Re: The root of all evil? - Dawkins Documentary

Michael Siemon wrote:
In article <1145839591.657635.201310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"David Ewan Kahana" <dek@xxxxxxx> wrote:

...

The statement that there exists a God who is creatively
active and who intervenes in history is one which it should be
well within the power of science to address. It is a statement
for which no empirical support exists and which, nevertheless,

Ummm, that is overly broad.

Perhaps so, but the claim that there exists a God who
intervenes in history is an extremely strong and broad
claim.

If it is a true claim about the universe, then surely it
would be of enormous importance to establish it objectively.

And yet, there are some people in this world who do claim
that we should all order our lives and all our social
interactions as if this subjective claim were an objective
truth, and who do not seem to regard it as important whether
it actually can be established as a truth.

At that point, I demur, and demand stronger evidence.

I am willing to grant (provisionally;
I am not certain of this, but assume it is likely to prove true)
that there is no _objective_ evidence (maybe that's what you
mean by "empirical") to support the religious claims. However,
there _is_ "experience" (and hence, what I take to be empirical,
though it is, admittedly, subjective) from various "spiritual"
practices (meditation, prayer, ...) that supports the statement.


I'm using the word empirical in what I understand to be its
common scientific sense and the word `support' in the sense
of `evidence.'

That is, I use empirical to mean: relying on or derived from
observation or experiment, and, of course, in the case of
science, observation and experiment must be objective.

That is say, results of observation and experiment must be
free of distortions due to emotional or personal bias, and
all possible care must be taken to eliminate emotional and
personal bias from observations and experiments.

So:

Ohm's law is a statement about the universe with empirical
support, in exactly the sense that the statement that there
exists a God who is creatively active and intervenes in
history lacks any empirical support.

The case of Ohm's law is so straightforward a case, that I
think most will agree that it is possible to eliminate
emotional and personal bias from the experiments that have
been done, and which one would do in order to verify Ohm's
law.

Now, as you say, there certainly exist numerous individual
and collective claims that this or that subjective
experience suggests to this or that person or group of
people, that there is a god(s) who actively intervene in
human history.

In a loose sense, one can certainly say that this
constitutes empirical support for the claim.

I do not consider such evidence to constitute empirical
support, on the grounds that it is purely subjective
and is clearly open to personal and emotional bias.

There is a problem here, for the believer (though the nonbeliever
can easily blow this off as irrelevant). The various "mystical"
traditions (of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,
and presumably more "tribal" religions) claim to be able to put
their adherents into some sort of relationship with non-physical
"reality". (In the case of Buddhism, this may not be well defined
as a relationship with "personal" deities...) And, historically,
there has been sufficient success in this claim that it continues
(whatever "success" in the context might mean!)


Well, that the claim does continue, of that I am a convinced
believer ;->

But: `There has been sufficient success in this claim.'

Meaning precisely what?

Surely not that adherents have actually been put into some
sort of relationship with `non-physical reality.'

There are swamis who claim that they can levitate, and there
are any number of magicians who claim that they can pull
rabbits from empty hats, or saw beautiful women in half, and
then put them back together.

Glendower claimed that he could `call forth spirits from the
vasty deep.' Hotspur answered: `Why so can I and so can any
man; but will they come when you do call?'

I think that a problem exists for the believer, only when
the believer wants to convince the non-believer of the
objective truth of his belief, or to bring about the result
that the non-believer will act in a way that the believer
says he should, purely by virture of the believer's
subjective feelings about the actions in question, based on
the revealed truth of his religion.

This is *not* to say that non-believers necessarily act in a
fundamentally different way than believers do, when it comes
to the art of persuasion.

Neither is it to say that non-believers are in any way
superior to believers.

I believe that we are all equally human, and subject to much
the same mix of rational and irrational internal motives, no
matter where we come down on questions of the existence of
god(s).

But I think we humans can lose a very great deal by
accepting uncritically the truth of what is said about how
people should behave towards one another in certain stories
that were told 5500, 3500, 1900, 1400, or even 174 years
ago.

I think it is incumbent on believers and non-believers alike
to at least consider whether there may be more objective
ways of proceeding.


all collective religious movements of which I am aware, to
a greater or to a lesser degree, ask their members to take
into account as if it were a reality in making their life decisions.

Yes, but _none_ of them ask their members to act on the basis of
an objective study of the actions/interventions of God. :-)


Precisely right ;->

There's an old russian joke which seems to fit here.

Brezhnev, on a visit to Rome asked the Pope:

`Why do people believe in your paradise in heaven, but
refuse to believe in the communist paradise?'

Without hesitation, the Pope answered: `That's because
we never show ours.'

What I am trying to get at, and perhaps it was poorly
stated, is that _some_ of the members of _some_ religious
movements centered around god(s) as described in sacred
texts are asked, by _some_ people who hold themselves forth
as religious leaders, to accept that such actions and
interventions _do_ occur without making an objective inquiry
into the question at all.

This is really a quite extraordinary request to make of any
person, to suspend disbelief in some stories that were
written a long time ago in some texts, to such an extent
that those people will then act as if the stories were
objectively true.

It is a request which would never be made, for example, of
people who were reading the novels of George Eliot.

But in the case of religious texts, we also have before us
certain literary texts, which, it is sometimes said, are to
be treated in a very different way from all other such texts
which with we deal in our lives.

At bottom the belief in such a being has no empirical basis,
and it is well within the province of science to point this out,
which for all practical purposes constitutes denying that such
a being exists.

I think Stanley would agree with me that we do _not_ expect there
to be any "empirical basis" (if, again, you mean a critical and
objective study of objective evidence) for our faith. But we
_would_ expect that individuals can _experience_ things which
incline them to belief (or non-belief).

I'm sorry, but I most emphatically do _not_ agree that this "for
all practical purposes constitutes denying that such a being
exists." For all _scientific_ purposes, yes. Assuming (for the
sake of argument) that God "acts" in history (meaning, in some
manner other than the framing of natural law at the "beginning")
then, if there is no objective evidence of this accessible to a
scientific investigation, there is _no_ existence of such a being
_as far as science goes_.


I am in full agreement with the conclusions of your
hypothetical.

And so, I claim that, for all practical purposes, science
*does* deny the existence of such a being under the
conditions that you framed. There is no practical way in
which it would need to be taken into account, and the
default position is surely to deny, or, which may _seem_
different but which practically speaking is not actually
very different at all, to ignore the existence of all those
entities which need not be taken into account for
any scientific reason.

I am not among those who hold that there is _always_ no
basic conflict between a scientific approach to the world
and a religious approach to the world, and I think that this
is one point at which there can be, unless the form of the
religion has become such that it does not actually, anymore,
demand belief from its adherents in things for which there
is no empirical evidence. (Empirical in the sense of
objective.)

I think that in some cases there is a basic conflict.

By saying this I do not mean to make a negative value
judgement about all believers or any particular group of
believers.

That for me would be another matter entirely.

Any judgement of a moral nature that I personally would make
would depend upon the nature of the beliefs held, which, I
think you might agree, are all subjective, and far more
importantly: on the way in which those beliefs are put into
action by believers in this, the _physical_ world.


I disagree. Science constitutes the only method yet found
of proving anything that is of any utility in the case when
we want to make objective statements about reality.

Yes, but you have explicitly given a constraint that does not
apply when I try, in considerable confusion and doubt, to deal
with other, non-objective, aspects of my life -- which happen to
be very important to me, for good or ill.

I prefer, as a general rule, to apply critical methodology to all
aspects of my _intellectual_ life -- and that includes theology.
But I get into a kind of unlimited regress when I try to do that
with respect to _subjective_ experience (of music, of liturgy, of
love, of happiness or unhappiness....)

But why should one even want to apply critical methodology
to subjective personal experiences of the nature you
describe?

I trust and I hope you will be able to order, or not to
order your internal life as you yourself see fit to do and I
hope you will achieve that to your greater satisfaction ;->

But when a believer and a non-believer meet in the
_physical_ world and discuss, say, what should be the lawful
penalty for expressing disbelief in the Invisible Pink
Unicorn, then a higher level of rigour surely must be
demanded of them both than to point to some ancient scraps
of text in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic or Hindi and solemnly
intone `As it was in the beginning, so shall it ever be.'


For example, I consider Newtonian mechanics to have been
empirically proven, within its range of validity.

As a mathematician by training, I am not happy with this usage
of the word "prove". :-) I think I understand your point, and will
agree to it -- but not in the phrasing you have chosen here!

Clearly I mean a far weaker sense of the word prove than the
mathematical one.

I was also a mathematician by training, BTW, and might have
gone either way after university.

You probably know the origin of the term `bulletproof.'

In those days in which the best armourers were, for a short
while, able to defeat the early guns by making new and
stronger plate armour, it was customary to demand that suits
of armour that were purchased were bulletproof.

This meant that a gun was fired at the armour, and where the
bullet failed to pierce it, usually near or over the heart,
a small and observable dent was left.

The dent was the proof that the armour would be safe against
bullets.

Scientific proof is more analogous to that, than it is to
mathematical proof.

But it is still the best we have in the real world.


To make such an admission, that science cannot prove
anything seems to be going too far. Science is pragmatic
in its goals. It has never sought for logical proofs in the sense
of mathematics.

Indeed -- but in the current context, one has to "know" with some
kind of "certainty" what scientific conclusions are and how they
do, or do not, apply to religious claims. "Pragmatic" is as
pragmatic does, and for everyday and objective purposes it is fine
to completely set aside questions about a "reality" not captured
by the scientific method. It _does not matter_ to science; and
hence does not matter to the work of scientists as such, unless
they impose some kind of "filter" on their work from non-scientific
sources. At the start of your response, it was not clear to me that
you do indeed accept what you say here: that science "has never
sought for logical proofs in the sense of mathematics" -- because
you seem to have been making statements that assumed precisely
such degree of certainty.

Certainly I accept that.

All human knowledge about the world is imperfect. Science is
cogitation and theory, backed up to the extent possible, by
observation, or to put it in another way, by reality
testing.

Mathematics, when it is able to establish general truths,
does so within a formal logical/linguistic structure by
means of following specific rules about the manipulation of
certain symbols. Reality testing is not a requirement,
but following the rules of symbol manipulation is.

Religion, on the other hand, appears to me to make some
claims that are to be accepted as truths about the world
without applying either a mathematical or a scientific
technique of establishing those truths. That is, reality
testing is not, in the first instance, important in the
method of revealed religion.

It is hard to get away from the notion that when, as it is
written:

`Bere*** bara elohim et hashamayim, ve'et ha'aretz,'

this is a truth claim which is meant to apply in some way to
the real world. It embodies two truth claims in fact.

(1) There was a god.
(2) In the beginning he created the heaven and the earth.

And of course, the story continues, linearly laying out in
time what can only be regarded in the context of the text
itself as the sacred history of the origins of the world,
human beings, the Israelites and all other peoples, and
defining for the Israelites what their place is and what
their obligations are in the _real_ world.

It seems to me that these are not abstract claims at all
that religion in the first instance makes, these are in fact
very concrete truth claims.

This is *not* to say that all or even most Jews, in all
ages, have regarded all these things as literal truths about
the world, and that none ever did any reality testing.

To say that would be, in the first place, to disregard the
central importance of Talmud in rabbinical Judaism, which is
a movement that by all evidence has probably held sway, at
the very least, since the completion of the Babylonian
Talmud in about 600 AD, and probably even since shortly
after 135 AD. After that point, all of the texts began to be
re-interpreted as was thought necessary for the times, in
response to the changing political circumstances of the
Jews, and naturally also in response to the rise of
Christianity and Christian theology.

It would in the second place also be a great
mis-characterization of what has been over the ages a very,
very diverse group of people, holding quite divergent
beliefs when one looks in detail.

But one certainly could have believed _all_ of those things
that are written in Torah to be literal truth at any time in
the last 1800 years, have never in one's life tried to test
the objective truth of any of them, and, if one followed
what were said to be the commandments, still have been a
good observant Jew, who any Jew would have said did all that
was demanded of him by god.

There is no *requirement* for reality testing built into
religious systems of thought.



This does not mean that scientific proof is any less powerful
a notion than mathematical proof, or that scientific proof is
non-existent.

??? This seems a bit incoherent. The utility of Newtonian physics
is "certain" in our ordinary human activities, regardless of any
"corrections" (from GR, QM or anything else coming down the pike).

Fair enough ;->

Yes, of course, modulo the possibility pointed out by Hume
that tomorrow Newtonian physics will utterly fail to be
true. Which we can't, of course, logically rule out.

I don't have a clue how to "rank" that (or should I say, as a
mathematician, "order" it?) in "comparison" with mathematical
proof.

I don't know if it would be an order, or even a pre-order.

It is something different certainly.

But I think you have stated the point well enough to make a
clearer statement of what scientific proof consists in.

Once we have done sufficient reality testing on a scientific
theory we may well reach a point where we are justified in
holding the opinion, pragmatically, that the theory makes an
approximately true statement about the way that the world
has behaved in the past, and we are justified in using the
theory to make predictions about the way the world will
continue to behave in the future.

The meaning of approximately and the domain of applicability
in the case of some theories which have been superceded,
such as Newtonian mechanics, can be made reasonably clear.
The meaning in the case of other theories remains less
clear.

That some scientifically theories are scientifically proved
in this sense, in some cases, is an empirical fact.

It is a different _kind_ of conviction/certainty. And the
conviction of a personal relationship with (some) God (or
some other "ultimate reality" in cases such as Buddhist
non-theistic belief) is yet-again a different _kind_ of
conviction.

It is a conviction, which, since by definition it involves a
statement about some putative `ultimate reality,' must be
held without any testing against physical reality, or proof,
in the sense of `testing' of any kind other than subjective.

What way would I have of determining, for example, whether
someone has such a conviction, or merely says that they do?

Mathematical
proof is not _ever_ impacted by certainties or doubts of the
scientific kind. (Sometimes, as a mathematical observer of the
cavalier treatment by physicists of mathematical theorems, it
appears that mathematical truths are only occasionally bothersome
to physicists! and I'm never sure just when... :-))


We physicists take a catch as catch can approach to
mathematical rigour; we are happy if it's possible,
at least those of us are who know what rigour is,
but we aren't too concerned if rigour isn't possible,
but the theory gives a set of definite rules that can
be followed, and that work to describe experiment.

cf. Feynman path integral ;->

In short, I don't see why either mathematical or "spiritual"
convictions should be particularly constrained by the certainties
or convictions I may derive from science. The context is different.


They are not, and I am not arguing that they should be.

But again: when mathematicians, physicists, Jews and
Buddhists meet, for practical purposes it makes sense to
regard them as meeting each other not in the `ultimate
reality,' claimed by the Buddhists or the Jews.

And so in the hope of, possibly nothing more than preserving
a general amity among them, none of them can claim to know
truths that are to be accepted by the others without those
others justifiably demanding that those truth claims be
subjected to some form of reality testing if the claimant
wishes the claims to be accepted as truths by all.

Science and mathematics both have no problem with this
requirement. Revealed religion does.



Once the notion of god or gods is adequately stated I do
not see why it should not become susceptible of scientific
proof.

I strongly suspect that when you say "adequate" you mean something
like "physical and operational". That doesn't really address the
question as it presents itself to a believer (or one who is in
doubt about belief).

Yes, I do mean that.

But, I suspect that you really don't expect that I, as a
non-believer, should treat believers any differently than
non-believers when they are making truth claims about the
world that we both live in, as opposed to truth claims about
what they themselves believe.



If you are worried about
religious people feeling threatened by science because of this, then
this simple message - if correctly understood - should allay those
feears.


Why should scientists seek to allay the fears of religious people?
Science does not seek to allay the fears of scientific peple.

I think you are being rather crudely dismissive of Stanley's point.
Apparently from the assumption that nothing matters unless it can
be ground in the mills of science.


It's very possible that I am being crudely dismissive of
Stanley's point.

I confess though that I don't remember exactly what
Stanley's point was here. None of the statements directly
above are due to him, I think. We do have Algis Kuliakis
guess as to what Stanley might be worrying about. I was
responding to that.

I am not saying, though, that nothing matters unless
it can be ground in the mills of science.

I really would like to know, however, why scientists should
seek to allay the fears of religious people.

It simply doesn't seem to me that it is the business of
science to allay people's fears.

That, I thought, is claimed by some to be one of the major
benefits of religion; that it can, for example, allay
people's natural fear of personal annihilation.

But I suppose that, in fairness, one has also to consider
the generations of people who were terrified as small
children by fire and brimstone sermons delivered by the
likes of those preachers satirized in the play, Cold Comfort
Farm (only loosely remembered I'm afraid):

Think of having a burn on your arm, and its a burnin' and a
burnin', and then you put some cold butter on it and the cool
feeling lifts your heart from the pain.

Well, I'm telling you all right now: THERE'LL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL!

;->


Religious movemens often make very sweeping and extensive truth
claims. They claim that the universe is organized in a certain way,
by a being or beings who are assigned various quite definite
characteristics, which are outlined in certain `sacred' texts.

Yes; and to the extent that these claims can be put into any kind
of correspondence with objective data, they may be shown to fail.

But the traditions making these claims _also_ have, quite generally,
claims that any such correspondence misses the point. Certainly
that is true of the history of Christian interpretation of these
claims. You may (quite reasonably) shrug your shoulders and ignore
anything so constructed -- but it is simply wrong to dismiss the
claims on the basis of a "mapping" to objective data that is _not_
accepted by the claimants! [The really bizarre thing about various
"fundamentalisms" is their acceptance of such mappings, and then
extreme intellectual contortions to avoid the obvious -- negative --
conclusions.]


I agree with you that this is a general component of the
defence of religious truth claims in the face of their
failure to pass basic reality testing, when that is
attempted. It is not just a component of Christian
interpretation, either, I think.

But it has also at times been regarded as necessary by many
religious thinkers to defend, by means external to religion
itself, existence claims about the gods themselves, since if
these are abandoned, then it is really not clear what
remains of religious thinking.

We can trace these efforts, certainly, in Jewish and
Christian thought in the middle ages.

With Muslim religious thinking I am less familiar, but I
suspect that they too have had their rationalist theologians
who have tried to prove the existence of god from
self-evident truths.

Now it is clear that there are many different organized religious
movements, and it was explicit in the sacred texts of almost all
of them of which I am aware that all other religious movements
are false.

??? I don't think this is strictly true, though it often comes across
that way. The cases that occur to me are instructive:


Perhaps it is not always strictly true.

But I think it has very often been descriptive of the state
of affairs that exists among believers in religions
involving revealed truth. Believers hold that their religion
is true, and since the revealed truths of other religions in
general conflict with the revealed truth of their own, they
are almost bound to regard the others as false. And then
quotations can be and are found in the texts to support such
a position. And other texts are found to vitiate that position.

So belief never in the end remains a private matter.

If only it could, and did, then I would not be at all
worried about what people want to believe in private ;->

a) Muslims say of Allah, "He begets not and is not begotten" -- and
this is a rejection of (orthodox) Christian doctrine. But the origins
of that doctrine are metaphoric; far too many Christian sects exist
purely on the basis of disagreement about catechisms, creeds or other
artifacts that exist only in an attempt to _teach_ the faith.


However, Allah says to the Prophet:

`Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites
and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home,
an evil fate.' Sura 9.73

This text, I think, must be reasoned away somehow in order
to avoid my claim.

I do not say that no Muslims have done that, nor do I claim
to know what the general Muslim attitude is towards these
verses, and certainly I do not claim that all Muslims
interpret this verse as literal truth or act as if it were.

But the verse seems to have a plain enough meaning, to me at
least. Unbelievers can and will go to hell, as far as Allah
is concerned, and so, believers could at least _imagine_
that they have been told to act as follows in this world:

`Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.
Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the
righteous.' Sura 9.123


b) Christians say, "No one comes to the Father except through [Christ]"
which is usually interpreted as meaning "confessing" Jesus as Lord.
But if God is Love, and the essential point of Christian action is
what one _does_ to the least of our brothers and sisters, then such
action _is_ coming to the Father through Christ. Words do _not_ matter.


More problematic to me is this sequence from John Chapter 8.

They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery,
in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that
such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said,
tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus
stooped down, and with [his] finger wrote on the ground, [as
though he heard them not]. So when they continued asking
him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And
they which heard [it], being convicted by [their own]
conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest,
[even] unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the
woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up
himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her,
Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned
thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Now this passage is clearly a rejection of Jewish law at the
time, and in Judaism, law counted for a very great deal.

Now I am not making any moral judgment here. I certainly
prefer a law which does not require us to stone adulterers
to death. But I think that it is hard to read this other
than as a rejection of Mosaic law, and with it the Jewish
religion, as it was seen at the time, at least by the writer
of John. Then there is this:

Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead?
and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?
Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing:
it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he
is your God: Yet ye have not known him; but I know him:
and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar
like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying. Your
father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw [it],
and was glad. Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not
yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Before Abraham was, I am.

Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid
himself, and went out of the temple, going through the
midst of them, and so passed by.

Now I personally think it is very possible to read this as a
statement that Christianity has superceded Judaism.

`Before Abraham was, I am.'

And in fact, people who read this and much worse which
exists in the NT relative to the Jews as literal truth, have
very often been, let us say, confused by the texts. I would
say that some have indeed been convinced or found ways to
convince themselves that Judaism is a false religion.

Now this is *not* to say that all Christians read the
texts in this way, or that all hold this opinion. But
some have, and I think that some reason for it can
be found in the texts.

Christian texts could hardly make reference to Islam, of
course.

c) Jews say, "Hear, Israel, the Lord your God ... is One", which is
usually interpreted as rejection of the Christian Trinity (except
that it has the minor difficulty that Christians _agree_ that God
is One. :-))


It also would seem to be something of an anachronism to
suggest that the Shema is a rejection of the Trinity, since
neither Christianity nor the Trinity existed at the time
when the Shema was written ;->

Consider the first line.

`Shema Yisrael, adonai elohenu, adonai ehad.'

`Hear O Israel, the LORD your god, the LORD is one.'

The word translated as LORD, in English, is always
pronounced adonai by Jews, but it is written YHVH in the
Hebrew. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is always written in the
ancient Hebrew script, that was current before the square
Aramaic characters were generally adopted, which happened
only after the destruction of the first Temple.

The Shema, if you ask me, is an explicit statement that the
religion of Israel is monotheistic, and that the God is a
unity, despite the existence of multiple terms and names for
god which exist and are used by the Israelites in the
Tanakh.

As for the rejection of other religions in Judaism, here
are two key passages.

First of the commandments to the Israelites in Exodus:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that
[is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under
the earth:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:
for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third
and fourth [generation] of them that hate me;

Then in Deuteronomy:

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy
daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which
[is] as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us
go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou,
nor thy fathers;

[Namely], of the gods of the people which [are] round about
you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the [one]
end of the earth even unto the [other] end of the earth;

Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him;
neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare,
neither shalt thou conceal him:

But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first
upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all
the people.

And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because
he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God,
which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house
of bondage.

This is all quite unambiguous, about what to do with people,
even one's own loved ones among the Israelites, who follow
other religions, if you ask me, and it seems to me clear
that it is because the Israelite religion is regarded as
true, and all the others as false.

The requirements placed upon the Israelites are very strong.

Now it is true that this treatment for believers of other
religions is not, at least not always, countenanced in the
Tanakh, and it is true that the Jews very early on appear to
have developed a notion that a person of another religion
could be a righteous person if they followed the Noachide
laws, and that people living among the Jews need not
convert to the Jewish religion. All that I think is true
enough.

And it is true, I certainly believe, that no Jews would act
in this way in the modern era.

But all of this is accomplished in spite of the clear
meaning of such phrases in the sacred texts.

In all cases, the exclusion is in the eye of the excluder.

In many cases the penalties for holding other beliefs
about the superbeing or beings are quite extreme. In the
case of the Abrahamic religions, the penalty is that one is to
be put to death, and it is only possible to evade this requirement
of the texts by a kind of tacit and collective denial that this is
what the texts actually say about the matter.

I will agree that history has, in this, not been favorable to any of
the three I mentioned, though the Jews are more sinned against than
sinning (presumably mostly for want of opportunity...)

We know relatively little of Judaism in the very early days.
But I suspect that, judging from passages such as I quoted,
the stories from the wilderness tradition of the treatment
of idolators, and the Levitical laws, they sinned as much
against people of other religions as any similar groups did
against them.

In the modern era, Jews have very rarely had the political
power that is required. This has deeply modified the nature
of the religion, and it is almost impossible to separate
this fact.


Now far be it from me to criticize religious moderates for wanting to
ignore these aspects of their sacred texts and ignoring them
as a practical matter. I applaud all those who oppose
fundamentalists who would restore the ancient ways
in their full horror.

Fundamentalists are not "restorers of ancient ways" -- they mostly
have no clue at all about history. They have a radical anti-modern
agenda, in most cases, and use any bogus claim whatever in their
cause. And the "sacred texts" usually do not -- without some very
deliberate excision from context -- support any of the agendas for
which they are contemporaneously cited.

I agree on everything you say here.

I was speaking of some of these specific treatments that
are prescribed for unbelievers and blasphemers and so on.

These, I think were probably at some time `ancient ways' and
I think you can find fundamentalists who read some of these
passages and think it would be a good idea to re-institute
some of the old laws.



But it must then be admitted by moderates that part of their
received religious tradition has been abandoned, and that
they are then on a slippery slope as regards the rest of the
tradition.

I think you will find, if you actually look into this, that the
"moderates" in all three of the cited "Abrahamic" traditions -- and
in general the same kinds of folks in Buddhist or Hindu or Shinto
or other traditions -- have very deep roots in history and are by
no means as divorced from the text and historical communities as
this seems to suggest.


I remain of the opinion that in order to be a moderate it is
necessary to act at times in ways that are directly contrary
to the underlying texts on which revealed religions are
based, and I think that this position is always vulnerable
to attack by one who is well versed in the underlying basic
texts, and interprets them directly as written, taking them
as simple moralistic homilies or worse, as direct commands
on how to act towards others in the real world.

In modern Judaism, I would agree that its impossible to
overestimate the centrality of the Talmud. People who are
fixated on the Tanakh as embodying the whole spirit of
rabbinical Judaism have utterly missed the point.

The passages I quoted have been worked around by means of
centuries of interpretation and reinterpretation by
scholars, so that the overwhelming majority of Rabbis
would never advocate enforcing these old laws.

But you will find some real nuts among the Jews who have
drawn very intolerant lessons from their studies. I would
cite Rabbi Meyer Kahane, my namesake, but by no means my
idol, as a case in point. And there are a very small
minority who have been convinced by him, though Israel
itself found him to be so impossible that it expelled him.

However the Mishnah, the mostly legalistic core of the
Talmud, asserts, on no authority but its own, that it is
the oral part of the Torah, given on Sinai to Moishe
Rabbeinu, and thus that it is part of divine revelation.

So I think that the potential for the kind of instability
I'm speaking of is always there, and I wonder whether
all of the effort that goes into avoiding the plain
meaning of the texts is the best way for people to
spend their precious time and energy.

Do we in the modern era really have no better
advice to offer than heavily reworked Iron Age
thinking?


The question is -- and it _always_ has been -- how to go from text
and practice to the _reality_ behind it that is _known_ not to be
captured in the text. If there _is_ no such reality, then of course
post-modernism reigns and there is no hope. Then the correct response
is Wilkins' "apathetic agnosticism". But if one embarks on that
course, I would hope for some accuracy in portrayal of the history
and reality of the "believing" communities, rather than indulging in
hatchet jobs of the sort lots of evangelical atheists are fond of.


I don't accept either post-modernism, or that there is a
_reality_ behind the text and practice to get to. Texts and
practices through the ages define, for me, all of the
historical reality about a religion that we could possibly
ever know of objectively.

I reject the term evangelical atheist as well at least if it
is being applied to myself ;->




This also means that moderates have at best a weak position
in arguing against fundamentalists, who can, quite rightly,
say that religious moderates are not following the religious
traditions any more, have effectively given up the divine
law, and are destined for hellfire, in religions that make such
statements about eschatology and the afterlife.

Fundamentalist claims (in Christian, Muslim and Jewish contexts)
are bogus. What they mean by "tradition" is some (heavily edited
and "romanticized") version of small town practice in uneducated
areas that they see as "uncorrupted" by education or thought. In
the Christian context, Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran (outside the
American revivalist context), and Anglican traditions are steeped
in history and tradition in a way NONE of the evangelical sects
have any hope to be. Some of the Calvinist traditions may also
be fit here (except they have _always_ been prone to ahistorical
excessess :-))


I fully agree. But fundamentalist movements undeniably gain
a certain strength by ignoring history.

You are very clearly a moderate. You want to make things
complex, and say they must understand the history, they
must learn it in order to get at the reality.

But they want to make things seem simple, and they can and
they do succeed in doing that.




In fact, it is only when one lives in a society which is strongly
secular in its institutions that religious moderates are able even
to think in the fashion in which they do today,

Bull***. Try reading some 17th century Anglican work. Or Erasmus.
Or much of medieval Christian literature (before the reaction to
the Plague). Yes, there are also immoderate threads in these
traditions. Sometimes the hostile threads prevail. Same as now in
_our_ secular world. (Note that persecution of "witches" is a
phenomenon of the Renaissance, not of the Medieval "Age of Faith").



Sure, in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and
after, there is a veritable sea change in Christian
literature. But over against your Erasmus (whose writings I
do admire), I can place some of the writings of Martin
Luther.

And serious persecution of heretics began already with the
Cathars in the late middle ages, apparently after a very
long quietude of some five hundred years duration in the
historical record, following the last executions of early
Christian heretics in late classical antiquity, which took
place in about the seventh century.

I agree with you, though, that there were always moderate
threads. Maybe it is reason to hope that they will win out
in the current situation.

But there is a point here which you seem to be ignoring here
I think, which is that Christian religious control of the
entire apparatus of the Roman state was never completely
established, neither in the Western Empire nor in the
Eastern Empire. This despite the fact that on one occasion,
a certain Holy Roman Emperor was forced to bow to a certain
Pope ;->

So there were *always* secular institutions around, centers
of power other than the Church. There has been no purely
religious state in the whole history of Christendom.

Note for example, that the Church itself never had the power
to directly apply the extreme punishments that were, on
occasion, meted out to heretics, but instead turned the
condemned over to the secular power to carry out the
burnings. To do this, Churchmen had to persuade the secular
power to assist. Not to say that this was always so hard to
do ...

...

All of this is true and accurate ... but for religion, this iterative
process > leaves in the end very little space for a creator god who
regularly intervenes in history.

Only to the extent that divine action is seen as somehow essential
to explanation of the details of the physical world... And unless
you believe (on whatever grounds) that the temporal evolution of
the universe is absolutely determined from its origin and boundary
conditions, there is "wiggle room" for a supremely knowledgable God
to do some "interesting things" in the course of universal history.
Even from a totally deterministic viewpoint, you will find theological
views that attempt [not to my satisfaction, I must say :-)] to square
that with a view of God as "acting" in history. I think it is mostly
Calvinists who manage to swallow that particular oyster. I also don't
much care for a "God of the Quantum Gaps" -- but the notion does give
a theoretical "hiding" place for an interactive deity.


Either such a god can violate the laws of physics as we have
proven them, or it cannot. If it cannot, or chooses not to
intervene in such a way, then it does not have the characteristics
that religious movements (as I attempted to define them)
claim for it. And then, what force is there in the argument
that one should live one's life according to religious precepts.

Standing entirely outside the "question" of whether a God exists or
not, living one's life according to religious precepts is a matter
of whether one _agrees_ with those precepts. One of the things that
I find bothersome about the hellfire-preachers and their ilk, who
seem to think that people can only be "forced" to "behave" well if
they are threatened with eternal torture otherwise, is that I have
never believed in "eternal torture" and still _very_ much want to
behave in ways that (some, valued) others approve. Religious
literature is almost the only source of guidance for this (other
than dubious self-help literature that is so smarmy as to be quite
useless.) Even _without_ any acceptance of the "metaphysical" claims
of religion, many folks carry around with them the "instruction" they
may have received from church/schul/masjid or whatever. This gets a
bit dicey in areas that are not well handled by the traditions (such
as gay sex... :-)). We then must sort that out for ourselves. It is
much too simplistic to simply reject all of that, or "invert" it and
value everything devalued in the religious instruction (and vice
versa). Even for non-believers, it _may_ be a useful exercise to
examine the "life advice" of the tradition-you-are-not-accepting to
see what you wish to take from it, and what you wish to leave out.

There's more to David's post that I am not going to deal with, at
least now -- this has gone on long enough, I know. I hope what I
have written is not seen as merely negative and controverting what
I'm responding to, as I admire the body of work David has done here
in talk.origins. It's just that I was somewhat surprised by the tone
of his post, and felt I should engage it at some length. Apologies
if the length has become excessive!

It may be that I was in a particularly bad mood at the time
when I wrote. I do sometimes tire of people (I don't know if
it was Stanley who did this actually) dismissing the
arguments of avowed atheists such as Dawkins as the rantings
of `evangelical atheists.'

He is an advocate of a very unpopular position in American
society at the moment, that religion is an inherently
dangerous illusion. This does not make him an evangelist
as such, I think, in the sense of being a preacher of
some particular gospel. There is no unique `Gospel of
Atheism' I think, though it seems that there was one
of Judas :->

I feel in these times that we (humanity) stand at a
particularly important cross-roads, and I know that
here I am being infected by fundamentalist messianic
and apocalyptic ways of thinking which are in part
foreign to my upbringing (I am culturally Jewish,
but am not observant and am an atheist My father
was an atheist. My mother was baptized in the Wee
Free Kirk for some reason that remains perfectly
obscure to me, because she and all of her
extended and close family that I ever met were
atheists.) But there is a real possibility as I see
it, that the US is going to head further down the
road towards fundamentalism, and I do not view
that as a good thing. There are many restoring
forces that act, and people I trust who are much older,
and have seen more say that in US politics the
pendulum always swings back to the middle.

But there are multiple crises of natural resources
which the world is really beginning to have to face
now, and I would view a further flight from reason
at this time in the US as an extremely dangerous
development. Abroad, the power of extreme Islamism
is evident and seems to be growing, in part due
no doubt to colonialism and imperialism and economic
oppression and all of the other reasons that are
trotted out, but in part I believe due to an inherent
appeal that the movement has to its adherents,
some of the most prominent of whom are not at all,
to a man, economically oppressed. It is time I think,
for the moderates to start speaking sharply.

In any case *I* don't see what you have written as
being merely negative. You've given me a lot to think
about and I thank you for the effort that you've put into
your response.

But as it's time for me to get a little sleep, I think I
will leave off responding to these last comments of yours
until a later point.

And I'm certain that I have now gone on for far too
long ;->

David

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