March 10, 2003
MAYBE HIS GRANDMOTHER:
Dawkins versus the priests and New Age shamans? No contest: Richard Dawkins is suitably knockabout in A Devil's Chaplain - but he should stop pulling his punches. (Robin McKie, March 9, 2003, The Observer)Consider this experiment in temporal ingenuity. You are holding your mother's left hand. At the same time, she clutches her own mother, your grandmother, with her right. Your grandmother then holds her mother's hand, and so on into the past.With each individual allocated a yard of private space, your ancestral queue snakes off into the Industrial Revolution, through the Middle Ages and on into prehistory, until, 300 miles down the line, it eventually reaches the missing link, the common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six million years ago.
Now imagine a similar, parallel queue emerging from that common ancestor, this time following the chimpanzee side of her family - until it reaches the present day. 'You are now face to face with your chimpanzee cousin, and you are joined to her by an unbroken chain of mothers holding hands,' Dawkins observes.
The crucial word in this sentence is, of course, 'unbroken', for at no point on Dawkins's seamless chain of primates does one link differ in any substantive way from the next. There is only imperceptible change, one species eliding effortlessly into the next. There are no jumps in which one animal abruptly turns into a totally different kind of creature, no sudden hurdling of species barriers, an idea that so bothers opponents of natural selection. There are only tiny, unnoticeable transformations.
It is a typically deft piece of Dawkins imagery that not only illustrates the relentless power of evolutionary process, but reveals the dangers of the 'discontinuous mind', the thinking of the priest, lawyer or politician who seeks to compartmentalise our minds and inflict arbitrary concepts - soul, race, even species - on mankind. These are all villains in Dawkins's world, particularly the priests, individuals who have inflicted the 'the most inflammatory, enemy-labelling device in history' -religious affiliation - and who have been responsible for civilisation's worst horrors.
Of course, when Hitler went forth to kill Jews, he didn't much mention souls, but he did call them monkeys. The idea that soul-denying reason has less blood on its figurative hands than "enemy-labelling" religion is amply denied even by simple reference to abortion. Just to offer some perspective on this--you could turn the current war in the Middle East into a genuine crusade, but you'd have to kill every person in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine before you approached the number of children aborted in just the United States since Roe v. Wade did away with the arbitrary concept of human dignity. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2003 8:27 PM
I don't know about that.
Surely if a woman decides not to have an abortion and gives birth to a child, she'd be likely to have fewer children in the future?
She can't have less children than she had pregnancies at that point.
Posted by: oj at March 11, 2003 7:41 AMHow are Communism and Nazism different from religious affiliation?
Regards,
Jeff Guinn
Jeff - good question - so what's the value of the religious-secular distinction?
Posted by: pj at March 11, 2003 11:39 AMPJ:
You answered a question with a question.
I think a lot (many? most? Sorry, I can't remember specific examples) of historians view Communism and Nazism as messianic religious belief systems, complete with sacred texts, priesthoods and deities.
The value of the religious-secular distinction? I'll go with virtually ending sectarian slaughter.
Regards,
Jeff Guinn
How is atheism different from religious affiliation? Isn't the refusal to believe in the Absolute a form of absolutism?
Posted by: oj at March 11, 2003 11:53 AMJeff -- I agree with the historians who view Communism and Nazism as essentially equivalent to religions. And given the slaughters Communists and Nazis perpetrated, one would have to say that "sectarian slaughter" is as recent as Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. The sects are new, but the slaughter continues.
And the secular-religious distinction is therefore proved valueless, because these are secular sects.
I find it more useful to distinguish between universalizing, monotheistic, salvationist cults -- which easily encompasses Christianity, Stalinism etc. -- and non-universalizing, polytheistic cults.
Under this rubric, the U.S. way of life would be universalizing and perhaps salvationist but not monotheistic. Hinduism is salvationist but not monotheistic or universalizing. Buddhism is salvationist and universalizing but not monotheistic (except maybe Pure Land, which is the most violent form of Buddhism, QED).
Anyhow, the ones who want to kill you are the universalizing salvationist monotheists, no matter what the brand.
pj:
Here are a couple meanings for secular: not overtly or specifically religious; not ecclesiastical or clerical; not bound by monastic vows or rules; not belonging to a religious order or congregation.
That Communism/Nazism didn't worship a transcendental being does not make them secular; the character of their belief system makes them sectarian. The words "secular sect" simply do not track
OJ: Atheism is not a form of absolutism, it is just applied skepticism. Actually, agnostic would be a better term. Unfortunately, far too many people interpret that to mean "can't make up his mind," instead of the terms true meaning: the issue under discussion is undecidable.
Regards,
Harry:
Thanks for making the distinctions--very well put.
Regards,