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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 31, 2012 20:39:08 GMT
It's amazing how well the rhetorical strategy of New Atheism works, though. For instance, in the Irish Catholic this week, William Reville in an otherwise excellent article seems to label Intelligent Design proponents as dangerous. "There is a rump of Christian fundamentalism in America that rejects evolution, but the threat of European Christian fundamentalism seems nonexistent." (My italics.) What on earth is threatening about a lack of belief in a scientific theory? How have the New Atheists taught us all to wring our hands about Intelligent Design theory, and compete with them in professions of Darwinist faith?
Reville's lines above make me think of Newman's words: "Here I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be." European Christianity produces so few extremists because European Christianity is almost moribund-- I think that's the sad truth.
Slightly wandering from the topic, perhaps, but I am simply trying to show how the New Atheist attitude throws even the more bullish religious believers onto the back foot. "Who can refute a sneer?", indeed.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 1, 2012 17:16:21 GMT
Criticism of Intelligent Design is not confined to the New Atheists - Feser for one has complained that it amounts to a "God of the gaps" argument, which points to phenomena for which no current natural explanation exists and proclaims that God must have intervened directly to bring them about - unfortunately, this has often been put forward in the past in relation to phenomena for which natural causes were subsequently discovered. Feser's argument is that Creation takes place at a much higher level and that ID amounts to assuming that God makes all sorts of blunders and constantly intervenes to fix them. This BTW is different from miracles which are direct displays of divine power for a reason (usually to confirm faith). I would say one reason why (say) young-earth creationism is dangerous is that it tells people they cannot be Christians unless they believe in the Ussherian chronology (world created 4004 BC in 7 days of 24 hours) and that there is a conspiracy to cover this up - the result being that many people wind up believing something that is not true, and when they realise it is not true they think Christianity is not true either. Now I quite agree with you and Newman that we must believe in ecclesial as well as gospel miracles, and the "how little can I believe and get away with it" attitude is a dangerous one - but so is the "it's presumptuous to doubt any alleged miracle and we should give every professed visionary the benefit of the doubt" attitude. Our Lord warned us of false Christs and false prophets who would perform apparently convincing signs.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 1, 2012 19:25:19 GMT
I would never suggest we should give a ready ear to every miracle monger; but I do fear a kind of sheepishness and minimalism that seems to afflict believers in the presence of New Atheist bluster. I am guilty of this myself. I fear it makes us seem duplicitous; that in debates with sceptics we confine ourselves to scoring points against scientism (which is not at all difficult) while in our devotional language we inhabit a world of miraculous cures and answered prayers and Marian visions. Now, I'm not suggesting we should start handling snakes and drinking poisons, but I do think it is important to resist that oh-so subtle drift towards a sort of Deism-for-public-consumption. I think the supernatural order is indeed a scandal and a sign of contradiction, and I wonder if we must be "fools for Christ" to some degree-- in the eyes of the secular world, anyway. (While of course not ceasing to punch philosophical holes in the scientistic worldview.)
All these are just ideas aired aloud rather than contentions.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 2, 2012 19:25:20 GMT
Fair enough. A good example of the problem is the argument I have seen put forward by social scientists that (for example) scholars can never say that the Marian apparition at Knock actually happened, because that lies outside the realm of scholarship. The problem with this is that it delegitimises arguments for its genuineness as "unscholarly", while arguments for its phoniness are presented as unquestionably legit. Look at Kevin Rockett's recent argument that the Knock apparition was caused by a magic lantern wielded by the parish priest who was trying to counter the local hostility caused by his opposition to the Land League, alleged to have gone to the extent of plans to cut off his ears. (This is in Rockett's book on magic lanterns and other visual displays in C19 and early C20 Ireland - the hostility, and the bit about the ears, really existed and have been described in earlier work on Knock). Quite a few people I have discussed this with take his arguments at face value, but if you look at them closely you can see that they rest on hearsay (e.g. a descendant of a family who ran a magic lantern business reporting a 100-year-old family tradition that they sold a magic lantern to Fr Kavanagh; would you hang a dog on that sort of evidence, any more than you would on some of the traditions in the area naming other people as the supposed hoaxer?), supposition (e.g. that if the witnesses saw the light-beam they would assume it emanated from the figures rather than vice versa), discounting significant evidence (e.g. the contemporary tests with a magic lantern showing the images could not have been produced by such means are mentioned but argued away), and ignoring relevant points (e.g. contemporary newspaper and other accounts of Fr Kavanagh suggest that he was a rather naive man, who spontaneously made damaging admissions such as claiming that someone had been miraculously cured and then adding that they had died since, rather than the sort of calculating hoaxer Rockett's theory would require). Of course, at the core of Rockett's argument is the never-explicitly-stated assumption that Marian apparitions do not occur at all and that his readers are too enlightened to even consider the possibility - sheer question-begging. BTW one of Rockett's wilder flights of fancy is his claim that the figure of the bishop was identified as St John the Evangelist because the official Church saw popular devotion to St John the Baptist in the area as semi-pagan and wished to promote the more "dainty" Evangelist as a substitute. Of course the real reason for the identification is that the imagery of the Lamb on the altar is straight out of the Apocalypse of St John, as anyone who is familiar with the role of that book in Eucharistic theology could have told him.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 4, 2012 21:53:35 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 17, 2012 20:46:20 GMT
An interesting and respectful review by an atheist of a book by the Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga arguing that the claim that theism and natural science are incompatible is the exact opposite of the truth - that the fact that natural science "works" suggests some sort of design, some "fit" between our perceptions and reality, rather than an universe of chaos and chance in which apparent order is simply a human projection on the void. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/philosopher-defends-religion/?pagination=false
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 24, 2012 10:34:38 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 2, 2012 11:30:09 GMT
Peter Hitchens discusses why he regularly gets hate-messages from self-professed fans of his late brother Christopher, expressing such charming sentiments as regret that it was not he who died of cancer instead of Christopher, or even suggesting that he should have been aborted so that Christopher could have grown up untroubled by his presence. (In fairness, I should note that he makes it clear that this is only a portion of the Christopher-admirers who have contacted him, and that many of those who got in touch have been polite and respectful. Peter Hitchens remarks that the only two subjects which provoke such vitriol from correspondents are atheism and his opposition to legalising drug use, and he discusses what sort of person might display such anti-religious animus. Read the whole thing at the link, but I will reproduce the key paragraphs below - I think they have some implications in explaining the sort of atheist subculture you find in certain circles in Ireland - such as, I suspect, many of the students whom I saw at the March for Choice on Saturday. hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/what-sort-of-people-are-the-christopher-hitchens-fan-club.htmlEXTRACT I would imagine that my opposition to the Iraq war is much closer to their views than my brother’s keen an unflinching support for it, right to the very end of his life. So what is the problem? Well, over the years I have debated most of the major controversies of our time, and there are two subjects where you regularly meet bilious, hate-filled unreason *simply for holding an opposing point of view* . They are linked. They are religious belief, and hedonism, and the sub-class of hedonism which covers illegal drugs. It is summed up in the statement that 'Nobody can tell me what I do with my own body', the key text of the Century of the Self. I have a theory that the enormous success of my brother’s anti-God book (which was a colossal seller in the USA) was caused by a huge cultural revolution among American college kids, brought up in Christian homes and Christian towns, arriving at their campuses and throwing off what they regard as the tedious moral shackles of a suburban faith. What they liked about Christopher was that, in debates and TV appearances, he made their pastors and their parents look foolish , and his English Oxford smoothness gave an intellectual cover to what was in most cases an almost elemental rage against their backgrounds. His way of life , the way he dressed, the way he was rude, the way he drank and smoked and swore, was heroic to them. I remember there was a period when sweet-faced young women from Iowa or Nebraska, more used to banana milkshakes than to ardent spirits, put films of themselves on YouTube choking down fiery slugs of Johnnie Walker Black, in emulation and admiration of their hero. I didn’t notice many or any of them lighting up cigarettes in sympathy, for some reason. But they can certainly swear. Oh, my goodness, yes, sir, they can do that. And they can be rude, though the rudeness lacks the curving, beautifully-timed style ( and sheer nerve) that gave my brother’s insults such power. I’m not sure they actually read his writings all that much, though they like to possess them. People often buy books as a modern relics, so that they can own a piece of the ‘ true cross’ . It was noticeable, at the memorial meeting in New York, that those of us sitting near the front, who were family and friends or colleagues, and had read Christopher’s books and articles and reviews, laughed a lot less at the jokes (when his works were read out by others) than those sitting nearer the back, the admirers from a distance who had lined up in the street to get in. For them, these jests were a fresh and novel experience. For the rest of us, they were well-known, enough to conjure a smile, but not a laugh. My suspicion is that, for some of these people, since the very things they admire him for are the very things that I most specifically reject, the idea that I am closely related to him, have a similar education and background, is close to unbearable. They admire him so much that it is close to reverence. They would, if I were dead, or had no opinions, or agreed with Christopher, quite possibly allow me to have a share of that reverence, a member of the Holy Family. But oh dear, what is this? I am not dead. I do have opinions. They are the wrong ones, the wrongest opinions, in fact, that I could possibly have. Yet my voice is eerily similar to their hero’s and I bear the same surname . Help! There is no room in the atheist shrine for me. Thus it would be better if I did not exist at all. Why? If I am related, and if I am intelligent, then that means that it is possible they may be wrong about God and the Self. And of course it is desperately important to them that they are right. If God exists, and they do not have absolute sovereignty over their bodies, and their dull parents and pompous pastors and priests are correct, or may even have a point, then their whole choice and way of life, their whole rebellion against the previous generation, is open to question. They don’t even want to consider that possibility. Thus they conclude that I must be stupid, and that it is impossible that my brother and I are really related, and (in some cases) that they wish I were dead. I treasure the hope that these poor lost children will grow up enough, one day, to see what a sad, hopeless and deluded view of the world this is, and may come to realise – through this very process – that they may possibly be mistaken about greater things as well. END
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 22, 2012 22:44:59 GMT
Yesterday the SUNDAY TIMES reported the story of a 16-year-old self-described "atheist and anti-theist" called Nathan Young who attends Borrisokane VEC and complained that he was made to attend a religious assembly of the pupils and not allowed to opt out as a conscientious objector. The SUNDAY TIMES story is behind a paywall, but you can find another report here: www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-atheist-student-says-school-forced-him-to-attend-prayer-meeting-175135681.htmlEXTRACT Nathan told the paper that he will continue to attend the school because he thought students were "free from others forcing their ideas upon them." He said he could not understand how the community college could allow "religion to call a halt to normal school activity, with full support from the staff." The report says that Young had asked his class tutor on Tuesday if he could opt out of the prayer service in the school’s canteen and the teacher relayed his request to principal Matthew Carr. The paper says that Young was later informed by his tutor that the principal had said "everyone has to attend." He was refused permission to leave the service by the acting deputy vice-principal who told him it was a ‘multi-denominational event for all religions’. Young disputes a claim by one of the religion teachers who wrote the service’s programme that it was for ‘Christians or atheists or agnostics or whatever’. He claims God was mentioned 28 times and Jesus six through-out the service, which included three hymns, two Bible readings and references to baptism and the Eucharistic Congress. He said: “A prayer of the faithful described the students as a “Christian community. “We shouldn’t have to be told vicarious redemption stories some of us believe to be false. “Although they are the majority, the Christians have no right to claim the entire school community as theirs or to force people to join their hollering. “The school’s few agnostic and atheist students should have been given the option of not attending, as should the even fewer Buddhists and assorted spiritualists, and of course Christians themselves.” Young was born in England and raised in Ireland as an Anglican, but now considers himself an atheist and anti-theist. He said he wanted Borrisokane to become secular but would settle for an apology. Principal Carr told the Sunday Times he had not yet read Young’s correspondence and declined to comment on whether the school had committed a breach of the student’s human rights. “We have a prayer service to mark the beginning of the school year and students are expected to attend,” said Carr. “We are a multi-denominational school but the majority of students would be Catholic or Protestant." END The first thing I have to say is that Mr Young has indeed been treated disgracefully and he should have been allowed to opt out of the assembly. His being compelled to attend it was as outrageous as forcing a Jew to eat pork or a Mormon to drink coffee, and this would hold true even if the school was explicitly denominational instead of being multidenominational or nondenominational. I might add, though, that Mr Young hardly strikes me as being a model of tolerance himself. He seems to object to the service having been held at all even for those who wanted to attend on the grounds that it "disrupted" the school's activities, and he sneers at Christian prayers as "hollering" which is quite gratuitously insulting. Nevertheless he has clearly been coerced and it was wrong that he should be coerced, and I hope his complaint is upheld on that ground alone. The second thing that strikes me is the complete cluelessness of the teachers responsible for this outrage. It is quite clear that they were not oldstyle bigots but modern lowest-common denominator liberals, and their spirituality is of the "warm and fuzzy whatever you're having" variety. This is exactly the problem - because they do not see religion as something which involves truth-claims, they do not realise that anyone could legitimately object to participating in their multidenominational service any more than they could legitimately object to reading fiction in English literature class. They don't realise that some religious commitments/positions are mutually exclusive and that to hold one necessarily rules out another, and because they see things this way they persecute Mr Young without realising that is what they are doing, just as I am sure they would persecute a fundamentalist Protestant or traditionalist Catholic who objected to attending the service. There is one thing that Mr Young and I would agree on even though we would disagree on its implications - religious commitment involves questions of truth, and it is not possible to ignore those questions. If the dogmas of the Catholic Church to which I subscribe unreservedly are true, then Mr Young's position is false and vice versa. Because I can see Mr Young's conscience as akin to my own, I can support his right to conscientious objection; but the persons responsible for his persecution do not seem to realise that conscience is involved at all, because they don't recognise their position as one amongst many and they therefore don't recognise that anyone could legitimately disagree with them. This characteristic of liberal religionists, BTW, also explains why so many of the commentators on the ACP website are narrowminded bigots who cannot see anyone else's point of view. Any atheists or friends of religious freedom - the two are not coterminous, I may add - are at full liberty to link to this post [edited slightly - I got a bit self-important - HIB] www.politics.ie/forum/education-science/198793-atheist-student-forced-attend-prayer-service-multi-denominational-school.htmlADDENDUM - on looking closer I see Cato explicitly cites this post in the Politics.ie thread. Thanks
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 23, 2012 10:14:22 GMT
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 23, 2012 14:15:03 GMT
This kind of thing is so patronising.
""What struck me about the people I knew who did believe in the paranormal was that they clearly had a circular belief system. Essentially, one believes X so strongly that all evidence that does not support X is ignored, and all events that fit in with X are noticed and amplified...
The more I came up against this sort of thing, the more I became concerned that I, as a Christian, was falling into exactly the same trap. Was I not indulging the same sort of circular belief? Remembering prayers that had been answered, and forgetting those that weren't? Or deciding that they had been answered but in a less obvious way? What separated my belief from the equally firm convictions of my psychic friend, other than the fact that hers were less mainstream and therefore easier to poke fun at? Weren't we both guilty of the same comforting nonsense? Surely I was being a hypocrite.
It's a question I still ask of intelligent Christians, because I would dearly like to hear a well-formed answer."
I wonder who these intelligent Christians were, who were all apparently stumped by this rather banal challenge? How many Christians would claim that their faith is based upon God's "performance" in answering prayers? The fact that I make petitionary prayers, as Christ instructs us to do, is not because of its productivity in the past but because it flows from my view of the universe. It should be obvious that it's impossible in principle to decide if any given effect is a result of a prayer; it's a matter of interpretation. Even in the most mundane matters cause and effect are almost infinitely controversial, and indeed controverted.
But what really bothers me about Derren Brown et al. is their assumption that believers have just avoided or evaded the questions they raise. I think I could fairly say that I've never heard a good argument against religious belief that hadn't occurred to me, independently, a long time ago-- when I was a child. It was the starting point of my own thought about God, not a level I never attained. And I imagine that is a common experience with believers.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 24, 2012 20:38:41 GMT
To be fair to Brown, he was a Pentecostalist before turning atheist, and Pentecostalists are very prone to seeing divine intervention in everyday life and assuming prayers are automatically answered if your faith is strong enough. (The Prosperity Gospel is a logical offshoot of pentecostalism in this sense.) They also have a very poor sense of history in contrast to classical Protestants; so far as they are concerned New Testament times are still going on and the subsequent experience of the church is irrelevant. One reason BTW why the last US census states the US is no longer Protestant-majority is that many Pentecostalists do not think of themselves as Protestants but as Christians; they have internalised all sorts of Protestant assumptions but they take them for granted and don't realise other forms of Christianity are possible. (An example of the difference between this and classical Protestantism would be a debate between Fr Dwight Longenecker and an Evangelical theologian on Marian devotion, in which the Evangelical stated that Longenecker's strongest point was that the present-day Catholic attitude to MAry was clearly shared by "such godly men as Athanasius and Augustine". A classical Protestant would know that Athanasius and Augustine played a major role in formulating Christian doctrine; a Pentecostalist, or some other forms of Pietist, would see them as irrelevant because they would just assume that the Athanasian and Augustinian doctrines they have inherited via Protestantism are self-evident.) I suspect Brown is also using the classic Dawkinsite tactic of assuming that all Christians are naive fideists and treating any more elaborate apologetic as rationalisation, but he probably is marked by his Pentecostalist background as well.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 2, 2012 20:56:56 GMT
There is a row going on in the IRISH TIMES letters column between atheists and their critics, in which the argument about religion as underpinning mortality has arisen. One atheist cited the Kohlberg moral scale, which states that actions undertaken in hope of a reward are less moral than those undertaken for their own sake, and argued that this means atheists are more moral than Christians because the latter hope for a reward in the next life. The problem with this view is (minor) this internalises a Kantian view of morality which is itself derived from a secularised form of Protestant pietism (major) it completely fails to understand the Christian viewpoint, because it assumes that our relationship with God is entirely external and based on subordination, and eternal life is a reward like giving Rover a treat. In fact, we are created, by God, to seek and desire God and to find fulfilment in Him - as St Augustine put it "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee". Eternal life is our end in the sense that the end of French lessons is to speak and understand French, and the atheist critique of Christian hope mentioned in this post is like saying that someone who learns French as one might do a crossword puzzle and never actually uses the language is morally superior to someone who learns the language for the selfish purpose of visiting France, meeting French people, following French affairs, and reading French literature.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 2, 2012 21:58:30 GMT
Edward Feser often points out that the famous Eutyphro dilemma (are morals good because they please god, or do they please god because they are good?) resolves itself if you understand that god simply IS absolute goodness, truth, knowledge and the other divine perfections that converge in the divine simplicity. And of course, all those attributes need to be understood analogically rather than in the sense we understand them, i.e., god does not have "knowledge" in the sense we understand it, but our knowledge has an analogical resemblance to that perfection in god.
As Chesterton said: "god is not a metaphor for goodness; goodness is a metaphor for god."
(p.s. I am not a postmodernist theologian, but the "g" key on my laptop doesn't work. I get sick of copying and pasting capital "g"s for god.)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 2, 2012 22:04:29 GMT
I think there is a sense in which nobody acts except for reward. As Alexander Pope wrote:
OH happiness! our being's end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name: That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die.
Even someone who lives a life of total self-sacrifice is acting for reward in that they gain some kind of gratification in seeing others happy or reducing suffering or serving a cause.
It has been pointed out that Christ does not chide the sons of Zebedee for asking to sit on his right hand on his left, or Peter for asking what the disciples will get for leaving everything for him.
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