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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
I had planned to consign religion to the vaults I imprisoned politics as a subject that was not going to be discussed here, but this article on Isaac Bashevis Singer's anti-theism seemed well worth making an exception for:"None has seen fit to give a name to Singer’s Third Position in the debate. So I will: It’s not atheism, not theism, but rather anti-theism, a provocative, profoundly different stance from either of the others. Simply put, contrary to the atheists, Singer believes in a God, but, contrary to the theists, he doesn’t believe in a just, loving or merciful God; he believes in a God who doesn’t deserve worship, a God who deserves our condemnation.
“Singer’s ‘ethic of protest,’ a philosophy that would be his to the end … the point was to show God that he [Singer] disapproved of the way He ran the world, disapproved of His silence and absence of compassion …. Singer insists that because God is evil, man should behave in a moral way … ‘to spite God.'"
I'm reminded of the ending of Joseph Roth's Rebellion; mistreated by god and state the dying and suffering Andreas is afforded a vision of being entered into heaven. He responds to it by turning his back and proclaiming that he wants to go to hell. In the past, I've generally tended to describe myself as agnostic. It's not so much that I don't think god exists (though it seems overwhelmingly improbable) as that the depictions of god in the major monotheisms present an entity that is invariably such a repellent tyrant that sympathy for the devil seems the only honourable course to adopt. In practice, this means that the position I most closely have to identify with the likes of Dennett and Dawkins, though I am far from sharing their commitment to rationalism. Dawkins objects to religion on essentially the same grounds that he objects to homeopathy; that he does not believe it to be true. For instance, consider the following from Sam Harris:"Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth...
In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available... If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion... We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. "
There are two overlapping questions. Firstly the truth value of religious mythologies and the question of morality and religion. While these are clearly related as questions, they are far from being ideal companions; the implication of the former proposition is that even if all morality did depend on religion, that this would still be a peripheral concern compared to whether it is true or not. For myself, I'd reverse this; even if god exists, that would be very far from making him moral.
Update: A similar argument in a review of Richard Dawkins by Thomas Nagel:"Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.
This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.
That conceptual purification launched the extraordinary development of physics and chemistry that has taken place since the seventeenth century. But reductive physicalism turns this description into an exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical--that is, behavioral or neurophysiological--terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed--that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts. "Labels: Religion
posted by Richard 9:10 pm
