But since you rejected me when I called and no one gave heed when I stretched out my hand, since you ignored all my advice and would not accept my rebuke, I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when calamity overtakes you– when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

Proverbs 1:24-27

While struggling through the more dense corners of the web I found this gem, deployed by a Monopolist Christian. It’s really hard to work out what lesson they hope the heathen Other will draw from it, isn’t it? If somebody did this in real life, you’d think that they were a callous dick - but apparently it’s all good if God does it. Luckily I refuse to let this prevent me from recognising that most Christians don’t follow this particular bible passage especially closely.

The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied nor extenuated.

- J.S. Mill, The Utility of Religion

(HT: Adam Gopnik)

Also worth your time: You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill.

But what I want to be cautious of in a way that I don’t think Paul and Maher are, entirely, is conflating “religion” and “faith”… I agree with Maher that an intellectual grasp of religions is not sufficient to fully understand what it means to live a life of faith.

Caution is always to be recommended on the Web, and I agree completely that a purely “academic” (in the derogatory sense) approach will never lead to true understanding of something so deeply felt.

While we agree on that, I think we disagree quite fundamentally on how religion and sport look from the outside - although as Jennine says, she occupies an ambiguous position with regards to both activities due to her upbringing (which is partly my point, I think).

However, knowing people of faith who live their faith - as expressed through religion - deeply and beautifully, there is something there that I just don’t see captured in sport.  And that is the relationship between a person and the divinity that they engage with.  Although supporting a sports team can offer a sense of identity and community, I hope at least, that most fans understand that the team is not invested in their wellbeing.  And that, at least in the Christian traditions I grew up in, is exactly what I was taught about God - that God is concerned with each person’s wellbeing, that God loves each individual and wants them to live a good life.

That may well be what people believe about God - but, just like their favourite sports team, God does appear to keep on letting them down. And yet those people keep going back for more, just like sports fans who follow their teams despite persistent losses and consistent mismanagement. It’s all about feeling connected to a higher power - whether that higher power is Yahweh or Nike.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.)

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.

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.

Is morality something that can be pumped out of society as if we lived in a bell jar? Is there an optimal level of morality that we should be striving for? If it’s possible to have too little morality, is it possible to have too much morality? What people like Nazir-Ali mean when they say this is that they don’t like the morality that they see around them.

Unfortunately this is a common meme amongst Christians and Christian nostalgia buffs who long for a time before the 1960s, when apparently we didn’t live in a spiritual and moral vacuum. It’s strange that anybody thinks that prior to the 1960s we lived in a more “moral” time, back when we thought crushing the natives underfoot, firebombing German cities and winning at football were morally justified. Quoth Nazir-Ali:

Do the British people really want to lose that rooting in the Christian faith that has given them everything they cherish - art, literature, architecture, institutions, the monarchy, their value system, their laws?

The article then points out - with no apparent irony - that he is “a Pakistani-born immigrant who has suffered racist abuse - he was called a “Paki papist” by Anglican clergy.” So apparently I should be taking my moral cues from bigots - good to know. While these thoughts were percolating through my brain, clogging it up like coffee grounds, the Rev Dr Peter Mullen weighed in with his thoughts. Guess what? He feels similarly to Nazir-Ali:

We might have expected the Church to resist the decay, but instead it has connived with the destructive sexual and social revolution begun in the 1960s. Back then, I voted for homosexuality to be decriminalised. But this meant “between consenting adults in private” - where “between” meant two, “adults” meant men over 21 and “private” meant behind locked doors. I did not foresee the obscene and coercive “Gay Pride” pantomimes that now disfigure our high streets.

The Reverend should probably have thought more carefully about what he was voting for; in any case, the 1967 Bill decriminalised homosexual acts, not homosexuality. Criminalising homosexuality (i.e. the state of being homosexual) takes us into the land of crimethink, which isn’t somewhere I particularly want to go. The Reverend isn’t upset by homosexual acts (as long as they’re kept behind locked doors, of course) but by the sight of buttless chaps; and I’m not certain that buttless chaps are a moral issue.

I don’t particularly like Gay Pride marches (although I do like pantomimes) but you know how I deal with that problem? I DON’T GO NEAR THEM. It’s a controversial approach, but I’ll stick to it.

Mullen’s opinion piece is entitled “Without Christianity, our society is doomed”, but neither he or Nazir-Ali seem to have noticed the slight problem with their thesis. When Mullen says “We might have expected the Church to resist the decay” - well, wasn’t that his job? When Nazir-Ali laments the spiritual vacuum that’s magically appeared, does he stop to ask which institution usually addresses spiritual issues? It was their job, and they failed to do it, failed so badly that CofE attendance has fallen precipitously even while other denominations have risen.

Nazir-Ali says

If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we’re used to and that could be Islam.”

Well, it could be. It could also be Christianity, which has approximately 26 times more adherents than Islam, a comprehensive network of churches and other institutions across the country and a privileged position in the establishment. I would rather that the UK celebrated its religious heritage, and I would rather that Christianity continued to inform our social and political development. However if the pair of them - and all the others that follow their view - don’t want to live in a “spiritual vacuum” or an “Islamic theocracy”, then I humbly suggest that you fill it with something more substantial than a love letter to pre-1960s Britain, the era that brought us two worlds wars, institutionalised racism and sexism, and spam fritters.

Bah. I wanted to be the Lord of the Dance, but it turns out I’m the Scrooge of Easter.