Club Troppo

Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I’m about ready to concede it’s not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with what had been billed (at the end of last week’s show) as a discussion that tackles ‘the existence of God and the great moral challenges of our time.’

In fact, the panel didn’t debate the existence of God at all, apart from one set piece by John Lennox about the complementarity of science and religion. Lennox was the only intellect of substance on the panel. He’s an Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist, who’s debated many of the prominent atheists, including Dawkins, Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. In addition to his debating skills and knowledge, Lennox benefits from a happy combination of scholarly gravitas and disarming humility, the latter aided by a charming Irish brogue which is in winning contrast to the superior English accents of Dawkins and Hitchens. (Continued)

I couldn’t help thinking that the media’s obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist.   The latter rather crassly bills himself as “Godless” Gross.  This week Gross went toe-to-toe with the ABC’s God-botherer correspondent Scott Stephens on the vexed question of the penchant of too many Catholic clergy to molest children.

Both wrote columns about a recent Catholic Church-commissioned major report on the subject by John Jay College, but reached diametrically opposed conclusions about causation.  Gross puts the kiddie-fiddling down to priestly frustration born of unnatural celibacy. Stephens on the other hand adopts the John Jay College line that there was an epidemic of it in the 60s and 70s, probably caused by a combination of poor priestly recruitment decisions, dodgy training and the temptations of the Swinging Sixties.  He cites figures showing that the reporting of priestly abuse was much lower before the 60s and has subsequently tailed off (so to speak) over the last couple of decades.  Accordingly, Stephens argues that celibacy can’t be to blame because it was a constant factor throughout.  The child-molesting epidemic must have had another cause:

This line of reasoning has been characterized as the “blame Woodstock explanation,” designed to give the Catholic Church some alibi for its crimes. It does no such thing. Indeed, there can be no more damning indictment than that the Church had so imbibed the proclivities of the age that it reproduced them in its own life.

That being said, only someone who is wilfully naive or intractably bigoted would refuse to acknowledge that the social antinomianism and fetishization of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 70s, along with the valorization of the pursuit of individual pleasure and free experimentation with transgressive sexual practices, created the conditions for a dramatic escalation in deviant behaviour – including paedophilia – both within and without the Church.

But surely there is another and rather more plausible explanation which doesn’t exonerate the bizarre institution of priestly celibacy quite so glibly. Is it not likely that priestly child abuse was just as prevalent before the 1960s but drastically under-reported because of the general prevailing social repression about matters sexual?  Recent reports about the treatment of Aboriginal children and child migrants in Church homes through the 1940s and 50s rather suggest some such explanation.  And is it not likely that apparent reductions in child abuse reports from the 1980s onwards are explained by the very permissiveness that the 60s ushered in? The Stephens/John Jay College explanation appears to rest on a tacit but patently spurious assumption that we’re now in a post-permissive age of latter day prudery where vulnerable young priests are no longer subject to licentious temptations.   In reality, children are much more sexually aware today, so priests who might otherwise be tempted by pre-pubescent flesh know that they’re unlikely to get away with it.  Perhaps better clergy selection and training has played a role too.  You’d certainly hope so.

If you look at the picture on the left, you’ll see a ladder on the upper right window looking at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You may not believe it, but there’s more chance than is usually the case with relics that the church is on the right spot. It’s location was not arrived at in the middle ages, but in the third century by St Helena, Constantine’s Mum who turned up in Jerusalem and looked for relics.

Anyway, the attentive viewer might assume that the ladder will be moved some time soon, it’s job in lifting up some tradesman to work on the window done. But you’d be wrong, something which is well illustrated by the companion photo from the late nineteenth century. There’s that ladder again!

In fact the ladder turned up sometime in the 1850s. So what’s it still doing there? This is the explanation offered by Atlas Obscura which offers itself as a “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, esoterica (I guess this qualifies in the latter two categories).

The church is run by six denominations – Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman catholic church, with lesser duties shared by Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches.

The whole edifice is carefully parcelled into sections, some being commonly shared while others belonging strictly to a particular sect. A set of complicated rules governs the transit rights of the other groups through each particular section on any given day, and especially during the holidays. Some of the sections of the church however still remain hotly disputed to this day. Arguments and violent clashes are not uncommon. In November 2008 the internet was flooded with videos of a fistfight between Armenian and Greek monks in one such dispute. A small section of the roof of the church is disputed between the Copts and Ethiopians. At least one Coptic monk at any given time sits there on a chair placed on a particular spot to express this claim. On a hot summer day he moved his chair some 20cm more into the shade. This was interpreted as a hostile act and violation of status quo. Eleven were hospitalized after a fight resulting from this provocation.

This state of affairs makes any agreement about renovations or repairs on the edifice impossible. The church is in a state of decay as a result.

The famous immovable ladder is a bizarre outcome of this religious stubbornness pushed to extremes. Some time in the first half of the 19th century, someone has placed a ladder up against the wall of the church. No one is sure whom he was, or more importantly, to which sect he belonged. The ladder remains there to this date. No one dares touch it, lest they disturb the status quo, and provoke the wrath of others. The exact date when ladder was placed is not known but the first evidence of it comes from 1852.

The ladder hasn’t moved since.

The immovable ladder is a nice metaphor for decision making with large groups or within complex systems of rules or regulations.  Satisfying them all can be hard. And when the obstacles are not ‘hard’ ones, they can be soft sociological ones.  Within bureaucracies one is ill-advised to offend anyone gravely – often even if they’re not very important.  People don’t like other people getting their noses seriously out of joint and will go to some lengths to preserve harmony and consensus.  So the immovable ladder goes into my slide pack to illustrate the problems of paralysis by serial veto. And below the fold, you’ll find a spooky codicil to the story.  Just spooky. Come in Dan Brown, come in.

(Continued)

(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it’s certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xayDw2gS7-0&feature=related

OTO I really love this song about Christmas by Kate Miller-Heidke, although it doesn’t quite capture the Christmas our blended family has in store … (hat-tip Values Australia)

Click here if you have 7 spare minutes or so to listen to an excerpt from an ABC Local Radio panel show I usually do on Friday mornings.

Update - Roger from Values Australia has also milked the McKillop cow (though rather less light-heartedly than yours truly) as has Adele Horin in The Age.

This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week, orgainsed by the Muslim Students’ Association.

The official question for debate was ‘Should God have a place in the 21st Century?’, and the format was pretty standard for this kind of thing: two speakers on each side, a fifteen minute opening speech, rebuttals, cross-examination, and a Q&A session to round off. The arguments were pretty standard, too, for anyone who has seen a few of these debates (there are scores on YouTube). For some fairly partisan accounts, see here and here.

Wassim Doureihi spoke first for the affirmative and got the evening off to a bad-tempered start by announcing that he had very low expectations of his opponents. This was ironic as he was easily the weakest of the four, with little to offer except the observation that without God there would be no objective morality — more wishful thinking than an argument — and some unsubstantiated hyperbole about ‘atheism’s two embarrassing children — totalitarianism and liberalism’. (Continued)

Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and was statistically astute enough to regret not having smoked a page of Bertrand Russell’s complete works as a control.

(Continued)

So asks Don of Ed. It’s sufficiently off-topic to warrant its own thread. Here’s my own first stab at the question, but it’s doubtless very unsophisticated, and sure to be substantially revised after a robust discussion.

Belief has a wide variety of meanings connected by family resemblance.

1. A deeply held conviction, such that finding the contrary to be true would be a disturbing experience — like finding out that your father isn’t your real father. Or it might be something quite trivial — I remember discovering that a fellow student at uni, who had told me she was 26, was really 22, and it quite shook me. Children’s belief in Santa is in this category.

2. A hunch we hold on a factual question that we know is not settled one way or the other. I might claim to ‘believe’ that there is life on Mars or that the Hindenburg was sabotaged, but I wouldn’t be unsettled if the balance of evidence tipped the other way.

3. A hunch on a question that is unsettled and we know is unlikely to be settled in our lifetime, such as whether there is extraterrestrial life, or whether God or gods exist.

4. An official position we declare on some issue — factual or metaphysical — that we don’t have a firm conviction or opinion about, but on which an opinion is expected. Don’s opinion poll responses are in this category, but some people enjoy expressing such ‘beliefs’, like fashion statements.

5. A cultural identity statement: If someone raised as a Catholic says ‘We believe that in the Eucharist bread is transformed into the body of Christ’, they may be combining two factual statements — (i) here is a piece of Catholic doctrine and (ii) I am, due to circumstances of history, identified as a Catholic. The speaker’s personal convctions may remain uninterrogated and are irrelevant to the point being made.

Religious belief could be any of these. For children and extremely naive adults it most closely resembles (1). People who have deconversion experiences when they are very young usually find them very truamatic. In modern societies reflective people who remain religious progesss from (1) to (3), which is essentially optimistic agnosticism. Less reflective people progress to (4), and non-reflective people stay at (5).

There are intermediate cases between the above, but have I missed any important forms of believing, at least insofar as they relate to the question of religiosity?

Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity. Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as infant credulity, pattern seeking, or the tendency to attribute strange events to agency.

But last year a certain Gregory Paul announced in Evolutionary Psychology that this project is a false trail. According to Paul, the rapid decline in religious belief in the West shows that it can’t be a hard-wired psychological propensity.

Paul first ignited controversy in 2005 with an article in the Journal of Religion and Society arguing that religiosity was highly correlated with high rates of homicide, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and other social disorders. Despite his explicit protestations to the contrary, critics initially inferred that Paul was blaming religion for social problems. In fact his aim was merely to refute the conventional wisdom that religion is socially beneficial, and the best way to achieve this was by showing that the relationship is if anything negative.

In the 2009 article, Paul went on to propose a causal relationship, but with the direction of causation running the other way: that is, religion is a response to social dysfunction and anxiety. This is evident, he argues, from the observation that religiosity has retreated in response to three pressures: (1) the march of science and rational thought; (2) increased economic security including employment protection and free medical care; and (3) the ascendancy of materialism as a legitimate outlook. These factors neatly explain why religiosity has declined so much in Europe, Japan and Australia, and why the USA is such an outlier. (Continued)

I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins.  Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological sciences populariser Stephen Jay Gould.  They seemed to me to epitomise scientific rigor and rationalism.

However Dawkins seems to have gone completely off the rails over his atheism obsession.  His gratuitously offensive and silly reference to Benedict XVI as “Pope Nazi” at a recent atheists’ conference in Melbourne was bad enough.  But now he and Hitchens claim they want to arrest the Pope for ‘crimes against humanity’ for  ’the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church’.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s highly unlikely that Benedict’s alleged actions (he wrote a letter as a Cardinal in 1985 indicating that moves to defrock a paedophile priest required “very careful review” and more time for investigation)  could be classified as a crime against humanity within the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court even if he had ‘covered up’ child abuse,  the known facts don’t actually point to the commission of any crime at all by Benedict:

(Continued)