Christian Theological/Philosophical Book Club discussion
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Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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Genni comment:"For example, angels. Granted, the Bible gives little specific information about them, but from what it does say, they exercised free will in a great battle in heaven, with a third of them choosing to follow the Adversary."
It seems very few Christians give this more than 5 seconds of thought.
I would add: Why are the angels not CONTINUALLY choosing and changing sides? What stopped them and holds them to their ONE TIME decision? It sure isn't their physical bodies or the flesh.
I say it is God himself who directed their choices. Imagine if ALL of the angels sided against him? Or NONE sided with Satan.
Of course: many Christians don't believe in angels anymore... Good thing the church is divided eh?
But this is so much fun I'll move it to a separate thread.
David wrote: "Good discussion all!If he created this universe to achieve some goal, what is it? Just curious what your ideas are, since you mentioned it.
As a Christian, I think the goal is relationship - God..."
Thanks for expanding my view of free will, David. I will have to think about that.
As for God's command, I understand that you think God's command is good. What I was wondering is if there is another possibility for an inherent morality other than God's command, what is that theory?
Paul wrote: ".Genni writes: If this is the best of all possible univereses, what must the other universes be like? :-) If he created this universe to achieve some goal, what is it? Just curious what your ideas are, since you mentioned it.
Just as we can catch glimpses of what we hope is the world to come within our own world, I think we can catch glimpses of the world of horrors that could have existed given other patterns of development.."
Haha. Yes, I agree. That question was not serious. I was quoting (loosely) Candide because it seemed appropriate. :-)
Mark wrote: "Genni said: My interest is in the idea of there being different types of free will. Just because our experience of free will (if indeed we do have it) is such as it is (I can't even explain it) doe..."Mark, I am really sorry. You are so enthusiastic about your work. I am really lazy about writing, struggling even to write reviews or posts on here! The drive and creative process of writers astounds me. So I appreciate that you have written a book. But I don't read sci-fi at all. And I have two kids, so my reading time is very limited. I hope others who are interested in sci-fi will take a look though. :-)
Rod wrote: "Genni comment:"For example, angels. Granted, the Bible gives little specific information about them, but from what it does say, they exercised free will in a great battle in heaven, with a third o..."
Rod, It is fun to discuss. :-) I understand that you seem to lean towards a more deterministic worldview. If that worldview is true then your response makes sense. However, if things are not determind beforehand, then we are kooking at different types of free will. I kind of think convincing cases can be made for both and have no idea where I stand on the issue. Or maybe there is a thid option that I can't currently imagine...
Has anyone moved on to the second essay? Ouch!
Also, did anyone resd the introduction? Since the situation is currently reversed, it strikes me as ironic.
Genni comment:" I kind of think convincing cases can be made for both and have no idea where I stand on the issue."
I agree - as much as I like to attempt to put all the puzzle pieces together: There may very well be a few ingredients we can't even imagine. But we must follow what the Bible clearly dictates.
I hold to a very messy deterministic. God's will be done PERFECTLY - whether we like it or not. But our freewill plays a part, we just aren't sure exactly how.
Some people confuse what is determined "Election" with what is guided "Freewill".
Genni said: Mark, I am really sorry. You are so enthusiastic about your work. I am really lazy about writing, struggling even to write reviews or posts on here! The drive and creative process of writers astounds me. So I appreciate that you have written a book. But I don't read sci-fi at all. And I have two kids, so my reading time is very limited. I hope others who are interested in sci-fi will take a look though. :-)
Thank you, Genni. According to the built-in Wordpress stats counter (possibly inaccurate), no one has looked at the blog post on free will that I linked here. Our planet has 7.125 billion people on it, and they produce 60 million Wordpress posts per month. Millions of brave literary efforts simply have to be buried. If you study these things, you'll see that there's a mathematical distribution called the inverse-exponential distribution that covers all such opportunity-based situations. The Pareto principle more or less fits, i.e., circa 10% of the works get circa 90% of the readers.
I shall return to the 10% and read another chapter of Russell when I have the chance.
Thank you, Genni. According to the built-in Wordpress stats counter (possibly inaccurate), no one has looked at the blog post on free will that I linked here. Our planet has 7.125 billion people on it, and they produce 60 million Wordpress posts per month. Millions of brave literary efforts simply have to be buried. If you study these things, you'll see that there's a mathematical distribution called the inverse-exponential distribution that covers all such opportunity-based situations. The Pareto principle more or less fits, i.e., circa 10% of the works get circa 90% of the readers.
I shall return to the 10% and read another chapter of Russell when I have the chance.
Let's plan on discussing each essay from the rest of the book, one essay a week.This week - "Has Religion Made Useful COntributions to Civilization?"
Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?According to Russell religion has done two good things - helped set the calendar and helped Egyptian priests chronicle eclipses.
He says "the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians." Sadly, I think he is right. We see this today - we'll take Paul's words on gay relationships as literal and leaving no room for debate, but the clear words of Jesus on violence...well he obviously did not mean that. Do you think Russell has a point here?
He argues Christians oppose intellectual life - this seems blatantly untrue and requires ignoring many great Christian intellects in all sorts of fields.
He argues it is untrue Christianity lifted the status of women. I disagree.
He argues that Christian opposition to birth control causes much harm. I agree. If we truly are pro-life why would we not want more birth control as access to birth control has been shown to drive down abortion rates?
He argues that since God foresaw human sin, then God is responsible for it. How do we answer this? I often draw an analogy to parenting - I knew, when I had kids, that they were born into a dark world and would experience suffering and heartbreak (they are sick right now...any prayers would be nice). But I chose to have kids anyway, seeing the joy and beauty of children as outweighing it. I do not think Russell would buy it, but I see God as seeing the good of creating as outweighing, in the long-run, the bad.
He says Christians once baptized babies and then killed them and that no orthodox Christian could find a way to condemn this. All i will say is that while I think some of his arguments are strong, ones like this one are weak. An argument against killing babies - thou shalt not kill. That was easy...and orthoox, Mr Russell.
Finally, his discussion of free will is interesting. He writes:
"Materialists used the laws of physics to show, or attempt to show, that the movements of human bodies are mechanically determined and that consequently everything that we say and every change of position that we effect fall outside the sphere of any possible free-will"
He goes on to say that only metaphysical systems like religion have any room for free will. I think a materialist view such as this leads to all sorts of horrific places - why not just give people happy pills to make the world better? At the end of the essay Russell shows great confidence that the world can be better. What steps would he take - enforce - to get here? If we are just machines, why not reprogram us? Makes me want to read Brave New World and re-read 1984
On the flip side, I think free will needs be better defined then Russell sees it. We have freedom to choose other than what we may desire, but each choice is easier or stronger depending on various forces. If I am hungry and someone offers me a cheeseburger, I may have freedom to say no but it will be quite difficult. So free will, to me, does not mean that we can choose any option on every choice we have. Our desires and will play a part and sometimes it may appear we have little to no free will (though our previous choices that feed or starve those desires play in).
So...anyone see anything here they want to chat about?
Once again, I found Russell disappointing here.First, let me say that I am open, even sympathetic, to the basic thrust of his argument: That Christians have contributed much to the suffering of the world and often oversell the achievements of other Christians to bettering it. (As I mentioned above, one could argue that more progress has occurred in the 300 years since the mostly secular Enlightenment than occurred in the 1,200 years of religion-dominated culture that preceded it.)
But Russell's tone and method are to take a good point and overstate it to the point of nonsensicalness. To simply dismiss the numerous Christians who made great strides in science (Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo), philosophy (Descartes, Kant, Locke), human rights, etc. and act as if all human progress has occurred in spite of Christianity is absurd.
He raises some good points. Yes, the church often falls short of the standard set by its founder. Yes, churches in America were significant sources of opposition to ending slavery (and yes, the most prominent abolitionists, such as Garrison and Douglass and Lincoln, tended not to be straightforward Christians). And the church has been a significant source of anti-Semitism and patriarchal oppression (he no doubt would chalk the Holocaust up to the forces nurtured and unleashed by Christianity).
But from these specific examples, Russell moves to generalizations that seem untenable to me. Do Christians have trouble with sex, in large part because of the toxic doctrine of original sin and a misguided notion of purity? Yes. But it seems the abuse and suppression of sex are two sides of a coin that has existed across nearly all cultures and times, regardless of whether they heard the name "Jesus Christ."
Thus Russell's major moral objection to Christianity — "religious precepts date from a tim when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow" — seems to be wide open for an objection that correlation and causation could be reversed here. Perhaps the moral conscience continually outgrows its more barbaric assumptions because of the influence of religious precepts, which reflect their time yet call people to transcend it.
Again, I think Russell stumbles on an interesting point when he says the Christian emphasis on the individual soul can lead to problems with Christian ethics. But he places this emphasis in the early church, rather than the medieval one, which is a mistake, I think. And when Russell says there's not a single saint canonized because of "work of public utility," I said out loud: "Nonsense." I'm pretty sure Bertrand Russell had at least heard of St. Nicholas.
To wrap this up, I'll reiterate my biggest problem with this essay: Russell ascribes to Christianity problems that existed in the broader, non-Christian culture. He criticizes soul-body dualism, and rightly so, in my opinion – but that dualism rose among the pre-Christian Greeks. He laments the spread of intolerance around the world as if intolerance did not exist before Christianity. But surely Russell would acknowledge that as evolved beings, humans would be poorly adapted to pass along their DNA had not natural selection provided us with selfishness and intolerance from the very start
By the end of the essay, Russell is simply spitballing, fantasizing about a pure world in which scientism is the only religion. I suppose we'll give him something of a pass because the horrors of eugenics were not yet fully apparent and their culmination in the Holocaust had not yet occurred (though, as I've said, science and Christianity can share the blame for helping that climate exist). Nevertheless, any religion can be subject to abuse, whether one founded on devotion to a man or devotion to science. Russell is correct in pointing out some of the flaws and excesses of the former; he has a tremendous blind spot regarding the latter, and that weakens his argument significantly.
I think Russell would have to resist the urge to cringe if he re-read this essay now – even if he still essentially agreed with himself. One comes upon such an optimistic artefact of an earlier time with a degree of pity that the writer didn’t live to see what happened to his scenarios. Then, of course, that thought is superseded by the knowledge that the same thing may very well happen to one’s own scenarios.
Reading “Has religion made useful contributions to civilisation” brings to mind the now-obscure figures of Olga Lepeshinskaya and Trofim Lysenko, the two Russian grandees who became the most radicalized exponents of the doctrine that “the environment is the genotype” – that not only people’s natures, but also their bodies and their crops, can be perfected by cultivating them in a nurturing environment (Consider any name given here without background information as a Wikipedia link). Russell here argues for an early 20th-century vision of socialist human engineering, and he denies free will just as Lysenko denied Mendelian inheritance. The idea that people and creatures are inherently independent and not perfectly environmentally malleable was a problem in this world-view. How long ago that was. It evokes a sense of silliness-nostalgia, an emotion we have no word for.
One of the most poignant sad-funny anachronisms here is the idea that a scientized world would bring sexual knowledge among children into the realm of calm rationality. I suppose that, to some extent, this has happened. As I was writing this, my eleven-year-old neighbour came by wearing a gay pride T-shirt from 2013 – I didn’t ask him if he was supporting a family member, coming out, or just wearing a cool shirt. Even in a world where this can happen, imagine what would be said in the Daily Mail or the Toronto Sun if Russell were to republish the following paragraphs today:
“Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of ‘improper’ talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defence for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age.
“But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favour than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.”
The reality today is that the idea that children are to be protected from all but the most neutralized sexual knowledge has been taken up with great force by mainstream atheistic feminism and its male supporters. A Russell advancing such propositions today would be Tweeted to death as in a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. A mild but typically provocative statement from Richard Dawkins some years ago that he felt his experience of having been sexually groped by a teacher at age nine was far less traumatic than that of a Catholic being raised to believe in hell has caused Dawkins to be pilloried ever since, in widespread subcultures, as a pedophile apologist or possibly “one himself.” Few if any of his sexually horrified critics have espoused any Christian doctrine.
One of the main projects of major organizations and publications in various countries has been to lobby governments precisely to “put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age,” by censoring the internet. In Australia and the UK, this agenda has been largely implemented, though ever more censorship is constantly demanded. Given that much of the internet’s sexual knowledge is expressed as anything-goes pornography, some of this lobbying may be defensible. What is important in our discussion here is that it is by no means associated with Christianity. It is now a core secular project to bowdlerize sexual knowledge for the young. The “tell them everything” trend Russell led, which reached its apogee in glossy, illustrated sex books for the whole family in the 1970s, has been killed dead by proponents of the secular, feminist abuse discourse. The family encyclopedias of sex are now illegal. Russell’s own tribe, the atheists and seculars, prosecute them with vigour.
We now know that literally thousands of celibate priests responded to the temporary atmosphere of all-ages sexual liberty in the 70s and 80s by relieving their chastity with unwilling children. I think this tends more to embarrass Russell than to vindicate him, but I am not sure he’d agree. Perhaps he’d see it as religion’s mindless revenge against his modernity. Such sly productions of the wild human ‘id’ are hard to fit into most systems of belief, if those systems don’t include some facsimile of ‘original sin.’ I don’t think Russell would ever have accepted the existence of such an impetus, since it would undo almost all of his social conjectures.
If Russell were here to answer back, he wouldn’t be much impressed by my statements so far, in that they mostly do not contest his ideas. I’ve only spoken about the fortuitous success or failure of these ideas in a chaotic human environment. They mostly haven’t done well, and many Christians would nod knowingly and say, justly in my view, that ‘we knew crafty old sin would infiltrate the Russell fantasy world.’ This isn’t an accident: the ideas are flawed, not just retrospectively ill-starred. If I have time, I’ll make another post contesting some of the ideas themselves.
Reading “Has religion made useful contributions to civilisation” brings to mind the now-obscure figures of Olga Lepeshinskaya and Trofim Lysenko, the two Russian grandees who became the most radicalized exponents of the doctrine that “the environment is the genotype” – that not only people’s natures, but also their bodies and their crops, can be perfected by cultivating them in a nurturing environment (Consider any name given here without background information as a Wikipedia link). Russell here argues for an early 20th-century vision of socialist human engineering, and he denies free will just as Lysenko denied Mendelian inheritance. The idea that people and creatures are inherently independent and not perfectly environmentally malleable was a problem in this world-view. How long ago that was. It evokes a sense of silliness-nostalgia, an emotion we have no word for.
One of the most poignant sad-funny anachronisms here is the idea that a scientized world would bring sexual knowledge among children into the realm of calm rationality. I suppose that, to some extent, this has happened. As I was writing this, my eleven-year-old neighbour came by wearing a gay pride T-shirt from 2013 – I didn’t ask him if he was supporting a family member, coming out, or just wearing a cool shirt. Even in a world where this can happen, imagine what would be said in the Daily Mail or the Toronto Sun if Russell were to republish the following paragraphs today:
“Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of ‘improper’ talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defence for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age.
“But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favour than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.”
The reality today is that the idea that children are to be protected from all but the most neutralized sexual knowledge has been taken up with great force by mainstream atheistic feminism and its male supporters. A Russell advancing such propositions today would be Tweeted to death as in a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. A mild but typically provocative statement from Richard Dawkins some years ago that he felt his experience of having been sexually groped by a teacher at age nine was far less traumatic than that of a Catholic being raised to believe in hell has caused Dawkins to be pilloried ever since, in widespread subcultures, as a pedophile apologist or possibly “one himself.” Few if any of his sexually horrified critics have espoused any Christian doctrine.
One of the main projects of major organizations and publications in various countries has been to lobby governments precisely to “put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age,” by censoring the internet. In Australia and the UK, this agenda has been largely implemented, though ever more censorship is constantly demanded. Given that much of the internet’s sexual knowledge is expressed as anything-goes pornography, some of this lobbying may be defensible. What is important in our discussion here is that it is by no means associated with Christianity. It is now a core secular project to bowdlerize sexual knowledge for the young. The “tell them everything” trend Russell led, which reached its apogee in glossy, illustrated sex books for the whole family in the 1970s, has been killed dead by proponents of the secular, feminist abuse discourse. The family encyclopedias of sex are now illegal. Russell’s own tribe, the atheists and seculars, prosecute them with vigour.
We now know that literally thousands of celibate priests responded to the temporary atmosphere of all-ages sexual liberty in the 70s and 80s by relieving their chastity with unwilling children. I think this tends more to embarrass Russell than to vindicate him, but I am not sure he’d agree. Perhaps he’d see it as religion’s mindless revenge against his modernity. Such sly productions of the wild human ‘id’ are hard to fit into most systems of belief, if those systems don’t include some facsimile of ‘original sin.’ I don’t think Russell would ever have accepted the existence of such an impetus, since it would undo almost all of his social conjectures.
If Russell were here to answer back, he wouldn’t be much impressed by my statements so far, in that they mostly do not contest his ideas. I’ve only spoken about the fortuitous success or failure of these ideas in a chaotic human environment. They mostly haven’t done well, and many Christians would nod knowingly and say, justly in my view, that ‘we knew crafty old sin would infiltrate the Russell fantasy world.’ This isn’t an accident: the ideas are flawed, not just retrospectively ill-starred. If I have time, I’ll make another post contesting some of the ideas themselves.
On a couple of the ideas in “Has religion made useful contributions to civilisation” : slavery, you and me.
One of my complaints about ‘Why I am not a Christian’ was that it seemed to favour determinism over probability – Russell seemed not to respect a God who played with dice and constructed games of chance.
In this essay, his non-statistical framework comes out yet again. A religion would have made a useful contribution to civilization if it had made people significantly more cooperative, peaceful, generous or loving than they would have been without it. Russell’s question could be answered definitively if a random or socioeconomically stratified sample of people from Religion A could be compared to those of Religion B, or to adherents of Non-Religion A-prime, to ascertain if some measures related to these good qualities were better in adherents of Religion A. If Russell had duly considered this notion and declared its impossibility, he would at least have addressed his question with some degree of respect. As it is, though, he has resorted to one of the best known devices of flawed logic, ‘proof by selected example.’ Under statistical randomness, you’d have to look through a whole lot of Christians before you came up with many adherents of a subpopulation as venomous as the Ku Klux Klan. But under Russell’s rhetorical management, they pop right up as an example. In fact, he also mentioned them in ‘Why I am not a Christian.’ Social movements that encompass hundreds of millions of people can scarcely control the possibility that there might be a fringe somewhere where the basic principles have been subverted under self-serving fanaticism. In reality, there may be far more kindly, unknown people in a small denominations like the Chaldeans, completely unknown to Russell, than were active in the KKK at its peak. To what extent is religion responsible for politically venal groups that find it convenient to hide themselves under its skirts?
One thing that Christians did manage, statistically if not absolutely, was to radically diminish the level of slavery in contrast to levels seen in adjacent parts of the world – for a time, at least. Here’s some Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_...
“As these (European) peoples Christianized, the church worked more actively to reduce the practice of holding coreligionists in bondage. St. Patrick, who himself was captured and enslaved at one time, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus. The restoration of order and growing power of the church slowly transmuted of the late Roman slave system of Diocletian into serfdom.
Another major factor was the rise of Bathilde, queen of the Franks, who had been enslaved before marrying Clovis II. When she became regent, her government outlawed slave-trading of Christians throughout the Merovingian empire, as well as purchasing and freeing existing slaves.
About 10% of England's population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves, despite chattel slavery of English Christians being nominally discontinued after the 1066 conquest. It is difficult to be certain about slave numbers, however, since the old Roman word for slave (servus) continued to be applied to people with a status that was later to be called "serf.”
Demand from the Islamic world dominated slave trade in medieval Europe. For most of that time, however, sale of Christian slaves to non-Christians was banned.”
During the era of colonization, half a millennium later, after developing an urge to grow sugar in lands where the indigenous slave trade was a major part of commerce, one nation after another backslid. Arguably, though, the impulse to free one’s fellow men and women remained as a Christian impulse even as aggressive traders pushed for the opposite tack. There are still thousands of slaves today in several Islamic countries, even though eventual manumission is inscribed as a good deed in Islamic scripture.
Every social movement that becomes predominant and reconciles itself with the powers-that-be is going to have to bear the burden of encompassing a political spectrum of adherents. Whatever your movement, there will be conservatives, liberals, radicals, go-getters, contemplatives, aggressive people, timid people, and diplomatic people. Russell says “It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is, and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.” Are we mild and relatively rational thinkers within Christianity supposed to give up our claim to being Christian, now that we’ve won the political draw? I think not! The ogres of frowning ‘orthodoxy’ are not the automatic bearers of authenticity, even when they insist they are.
Christianity has contributed to me, improved my ways. I assert my statistical right to be counted. You may do the same. No one examining the effects of faith can legitimately reach over my head and go straight to the Ku Klux Klan. Let’s do the Christian thing and improve rhetoric so that it is less likely to engage in such deceptions.
One of my complaints about ‘Why I am not a Christian’ was that it seemed to favour determinism over probability – Russell seemed not to respect a God who played with dice and constructed games of chance.
In this essay, his non-statistical framework comes out yet again. A religion would have made a useful contribution to civilization if it had made people significantly more cooperative, peaceful, generous or loving than they would have been without it. Russell’s question could be answered definitively if a random or socioeconomically stratified sample of people from Religion A could be compared to those of Religion B, or to adherents of Non-Religion A-prime, to ascertain if some measures related to these good qualities were better in adherents of Religion A. If Russell had duly considered this notion and declared its impossibility, he would at least have addressed his question with some degree of respect. As it is, though, he has resorted to one of the best known devices of flawed logic, ‘proof by selected example.’ Under statistical randomness, you’d have to look through a whole lot of Christians before you came up with many adherents of a subpopulation as venomous as the Ku Klux Klan. But under Russell’s rhetorical management, they pop right up as an example. In fact, he also mentioned them in ‘Why I am not a Christian.’ Social movements that encompass hundreds of millions of people can scarcely control the possibility that there might be a fringe somewhere where the basic principles have been subverted under self-serving fanaticism. In reality, there may be far more kindly, unknown people in a small denominations like the Chaldeans, completely unknown to Russell, than were active in the KKK at its peak. To what extent is religion responsible for politically venal groups that find it convenient to hide themselves under its skirts?
One thing that Christians did manage, statistically if not absolutely, was to radically diminish the level of slavery in contrast to levels seen in adjacent parts of the world – for a time, at least. Here’s some Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_...
“As these (European) peoples Christianized, the church worked more actively to reduce the practice of holding coreligionists in bondage. St. Patrick, who himself was captured and enslaved at one time, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus. The restoration of order and growing power of the church slowly transmuted of the late Roman slave system of Diocletian into serfdom.
Another major factor was the rise of Bathilde, queen of the Franks, who had been enslaved before marrying Clovis II. When she became regent, her government outlawed slave-trading of Christians throughout the Merovingian empire, as well as purchasing and freeing existing slaves.
About 10% of England's population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves, despite chattel slavery of English Christians being nominally discontinued after the 1066 conquest. It is difficult to be certain about slave numbers, however, since the old Roman word for slave (servus) continued to be applied to people with a status that was later to be called "serf.”
Demand from the Islamic world dominated slave trade in medieval Europe. For most of that time, however, sale of Christian slaves to non-Christians was banned.”
During the era of colonization, half a millennium later, after developing an urge to grow sugar in lands where the indigenous slave trade was a major part of commerce, one nation after another backslid. Arguably, though, the impulse to free one’s fellow men and women remained as a Christian impulse even as aggressive traders pushed for the opposite tack. There are still thousands of slaves today in several Islamic countries, even though eventual manumission is inscribed as a good deed in Islamic scripture.
Every social movement that becomes predominant and reconciles itself with the powers-that-be is going to have to bear the burden of encompassing a political spectrum of adherents. Whatever your movement, there will be conservatives, liberals, radicals, go-getters, contemplatives, aggressive people, timid people, and diplomatic people. Russell says “It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is, and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.” Are we mild and relatively rational thinkers within Christianity supposed to give up our claim to being Christian, now that we’ve won the political draw? I think not! The ogres of frowning ‘orthodoxy’ are not the automatic bearers of authenticity, even when they insist they are.
Christianity has contributed to me, improved my ways. I assert my statistical right to be counted. You may do the same. No one examining the effects of faith can legitimately reach over my head and go straight to the Ku Klux Klan. Let’s do the Christian thing and improve rhetoric so that it is less likely to engage in such deceptions.
If I was an atheist: slavery would be fair game. Why not? Does Russell apply any of his thoughts to Atheism? What makes him assume it is noble and good?
Good comments fellas.Paul, your post made me wonder if Christian apologists do the same thing? I mean, I agree with you that Russell skews the facts in order to make a stronger case. But when I read many apologists, they gloss over real problems with Christianity to present a better case. Maybe it is just how the game is played - if you are trying to convince people of your position then you need to make your position sound more obvious and logical then it actually is.
Mark, your comments were interesting as I have read ahead and just read Russell's "Our Sexual Ethics." I do not agree with most of it, but he did spend some time talking about how we ought to be more frank when discussing sexual issues with children, when they ask. This made me think of a statistic I saw - I follow an anti-porn organization on Facebook called Fight the New Drug and they had a stat that said a high percentage of kids search for porn to fill in a lack of knowledge on sex.
When I saw that, I thought the answer is to be more open when talking about sex. If sex is not a total mysterious taboo, maybe kids will not look for answers in porn. And Russell made a similar point - kids brought up in ignorance on sex are more obsessed with it then kids who are knowledgeable.
You made the point that today it is atheists who want to disallow sexual knowledge - "The reality today is that the idea that children are to be protected from all but the most neutralized sexual knowledge has been taken up with great force by mainstream atheistic feminism and its male supporters". That is new to me. I thought it was conservative religious people who were more uptight.
Mark wrote: "On a couple of the ideas in “Has religion made useful contributions to civilisation” : slavery, you and me. One of my complaints about ‘Why I am not a Christian’ was that it seemed to favour det..."
Excellent responses Mark. I appreciate your taking the time to comment in such detail.
I agree. It seems to me that at least in America, it's conservative Christians who try to keep knowledge of sex out of the public sphere. Witness the ongoing insistence of abstinence-only education despite the evidence indicating that teaching high schoolers about contraceptives actually decreases pregnancy and abortion rates. That said, I have wondered if an alliance between the religious right and the feminist left could lead to some robust anti-porn legislation. But I don't see that as the kind of prudery that Russell seems to be objecting to. David, do Christians do the same thing? Absolutely. This is where I find myself trapped in the middle. I find Christian apologetics too simplistic and generally unconvincing. I also find atheist apologetics too simplistic and unconvincing. So what does that make me?
more intelligent than the average bear.Christian has always been simplistic to the point of frustration. 1 Cor 1:23-25 there's no getting away from the unsolvable mysteries of a realm we can't comprehend.
A Christian walked into a garden and said "this is amazing, I would love to meet the gardener."The atheist walked into the garden and said "this is amazing but I don't see any gardener what are you talking about?!?!"
They spend the rest of the afternoon arguing about plants.
I love talking about plants, but plants don't prove or disprove the existence of a gardener. When you see Him, then you know.
I find Christian apologetics too simplistic and generally unconvincing. I also find atheist apologetics too simplistic and unconvincing. So what does that make me? Honest.
I think Josh's point is true, that the message of Christianity is simple in its essence. But the message (saved by grace through faith or however you put it) is not what we are talking about here, we are talking about the apologetic case for that message.
I read Cold Case Christianity recently and it is a decent apologetics book. But there were numerous times the guy said things that way over-simplified the issue - I noted that any NT or OT scholars would see it as more complex and disagree with his points (even evangelical ones). But like Russell, he simplifies complex issues to make a case.
This may work for a while, but what happens when the convert begins to read the other side? That is why I'd rather be honest and up front about doubts and difficulties with faith all the while saying you can be a disciple of Jesus while acknowledging the difficulties! Get the core right and worry about the fringes later.
As far as sex, that is a can of worms to get into. But I agree with what you said - it seems that if the tactic is to protect kids this is going to fail. Access to contraceptives, in my opinion, ought to be acknowledged as a way to decrease unwanted pregnancy. To be blunt, hopefully not crass, a little desensitivity might not hurt. THere is more I want to say, but I fear I may cross a line.
I'll say it, free sex equals dead babies.
I'm not saying free sex. That is one extreme and I don't think it helps when Christians go to the other extreme, being uptight and making tons of rules and hiding everything from kids. I am saying we need honesty and frank conversation.
Thanks, Peter and David.
About sex and kids, I know a boy via family friends whose dad and mom were addicts some years ago, with only his mom 'recovering' and thenceforth becoming a great mother. His older brother became openly bisexual at 19 and had a particularly ribald gay teenaged friend. So anything this boy, 13, hasn't already at least heard about, I probably don't know about it either.
The result of this is a gnostic's dream -- he's very comfortably as normal as can be (also heterosexual, since 'normal' has widened out beyond that these days) and respectful, personable and conscientious. The gold has shed the dross. He's a Christian boy; we sometimes go to church together since the rest of his family generally doesn't. I think being so knowledgeable serves him well, in that no one can catch him by surprise in anything related to sexuality.
About apologetics: I respect apologetics, but in the curling game of Christian salvation, the holy spirit is the momentum on the rock and apologetics is more like the sweeper action.
Looks like hard work, doesn't it?
Boom.
About sex and kids, I know a boy via family friends whose dad and mom were addicts some years ago, with only his mom 'recovering' and thenceforth becoming a great mother. His older brother became openly bisexual at 19 and had a particularly ribald gay teenaged friend. So anything this boy, 13, hasn't already at least heard about, I probably don't know about it either.
The result of this is a gnostic's dream -- he's very comfortably as normal as can be (also heterosexual, since 'normal' has widened out beyond that these days) and respectful, personable and conscientious. The gold has shed the dross. He's a Christian boy; we sometimes go to church together since the rest of his family generally doesn't. I think being so knowledgeable serves him well, in that no one can catch him by surprise in anything related to sexuality.
About apologetics: I respect apologetics, but in the curling game of Christian salvation, the holy spirit is the momentum on the rock and apologetics is more like the sweeper action.
Looks like hard work, doesn't it?
Boom.
The next essay is "Do We Survive Death?" I found a few quotes somewhat thought provoking, but not much to talk on:"Those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future, and will therefore be the immortal ones"
"The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis."
The next essay is "Nay Madam, it is". Here he talks again on the purposeless of the world. He says metaphysics bears no relation to how the world actually is and that future hope was just invented to give comfort but has no bearing in reality. He goes on to say some interesting stuff about how metaphysics can play a function much like a Shakespearean play - the point is not that it is real but rather how it makes us feel. He distinguishes metaphysics from religion here. His point seems to be that thinking about reality, pondering metaphysics through intellectual curiosity, is not a bad thing but religion with dogmatism and rules and such is.
I am going to start moving through this discussion faster as it seems to be slowing down.
Oh, I must have a different version! I've been slogging through "What I Believe," which is the third essay in my book. Not only is it long, but I've been wrapping up reading and papers for two grad school classes, so it's been harder to get to reading other stuff. Still enjoying the discussion though!
Thanks David for keeping it going. Interesting stuff. Loved your last post: the Hopelessness of Atheism.
That's my bad Paul, I did not clarify which edition to get.
David said: I think for love to take place, there has to be some degree of freedom. If scientists ever create life-like robots that can be programmed to say they love you and that you can have sex with, this is not real love. Likewise, if we did not have the option to say no, I do not think love of God would be real.
That said, I think free will is more complex, it is not a simple dichotomy of determinism vs. freedom.
I've previously written a short piece that addresses exactly these topics, including the topic of robots vs. love, and I'm going to link it here:
Free will, as found in champagne drinkers and robots
As usual, this is in sci-fi format; it's prefaced by a short explanation of the ongoing story-line.
Free will is more complicated than most philosophers let on. It's a problem where any programming for your planned loving robot is going to involve recursive functions. Love links integrally to faith, and as one of the characters says in this piece, "Faith is the ultimate Dauw-Lewrou room [you'll see what that means] of decision-regress." I think anyone interested in free will would find his analysis interesting.
It would also be interesting, though, if someone undertook to challenge 'him' (or his author).
By the way, two of the characters in the post are in a same-sex relationship. Not that that's a big deal in civil discourse these days, but I don't want any of our more traditional friends here to feel as if they were lured someplace they didn't want to go.