennett, and asserts that the traditional mind-first view is a problem (Dawkins makes a hidden assumption here). Points 4 to 6 explain that the evidence shows that it is false (given his hidden assumption). I think he's right on his own terms, but theists and atheists often argue past each other on this. Even many atheists get the wrong end of the stick; I think, perhaps, because they are so familiar with more sophisticated god concepts. Here, Common Sense Atheism fails to see the problem, because of the god concept they address. They use philosopher Erik Wielenberg's redrawn argument as the basis for a re-appraisal. Wielenberg's piece is right on its own terms too; it's just not how I interpreted Dawkins's words. Despite Dawkins describing the above as his 'central argument', I don't see Dawkins proposing an argument; I see him refuting an argument.

He starts the chapter by referring to Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747 argument for God:

Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility.

This is the common refrain (and one I used to express): if there's no God, then how likely is all this around us? And just before that, Dawkins says:

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. 

So, the way I've always read it, Dawkins is trying to refute an argument for theism that goes something like this:

P1 There are complex things.
P2 The existence of complex things is unlikely without ultimately a mind to explain them.
[P3 Minds are complex.]
C Therefore an ultimate mind [the most complex?] exists, and this is God.

But, Dawkins says, since your god is a complex thing, it is therefore most unlikely without another mind to explain it, per P2, so the argument is self-defeating, and invalid. Spot on, I say. This doesn't need any argument for more complex explanations, per Wielenberg; it just needs a complex explanation. This argument was basically how I thought when I believed, and, to be honest, that's what everyone I knew who believed thought too, as far as I could tell! But it doesn't work. I've bracketed P3 because this is generally a hidden assumption, and, I think, is where atheists and perhaps many 'everyday' theists differ from theists who have realised this argument is hopeless.

So, many theists have thought about this some more and deny that this is the argument; they posit something more like this:

P1 There are complex things.
P2 The existence of complex things is unlikely without ultimately a mind to explain them.
[P3 Minds are simple.]
C Therefore an ultimate mind [the most simple?] exists, and this is God.

Now the argument is valid, I think, and Dawkins’s improbability objection doesn’t apply, because the god isn't a complex thing. P2 doesn't apply to it.

For theists, P2 is supported by many arguments, such as Aquinas’s five ways, Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, Paley's teleological argument, and so on. P3 seems to be intuited from the supposed immateriality of thoughts. Minds don't have extension in space, per Descartes, for example, so don't have parts, so are simple. For atheists, obviously, these arguments don't convince.

Furthermore, for atheists, Hume’s arguments for the preferment of natural explanations, evolution by natural selection showing the direction of development from simple organisms without minds to more complex organisms with minds, and physics also showing a move from low entropy to high, and simple universe origins, all militate against P2; and the incoherence of dualism in the light of the evidence shows P3 to be false. And this is what Dawkins is referring to in points 4 to 6, I think. So, that argument, with a different hidden assumption, isn't sound.

In the end, I think Dawkins addresses an intuitive argument for god adopted by many that is invalid. Certainly, many theists don't adopt that intuitive argument, but a revised valid argument many do adopt is not sound, because our exploration of reality shows that its premises are unlikely to be true. Dawkins fails to pull out these different assumptions, but nevertheless brings forward points that fatally damage both arguments. I think many readers see what he means, and the book's popularity certainly supports that thought.

Since these are the arguments I see Dawkins refuting in this section, it follows that other arguments that theists may want to posit need to be countered differently, so I think when he says that 'The argument... comes close to proving that God does not exist', I think he's stretching. Nevertheless, I think it's reasonable to say that the first argument, above, if taken by a theist as reason for believing, is in fact a good reason for not believing.

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The Point of Free Will

I've been enjoying (or is it suffering?) another round of free will posts. Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne state the obvious, that contra-causal free will does not exist, and so conclude, contra compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, that free will does not exist. This is not entirely unreasonable, since free will is commonly considered to mean contra-causal free will. And maybe they're right, that it should be held to that definition; for philosophers to amend free will to some other thing allows theologians the get-out of pointing to many respected philos who believe in a free will that has nothing to do with their bankrupt theological concept of free will.

But I'm really not that fussed about the use of the term. I've previously discussed how contra causal free will makes little sense whether determinism is true or false. But rather than rescuing free will, I do think it's worth rescuing the point of free will; or why responsibility is worth laying.

In another piece Coyne says this:

I still see myself as a meat robot, and I don’t accept free will as meaning “I could have done something different had circumstances been different.” For in that sense computers and nearly all living organisms also have “free will”.

This strikes me as a slightly strange thing to say; the first part seems to contradict the second, since if he's a 'meat robot' then obviously robots too can have free will, and we surely treat many living organisms as if they too have free will. I treat my cats as if they have causal influence over their own behaviour, for example. And there's a sense in which Coyne is suggesting some kind of human exceptionalism; if we allow free will then I see no reason to deny it to computers and living organisms a priori. 

I suppose he means something more, that any computer or any living organism would have free will under the definition offered - it's too liberal. But I think this gives a clue to the point of free will; if a computer or living organism is sufficiently complex that it can change its behaviour because it has an internal guiding mechanism that responds in a certain way to external prompts, then we have a reason to talk about the machine having something like 'free will'. We aren't puppeteers in these circumstances, but nudge button operators.

What difference does this make? If we want to affect our futures, and I assume we all do, we need to differentiate between objects that can be remonstrated with and those that can't. Now, although I do remonstrate with my computer, I understand it's pointless: I could change how it operates, but it could not reflect on its actions. However, a more complicated computer, like Marvin, might be worth remonstrating with, if it has an internal guidance and reflection system open to external prompts and information. Similarly, experience shows that my cat is worth remonstrating with too, even if it's less effective than with fellow humans; she doesn't have all the tools or understanding available to most humans. But notice, there are humans who also can't be remonstrated with, so membership of homo sapiens does not determine who is in this group.

In another Coyne piece, in response to some issues that Russell Blackford raises, he says this:

When Russell says “I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise,” he seems to mean only, “had I been somebody other than Russell Blackford at that moment, I might have done otherwise.” And in what sense is that free will? It’s one thing for people to chastise somebody for making a “bad choice” (an emotion that feels natural but is at bottom irrational), but it’s a different thing to think that somebody actually can act in different ways at a single time.

To me, this highlights the very point of free will; to identify the nature of particular agencies, so we can take an appropriate course of action in the light of that nature. I don't think Russell, or anyone, would have behaved differently under the same circumstances (that would just make us randomly-acting beings) - but the difference between how Russell behaves and how another person behaves under the same circumstances reflects a freedom to act differently which is open to all agencies. So we can then apply a 'blame' in proportion to the 'culpability' of each agency going back in the causal chain. I use scare quotes to recognise that the agencies weren't 'free' from their own causal determinism, but we can now usefully employ this information to address any problems caused, or reward any benefits resulting, in the knowledge that the responsibility reflects an agency's ability to self-regulate. We wouldn't allocate moral responsibility to the snow in deadly avalanches, but we might to folk who detonate charges setting off deadly avalanches, because the former has no agency that would respond to remonstration, but the latter has. And such allocation would actually require determinism, or, at least, if there are any indeterminate events, these would be irrelevant to any such moral calculation.

So, in summary, I'm happy to jettison free will; I'm just not so happy to jettison the point of free will, if this is what it is. It does appear that Sam Harris, at least, agrees:

...I argue that people are mistaken in believing that they are free in the usual sense. I claim that this realization has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and for that reason we should not gloss over it by revising our definition of “free will” too quickly. Dan believes that his adjustment of the concept has allowed him to provide a description of human agency and moral responsibility that preserves many of our intuitions about ourselves and still fits the facts. I agree, for the most part, but I think that other problems need to be solved.

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Melanie Reid on Assisted Dying

Melanie Reid has written a clear-sighted 'view from the wheelchair' on assisted dying, prompted by yesterday's commons debate on the DPP guidelines on assisted dying (MPs supported the guidelines, though no change to law was supported). Because it's behind The Times paywall, but is very good, I make no apologies for reproducing it here, because I think it deserves a wider circulation. Reid was a Times columnist, but broke her neck and back in a horse-riding accident in 2010, and has charted her progress since then in a series of moving pieces in the magazine, called Spinal Column. Anyway, here it is, entitled I choose, fiercely, to live - but only for now:

When asked about assisted suicide, I tend to pause and take a deep breath. You really want to know what I think? From the vantage point of a severely crippled body?

Honestly? You want the voice from the coalface? You don’t just want an opinion from some able-bodied moralist who presumes to know what’s best for me?

I find it ridiculous that an educated society, facing an unaffordable explosion in dementia and age-related illness, is prevaricating over this issue. It is, for me, almost inconceivable that the law lags so many decades behind modern realities; and is so out of step with the feelings of the vast majority of the population.

Where is the democracy surrounding death? The fact is simply this. Because of a religious minority, a few antediluvian pressure groups and the might of modern medicine, we are condemning growing numbers of elderly, terminally ill or disabled people to a terrible lingering twilight rather than a good death in the circumstances of their choosing.

And we are condemning the people who want to assist them to the threat of criminal prosecution. This is a scandal.

Today, apparently for the first time in nearly 40 years, MPs are to vote on assisted suicide (in 2006 a change in the law on assisted dying was defeated in the House of Lords by 148 votes to 100). Says it all, doesn’t it? The Conservative MP Richard Ottaway has secured a debate about the guidelines by the Director of Public Prosecutions on the issue, which have been in place since February 2010. The guidelines make it clear that prosecution is unlikely in cases of compassionate amateur assistance to die.

We must hope our MPs are bold enough to represent the nation’s views and support this stance. A recent poll found that 82 per cent of people believe that the DPP’s approach to prosecution is “sensible and humane”. Every single person I know is of the same general opinion: that there is no point keeping humans alive just for the sake of it, when they don’t want to be, in circumstances which we and they regard as intolerable. And if they need help to achieve a good death, in the comfort and peace of their own home, we should be able to give it to them.

Yet we are being held back by a tiny number, not even 18 per cent I bet, who either believe the Bible rules it out or are so blinded by the doctrine of palliative care (or perhaps both), that they remove choice from the majority.

Ironic, isn’t it, that we can buy 50 different types of pasta or ice cream? We can choose a million styles of hair, or clothes, holiday destination or car. Tidal waves of consumer choice lap against us every waking minute. Yet when we need help to effect a simple, primary decision to ease out of life; when we want to avoid becoming a living shell, stuck in bed, in pain, staring at the wall for months on end, and thereby condemning our relatives to a similar suffering, we are denied that choice. Or, if we are able, we must leave the country and go to a grotty Swiss suburb to find it. In an age wedded to the gospel of human rights, in other words, we are denied the most basic human right of all.

I will be very blunt. Most mornings I contemplate suicide, briefly examining the concept in a detached, intellectual way. It’s always during the hour when I am sitting on my shower chair over the loo, leaning forward over my purple, paralysed feet, fighting nausea and light-headedness, sore bones and paralysed bowels. This, without intending to sound self-pitying, is the worst bit in the day of a life as a tetraplegic — a cruel Japanese game show, full of repeated tortures.

And every day I stare at my toes and say to myself: “Nope, got to keep going, got to keep fighting.” Because I choose, fiercely, to live for the people who love me; and will continue to do so until such point as they understand I cannot carry on. I hope that moment, if or when it comes, is many years away.

But you know sometimes, just sometimes, I get angry enough to wish that a few bishops, palliative care specialists and those dedicated campaigners from Care Not Killing — ah! what amazing arrogance lurks in a name — were in my skin, sitting in my shower chair, facing my future.

Knowing that I have a choice is a huge comfort to me; it sustains me on the days when I make the mistake of looking too far in the future. But the point is, I am blessed precisely because I have a choice. I can talk, use my hands to a limited degree. I could, if I sought to, take my own life without implicating anyone else.

There are many other people who, because of their illness or their disability, do not have this possibility of self-determination. Their right to choose is denied to them. They need help to escape from their imprisonment; and they want to know that their family or friends will not be punished for assisting them to die.

The debate today is narrow in scope and only the beginning. It covers the terminally ill, which rules out spinal injuries and a host of other forms of chronic suffering. But it is an important start.

Humanity and economics demand that, eventually — and yes, yes, yes, with all proper safeguards — assisted dying is extended to become legally available to all those who seek it, and not just cancer patients. People like me, living with the consequences of an accident, who dread growing old and lonely. People like my mother, who in the early stages of dementia expressed a clear wish to end her life and not be a burden on us.

There will be a whole generation of ageing babyboomers, in fact, who will seek to go out of life in the same way they have successfully run it: in control, not in incontinence pads in a care home. This debate is not about other people. It is about every single one of us.

(© Melanie Reid, The Times etc)

Hear, hear. It's about autonomy and resisting the tyranny of a misbegotten authoritarianism.

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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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