901. Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster

Comment #92082 by Cartomancer on November 29, 2007 at 9:07 pm

Oh the irony of it all!

I have just spent the last fortnight trying to get over three cases of powerful sexual jealousy - first for my best friend, whom I have loved since I was nineteen but never had the chance with because of his boyfriend, one for the man I thought I was in a relationship with for the last two months but it turns out I actually wasn't (not nice having someone tell you they're sleeping with an ex on MSN out of the blue), and now rejection from somebody I slept with last night and felt stronger about than anyone I have slept with before, but who doesn't want to see me again and is now sleeping round and looking for someone else.

I have never actually had anyone love me back in a sexual relationship context, so I cannot comment on whether the jealousy is more profound if this is the case. What I do know however is that my sexual jealousy is certainly not monogamous at all. Maybe if someone were to love me back when I loved them then this would supercede all other concerns, if not scotch them entirely. I cannot say. I shall leave the point to my psychiatrist who is better qualified than I to judge.

And throughout this period I have been constantly telling myself that a) Sexual jealousy is biologically normal, and b) I should try my damnedest to rise above it. And I have been picking arguments with street preachers to make myself feel better, to rail against the judaeo-christian morality their hateful kind promote and which has ruined my feelings on sex for most of my short life.

And now Richard Dawkins, whose sound judgement I trust more than anyone's, comes out and says exactly what I am feeling. I would have chalked it up to Fate if I were the sort to believe in that nonsense. Surely I must have seen it in the cards...

My question is not whether sexual jealousy should be overcome, but how one goes about overcoming it? What am I supposed to do? I want to be able to let these people get on with their lives and not get worked up and hurt when I think about who they might be sleeping with, but I cannot. And it is making me very depressed indeed (well, more depressed that usual at any rate). Just thinking happy thoughts doesn't help, nor does imagining my life without the jealousy. No rationalising I can conjure will dull the pain. If I weren't teetotal I might get horribly drunk at this point.

Maybe that's another one for the psychiatrist too. I do worry about what I put the poor woman though - the university can't be paying her all that much.

Anyway, suffice to say I wholeheartedly agree with the good professor's point about thinking outside the box where love is concerned. Let us subject it to scrutiny with our microscopes and callipers, bound and weigh and measure it until we can pick it apart piece by piece and come to understand it. Only then can we control it and still the raging fires of our hearts. Only then can we stem the pain.

902. A New Flea in Town!

Comment #92055 by Cartomancer on November 29, 2007 at 7:29 pm

What I would like to see is a satirical take on the flea books in Sellars and Yeatman style. Or, in fact, just a lot more satire on religion in general. Terry Pratchett is always good for your money there of course...

903. Boy dies of leukemia after refusing treatment for religious reasons

Comment #92052 by Cartomancer on November 29, 2007 at 7:14 pm

In any kind of sensible world they would have been able to tell that the boy was quite clearly incapable of making rational decisions for his own good.

Refusing a life-saving treatment because you believe an imaginary sky-tyrant doesn't want you to have it is a textbook case. Anyone who comes out with that sort of rubbish should be categorically labelled as unable to make rational decisions for their own good.

If he had just said Pastafarian or Jedi instead of Jehovah's Witness the surgeons would have laughed and carried on anyway. That's the real travesty here...

904. Fear Is Stronger Than Hope When It Comes To Fitness

Comment #92041 by Cartomancer on November 29, 2007 at 6:26 pm

I think it has a place here, even if it isn't exactly the sort of fine upstanding young thing which would be given its spear and hoplon and sent to do battle in the forefront of the war against all gods.

To be honest I kind of knew most of this instinctively already. Fear has pretty much been the only thing that motivates me to do anything for a very long time. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of losing what I have, fear of being too late to make a difference, fear of never getting a boyfriend, fear of change. You name it, I am probably afraid of it.

Well, maybe not everything. Fear of fitting in? Fear of death? Fear of divine punishment. The wider applications in the field of religion are hardly difficult to imagine, and it is only through a proper understanding of human psychology that we will be able to target the causes of religion at their roots - and especially to provide an infinitely superior secular means of finding happiness.

905. In the name of God: the Saudi rape victim's tale

Comment #91770 by Cartomancer on November 29, 2007 at 7:53 am

Whenever I read a piece like this in a newspaper the little "journalistic sensationalism" alarm bells go off in my head. I keep thinking "yes, but you're obviously spinning it for shock value, what is it that you're not telling us?". They were doing that here too. However, after thinking about it I really cannot see what else could possibly make this sort of thing even remotely acceptable. If there is a theoretical, halfway-credible counterpoint to the story as written then the story as written must have gone beyond journalistic bias and into outright lies. Since it is not an article for the Daily Mail I am thus forced to conclude that what we have here is close enough to the truth of the matter to print.

I really wish it wasn't. It would be so much nicer if things had been blown out of all proportion by the British media.

I am genuinely frightened by this incident. And the teddy bear incident. I find it horrifying that I share a planet, in the 21st century, with people whose mind-set is taken straight out of the 8th. Such importance placed on percieved insults and personal reputation. Such a lack of tolerance or ability to get things in perspective. Such abominable attitudes to women and sexuality. They terrify me, no two ways about it. I can just about understand on a rational level why people can possibly think this way, but on an emotional level I am at a complete loss.

I think I will hide under the covers and hope it all goes away now...

906. Sunday School for Atheists

Comment #91262 by Cartomancer on November 27, 2007 at 8:14 pm

Ooh, sarky...

Mustn't... rise... to... that... one!

907. 'Muhammad' teddy teacher arrested

Comment #91260 by Cartomancer on November 27, 2007 at 8:08 pm

Yeah, my point was more that it is a bit silly to say that in the Roman Empire the emperor was actually "chosen". That's not generally how monarchies work! Nevertheless, Julian did manage to secure the support of the army (he was quite a formidable military leader all things considered, whatever mud the Christian partisan Ammianus Marcellinus might wish to throw at him) and that, de facto, was what kept you in power in the later empire.

He was also an amateur philosopher, and wrote a book called "why everyone hates my beard". You've got to love someone who does that.

I really should get some patches for this annoying antiquarian pedantry addiction...

908. Sunday School for Atheists

Comment #91103 by Cartomancer on November 27, 2007 at 8:24 am

Prettygoodformonkeys, comment 39,

I only claim that it's misrepresenting history to call the entire medieval period the "dark ages", or that they were dark because they were ignorant.

I make no claim that we're not headed for a real dark age of blithering theocratic ignorance some time in the future. In the Holy Kingdom of Merica at least...

909. 'Muhammad' teddy teacher arrested

Comment #91101 by Cartomancer on November 27, 2007 at 8:14 am

Christian Rome wouldn't appoint a Pagan as emperor? Julian the Apostate anyone...?

910. 'Muhammad' teddy teacher arrested

Comment #90877 by Cartomancer on November 26, 2007 at 2:41 pm

I suspect they probably couldn't tolerate, or perhaps even understand, this strange western infidel concept of "voting" either. Now if she had said to the children "ok class, somebody come forward and lead a military coup to name the teddy bear" then it would have been fine and dandy.

This is why I loathe such people with boundless vehemence. IT'S CHOOSING A NAME FOR A BLOODY TEDDY BEAR! My mind simply cannot grasp what sort of mental software corruption has occurred in the people of the Sudan to make this happen. The rich irony is apparent also in the fact that, in the Middle Ages at least (I don't know if it still goes on today) it was traditional in most Islamic cultures (in some places even expected) to name one's firstborn son Mohammed.

The idea that ANYTHING, anything at all, should be protected from insults by law offends me to the core. The idea that such things as naming stuffed toys after someone counts as an insult is a vile and ridiculous travesty of human thought.

I make it a point these days to greviously offend every Muslim I meet in as imaginative and infuriating a way as possible to show my utter disdain for their cancerous religion and all its horrific intolerances. They must learn that respect is to be earned and politeness is entirely optional. If mankind started ignoring, accepting and even acknowledging in the insults it receives then all the world's problems would be solved tomorrow.

911. Sunday School for Atheists

Comment #90750 by Cartomancer on November 26, 2007 at 8:56 am

Well, I could lie and say there was a lot more to my comment than self-serving antiquarian pedantry, but there wasn't.

Though it does go to show that the idea of cosmological dualism is much older still than late antiquity. I'm not entirely sure what Manichaean cosmological dualism has to do with this though. Mani posited, following Zoroaster though changing it round, that matter as we understand it is bad, while spirit or light (also a kind of matter to him) is good. He also thought the universe of light was trying to separate the two into their original unmixed conditions after an incursion by the universe of darkness which created the universe we see ourselves. This is not the same as positing that only the physical world we see around us actually exists with no spiritual dimension at all, and thus anything "spiritual" is by definition unreal. To Mani (and to Descartes, but not in quite the same way) both the physical and the spiritual were real, material things. To the modern thinker the physical is material and real but the spiritual is unreal, intra-mental and imaginary.

912. Sunday School for Atheists

Comment #90733 by Cartomancer on November 26, 2007 at 8:18 am

Manichaeism? Pffft! Mani nicked cosmological dualism from the Zoroastrians of his native Persia.

913. Sunday School for Atheists

Comment #90653 by Cartomancer on November 26, 2007 at 3:29 am

I think the point of this article was that in messed-up countries like America, with loopy faith heads roaming the streets quite openly and trying to eat children's brains, it is quite helpful and even necessary to have some sort of corrective that will help these children to avoid this nasty fate.

I find the idea of the American style summer camp and the Sunday School quite sinister myself as it happens. Smells terribly of regimenting and processing children, inculcating group behaviour rather than stressing individuality. At that age all I wanted to do was play independently on my own or with a close friend. I would certainly have resented having half my weekend and most of my summer sacrificed to something I did not choose to do myself and sent away from my parents for a long period of time. Nevertheless, it is a specific cultural construction and if American parents want to have their sprogs tormented in this manner then it is a good thing there are secular, free-thinking alternatives available.

914. You can't be moral without God!

Comment #90245 by Cartomancer on November 23, 2007 at 4:50 pm

I'm not saying it's universal over here, but I just don't get that impression in the UK. Only the craziest howling nutcases over here would say something like that, and the moderates would scorn them for doing so.

I suspect it would be quite easy to get elected Prime Minister as an open Atheist over here.

915. You can't be moral without God!

Comment #90240 by Cartomancer on November 23, 2007 at 4:23 pm

Actually, to be fair to the man, even Augustine had some good things to say. I think this one is particularly appropriate for the current thread, and highly ironic given Augustine's stance on the disorderly nature of human morals:

"Dilige, et quod vis fac" - Love, and do what you will" (In. Ep. Iohan. Ad. Parthos viii. 8)

916. You can't be moral without God!

Comment #90234 by Cartomancer on November 23, 2007 at 4:03 pm

Ugh! It seems to me that Tibor is another one of these "zombie theists" as I call them in honour of the horror film staple. They keep getting bits shot out of them, limbs chopped off and lumps hacked from their thin, shrivelled bodies again and again and again. But still they keep coming at you! And they want nothing but to eat your brains and make you like them!

And just like zombies they're pretty pathetic on their own but extremely dangerous in massive shambling hordes.

Anyway, our do-it-yourself zombie theist said....

"This is exactly what I'm saying. :) If you read back you'll find that I haven't said that there must be an absolute moral standard. I just said that goodness is a quality so 'planet morality' either exists or there is nothing in the universe that has that quality. :) I accept that it is possible that morality doesn't exist, but I don't accept that morality is an emotion. The same goes for beauty, but not for love."

Well well, we do seem to be making some progress at least. So morality as an objective "quality" either exists or it doesn't? It is possible that morality as a "quality" is just a figment of your and many other people's imaginations? That was where my comparison with coming from the planet Vulcan comes in - I wasn't being flippant, there is no difference whatsoever between my argument and yours. So how do we determine whether such a quality actually exists and should be discussed under the communal realm of "fact" or does not exist and should be relegated to the realm of "fiction". Well, we use the only procedure humankind has ever had for determining the likelihood of propositions - the scientific method. That means evidence I'm afraid, and you have none of that whatsoever.

I can see why this does not faze you however. You actually think like a medieval scholastic theologian! As a historian of medieval scholasticism I am very excited by this of course - I thought you all died out in the fifteenth century, I might get some kind of award for demonstrating that you still exist! However, the sort of logic that got you by in the thirteenth century really doesn't cut the mustard today, and many of your terms come straight from the schoolrooms of early Paris and Oxford.

Your understanding of the term "Quality" for instance. I don't know if you're aware of it but it comes straight out of Aristotle's Topics, Categories and metaphysics. Vintage c. 330BCE. If told to you would probably also believe in hylomorphism, substantial and accidental forms, the Great Chain of Being, per se and per accidens causality, terminist logic and all the other things that got John Duns Scotus hot and horny of an afternoon.

"quality" is not a definitive metaphysical term anymore. These days when we say something has a quality we do not mean that it has some positive attribute which is the same everywhere from the same source and coded as a basic instruction into the mathematical fabric of reality. All we mean is that we recognise that it shows characteristics consonant with the words we apply, and as such compare it to other cases we find similar. "Blueness" for instance, to take an earlier example. The medievals would have posited a specific "form of blue", a "caerulitas" if you will, and said that it inheres in all blue things (as a quality projected over prime-matter-signed-by-quantity, blah blah blah). We know today that blueness is simply caused by a certain wavelength of visible light that comes to our eyes. Inasmuch as a surface is blue it is because it reflects that wavelength of light more than the others. "Blueness" is simply an arrangement of atoms. Take atoms arranged for "pinkness" and shift them about a bit and, hey presto, you've got "blueness". No metaphyscial buggery-pokery involved. So much simpler.

Similarly, take "goodness" and try to think about it in modern terms. An act which seems "good" to you seems so not because there is some intrinsic "bonitas" lurking in the act or the person performing that act (there isn't. We've looked. We didn't find any) but because that act registers in our brains, fits in with certain patterns of behaviour that we recognise, and triggers the ancient moral instincts which derive from group behaviours. Just as "blueness" comes from an arrangement of atoms, so "goodness" comes from an arrangement of events. Why do we broadly agree, then, on what is good? Because we are all 99.9% identical as far as our genes go. We all have the same instincts. So do most animals in some form or another. Modern Biology predicts it should be so and, lo and behold, it is.

If your weird pseudo-medieval version of events were true then how do you explain why we recognise images of people doing good things as showing good behaviour? Surely there is none of your intrinsic qualitative "bonitas" in pencils, paint or pixels for us to pick up on, so why does an image of "good" behaviour on canvas or a computer screen trigger the moral response? Let me save you looking up Aquinas' theories of cognition and memory in the Summa Contra Gentiles and tell you flat out that they don't work for this under modern debating conditions either.

Oh, and I'd like to point out at this juncture that Aquinas actually stole his solution to the Euthyphro problem from Augustine. Probably waiting on a fresh shipment of pies to cram into his distended dominican gullet and couldn't be bothered to think up an original piece of convoluted semantic contortionism for himself.

Shakespeare had it right. There is nothing good nor ill in all the world but thinking makes it so. And yes, this probably was a direct response to the scholastic view of morality which predominated up to his time, and still seems to have drawn you in with its ponderous, wordy sorceries.

As for Beauty and Love, what else can they be but instinctive or learned emotional responses to contemplation of physical phenomena? Aristotelian "formositas" and "amabilitas" perhaps? Got any evidence? Are you going to try to dredge up Plato's arguments on the unity of the Goods and the Form of Good now? Objective divinely dictated aesthetics? Pull the other one! How does instinctive or learned emotional response not account fully for either of these phenomena? I love a boy called James. To my eyes he is the most beautiful creature in the world. Nobody else seems to think this way however. Does this mean I have an impaired capacity in my anima sensitiva to pick up the species of formositas emanating from him? Do I have an enhanced capacity to pick them up? Or could it just possibly be that beauty is an entirely subjective response to sense data and unique to each individual? Again, we can establish common ground where the subjective responses converge, but the instinctive basis they are formed on and the upbringing recieved by the individuals concerned is usually very similar. Why is it that Europeans generally find European art more beautiful than Aboriginal Australian or Aztec art for instance? I'll stick my neck out and say that ideas of beauty are generally more influenced by culture than ideas of basic morality, but even then it's not easy to say.

So you see, by abandoning your anachronistic medieval prejudices and thinking like a modern human being for a change the morality problem is solved. All those moral dilemmas can remain moral dilemmas and you don't need any silly ideas about Ultimate Goodness to make reality intelligible. I know it seems so powerful and real to you, but the impression of design seemed so powerful and real to most people until Darwin. Looks like design so it must be. Surely? Darwin proved that it wasn't. It's the same thing here - feels like absolute rules, surely it must be? I mean, we can all agree on the basics, and these rules actually work to regulate our societies. It must be the work of some transcendent divine sky-tyrant surely? No, not at all - there is a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for it all that makes the sky tyrant seem at worst spectacularly unparsimonious and at best just plain silly these days. Looks like yet another thing Darwin's dangerous idea did for us.

917. You can't be moral without God!

Comment #90184 by Cartomancer on November 23, 2007 at 9:48 am

One can describe objects as "coming from the planet Vulcan" if they want. Coming from the planet Vulcan is a quality, not an impression. Whatever anyone thinks about the origins of a particular Vulcan vase is immaterial, it either came from Vulcan or it didn't. Ergo the planet Vulcan must exist and its green-blooded, pointy-eared denizens (who are definitionally Vulcan and make the planet itself Vulcan) must be real too.

Why is the planet Morality any different? Just because we can conceive of it does not mean that it exists. There is not one atom of Goodness in the universe, not one molecule of Justice, not one ounce of Happiness that you could put in a test tube and label with its atomic weight (435 if you were wondering).

You are convinced that Goodness must be a quality of matter from the following thought process:

1: You have an evolved impression of what is beneficial to the survival of your genes, which you label goodness, and it seems a very powerful conviction to you.

2. You assume that this goodness must be a quality inherent in things rather than your own personal interpretation and analysis of their actual qualities to the extent they affect you. In doing this I strongly suspect you are influenced by religious and folkloric ideas of goodness and false analogies with less problematic phenomena such as colour - you assume they must be the same sorts of things rather than determine that they are from any subjective mental process.

3. You can't find any evidence of physcial Goodness in the world around you, but you are still emotionally convinced that it exists. Thus you assume that there must exist non-physical entities and label them with silly but important-sounding names like Transcendence, God etc.

4. Plug in carefully chosen bits of bronze age nonsense to taste and you're away.

If your conclusions at stage 2 are correct then what you did at stage 3 is logical and consistent. If however they are not correct then stage 3 does not even arise. What you have failed to do is check your conclusion that morality must be an objective quality and assess all the options. All you have to base your conclusion that it is objective on are your own emotional hankerings - if you can see that love and beauty are not objective but subjective, why can you not see the same for morality? Love inheres in beings as much as goodness does - we love a particular person rather than others. Your argument for why morality is different could apply just as much to love.

When you abandon the unecessary baggage of objective morals, god, theology, transcendence and all that rubbish (Ockham's Razor claims another prize) what you are left with is the same confusing, nuanced and difficult moral situation (do you kill one innocent person to save another? do you kill one innocent person to save ten others? and all the genuine moral conundrums we face) but, and here's the thing, now all those moral conundrums DON'T HAVE TO HAVE A SIMPLE AND SATISFYING ANSWER. The very existence of moral conundrums which we cannot solve is good evidence that morality is not a perfect, streamlined, sophisticated absolute.

So stop using language like "but lots of people get away with it easily". Of course they get away with it! There is no divine metaphysical police force to stop them - just the checks and balances they have evolved and later thought up for themselves. Similarly, it doesn't MATTER that our evolved moral instincts are not perfect. Our evolved digestive system is not perfect but we don't go around positing some kind of Original Constipation foist on us to explain that do we?

918. Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion

Comment #89834 by Cartomancer on November 21, 2007 at 9:19 pm

Philip1978, comment 12,

What are the advantages of a proper full human clone? Good question. They are terribly expensive to look after. I eventually had mine trained as a ninja assassin bodyguard and cultural envoy to the far east, but it still keeps borrowing money from me at an alarming rate...

919. Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion

Comment #89458 by Cartomancer on November 20, 2007 at 8:14 pm

Also, use of the term "Traditional Christians" for those who oppose stem cell research is somewhat misleading. I suppose it's ok to use it in contradistinction to the "Post-Christians" if they're the two groups you're formulating, but the idea that the human embryo or foetus (the distinction is a modern, scientific one) has a soul right from the moment of conception or even beforehand was not the position of the church until quite recently.

Most patristic and medieval discussions of this issue leave it as an unanswered question of physics that is open to doubt. Augustine made quite a fuss of not knowing whether the soul is present from the beginning or arrives once the body is sufficiently able to recieve it. Many medieval commentators took the mosaic law in Exodus 21:22 as evidence that the soul does not arrive for forty days, or even up to six weeks.

The shadowy Honorius Augustodunensis even theorised that if a foetus is killed before this point then the matter of it will be resurrected as part of the mother rather than as a separate human being at the day of Judgement. Anselm suggests that the rational soul (the important bit as far as salvation is concerned) does not take root until after birth even, so there is still a chance to baptize the infant before it has a chance to die unbaptized and avoid punishment in the afterlife.

The main impetus for thinking a soul was present from the beginning was actually not Scripture or the Church Fathers, but Aristotle and the Galenic medical texts translated from the Arabic at Salerno and Cordoba in the twelfth century. Essentially this scientific tradition posited that all growth and augmentation in living bodies is caused by intermediary generated spirits that actualise the powers of the soul in the physical world. Without the presence of a soul, and hence these spirits, the embryo could not grow at all and hence they must be present from the beginning. Of course Aristotle's soul was not quite what the Scriptures had in mind (it was the substantial form of the body and little more), but the concepts merged in time.

So all these right wing Christian "fundamentalists" are actually, in a roundabout way, championing the progress of science over dogma. Twelfth century science it must be admitted, and the results are appalling, but it is an irony that appeals to a mind like mine.

920. Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion

Comment #89450 by Cartomancer on November 20, 2007 at 7:37 pm

Bonzai. Comment 8,

If the reaction to these things is "instinctive" then why do only some cultures have it and not all cultures? Why do the Asian cultures not feel that cloning is repellent? Why do Americans not feel that modified crops are repellent? Also, how could an instinctive dislike for human cloning have evolved? There is no chance at all of accidental human cloning in the wild (well, okay, as a human clone myself I must technically admit that there is, and if you saw my twin brother then you would probably be anti-cloning too, but you know what I mean), whereas there is a very real and deleterious chance of incest without some instinct to curb it. Designer babies? Human-animal hybrids? Genetically modified crops? These things don't happen in the wild either. How could we have developed an instinct to dislike them?

And a visceral response, if we are being entirely rational and thoughtful, should not dictate what we consider most seriously. Many people, myself included, have a visceral dislike of surgery and exsanguination, but does that mean we should be wary of advances in surgical technology or giving blood? In this case the dislike is all too instinctive - it is a misfiring of the very helpful instinct to avoid getting hurt - but not all dislikes are based in our unconscious faculties, and even those which are can be massively exaggerated by cultural conditioning.

Take fear of social discord for instance. That stems, perhaps, from herd or pack instincts we inherited from our ancestors, but is fear of social discord equally prevalent among humankind? No, it isn't. The Japanese, for example, are culturally much more sensitive to discord and disagreement than most Europeans - partially from their confucian culture which stresses harmony among the orders, partially from religious ideas of hierarchy and social station, perhaps even from the structure of their language if the Worf-Sapir theory is your thing. Whatever the case many Japanese experience far more discomfort at the idea of discord within society than their western counterparts.

Of course we should avoid knee-jerk reactions both for and against the public deployment of scientific discoveries, but understanding where those reactions come from is more than half the battle. I agree with your second point that we should discuss the issues rationally and dispassionately to formulate our policies, but your first point does not contribute to this project: deference to anachronistic human instinct is no better than deference to ingrained cultural prejudice.

921. 'Growing Up in the Universe' now available free online

Comment #88456 by Cartomancer on November 16, 2007 at 6:34 pm

Oh the memories! I can remember being sat glued to these lectures every morning over the Christmas period when I was a tender eight years old.

I decided then and there that when I grew up I wanted to be Richard Dawkins!

922. 'Secular Believers'

Comment #88431 by Cartomancer on November 16, 2007 at 3:34 pm

Ahhh, BBC educational programming. Taught me everything I know today.

(Well, maybe all those tutorials at Oxford helped a bit...)

923. Holy communion

Comment #88305 by Cartomancer on November 15, 2007 at 11:10 pm

I feel a bit silly now...

924. Holy communion

Comment #88293 by Cartomancer on November 15, 2007 at 8:44 pm

Keith,

Just because you interpret the cartoon one way and cannot see how others interpret it another way does not mean that your interpretation is necessarily the right one. It simply hints at an inability to come to terms with someone else's point of view.

Your example of Galileo's interpretation of the heliocentric nature of the solar system is not a comparable case. In that case there is a real, observable, physical phenomenon that the interpretation is trying to describe, here what we are arguing over is a culturally specific use of symbolism and trope. The bare "facts" of the cartoon are the lines, shapes and colours on the page. There is no intrinsic metaphysical meaning to these images, only what we read into them ourselves.

It might be possible to talk of the message that Rowson intended to convey with his cartoon, but, until we ask him in person just what he means by it, all we are doing is engaging in speculation and presenting our own personal interpretations.

One of us might very well have hit upon what was originally intended. Alternatively none of us might have seen the point that Rowson tried to make. Cartoons are like any other text, defining "text" in its broad sense - we read them in line with our individual cultural assumptions and our unique personal understanding of the language of visual imagery. A lot of our cultural assumptions are shared, but not all of them by any stretch of the imagination. As such there will be a good deal of concordance between our interpretations (we can all agree that it's Dawkins and Hitchens for example) but the precise meaning of the arm-waving gestures is not something we agree on. To you these gestures seem to imply a gay stereotype. To me they do not. Is this because one of us is less perceptive than the other? No, it is because we have different ideas of what those particular images mean, which have arisen from our different backgrounds, preoccupations, interests and experiences.

Russell Blackford brings up the idea of the thuggish union stalwart in reference to the Hitchens cartoon. I cannot say this theme ever occurred to me, but then again I have little to no experience of this character. Is it simply conveying Hitchens' own intransigence or is there an anti-union undertone? We cannot say definitively one way or the other. Are those of us who think the cartoon portrays a gay stereotype maybe expecting it to do so? Are they used to offensive and demeaning cartoons of gay men and viewing this one with those lights? They see an "Out 'n' Proud" placard and interpret the Dawkins figure according to their own previous experience of cartoon stereotypes - he's dancing around, wrists in a funny position, big grin - close enough to the standard mincing homosexual paradigm so that's what it must be. So we've got a gay Dawkins, big fat grumpy Hitchens, and a crowd of faceless grinning atheists. What sense do we make of this? Must be a sign of playground-level derision, and the childish grotesquery of the artist's style seems appropriate. Yes, it's an insulting slur on Dawkins and gay people everywhere.

Others of us look at it and think "OUT campaign placard, using the approved font and stylings of Dawkins's OUT campaign - ok, so they're making fun of that then. How are they making fun of it? Well, they're portraying it as a militant placard-waving affair much in line with the gay rights movement. Oh I see it now, they're pointing out how absurd it is to compare the two movements as Dawkins's rhetoric would invite us to. What else do we have? Dawkins bouncing around in wide-eyed awe and wonder - yes, he does that from time to time, so that's an appropriate comedic device to use. Bluebirds too - I've seen those in Tom and Jerry cartoons before as a sign of blissed-out befuddlement and joy, and how apt given that Dawkins's wonderment usually stems from the beauty of nature. He's clearly happy about something - obviously the runaway success of his OUT campaign - I mean look at all those atheists in the background, their numbers are legion and their might formidable! Go us! Hitchens is a grumpy old curmudgeon at heart, so, yes, predictably he's not all that impressed - even the good professor's infectious zeal can't penetrate his layers of world-weary journalistic cynicism - Lighten up Hitch! We're winning!

That was my thinking about it anyhow.

Or are we just less aware of gay stereotyping in cartoons? Are some of us so hopelessly optimistic about the levels of acceptance in our society that we do not see such stereotypes as offensive and so it never occurs to us that a mainstream cartoonist would use them? And thus we seek other explanations. Does the angle of the wrist matter? Is upturned like they are here just as camp as the more usual downturned John Inman style? Does it signify something else? What of context too? How has our reading of the article affected our interpretation of the image that goes with it? How many of us came to an understanding of the cartoon before we started reading? How many of us read PZ Myers' response first and had that buzzing away in our thoughts as we looked for the first time at the cartoon? How many of us think "well it's New Humanist, so they clearly can't mean this in an offensive way" - and our first or second thought is to look for a benign interpretation? How many of us think instead "well it's offensive" and then try to imagine why a magazine that is on our side would want to run it, without giving thought to the possibility that it might not have been intended that way? Are those who do the latter more confident in their own perceptions whereas those who do the former more willing to take their cues from others? Which do you look at first, the text or the context? There is no right answer.

So no, it is not unequivocal at all. I stand by what I said earlier.

925. Holy communion

Comment #88085 by Cartomancer on November 14, 2007 at 3:07 pm

Of course they're linked to gender. Or at least they are in the minds of unreformed bigots and casual detractors. It's all a part of the great big simplistic view of traditional gender roles that we've lived with for millennia, thanks in no small way to, err... what was it now? You know, the one with the candles and the singing and the believing in things without any evidence?

I was being parodic with that one by the way. I don't normally speak like that. You might have noticed. Honestly... [flusters about in purple dressing gown and changes the Abba record]

926. Holy communion

Comment #88051 by Cartomancer on November 14, 2007 at 10:58 am

Whatever the case may be it seems that Mr. Rowson has failed spectacularly to get an unequivocal message across. Some of us are adamant that it must be a gay slur, others think it simply can't be. I wonder if there is such dissent and ambivalence toward most cartoons - I've never really given the matter much thought.

Maybe we should write to Rowson and ask him what the intent behind it was? I suspect that if it rouses such ire among sections of the New Humanist readership as it has among sections of this thread then the question may already have been asked.

Right, I'm off to wave my wrists around in a girly fashion and simper at passers by...

927. Holy communion

Comment #88046 by Cartomancer on November 14, 2007 at 9:38 am

Perhaps my Golden Age rhetoric is a touch strong. Perhaps I am somewhat removed from the unpleasant realities in less salubrious parts of the country, not to mention what lies beyond. Perhaps the bigots are swarming in the dark places beneath the world, waiting for us to grow soft in our complacency.

But I am not advocating complacency. I am advocating confidence. For the first time in our history it is acceptable, by and large, to be out and proud in all levels of society. We have legal recognition. We have arrived. No longer must we sneak round in secret, watching for the police, ever wary of scandal and public disapproval. No longer, in my opinion, must we fear the barbs of the satirist. We can finally stride down the streets, hand in hand, unafraid and feeling good about ourselves. Perhaps the novelty will fade in time, but why should we not enjoy it here and now while it lasts?

Part of confidence is the confidence to put up with mockery. Satirical cartoonists in this country, and Martin Rowson in particular is on record having said this, do not attack the underdog. What would be the point? Their duty is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable - surely we should wear their barbs with pride as evidence that we are accepted into the mainstream?

928. Holy communion

Comment #88043 by Cartomancer on November 14, 2007 at 9:02 am

Well, I'm glad there are more people in my camp (pun intended) coming out (likewise) on this forum to say that they can't see a gay stereotype in the cartoon either. I sympathise, however, with the poor buggers (yes Vincent, stop it now) who do. I'm sure there's an essay in semiotics here somewhere, but since Umberto Eco hasn't shown his face I guess we'll just have to make do with our own disagreements and musings.

And I disagree with steve99 again here. I think that in the current liberal cultural climate of the United Kingdom the elderly religious bigots seem vastly out of touch, and getting further out of touch with every passing day. Crazy Opus Dei lady Ruth Kelly was considered an embarassment to the government (as minorities minister no less!) when her religious views became apparent (she refused to comment on the gay issue, demonstrating that she probably had somethng to hide). Similarly, the outburst of the Bishop of Carlisle on the recent floods being caused by our tolerance of homosexuals was greeted with condemnation for the most part, rather than assent. People who stand up and use words like "evil" or "sinful" or "objectively disordered" about homosexuals in this country only succeed in losing whatever credibility they once had with everyone except their own lunatic fringe. They are jokes, nobodies, antiquated dinosaurs from a bygone age. Future generations will pity them. The present generation pities them now.

Why is it that the Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords (some of whom are pro-gay by the way) could not prevent the passing of the repeal of section 28, the bills in 1999 and 2003 to equalise the age of consent or the recent goods and services discrimination act? Their only impact seems to have been to change the phrasing in the gay marriage bill so that it uses the patronising term "civil partnership" rather than marriage. While I find this last sop utterly unacceptable, indefensible and likely to perpetuate discrimination in the public eye it is hardly the greatest of our concerns. When our grievances are reduced to complaints about the impact of the wording of legal documents rather than campaigning on the denial of basic human rights it is clear that something in the zeitgeist has changed drastically.

All this has happened in the last ten years (under a labour government, but that's immaterial, although I cannot help but notice that Michael Howard, former leader of the Conservatives, was the one who introduced section 28 when he was Thatcher's Home Secretary). When I turned 16 back in 1999 I could not legally have sex or get married like my heterosexual friends, and there was no recourse in law for me should I be discriminated against. Worst of all the schools in this country were effectively prevented from teaching me about my sexuality. Now all of that is in the past - not because a tiny clique of reformers pushed the measures through against tremendous odds but because homosexuality has become accepted by mainstream society and the government has followed suit. With the equality measures now in place I can only see things getting better. Having taught some of the next generation in the last couple of years I have seen absolutely no evidence of the prejudice that was prevalent when I went to school. I am greatly encouraged by what I have seen. We are living in a golden age for British homosexuals and I am very glad indeed that I was born into it.

Yes, there is still some discrimination. Yes there are still some problems. Find me a community without any. Maybe there is a possibility of reversals (I think the arrival of AIDS in the eighties might have set the cause back ten years or so) but I cannot see where they might come from now unless as a bolt from a blue sky. Even the Muslim community - in general the most homophobic subset of our society - forms less than 1% of the population and has little impact on government decision-making. Were such a reversal to take place then perhaps the mockery would become counter-productive and have to stop, but while the going is good let us laugh and let the world laugh with us.

929. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #87948 by Cartomancer on November 13, 2007 at 7:39 pm

Blimey, Julian of Norwich. I never thought I'd see her on this site...

930. Onward Christian teachers?

Comment #87846 by Cartomancer on November 13, 2007 at 10:37 am

Religion makes ontological claims you say? Really? Wow, the things you learn on here. I must note that down. One moment while I go and get a pen...

Obviously it is vitally important that we teach children this wonderful and hard to discern fact of reality. Otherwise they might go through life completely ignorant of the notion that the religious claim that their mumbo-jumbo is true. Children are completely unable to tell when people are making ontological claims otherwise, surely? It's all one long round of sophisticated postmodern meta-discourse with them isn't it? The little tykes come out with some gems eh, like "Henry might have misappropriated the integral context of my self-definition through reclamation of my counter-evidential simulacra of familial inclusivity". Clearly their underdeveloped minds are incapable of seeing the obvious ontological point that dolly is mine, give it back?

931. Holy communion

Comment #87834 by Cartomancer on November 13, 2007 at 10:00 am

Well, Steve99, were it the case that the cartoon conveys that message "Dawkins is funny because he looks like a gay" then yes, it probably would be mildly distasteful. I don't think it does however, as I have explained above. I think the allusion to the gay rights movement has nothing to do with the dopey, wide-eyed arm-waving image of Dawkins (the bluebirds are hardly a gay trope are they? The sandals? If a gay stereotype was what he wanted to convey then he could have done a whole lot more than that. Why is Hitchens not done up in leather fetish gear or some such if that really was the intent? Are they trying to slur Dawkins but not Hitchens with this? The whole thing seems like an absurd proposition to me). Once we correctly attribute the mannerisms of the Dawkins simulacrum to enthusiastic innocence and wonder, the percieved problem disappears. What we have then is a comment on the nature of an atheist political-cultural movement rather than some kind of homophobic slur.

And we must differentiate between homosexuality, which is largely an inborn characteristic, and the flamboyant, frivolous, camp trappings of modern "gay culture", such that it is. To ridicule one is most certainly not to ridicule the other. I have very little time for the latter myself - I find almost every aspect of modern gay culture to be vacuous and shallow, and will not hesitate to say so. This does not mean that I would deny the fundamental rights of my fellow homosexuals however, including their right to express themselves in this manner, but the right to self-expression carries with it the implicit duty to bear reasonable criticisms of that self-expression.

Maybe some people really cannot tell the difference between the ridiculous stereotypes and real gay people. Maybe they do think we're all like that. Maybe the flamboyant public image we sometimes present of ourselves doesn't help to dispel this misconception, but it is almost always those who do not actually know an openly gay person very well who hold such opinions. As you say yourself, the zeitgeist has changed dramatically in this country. We are no longer an oppressed minority - we have a powerful public presence and, substantially, all the same rights as heterosexual people. The only people who still try to do us down in Britain are elderly conservatives, the religious, and those few ignorant, uneducated people who do not know better. These people do not have much sway in our society. Certainly not enough to reverse the gains we have made. They should be watched of course, that's only sensible, but there is little point denying them ammunition when they haven't got any guns to fire it with and couldn't hit the wide side of a barn door anyway. I'm sorry, but compared with the major problems facing Britain at the moment - the NHS, education, transport, the environment, getting out of that godawful war in Iraq - gay rights is now a fringe issue. Don't get me wrong, it is still worth pushing through for the last pieces of the puzzle (I would be the first to stand up and say that it is unacceptable calling heterosexual marriage "marriage" and gay marriage "civil partnership"), but the need is nowhere near as pressing as it once was.

As long as we still wear the, perhaps once necessary, kid gloves and take offense at anything even remotely parodic all we are doing is giving out the message that we are still frightened and do not have the confidence to laugh it off. I am not saying this was always the best policy, but I certainly believe that it is now. I cannot speak for other nations, but it seems to me that the British sense of humour has always had a strong element of mutual self-deprecation in it. There is an unspoken agreement that if I laugh at myself then I have the right to laugh at you too - nobody gets arrogant ideas of unwarranted self-importance and we're all happy. It is something of an honour to be the butt of a well-crafted joke, which is why certain enthusiastic politicians sometimes even send in their own material to satirical shows. There is little worse for a public figure over here than to be seen as dour, humourless and unwilling to put aside their pompous pretensions, or worse to actually speak out with wounded pride against those who try to mock them. It works with minority communities too, which is part of the reason why everyone is so suspicious of the Muslims but perfectly willing to accept the mainstream Jews.

As for religious antipathy toward gay people, that will always happen to some degree. As Hitchens says, the bacilli are always there, waiting to flare up again. The way to fight actual persecution is to show up how morally bankrupt the claims of the religious are, to show that religious figures do not and should not have any additional authority in the moral conversation whatsoever. In fact, since they are demonstrably deluded in their perception of reality and morality, they should have much less authority than everyone else.

932. Holy communion

Comment #87797 by Cartomancer on November 13, 2007 at 6:57 am

And I sympathise with you, Mr.Grape, for living in such a horrible place. Does this mean, however, that British satirists producing cartoons for British magazines read by a British audience should take into account the prejudices of the narrow-minded bigots in your part of the world? Do the satirists of your country ignore the sensibilities of their own constituency and produce cartoons fully in line with British standards of humour? Or islamic standards of humour?

Surely it should be encouraging to one who lives in such a place to note that it is not that bad everywhere, that places exist where these issues are fringe issues of little political importance, and can be treated humourously?

933. Holy communion

Comment #87686 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 8:59 pm

Well, okay, yes maybe I did exaggerate a tiny bit. But my point still stands - in England the two movements are in no way on a comparable scale, certainly not these days.

934. Onward Christian teachers?

Comment #87675 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 7:25 pm

Just another version of my usual spiel about the state of learning in the Middle Ages. Nothing worth missing a cup of tea for...

935. Onward Christian teachers?

Comment #87643 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 4:54 pm

Please don't get me started on the origins of the Universities Oxford and Cambridge...

936. Holy communion

Comment #87471 by Cartomancer on November 12, 2007 at 7:58 am

I also note the parallels with the Danish Mohammed cartoons fiasco. Quite ironic given that, in the very same November / December issue of New Humanist to which that cartoon forms the cover, there is an article by Tzvetan Todorov about this vile event.

I think it a sign of our cultural maturity and civility that we can laugh along with such things, while our bearded, Koran-toting opposite numbers call for violence and hatred.

937. Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Comment #87319 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 7:49 pm

Another delicious irony - where did he learn about social compromise and the give-and-take of integration that he so espouses? That tissue of plagiarised nonsense he reads in the mosque every friday? The oh-so-progressive values of the muslim society he comes from? Or maybe from secular enlightenment values and modern European pluralism?

938. Holy communion

Comment #87309 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 7:10 pm

Well, it looks like we'll have to disagree on the impact of and intent behind this cartoon. Short of asking the artist himself I don't see how we're going to resolve the issue.

At least I'm not the only one who takes it for a swipe at Dawkins's exaggerated sense of wonder.

Actually, yes, I do think that it is acceptable to mock the atheist OUT campaign by comparing it to the gay rights movement, but not for the reasons you describe. There is nothing funny about the aims of the gay rights movement at all, but that's not the point. The humour here comes from flagging up a false analogy and hinting at its absurd consequences. Atheists are NOT a persecuted minority in England. We never really have been. We don't lack for basic human rights. Atheism is not something English people have ever been ashamed to display. It has never been illegal to be a practising atheist. There is no disparity in the atheist age of consent. Atheists are allowed to get married and adopt children. Atheists are protected against discrimination by legislation. The idea that, in this country, we have anything like the grievances that the gay rights movement had is so palpably absurd that it IS a source of humour. I repeat that New Humanist is a British magazine with a largely British readership - perhaps the struggle is a lot more similar in the states.

In this sense the cartoon could be seen as actually confirming the validity and importance of the gay rights movement - by pointing out that it did have real social ills to contend with while Dawkins's OUT campaign does not, at least not over here.

I also think that we should laugh at the camp gay stereotype, because that's just what it is - a stereotype, and a somewhat outdated one. We all know what the stereotypes are, racial or otherwise - Chinese people are hard working and inscrutable, the French are arrogant, spineless and stink of garlic, the Jews and the Scots are tightfisted, gays are camp, promiscuous and obsessed with frivolities. Just because we recognise that these stereotypes exist does not mean we buy into them. Their very outdatedness can be a source of amusement, and they are all exaggerated comic characters anyway. Laughing at something is a powerful way of showing how ridiculous it is - that's precisely why so many gay people in the seventies and eighties took the stereotype to heart and parodied it mercilessly. Isn't it rather hypocritical saying that we can do this but others outside the club are denied that opportunity? Seems precisely what the religious are objecting to when they claim special privileges against us mocking their beliefs. Haven't we reached the stage where the validity of homosexuality can stand on its own merits and the gay community no longer need fear humour as damaging to its stability?

Maybe we have, maybe we haven't. It seems that Steve99 and I disagree on the state of acceptance in England at the moment, and hence on whether the gay community has the confidence to embrace mocking humour from without as well as from within. Perhaps it is a generational thing - I am certainly very encouraged by the confident, unfazed and shamelessly self-parodying attitudes of my gay students and see in them a security about their sexuality that I could never claim for myself (and I'm only 24!). Maybe it's a regional thing - my haunts of Oxford, Surrey and Somerset are all fairly middle class areas, perhaps it's different in the dilapidated inner cities of the freezing north. I honestly don't know the answer to that one.

939. Holy communion

Comment #87212 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Actually my best mates pass round cartoons of me looking retarded all the time. My brother draws most of them. They're quite good actually...

940. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #87026 by Cartomancer on November 11, 2007 at 3:13 am

steve99, comment #36

Hmmm... well, maybe that interpretation does occur to some English people after all. (It's difficult to synchronise with this topic occurring on two threads at once)

To restate my opinion on the original thread where the cartoon is posted, I do not believe that Dawkins is being presented as a gay stereotype, rather his characteristic exhuberance and sense of wonder are being exaggerated.

There are, of course, gay rights overtones in the cartoon too however.

I'm not sure the race and sexuality cases are entirely analogous myself. The overt gay community has for a long time courted controversy and indulged in shameless self-parody. It's not every gay person's cup of tea, but camp comedy and ridiculously over-the-top portrayal of gay stereotypes have been some of the best weapons in the fight for acceptance. It seems there is definitely a sense that we can laugh at ourselves now and have avoided, for the most part, the kind of paranoia and persecution complex that often goes with such minority rights endeavours. We can afford to do this, in the main, because we are not a self-perpetuating community and our "culture", such that it is, is rarely central to our own identities in the way ethnic or religious communities' cultures are to their members' identities. We are also able, where they generally are not, to blend in quite easily if we so choose. Actually mature and confident ethnic communities do parody and send themselves up quite extensively as well - remember the Indian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me in the nineties? It's a complex phenomenon, and one over which an awful lot of ink has been spilled by queer theorists and their nutty postmodern ilk, but undoubtedly distinctions deserve to be drawn. In fact there is a debate among gay rights people in the uk at the moment over whether maintaining the otherness of "queer identity" is a valuable thing or not, and this is where the philosophies of groups like OutRage! differ from those of groups like Stonewall.

As far as the atheist Out campaign goes, I think that such a conscious borrowing from the gay original does make it a legitimate target for humourous comparison. In the UK and US public gay rights marches and so forth brashly display the camper, more frivolous aspects of gay "culture" such as drag queens, fetish wear and men in ridiculously small shorts - one cannot get away from this. The idea that atheists could or would want to indulge in anything similar is frankly preposterous, in Britain doubly so because we simply are not discriminated against and simply do not have the same sort of vibrant, over-the-top visual culture to put on display. Go somewhere like Latvia and the gay rights marches are sombre, serious affairs with none of the pomp and glamour. The battle is still very much in its opening stages there, a battle which we have largely won.

In short, to my jaded, bourgeois eyes at least, the gay community and its various tropes are pretty much mainstream cultural property in Britain these days and thus need no special treatment. I think it a sign of maturity that we can laugh at aspects of them now without feeling it threatens their very existence - that's why our predecessors were so voiciferous and unrepentant about them in the first place. The main thrust of this cartoon comes, I think, not in saying "gays are worthless, so militant atheists are worthless by analogy" but rather in saying "gay rights campaigning is important for gays, but it's a bit silly saying that the atheist movement is the same".

Likewise, Dawkins is a hugely respected and serious figure among the British humanist community. A bit of mocking him can be taken tongue in cheek and does not affect his credibility in the slightest. I see it as mildly affectionate even - portraying him as a daft, batty old uncle figure, a harmless, sandal-wearing innocent enthralled by the wonders of nature in a very child-like fashion. I would not see that as a terrific disservice to the man. It certainly makes a change from the shrill, ranting demagogue of popular myth.

Or maybe that's just what I read into it - I am on record in this very thread as saying we bring our own preconceptions to any text we read.

941. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86990 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:21 pm

As I say, to my eyes it does come across as merely friendly ribbing.

942. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86988 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:10 pm

Punch did far more biting and insulting satire for decades. Private Eye is much more cutting. I suspect it's a British thing...

943. Holy communion

Comment #86986 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 9:05 pm

I'm not sure there's any real anti-gay bias in the cartoon. I'm certainly not offended by it in that way. Possibly the worst you could say is that they've tried for a striking disjunct between the obviously heterosexual Christopher Hitchens and the "out and proud" message of his placard. Maybe there is the hint of a suggestion that drawing such parallels is inappropriate - it certainly is here in the UK where New Humanist magazine is published. I was closeted on the sexuality issue throughout my teenage years, but I've been openly atheistic since I can remember with absolutely no trouble. The two situations are just not comparable on these shores. The gay rights issue is far more advanced over here too (patronising sops to the religious lobby in the House of Lords notwithstanding) and the British gay community is generally sufficiently secure in its confidence to laugh along at parodies of itself.

Dawkins seems to be portrayed not as a gay stereotype but as a woolly, sandal-wearing liberal dancing and frolicking with the birds in a dopey haze of wonder. I suppose this is just an exaggeration of the exhuberance he does actually display on matters of science. Maybe a little knocking, but hardly libelous.

Maybe we just expect this in our press to a far higher degree in England. I am constantly amazed at how little proper satire there is across the pond.

944. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86981 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 8:48 pm

I thought the cartoon wasn't all that bad really. Grossly and exaggeratedly parodic perhaps, but then again that's what cartoons, and indeed satire in general, are for. Political cartoons are usually far worse than this. Maybe it's just me being of the Spitting Image generation, but I think it's something of a compliment to a public figure if they are the target of such light-hearted fun-poking.

945. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86977 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 8:26 pm

The author, comment #13,

"Surely, the sources lie in ancient greek philosophy, yet they were transmitted to Europe by the humanists. What's wrong with that?"

Well, it depends what you mean by "the humanists". The word was only really used in its modern context in the nineteenth century, the word umanista used in fifteenth century Italy simply meant a teacher of classical literature. Yes, it is true that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did see the development of significant new cultural forms that acquired the name "Renaissance", and this is where the traditional model of historical development has seen the origins of "humanistic" thinking. In Jakob Burckhardt's classic nineteenth century formulation these were the "discovery of the individual", the appreciation of nature and aesthetics and the move in scholarship from a narrowly logical focus on patristic and biblical works to a more literary appreciation of the Greek and Latin classics. It is "humanistic" because it glories in the abilities and achievements of human cultures, human individuality and the human mind rather than in the "medieval" or scholastic preoccupations with societal hierarchy and the divine universal.

This model began with Petrarch's coining of the term "dark ages" and a conscious rejection by renaissance thinkers of a self-defined medieval "other". Their enlightenment and victorian inheritors perpetuated the antipathy of the European intellectual elite toward the middle ages, casting them as a period of sterile godbothering backwardness, and it remains the distorted stereotype we encounter all too commonly today. Serious medieval intellectual history is actually a comparatively young discipline that began in the early decades of the twentieth century with men such as Charles Homer Haskins.

Anyway, a century of study into the history of the period has confirmed that the traditional division of history into ancient, medieval and modern is far too simplistic. As far as the transmission of Greek philosophy is concerned the process most certainly did not begin with renaissance humanists. Historians now point to earlier "Carolingian" and twelfth-century "renaissances" when significant translation activity took place and the intellectual climate of europe was changed drastically. In the twelfth century for instance almost the entire aristotelian corpus was recovered, as were Plato's Phaedo and Meno, all of Ptolemaic and Arabic astronomy, the late antique medical tradition, Euclid's mathematics, the neoplatonic writings of Proclus and Plotinus and several other works. The Burckhardtian themes can be traced back well beyond the fifteenth century too - individualism, aesthetics and literary appreciation did not spring ex nihilo from the mind of Petrarch or the letters of Cicero he rediscovered. Just ask John of Salisbury, Walter of Chatillon, Suger of St. Denis or even Anselm. Of course medieval "humanism" (a term coined by the late, great Sir Richard Southern) differed from its quattrocento version, but there was no great moment of sea-change, no magic cut-off point when everyone suddenly realised what fools they had been for living in the middle ages, cast off their threadbare peasant smocks and started walking round in slashed pantaloons discussing republican theory and inventing gunpowder.

Instead it is better to see the development of ideas as a gradual change throughout the middle ages and renaissance periods. Of course there were times of quickening, but to ignore the medieval roots of humanism, science, or any other item of European and, I suspect, world culture is to unconsciously buy in to generations of uncritical anti-medieval self-definition. The truth is far more complicated than all that.

Finally, the idea of "sources" has to be treated in a more sophisticated manner. Simply having access to a new text is only a part of the story - people read these texts in very different ways depending on their cultural background, preoccupations, aims, wider reading and so forth. Similarly, people actively went out and found these texts - you don't go looking for such things unless you feel a pressing need for them which, by definition, cannot have come from the texts themselves.

946. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86898 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 11:51 am

I think Myers' dislike for the term "humanist" is almost entirely semantic actually - it is, after all, a very broad term that has different meanings to different people in different contexts. From his writings it is abundantly clear that most of the values he espouses would be recognised by the majority of humanists as a part of their own moral philosophy.

The squid comment is clearly a joke - PZ is obsessed with marine cephalopods and they form an ongoing comedic trope on his Pharyngula blog - but from the context it seems also to be a nod to the perceived speciesist overtones of the term "humanist". Dawkins alludes to these in several places too. For someone who is so deeply involved in animal biology, rather than someone taking his cues directly from the history of renaissance and enlightenment thought, it is perhaps a natural conclusion to arrive at.

I don't really use the term humanist to describe myself either, but it is probably the label which best fits in many circumstances, and I'm happy to be identified with it in opposition to those for whom god, not man, is the primary object of our moral, political and philosophical contemplation.
As a medievalist I am of course legally required to point out that the traditional view of the emergence of humanism in Renaissance Italy is a misleading and outdated piece of Burckhardtian Victoriana, so consider yourselves told.

947. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86853 by Cartomancer on November 10, 2007 at 10:12 am

Bravo PZ, exactly what I was thinking!

Though I do find it a somewhat delicious irony: a humanist claiming that we can only further the goals of humanism by ignoring the very argumentative contentiousness that he flagged up only a few paragraphs earlier as a cornerstone of our human nature...

948. Same Flea, Different Name?

Comment #85958 by Cartomancer on November 7, 2007 at 3:23 pm

Well, I've been sitting on this for some time now, but I thought it might be appropriate. Best Gilbert and Sullivan voices please oh choir of atheists to whom our good Professor is preaching:

He is the very model of a major modern atheist
Accreditations as a writer, humanist, and scientist
He knows the works of Darwin, and can quote from verse poetical
To peddlers of religious faith his thought is antithetical

He's very well acquainted, too, with matters cosmological
He understands the theories of beginnings biological
About the book of Genesis he's keen to point out that it's tripe
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype

With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenotype
With many cheerful facts about the genome and the phenophenotype

He's very good at pointing out the flaws of fundamentalists
He knows the answer to the claim that any sort of god exists
In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

He gives the lie to theists on their frankly loopy moral claim
He answers the apologists who bring up Adolf Hitler's name
He quotes in measured sentences the crimes of child labelling
And points out that the moderates are merely faith-enabling

His works inspire charlatans and liars to cacophonies
He treats with great bemusement all the writings of the lot of these
Their arguments a fugue of which we hear a hundred times a day
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say

An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to say
An order Siphonapterid with nothing of their own to, own to say

He wants to rid our lives of morals writ in ancient cuneiform
And show we might as well believe in pastel-coloured unicorns
In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In short, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

In fact, since he knows what is meant by Russell's flying crockery
Since he can tell at sight a valid argument made properly
Since he renounces theists, be they pope or seminarian
And since he knows precisely what is meant by "pastafarian"

Since he has learned what progress could be lost to ID flummery
and since he sees the child abuse that goes on in a nunnery
In short, since he exposes many dangerous hypocrisies
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!

You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrates!
You'll say a better atheist there hasn't been since Socrasocrates!

Our much beloved Dawkins, light of Oxford's University
encouraging us atheists to come out universally
Indeed, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

Indeed, his writing is among the clearest and the paciest
He is the very model of a major modern atheist

949. Same Flea, Different Name?

Comment #85829 by Cartomancer on November 7, 2007 at 9:33 am

The Dominicans have always had too much time on their hands. Wasting parchment is just about all they've ever been good for. Deep Fat Friar Thomas Aquinas and his endless stream of verbiage anybody?

950. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #85692 by Cartomancer on November 6, 2007 at 9:27 pm

I see... so The God Delusion reaches its conclusion because of the intractability of the problem of evil does it? I must have a copy with misprints then, because mine has a passage where Richard Dawkins says he has never been impressed by this argument and finds the argument from improbability much more persuasive. Oh, and I've lost all the smug, shrill and harsh bits too, but I think they deliberately missed those out of the special print run for atheists that we all seemed to get hold of.

And are we really back on the tired old "you can't get consciousness from unconscious matter" line? You might as well ask how you can get omelletes from eggs when there is no trace of intrinsic omelletosity in any egg you can find...