forget about it
by cloudier
(via Quora)
On why you should care about privacy: Plenty to Hide
- Some people do have something to hide, but not something that the government ought to gain the power to reveal. People hide many things from even their closest friends and family: the fact that they are gay, the fact that they are sick, the fact that they are pregnant, the fact that they are in love with someone else. Though your private life may be especially straightforward, that should not lead you to support policies that would intrude on the more complicated lives of others. There’s a reason we call it private life.
- You may not have anything to hide, but the government may think you do. One word: errors. If we allow the government to start looking over our shoulders just in case we might be involved in wrongdoing—mistakes will be made. You may not think you have anything to hide, but still might end up in the crosshairs of a government investigation, or entered into some government database, or worse. The experience with terrorist watch lists over the past 10 years has shown that the government is highly prone to errors, and tends to be sloppily overinclusive in those it decides to flag as possibly dangerous.
- Are you sure you have nothing to hide? As I said in this 2006 piece, there are a lot of laws on the books—a lot of very complicated laws on the books—and prosecutors and the police have a lot of discretion to interpret those laws. And if they decide to declare you public enemy #1, and they have the ability to go through your life with a fine-tooth comb because your privacy has been destroyed, they will find something you’ll wish you could hide. Why might the government go after you? The answers can involve muddy combinations of things such as abuse of power, mindless bureaucratic prosecutorial careerism, and political retaliation. On this point a quotation attributed to Cardinal Richelieu is often invoked: “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I’ll find something in them to hang him by.”
- Everybody hides many things even though they’re not wrong. The ultimate example is the fact that most people don’t want to be seen naked in public. Nudity also makes a good metaphor for a whole category of privacy concerns: just because we want to keep things private doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. And, it can be hard to give rational reasons why we feel that way—even those of us who feel most comfortable with our bodies. True, some people may be perfectly happy posting nude pictures of themselves online, but other people do not like to show even a bare ankle—and they should have that right. In the same way, there may not be anything particularly embarrassing about other details of our lives—but they are our details. The list of all the groceries you have purchased in the past year may contain nothing damaging, but you might not want a stranger looking over that either, because of that same difficult-to-articulate feeling that it would just be, somehow, invasive, and none of their damned business. As Bruce Schneier aptly sums it up, “we do nothing wrong when we sing in the shower.”
- You may not care about hiding it, but you may still be discriminated against because of it. As I discussed recently in this post about data mining, people are often denied benefits or given worse deals because some company decides that some behavior—entirely innocent and legal—might suggest you are a poor risk. For example, credit card companies sometimes lower a customer’s credit limit based on the repayment history of the other customers of stores where a person shops.
- Privacy is about much broader values than just “hiding things.” Although many people will want more specific answers to the question such as the above, ultimately the fullest retort to the “nothing to hide” impulse is a richer philosophical defense of privacy that articulates its importance to human life—the human need for a refuge from the eye of the community, and from the self-monitoring that living with others entails; the need for space in which to play and to try out new ideas, identities, and behaviors, without lasting consequences; and the importance of maintaining the balance of power between individuals and the state.
On health: Diet Quality and Quantity Matter
Conventional wisdom says that since a calorie is a calorie, regardless of its source, the best advice for weight control is simply to eat less and exercise more. Yet emerging research suggests that some foods and eating patterns may make it easier to keep calories in check, while others may make people more likely to overeat.
The Money-Empathy Gap
In another experiment, Stephens presented firefighters and MBA students with the following hypothetical situation: “You just bought a new car, and then you find that your friend has purchased the exact same car. How do you feel?” The firefighters were overwhelmingly pleased and said things like, “Fantastic. He gets a great car.” The MBA students were negative or ambivalent. “I would feel slightly irritated,” one said. “It spoils my differentiation,” said another. (Madison Avenue discovered and manipulated this bifurcation in the American self-image long ago: When it sells trucks, the ads might show a parking lot full, pulled up at a multigenerational picnic, with slogans like “Take Family Time Further.” When it sells sports cars, the commercials show a car zooming down the highway alone. The slogan for the BMW M3 even nods in the direction of Piff’s discovery about the drivers of high-end cars and traffic rules: “Street Legal. Pretty Much.”)
How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.
The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick
One common criticism of any proposed atheistic morality is that atheism is inherently incapable of giving rise to a moral system, and that atheists can only have one by borrowing – some less charitable apologists say “stealing” – it from theism. The logical conclusion of such an argument is that atheists are hypocrites (one apologist used the term “moral parasites”), rejecting the teachings of religion even while living by its ethical code.
I deny these claims categorically. It may well be the case that some theists have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they cannot even imagine how a moral code could be arrived at without the confines of their belief system, but atheists have no such difficulty. Atheists, like all human beings, can empathize with the happiness of others and wish to increase it; and they can empathize with the sadness of others and wish to end it.
And this turns out to be the crux of the matter. Universal utilitarianism is not in any way derived from theistic morality, because it is based on the fundamentally human trait of empathy. It proposes that we should help others not because a higher authority commands it, not because we will be rewarded if we do and punished if we do not, but because we all know what it is like to be happy and to suffer, and we should want to increase the happiness and decrease the suffering of others just as we want that for ourselves. If one happens to believe in a religion whose teachings align with this, well and good, but as far as universal utilitarianism is concerned, morality can be arrived at and defended for purely humanistic reasons without recourse to the will of the gods.
There is another argument against this accusation of theft. Many major religious traditions, including Christianity and Islam, consider this life no more than a momentary trial prior to an afterlife of infinitely greater importance. By contrast, universal utilitarianism, in conjunction with the moral-Popperian principle that no afterlife has been verified and this life is the only one we know of, holds that this life is therefore of primary importance. This point of divergence is a fundamental difference in the way this moral system and most theistic ones view human life and refutes any naive claims that one was straightforwardly borrowed from the other. Universal utilitarianism, for example, cannot justify human suffering, or withhold action to correct wrongs, on the grounds that all will be set right in the world to come. Nor can it countenance force or coercion to ensure uniformity of belief on the grounds that doing so will ultimately save the souls of those so coerced. Even more so, without certainty of an afterlife, it makes this life more precious and enshrines human happiness in this life as the highest goal.
There is one final argument against the claim of atheists using morality borrowed from theism: lack of reliance on a deity’s will is precisely the thing that allows universal utilitarianists to unambiguously condemn wrongs committed in the name of God. For example, the Muslim terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center believed that their brand of radical Islam justified their actions; by striking a blow against the corrupt and immoral West, they were serving Allah’s will and helping more Muslims reach Heaven.
This, then, is my rejoinder to those theists who claim atheism can only have an absolute moral grounding by “stealing” it from theism: it is precisely my lack of all religious belief that allows me to say with certainty that such actions are morally wrong. Theists, on the other hand, face a difficulty in condemning actions such as this – how do they know that God didn’t really command the terrorists to hijack those planes? In fact, some theists do believe that, and not just Muslims. Witness, for example, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s remarks to the effect that the actions of certain groups had caused God to lift his “veil of protection” from the United States and allow the September 11 attacks to occur.
Granted, theists who say such things are in the minority, and granted, their views are evil, hateful and wrong. I have absolutely no argument with that, and I have no desire to trivialize the people who lost their lives on that terrible day. I mourn their loss and honor the heroism of those who gave their lives trying to save others. But that is exactly the point. I, as an atheist, know why I reject the views of people like Robertson and Falwell. Why do theists reject them?
Is it not commonly said that no human being can know the will of God or fully understand the reasons why he allows evil to occur? Is it not the case, in the Bible and other holy books, that God frequently allows evil to happen to human beings to punish them for their sins? (Amos 3:6 claims that no evil occurs to a city that God is not responsible for.) Is it not true, according to many theists, that anything God wills is justified by definition? Given these facts, how then can a theist confidently say that any action is right or wrong? It hardly needs repeating that the events of September 11 are by no means the first evil act committed by humans against humans in the name of God.
What grounds does a religious believer have for pronouncing these things immoral? Mere inward certainty that God would not will such a thing is a completely subjective basis, able to justify any action as well as to condemn it. The internal contradictions within the Bible and other holy books make it impossible to use them as a reliable guide to morality, although even if they were completely consistent that would not prove them to be the word of God. Unless God clearly reveals himself and explains what his will is (as this article from the Onion imagines), no theist can say for certain that God does or does not approve of a given action, and thus no theist can say for certain that an action is or is not morally right. Religious belief is, in summary, a “moral blank check” that can justify any action if it is committed in the name of an inscrutably willed divine being; but universal utilitarianism does not allow such easy justifications.
company of three, black peppermint tea 
Um, first, sorry for ignoring everything but the last bit. As with most of my comments, rough and unpolished, so take without caveats.
1. > “Universal utilitarianism is not in any way derived from theistic morality, because it is based on the fundamentally human trait of empathy.”
I’m thinking there’s a basic presumption of conflating increasing happiness with a moral good, and increasing suffering as moral bad? Like, what compels me as an autonomous human individual with agency (supposing I have agency) to increase the happiness of everybody else? Empathy? But under naturalism, empathy is simply reduced into a brain process, certain neurons firing in response to certain stimuli (I’m probably wrong here on the details, but I hope my point stands regardless). There’s no actual rationale for me to act on my empathy, if it’s neurons firing. Does that make sense?
Like, I’m sure pragmatically speaking universal utilitarianism works fine, but there’s a serious gap between the descriptive pronouncement it makes – “we don’t like suffering, but happiness is nice” and the normative claim – “we should therefore alleviate suffering and increase happiness” that is never properly argued for, just assumed.
I’m worried I’m still making absolutely no sense and even worse sounding like a sociopath, but I can’t make it more cogent at the moment, sorry.
2. > “Nor can it countenance force or coercion to ensure uniformity of belief on the grounds that doing so will ultimately save the souls of those so coerced.”
Mostly irrelevant aside, but I find this very amusing given that the basic Enlightenment narrative I would assume the author is an adherent of is a secularized Christian salvation narrative of “progress.”
3. >For example, the Muslim terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center believed that their brand of radical Islam justified their actions; by striking a blow against the corrupt and immoral West, they were serving Allah’s will and helping more Muslims reach Heaven.
It’s probably also not that salient but I’m on a total Asad high at the moment so everybody reading this please oh please read Talal Asad right now:
http://libgen.info/view.php?id=390264
4. > “Theists, on the other hand, face a difficulty in condemning actions such as this – how do they know that God didn’t really command the terrorists to hijack those planes?”
Speaking from the perspective of (my admittedly somewhat idiosyncratic) theology, you can ground the character of God in the narrative of Jesus Christ (culminating in Crucifixion-Resurrection), where divinity is then understood as perpetually self-giving, for-others. This doesn’t so much dissolve the mystery of God as transform it from terrifying-darkness to infinite-and-unfathomable-love. But given that reading, we could say that whatever does not promote the establishment justice and love in all humanity is directly contrary to God’s intention?
As for those God-responsible-for-evil passages, I suppose I could reading Amos 3:6 and other passages like it (say, Isaiah 45:7) in a Thomist light, where God is not so much as sovereign watching and commanding creation from heaven, but as the ground of existence, the foundation of all being, the that-which-makes-possible. This I guess is a more helpful (to me, anyway) interpretation of those verses?
Oh, and also, that reminds me, I think divine punishment, properly understood, is not so much an active work of God but a passive withdrawal of God from the target of the “punishment”. Given that reading, I think a lot of the typical irreligious criticisms of God’s character (as seen in the Bible, particularly Old Testament) lose a lot of their force.
5. > “The internal contradictions within the Bible and other holy books make it impossible to use them as a reliable guide to morality.”
Well, generally speaking, when an finite and limited being encounters something boundless, infinite and beyond understanding (for a secular analogy, see poetry), I’d expect contradictions whenever the former tries to speak of the latter.
1 Being able to explain empathy doesn’t make it any less of an emotion. Also, the snippet up there is a short section of the article, so the rest of the article might answer your other objections.
2 Huh?
4/5 That’s all cool, but I think that the fact that there’s such a wide variety of interpretations of Scripture illuminate how difficult it is to use it as a reliable guide on morality, which is (in this case) fundamentally about human interactions, not, for example, human-god interactions or human-animal interactions.
Arguments against using the bible *as a guide to morality*:
(a) It is difficult to figure out which interpretation of the bible is universally correct since it’s hard to tell if you’re ascribing prior moral judgments to the bible or if you’re actually right.
(b) It is very difficult convince others that you are right.
(c) It is difficult to account for inconsistencies.
(d) There are secular alternatives to using the bible as a guide to morality which don’t have these difficult issues.
1. I think I was saying that emotions don’t constitute a good way to bridge the descriptive-normative chasm, because if we can reduce them to neurological phenomena, they lose any moral weight. I did browse the relevant sections of the article; I can’t say it’s a very impressive case. I think he does a considerable amount of violence to other ethical theories (I’m pretty sure he’s mischaracterizing moral relativism, or maybe it’s just how I would formulate moral relativism, and his treatments of Aristotle and Kant are pretty atrocious). I also think he begs the question by assuming improving happiness automatically translates to moral good, and this is something he never seriously justifies.
2. I think it’s been pointed out by various thinkers (John Gray most explicitly) that the typical Western Enlightenment historical narrative of religious-superstitious-mire to secular-non-religious utopia is pretty much a secularized Christian salvation narrative. I’d elaborate on this, but it would take a huge amount of space because there’s so much to expound.
3.I guess I should say here that I think the Bible shouldn’t be a moral guide but a political guide, but there I should qualify that by saying the most viable interpretation leads to an far-left politics. This probably sounds absurd, but it’s not totally bizarre, I’m drawing these conclusions from liberation (and feminist and queer) theology, the tradition of Christian anarchism. and the intersection of Marxist theory and Christian theology.
That doesn’t really make your objections go away, though, so I’ll try to answer the rest of them.
I think you’re drawing a false distinction between human-human and human-God interactions. In the prophetic (I’m using prophetic in the actual Biblical sense) tradition of the Old Testament, the worship of God is inextricably linked to works of charity and justice. Like, the prophets (Isaiah and Amos are I think the most prominent) fault Ancient Israel for sliding into greed and selfishness, failing to take care of the marginalized, and this is always viewed as a failure to properly worship God. This I think (not entirely sure) has to do with the connections between Israel’s status as the chosen nation of God, the divinely-given Jewish law and justice.
a) The Bible is certainly not a univocal text, sure, but I’m happy with privileging and prioritizing the “progressive” and even revolutionary passages over the reactionary, conservative ones, and I think the prophetic tradition as well as the aforementioned Christocentric hermeneutic provides a theological foundation for this type of reading. So I’m saying here that the inner logic of Scripture is evidence for preferring my reading over the average conservative pastor’s.
b) That’s a fair critique, but I don’t think that delegitimatizes the worth of the Bible. I guess I’m trying to separate the sociopolitical import of a stupid interpretation and the actual validity of a stupid interpretation here, though that might not be an acceptable move on my part, if this is a discussion in pragmatic, not theoretical terms?
c) Previous point 5? And I think most of the time the apparent contradictions that are fairly easily resolvable by approaching the passages from other theological angles or by examining the context or whatever. I’m not denying there are serious problems and inconsistencies within Scripture, but I’m denying they constitute a sufficient reason to throw it out entirely. Origen’s notion of Scripture-as-allegory rather than straight historical fact also seems pretty helpful here.
d) I think there are still pretty deep problems (which obviiously aren’t the same) with formulating a secular morality (or politics). I’d bring up Alasdair MacIntyre and After Virtue here to point out that the post-Enlightenment philosophical-ethical tradition is a fragmented mess, and each branch is riddled with problems, eventuating in the moral anti-realism of Nietzsche or the emotivists, which is probably not where the atheist moral realist wants to go..
Also, sorry again, but this time for the colossal wall of text.
1. You’re right, but I suppose that’s not really important from my point of view as ethics represents a means to an end to me. How do other frameworks deal with this?
2. …Don’t you mean ironic? ;D
Also, I think that idea of progress is pretty common in society in general.
3. Okay.
Edit: stop apologising.
1. I would still ask why your end is better than the end of say, a white supremacist? I still find it necessary in the barest sense of being able to to say something like Nanking was unequivocally wrong, and to be able to ground that in some absolute (which is an appeal to emotion, of course, but I wouldn’t use it as an actual argument, more a presupposition, but now I don’t know where I’m going with this.) I guess I’m just not satisfied with a pragmatic “free-floating” ethics with no meta-ethical foundation; but that might not be a universal inclination.
For the other frameworks; I’m really not versed enough in the literature to properly answer. I think most ethical naturalists take the easy way out and presuppose that morality can be reduced to natural phenomena (like pleasure or happiness, however quantified), and I’m sure there are arguments for this, but I haven’t come across a decent one. Maybe I haven’t read deeply enough; there ought to be one good one somewhere.
Someone like Moore would take “goodness” to be a be an irreducible, non-natural (but not necessarily super-natural) property which can only be spoken of in its own terms.
I think a Kantian would assume morality can be derived from pure reason; but I have no idea exactly how.
But this is all very very patchy, so grains of salt everywhere.
(Oh, and as ever, the two internet encyclopedias are probably far better guides.)
2. I don’t know, maybe; I’m too tired to figure it out. It’s still amusing, either way.
3. Ingrained apologetic nature, sorry.
Also, gah, forgot about progress. First, I’d say that the widespread status of a social belief doesn’t make it right (more Americans are likely to describe themselves as conservative than liberal, for example). More concretely, I think we (corporate human race) have certainly progressed very much in some areas (civil rights and medicine are probably the largest examples) but we’ve made things completely awful in other areas. The twentieth century was home to two world wars (and all the other conflicts like in Vietnam and Yugoslavia and of course Afghanistan and Iraq); the rise (and collapse) of totalitarian governments, and the completely wonderful and morally immaculate rise of global capitalism. The number of slaves nowadays is higher than any other point in history (not to mention the foreign factory labourers who make our lovely Western existences here in the West possible). We’ve also left the environment a complete mess and it seems like a pretty much lost cause.
And I’d also point out probably the defining atrocity of all history, the Holocaust, was a very modern phenomenon. (In no particular order), there’s the technological efficiency of the modern factory that was manifested in the efficiency gas chambers, and also the logistical efficiency of modern freight that brought the prisoners to the camps. Then there’s the ideally dispassionate, rational, amoral style of modern management reflected in the SS organization as well as the broader Nazi state (a genocide wasn’t actually the Nazis’ first plan, but they talked about it and they eventually came to the conclusion it was the best way to “cleanse” Germany of the Jews). Related to both of those is the constant deferral of authority that’s a product of the contemporary civil hierarchy. That was a really pretentious phrasing, but it basically means the modern employee (private or public) tends to assume that they don’t bear any responsibly for their actions; it all lies with the person giving the order, but they too cast all authority on their superior, and you can probably see how crucial this was for facilitating the Holocaust. I’m saying here that the Holocaust is not the atavistic move away from civilization, but instead very much an expression of the Western modernist ethos.
(Though this isn’t intended as a polemic against modernity, which I would swiftly take over anywhen else, but a critique of the prevailing Western myth of progress.)
I’d also say that a great deal of various other cultures have had or do have a cyclical, not linear view of time, which helps illuminate out just how Eurocentric this notion of progress is, but that’s my weakest point.
I think that what you actually have issues with is the widespread idea that in the future, humans will improve ethically – something like, a greater proportion of humans will be good. (I think that civil rights represents more of a change in the strategies of the regular proportion of humanity that are good.) It’s difficult to argue that technology hasn’t improved, and this is likely to continue since the activities that generate this improvement are somewhat distributed – a decline in innovation in America isn’t going to kill this trend since there are other places in the world where that innovation can happen.
But that’s beside the point I was making in the previous comment. I thought it was a bit mean/elitist that you thought it was amusing. Ignorance is only immoral when it’s the intended outcome.
1. I wouldn’t deny that we’ve made huge strides forward scientifically and technologically; but my point is that the linking of “technological improvement” and “moral improvement” is one of the core tenets of the modern Western creed. As in, it’s assumed that scientific-technological advances automatically translate to “progress,” and this ties in with the broader emphasis on reason, or rather, one particular brand of Enlightenment reason, which, once properly established, is usually the one great universal emancipator that will usher in an utopian era of peace and prosperity.
Back to technology, though, I’d basically argue that, no, advances in our technological acumen do not constitute “progress,” however you define the term. I pretty much don’t consider it progress to have nuclear weapons proliferated as widely around the world as they currently are; I don’t consider it progress for us to be able to ravage the environment in fancy new ways; I don’t consider it progress for the the head of the current world superpower has the ability to murder people at will and with complete impunity. And it’s our technological innovations that make all this possible. I’m again not saying it’s all doom and gloom, and yes, hospitals are great and it’s wonderful we’ve found the Higgs Boson, but these I don’t take to be representative of the ways we’ve used our increasing scientific and technological resources, and I think it’s intellectually irresponsible to do otherwise.
2. I’ll grant mine is a pretty elitist view (though I would begin to ask why it’s an elitist view in the first place). With regard to meanness, I was specifically focusing on explicitly atheist “thinkers” (Hitchens, Dawkins, and probably the author of that post) who do adopt the at basic “more secularization leads us to closer to utopia” narrative and in doing so end up revealing their deep Christian roots (as well as their ability to ignore the actual huge amounts of research that have been done of secularization and secularity and that causes quite huge headaches for their thesis; if not outright falsifying it.)
When it’s not specifically them articulating it, though, I generally don’t care enough to find the progress-myth amusing.
1. Okay cool. I misinterpreted your first comments then. Your outlook is pretty pessimistic :L I think that technology that generally benefits society isn’t developed and implemented very fast because it tends not to be very profitable. I’ve read somewhere online that the technology for making the world carbon-neutral already exists – it just hasn’t made it through the government yet.
2. I think it’s elitist because firstly, you’re amused at their ignorance, and secondly, it’s reasonable to assume that they haven’t encountered the idea. It’s like expecting a person on the street to be able to resolve the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise.
I think you’ve misinterpreted the ideas that they’ve been trying to express. They’re complaining more about the use (co-opting?) of faith to repress critical thinking and justify immoral actions, i.e. the idea that you should believe something with absolutely no evidence behind it is a major barrier to social improvement, and so is its veneration as a ‘virtue’. Like, for example, it’s hard to argue that contraception has had a negative impact on society, but that doesn’t stop the Catholic Church from spreading its message. It’s not like they’re arguing that secularisation is inherently better than religion, it’s just that faith helps to stop people from, well, thinking.
1. I’d say that I find it hugely unlikely we’re going to stop ruining the environment anytime soon; there’s too much money to be made in that area, and neoliberalism has too much a stranglehold on government to expect them to do anything about it. And even if I’m wrong on that, the environment is only one particular facet of the not-progress we’ve made – the fact remains that the 20th century was still the bloodiest in all human history, and now in the 21st we have nuclear weapons as well.
It is a pretty pessimistic outlook, though. On the bright side, these are good items to be a revolutionary.
2. If it’s elitist, then I shrug my shoulders. I’m not even in university and I’ve been able to access and absorb the serious scholarship done on Western (post-)secularity; if that’s the case, I don’t find it unreasonable to expect someone like Hitchens to similarly read people like Asad or Masuzawa or Cavanaugh (okay, maybe not Cavanaugh). Moreover, I would actually say they have a duty to do so, because I’m just some minor idiot in a comment thread, whereas they have thousands of readers. If Hitchens & co. are going to talk about secularism, then I would expect them to be at least acquainted with the actual details of Western secularism, not some vague Platonic ideal floating off somewhere with no actual attachment to reality.
I also don’t think they (the neo-atheists) are exclusively complaining about the apparent incompatibility of rationality and (all forms of) religion; they’re making that point, sure, but it’s incorporated into their broader advancement of the old Enlightenment reason-will-take-us-to-utopia narrative that goes all the way back to Diderot and Voltaire. I think they’re wrong, both on their critiques of religion (which doesn’t mean I think that entails religion being right; just that they happen to be an embarrassment to the otherwise fine lineage of thoughtful atheism), and their uncritical advocacy of their own narrative (uncritical is the crucial qualifier here), and I think it’s quite easy to show they’re wrong, but that’s a tangent.
I also would point out that the “progress’ thing we’ve been discussing is exactly like something people accept pretty blindly; I’d also say it’s “a major barrier to social improvement” since it actually serves to insulate the the contemporary capitalist pseudo-democratic global order from critique, which I would take to be, at the very least, equally as bad as the Catholic’s promotion of their stance on contraception.
Incidentally, as much as I hate to say this, I think there are decent and rigorous argument for the Catholic position on contraception, and I really think you’re missing the nuances here. Anscombe is wrong but brilliant here, for example. Though I do get what you were trying to say; I just think you chose a bad example.
(Also, isn’t “absolutely no evidence” overly strong language? Young Earth Creationists put forward evidence (bad, malformed, very poor evidence, but still evidence) for their few-thousand year old universe and denial of evolutionary theory. I’m not arguing for the legitimacy of creationism, only trying to point out you’re mischaracterizing even the most anti-intellectual strains of religious faith.)
> “It’s not like they’re arguing that secularisation is inherently better than religion, it’s just that faith helps to stop people from, well, thinking.”
I think it’s quite obvious they are arguing that being non-religious is better than being a superstitious moron; it’s right there in the names of their books. I do agree with you you on (qualifier: some forms of) faith stopping people from thinking, but I would point out not all faith is necessarily faith in “established” religions. I think I could build a fairly strong case for nationalism being a greater religious force than Christianity in America.
> I think they’re wrong, both on their critiques of religion
Okay. I’ve only read the God Delusion, and that was a while ago so my memory probably isn’t very reliable, but I felt that it wasn’t exactly directed at what you call ‘decent theology’. I get the impression that most people don’t take their religious activities too seriously and it was largely a reaction against that (and the resulting immoral/illogical religious beliefs) as well as the discrimination atheists face.
> their uncritical advocacy of their own narrative (uncritical is the crucial qualifier here), and I think it’s quite easy to show they’re wrong, but that’s a tangent…I’d also say it’s “a major barrier to social improvement”
Haha, I think that would be a much greater flaw in their position, but at the same time I still don’t find it too unreasonable for them to be unacquainted with it since, well, it doesn’t appear very relevant (at first) to what they are saying and it also seems pretty obscure.
> Anscombe is wrong but brilliant here, for example.
Summary? I’m too lazy to read it and I don’t have a good understanding of the context.
> Also, isn’t “absolutely no evidence” overly strong language?
Yeah. I meant no credible evidence. Informally, I tend to think of them as synonymous.
1. I agree that they’re quite adept at constructing strawmen and demolishing then, without engaging any “decent theology”. I just checked, actually, and they might try to, but Dawkins’s treatment of Aquinas in The God Delusion, is absolutely awful, he seems to lack even a basic understanding of Aristotelian teleology or causality, it’s sobs-inducing.
The thing is, though, they assume that they can fit all “decent theology” under their strawman, so that someone like Tillich (who I don’t entirely agree with but I think is eminently reasonable) gets lumped in with the average creationist or whoever, and this is just appalling. Analogically, it would be like conflating someone like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Feuerbach; Feuerbach is amazing and clever and original and insightful and Russell is… not.
I don’t know about the religious activities seriously thing – I would’ve thought that the increasing popularity of denying evolutionary theory, somewhat elatedly, religious fundamentalism (domestic and “Muslim”) spurred the rise of the New Atheism.
You’re probably right, though, about the discrimination against atheists, at least in America. The thing is, though, that I don’t think advancing “secularism” is, counter-intuitively, counterproductive, and just ends up retrenching insular, reactionary religions. There’s no easy way to “fix” America’s religious problems; it’s an extraordinarily ugly mess, but neither the silliness of the religious right or the dogmatic secularists seem seems to be a way forward.
2. I suppose we just take different intuitions then. I would admit that someone like Mazusawa is more than a little obscure; but I do think she (and theorists like her) are quite relevant to anybody working with secularity. I mean, their ignorance of the actual scholarship is still pretty bad, making them dangerous (and quite racist) at worst and merely clownish at best. The entire concept of the secular has such potential, but then they just go ahead and ruin it with their appalling naivete.
3. Anscombe takes a traditional Catholic natural law perspective, which of course is already hugely controversial. But from that, she first argues that the Catholic moral standard of sexuality is chastity, and then that marriage (which is of course the only permissible expression of Catholic sexuality) doesn’t cancel this, just reconfigures it within a specific framework. Then she argues that because marriage is about providing a proper place for developing this “chastity,” marital sexuality can’t be purely concerned with seeking pleasure, because it devalues intercourse into something like an “extreme kiss,” which she doesn’t think to be particularly good thing. I don’t think most people would much like her premises or conclusion; but I don’t think you can fault her reasoning at all; she was one of the most respected figures in 20th century analytic philosopher.
The brilliance I was specifically thinking about, though, was the way she had of applying her concept of intentionality to contraception and the rhythm method (both of which are sort of contraceptive methods; but the former is forbidden to Catholics, the latter is encouraged). She deals with the claimed inconsistency quite adroitly.