Postmodernity and christianity

[noel emits]

Did you read the whole speech? I don't think he is trying to undermine atheism as a belief system, at least not explicitly, more trying to get at the fact that while a definition of 'atheism' may not be straightforward, a discussion of what is behind it can be useful in examining the dynamics of faith as well. Also that it is not so simple to disentangle 'atheism' from historical and cultural context, one reason being that it did not come first - ever since human beings were conscious there has been 'religion'. And I think he does acknowledge what you identify as being suggested in a modern atheistic position. I dunno, I think there are some interesting points for consideration there at least.

Neither of these has much in common with the atheism characteristic of Western modernity, which draws much of its energy from moral protest. The God of Jewish and Christian faith is seen as an agent who has the power to prevent the world's evil yet refuses to do so, so that there is the appearance of a moral incoherence at the heart of this tradition. Or he is seen as an arbitrary tyrant whose will is inimical to the liberty of human creatures; or else as an impotent and remote reality, a concept given a sort of ghostly existence by human imagination. In all these instances, it is clear that the refusal of belief in God is something essential to human liberation. We cannot live with a God who is responsible for evil; we cannot grow up as human beings if what is demanded of us is blind obedience; we cannot mortgage our lives and our loving commitment to an animated abstraction. Atheism here is necessary to maturity, individually and culturally.

Even those who argue at length about the simply conceptual inadequacies, as they see it, of Western religion – classically, writers in the Bertrand Russell style – will frequently deploy the language of moral revolt as well. 'Protest atheism', as it is often called, has become a familiar element in the armoury of modern intellectual life, perhaps more often repeated than expounded, but culturally very powerful. The more austere objection to belief found in the positivism of the early to mid twentieth century – it is equally without meaning to affirm or to deny the existence of an agency whose existence could never be empirically demonstrated – has an ironic resonance with Buddhism, but is another component in the mind of Western modernity, even when the philosophical system from which it arises no longer has much credibility. This is atheism as the mark of supreme intellectual detachment, with the intellect defined as a mechanism for processing checkable information only, with everything else reduced to emotive noise. But the other great modern version of atheism is that which exposes religious talk as ideological – as an instrument of social control whose surface conceptual structure is designed to obscure its real function and to divert thought, emotion and energy from real to unreal objects. This is the essence of Marxist atheism, but it also has some relation to Nietzsche's unforgettably eloquent polemic against Christian faith.

Much of which is borne out in attitudes expressed in this thread from the Scientific Rationalist and Sociological perspectives.

 

[noel emits]

You start with nothing and build a working theory based on what you find. You do not come up with an idea and then go off to prove/disprove it.

Maybe not so relevant to this discussion, so it's just as an aside, but as I suggested above I think in essence the basis of religion was enquiry into existence and the forming of theories based on evidence - some of the earliest gods being the obvious Sun, Earth, Moon etc. They were powerful, eternal, dictated the terms of life. On a different tack you have some of the more inward looking traditions meditating and enquiring into consciousness and the relationship with nature in that way. Out of that you had things like yoga as well for instance. And of course religion does have traditions that evolve and develop. It's not exactly equivalent to scientific method but it's not as different as is commonly suggested in the modern era either.

 

[Dusty]

There is no such thing as a global system of 'atheism': there are denials of specific doctrines on varying grounds, and the examination of where the points of stress are in the exposition of these doctrines very importantly allows us to test the resources of what we say as believers

I think he is wrong, and I blame the cultural baggage the word carries.

Modern atheists need a new word. I know Scientologists! Oh wait... that's taken....

The boundaries break down completely when you take religion as the basic act of believing in unseen forces affecting our perceived environment, which as you quite rightly point out existed from the moment of conciousness. I believe in gravity, and have faith that it will continue to function, based on everything I have observed, even though I don't fully understand or am able to explain it. How does this differ from our ancestors looking at the moon and thinking it is being pushed across the sky by a big man? Techically if you take the concept of religion to its very core - I am not an atheist because I believe these things, I have faith in a greater power. However I'm not actively worshipping this unseen power.

 

[swears]

I think "skeptic" is a better term than "atheist".

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think "skeptic" is a better term than "atheist".

I think 'atheist' is fine as long as the emphasis is on it meaning 'a-theist' as opposed to 'athe-ist'. Um, if you see what I mean.

 

[poetix]

Methodological skepticism is clearly not a belief system, but it is just as clearly a system. A disbelief system, if you like.

It's interesting that skepticism, as a system, works best with stabilizers attached: being skeptical about everything, all the time, is rather disabling, so you have various points that you agree to take as fixed for the time being (even if, in principle, you might come back later and worry away at them). Rorty called these sets of fixed points "final vocabularies", although his point was that they never really are finally final.

What's the difference between temporarily accepting as a fixed point something you need not to have to justify right now, and believing that something is true without being able to prove it? Perhaps it is that religious believers don't regard their beliefs as temporary: they agree to be bound by them for as long as their religious identity persists, to the extent that giving them up would entail become a different person (or a dead one, if one's co-religionists are especially down on apostasy). But I am "religious" in just this sense about my belief that homeopathy is bullshit, or that it isn't OK to give other people a hard time just because you're having a bad day.

More generally, I'm "religious" in this sense about most of my ethical commitments, not because I think that God in the last instance has told me that the things I think are right and wrong really are right and wrong, but in the sense that changing my mind and becoming broadly in favour of selfish sexual hedonism (say) would mean becoming a quite different person, someone I wouldn't recognise as myself. It isn't just that my ethical commitments are relatively static, and not subject to constant interrogation; it's that questioning them is self-questioning in a way that wondering whether vi is really better than emacs isn't.

It is possible to be a religious believer and open to self-questioning at the same time; "the enemy of faith is not doubt, but certainty", as one the C of E's doubting bishops once said. Insecure people need to defend their primary commitments from questioning because they need to defend themselves from questioning. Aggressive skepticism about everything except one's primary commitments is one way of mounting such a defence. Fundamentalist Christians can be amazingly dismissive of rival truth claims; far more "relativist" about everything that's not Scriptural Truth (tm) than the most laid-back Rortean.

 

[poetix]

One might add that the sort of "self" that regards itself as having "primary commitments", an identity that is stable over time and stabilised by its commitments, and for which self-questioning and being decidedly one sort of person rather than another are significant issues, is the "religious" self par excellence. There are also humanists like that, of course, but they've basically mapped the religious notion of a soul onto something like a "narrative centre of gravity" and carried on from there. What no religious (theist or a-theist) person can really countenance is the prospect of a life without a moral focus, a life essentially out of control. They know what they're not: they're not children, or animals (or untamed women, or uncivilised natives...)

 

[swears]

Just something I thought was kinda relevant if anybody's interested:

Church-Shopping: Why Do Americans Change Faiths?

 

[polystyle]

The apocalypse Is always now

From Kill The Buddha ...
http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dogma/the-apocalypse-is-always-now/

 

[nomadthethird]

I'm a new athiest, and I don't care what anybody believes or practices religiously, so long as they keep it out of the science classroom.

I'd also prefer if non-believers weren't constantly forced to be party to religious practices during state ceremonies, at school, or anywhere that tax payer dollars are funding the proceedings.

I'm also interested in questioning believers in public at times if only because they are the single largest political lobby in the Western world, they have enormous power and influence, and they've been wielding it for centuries without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow let alone challenging their reign. I won't sit back mute and let a religion based on a book full of hate speech dictate what happens, at least and especially not in science and science education.

Also, religion should be taxed, just like other forms of entertainment. If they started taxing religion tomorrow, I'd shut up about the whole thing.

 

[polystyle]

Also, religion should be taxed, just like other forms of entertainment. If they started taxing religion tomorrow, I'd shut up about the whole thing.

Now that's a money raiser ...
great idea !

 

[swears]

Obama nominates Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health, Sam Harris don't like it one bit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/opinion/27harris.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

 

[nomadthethird]

Oh yes, the dance of the American presidents, the make-nice-with-the-goddists tango.

"Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time."

Ah, yes, the Ceiling Cat makes his first appearance just before the Big Bang, and that explains everything! Except, of course, the question of who created Ceiling Cat. I always wonder--how do people like this know Ceiling Cat exists? What makes them so sure? Isn't Ceiling Cat just a couple of words--a name--someone made up and imbued with special powers? Rather convenient that claims like this are entirely unfalsifiable. The universe was made the by Tooth Fairy, she gave birth to the big bang a bajillion light years before the first Christmas, the stars are really made of ground up baby molars collected from under pillows! Don't question my sacred beliefs.

"If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?"

I do it every day. Better than believing that Ceiling Cat likes to sit by while pre-schoolers get raped and dismembered on a daily basis, elderly women starve to death, animals tear each other limb from limb, natural disasters maim people, disease makes life a living hell for millions. Because then I'd worship a being who is supremely evil, basically like a Sky-Manson or a Sky-de Sade. At least in my worldview, there's no being who could be making things better but decides not to. I have no idea why there has to be a spirit in the sky for morality to make sense. Evolution hardwired the vast majority of humans for empathy, anyway. It's a biological drive, to need others, plus it's in one's best interest to find a group and coexist with it peacefully and share resources.

The upshot to belief is supposed to be that, if you're reaallly good, and apologize simply for being created without any say in the matter, and of course deny yourself sex outside of legal heterobondage, you'll go to heaven to be with Ceiling Cat and his coterie of prigs and hypocrites.

I'll pass, thnx.

 

[Mr. Tea]

preaching ---> choir

 

[mistersloane]

Now that's a money raiser ...
great idea !

Seconded. Genius one, you should really follow that one through nomad, I'd love to see a lobby for it.

The older I get the more I love the space for God that exists in my head as a concept to think about, and the more I just snort with bafflement and derision at organised religion. I was reading a book about Islam on the tube the other day and having to stop myself from snorting like a pig. Ironic but true. Mohammed was great but really.

 

[nomadthethird]

preaching ---> choir

Oh but Mr. Tea, don't you get it--we're inflicting our dogma on them! Yes, dogma. The only field that exists that's founded on a necessity to be ready to change everything you've ever believed or held true at a moment's notice, and to know that any time you do have a hypothesis or theory, that it can only stand insofar as it's always open for debate, critique, and revision on scientific grounds.

How dare we challenge their naive realisms about the mind and the centrality of humans in the cosmos? Really how evvilll of us. We're just a bunch of arrogant bastards, trying to cure cancer or find ways to block asteroids from hitting the earth for $40,000 a year and shit.

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

Seconded. Genius one, you should really follow that one through nomad, I'd love to see a lobby for it.

The older I get the more I love the space for God that exists in my head as a concept to think about, and the more I just snort with bafflement and derision at organised religion. I was reading a book about Islam on the tube the other day and having to stop myself from snorting like a pig. Ironic but true. Mohammed was great but really.

That was Frank Zappa's big lobbying point: tax the churches & the businesses owned by the churches.

People who constellate belief and identity are abundant but certainly make up the bulk of the type of religious people we're always being told to be 'sensitive' towards. Wasn't that supposed to be a hallmark of authoritation personalities? Frightened, insecure children who hold onto anything that gives them an edge or a sense of security in a dog-eat-dog zero-sum world. Ingrained pessimists, supporters of authority & teasers of the unfortunate. Nasty things.

Dull.

 

[Sick Boy]

Re: The evil problem religious thinkers will often tell you that God gave us free will and that evil is the inevitable sacrifice we make for something so equally a gift and a curse. Which is fair enough until you realize they are making excuses for "God", which, really, is the first problem.

I recently heard a talk by a religious philosopher whose theory was that religion can't be denied because with all the evil in the world, if we are able to maintain any kind of optimism - that is, to not go and hide under a rock - it must be because of some innate sense of higher purpose that has been placed there by, you guessed it, God.

 

[poetix]

Theodicy is quite a fun unsolvable problem, and although in an obvious sense you can make it go away by just not bothering with its premises (there's no God, so no reason for suffering not to happen) it can also be taken as a kind of template for a class of unsolvable problems: wherever there's an X that is both responsible for everything that happens within a given domain and essentially Y, account for the occurrence of anything non-Y-ish within that domain.

For example: if vitalism is true ("Life" is responsible for everything that happens within the domain of the living, and is essentially dynamic, creative, fluid and unclassifiably various), then how is it that anything static, moribund, rigid or categorically identifiable gets to exist?

You can map back in the opposite direction, as well: one answer to the vitalist question is that static entities appears as a result of the self-limiting, self-determining, self-regulating capacity of Life (virtual->actual), which enables it to concentrate its powers and create new occasions for vitalisation (becomings, lines of flight, or what have you). In theodicy this is the argument that God limits his own omnipotence, in order to create a space of human freedom within which we can live in a genuine relationship with him rather than as puppets on a string. Quite a popular argument at present, although to me it smacks of respecting your kids' independence by letting them go play on the motorway.

Another answer to the vitalist question is that there really aren't any static entities - they're artifacts of our cognitive bias, projected over the chaotic inconsistency of the Real. If we could see things as they really were, we'd see that they really weren't. In theodicy: evil is essentially a consequence of our imposing moral categories on experience (having eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil). If we accepted everything that happened as God's will, suffering would not be real to us as suffering.

So it goes on. All the answers are bad ones, in one way or another. But it's interesting to consider them as attempts to get around of the impasse imposed by the formulation of the problem, which is hamstrung by the assumption that power (potency) transmits essence without modification. The world would not in any sense be a creation if it were essentially Good in the way that God is, if its essence were continuous with God's. Another way of putting this is that theodicy is for people who don't want to think dialectically.

Science mostly doesn't have to worry about this particular non-problem, incidentally, because in most of its regional investigations there are multiple causal powers all pulling in different directions. You can just say "this is caused by a combination of X, Y and Z", and not particularly have to worry about whether the phenomenon demonstrates consistent X-ness, Y-ness and Z-ness. I don't know if it crops up in a formal way in theoretical cosmology. If you squint at it, I guess dark matter looks ever so slightly like the problem of pain.

 

[nomadthethird]

Within the biosphere, life and death form a kind of continuum where no simple, clean separation can be maintained between matter that is in these two states. When I die, and all electro-chemical impulses eventually cease flowing through my body, then I'll stop having thoughts and feelings and sensations, which will probably happen in stages over a short period of time. Flies will come and lay eggs that will hatch into larvae and begin to feed on my decomposing tissues, which upon ingestion will be metabolized into ATP-- the most basic unit of electro-chemical energy that is responsible for giving organisms what we call 'life.' Eventually, the larvae that eat me will become a flies and die, and fall onto the ground, where they will in turn decompose and fertilize the soil, and grass will take them up as nourishment. The grass will then be eaten by a cow, and so on. Or a predator will eat the larvae and they will become ATP/life-energy within it, and then the predator will fight another animal for food, and die, and be eaten by another animal, and so on.

So I'll be around in one form or another for a long time yet, at least insofar as energy flows count as being around. I'll sacrifice being-animated for animating other life forms, which is fine with me. Some of our ancient African ancestors revered this process, rather than fantasizing about creator-gods. Go figure.

The limitation of certain religious beliefs (particularly monotheism and with it some sorts of political systems) is that they reduce the workings of universe to a single cause, or one originary and eternal process, at the same time personalizing this cause and insisting that it is benevolent. This is in direct contrast to the scientific-cosmological view, which recognizes a vast network of interrelated but not exactly "cooperative" forces that are impersonal, unpredictable, and wildly random, so that everything that exists is a contingent byproduct of chaos. A billion supercomputers working for the rest of eternity couldn't do the math for the "how", so anyone pretending they know "why" is just thinking wishfully.

"We don't know yet what a body can do"… When I learned about what happened to the pfiesteria piscicida--a dinoflaggellate (marine plankton) that had existed for 300 million years living peacefully side-by-side with fish but that suddenly became a superpredator, evolving a mechanism for killing entire populations of fish by attacking them with a neurotoxin that is so strong it can kill a human, when farmers began dumping pig manure off the shores of the Carolinas feeding it the necessary nutrients--I realized exactly what that meant.