religion

I’m not a particularly big football fan. I support Crystal Palace because their playing grounds are close to where I grew up, and I had a particularly 1970s Eagles school bag while I was doing that growing up. I’ve been to a few football matches, watched a few more on television and play football twice a week with a bunch of people who are clearly better than me.

In this fascinating article, Ryan Maher is talking about American football rather than real football, but I think the principles are the same. In fact he’s talking about how to discuss faith in a meaningful way with those of other faiths, in the context of his work in Doha.

This template for discussing religion and faith is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that different groups of faithful people approach their religions in the same way football fans approach their favorite teams: I cheer passionately for mine, you cheer passionately for yours, and we all agree to play by the rules and exhibit good sportsmanship. For people of faith, religion isn’t like that.

Actually, football isn’t like that either. That’s a very strange view of sport - a matter of etiquette rather than passion. I don’t believe that Chelsea are any good, not on the basis of the empirical evidence but because I don’t like Chelsea. I don’t believe that Crystal Palace are any good, but if people ask I’ll still say I support them. I don’t think that England are much good, but I’ll still be jumping out of my chair whenever they win a match with a goal in the last two minutes.

Good sportsmanship has its place on the pitch; off the pitch, the barracking that opposing supporters give each other is seldom good-natured and sometimes spills over into violence. So perhaps it would be more useful to see religion as exactly like sport - pursued by different people for different ends and in different ways, and occasionally with more agreement between people of different faiths than with those of their co-religionists?

In a article for Axess entitled The Return of Religion, we are privileged to watch Roger Scruton defend a form of religion that nobody in the world actually practices - a common affliction for academic philosophers and theologians. He’s a pacy rider, but the wheels come off the wagon towards the end:

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

I don’t have any such innate need, and consequently his entire argument is falsified.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation. One of these is the question of consciousness. [Insert barely-understood and largely irrelevant reference to quantum physics to distract the punters here.] Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them.

It may be the case that the reason that we haven’t been able to “see” the consciousness before is that we didn’t have the right tools - in exactly the same way as we weren’t able (and in many cases, remain unable) to see the “great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy” that so impresses Scruton. It may be the case that we may be in the early stages of exploring consciousness, some years behind our journey of exploring the cosmos. It may be the case that consciousness will soon be laid bare, and that Scruton’s metaphysical discourse turns out to be a dead end.

On the other hand, it may not. One thing is absolutely certain, however - consciousness is very clearly and very obviously a question that is addressed to science. If I were Roger Scruton, I probably wouldn’t try to build my house of worship on this particular sand.

Awesome in its predictability:

Whether you’re an action/sci-fi movie fan or not, if you find yourself in the midst of conversation about The Incredible Hulk, try using the conversation to talk about stress - how you deal with it and how your personal relationship with Jesus impacts you when stressful times smash into your world and threaten to turn you into your own raging version of The Hulk.

Alternatively you could just relax, enjoy the movie and avoid alienating your friends and colleagues completely.

While reading this post, you should be listening to Let the Good Times Roll by Layo and Bushwacka!

I tend to think that the Singularity is merely the ne plus ultra of technotopianism, a trend which must be combated wherever it is found, but I avoid talking about it for fear of drawing down the wrath of Eliezer deliberately. However singularity thinking does force us to ask difficult questions about almost every aspect of human endeavour, and I like that. Probably a bit too much.

One such aspect is the question of what it really means to be human, intelligent and conscious, with the prospect of various combinations of biology, chemistry and engineering about to radically alter the way the human does business. You need to read a bit of background before the following will make any sense, and understand that one of the key tenets of singularity thinking is that - at some point in the near future, as computer processing power increases - it will be possible to upload a human mind to a computer.

This raises all sorts of questions, but in the course of arguing for the singularity on 3quarksdaily, Jesse M makes the following point:

Of course a simulated brain would require inputs like those from a real body or it would probably go crazy or become comatose, like a person locked in a sensory deprivation tank forever.

As I burnt my tongue on the pizza I’d just made, this set me thinking. What does it mean to be crazy or comatose? In essence it means that you involuntarily apply an abnormal filtering process on the inputs your brain receives. So being without inputs wouldn’t just be a cause of being crazy or comatose - it would be the result of being crazy or comatose as well. The causative chain doesn’t just go in one direction here, which makes it hard to disentangle which came first without being able to go inside and have a look - and that’s the one thing that currently we can’t do.¹

This made me think some more - what would it mean to have a brain without inputs? This is where you have to separate out mind from brain (sorry dualists): let’s say that you have a brain in a tank - how could you tell if there was anything going on inside that brain? From outside, how would you know a mind existed, if it wasn’t open to inputs against which you could test its responses as per the Turing test? From inside, how would you know you were a mind if you weren’t open to inputs against which you could define yourself (bearing in mind that even the Cogito requires external experiences, even if only to doubt them)?

And then I had the flash of insight which made me forget about my burnt tongue². A brain might exist in a purely physical sense, but without inputs it makes no sense to make the assertion that a mind exists. If there are no inputs, for all practical (and possibly for all philosophical) purposes there is no mind. It’s therefore entirely reasonable to assert that the mind exists only insofar as it interacts with an external world.

If this is the case, is it sensible to draw a hard line between our minds and that external world? (No.) Does the external world need us as much as we need it? (Possibly.) Does my tongue still hurt? (Yes, but I’ll be alright.) In the context of the ongoing singularity conversation, if you upload your mind to a machine, and then close that machine off to all inputs, what are the implications for the continued existence of that mind? Perhaps the Singularity doesn’t provide all the answers to the question of mortality after all.

The good news is that this does help to confirm my own prejudices that (a) The internet already constitutes a machine intelligence - just as these machines are becoming an extension (extrusion?) of our intelligence, we’re an extension of their intelligence - and (b) God is an emergent property of a universe with intelligence in it, in a similar way as consciousness is an emergent property of a body with a mind in it.³

1. Of course with a simulated brain it may well be possible to go inside and have a look (although I tend to doubt it, for reasons which are irrelevant to this discussion but have to do with levels of complexity). Interesting ethical question - should it be considered torture to deliberately inflict this type of condition on a conscious entity, even if it’s artificial? I strongly suspect that this may form part of the case that Eliezer makes in his AI-Box Experiment. [↩]
2. I’m sure there’s some lesson in there as well, incidentally [↩]
3. Note to self: this also creates problems for God, but he’ll have to take care of that on his own. Literally. [↩]

I recently became aware of a religion called Frugianism, whose followers are called Frugians. All Frugians share a core belief that the earth was created by a supreme being, named Frugi, but they are split into two groups. One group of Frugians believes that Frugi directly controls everything that happens, and that free will does not exist: the other group of Frugians believes that Frugi has no involvement in day-to-day events and that free will is the supreme truth; and each group criticises the other for its false beliefs, believing themselves the true Frugians.

I was immediately struck by this conflict, and became very confused. How was it possible for me - an outsider - to work out which group was right in its beliefs? When I asked individual Frugians about this they presented three linked explanations. First, they pointed out that Frugi is above mere descriptions, so Frugi can be all things to all people. Second, they pointed out that humans are imperfect creatures, so their comprehension of Frugi will always be flawed. Finally they conclude that my observations have no bearing on the truth or falsity of their personal beliefs, which they hold to be true regardless of anybody else’s beliefs about Frugi.

However my confusion is not about what the true nature of Frugi is, nor about whether it is possible to know the true nature of Frugi, or even about whether their beliefs are true. No matter what the answers to any of these questions are, the beliefs of each group concerning Frugi are mutually exclusive. Either Frugi controls everything directly or Frugi does not - there is no way that both beliefs can be true at the same time. Of course the Frugians themselves recognise this - which is why each group asserts that their belief about Frugi is true, and the other groups false. When an outsider criticises Frugi or Frugianism in any way, however, the two groups present a united front - they are all Frugians together, and any criticism of Frugi or Frugianism is a criticism of them all.

Although both groups refer to their supreme being as Frugi, the only possible conclusion for an outsider is that the two groups are describing two different entities. It is only historical accident that leads them to use the same name for both entities, without recognising that they are talking about different things. There is no point in asking which group’s beliefs are correct - the only way to decide would be to join one of the two and subscribe wholeheartedly to their version of Frugi, condemning all other versions as mighty errors in thinking.

(HT: Stephen Law and his vastly superior God of Eth.)

UPDATE: Fitna has been taken down by Liveleak following threats against its staff. This is a sad day for freedom of speech (even if it’s poorly produced speech) and plays into all the fears that Geert Wilders presumably wanted to raise by making it in the first place. Oh well. You can still watch it on YouTube if you really want to.

Fitna appears to be the modern equivalent of the Theatre of Cruelty, minus the creativity. It’s a fairly rudimentary cut-and-paste job - if I can speak bluntly for a moment, if a video doesn’t feature a fighter jet made of biceps, then it’s going wrong somewhere. However clearly my taste is not shared by the rest of the internet; apparently since it was released the video has been viewed 3291470 times (as I write these very words).

More worryingly, Fitna demonstrates almost no insight into the substantial problems of dealing with immigration in post-war Europe. Yes, I know it’s a polemic; however while it’s fairly clear that Wilders is against terrorist bombing and beheading - radical positions, certainly - beyond that it all gets a little fuzzy. Wilders claims that this is “a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization” but I have difficulty seeing exactly what the average person is expected to do in this heroic struggle.

If you prefer knowledge to fear, you could spend your time more wisely watching the astonishing video interviews with frontline Taliban fighters carried out by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. This series of interviews covers a range of topics; it’s pretty much essential for anybody who wants some insight into the mindset of the Taliban, and absolutely fascinating even if you only have a passing interest.

The Taliban are not a good guide to the mindset of Muslims in general; but while we’ve been told that they’re Our New Favourite Enemy, most people have no idea who they really are and what they really believe. As the interviews show, these are uneducated men who come from unrelenting poverty, and their understanding of the world is understandably stunted.

It’s by no means good news, but if we want to understand Our New Favourite Enemy - and to improve people’s lives rather than dismiss their culture - then this is the place to start. Needless to say, the web is having a grand mal episode over Fitna, but almost nothing about the Globe and Mail’s report, the “war on terror” having been reduced to schoolboy videos and endless punditry.

Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed - Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.

Too much detail.

Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom - and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.

Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have - no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.

In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:

The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.

That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

Cranmer is more than a little irritated by … bland and oblique moralising

Oh crikey. When Cranmer gets a little irritated, property gets damaged, so imagine that carnage that will ensue now that he’s more than a little irritated. Your Grace, what’s got you so riled up?

While Cranmer agrees that the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961 made a modicum of sense insofar as one could never achieve a successful prosecution of the successful and ought to express compassion toward the unsuccessful, the liberalisation of the law on euthanasia would be a dangerously amoral development, as the Lords Spiritual asserted when the issue was last presented to Parliament.

Aha, euthanasia - always a good way of telling the religious person from the secular. Along with abortion, it’s the last area where the faithful believe that they have the right to impose their views on everybody else in our society. Unfortunately Cranmer is not content to assert that his particular faith group is against suicide / euthanasia - he wishes to demonstrate that

Opposition to ‘do anything which is destructive of life’ is one of the few general rules which unites all of the world’s religions

as well as apparently being against the principles of Enlightenment secularism. Unfortunately the quotations he provides demonstrate exactly why the world’s religions are in no position to dictate what the individual does with their body. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sorry, but what the hell did you just say?

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that’s a bit of a danger… There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

No there isn’t. People who predict the Islamopocalypse are barking idiots, and my problem isn’t with Williams’ saying that we should accommodate aspects of Muslim law into our legal system. My problem is his assumption that religion has any place in our legal system at all, apart from in measures to protect the freedom to pursue those beliefs - and protect others from those beliefs. Without that separation, the entire legal system is undermined, as we all merrily pursue our own ideas of what the law should constitute and who it should cover.

Of course, that’s a completely separate question to why Rowan Williams, the head of the established Church of England, feels the need to advocate for Islamic law. Perhaps he misread the job description?

UPDATE: I find more intelligences more subtle and profound than I writing about the same issue at Cranmer and Our Kingdom, while Stumbling and Mumbling emphasises that “civil society” has a place in this discussion that goes mostly unnoticed.

I am lucky enough to be in Bangladesh for Eid al-Adha, the commemoration of Abraham’s near-miss sacrifice of his son Isaac (which is a whole topic in itself - suffice to say that I’m not a big fan of Kierkegaard) and the time of Hajj. Neil spent the 2005 Eid in Pakistan and told me that I was insane to want to set foot outside the hotel that day - said the experience had turned him into an “aspirational vegetarian”. I’m already vegetarian, so I don’t see that as being a problem.

So if I’m honest, I am looking for death. When I leave the guest house that morning, there’s no sense of tension building. The streets are much more quiet than usual, empty of cars at least (something that I would have found impossible to imagine for myself, in Dhaka) but with rickshaws and tuktuks plenty, taking people from house to house. Dhaka feels almost serene today, released from the coffee-mill grind of daily life and the coffee-coloured smog that the city roasts in.

Children race over the puddles in bare feet, pouring out from the shanties around the lake. I walk and walk but don’t see anything apart from the usual beggars, dipping on crutches or pulling themselves over the ground towards me. Yet even they are less obvious this morning, drawn towards the mosque to wait for the zakat that will inevitably follow the morning prayer. Around 8.30, groups of men in white shirts carrying round wooden blocks and long sharp knives begin to congregate at the gates of the residential compounds. The sounds of prayers finishing open up the streets, and families emerge blinking into the hawkers and beggars, momentarily disoriented before they head home to begin their rituals. The cows and goats line the streets as if they were waiting for a bus to arrive.

I am still wondering where all the sacrifices are, but then I realise that I am in the midst of it all. There was no elaborate preparation for any of this, all the animals had been bought in the days and weeks before, families saving up for the purchase, some of them buying shares in an animal with their neighbours. There isn’t much sense of occasion, I feel, it’s more as if this is just something they have to get over with so their day of rest, of family, of celebration, can begin.

Goats are easy - a couple of men to hold them down is all it takes, the noise and fuss are minimal, no rope required. Cows are a different story. The beast needs binding, the front legs tied tightly together while the rear legs are looped twice. A man takes each side of the head, gripping the horns and twisting it to face the sky. If things go well, the rear legs are pulled sharply away; if things don’t go well, if the cow is strong, it jumps and kicks, escaping the rope. The children scream with excitement and try to get closer to the action.

It’s only postponing the inevitable; eventually the rope takes hold and the cow falls like a fat man stumbling, while the children are waved away by the slaughtermen. Once the cow is down (and only then) it starts to realise what is happening - but also to realise that it’s too late. It stops struggling almost as soon as it starts, becoming less vigorous as all four legs are tied into one and four men kneel upon its body.

The first cut is made by the official slaughterman, deputised by a mosque, just below the jaw, followed by a swift sawing through the meat. At first the inside of the throat looks like papier mache that’s been left in the rain, slack and sagging; but, as the blood overflows the body like a bath that’s been left running too long, it looks more like a series of red ballons, punctured by an angry white windpipe that contracts with futile energy.

About 50 seconds after the first cut, the body remembers what it is. The chest heaves again, the legs kicking once they’ve been unbound, as if they might by chance get some revenge on their murderers. It’s all in vain, of course; the children scurry out of the way of the flailing hooves, in bare feet through puddles which are now blood, rather than water. The other animals remain calm, and I realise that they don’t recognise their own death even when they stare it in the face, sniffing instead at the blood in the hope of fodder.

A man in white goes past on a rickshaw, his hands covered with the red ink from the book of life, as the butcher takes over the duties, slitting the gizzard vertically and peeling it back. He is brilliantly efficient, marking out the flesh in portions for distribution. The rich distribute this meat to the poor, and those children in the shanties will eat very well tonight.

I watch the act of death several times, each time noting new details, techniques not always widely shared, the different circumstances of each sacrifice, the character of the animal itself. None of it horrifies me; at least this places the killing where people will have no illusions about where there food comes from. In some ways it feels more humane than the western mode of killing - indoors, out of sight, industrial - because here the value of the animal is felt more keenly.

After a while, I don’t feel like there’s any more that I can learn from seeing all this. Details aside, every killing is the same at its core, and eventually I come to find it as tedious as the butchers must, diving blade first into yet another gut. The killing will continue without me, of course, and so I return to the hotel for breakfast with my colleagues, where I will not talk about anything that I’ve seen this morning.