A positive post about religion for a change.

I just read this op-ed piece about Jesus in The Guardian.

I think there are three powerful elements in what we know about his teaching that are enduringly important and have lessons for us today. The first was his attitude towards the laws and customs by which we have chosen to organise ourselves. He did not believe they should be afforded absolute, unchanging authority over us. They were created to assist us in leading the good life, but he knew that if they were not held lightly, and with a shrewd appreciation of their provisional nature, they could easily became stupid and tyrannous.

This is the hardest thing for me to understand about the prevalent forms of Christianity in today’s America. When a liberal, atheist like me reads what Jesus actually taught, we want to punch the air and say “Amen, brother!”.

I just find it so difficult to reconcile what I know about Jesus’s teaching with what his latter-day followers advocate.

I thought this guy was me when I first read the subtitle of his blog. But I am not a mac-user.

His criticism of Sullivan is similar to mine though. Sullivan champions an idealized form of conservatism that is so distant from what actual conservatives believe that most actual conservatives reject Sullivan as one of their own. Perhaps using Scott Adams sniff and lump strategy, he seems have lumped all liberal thinking together with communism and socialism. As Arnold points out here, Sullivan often claims that the best bits of liberal thinking are actually conservative:

So obsessed is he with his one-dimensional view that Sullivan event tries to attribute to pragmatic conservatism such initiatives as the extension of the franchise to working men and then to women. As Brooks notes, this won’t wash. The great social and political leaps of imagination and courage did not spring from conservatism, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

Arnold does us all a great service by pointing out how both unrestrained liberalism and unrestrained conservatism tend to spin out of control and suggests that the tension between the two is the recipe for progress.

Sullivan and many others misdiagnosed the disease back in the 1980s: like Margaret Thatcher, they thought that there was no such thing as society, identified liberalism with socialism, and concluded that everything apart from conservatism should be flushed down the drain. What we can now see is that conservatism without liberalism cannot stand: it is too easily warped by the forces of reaction, just as it has been for the last two hundred years.

The challenge is simply this: how do we restore the creative balance between liberalism and conservatism: between compassion and prudence, between idealism and skepticism, between inventing the future and learning from history?

There’s a nice parody of a whole class of reviews of The God Delusion over at Dawkins’s own site.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

For the first 40 years of my life, there has only been one rule of underpants.

The label goes at the back

After several days of trying to figure out how to work my new underpants, I realized that they don’t follow the rules. The label goes at the front.

Thank you, Nautilus, for making my life more complicated.

I heard from several correspondents that they thought my attitude to religion (Christmas vs Holidays) was unusual.

One had been brought up in a religious environment and now rejects the whole shebang - she can’t understand why I am interested in Christian mythology at all. She wouldn’t even let me buy a children’s bible for our daughter because she still has bad memories of the nuns who ran her school. Another reported that their family, having walked away from their childhood beliefs wanted to get as far from them as possible. Still another suggested that I had fabricated my whole attitude just to be controversial.

For me growing up, the Church of England was like the kindly but eccentric old man who lived down the road. He had a whole bunch of fascinating stories and some of them may even have been true. Everyone knew him and liked him but no one took him very seriously. I have nothing but fond memories of him.

Perhaps, for people who were brought up with a more strict form of religion, a part of their identity is tied up in their religious beliefs? Maybe religion is like a strict aunt who tried to control their lives? When they finally break free from her controlling ways in adulthood, they have to let go completely and discard everything that might remind them of her.

I have often thought that these differences in attitude towards religion between Americans and Europeans (Malta doesn’t count as it’s pretty much a theocracy) can be attributed to the lack of religious education in schools in America. My son will never play the innkeeper in the school nativity play. My daughter will never sing Little Donkey in the Christmas pageant. They will never get to tease the RE teacher about some of the more way out stories from the bible.

The only way my kids will get a religious education is if we sign them up for the whole package and that requires actually believing that the stories in the bible are true. That can’t be right.

Ever have one of those moments where you know that the other guy is gonna kick that chest-high ball but if you were to stick your head in there you would get the ball before him and it would create a counter-attack possibly leading to a goal-scoring opportunity? On the debit side of the ledger, if you stick your head in there, it will almost certainly get kicked.

What would you do in that situation?

I stuck my head in there. It got kicked.

I just did a quick count of our Christmas cards. They are evenly split between the sacred (Merry Christmas) and the secular (Seasons Greetings, Happy Holidays and the like). The Christian cards mostly have scenes of the holy family or of the nativity. The secular ones are just vaguely wintry with the occasional fat old man dressed in red. Its significant that my dentist and my mortgage broker both sent secular cards.

For the record, I prefer the sacred imagery. When I have influence over the card-buying decision (which is rarely these days) I follow the same rule of thumb as my mother-in-law. The card must have a picture of the baby Jesus. Extra points for cards with a particularly beatific virgin Mary.

That’s why I think this NY Times article protests too much about Sam Harris’s protesting about Mrs Harris’s Christmas tree as though it might be shocking or hypocritical for an atheist to have a tree or a nativity scene (we have both).

In the war against the war on Christmas, I am solidly on Bill O’Reilly’s side. I detest the secularisation of Christmas. I can’t stand the pap that spews out of the muzak systems in stores and I hate that they make my children sing those songs in school. In two generations, Frosty the Snowman has defeated the whole host of Herald Angels. Two thousand years of culture lost in a cacophony of sleigh bells.

There is a tipping point where multi-cultural topples into mono-cultural; and a mono-culture that is terrified of offending anyone is worse than no culture at all.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Don’t ever hit ctrl-shift-z in Wordpress or you will end up with huge text like this.

There is no known antidote.

I was wrong. I expected the anti-religious polemic The God Delusion to be over the top but I found it to be entirely measured and reasonable. Dawkins doesn’t so much ridicule religion as shine a light on its ridiculousness.

Dawkins claims that he hopes to convert a few people to atheism with TGD but I think that highly improbable. I do expect that it will achieve two other worthy goals:

1. It will appeal to the many people who have had a religious upbringing but have always suspected the verity of religion.
2. Encourage atheists, especially American atheists, to step out of the closet.

The book covers a lot of ground. It could easily have been entitled An Atheists Handbook (but then no one would have read it). I especially liked the section on antidotes to religious apologia. While it is futile to try to disprove god it is handy to know where the classical proofs for god fall short or to have ready quotes to counter claims of Einstein’s or Jefferson’s religiosity.

In the final analysis, I agree with Dawkins at every turn except for his stance on moderate religion. Dawkins thinks it provides cover for the fundamentalists but I am with Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney, who argues that moderate Christians and atheists should be allies in the strugle to resist fundamentalism.

I enjoyed The God Delusion immensely and recommend it wholeheartedly. The only problem I had with TGD was that he references so many other books and my Amazon Wish List is already waaaaay too long.

At last, atheists have something to shout during sex

Oh, Richard Dawkins!

I have two burning questions that I have been saving up to ask an evolutionary biologist should I happen to run into one. The first is

If all the primates were to die off, from which class would the next dominant intelligent species evolve?

The other is

When, in evolutionary time, did play evolve?

Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor’s Tale answers the first question (rodents). This article, Games Animals Play, hints at the answer to the second.

I expected the answer to include the word mammal as I am not familiar with any reptiles that frolic and gambol the way that we do. But, according to Carl Zimmer, apparently even turtles enjoy a bit of fun and octopi have been observed playing with lego. I need to go get the book he mentions: The Genesis of Animal Play.