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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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When authoritarians promise to starve themselves, how is that a bad thing? Some authoritarian asses in India who are enraged that a work of fiction called the Da Vinci Code will be shown in cinemas to anyone who wishes to see it, have threatened to starve themselves to death in protest if the movie is not banned by the state.
If these particular Christian protesters are as good as their word and are so keen to snuff it and thereby put their theories to the test, namely that there is a God and their actions (i.e. attempting to use the force of law to prevent freedom of expression followed by suicide if they are unsuccessful) would be viewed favourably by their deity, well why should anyone want to stop them?
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Amen.
As Jerry Pournelle (or was it Larry?) said in one of his novels:
“Think of it as evolution in action.”
In any case, good riddance.
If they really wanted to stay true to form, they’d throw themselves in front of lions…
Isn’t suicide a mortal sin?
Quite.
There was another group of idiots who wanted a disclaimer at the start of the movie that it was a work of fiction. That’s fine, as long as a similar disclaimer is included in every Bible.
I’ve never understood the idea that someone determined to kill himself was some sort of claim against the rest of us.
While I appreciate the statement that some issue is so important it’s worth dying over, as Ghandi repeatedly attested to with his fasts, I guess I never felt the guilt that is apparently supposed to cause one to accede to the faster’s demands.
I suspect this is an Indian modification of the Muslim “respect” demand, filtered through the aforementioned Ghandian precedent, but I find it trivial and silly.
I was much more impressed when the Bhuddists in Vietnam used to set themselves on fire. I heartily recommend that course of action to any and all religious fanatics, or lunatics of any stripe, as a way to make their points with a dramatic flare.
Of course, they have to understand that the rest of us might not break any legs running to put them out…
I am a Christian, so theologically conservative I make Pat Robertson look like a unitarian, and I find the hulabaloo over Davinci HILARIOUS! I read the book before it was “cool” and found it very entertaining. THe premise is, of course, rubbish, but so what? My guess is that the percentage of people who wil now believe Jesus was married to Magdalene and had a child with her etc.etc.etc. who dont already own a selection of tinfoil hats will be slim to nil. THose of us who believe Jesus to be GOd incarnate will continue to believe so, and those who dont, wont. Some churches(thankfully not mine) are doing speaking series debunking Davinci…what a waste of time! More making mountains out of molehills….something CHristians do well. But there will probably be no beheadings as a result of it , tho.
Amen to all of that! If ever there was a DAFT thing for Christians to get worked up about, it is the novel the Da Vinci Code. Hello? ANYONE HOME??? ITS A NOVEL!!!!! Sane Christians who feel a need to say anything at all on the subject have just reminded people this is fiction and left it at.
By “authoritarian asses”, do you mean the government of India and its official Censor Board referred to in the first article? It’s certification guidelines do, after all, include a requirement that (xii) visuals or words contemptuous of racial, religious or other groups are not presented among its 20 or so strictures.
Also, from their background page:
If this post was an attempt to burnish your bona fides as a defender of free speech and expression, color me unimpressed. One can only guess as to why you have directed the vitriol in your post solely at the Christians going on a hunger strike — without even a pro forma condemnation of the official government body whose entire purpose is to impose judicially-sanctioned censorship backed by the violence of the state.
In reading David Gillies post, I am reminded of all those folk who have similar fashionably cynical remarks about the Bible. The Bible is by the way, the basis of the concepts of individual worth and inalienable rights which were enshrined in the British and American legal codes, during times when both countries were convulsed by what today would be called …. Christian zealotry.
But yet in my experience, these self same people will wax poetic about the power of the goddess, Area 51, crystals, mega-vitamins, yoga (stripped of the religious component), macrobiotic diets, scientology, global warming, black helicoptors, the tri-lateral commission, etc, etc, without the least awareness of how mindless and superstitious *they* sound.
Actually, while DaVinci Code was fiction, it was based almost entirely on a non-fictional work, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, which had a lot of well established research mixed in with a lot of bunkery by a crazy frenchman who thinks he should be made King of France.
The history of Mary Magdalene and her daughter landing in Marseilles is established, as is the journeys of other relatives of Jesus to the south of France, Scotland, etc. What the Templars were after and rumored to have found in Jerusalem is also well established by historians. A lot of the disparate facts of the story are true, what is fiction is how they’ve been woven together into some vast conspiracy, put together by tin foil hatters, anti-masonic “Know Nothing Party” propagandists of the 19th century (a predecessor of many of the populist-patriot groups of the current day) and 1960’s illuminatus trilogy fanboys.
Anyone who has had a chance to compare the Gnostic Bible (Nag Hammadi) to the Dead Sea Scrolls translations can’t help but notice the authenticity vs much of the official bible fabricated by the church. I happen to think that many so-called ‘christians’ will wind up learning how unchristian modern christianity really is.
Debbie, my sense is that the harm the book causes is not in its conversion of anyone, but in the prejudice it encourages against Catholics. I’m hoping that most of those on this blog support the work of people like Justice Thomas, and deplore the degree to which irrational prejudice against him allows discrimination like that surrounding the baseless allegations that he was a member of Opus Dei (which he wasn’t) and that his membership caused him to act improperly.
Of course, Dan Brown should be able to publish his work. That is a very different question to whether or not his work causes harm.
Obviously, the impulse to censor him is not a positive political force. Still, to suggest that those who disagree are so bad that they should die and that it would be a good thing if they did seems ugly and unpleasant. The idea of it being “evolutionary” seems even worse.
Iain,
But yet in my experience, these self same people will wax poetic about the power of the goddess, Area 51, crystals, mega-vitamins, yoga (stripped of the religious component), macrobiotic diets, scientology, global warming, black helicoptors, the tri-lateral commission, etc, etc, without the least awareness of how mindless and superstitious *they* sound.
Not in my experience. In mine, religious fundamentalists and conspiracy-theorists and new-agers are very closely allied psychologically. None of them would mark the Bible as fiction, and mock people for uncritical belief in it, because they don’t really have a concept of fiction as deliberate invention for the purpose of entertainment or thought-experiment. They tend to believe that there are only The Truth and lies in any narrative; that there are no mistakes, only deceptions.
You have a touch of that yourself in your litany of the weird. It is perfectly possible to have differing non-superstitious beliefs about the physical world – global warming, the value of certain diets, or exercise regimes – where the evidence is patchy or bears different interpretations quite well. Where superstition conspiracy theory, and religion (and political ideology, too) depart from views that may be mistaken or drawn from insufficient information, is that they are holistic and proleptic. It is inherent in them that all is significant, evidence cannot turn out to be of partial value or irrelevant, there are hidden powers behind everything, and that critics are not justified or in error but necessarily ill-motivated – lying or themselves deceived.
BTW, would you be so good as to point to the bits of the Bible that are the source for concepts of individual worth and inalienable rights?
Philosophy is the root of Western morality. There is nothing that Christianity has given us, really.
The divine right of kings and the Inquisition have gone the way of the dodo due to philosophy, not religion.
So you can thank Plato, Socrates and especially Aristotle (see: Aristotle’s Ethics), for being the font of Western morality.
Christianity, at least, did not get in the way after a certain point.
Another issue is that it gives nurture to ideas like Mike Lorrey’s. Seriously, take his advice and read some of the pseudepigraphal gospels, or some of the old testament pseudepigrapha, some of the gnostic writings, and then read some of the canonical gospels, ideally in the original languages. There’s really no comparison in the quality and depth of the work. My theology degree was from St. Andrew’s, one of the world’s leading schools in the field of pseudepigrapha. Almost universally, significant degrees of familiarity with these writings pushed people away from any kind of respect for the sects and authors that wrote them.
Christianity is a mixed bag for libertarians. The solid social structure and charitable impulses that it provides can support societies that can better integrate libertarians (arguing for private health care is a lot easier in societies with a large non-profit sector). Set against that, the Christian view of a moral life can sometimes be at odds with those espoused by some libertarians, and the faith can lend itself to some authoritarian structures.
Classical gnostics offer nothing to the libertarian. The libertine branch drives those who would rather not live in a world filled with people who engage in active and deliberate evil to legislate and regulate to protect themselves from those who society cannot and will not tolerate (Carpocratians and their ilk). The ascetic branch are parasites on society, producing nothing and inspiring the same kind of handicapping guilt that inspired the actions noted in this post.
What is it that we see in the early gnostics that shows the orthodox church to be unchristian? That the orthodox church were insufficiently anti-semitic? If you gravitate towards the uglier side of the BNP, one could totally see how you could imagine the “British faith” to lie predominantly with those who believed that the God of the Old Testament was entirely evil. Is it that the orthodox church saw some good in the material world, believing in marriage, hard work, division of labor, celebrations, as opposed to believing it to be wholly evil? Is it that the orthodox church, unlike the Sethian Gnostics, taught of a god who cares about mankind? Is it that the orthodox church lacked the virulent misogyny of the Marcionites? Were they unchristian because they didn’t spend enough time painting each other with menstrual blood like the Borborites? Did they portray an insufficiently homophobic Christ, unlike the Cainites? Seriously, the Nag Hammadi texts were from a bunch of different, and violently disagreeing sects. You can’t point to them generically as the truth, any more than you can say that political scientists in general are right about how the world should be governed.
Couple of further points:
As regards Magdelene’s history being well demonstrated: We know very, very little indeed about Magdelene. We aren’t sure if she was the girl rescued from stoning and the Mary from Bethany, or a different person. We don’t know if the Nag Hammadi texts refer to Magdelene or the Virgin. I have no knowledge of any atheist or agnostic theological academic anywhere who credits any of the ideas of Magdelene being married to Christ or carrying his child, for which there is precisely zero ancient attestation. The idea of her being in Marseille at the end of her life is better documented than the seriously crazy ideas, since there was a belief in the area that she was there as early as 745AD, but I cannot think of any way in which her being in the South of France after the Jewish Revolt demonstrates a lack of Christianity in anyone.
Those of us who believe in free markets have a strong incentive to encourage others to have a degree of trust in other private actors and a belief that there is good in the material world. Thus, for instance, the degree of trust in American society allows for a considerably greater level of venture capital activity, greater price stability, and so on. I think that I’m agreeing with Verity when I say that, to an atheist capitalist, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity may suck, but they’re a helluva lot better than many of the alternatives (Wahhabism, Gnosticism, or Buddhism, say). The good thing about the Da Vinci code from this perspective would be that it would bring more people to atheism and agnosticism than to Gnosticism, and the Gnostics it produced would be of the new-age kind who would never think of sharing my misery in plugging through the books of Enoch. Still, the more supportive intellectual atmosphere produces a few Gnostics of the kinds that harm, and the new age Gnostics of no fixed beliefs surely make us more vulnerable to Islamic assault (they get on the news a lot and prevent any educated Muslim from being able to respect our culture).
Guy, I think that I agree with a lot of your statement, but I’m curious as to why you appear to exclude “superstitious” beliefs from your appeal that we default to believing in the good faith of others in the ways that they arrive at their conclusions. Is your spiritual cosmology (or denial thereof) based on objective, verifiable fact?
In terms of biblical quotes suggesting individual worth, I think you’ll find a rich vein of language referring to God loving us as individuals. The second person of the Trinity gets in some particularly key notions of our worth. Apparently God and his crew in heaven celebrate every time the one lost sheep returns and so on.
In terms of biblical quotes suggesting individual rights, I would direct you to some of the concerns voiced before Saul became king. As I’m sure you’re aware, in the age of the Judges, “there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” 1 Samuel 8 sees a strong argument from Samuel that the Israelites getting a king will condemn them to an unfree existence after God has told them that the statist solution is a rejection of God’s authority. In the New Testament there is less assertion of rights since the text is not addressed to those with any ability to protect those rights, but state authority is generally frowned upon. We are called on to obey it, but it is portrayed as abusive and wrongful. The temple tax in Matthew 17 is the clearest example of Christ asserting the ungodly nature of the authority and yet providing a miracle to comply with it (st. Peter gets the money from the mouth of a fish he is sent to catch). When Peter tells us to respect the authorities, he compares them to slave owners and asks us to tolerate the abuse rather than suggesting that it might not be abusive. In the same way as the bible persuaded many, throughout history, to feel uncomfortable about their slave holding, it should make statists feel uncomfortable about their support for state power.
The various statements about who has authority over Christians, likewise, suggest that they have individual rights. They don’t have them in the sense that Americans have them, or an ECHR sense. There is no secular remedy based in the bible for those who are tortured and martyred. That they had the “right” to refuse to sacrifice to pagan gods did not mean that they were not going to be killed for doing so, nor that their families could claim damages. It was a moral right. It is my hope that you can see the value of these kinds of rights and philosophical underpinnings. To my mind they are a necessary precondition for the development of the kinds of thoughts that gave rise to the bill of rights and libertarian thought in general.
Last Toryboy, do you see individual rights as being particularly strong in platonic thought? How about kindness? One of the central changes that Christianity brought to the Roman empire was the chilling of the idea that you wanted to teach your kids to be bastards. I believe that to be a useful contribution to humanity and to the development of western civilization. I’m also happy that the whole philosopher king thing never took off, at least until the last century. Maoist China, now there’s a Platonic civilisation.
May I recommend the Bobby Sands diet for wouldbe starvation protesters … it never fails to achieve splendid results.
I doubt there is any less fiction (or if you prefer, more non-fiction) in HB&HG than in DVC; just because it is marketed as non-fiction does not make it so.
Well… kinda.
The concept of universal individual rights and worth begins with the Scottish invention (out of Calvinism) of the Presbyterian form of church government in the 16th Century, courtesy of John Knox.
The Presbyterian Kirk made everyone — even the king — absolutely equal for the first time in history. As Andrew Melville, then Rector of St Andrews University, told James VI (who he also famously called “God’s silly vassal”) to his face (in Scots of course) in 1596 when James was still King of Scotland alone,
In the 1500’s, this was really revolutionary!
Indeed this remains the situation to the present day. The British monarch may be supreme governor of the established Church of England when in England, but in Scotland is but a mere member of the established Church of Scotland, which is the Kirk.
But great things can be traced back to this uncompromising creed of absolute equality. Not least can be said to be the modern concept of representative democracy and even the United States Constitution is in many ways a pretty direct product of the Scottish Enlightenment which the Presbyterian Kirk did so much, consciously and unconsciously, to help engender.
(Some have said that this is how it was the Scots who invented the modern world.)
So Scottish Calvinist invented the modern World?
Why do I not believe this?
I always thought it had something to do with folk like John Locke.
Back on topic. Maximillian Kolbe allowed himself to be martyred so another could live. These Indian nut-jobs are prepared to starve themselves so that a Tom Hanks film doesn’t get released. Perspective people!
And I bet ya didn’t know this about Fr Kolbe. He’s the patron saint of (amongst other things) Amateur Radio.
John Knox: 1513 to 1572
John Locke: 1632 to 1704
Equality was a Scottish Presbyterian invention; so was representive democracy.
Locke came along over a century later, but as a follower not a leader.
Any time I hear of people going on a hunger strike I think Darwin Awards. If people are that stupid then let them die.
I have been reading esoteric/occult texts for many a moon and I find the row about the DC rather amusing. This info has been out there for years and years but no one got upset. But then again it does amuse me when a Christian stands up and says everything in the HBHG is utter tosh yet expects us to believe everything in the Bible is 100% truth. (Despite the contradictions, books that were culled by the Council of Nicea and the botched translations.) The one thing is certain is that neither the Catholic Church nor its Protestant bretheren wish to encourage people to educate and elighten themselves.
Surely it is a good idea to read religious history, both official and non-approved, the official books of the Bible as well as the “lost” ones. The Gnostic texts etc.
NB: Needless to say all this reading took me from a skeptical Christian (ie not buying the virgin birth, the trinity etc etc) in my younger days to a complete unbeliever now.
Not allowing any fun at all was a Scottish Presbyterian invention. Though some might claim that muzzie got there almost 1000 years before…
Equality is not the big deal here. The big deal is freedom. The US Declaration of Inpendance is heavily cribbed from Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Civil Government.
What precisely Knox achieved apart from tiresome rants contra “The Divil in Rome” God alone knows.
Really(Link)?
“The Bible is by the way, the basis of the concepts of individual worth and inalienable rights which were enshrined in the British and American legal codes…”
Surely there was a little more to it than a bunch of folks reading the Bible?! Just as starters, wasn’t there a certain individual who took great paine to make the Americans see common sense?
Starving oneself to death is an act of pure resentment – the desire to lash out turned inwards. And why? Can they not debate for fear of having their views defeated? Can they not reconsider their views? Pathetic.
Well it is their choice to do what they want with their bodies, and at least they aren’t trying to kill anyone. Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. Everybody knows that it is fiction, that uses a historical base like so many other novels. But really killing yourself because a work of fiction isn’t a strict work of history?
Guy-
Sorry I took so long to respond…. Sleeping off a business trip to Munich. In addition to some of the above posts. I would add what I think is the root of it all ….
“For God so loved the world that he sent His only Begotten…… that those who believe on Him would be called Sons and Daughters of God.”
This is radical stuff and no other religion gives this promise that I am aware of. Once Gutenberg’s press got cranking, this single passage started a revolution in thinking, that relationship with God was not predicated on wealth or lineage. This put a higher authority above any aristocrat and was so dangerous that the heretical concept of Divine Right was introduced by accomodating clergy, until its demise, incited by Gutenberg’s invention.
mike-
If I am correct, I believe that Thomas Paine was a preacher and used his pulpit to explain that independence for the Colonists could be justified biblically. By the way, the Gopels are very clear that suicide is a Mortal Sin.
Actually, as a Christian, I take this whole thing as a compliment; that we are so known for our civilised behaviour, that people rightly are horrified when those that would claim to be part of us would act in an …… un-Christian manner.
Uhhhh… Thomas Paine was an athiest.
Beside the point.
Yet I think about 10 of the Signers were Presbyterian ministers or sons of Presbyterian ministers — not least John Witherspoon, founder of Princeton University and direct descendent of John Knox. These people were no fans of Locke.
The US Constitution was in effect written by Thomas Jefferson, who was educated from his earliest years by a succession of Scottish Presbyterian ministers. The Constitution, as a result, is really the finest product of the Scottish Enlightenment.
(When Jefferson was US Ambassador in Paris later, the French commented on the fact that he spoke French with a very distinct Scottish accent… that’s how he was taught it!)
Snide, Iceland was a democracy earlier… so was ancient Greece.
What was new in Scotland was representative democracy.
In Iceland and Athens you had to be at the parliament yourself to vote. In Knox’s Scotalnd you elected a representative to attend and vote on behalf of his electorate. That was the big change.
“Uhh… Thomas Paine was an Atheist”
A bit wide of the mark JEM. Paine was a Deist, a rather large difference.
If you read his pamphlet Common Sense you will see how extensively he qoutes from the Bible to justify why hereditary monarchy is inately wrong. Probably why I assumed he was a preacher, but my apologies.
Andrew Ian Dodge, why does it make someone stupid if they go on a hunger strike? Do you think there could be no cause in which a difference that can be made that way could be worth your life?
ToryBoy: No offense, but you’ve got a lot of reading to do if you don’t think Christianity had anything to do with all of that philosophy. You’re absolutely right about “Divine Right” and other bizarre aberrations, but the notion that theologically uninformed philosophy informs the West’s notion of morality is simply counterfactual. Even the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment are either wrestling with, or rebelling against, concepts that can readily be found in moral thought going all the way back to Boethius and further.
According to Theodore Roosevelt (just as one example among many) Thomas Paine was “a dirty little atheist.”
Now I’m not going along with the “dirty little” part of that, but the evidence of Paine’s athesim is all around when you look at his life and his sayings.
In the Age of Reason he said, among much else:
Back in these days, that was about as public a declaration of atheism as you could dare make without risking a lynching.
Thomas Paine was certainly an atheist.
Uain, you’re the one far wide of the mark here.
(I don’t say any of this as any sort of attack on religion, but only in the interest of historical accuracy.)
Whilst they are also authoritarian asses, as I see no indication anyone who is a member of the government of India and its official Censor Board are planning to starve themselves to death, clearly I am not referring to them.
Simple really… while the Indian state disgracefully reserves such powers to itself, it is asked to use that repressive power by a bunch of Christians who are strangely threatening to commit the mortal sin of suicide if their demands are not met. That sounds like a pretty good example a group of people acting like “authoritarian asses” to me.
Because as I am condemning the people trying to invoke this use of power by the Indian state, it seems rather superfluous to also remark in such a brief article that I do not approve of this power being invoked by anyone. Do I really have to spell that out?
Satanic Verses: A novel. Wahwahwahwahgh etc.
da Vinci Code: A novel. Wahwahwahwahgh etc.
…and He made us in His likeness?
Pathetic.
Let them starve if they so choose – it’s the libertarian way, like taking a one-way trip to Mars. But what intrigues me is that, on the contrary, the religious fundamentalists in the House of Lords have today barred us from taking our own life with a painless dose of sodium pentobarbital (15 grams) in the event that one should be experiencing a slow, painful and stressful death. It dissolves in water – no nurse or doctor assistance required, just a little less government intervention.
There’s nothing at all preventing you from taking your life with a lethal dosage of anything whatsoever. The Lords rejected the notion of a bill “modelled on a law on the books in the U.S. state of Oregon, which would let doctors prescribe lethal drugs to patients who are suffering unbearably and have less than six months to live.” [Reuters]. There are plenty of other relatively painless and lethal remedies available on the open market which will achieve exactly the same result.
JEM,
Being an atheist does not prevent one from being a preacher… some might say it is a job requirement for being a great preacher.
I never said it did.
John Locke based his stuff on the concept of natural law.
Yes, it was adapted to a Christian outlook by Enlightenment philosophers as most of them happened to be Christians, though by no means not all (deism strikes me as as close to atheism as someone in the 18th century gets) but the concept of natural law can be traced back to the Stoics, and further back again to Aristotle and his definition of what virtue was.
Christianity may have coloured it but saying that the writings of Locke came from God are a bit of a stretch IMO. Christianity has said a whole lot of things, usually contradictory ones. I would hardly say the Inquisition was an aberration to be honest, the Catholic Church held Europe in a religious tyranny for centuries.
It was called the Age of Reason for a reason after all.
JEM, nothing of Paine you quoted is incompatible with Deism.
Last Toryboy, my suspicion is that the stated Deists of the time were indeed Deists in fact. I think the Atheists more likely passed as Christians. After all, it was easier, and what difference does it make to an atheist? There’s no deity to offend or respect.
Oh, no, I’m not saying they were closet atheists. Just that deism is a pretty weak position to take, certainly in more religious times such as those.
If atheism is republicanism, deism is a constitutional monarchy. 🙂
Deism is God for scientists. It posits a god that wrote the laws of physics, and it rejects metaphysics. Far from weak, Deism takes the most courage because both sides think you’re on the other one. I seriously doubt they were atheists. Certainly their life work was consistent with Deism.
Deism is more like constitutional reality. Reality by rules.
To stand up and state in so many words in late 18th century America that you were an athiest was little short of suicidal, the shortest way to being strung up on the nearest lamp-post (or 18th century equivalent of a lamp-post). Therefore the code-word for ‘atheist’ in these days was ‘deist’, a nominal position you could get away with in public, but everyone who knew what was actually going on knew it really meant ‘atheist’.
By the way, John Locke was hardly a pillar of moral rectitude. While condemning slavery in his writings, he was busy investing in what he well knew were slave-owning plantations in the West Indies.
Do I hear the word ‘hypocrite?’
Permanent Expat, Debbie: I agree that the Da Vinci Code is fiction and is thus important in different ways to non-fiction.
I’ve no idea what seems to make you both feel that as fiction it is less important. Orwell wrote great fiction and great non-fiction. I don’t think that it is ridiculous to believe that his fiction changed the world more than the non-fiction. Ayn Rand did the same, and I think that Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were probably bigger influences than her “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. People like Debbie who aren’t their target audiences think that they are ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop them from having an impact.
Again, I agree with the idea that they should be freely published and so on. This is just a reply to those who say not only that Dan Brown should be free from legal concerns, but that those who criticise him are irrational per se.
JEM, care to cite anything for the proposition that so many of the founding fathers were so comprehensively dishonest about matters of their conscience?
No, because I did not claim that nor do I believe it.
James of England:
I don’t even seem to think that fiction isn’t important. I am simply devastated that ‘intelligent’ folk get their knickers twisted confusing it with accepted “fact”……….Could it be that they doubt their “facts” & are therefor unable to rationalise? I do not see The Red Queen as an attack on the Monarchy, nor as a personal incentive to attack that institution.
The attitudes of Islamic fundis leave everyone bemused……& now the Crusaders are displaying the same incredible childishness.
If God/Allah/Jahveh etc. created us in His image & likeness He must have been suffering from a very bad-hair day at the time.
By the bye, could an Agnostic be a Deist?
JEM: You claim that people who wrote and talked widely about their religion were not of the religion that they claimed. How on earth is this not accusing them of dishonesty?
I personally find the characterization of people going on a hunger strike as “authoritarian asses” ludicrous, but obviously you disagree.
Whatever it takes to push that “it’s those damned Christians’ fault that the Indian government has an official movie Censor Board” meme forward, I guess.
Pardon? Are you confusing me with someone else?
I made no such claim.
James of England,
JEM said
As I understand his arguments, he claims the founders are willing to lie and claim a belief system of somebody else’s in order to avoid ostracism. Then, for some incomprehensible reason, instead of claiming Christianity, they choose another slightly less ostracized belief system that is contradictory to their own, and claim it!
What is happening here, almost certainly JEM is an atheist. Like some people who find vicarious glory in the accomplishments of people with whom they share a skin color, JEM is finding that same vicarious glory in the accomplishments of atheists. He really REALLY wants them to be atheists. He’s willing to recast them as cheats liars and cowards to make that shoe fit.
By the bye, could an Agnostic be a Deist?
I believe in a Deity which wrote the laws of physics, and find it aesthetically pleasing to believe said Deity structured the process of evolution, but I don’t know this to be the case.
permanent expat, Agnostic and Deist can not overlap yet the confusion is justified because both belief systems can be construed to require the exact same response. Many people who are not sure whether they are Agnostic or Deist don’t worry about it. Functionally, it usually makes no difference.
The best polite way I can express what I think of that remark is, ‘baseless twaddle’. Nothing I have said or suggested or implied can possibly lead you to that conclusion by any rational thought process. Therefore I conclude you don’t go in for rational thinking…
You don’t understand. The baseless twaddle continues.
I said no such thing, as you will see for yourself when you learn how to read, Midwesterner.
In actual fact I said that Paine (ONE INDIVIDUAL!) called himself a deist because of the well-nigh suicidal consequences of calling oneself an athiest back then.
It is crystal clear from even a brief study of the way people expressed themselves back then that ‘deism’ implied at most an impersonal god whose sole purpose was to create and ‘switch on’ the universe. This is quite clearly just one step away from atheism and the words were regularly used interchangeable, as ‘deism’ provided a sort of cover from the lynch mob.
Paine neither signed the Declaration of Independence or took part in the formation and acceptance of the Constitution. As such, although undoubtedly a powerful ‘propagandist’, does he qualify as a ‘Founder’? I don’t think so. And I certainly made no comment on the actual, real Founders propensity to lie. Nor do I now, except to say I’ve no reason to suppose they did.
Well, they should. Because an agnostic is someone who is not sure if they are a deist or not (among other things.)
So by what passes for reasoning by you, an agnostic is someone who is not sure if they are an agnostic.
Now I don’t know about you, but the world ‘crap’ springs to mind…
Midwesterner: Thank you for the Agnostic/Deist opinion. It appears I am either both or one or the other and, happily, no, I care not a jot.
…..and oh. there really is some knicker-twisting in progress. Paines in the youknowwhat.
As I understand his arguments, he claims the founders are willing to lie and claim a belief system of somebody else’s in order to avoid ostracism. Then, for some incomprehensible reason, instead of claiming Christianity, they choose another slightly less ostracized belief system that is contradictory to their own, and claim it!
To claim Christianity in those times, you’d be left having to answer many questions;
What denomination?
What Church?
Who do you know in it?
In what way to you finance it?
What’s your typical contribution?
How frequently do you contribute?
How frequently do you attend this Church?
What prayer book/sermons/quirks etc. do they use or practice?
Who can vouch for you in the Church?
Who do you do business with in the Congregation?
Who is the Pastor/Preacher?
How well do you know him?
How well does he know you?
…and perhaps a dozen more I can’t think of offhand. See why it’s easier to claim Deism than a formal religion? Life was lived and business conducted through the Church in those days, far more than is now.
Or would you rather he live the “Christian” lie? Fancy spending your days “being a Muslim” in the Middle East for the rest of your life, for example? I know I’d have better things to do with my time.
Paine did more for us in his idle Sundays at home than he ever could have done keeping up appearances on his knees at his local Church. I can forgive him his small “sin”.
James: I’m not saying that it wouldn’t have been a tempting lie. Obviously, there would have been clear and reasonable motivations to do so. Still, the deists could, and did, answer these questions and spent considerable effort in doing so. Jefferson, for instance, was a member of the Church of England, moving with his coreligionists to the Scottish branch of Anglicanism when Canterbury became too clearly the wrong archdiocese. When you recall that his religious views were regularly central issues in his elections, it should swiftly become clear that he was not calling himself a deist in order to avoid questions.
As an aside, I think that you fail to appreciate how small their communities were. It would be absurd to try to demonstrate that Jefferson did not attend Bruton Parish by trying to claim that he did not know who did. It’s not a very large church and it didn’t have a lot of competition. I’m not well educated in Paine’s religious life, but I would be very surprised indeed if his churchgoing and charitable habits were not well known. C18 != C21.
Likewise, the benefits of Paine’s atheism are not the same as the benefits of your atheism. If he was lying, and he was not a deist, then surely his spending time writing about how he was a deist (“the Age of Reason”) was not a useful timesaving way of avoiding detection. Better to be a Quaker and get to spend his time hiding in church in quiet contemplation of his outline for the latest successor to “Common Sense” or whatever.
JEM: Likewise, I agree that they could have been more dishonest. If, in fact, they were atheists, it would indeed have been a greater lie to have said that they were enthusiastic followers of Calvin.
That wouldn’t mean that it’s not a lie to say that they were deists if they weren’t. When you say that it was a “code word”, it really sounds as if you feel that most deists were using the term.
ie. That Jefferson was lying when he said “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every from of tyranny over the mind of man.”
That the reference in the declaration independence to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” was not in good faith.
Indeed, as I’m sure you recall, Jefferson used the term “atheism” as one of approbation (criticising, separately, immaterialism and Calvin), but perhaps this was just a sort of beard for his true beliefs, of which he told no one.
Franklin, it appears, used some really opaque code words for his atheism: “Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.”
Indeed, Franklin’s claims to be a deist, when understood to be his secret claims to be an atheist, make some of his statements not merely dishonest, but actively evil: “The worship of God is a duty”, eh?
But, it may be that you meant only that Paine used it as a code word. Just to be clear, are you seriously saying that when Paine said “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life” he intended it to be understood as “I do not believe in one God and I do not hope for happiness beyond this life”?
Do you have anything to cite for this proposition? If you’re just making it up, do you see why Midwesterner might believe that your own atheism might be a motivation? Since you say that it is not, can you provide us with an alternative motivation? Why would you post this stuff?
As a final question, why should someone worry whether they are an agnostic or a deist? I’m assuming you do not mean to deny, as you appear to do, that you can be unsure if you are an agnostic. Most humans have moments of doubt in their faith, whatever it is. This isn’t to say that Permanent Expatr should not worry about it (perhaps he should), but he is probably a better judge of whether or not it matters to him than we are, no? As an alternative form to the final question: what possible harm could accrue to Permanent Expat if he accidentally wrongly self-labeled?
I try not to wrongly self-label myself as I may fall foul of the law concerning truth in advertizing.
I remember once asking a beautifully cicatriced West African gentleman what his confession was…(I had to fill in an AB64 for him when he was joining the GCR (RWAFF))…You Christian? No. You Muslim?, No. You Juju (animist)? No. What you be?…….I savvy God dere for up.
Was that really not enough? His simple words live with me forever as an ultimate truth.
James of England, I am puzzled by this idea going around here that I claimed ‘they’ (the Founders?) lied about their beliefs. I did not then and do not now make any such claim.
Specifically, I never made any claim about Franklin being a closet atheist — or indeed any other claim of any sort about Franklin; I never even mentioned him! If you are saying he was, that’s news to me.
All I ever said was that Paine used ‘deist’ as a code-word for ‘athiest’. That was common in the 17th century, but certainly not the universal use of the term; most deists were clearly what they said they were and not atheists. Atheism was not a common position back then.
So yes, it was a lie, but really a rather small white life-preserving one.
And on top of that, I’ve already pointed out that I don’t think Paine was actually a Founder as such in any case!
If you ever get round to reading up about Paine seriously (perhaps I have because I live just 10 miles from where he was born at Thetford in England) you will learn that there was no serious doubt among those who knew him personally as intimate friends that he was an atheist. What he said in ‘Common Sense’, like what you quote, was put in to try to throw the atheist-lynching 19th century mob off the scent.
As for Midwesterners presumption of my supposed atheism… well it is utterly without basis, dangerous and (what other word can be use?) stupid. If I announced that Midwesterner is a baby-eating devil worshiper, I would be saying so on just as much evidence as his announcement that I am an atheist.
So, you ask, am I an atheist or not? Well, before Midwesterner’s crass and stupid jumping to a conclusion I would probably have answered the question if asked. Now, on princple, I will not.
However I will remind you that I entered this thread making two points.
One was that ‘Holy Blood & Holy Grail’ was as fictional in my view as ‘Da Vinci Code’.
The other was that universal equality and representative democracy came about through the adoption of the Presbyterian form of Christianity in 16th century Scotland.
Later, I pointed out that Paine was an atheist.
On this evidence, I am accused of atheism!
Of couse. It’s called ‘the truth’.
You tell me. I don’t know.
That was not my point. My point was that since an agnostic is someone who does not know if they believe in god or not (as a deist or whatever) and a deist at least claims they beieve in god, then someone who is not sure if they are an agnostic or a deist is someone who is not sure if they are not sure. THAT piece of innovative logical contortioning is what they should be worrying about.
If you are not sure if you are in a state of certainty, then it is automatic that you are not sure of your uncertainty.
It is absolutely possible to not know if you are a Deist or an Agnostic. It is what many rational people do when evidence is unobvious and the chosen responses are indentical. They don’t worry about it.
I’ll leave the rest of your confusing ramble and dissembling to James of England. He has phenominally more patience than me. But I will remind you of your blanket statement, “the code-word for ‘atheist’ in these days was ‘deist'”
No, it is not. The concept is peurile.
However it is absolutely possible to not know if you are a deist or an athiest. Such people are called (surprise!) agnostics.
In your confused rambling bluster, this may have been what you intended to say.
Here you are guilty of a fundamental logical fallacy — generalising from the particular.
I made no such blanket statement such as you imply. Because ‘deist’ was then used by athiests as a code word for athiest doe NOT mean that all calling themselves deist were athiests. In fact if all calling themselves deists were really athiests, it would not have worked as a cover or code word.
Clearly, you are way out of your depth around here. Maybe you should stick to playing with coloured wooden blocks or perhaps dressing dolls (depending on your gender propensity) in future. That would seem to be about all you might have the brain power to cope with.
Just in case your obfuscations are confusing any one else, I’ll try one more time. BTW, I assume that by “peurile” you were trying to say “puerile”.
Atheist = believes no god exists.
Deist = believes God does exist.
Agnostic = either does not know if the existence of god is knowable, or does not know if god exists.
I can be certain that I am not an atheist.
I can determine that the appropriate response for an Agnostic is to behave as though God exists, even though I am not certain.
If the god that I believe may exist is of the deistic form I can, at this point, reasonably conclude that it is unnecessary to pursue the matter further as my response will be the same in either case.
Not having chosen does not mean that choice is made for me. If I have not chosen, then I have not chosen. It’s possible.
To bring this down to your level, say there is an ice cream store that offers three choices, vanilla, chocolate, or random. What you are saying is in effect, it is impossible to be undecided between vanilla and random, because people who are undecided have chosen random. No. They haven’t. They’re undecided.
And in the field of theology, many people who reach this point often deem that a final decision is unnecessary.
Agnostic noun : a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God (Compact Oxford English Dictionary)
Therefore the first alternative meaning you offer (“someone who does not know if the existence of god is knowable”) is twaddle, as I have already been pointing out. The second alternative is of course what I have been saying all along, and it’s gratifying that the Oxford Dictionary agrees with me. (g)
This is known as Pascal’s Wager:
(From Wikipedia:) Blaise Pascal [ French mathematician, physicist & philosopher, 1623 to 1662] argues that it is always a better “bet” to believe in God, because the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief. Note that this is not an argument for the existence of God, but rather one for the belief in God. Pascal specifically aimed the argument at such persons who were not convinced by traditional arguments for the existence of God. With his wager he sought to demonstrate that believing in God is more advantageous than not believing, and hoped that this would convert those who rejected previous theological arguments. The incompleteness of his argument is the origin of the term Pascal’s Flaw.
Pascal’s Flaw is derived from the incompleteness of Pascal’s Wager, in which Blaise Pascal argued against atheism simply by stating that it would be better to believe in a nonexistant God than to offend one that did exist, while avoiding entirely the questions of whether or not God actually existed, whether or not the Christian concept of a faith-rewarding God existed, and whether belief could actually be chosen.
Pascal’s Wager and what you propose are examples of begging the question, a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.
It can also be characterised as circular definition, tautology, self-referential reasoning — or if you like, Catch 22.
As I said earlier, you are clearly out of your depth. And instead of making for the shore, you are swimming out into even deeper waters.
Stick to your little coloured blocks, there’s a good fellow. I don’t really want to see you drown.
Since you’re quoting Wikipedia, why didn’t you quote this?
Since this Wikipedia quote simply says at greater length what the Oxford Dictionary already said, I take it this is your ungracious way of recognising I’ve been right all along.
Stick to your coloured blocks.
I should have quoted a little more of it. –
I’m done. Your a troll.
Well, guys, that would have impressed my beautifully cicatriced African gentleman who, had he been able to express the thought, may have said that his universal god also played with colo(u)red building blocks.
permanent expat,
I’ve been a carpenter and built some houses. It’s deeply satisfying work.
Truth be said, I rather enjoy playing with building blocks.
Those of us with some minimal ability with the English language (British or American versions) would write that “You’re a troll”.
Back to the building blocks for you. It’s good to learn there’s something you’re competent with.
As my granny used to say to people like you who stayed well outside their area of competence, “Stick to the knitting.” — or in your case, wooden blocks, obviously.
Do you think there could be no cause in which a difference that can be made that way could be worth your life?
There is no cause where suicide by starving myself to death would be the correct path. How exactly could a difference be made by refusing the sustenance of life? Its a ploy for attention and pathetic one at that.
Viz the deist vs agnostic vs atheist debate: I consider myself a deist.