****Day-O!****
"To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Gen 3:17 (NIV)
Compare this with Articles 3, 4 and 5 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948:
"Article 3
These are far-flung hopes. They are not practical or really viable at all, but for all that - and perhaps because of that - they are still not really ideal, abstract thoughts. Yes, human rights is incredibly popular and everybody wants to expand the law and work within the system to do whatever, but what kind of bastardisation of the simple notion of dignity is that? I emplore you to stop for a minute and see that, on some utterly important and visceral level, what the UDHR touches on is the idea that when ordinary human beings look around and see misery, they can, on the back of that experience, feel completely justified - even ontologically so - in expecting and demanding better. That is a simple thought that anyone can author in its entirety.
And yet the Human Rights movement is ideological, it idealizes certain modes of thought and culture. I don't wish, though, to criticise the Human Rights movement here. What I did want to do is to offer the simple thought, the everyday danger of the simple thought, that human life is undignified - that my, your life, robs us both of dignity, and ask you why you, like me, must work for a living.
It is, to be sure, partly God's fault. It can be said that religions originate in the need for cultures to tell themselves stories in lieu of explanation for why man must work the land, why women must bear children, where animals come from, and so on. But once these stories are passed down the ages they sit over you like so many dead ancestors, mixing their misery with yours, letting you know through the centuries that you simply deserve it. Sure, religion provides for some need for explanation, but that explanation deadens your feelings, and it even does more than that: it takes your self-respect and gives it over to an arbitrary religious authority, such as a God or a leader or a community, and allows that authority to administer it back meagerly and conditionally.
What does it take to stand up and say that your life is not conditional, that it simply is what it is? What does it take to say that it does not need to deserve to be what it is, or to possess those capacities for the furtherance of life which it already exercises and enjoys?
This is the context in which I want to ask the following question: Why do Humanists feel that human life is worth something? Is it because there is always something to be extracted from it?
That's what I think is a more incisive question than the one I addressed in the last post. The last post, and other things I've seen on the internetz, deals with arguments in part decrying the lack of power atheists and scientists have, globally, to 'fight for their rights'. As I encountered this it was set in terms of the question 'how are you going to have space to think without being crushed by the weight of the world which religion suspends, however badly?'. In order to exercise the right to think (scientifically and properly) you have to first have the space to think. A compelling common sense idea but I think I've shown that it falls pretty flat.
There's more I can say about the idea that religion is in some fundamental sense (a practical sense, of all things!) a positive force, but I think it's even more important to talk about the much anticipated 'political growth of atheism', the partner to the helper-religion.
It's already difficult to find an atheist that doesn't pay heavy platitudes to over-simplified notions of rationality, and who doesn't assume that minds work more or less rationally on the basis of awareness of independent evidence. The ideas atheists have about what kind of thing the mind has to be is just very outdated, possibly by a couple of hundreds of years. Of course it's ok to criticise religion on the basis of historical argument, but when you draw political conclusions from the principles you express what on Earth do you think you're doing? The growth of atheism is predicated on membership to this sort of peculiar club, like a Frankenstein club.
Yes, of course it is understood that the mind is more complex than all that, but the belief remains that it is the operation of this over-simplified mind that matters, ultimately, that they are idealized traits and provide a base of operations for atheism. Every time you have heard an atheist opine regarding the inability of the converted to reason about evidence, and that it is this skill that needs to be taught through education, did you really want acquisition of that skill to be the fundamental human skill?
Here's the rub: What does a mind like that deserve? What is it said to deserve? Certainly it has to deserve the work-curse, does it not!
It is the supposed growth of atheism, based upon humanistic principles of 'rational practice', that most smacks of scientism - not, of course, the idea of being led by the evidence, but the idea of the slave-mind that gets invoked to prepare it for the future. The thing I would hate most for atheism to be is a shuffling of the ideological scenery, a slight re-organization of the same kind of society, just with 'a different basis' for the same sense of morality (and sure the poor continue to be poor but now they can be felt to properly deserve it: even if the market isn't rational at least the individual is!?). One of the most wonderful things about Richard Dawkins, in fact, is his political modesty, and thank goodness for it.
Adam was cursed and the world suffered. That curse will simply continue whilst human life has to be made worthy of itself, the making-rational of the untamed mind echoing the process that makes man worthy of God - the repentence of sin. If we are happy with our mind's capacities then we can look forward to a future in which there is an infinity of work to be done, but on what basis should we be happy with the mind's capacities? In this miserable and dying world is the success of science really enough to justify a full-blooded social programme for atheism? No! Eveything needs to be worked out, no half-measures are possible (and entreating rational behaviour is certainly a half measure). The only people unaware of this are the ruling classes, and it is in their unfortunate hands that the future of human dignity currently rests - although it should be possible to recover the unconditional awareness of dignity, very simply, from out of your own experience. Only this time, no excuses, no more work.
V
"To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Gen 3:17 (NIV)
Compare this with Articles 3, 4 and 5 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948:
"Article 3
- Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
- No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
- No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
These are far-flung hopes. They are not practical or really viable at all, but for all that - and perhaps because of that - they are still not really ideal, abstract thoughts. Yes, human rights is incredibly popular and everybody wants to expand the law and work within the system to do whatever, but what kind of bastardisation of the simple notion of dignity is that? I emplore you to stop for a minute and see that, on some utterly important and visceral level, what the UDHR touches on is the idea that when ordinary human beings look around and see misery, they can, on the back of that experience, feel completely justified - even ontologically so - in expecting and demanding better. That is a simple thought that anyone can author in its entirety.
And yet the Human Rights movement is ideological, it idealizes certain modes of thought and culture. I don't wish, though, to criticise the Human Rights movement here. What I did want to do is to offer the simple thought, the everyday danger of the simple thought, that human life is undignified - that my, your life, robs us both of dignity, and ask you why you, like me, must work for a living.
It is, to be sure, partly God's fault. It can be said that religions originate in the need for cultures to tell themselves stories in lieu of explanation for why man must work the land, why women must bear children, where animals come from, and so on. But once these stories are passed down the ages they sit over you like so many dead ancestors, mixing their misery with yours, letting you know through the centuries that you simply deserve it. Sure, religion provides for some need for explanation, but that explanation deadens your feelings, and it even does more than that: it takes your self-respect and gives it over to an arbitrary religious authority, such as a God or a leader or a community, and allows that authority to administer it back meagerly and conditionally.
What does it take to stand up and say that your life is not conditional, that it simply is what it is? What does it take to say that it does not need to deserve to be what it is, or to possess those capacities for the furtherance of life which it already exercises and enjoys?
This is the context in which I want to ask the following question: Why do Humanists feel that human life is worth something? Is it because there is always something to be extracted from it?
That's what I think is a more incisive question than the one I addressed in the last post. The last post, and other things I've seen on the internetz, deals with arguments in part decrying the lack of power atheists and scientists have, globally, to 'fight for their rights'. As I encountered this it was set in terms of the question 'how are you going to have space to think without being crushed by the weight of the world which religion suspends, however badly?'. In order to exercise the right to think (scientifically and properly) you have to first have the space to think. A compelling common sense idea but I think I've shown that it falls pretty flat.
There's more I can say about the idea that religion is in some fundamental sense (a practical sense, of all things!) a positive force, but I think it's even more important to talk about the much anticipated 'political growth of atheism', the partner to the helper-religion.
It's already difficult to find an atheist that doesn't pay heavy platitudes to over-simplified notions of rationality, and who doesn't assume that minds work more or less rationally on the basis of awareness of independent evidence. The ideas atheists have about what kind of thing the mind has to be is just very outdated, possibly by a couple of hundreds of years. Of course it's ok to criticise religion on the basis of historical argument, but when you draw political conclusions from the principles you express what on Earth do you think you're doing? The growth of atheism is predicated on membership to this sort of peculiar club, like a Frankenstein club.
Yes, of course it is understood that the mind is more complex than all that, but the belief remains that it is the operation of this over-simplified mind that matters, ultimately, that they are idealized traits and provide a base of operations for atheism. Every time you have heard an atheist opine regarding the inability of the converted to reason about evidence, and that it is this skill that needs to be taught through education, did you really want acquisition of that skill to be the fundamental human skill?
Here's the rub: What does a mind like that deserve? What is it said to deserve? Certainly it has to deserve the work-curse, does it not!
It is the supposed growth of atheism, based upon humanistic principles of 'rational practice', that most smacks of scientism - not, of course, the idea of being led by the evidence, but the idea of the slave-mind that gets invoked to prepare it for the future. The thing I would hate most for atheism to be is a shuffling of the ideological scenery, a slight re-organization of the same kind of society, just with 'a different basis' for the same sense of morality (and sure the poor continue to be poor but now they can be felt to properly deserve it: even if the market isn't rational at least the individual is!?). One of the most wonderful things about Richard Dawkins, in fact, is his political modesty, and thank goodness for it.
Adam was cursed and the world suffered. That curse will simply continue whilst human life has to be made worthy of itself, the making-rational of the untamed mind echoing the process that makes man worthy of God - the repentence of sin. If we are happy with our mind's capacities then we can look forward to a future in which there is an infinity of work to be done, but on what basis should we be happy with the mind's capacities? In this miserable and dying world is the success of science really enough to justify a full-blooded social programme for atheism? No! Eveything needs to be worked out, no half-measures are possible (and entreating rational behaviour is certainly a half measure). The only people unaware of this are the ruling classes, and it is in their unfortunate hands that the future of human dignity currently rests - although it should be possible to recover the unconditional awareness of dignity, very simply, from out of your own experience. Only this time, no excuses, no more work.
V
No comments:
Post a Comment