Nadira has been refused the hire of our local church hall in Ramsgate for rehearsal because Medea is “Greek” and “Pagan”. I had thought that the Church of England had come fully to terms with the classical world since before Gibbon. And we are talking the church hall, not the church.
It is a tremendous mistake for the Church of England to start taking an interest in religion. Promoting intolerance is not what the Church of England is for. It is still an established church – do we really want a state church that bans Euripides? I fear for some reason the CofE feels a need to compete with the lunatic evangelist establishments which attract large congregations and promote miracles, speaking in tongues and other arrant rubbish. Oh dear.
But in any case, Evgeni, you don’t need to be at the cutting edge of evolutionary research to see that some human groups succeed and others fail. Think the horde of Ghengis Kahn and the Beothuk of Nova Scotia.
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It is also unnecessary to understand the theory of group selection or to master the mathematics of population biology to see that the success or failure of human groups depends in some measure on what they believe.
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My case follows incontrovertibly from those two propositions.
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If Dawkins cannot grasp it, his pronouncements as a member of one of those institutions of undistinguished men who grant distinctions upon one another, won’t alter the reality.
@angry
Humanism: don’t know if the book you are reading will cover the impact of humanism on church music – quite interesting. Compare (for example) Johannes Regis Mass L’homme armé (before humanism, or just as it was getting going) and William Byrd’s Magnificat from the ‘Great Service’ (afterwards). Regis: based on a popular secular tune, lots of melisma (many notes per syllable), Byrd: no pop music, one note per syllable. Byrd CofE of course, so I’m still on topic really.
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So *that* humanism isn’t what we might understand by the term today. And when we announced to my partner’s young daughter that we were considering a humanist marriage ceremony, she looked very shocked. ‘You’re getting married with no clothes on?’ she said.
One other thing, Evgueni,
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You draw a false dichotomy between Dawkins accepting the idea that belief affects human success, biological or otherwise, and Dawkins failing even to grasp the possibility of a connection between belief and success.
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For there is a third and much more likely possibility, which is simply that Dawkins rejects the idea that religion, whatever its truth content, can ever contribute to human welfare.
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But if that is his view, he should have the honesty to be clear about and not ridicule religion because it is illogical.
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To an intellectual, obviously, religion is rubbish. There is simply no possibility, for example, that there was a historical Jesus as described in the gospels. But that has no bearing on the selective value of religious belief.
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In any case, Dawkins campaign against religion appears futile. Everyone has a basic set of ethical beliefs, which function as a religious creed. So the question that is of real interest is what beliefs are most conducive to human welfare. And that in turn depends on how you define human welfare (e.g., does it refer to standard of living, group survival or what?).
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These are rather deep questions that, so far as I am aware, Dawkins has never addressed.
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Oh, and Jon, since you seem so anxious to know if there could possibly be a better world than the soft tyranny that constitutes modern liberal democracy, my own view is yes, a god-fearing conservative democracy, obviously.
Canspeccy,
My original post was in response specifically to your claim that religion has an “obvious biological significance”. I took exception to this claim. I must have committed some html or xml crime and my attempt at quoting you directly was foiled. Perhaps this explanation makes the context of my original comment more clear.
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For the record, biology is a very wide field of enquiry, and the sub-field of evolutionary biology grew in popularity relatively recently (since the 70s). It is one of the most exciting new sciences and it promises to shed light amongst other things on the evolutionary origins of human morality. Naturally this is dangerous talk as far as assorted holy book proponents are concerned – morality is supposed to be the monopoly of god. Hence long before Dawkins published his book The God Delusion, Christians world over were seething with contempt for him for popularising the new science in his books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. You appear to be particularly venomous in your judgement of Dawkins, why is that?
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Also for the record, your qualifications carry no weight here. First, and this should be obvious – we only have your word as assurance of veracity and relevance. Second, I have met PhD graduates in their chosen narrow field of enquiry who could demonstrate little capacity for logical thought. Clearly qualifications are not everything. Verifiable examples of past academic achievements are another matter – journal publications etc, but in the absence of such here on this forum what counts is logically consistent argument.
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So, I pointed out that it is by no means “obvious” that religion confers an evolutionary benefit on a ‘nation’, which had been your contention. In support of my counter-claim I gave an example of an alternative hypothesis by Dawkins himself – that ideas, including religious ideas, may exist in our minds without purpose that is associated with natural selection, but simply as parasitic replicators in an enabling medium. Note I wrote ‘ideas’ and not ‘all ideas’ as a large part of what goes on in the mind is dictated by evolutionary pressures. Of course, this is Dawkins’s view of memes also and not some simplistic misrepresentation that you put forward. If you really are familiar with Dawkins’s work then you ought to know this (that was specifically my dig at you, remember?) As far as I know, there are scientists who take memetics seriously which makes it unlikely that it is ‘daft’.
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I also mentioned the difficulties with group selection theories, namely that evidence in support of these has proven elusive. You keep re-iterating that the benefits to ‘human groups’ of having certain beliefs are incontrovertible but you have failed to show how this is so. If group selection really does occur then surely it is but a question of gathering evidence. Those evolutionary biologists had better pull their fingers out. You could give them a helping hand!
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In the meantime in the absence of evidence, alternative explanations for your claim of “obviousness” are:
1. You use the word ‘obvious’ in a different sense from me
2. You are expressing a dearly-held belief rather than engaging in logical argument
Please supply evidence in support of your claim, or retract it. Btw I am not quite sure how Genghis Khan fits into your argument.
Also:
“You draw a false dichotomy between Dawkins accepting the idea that belief affects human success, biological or otherwise, and Dawkins failing even to grasp the possibility of a connection between belief and success.” – Canspeccy
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I beg your pardon, could you male that one clearer for me. English is not my mother tongue.
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And finally, I am curious about “god-fearing conservative democracy” – sounds like a contradiction in terms.
CanSpeecy:
““So, CanSpeccy, you were caught telling untruths about Katyn”
Not so. Which is why Angrysoba provides no support for his claim.”
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CanSpeccy, you haven’t substantiated either of these claims:
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“For example, under anti-revisionist laws, it is, I believe, an offense in France to deny that Hitler was responsible for the WWII Katyn Massacre of Polish army officers — even though the Russians have now admitted and apologized for the crime — or to deny that six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis — a claim that Raoul Hilberg, a Jew who devoted his Career at Columbia University to the study of the Jewish Holocaust, firmly rejected.”
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I know that there are laws about denying the Holocaust in a number of countries (particularly in countries that were responsible for perpetrating it), which I do not approve of and do not approve of on liberal free speech grounds but show me an example of someone actually being convicted for saying the Katyn massacre was not perpetrated by Hitler. And show me an example of someone being convicted of making the precise charge of denying “six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis”.
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You posted something about the Gayssot Act (Gayssot is a Communist member of the French parliament, by the way, emphatically not a liberal) and yet the Gayssot Act only seems to refer to those crimes established by the Nuremburg Trials. Nobody was convicted for the Katyn massacre at Nuremburg.
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So, you are wrong. I’ll be charitable though and say you were wrong out of ignorance. I don’t ascribe malice as easily as you do to someone else’s view. I did roll my eyes a little though when YOU brought up Faurison. I also rolled my eyes when YOU started accusing ME of injecting disreputable figures into the discussion and then you started accusing ME of accusing you of “hate speech” when it was you that brought up “hate speech” and you that brought up Faurison. This is exactly that type of thing that makes you appear like a tiresome whining twisty turny thing who moves the goalposts incessantly and then screams, “It’s so unfair!” when it is pointed out that that is against the rules of the game of “Arguing in Good Faith”.
Vronsky: “Humanism: don’t know if the book you are reading will cover the impact of humanism on church music – quite interesting. Compare (for example) Johannes Regis Mass L’homme armé (before humanism, or just as it was getting going) and William Byrd’s Magnificat from the ‘Great Service’ (afterwards). Regis: based on a popular secular tune, lots of melisma (many notes per syllable), Byrd: no pop music, one note per syllable. Byrd CofE of course, so I’m still on topic really.”.
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There is quite a bit here and there on church music. It’s something I know even less about than the history of Christianity though so some of it washes right over me without leaving a crease in the old walnut. In this case I can’t find anything about Mass L’homme arme but William Byrd does appear although he is described as an “English Catholic composer”. Wikipedia seems to bear this out but he was conscripted by the Anglicans although remained a Catholic. Apparently he wrote something in homage to Savanorola, a Dominican friar that MacCullouch says should be accredited with creating a true republic in Florence which aimed at rule by all of its citizens. Savonarola was responsible for the Bonfire of the Vanities, which was a wanton act of vandalism such as book-burning and portrait-burning so I don’t know why MacCulloch likes this lunatic.
Angrysoba said: “I did roll my eyes a little though when YOU brought up Faurison. I also rolled my eyes when YOU started accusing ME of injecting disreputable figures into the discussion.”
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Excuse me, but it was you who mentioned Faurison, not once but multiple times.
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If you search this page, you will be able to confirm that I never mentioned that name until now, and that for the simple reason that I have only the vaguest notion as to who Faurison is, based on a report a read years ago that Chomsky had condemned his conviction for Holocaust denial.
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But I am prepared to acknowledge that this was an error on your part not a deliberate factual inexactitude.
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As for Katyn, what I said was prefaced by the words, “I believe that…” which was the case, because I had heard it so claimed.
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However, subsequent research indicated that, like you, I am capable of error. In fact, at the time I was aware that I might be in error, which was why I chose the wording that I did, i.e., “I believe that …”
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That was not mere verbosity, it was a deliberate hedge, although I did believe that I was most likely right.
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I did not immediately acknowledge my error since I could not see why I should do all the work if you wanted to make an issue of the matter. As it is, I now understand that under the Gassyot law (1990) it is illegal in France to challenge the Nuremberg verdicts.
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It is the case, also, that Germans were tried, convicted and punished for their alleged role in the Katyn Massacre, but that was by a Russian court, not Nuremberg. The Americans did not buy the Russian claim and would not include a charge relating to Katyn in the Nuremberg indictment.
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Therefore, what I had heard said about denying the role of the Nazis in the Katyn murders being illegal in France was incorrect.
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However, my larger point stands. That there are laws in Europe which deny free speech. That I believe is an aspect of what I think may reasonably be called the soft tyranny of liberal democracy today. And while you may not like the terminology, I am glad that we agree on the principle.
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As for denial of the six million being illegal, maybe that is not so either. But am I not correct in believing that David Irving served time in an Austrian gaol for being insufficiently liberal in his estimate of the death toll?
The statistics don’t much interest me as I can only imagine one murder at a time, and I have researched the subject very little except to read something in Wikipedia about the work of Hilberg. I thought it worth knowing his conclusions since he is, I understand, a preeminent Jewish expert on the Jewish Holocaust.
“Angrysoba said: “I did roll my eyes a little though when YOU brought up Faurison. I also rolled my eyes when YOU started accusing ME of injecting disreputable figures into the discussion.””
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CanSpeccy: “Excuse me, but it was you who mentioned Faurison, not once but multiple times….If you search this page, you will be able to confirm that I never mentioned that name until now, and that for the simple reason that I have only the vaguest notion as to who Faurison is,”
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No, sir. You were the first to bring up Faurisson. I happened to have spelt his name incorrectly so if you search “Faurisson” you will find that you were the first to bring him up when I suggested you may have been misled about Katyn by a “grubby revisionist site.”
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You responded this way:
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“Here’s a quote from that grubby revisionist site Wikipedia:
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France
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In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.[21]”
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CanSpeccy: “But I am prepared to acknowledge that this was an error on your part not a deliberate factual inexactitude.”
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The only error on my part was that I mispelt “Faurisson”. Now, run another search and you will see that no one mentioned him until you did.
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Canspeccy: “As for Katyn, what I said was prefaced by the words, “I believe that…” which was the case, because I had heard it so claimed.”
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I know that. This is why I said: “I have no idea what the legal ramifications are for saying the Soviets killed the Polish officers in Katyn but I suspect that you’re either wrong about it, have been misled by some grubby “revisionist” site or are just lying.”
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I gave three possibilities. I said you may simply be wrong. As it turned out I was correct. Then I added it is possible you have been misinformed by a “grubby revisionist site”. You said you “had heard it so claimed”. By whom? You didn’t say but took immense umbrage at the distinct possibility that you have been misinformed by a revisionist and then started to dangle the possibility of legal action. I also suggested it was possible that you were simply lying yet I am now ready to drop that even as a possibility due to your qualified magnanimity in recognizing your error. I think however I will be far more satisfied if you now admit that you were the first to mention Faurisson, if only as a quote, because then you can drop your claim that I brought up Faurison as a tactic.
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“I did not immediately acknowledge my error since I could not see why I should do all the work if you wanted to make an issue of the matter. As it is, I now understand that under the Gassyot law (1990) it is illegal in France to challenge the Nuremberg verdicts.”
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You mean you thought you’d twist and turn like a twisty turny thing because you weren’t prepared to substantiate a claim but prepared to make half-claims that I am then supposed to research for you and show them to be bunk. You’d save people a lot of time and yourself embarrassment (if you weren’t completely shameless) if you researched your own claims first or at least retracted fully rather than partially and only then grudgingly when your claims were exposed. In this very case you say that you “now understand” that the Gayssot law made it illegal to challenge the Nuremberg verdicts and yet that was explicitly stated in the very Wikipedia article you first cited. You know, the one that even had Faurisson’s name attached to it. Do you even read what you quote to people?
“However, my larger point stands. That there are laws in Europe which deny free speech. That I believe is an aspect of what I think may reasonably be called the soft tyranny of liberal democracy today. And while you may not like the terminology, I am glad that we agree on the principle.”
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There are laws in every country which in some way limit free speech (not DENY free speech) and no country, as far as I know, allows free speech to be absolute. Perhaps you would like free speech to be absolute. Do you? You still haven’t said.
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Liberal democracy is hardly what I would call “soft tyranny” but even if it were it does not follow from that that “hard tyranny” is better. It doesn’t even follow from that that “soft tyranny” and “hard tyranny” are the same or equivalent. Anyway, there’s little point in having this discussion because you refuse to say what you prefer to liberal democracy and therefore look dangerously short of having a point. You have suggested to Anno that your main purpose is to simply enjoy being a pain-in-the-arse because somehow you divine some kind of distress in your liberal interlocutors from what you may believe are examples of hypocrisy. Yet the fact is that you have still failed to score any points at all even with the limited commitment you make to an argument.
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A case in point:
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“As for denial of the six million being illegal, maybe that is not so either. But am I not correct in believing that David Irving served time in an Austrian gaol for being insufficiently liberal in his estimate of the death toll?”
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The first part is simply a factual error. Almost all historians on the Holocaust think the number of victims is somewhere between five and six million. Of that number perhaps a million and half, perhaps more, were gassed. There were various other methods of extermination including mass shootings, deliberate starvation in ghettoes, camps designed to have the inmates starve to death, beatings, medical experiments, forced marches etc…etc…
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David Irving did indeed serve time in prison in Austria and Zundel was imprisoned in, I think, Germany. This is why I brought those two up after your mentioning of Faurisson. I brought them up expressly to say that I vehemently disagree with them but that in a true liberal democracy even highly unpopular and deplorable speech must be allowed. So, I will state again that it is NOT consistent with liberal democracy to imprison cranks and pseudo-historians such as Zundel, Faurisson and Irving and I oppose doing so.
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“The statistics don’t much interest me as I can only imagine one murder at a time, and I have researched the subject very little except to read something in Wikipedia about the work of Hilberg. I thought it worth knowing his conclusions since he is, I understand, a preeminent Jewish expert on the Jewish Holocaust.”
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Hilberg, who you mention as being out-of-step with the majority of Holocaust scholars by saying that 5.1 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust was one of the pioneers of the subject and the book he produced on the subject is now well over forty years old. It is not unusual for early works of scholarship to be superceded by later scholarship and so while Hilberg is still highly respected it is not necessarily true that he is the last word on the subject.
Canspeccy: A God-fearing conservative democracy.
Oh dear, that sounds too much like the US of A. There is too much ‘I believe in God, that’s why I believe in doing A or B.’
You can’t use conscience only. You have to have accurate information about the thing you are trying to judge and you have to know God’s criteria, a latest edition of which are to be found in the Qur’an.
For example 9/11 was a clearly stated retribution for injustices committed in trade and politics by the Western superpowers. Just because the people of the US were unaware of the wholesale stitching up of world trade being done in their name, doesn’t mean they are just in getting together a coalition to carpet-bomb Afghanistan displacing 3 million people.
What followed 9/11 was a media war in which the justice of the retribution against the US Trade Centre was swept under the carpet, but the US retribution for the challenge to its injustices has been the open proof of the US injustice which they had tried to suppress information about. The US launched massive state terrorism on the one hand and equally massive false flag terrorism on the other. The first is well documented and the latter is well understood by all.
It was not democracy that challenged the lies and corruption of US corrupt power in trade. The people of the US and Europe are sleepwalking in a media dream. Courts still declare UK soldiers deaths in Afghanistan as unlawful. No. It is completely unlawful for those soldiers to be there. At some stage, liberal democrats have to acknowledge that the things they believe in will never be achieved by liberal democracy and that the defence of liberal democracy has been a travesty of both those ideas, liberty and democracy.
We are now in a government which is universally acknowledged to be unrepresentative of the democratic wishes of the UK people. The coalition ought to fail, if promises to the electorate were honoured. There is no point in talking about creating stable government when the result is destabilised by wholesale lying.
Similarly, there is no point in fighting a violent war in Afghanistan without first assessing the rights and wrongs of the cause. You end up humiliating yourself, because no amount of media or false flag terror can ever cover up the injustice of our cause.
During the last decade, the root cause of the Afghanistan war, which was and still is our own neo-colonialism, ought to have been addressed so that we could have our say in the discussion of how to share the world’s resources. Remaining in denial is the worst possible option. Instead we are now in direct confrontation with China concerning the ethics of acquiring resources, and we have failed to secure legitimacy for our so called liberal democracy because of our refusal to admit blame for our neo-colonialism plus the addition of ten years of aggressive and unjustified murder trying to defend an indefensible position.
That is what I call terrorism – fighting without clarifying your cause. It is wrong because it is futile. The word conservative used to mean fighting for your right to maintain the priveledges you have traditionally enjoyed. Then under Mrs Thatcher it came to mean fighting for the priveledges which other people have traditionally enjoyed. That is what China is doing now – let it be a sweet taste of their own medicine for the neo-conservatives of the New Labour, Liberal, and Tory parties who have allowed the excess to continue of the pointless Afghan war.
Angry,
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I did not “say”
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“In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.[21]”
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That was a direct quote from Wikipedia:
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“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
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Sorry for the omission of the link. But since there was a footnote number it should have been fairly clear that it was quote.
Angry,
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You say: “Hilberg, who you mention as being out-of-step with the majority of Holocaust scholars”
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This is false. I said nothing of the kind. What I did say is that I knew very little about eh Holocaust but that I had read something of Hillberg’s work who I took to be a legitimate authority.
Angry,
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The denial of the right to say certain things even though they may be true is an issue quite separate from that of having responsibility for one’s actions.
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A statement, true or false, may constitute libel, fraud, treason, etc. I am not in favor of any of those things.
Anno,
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You say: “For example 9/11 was a clearly stated retribution for injustices committed in trade and politics by the Western superpowers.”
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So you believe 9/11 was the work of Muslim terrorists?
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I guess that is where we part company.
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As for justice, I thought Osama bin Laden explicitly denied responsibility for 9/11 and declared that as a Muslim he opposed the killing of civilians. I cannot remember the exact words, but you must be aware of the statement I am referring to.
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But maybe I simply don’t follow what you are saying at all.
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As for conservatism, it is like liberalism, or socialism, it can mean anything. To me, the neoCons appear to be lunatics. Margaret Thatcher, if a conservative, was conservative very nearly unhinged and David Cameron, seems to be merely a puppet of Israel, BP and and the financier class.
Angry,
Re: Wikipedia reference to Faurrison,
I see now, scrolling up and down this rather long page, that I in fact gave the reference to Wikipedia when I first quote the passage mentioning the name Faurrison. So why that would make you roll your eyes, I don’t know.
Anno,
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If I understand you correctly, you are saying that 9/11 was carried out by Muslim terrorists.
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And if that is correct, that is where I part from you, although you are no doubt in good company — George Bush, Angrysoba, Craig Murray, etc.
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As for the term conservative, it is like liberal or socialist, it can, and often is, applied to just about anything.
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There is a valid use of the term conservative, nevertheless, as it refers to one who holds traditional attitudes and values and is cautious about change or innovation.
Anno, I have tried twice to respond to the remarks you addressed to me. But both responses disappeared.
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I give up. Cheers!
Ha! my response to Anno has now appeared. I guess it was intercepted by a filter pending inspection by moderators because it contained a reference to a certain set of events in a certain city on a certain day.
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Anyway, Anno, is your view that said events were “justifiable revenge on the Western powers” widespread among Muslims in Britain or elsewhwere?
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And do you disagree with what Osama BL is purported to have said concerning said events?
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“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.”?
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I very much look forward to learning your response.
CanSpeccy: “I see now, scrolling up and down this rather long page, that I in fact gave the reference to Wikipedia when I first quote the passage mentioning the name Faurrison. So why that would make you roll your eyes, I don’t know.”
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It made me roll my eyes to see revisionist tropes appearing in support of your rather bullshit case that liberal democracy is tyranny and an oppressor of free speech. I thought to myself, “I wonder how long it will be before Alfred brings up Holocaust deniers.” I was rather disappointed to see my prophecy come true so quickly. The point is that you brought up Faurisson first with your quote from Wikipedia. I mentioned before that you probably were getting information from revisionist sites so to see it was about Holocaust deniers was hardly a surprise.
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“Sorry for the omission of the link. But since there was a footnote number it should have been fairly clear that it was quote.”
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I acknowledged it was a quote and I even asked you if you even read the quotes you copy and paste. It appears not given that you accused me of bringing up Faurisson and other “revisionists” (AKA Holocaust deniers). Yet this merely shows your dishonesty as you were quoting from a page entitled “Laws against Holocaust denial”!!! So what was all that faux-outrage, jowel-wobbling and high-horse-mounting about then with all that How-dare-you-I-shall-see-you-in-the-high-court business?
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Ef off Soba. I’m not interested in your tedious rambling smears.
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I only came here to find out
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(a) whether Yugo Stiglitz thinks it as silly for the Israeli government to support religious institutions in Israel as he thinks it silly for the British Government to support religious institutions in Britain, and
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(b) how many of Anno’s Muslim brothers in Britain support his treasonous view about the attacks on the WTC, and how those attacks are justified by a good Muslim.
“Ef off Soba. I’m not interested in your tedious rambling smears.”
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The mating call of the loooOOOoooOOOOooooser! Always claiming victim status.