BHS
Gabriella,
1. I never suggested that you did claim that all religious people are good, and nor would that be relevant even if I had.
Then your list of failings of some religious people was irrelevant.
2. The religion/science analogy fundamentally misses the point – people behave differently when they have dogma and certainty (religion) from the way they behave when they have provisionality and doubt (science). That's the point.
Then you have missed my point. I was not comparing scientists and religious extremists. I was comparing beliefs - certainty in a belief that the end justifies the means in order to advance a scientific cause with the certainty in belief that the end justifies the means to advance a religious cause. For example the morally questionable decision by the US government to bring Nazi scientists to the US at the end of WW2 to develop biological weapons. The problem in both cases is not religion or science but people who have certainty of belief that the end justifies the means for the advancement of their particular cause – whether the cause is religious or scientific.
3. The dots are joined up – just ignoring the picture doesn’t help you here (about Islamic enforcers for example). The problem with “all religions” (all certain, dogmatic, faith-based belief systems in fact) is that people behave differently when they don’t think they could be wrong. It’s very simple.
Just asserting that is pointless. We're back to you trying to generalise based on the actions of some Muslims. Islamic enforcers in ISIS territory do not apply to all the Muslims who are not subject to their enforcement. Lots of followers of Islam ignore fatwas as having zero authority or applicability to them.
You have not demonstrated that a belief in God is a problem. You keep trying the argument that if you believe in God then anything goes but you have no evidence to justify it since quite clearly there are plenty of people who have a certain belief in God but who do not have a certain belief that killing people will please God.
That is where your argument fails because it is dependent on taking an individual person acting on a particular belief (killing to please God) and trying to use it to generalise about all faith beliefs, and you have no evidence to justify that generalisation. A person can believe with certainty in the concept of patriotism but they don’t all turn into George “either you are with us or with the terrorists” Bush – or Donald “get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired!” Trump, hence trying to argue that no one should believe in patriotism because there are some people who are certain they know what is acceptable behaviour to demonstrate patriotism is a non-starter as an argument.
Of course it’s serious – deadly serious. It’s essentially Christopher Hitchens’ famous challenge: “Name me a good deed done by a religious person that could not just as well have been done by an atheist. Now name me a bad deed done by a religious person that an atheist would have no reason even to contemplate”. The answers are “none” and “lots” respectively.
Hitchens sounds confused. Is he focusing on the deed or the motivation for the deed? If he is trying to say atheists don’t commit bad deeds that some religious people commit, that's quite clearly false as atheists kill people. If he is trying to say atheists don’t commit bad deeds because of their atheism, then atheists don’t do good deeds because of their atheism either. Being an atheist is irrelevant so what is the point of the comparison?
Wrong again for the reasons I’ve explained to you several times now: it’s just a tu quoque; human laws make no claims to inerrancy; they’re a lot less ambiguous than they would be if they were set out in vague verse; if need be, the draughtsmen are often available to be asked what they meant etc.
You’re missing the point. The Quran gives some moral principles – it is not a book of statutes.
Fallible people are supposed to interpret the moral principles to develop a workable legal system to govern fallible people. It is inevitable that the a system run by fallible people will exhibit imperfections. It is impossible to word any principles about fighting and killing in a way that achieves justice but does not allow for variation of circumstance, which therefore makes interpretation necessary if the goal is to have a just outcome.
You might think it “interesting” but it’s certainly suboptimal if you’re trying to set out some infallible rules, and why would it be impossible in any case for an omniscient god at least to have had a better stab at it than some vague versifying?
It’s not impossible to put it in prose, it just isn’t in prose. A matter of taste – some people find moral principles in verse inspirational, some people prefer them in prose.
It’s not a mistake to point out that, while you personally don’t want to blow up anyone, privileging your faith beliefs over just guessing provides intellectual cover for those who do.
That’s a nonsense argument. It’s similar to claiming that privileging some moral beliefs, which some people feel certain about, by enshrining them in law or through social norms provides intellectual cover for other moral beliefs you don’t like that some people feel certain about, so people should abandon enshrining moral beliefs in law.
And my “claim” is only that it’s clearly the case that it’s possible to set out moral rules that require less interpretation than some vague verses.
Less interpretation? As I explained the Quran is a message, not a statute book. The message contains some moral principles. If you want to make a claim about less interpretation you would first have to figure out a way to quantify the interpretation in order to do a comparison and the burden of proof is on you to show that you have come up with a moral principle on fighting and war that gave rise to less interpretation. Otherwise your claim is dismissed.
“…don't bury alive your female children” eh? Good grief. Why on earth would you think that needs to be written down whereas, say, “sexual activity with children” does not?
Because during the time it was claimed that Prophet Mohamed was delivering the message of the Quran, in 7th Century Arabia it was customary to bury girl infants because women were not valued.
Sexual activity outside of marriage was not allowed. The rules around marriage are in the chapter called Nisa (Chapter 4), which is the Arabic word for women, not female children. Chapter 4 states there is a marriageable age but does not state a specific age to be considered mature (“shudud” in Arabic) enough to marry as people mature at different rates depending on the period of history, the culture, the circumstances and environments. The Quran distinguishes between women of a marriageable age and children.
As for the freedom fighter thing, well yes. That’s often a problem when you’re daft enough to think that morality is amenable to absolutism. If your defence is, “but it’s really hard to do” then why would a god who's not up to the job even bother trying in the first place?
Bother trying to do what? Give moral guidelines in a message that we are supposed to interpret and apply to our individual circumstances? I think moral guidelines are a useful basis to develop a system of laws. I think laws are useful for societies.
I’m just suggesting that your explanations keep collapsing into incoherence or contradiction is all. If you want to use UN legislators for an analogy, then you’re also suggesting that your god is no better a legal draughtsman than they are.
In other words you are admitting that you can’t or won’t understand my point that it is impossible to draft a law about fighting and war that cannot be open to interpretation due to the variation in circumstances in every situation that could lead to one set of people arguing that violence is justified whereas another set of people will argue that it is unjustified.
Then you’re arguing wrongly. “The problem” is beliefs that are held dogmatically and arrived at by faith. That’s the beginning and end of it. We can get to the content of those beliefs (ie, the only thing you want to talk about) some other time – what this is about is that when people are certain they’re right and they haven’t reasoned their way into that there’s no way to reason them out of acting accordingly. That’s why your analogy with science fails – science actively builds in falsification tests: “Here’s a tentative model that accords with experience, but if ever X happens then the model is wrong”. Religion on the other hand trades in “sures” and “certains”. Where for example in the Quran (or in any other "holy" text) does it say, “If X, then the conjecture “Allah’ would be falsified”? It doesn't do that precisely because it asserts its claims to be certain. Even the possibility of fallibiity is anathema.
There is no automatic link between believing in Allah and believing Allah wants you to kill people. People believing in ghosts aren’t a problem and do not provide intellectual cover for people who kill someone because they are certain that person is possessed by a spirit. So the content of the belief that a person is certain about is the problem, not that they hold a belief.
Surely in your ontology it’s for the people (god?) holding you accountable to decide whether you did the wrong thing isn’t it, and it is simple to grasp only you keep avoiding it. Here it is again: If you decide that the holy book is wrong and follow your conscience instead, would you expect the deity holding you accountable to think you behaved well or badly?
I would expect that it would not be a simplistic yes or no answer. Most decisions are a mix of “good” and “bad” intentions, so I would think the concept of accountability would not make sense unless the person holding me accountable (who presumably decides what is “good” and “bad”) judges it based on the details of the case. I would expect them to dissect my individual motives and actions and give me credit for “good” and debit for “bad” and determine where that left my balance overall.
No doubt, but the question was about “whether you thought the 9/11 hijackers just happened to be a bunch of psychopaths, or were they rather pious men who thought the day of reckoning would go swimmingly for them because, regardless of their ordinary humanity, they’d acted as they thought their god wanted them to for which action they’d favourably be held “accountable”?”
It sounds as though you’re leaning toward the latter but can’t bring yourself to say so. Is that right?
Are you defining “can’t bring myself to say it” as someone who does not want to guess someone else’s mental health due to having insufficient information? I’m prepared to discuss Bin Laden’s thoughts as he appeared to have released a statement setting out his thoughts post 9/11, and we’ll just have to assume his thoughts were similar just before 9/11. Unless you want to point me to something said by the highjackers, I have no idea what they were thinking – but I can assume they were thinking the same thing as Bin Laden.
By the way, “Allahu Akbar” or some phrase remembering Allah is what a Muslim would try to say in a moment of intense emotion, and being about to die would be a period of intense emotion. If I was dying in hospital my last words or thoughts would probably be Allahu Akbar or Alhamdulillah or La ilaha illAllah.
Bin Laden at the start of his Letter to America justifying 9/11 said he wanted to “outline the truth - as an explanation and warning - hoping for Allah's reward, seeking success and support from Him” and he ends it “This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?” so he states his hopes about how Allah will view his actions, and then acts decisively in what he perceives as a war situation.
Then you need to look again. The problem being certainty is a principle. When you think that some things are certainly true and moreover that you know what those things are because of faith, that’s the problem.
Why? Because if you allow that to be respected as a position and privileged in the public square then you have no knowledge of what specific beliefs might at some time populate that paradigm and no way to argue against them when they do.
And that’s the problem.
Nope. Certainty just indicates resolve. It’s a think positive attitude. It is only a problem depending on the circumstances and the belief and there is no problem arguing against specific beliefs based on their consequences while allowing other beliefs perceived as having benign consequences to exist.
