1. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #14011 by J. on December 20, 2006 at 5:00 pm

Fabulous suggestions, Jared! (Especially the 'ambivalence'.) I am now going to spend the rest of my life trying to outdo these. (I'm not sure whether that counts as a valuable linguistic contribution to the cause, but it'll keep me happy.)

Equally stimulatingly but less terrifyingly than the above, how about 'a frisson of freethinkers'? Seems to strike about the right note to me.

Stressing an activist agenda: 'an ultimatum of unbelievers'.

Neatly decapitating creationism: 'an execution of evolutionists'.

And, just for the diabolical chaos of it: 'a pandemonium of pagans'.

2. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13964 by J. on December 20, 2006 at 10:05 am

Sancus and Logicel,

Thanks for the remarks about the Ted letter. I agree that it's too long, and that that's probably a barrier to signing it. The length is largely due to the fact that it was originally sent as a hard copy to Ted and I wanted to take great care over the points made and the way they were presented. There was a lot of 'covering all the bases' going on. And I'm not the world's best editor.

Maybe I should add a synopsis. Or a length warning. Audiences respond differently when forewarned.

Notes taken on working with wikis. In lieu of personal experience, I'm converted. If there's a next time, I'll give it a go.

I have been wondering whether links to similar efforts (there are one or two on the net, now) might be a good idea. That may be another method of unifying holders of this general sentiment (and provide an avenue for a more finely-honed, razor sharp alternative letter).

On collective nouns: ever seen or read the play Humble Boy? A neologism coined therein is 'an apocalypse of beekepers'. Worth thieving? 'An apolcaypse of atheists'. Sure, nothing to worry about there.

3. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13962 by J. on December 20, 2006 at 9:47 am

@ Yorker

'I think "Demon Haunted World" should be made required reading for secondary school pupils.'

I completely agree, and oddly enough was thinking the same thing a few hours ago (after getting my copy down and stroking it affectionately for a few minutes). It's hard enough to buy the book at all these days.

A Gideons-style dissemination group for this book would be a thing of great value. Compact editions to all schoolkids and placed in bedside drawers in hotel rooms. (I think I'm having a utopian turn, again...)

4. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13840 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 4:37 pm

Hi, Yorker,

Just broad agreement with you, here!

The Carl Sagan book containing the Baloney Detection Kit is one of the best handbooks in 'how to think' that I've ever read. It was also one of the things that pointed me toward Richard Dawkins, because his comment on it was on the front cover: 'I wish I had written The Demon-Haunted World'. (He then had a good go at doing so with Unweaving The Rainbow, of course!)

I wasn't completely impressed by the Mike Dickin show. It was much better than most, and admittedly I gave up halfway through, but it quite often seemed that Dickin dismissed callers' points as obviously ridiculous rather than offering a convincing rebuttal. Sure, he was largely *right*, but I doubt he persuaded many of the callers themselves. Mind, he's not a specialist in the subject and he was having to think on his feet. And perhaps I gave up during a weak patch.

But someone doing what he was doing live on the radio also faces a problem you touched on, I think. Often, spurious superstitious answers are just *easier*. We can't all devote our lives to learning lots about everything, and many people simply haven't the enthusiasm or aptitude to get a grip on evolution and other relevant, counter-theistic scientific knowledge. God gives such an *easy* answer, and such a comfortingly human-shaped one. It makes instinctive sense, in a fraction of the time it would take to pursue the rational sense that would dispell it.

Which, I suppose, is another way of agreeing with you. Gifted educators and popularisers of science are like gold dust, and we need to get on with some serious prospecting.

5. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13721 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 7:49 am

@ Yorker,

No, I quite agree. As it says in the letter, I fully expect him to anchor himself firmly in Chistianity and to continue trying beat his sexuality out of himself. I'd love to be wrong about that, but I doubt I am.

Of course there's room in secularity for everyone. It's not a club, after all - it's a personal perspective which places one outside the existing religious clubs.

But, many many people clearly have a need for the psychological buttressing they gain from religion. I don't think that makes them childish or stupid. I think it *would* be stupid for secularists to confidently agree that everyone can be as happy with plain godlessness as Richard Dawkins is. Dawkins seems to be the sort of person who simply has no inclination towards religious belief. Doubtless many other atheists are similar.

But I think there are also enough of us who have reached atheism in spite of quite powerful emotional leanings towards theism. There's no sense in denying this. And there's no sense in just shrugging our shoulders and saying 'I don't care if believing in god made you happier - get over it'. Finding the secular practices and attitudes that replicate the strengths of religion to the extent that 'losing' a god does not entail losing the positive benefits of religion strikes me as an important endeavour.

Furthermore, I think we should not exclude people from entering into this kind of enriched secularism (not a good way of putting it, I know) on the basis of their having been prominent theists in the past. Here, as in many places, there are good lessons to learn from Christianity. Churches seem to be full of people who reckon god saved them from their sinful ways. So, ideally, should secularity appeal to the sometime theistic, accepting the formerly faithful without spite.

Maybe this all seems a bit idealised, and maybe it is. I'm not keen on ripping things down without having something better to put in their place. (In spurious analogy mode: Iraq should have taught us what that sort of strategy engenders.)

6. The Trouble with Atheism

Comment #13716 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 7:24 am

Let me get this straight:

IQ = Intelligence Quotient
EQ = Emotional...Intelligence

Hmm. Look what happens to acronyms when you monkey about with Intelligence.

(No offence, penbat! Couldn't resist.)

Can't fully agree with this, though:

'There is no need to drag religion into this. Personally I have no problem with an adult having any religion or belief which they have chosen of their own free will, but feel uneasy about children being indoctrinated into any particular non-scientific belief system.'

*I* have a problem with it. The sign-waving atheist evangelist in The Trouble With Atheism had an opportunity to point out this problem, when Liddle asked him why he was so bothered about other people being religious (but seemed a bit too overawed with the experience of being taken seriously by a film crew to articulate anything meaningful).

I'm human, you're human, we're all human. If we're living by a moral code that proceeds from our common humanity and our common experiences of the world, then we have something we can work with. But, if *your* behaviour is significantly influenced by your *belief* (actual belief, mind - we're not talking about some innocuous spare-time hobby) in something that, by all measures, you seem to have made up, then I have grounds to worry. Your interaction with me and with the rest of the world is tethered to something that exists only in your imagination.

I shouldn't be obliged to suffer the whims of other people's imaginary constructs. That's why even wandering the pavements waving a cardboard sign about atheism is less worrying than genuinely believing in the Christian God, or Allah, or any of those others who would have a say in human affairs.

If EQ (or EI, or EIQ, or whatever) helps us to explain and understand such beliefs, that's excellent news. But an explanation isn't the same as a justification. People need to be very aware of how their beliefs affect their morality and their behaviour towards others. Allowing these to be influenced away from humanistically derived standards by a privately imagined authority is not acceptable. (That's what I reckon, anyway.)

7. Security tight as Mozart production resumes

Comment #13693 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 5:43 am

Oh, I don't know. Wouldn't mind seeing Darwin given divine status. (At least he *had* a head, after all.)

8. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13690 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 5:40 am

Katherine,

Fun, isn't it? I've twice invited him to smite me at the FSM website and still nothing. If he's there, he just doesn't care these days.

9. Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights

Comment #13666 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 4:11 am

Ta, Irate Harry!

As luck would have it, I just found that page too (or Google found it for me).

It makes a good point, actually, which is that I/we are at risk of going off half cocked. On the basis of the NYT story I'm up in arms on Matthew's side, and death threats from fellow students and neighbours are certainly inexcusable.

But it'd be naive to suppose that the story hasn't undergone a little journalistic accentuation. And, given the runaway litigiousness of modern society, Matthew's apparently swift recourse to the media and the number of less extreme voices chipping in to protest that Mr Paszkiewicz is a good teacher, it's got to be worth adopting a fairly curcumspect attitude.

That doesn't necessarily mean saying nothing, of course...

10. Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights

Comment #13658 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 3:46 am

Niels Thorsen:

'Matthew and his family need to have direct support from the larger international community in this fight.'

I totally agree. What's the best way of doing this?

kmccardle, you said:

'I went and checked out the Kearny forum to see what the posters actually thought, and I must say I died a little inside.'

Where's this forum? What's the URL (sorry if I missed it somewhere)? Perhaps we could ALL take a second to visit and post our support for Matthew and our disgust at the medieval attitudes of his community. Include your home region - show that people across the world are serious about this.

11. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13656 by J. on December 19, 2006 at 3:23 am

[Hope this doesn't double-post. It might.]

@ Yorker - hey, no problem. Not expecting *universal* agreement (few statements are bland enough to achieve that). I'm grateful that you read and considered it though, which is all I can really ask of people.

@ Sancus - great idea! Confession: above typing, I've no real internet-relevant skills. The site has been put together by a friend. 'Wiki' is not a word that has hitherto held any meaning for me unless suffixed by 'pedia'. (I get it now.)

In the case of the present letter, a draft was posted on a discussion board populated chiefly by secularists. It was available for them to amend and it underwent some revisions following their suggestions. It also lingered there for about a week gathering the initial 13 signatures before it was posted to Ted.

Also, I kinda knew what I wanted to write. The letter is largely what I wanted to say to Ted. Sure, I dislike his sort of evangelicalism, but I'm soundly in favour of trying to turn something bad into something good, rather than just ascending the nearest ivory tower in order to drop bricks on it.

My personal experiences of Creativity By Committee have not been *wholly* positive and I didn't want this letter to decay into featureless mediocrity or languish in perpetual incompletion. And, I've been overjoyed by the range of people who have signed the letter so far. Though they are still relatively few in number, they cover a reasonably wide section of the Richard Dawkins 7 point a/theism spectrum.

I'd be interested to know what other people would have written instead. Do people approve of the 'The Good Samaritan' approach? Does the letter concede too much, or not enough? Does it accurately or positively represent non-believers? What place is there for a de-converted Ted Haggard within secularity and how might we go about winning such a man over in the first place?

(www.letter2ted.org for anyone who wants to know what on earth I'm talking about.)

12. Day 1: Is God Still Necessary?

Comment #13584 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:10 pm

Taped that, Yorker - will watch it shortly.

I was pleased by dismissive critique of it in the Telegraph's TV pages (as reproduced on this site). Given the Telegraph's usual editorial line on religious matters (and on Dawkins) it was nice to see them pick out the thinness of this 'Atheists Are All Really Horrible' argument.

13. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13583 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:05 pm

Thanks, Logicel and briancoughlanworldcitizen, for signing the letter at www.letter2ted.org

Glad it appealed to you. The idea is to find the humanist common ground. Coincidentally, this afternoon I was at the first funeral I've been at to have a British Humanist Association service. The sentiments expressed were wonderfully inclusive – no grounds for anyone to feel alienated.

As well as hacking away at irrationality, I think the godless among us should be trying hard to emphasise everything we share with our theistic cohabitants.

Additionally, we should be putting in some effort to ensure that the atheistic life view offers equal or superior rewards to the various theisms. There's a danger of becoming very snooty about people's need for the psychological support offered by theism. Arguably, living a productive lie could be wiser than forcing oneself to accept a destructive truth. Scientific investigation should, in time, reveal the bases of religion's strengths. Humanism ought to be able to preserve such strengths whilst ditching the dangers of living out a deluded faith. Hopefully…

In the meantime, when a situation like Ted's arises in which a man is both in plain need of support but is also a victim of his faith, it seems only right that we should offer him such solutions as we have. And if, in doing so, we could provide some kind of statement of the humanistic common ground between atheists, agnostics and theists: better still.

Please do spread word about the letter, by the way! (It's rather hard to use it as a demonstration of the warm and cuddly common humanity of freethinkers when less than 30 people have put their names to it.)

14. Richard Dawkins on The Sunday Edition

Comment #13514 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:58 am

My word. What a buffoon Tony Benn seems to have become.

I was especially impressed by his attempt to show that Richard was wrong *because* he was right on the 'picking up sticks on the Sabbath' point (ie 'you're wrong to argue against the Sabbath *because* you say there is no god', bafflingly), and by his tactic of supporting his argument for general love and tolerance with the phrase 'Richard Dawkins hates everyone'. Some heavyweight pro-Christian arguments there, alright.

By the way, @ k1mgy:

'...gave one the impression that Dawkins had just jumped off a motorbike, plunked down his sweaty helmet, and swaggered onto the set.'

Now *that's* the sort of atheist figurehead I can look up to.

15. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13506 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:35 am

Oh, and, in common with Yorker: congratulations, Aussie.

At least we're out of our misery well before Christmas. It was looking to be the biggest yuletide letdown since the crash of the Beagle 2.

16. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #13505 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:32 am

For anyone who suspects that atheists and sceptical agnostics might be well employed in making a more positive, less scathing, statement, either in addition to, or instead of, the Blasphemy Challenge, may I draw your attention to:

www.letter2ted.org

This site is trying to take a supportive approach rather than a derisive one, presenting a humanist face that everyone from iron-clad atheists to independent-minded moderate theists can associate with. And, indeed, among the signatories so far, both these extremes and the spectrum in between are represented. If you agree with what you read there, please sign!

(If you find this site worthwhile, by the way, please pass it on to anyone else who might also sympathise. Feel free to make links to it!)

17. Atheist Chic

Comment #13502 by J. on December 18, 2006 at 3:12 am

Um, Yorker? Regarding your heartwarming story (2. Comment #13456 by Yorker on December 17, 2006 at 9:02 pm) - forgive me, but:

'Doctor:
"...it's called the Dawkins/Harris treatment...slip down your pants and we'll have at it.

Patient: (reluctantly)
"Hold on doc…I'm not sure about this…"

...

Doctor:
"Well, it was just a tiny prick, how do you feel now?"'

Just *what* are you suggesting about the 'Dawkins/Harris treatment'...?