Respect
Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?' but I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.—Douglas Adams
Comments
Apparently Mr. Adams never visited 1gm.
Here's Richard Dawkins reading that passage, plus some other funny observations: http://bigdaddymalcontent.blogspot.com/2007/02/richard-dawkins-invokes-douglas-adams.html
mr. syngas makes an excellent point. in fact i'm going to go out on a limb here and call the whole "it's forbidden to criticize religion" argument a straw man. i'm willing to be corrected, of course, if anyone is willing or capable of doing so. just be aware that in doing so you'll be making my point. :)
Douglas Adams has some great quotes ...
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/douglas.htm
Some of my favorites ...
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?" -- Douglas Adams
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? -- Douglas Adams
"To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle." -- Richard Dawkins, in "Lament for Douglas" (14 May 2001)
let me quickly add, should anyone think otherwise, that i am a huge fan of mr. adams and have read and enjoyed immensely a great deal of his work, including speech transcripts. vonmeths' examples are wonderful.
i've mentioned here before that my father used to teach heuristics. as an exercise, he used to postulate a little man inside a coke machine as an explanation of how it worked and challenge the students to prove it wasn't so. this was in the very early 70's, i daresay before the adams quote above. it's not as simple as you might think, and i often think of this when i see atheists and theists going at it here on 1gm.
playing devils' advocate (sorry, it's what i do):
isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there is a struggle for survival and territory at the bottom of it too?
see, a lovely statement, good hearted, but not a good argument. reminds me of oscar wilde, same thing. not much truth there, but truisms galore, and such delight to be had!
I like to think the beauty of the garden has a lot to do with that "survival and territory." The aesthetic nature of it is nice, sure, but understanding the way it works, the chemical reactions, and growth pattern, the reason a flower blossoms and spreads and interacts with the world, etc. adds an incredible depth to its beauty.
vonmeth:
Nice quote. It reminded me of my mother, who claims to believe in fate, but not in god. She cannot grasp that for there to be fate there must be some kind of god-like intelligent being whom created it. When pushed she can't explain this gap in her logic.
It's infuriating. I've really tried hard to get her thinking in a different way, but it really does seem impossible.
The argument that religion gets a free pass is not a straw man argument but your response to it is. Tell me your kidding.
norm, i'm really not kidding, and, as syngas pointed out, 1gm itself is an excellent example of how it just ain't so. as i said, i'm willing to be corrected. how is it "forbidden" to critisize religion? isn't the right to do so enshrined in the constitution? can we leave muslim fatwas out of this, as this is a fairly recent development in terms of real impact? maybe i'm in the dark because i don't own my own copy of "the god delusion", maybe dawkins could explain it for me. all i know is i grew up criticizing religion loudly and often, and, other than being made to realize from time to time what an asshole i was, i didn't suffer for it too much.
jonathan becker - I think you miss the point. It's socially unacceptable to criticise religion.
For example, I could quite easily imagine a TV documentary looking at Islamic extremism, or any other topic related to religion, and the single most important issue would be completely ignored: why do people believe in god?
It is sometimes covered - Dawkins has made a new TV programme for Channel 4 for example.
But I usually find that such commentaries are disconnected from real world problems and may only tend to look at fundamentalism rather than the everyday kind of religion, which is even more corrosive.
Basically it's just too inconvenient for mass media to confront without offending its audience.
I think religious people must have failed to think in order to end up believing in what they do. As a consequence, asking them to think is a humiliating experience, and being human beings, react in a human way - which is, more often than not, as a child would do.
jonathan becker wrote:
mr. syngas makes an excellent point. in fact i'm going to go out on a limb here and call the whole "it's forbidden to criticize religion" argument a straw man. i'm willing to be corrected, of course, if anyone is willing or capable of doing so. just be aware that in doing so you'll be making my point. :)
Tell that to Salman Rushdie.
There's a fundamental difference between expressing liberal points of view on a blog and having the conversation in the "real world." Anyone could make, say, a holocaust denial forum and post all they want about how they think such and such didn't really occur but society does not look upon them favorably much less in some European nations that make it a crime.
Unbelievable, do you think Adams and others mean the word forbidden to be taken literally? Tell me that's not what you're doing? It sure looks like it. Of course we can criticize religion. It is forbidden in the sense that you pay a price for treating religion as just another topic like politics or economics. Certainly you aren't trying to make the case that criticism of religion is treated the same as criticism of other topics or are you? It is forbidden in that sense that religion gets undeserved respect in the marketplace of ideas. That is what Dawkins is talking about, that is what Adams was referring to, and that you apparently didn't know that is absolutely amazing.
How many people who write unacceptable books are knighted by the Queen of England? I'd say that's a pretty big endorsement.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6756149.stm
Unacceptable? I must say I appreciate you making the case for the special treatment. The Knighting something that should have simply be viewed as a well deserved honor created a shit storm. Criticism of religion is forbidden in the sense that if you do there is a price to pay. The Queen was brave to stand up for excellence in writing. The reaction makes the case Dawkins et al have been making. Do you get a reaction like that when others are knighted? Well do you?
Syngas I'm having trouble getting over your statement people who write unacceptable books. In what sense are Rushdie's books unacceptable?
Jonathan said, "as syngas pointed out, 1gm itself is an excellent example of how it just ain't so."
Oh, give us a fucking break! The point of view on 1gm is a minority view.
jonathan said, "as i said, i'm willing to be corrected. how is it "forbidden" to criticise religion? isn't the right to do so enshrined in the constitution?
Well, the majority of Americans are offended when religion is criticized. Not forbidden by law (yet), but forbidden by social mores.. yes! It is not accepted by the majority of Americans.
And you know this Jonathan!
Sorry Norm, I could have been more clear. When I used the word 'unacceptable', I didn't mean I thought his books were unacceptable. Mr. Adams implied that any criticism of religion is unacceptable to society. I was trying to point out that the Queen of England didn't feel Sir Rushie had violated any rules or she wouldn't have knighted him.
I only mentioned this because an earlier post brought him up.
Careful... that might be interpreted as "Give us a time-out period during which we can pursue sex".
(kidding! -I intend only mirth.) but yeah, what the others said. DNA was (and he didn't say "forbidden", by the way) referring to the tacit expectation that religious opinions will not be mocked in public. The zeitgeist is changing now, and that's good.
@jonathan:
are you seriously suggesting that critisizing irrational belief under the protetive umbrella of religion is not generally regarded with much stronger disapproval than critisizing, say, a political position or even other superstitions?
and you reason for this by pointing to one oasis of a forum where religion is freely critisized, as a 'proof by example'?
please clarify if i am mis-representing your points, as far as i am concerned, your credibility is at stake.
-- oskar
What credibility?
..jk Ha anyway yes people take religion very seriously (their religion atleast), so any ill will towards it will offend people. Is that really very shocking? and didnt rushdie talk shit about islam anyway? poeple can always laugh at others but not as easily at themselves. aka if he was saying those things about christianity maybe he never woulda been knighted at all...not saying for sure just a possibility
The social acceptability accorded the criticism of a given religion depends on the degree to which that religion is adopted in a society. You can bet that there will be NO open criticism of the religious beliefs of Brownback, Huckabee, or Romney by any other candidate running this year - Democrat or Republican. Romney will get more criticism from the GOP grassroots. If criticism of religion weren’t verboten, Romney would be criticized - it is practically axiomatic: if it weren't considered unacceptable to criticize religion, Romney’s opponents would do so to gain political advantage. Some nasty behind-the-scenes crap may go on, but the candidates will say NOTHING - or pay the price for doing so (Race is similar in this respect - Rove could start a shitty rumor campaign about McCain's supposed illegitimate black baby, but none of that shit could splash on Bush's shoes. The difference, of course, is that race has no connection with inherent irrationality.)
If you think criticism of religion is acceptable in the public sphere, try running for office while doing it. How many points do you think Jesse Ventura dropped in the polls when said, "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business"? What do you think his chances of being elected would have been, even in Minnesota where he squeaked by in a 3-way race with 37% of the vote, if he’d said that before the election?
Try to find a clip discussing any mainstream Christian denomination in terms as stilted as the one Norm posted a couple months back in which CNN did a hatchet job on atheists. The "straw man" of which jonathan speaks is really made of brick, I'm afraid.
well, i said i was sticking my neck out.the most cogent argument here,
is true, but i was prepared for it. its reductio ad absurdum, and i can show many other examles of things that, if uttered, would destroy a candidates chances. (like an attack on nuclear family values).
the rest of you, well, i'm sorry to have ruffled so many feathers. yes, i see your point, but i don't think you see mine. where is the marketplace of ideas, norm? is it at a professors' dinner table? is it anything i can say and not be arrested? is it the world of publishing? you all seem so hell bent on protecting your persecution complexes (believe me, i recognize one when i see one) i thought i'd give you all a little taste of perspective, that's all. i already know about the injustices. the question is, do you know about the freedoms?
now if you'll excuse me, i have to attend a a book burning. i think tonight it's voltaire, one of my favorites.
Oh Jonathan, you disappoint. What is it, you feeling persecuted lately, and don't like any competition? Is this nothing more than my persecution is worse than yours. Marketplace of ideas? That's a little to cryptic even for me. Plain language is valuable, try it. Your shtick is amusing on occasion, but a constant dose of it is just annoying. Change up once in a while it's more fun that way.
your quote, norm.
I don't think criticizing the more flat out loony miracles of certain religions is what bothers people these days. The influence of science has produced more moderate religious people than some people like to let on.
However, open atheism and the push against the fundamentals which religion rests upon certainly is frowned upon, nor does it warm over well in public spheres.
Attacking the Trinity or the virgin birth is one thing. Most liberal believers do not hold on to those beliefs very much anymore, and if they do, they have a safe way of deluding themselves beyond criticisms reach.
However, full on attacks against faith and against God... It's not question that these issues are still held sacred, but they are discussed more openly now.
jb, and I believe you know the context in which it was meant. I'm tired of the endless parsing the lack of charity, you may think it great fun, but I don't. .
Word up, Mr. Adams.
wow, good word. parsing, eh? had to look it up on wiki. what a great word! yeah, i never thought about it before, but thats a good summation of what i do here. yeah. parsing the lack of charity. i like it. i accept this designation and humbly ask if there is a position for "lack of charity parsing-er" in your organization.
How about the malevolent parser or the no charity parser or the charityless parser. All three are available. They are however all lowercase positions.
How 'bout VP In Charge of Parsimony?
I'm not sure the "don't question religion in public" idea originally came into being as a way to supress expressions of disbelief. I think that use is more recent in origin.
Given the many many years of despute and violence between Catholics and Protestants, especially in Europe I believe that concept was originally adopted to keep the Catholic/Protestant struggle out of civil discourse. Religion was considered an impolite subject because of the sectarian animosity it could and often did inspire.
I believe that is the context inwhich the idea came into being but the context and the meaning of it has changed.
That criticizing religion is socially unacceptable was perfectly described by Dawkins' (in the same speech where he quoted the above passage by Adams), when he described how someone he knew had submitted a priest for the Darwin Award... The guy who decided to handle a snake, insisting that God would protect him -- the snake bit him, and he died.
They refused to accept this guy as a candidate, simply because you couldn't make fun of religion...
Dawkins said it was in pretty bad taste to make a joke about someone's death, even if it was due to stupidity. If you are willing to do something like that, you're really pushing the envelope, right?
Well, it's okay to make fun of a person who dies because of stupidity -- but only if it does not pertain to religion.
So there you have it -- religion has a special "get out of jail free" thing going.
Or at least, "established," major religion. If someone sprinkles magic fairy dust, or rubs magical voodoo juice on themselves, thinking it makes them bullet-proof, and proceeds to shoot themselves to death -- does that qualify for a Darwin Award nomination? Maybe -- because it isn't a "serious" religion, right?
found a relevant link:
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/08/08/dont-go-there-top-20-taboo-topics-for-presidential-candidates/
you'll notice the issue on the table is #5 of 10
sorry, #5 of 20. my vote for funniest line:
from#14
you'll notice the issue on the table is #5 of 10
so what? And?
just thought the list was interesting. i guess the point would be, if i were trying to continue arguing, which i wasn't, that religious faith is only one of many things that can't be criticized if a candidate wants a chance at election. like i said, i realize this doesn't prove anything. i just thought it was interesting and relevant and provided some context.
sorry. (cringe)
I hope Norm sees this one. lol
erick, i have to admit that was pretty funny. i was kind of honored to be so humiliated. :)
wondering: is that some kind of "instant cartoon" software? do you do the drawings yourself? have you done more of these things and if so, is it just me or everybody that comes in for such treatment? a compliment: it kind of reminds me of "xpcd webcomic", or whatever that thing is called that norm posts here from time to time, which i think is one of the cleverest cartoons i've seen in many a moon. there's potential here, man! if i could get paid for making an ass of myself, i'd be willing to split the take. :)
Just noticed this! LOL! But could you please place Syngas in frame #5?
Aww. I didn't intend to humiliate. I was just bored and felt like drawing. I used flash which is what they use for explosm comics if you've ever seen them. And no you didn't make an ass of yourself, that's teaforthetillerman's job.
well, everybody's got to have a job. i just got promoted, or demoted, to lack-of-charity parser.
Well, you're lucky, Jonathan! I was assigned the role of kicking some poor guy's balls! :/
well, as the guy whose balls you were assigned to kick... ok, i don't want to be accused of not being a team player. anything in the name of comedy...:) that's what avatars are for, anyway, right?
Yes, all in the name of comedy, we shall suffer being the butt of Erick's joke! :)
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