Jonathan Sacks thinks atheism is doing it wrong

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has a piece in the Spectator entitled atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians headed by this observation...

Jonathan Sacks

“I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists.”

Which ironically also sums up his own argument pretty well.

"Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another."

Well if that were really all intelligent secularists were doing, historians may well wonder. But, debunking the obvious idiocies of scripture is only a part of the new atheism, a necessary part too because the corollary assumption the good Rabbi is making is that all theists are of his sophistication whereas many of the powerful members of the Christian right, Hassidic Jewry and Islamist don’t share his nuanced views. There are still children in advanced countries being taught that Genesis is history, and someone has to keep the scientific truth in the public eye.

"Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?"

Can Sacks really be unaware of the existence of Humanists, ethical societies, The Sunday Assembly,and the moral explorations of atheism by authors such as Sam Harris and Adam Lee or philosophers like Alain De Botton? It’s almost as if the Chief Rabbi was erecting some kind of strawman atheism to denigrate but surely a man of his depth who claims familiarity with “serious atheists” like Nietzsche and Hobbes would not stoop to such a tactic. Or would he…?

"A significant area of intellectual discourse — the human condition sub specie aeternitatis — has been dumbed down to the level of a school debating society"

Yes he would apparently. Just because the ‘eternity’ of the human condition is not a given within atheist discourse does not mean that the practicalities of human thriving and social justice are not. And then there’s this canard…

"Nietzsche and Heine were making the same point. Lose the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and there will be nothing to contain the evil men do when given the chance and the provocation."

This always has and always will be complete nonsense. The fact that Sacks precedes this with a reference to Nazi Germany is also intellectually dishonest as none of that philosophy had anything to do with atheism. He then goes on to recruit, of all people , Richard Dawkins to his cause.

"Richard Dawkins, whom I respect, partly understands this. He has said often that Darwinism is a science, not an ethic. Turn natural selection into a code of conduct and you get disaster. But if asked where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion, the new atheists start to stammer. They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t, or natural, which it manifestly isn’t either, and end up vaguely hinting that this isn’t their problem."

Well let’s see if this atheist can explain it to him without stammering: Darwinism is not an ethic and Dawkins is correct to say that treating it as one (at least the simplistic version of Darwinism many people carry around with them) would not make for a fair or pleasant world. However, Darwinism properly understood explains morality perfectly well as a natural (yes Rabbi “natural”) consequence of our evolution as a social species living in small close knit tribes under extremely harsh selection pressure over the past few hundred thousand years. We even have evidence of caring and compassion in our Neanderthal cousins who presumably managed it without the Judeo-Christian narrative to influence them. The obsession theists have with seeing humanity as fundamentally flawed or evil without the watchful eye of a vengeful deity to restrain it is one of religion's most egregious legacies and those modern states that have largely abandoned religion, such as the Scandinavian countries, give the lie to the idea that society falls apart without it. So Sacks concludes with this..

"I have no desire to convert others to my religious beliefs. Jews don’t do that sort of thing. Nor do I believe that you have to be religious to be moral. But Durant’s point is the challenge of our time. I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other. A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also."

Well, fair enough, but that he is unable to conceive of a sufficiently robust secular ethic is a failure only of his religiously constrained imagination, not a failure of secularism or the ability of humanity to apply reason and enlightened self-interest to the task of surviving whatever the coming ages demand of us to prosper. That such a societal view is only now beginning to emerge is to some extent due to religion’s previously unfettered ability to suppress it, retreating only when faced with similarly monolithic ideologies such as Communism or Nazism which it then tries to lay at atheism's door. Freedom from religion is not freedom from culture or obligation, it is however freedom from the fetters of dogma and from the institutions that perpetuate misogyny and social inequality in the name of traditions that are the real epitome of the faux profundity he accuses atheist of.

C of E drops opposition to same sex marriage

Well! Here’s something to be pleased about. The Church of England has decided that its chances of blocking the legalisation of same sex marriages are so remote, it will no longer oppose them. In fact, it now claims it is intending to seek to amend the new law in ways with which I heartily agree.

'under the current bill people in a same-sex marriages who discover that their spouse is unfaithful to them would not be able to divorce for adultery after Government legal experts failed to agree what constitutes “sex” between gay or lesbian couples. The bishops are also seeking to change a provision which says that when a lesbian woman in a same-sex marriage has a baby her spouse is not also classed as the baby’s parent. The result is that in some cases children would be classed as having only one parent.'

Assuming the church is not just attempting a cynical passive aggressive approach to elicit greater antagonism to the bill, strengthening the institution of same sex marriage to cover adultery and shared parental responsibility will in my opinion add to the justice of this long awaited social advance.
So far the government has taken the line that it cannot adequately define adultery in a same sex relationship, which strikes me as bizarre and vaguely insulting. After all when homosexuality was completely illegal they had no problem defining what constituted sex between gay men and something about the idea suggests they have bought the stereotype that all same sex relationships are based in promiscuity and infidelity by definition.
I can accept that there may be ethical dilemmas over parental rights of a lesbian spouse, but they are by no means insurmountable. There are plenty of same sex couples where the legal father of a child is not the biological one and we seem to negotiate competing financial and emotional interests in the child quite adequately under those circumstances.
So I await with interest the detail and substance of the Lords Spiritual’s actions towards the bill’s passage from here on. I would not be surprised to hear demands for greater protection of Christians who want to discriminate against same sex couples but the government must resist weakening equality legislation in one area merely to facilitate implementation in another. Nor do I think we have heard the last of the church’s concerns over challenges to the ban on same sex marriages happening in church, for the good reasons I outlined in an earlier post.
Finally, for now I am going to resist making too much of the moral and theological volt face this change of position implies, content as I am to welcome the fact of it. Suffice to say the Anglican church has a history of catching up with enlightened thought... eventually... and before long will be telling us that this whole gay marriage thing was its idea in the first place.

Christianity's shallow morality

I recently finished reading A.C.Grayling’s latest book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism which is a pretty good read and an excellent primer on the standard apologetics of religion and the Humanist alternatives. However it is one, almost throw away, observation that he makes about the New Testament that I want to focus on here. He points out that because early Christianity was actually an apocalyptic and eschatological movement there is very little practical depth to the morality espoused within it.
Even I raised an eyebrow at this, because I’ve read a fair bit of the Bible (The cover to cover project is still a work in progress, finished the O.T and into the new as far as Paul’s Epistles) and I’m as likely as anyone to admit there is some real moral content. But actually, giving it some thought, I suspected I may have become a victim of the cultural hype surrounding Christianity and seeing something that isn’t there. So I did a little Bible dipping to refresh my memory and now I see his point.
Although the Gospels are strong on narrative, the specific exhortations to living a good life are sparse and in reality impractical for most people to follow. In effect they boil down to; give all your possessions to the poor, abandon your family to follow Jesus and love everybody. Paul in various epistles, but mainly to the Romans, adds “stoppit with the gay already” (that might not be a direct quotation) as like modern evangelicals it seems to be the only bit of Leviticus he still cared about post conversion. But he offered very little extra in the way of moral guidance.
The Pauline epistles are clear in the expectation that Christ is expected to return imminently, and it’s worth bearing in mind that all of Paul’s writing was done without the benefit of the synoptic gospels which all postdate him by various degrees, and say the same. Consequently his advice to his churches that members should only marry if they really really couldn’t keep it in their togas makes sense if you think that celibacy is going to be fairly short term and a brownie point come doomsday.
However, in the event that your messiah is going to be at least two millennia late (like that would happen?) celibacy seems less attractive and likely to supress the number of new Christians in the future. Similarly the thought of all Christians giving away their possessions and leaving their loved ones for a life of sandal shod evangelising today seems ridiculous, which is why they don’t do it for the most part.
Given that Paul also said that obeying the O.T laws was not a requisite for salvation (except the ‘don’t be gay’ one of course, what is it with that?) as it was all down to grace and faith in Jesus he seemed to rely on the same assumptions that some do today, that to be a Christian was to be intrinsically good, without any other moral input. This means that, as any Humanist would point out, Christians have to get their true morals from somewhere external to the Bible, in fact the same place we all do; from our common humanity and evolved pro-sociality. But if the early Church and indeed Jesus had really intended Christianity to be around for two thousand years we would expect the Bible to be much richer in moral guidance and be more relevant to the complex lives that we live today.

Beware of blasphemy laws

Over the past week or so there has been a rash of stories from diverse countries involving the non-crime of blasphemy.
Some of these are extremely worrying and serious, if to be expected, like the arrest of four atheist bloggers in Bangladesh, putatively at the behest of a mob of Islamic fundamentalists. Others like the conviction of Turkish pianist Fazil Say for tweeting against Islam, and the backing by Russia of a harsher anti-blasphemy law following the Pussy Riot protest may have political rather than religious motivations behind them.
But regardless, this trend towards using the law to defend religious sensibilities is one that needs monitoring and combating wherever it manifests itself. Blasphemy is an insidious concept that seeks to protect ideas from criticism under the cloak of protecting the feelings of the believers that cherish them. Sometimes this is overt as the law may actually be worded as “offending religious sensibilities” rather than blasphemy per se so framing it as a crime against persons rather than a deity or a religion, but is really a way to prevent the claims and consequences of those religions from being scrutinised.
The idea that religion is a special case, and therefore should be respected whatever, is of course not new. Even when blasphemy isn’t actually illegal in a society it is often socially unacceptable to criticise or ridicule religious beliefs or practices and those who break the taboo are often defamed as shrill, strident or divisive for doing so. You only have to see the invective that people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens can attract to realise how precious some aspects of society can be about religious conviction.
The problem with this is that although a polite toleration of religious, and indeed political, thought may be fair enough around the dinner table to preserve an equitable atmosphere, once out in the wider marketplace of ideas the inability to criticise religion’s assumptions about what is the right way to order a society can quickly stifle debate and give religion’s more egregious consequences a free pass. It can also be used as a cover for supressing political dissent, which I suspect is the real reason Vladimir Putin is so in favour of such laws.
It is a fact that many of the world’s pressing political and social justice issues are framed in a religious context; from gender equality to planned parenthood, education for middle eastern girls to FGM and Burqas, cast discrimination in India, stem cell research, science education, even climate change and the environment, the religious of all stripes have a stake in the agenda. Regardless of where one stands personally on these issues it cannot be healthy if one side of the debate is stifled by laws that prevent the religious basis of argument to be challenged. If a politician or other opinion maker is motivated by her opinion that the world should be so because Allah or Yahweh decrees it, we should all be free to challenge the premise. If not we are living in a theocracy despite what our countries’ constitutions may suggest
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating that respecting an individual’s right to a belief does not entail respecting the belief itself. However people can often be offended (or at any rate claim offence) when their beliefs are even mildly criticised, which is what makes blasphemy laws dangerous as religion is particularly sensitive in this respect. This is not to say that religion should be excluded from social debate but it should not occupy a privileged position supported by laws (or conventions) that protect it.

In response to the arrest of the atheist bloggers in Bangladesh I have written to their High Commissioner in the UK as follows

Dear Sir, I am writing to protest the arrest of Asif Mohiuddin, Rasel Parvez, Mushiur Rahman Biplob, and Subrata Adhikhari Shuvo on charges of blasphemy against Islam. No civilised country can hold its head high in the international community while denying freedom of expression to its citizens and unreasonably protecting religious or political ideas from criticism or dissent. I urge you to put pressure within your government to ensure these atheist bloggers are not only released but assured safety from the ignorant baying mobs that will surely pursue them. Rest assured that the greater worldwide secular movements will continue to point at Bangladesh and shame your government if this vile blasphemy law continues to be used to supress the perfectly reasonable opinion that there are no gods. Not only does the existence of such a law demean your country, your government and your people, it also demeans the religion of Islam which is obviously so insecure in its own beliefs that it cannot stand dissent or critique. Suppression of free speech on the internet is in any event a futile exercise as there will always be people, like me, to take up the cause for secularism and the right to criticise religion from within those countries that are sufficiently mature to have abandoned such medieval notions as blasphemy. So once again I call on your country to release and protect Asif Mohiuddin, Rasel Parvez, Mushiur Rahman Biplob, and Subrata Adhikhari Shuvo. The world is watching.. Yours Sincerely

I have yet to receive a reply or an acknowledgment of this letter, which is disappointing, but allowing this sort of thing to go unremarked is to perpetuate the idea that blasphemy is a real crime that can merit a civil punishment. Secularists all over the world are also penning similar missives to their respective ambassadors so I can only hope some good will come from this
Although we have come to expect Islamic countries to incorporate blasphemy in their legal system it is worth remembering that it was only in 2008 that laws for this “offense” were repealed in the UK and we need to watch out for well-meaning but misguided people who would see them back.

How to lie with statistics the CofE way.

Well I suppose a charitable interpretation would be that the Church of England doesn’t know a loaded question when it sees one or that it has a poor grasp of statistics, but at least someone in that vast Oxbridge educated hierarchy must have learnt something vaguely scientific in their lifetime. Which leads me to conclude that this headline claiming that 4 out of 5 people in Britain believe in the power of prayer is intended to be wilfully misleading.
The question asked by an ICM online poll was

image credit atasteofgarlic.com

""Irrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, what would it be for?”

Now had I been involved in the survey I would probably have answered that I wouldn’t pray for anything as it’s an observable empirical fact that it achieves nothing. However most people would respond to this in the same way as if they were asked what they would buy if they had just won the lottery i.e. suspend disbelief for the fun of it and answer the question as though it were meaningful.
Consequently…

Asked what it would be for if they were to pray, 31 per cent of respondents cited peace in the world, followed by an end to poverty in the world (27 per cent), a family member (26 per cent) and healing for another (22 per cent). While 5 per cent said they did not know what they would pray for, 14 per cent said they would never pray.

…which is no surprise really but anyone grounded in reality would have to point out that these people do not necessarily expect those prayers to be granted. Furthermore, if 80% of the country really would pray for these things in these proportions, how come there is still war and poverty? surely we have just proved the futility of prayer right there.Such empirical grounding is not evident for the Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Revd Dr Alan Smith, however who said:

"Prayer is one of the most natural and instinctive of human responses, so I am not surprised to see these findings. I come across people on an almost daily basis who want to talk about prayer and how to do it.”

This is equally unsurprising as he’s an Anglican Bishop who mostly meets with people as delusional as he is. If he spent time with others like me he’d be coming across people on a daily basis who wanted to know why he was talking to himself.
And speaking of self-selecting groups, who answers a poll like this anyway, or even knows of its existence? Christians, that’s who, but Christians are not representative of the nation at large.
I understand that the CofE is trying to prove its relevance to an increasingly secular country, but  relying on the general population’s ignorance of maths and stats to lie so egregiously is a poor way of doing it especially since the very people who would call them out on it publically are the very ones who do know enough statistics to notice. Richard Dawkins has already tweeted

“If I gave you a magic wand, what would you do?” I’d get rid of disease. “Aha!! Gotcha! You believe in magic wands.” — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 26, 2013

For those interested the full results of the survery are here

Catholic Archbishop says abusing Priests are not criminally responsible

The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, has said in an interview that paedophilia is a psychological illness and not "a criminal condition". The claim was made on BBC Radio 5 Live where he went on to say…

"Don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished when he was himself damaged."

…referring to Priests he was aware of that had themselves been abused as children.
Now, I’m going to choose my words carefully as any defense of paedophilia can be seen as abhorrent by some people but in a limited sense I agree with him. Paedophilia is a paraphilia which may have its roots in early childhood abuse or it may simply be part of a range of human sexuality that includes all sorts of deviation (not meant pejoratively) from the heterosexual, age appropriate norms of modern society. However paedophiles have, in common with compulsive rapists, an insurmountable problem when it comes to satisfying their sexuality in that they have no potential consensual partners.
Our society, for good reason, does not consider minors to be emotionally capable of consenting to sex, even with each other let alone with an adult so any paedophile who acts on their desires immediately becomes an abuser. This must be so and must carry the full weight of the law, because there is no way to know how many paedophiles are actually in the general population who need to be deterred from abusing.
Risking making an argument from personal incredulity, I cannot believe there are any paedophiles who do not understand the profound wrongness of grooming and enticing children into sex. Our culture is explicit about this and transgressors get high profile coverage and stiff sentences not to mention the disgust of the population at large. So whilst Cardinal Napier maybe correct that abusers need counseling and therapy or whatever, he is totally off the mark when he suggests it is inappropriate to punish as well.
On one hand the Cardinal is actually espousing a progressive and liberal view of a subset of people many of whom are undoubtedly living their lives in emotional turmoil. On the other hand he appears to be doing so in an effort to exculpate abusive Priests from their moral responsibility for their actions and excuse the Church for aiding and abetting them. This cannot be allowable, and in some respects is precisely the attitude that got the Church into this position in the first place. A celibate priesthood must seem like a godsend (pun intended) to someone whose sexuality will never be socially acceptable, but then he finds himself not only with unfettered access to young children but in an institution that will shield him from the worst consequences of his actions. To suggest that these priests are not morally and criminally responsible on the basis that they couldn’t help it is wrong and dangerous in the extreme.

Pssst! Frank, a word in your ear..

On the off chance that the new pontiff is in the habit of reading obscure atheist blogs I thought I’d take this opportunity early in his career as head of one of the worlds most damaged and damaging institutions to offer him a few words of considered godless opinion on the best way for him to fulfil his brief while doing as little as possible to exacerbate the social evils his Church is currently responsible for.
We already know that former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is a theologically conservative Catholic with all the inherent homophobia, misogyny and irrational opposition to reproductive rights that entails. Quotes already abound on the internet about his claims that adoption by homosexuals is a form of “discrimination against children” and that gay marriage is “an attempt to destroy God's plan”. So far, so conventionally Popish. But of course he doesn’t have to make those things a big issue. His views are known and if he has any sense whatsoever he will leave it at that.
Anecdotally the new Pope is a man with the common touch, a concern for the poor and a track record of working for economic equality. He even has a science education having studied chemistry before abandoning rationality and joining the priesthood. His best strategy therefore should be to confine his social advocacy to the things most of us can agree to (Ultra-right-wing sociopaths can stop reading at this point) such as alleviating poverty, providing medical services to the third world etc. He can still go on believing that condoms are the invention of the Devil or that abortion makes baby Jesus cry, he just doesn’t need to make a song and dance about it. If he really is in tune with his flock he will already know that most of them do not agree with the doctrine, so best let them get on with their lives their way.
In consequence he could then use the time he saves by not talking crap about other people’s sex lives to quietly root out the child molesters and their apologists that Ratzinger so singularly failed to do. He could work behind the scenes to clear the Vatican of its self-serving, money hoarding cabal of mafia priests and get the Church to behave as though it really believed half the cherry picked love thy neighbour religiosity it espouses.
As an atheist I don’t really care who the Pope is, or what he believes. But, I do care when a powerful institution tries to impose its twisted morality on people who do not suffer the same delusions. So if Bergoglio lays low and does no evil, that’s fine by me and we can happily ignore each other. The alternative is that we get more of the same crap Ratzinger dished out, in which case I predict the Catholic Church will continue to fade into irrelevance (at least in the west) as the inherent hypocrisy it entails drives what is left of the faithful away.