nameandnature | Entries tagged with robhu

'Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI' by Marc Horne - TimesOnline - RichardDawkins.net: Dawkins Our Leader: "Needless to say, I did NOT say "I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI" or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope's proposed visit to Britain."
(tags: richard-dawkins pope catholic abuse children ratzinger law uk politics dawkins)
Christian faith and modern British politics, a layman’s view: Mattghg has a post on the role of faith in politics. He mentions an illiberal attitude taken by Labour (they wanted to reverse an amendment which said that discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred). Robhu and I are having an interesting chat in the comments, concerning whether Britain is a Christian country, among other things.
(tags: robhu religion discrimination homosexuality politics christianity uk britain)
Arresting comedy « Open Parachute: Graham Lineham (Father Ted, Black Books) on what would happen if Dawkins and Hitchens actually arrested the Pope.
(tags: pope dawkins hitchens funny arrest graham-lineham richard-dawkins christopher-hitchens)
Evangelical scholar forced out after endorsing evolution - USATODAY.com: "Forced out"? Don't you mean "expelled"?
(tags: evolution theology bible expelled bruce-waltke lolxians seminary biologos)
Special Investigation - Atheist Alert: The horrifying truth about atheists.
(tags: funny video parody religion atheism youtube nonstampcollector darwin stalin)
Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything: The Alot is a mythical beast. Lots of people on the web write about them.
(tags: funny grammar spelling english language internet)

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Expel the evildoer from among you

If you're not reading back over my old entries (why not? I used to be much better before I jumped the shark), you might not have noticed that there was some LJ drama over the last one. robhu conclusively won the debate on whether complementarianism is sexist by the cunning ploy of banning me from commenting on his blog: an innovative rhetorical tactic, and undeniably a powerful one. But it's not over yet. I've realised that he may have made a Tone Argument, which might enable me to reject his ideas out of hand and advance three squares to the nearest Safe Space, so I'm awaiting the results of a steward's inquiry. It's possible I may have too many Privilege Points to make a valid claim for Tone Argument, but I'm hopeful the powers that be will see things my way.

Could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Down on the Premier Christian Radio boards, they're talking about science and religion again, specifically whether science can ignore the possibility of God's existence. I've been sticking my oar in, as usual.

Red Ken again

When I reviewed Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions, I reckoned that he had something to do with Christianity himself at one point, as the observational humour was too keen to come from a total outsider. It turns out he's the son of a Presbyterian minister. At an SF convention in 2006, MacLeod spoke about his childhood, discovering that creationism was wrong, and the social contract. This old speech of his was linked from his recent blog posting on the changing meaning of evolution. MacLeod says a change occurred in the 1970s when Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins introduced a thoroughly materialistic theory. This replaced older ideas that evolution is progress up a sort of secular Great Chain of Being, ideas which C.S. Lewis grumbled about, though not for the same reasons as the biologists. "Evolutionary Humanism was no doubt troubling enough to believers, but at least it wasn't a vision of blind, pitiless indifference at the heart of things." It's the latter vision which MacLeod says has so riled modern creationists. I'm not sure whether he's right, but it's an interesting speculation.

Morality

Some people argue that if there's no God, you can't have real morality. We've discussed this previously here (and also here). The debate seems to boil down to which definition of morality you find psychologically satisfying, since as far as I can tell it has no practical consequences: almost everyone thinks that Bad Things are Bad, whether or not they also think there are moral absolutes.

Anyway, Jeffrey Amos over at Failing the Insider Test has an interesting post specifically about the idea that morality shows there's a God. Firstly, he argues that all moral systems have the problem of where you start from, so the Euthyphro dilemma isn't introducing a new problem for theists. Nevertheless, it does show that the problem isn't solved by introducing God, either. Secondly, he argues that a theist must either say that God's ideas of morality are not similar to ours, in which case pretty much everyone is wrong about morality and once we allow this, it's no stretch to say that they might be wrong about it in a different way (for example, maybe true morality doesn't have to be absolute). Or a theist must say that God's morality is similar to ours, but this runs into the problem of pain: a God whose morality was similar to ours wouldn't allow there to be so much suffering in the world. The standard response that God allows suffering for inscrutable reasons doesn't help: if God is inscrutable, how can we know his morality is similar to ours? The second prong of the second argument isn't new (gjm11 makes it here, and I doubt he was the first), but I think Amos's article states it very clearly.

Readers: in a recent thread on

robhu's journal, Rob said I had misrepresented complementarians (of which he is one). I'm not sure how many of you click the links in my postings and have noticed that I occasionally have a joke with them, but to be clear, on the occasions where I have linked the word complementarian to Houseplants of Gor, I did not mean to imply that complementarians are the same as Goreans. Unlike Goreans, complementarians do not believe that women are intrinsically inferior to men and should naturally be their slaves. They believe that men and women are equal in status and dignity, but should occupy different roles in relationships like marriage, with women submitting to men's loving, self-sacrificial leadership. You can find a summary of complementarian beliefs in the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Despite the complementarian assertion that men and women are of equal status, I find complementarianism problematic because it seeks to perpetuate a hierarchy with men in a position of power over women, and claims that this sort of hierarchy is normative. While I should probably be cautious about comparing historically oppressed classes for fear of being called problematic myself (this being one of the worst things that can happen to you on LJ, as some of you will know, second only to being accused of "fail"), I'd note that replacing "men" with "white people" and "women" with "black people" in complementarian statements would not result in something many of us were happy to sign up to (with the possible exception of Rudyard Kipling, who was big on loving, self-sacrificial leadership). To be clear, I am not saying the complementarianism is racist (I'm saying it's sexist), but I believe the analogy is appropriate as members of both classes were and are oppressed as a result of being born into a particular group.

While there are important differences between them, complementarians and Goreans are similar in that both advocate a male-led hierarchy and claim it is the correct and fulfilling state of all male/female relationships. As such, the two philosophies are, shall we say, equal in status and dignity, with complementarianism certainly not deserving more respect merely because it originates in a religion.

Hope that's cleared things up. Must go, scribb1e's just finished cooking my dinner.

Update: Expelled!

Edited to add: So, Rob didn't like my analogy and banned me from commenting on his blog.

Of course, I didn't chose the analogy at random. The question at hand was whether complementarianism should be considered sexist. I think it should. If similar statements to those complementarians make about women were made about another historically disadvantaged group, like black people, we would rightly consider them discriminatory against that group. Likewise, there have been times when sentiments we'd now consider discriminatory have been couched in terms of self-sacrifice and serving the disadvantaged group, as Kipling's poem illustrates.

Is complementarianism as bad as racism or sexism at its most horrible? No. It is patronising rather than hateful, and I'm not sure how much harm it does. There are much worse examples discrimination around today. I suppose what irks me about complementarianism is that it pretends to righteousness (that, and the fact that I was once taken in by it). Were the early Christians ahead of their time in their attitude to women? Quite possibly, but complementarians are behind theirs.

If anyone feels the analogy was taking things too far, I'd be interested to discuss it.

Update again: Censored!

And now the post has gone. I never appreciate people playing the "unpublishing" game: here's my copy so you can see what I actually said.

A while back,

robhu was looking for Bible study courses, and

nlj21 recommended TEAM, a course which is run by the vicar of an offshoot of my old church (you might remember my posting about his sermon on The God Delusion).

I poked at the media site. Surprisingly, I didn't make a bee-line for the sex one: anyone who has been in an evangelical church for any length of time has heard 1 Cor 7 preached to death, and knows that sex is a Good Thing if you're married (but if you're very keen on evangelism, or merely very bad at talking to girls, you can be "single for the gospel"). Instead, I picked on the evangelism one, specifically the Q&A session (that's a link to the audio, which you may want in a minute) on how to convert your friends. Know your enemy, right? :-)

~~John Richardson~~(edited: I got the name wrong initially, apologies to Richardson and Woodcock should either read this)Pete Woodcock, the speaker, is a straight-forward sort of bloke. He's also pretty funny. The Q&A starts with a worked example of how to talk to various types of people about Jesus, which says sensible stuff about working out where people are coming from, sensitivity and suchlike, while also having a slightly cheeky approach (he talks about how he gave the residents of a new estate flyers saying "your foundations are crumbling", for example).

There were a couple of bits which stood out as quick shocking. Looking at it from the evangelical viewpoint, I'd say Woodcock is being consistent with it, and that this is so much the worse for the evangelical viewpoint. See what you think.

( Pray for your well off friends to have an accident, pray for obstructive liberal vicars to be converted or to die )

It's lucky this chap isn't a Muslim, or he'd have his own Channel 4 documentary team doing a programme on him. We're not quite in Undercover Mosque territory, as there's no suggestion of giving God a helping hand with the brake lines (not worrying about a "dead vicar" here probably refers to a spiritually dead vicar, i.e., one who is not an evangelical Christian): at least praying for something gives God the option of saying no.

These are off the cuff responses to questions. I imagine the poor chap never thought they would turn up on some atheist's blog. But the important thing to realise is that, as far as I can tell, Woodcock is perfectly consistent with evangelicalism, consistent in a way which even many evangelicals are not (the lack of consistency in the other evangelicals is possibly a manifestation of belief in belief: they think it's good to believe in hell, so they say they believe in hell, but they don't anticipate-as-if there's a hell). If you ask your evangelical friends where you're going when you die, if you're not a Christian, they'll tell you're going to Hell. Hell is the worst thing ever, so keeping you out of it is pretty important. What are horrific injuries in the temporal world compared to an eternity in hell? What is the death of one man if it leads to the salvation of many?

One might quibble about the advice to pray for this stuff, rather than, say, praying for God to convert the person or get the vicar out of the way and letting God sort it out. For some reason, it's usually thought to be better to pray for specific stuff rather than generalities. If we concede that it would be right for God to do this stuff, it's surely right to pray for it. So would it be right for God to do it? Recalling that whatever God does is right, that the Bible is inerrant, and that the Bible says that God isn't averse to killing people that get in the way of his chosen people, it's hard to say that smiting recalcitrant vicars isn't something God might do (it's right to pray that the vicar gets converted, but recall also that God doesn't force himself on people to make them converted, so the smiting is a useful backup plan if the vicar won't become a real Christian). In the case of the car accident, we know from C.S. Lewis that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Speaking of car accidents, this sort of thing does make you want to have a Barlet moment, doesn't it?

robhu made a post on the Two Ways to Live presentation, which summarises the important points of evangelical Christianity. That particular posting's intended to be evangelistic without getting de-railed by knowledgeable atheists, so I've move my original comment on it from there to here at Rob's request. This posting remains open for whatever discussion you'd like to have on it (as do most of Rob's), subject to my comment policy. Here's my comment:

Serious points about the video, rather than silly ones, in no particular order:

The video doesn't summarise Christianity, it summarises evangelical Christianity. You won't find many universalists or liberals agreeing with it, and I think the Catholics would at least take a different slant on it. So I think it's a mistake to leave out the "evangelical" qualification when talking about TWTL, unless you really do think those people aren't Christians (which I don't think you do).

( And another thing... )

In the comments on a recent posting of mine, there are several discussions on the subjects of consciousness, Hell, whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

robhu is speaking for the "we sinners all deserve to burn, but God is so super that he saves some people" side,

gjm11 for the opposition. I've been busy all day so haven't had much chance to contribute. I think it's shaping up to be the post of mine with the most comments. Have fun.

In a not entirely shocking move (although I was kind of expecting it earlier, rather than now),

robhu has re-converted to evangelical Christianity. His stated reasons are that he doesn't want to be a philosophical zombie and he kind of feels God is real. More reasons as we have them.

This sort of thing can happen to the best of us. Stay vigilant.