AW! Epistles
From Ray
Abstract
Thursday, 01 January 2004
Although I agree with your position 100% I do not want to appear like a “believer”, who, whether as a Christian fundamentalist or as a rabid Atheist, loves to read things that are “in concert” with their worldview… I have been as any scientific thinker looking for evidence that my thinking is WRONG. How else can we challenge our own status quo? So I enjoy your work which is compatible with what I see, but I am absolutely and humbly open to all ideas.
I agree with you entirely, but there is a danger, and that is that you might fail to keep in consideration the whole balance of the evidence. You use Karl Popper’s idea about evidence that our hypotheses must be open to refutation and any that are not are therefore not scientific, but this applies really to specific hypotheses. The totality of science is the sum of all these, and so the refutation of one hypothesis does not bring down the whole of science. I am sure you realise this, but the Christians will argue the opposite, and many who do not grasp that science is not an arbitrary collection of beliefs will believe them.
In the field that I have written a lot about, the myths of Christianity and Judaism as expressed in the bible, my view is plain enough—the balance of evidence overwhelmingly disproves it as history. Not all though. There is some real history in the bible, and from it, the Christians will claim it is all therefore true. Theirs is the faulty attitude but they always manage to sell it to their converts. Having considered a lot of evidence, and decided it is overwhelmingly against the bible as history, I would be foolish to continue to sit on the fence and refuse to take a position on the grounds that I would then be biased. Evidence is sought so that we can take a position one way or the other, and our fairness is maintained not by taking a view, by by always being open to new evidence that might change our view. So, it is correct to be open to ideas—though not all ideas because many of them are irrelevant to the issue and many quickly prove to have been rejected already, and have merely been represented in a new guise.
I hope you are well in the UK today. I extend you my good wishes and my admiration for the homeland of our “English” tongue. You think so nicely, Mike, and that is because you can take a huge subject and summarize it into “chewable” form. I was raised in the Catholic faith, Christian Brothers, French tradition, and then St Johns University. I loved the smells and sights of huge cathedrals and incense, pomp, etc. It is uplifting until a young man faces the fraud. I have since learned to not say around believers:
- their inner fears surface and turn into hostility,
- I am not out to shatter dreams, let them dream.
What the heck, I am probably full of as much shit anyway.
You sound to have had an interesting and successful life. My father was a Catholic, but essentially lapsed. His own father was a bit of a holy Joe, I gather, but he died before I was born. My mother was an Anglican Protestant, those called Episcopalians in the US, and refused to have my sister and I brought up as Catholics, so we had the relatively mild indoctrination of Anglican and County schools.
It would be hard for anybody not to admire the architecture of many of our churches, especially the ancient ones and the Medieval Cathedrals, and many like the ceremonial and ritual atmosphere, especially of Catholic churches, but I still do not understand how the Poor Galilean becomes as glitzy as the Catholic and Orthodox churches make him, so I guess my own criticism of religion began from a standard Protestant criticism of Catholicism. It quickly moved on to a realization of the hypocrisy of them all.
The advantage of writing on the web is that you can always say, to the many believers who complain, that no one made them read it. Just as on TV, you can click to another channel, and the Christian criticism therefore betrays its own intolerance. Regrettably, in my view, sensible people are letting the Christians get away with their intolerance, and I fear that I might have been lucky enough to have lived in a short window of freedom in the continuing Dark Age history of the churches. Our children will not be so lucky if we let the Fundamentalists get away with their designs.
My wife and I have for years outlined the potential subjects of a Sunday Television Program that focuses on Humanistic uplifting programming to be an alternative to US fundamentalist broadcast: “Yew Sinner-ah, send in your vulgar money to the Lord-ahhh.”
I love this! It made me laugh.
Anyway these days I am longing for a total work that answers my questions as a guy turning 60 next autumn: Given our history of myths, violence, territory, and greed, is there any hope for a message that will be popular enough to produce a just or humane world in the future without the magic of religious faith?
Well, I think the scientists and educationists are behaving like moral cowards over this. Maybe they do not think it is serious, but I think it is, and perhaps you too. My own worldview is that of Adelphiasophism, a sort of rational scientific pantheism, in which the world we live in is treated as if it were divine for practical reasons. If salvation (from death), providing food and pleasure, and giving life are the qualities of a divinity, then they are the qualities of Nature, not some abstract father. It is a practical Stoicism, with a simple gratitude for having been, an acceptance that we cannot always be, and a severe hesitancy to judge whether other life can be or not. I cannot see it appealing to the simple souls who will believe Christianity, but any scientist, agnostic or atheist could accept it because it denies supernatural gods and such like.
Contemporary note: Many in the US are resentful of Mexican people who come here and work for lower wages, they forget that in the US we are ALL immigrants, and if truth be told, had no particular claim to coming here other than the generosity of those who came ahead of us. Why in modern thought is there any reason to believe that a human born to the earth has to be subject to invisible lines drawn by mapmakers to protect the territorial claims of people long dead? Why are the simplest ideas of justice, dignity and liberty so hard to evoke… Wah, wah, wah. When I was a teen I stopped by at “speakers” corner at Hyde Park and was thrilled… not by the Worker’s Party speakers on the box screaming about the abuse of the working class but by a culture that accepted the value of contrary opinion.
We have just the same here, but the Mexicans are Asylum Seekers—those displaced by our gung-ho adventures in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, first supporting unspeakable despots then bombing shit out of the people to get rid of them. The ordinary guy and his family are the ones who suffer while most of the Herods and Pharisees get richer and smugger. It is greed that stops us from having a sensible world. “Enough is a feast”, but no one thinks like that any more. I was lucky enough to have retired early on a small pension as a result of redundancy. I thought I would never manage it, and would have to return to work, but I found that most of my expenditure was related to work and all the pretence and demands it made. The pension has so far been more than adequate, and I can even feel a certain smugness myself that I have not been unduly damaging the environment, by living frugally. I always thought that was the point of the Poor Galilean, but modern Christians say not. They never doubt that a camel can go easily through the eye of a needle.
