Ian Robinson | Rationalist Society of Australia

Faith that is not justified?

Posted by Ian Robinson On 7 April, 2015 26 October, 2016

Are our daily lives filled with faith that may be unjustified, as asserted by Barney Zwartz, Senior Fellow with the Centre for Public Christianity, in the Fairfax press?

It depends on the way you are using the term 'faith'. Here, Ian Robinson, President Emeritus of the Rationalist Society, picks apart Zwartz's facile arguments (in parentheses)

THE most famous description of faith (While this quote may be well-known in some Christian circles it is an exaggeration to say that it is the 'most famous' description of the concept) comes in the anonymous New Testament epistle to the Hebrews: 'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' (Zwartz is naughty to base his argument on the 16^th century King James translation which, while being wonderful language, is notoriously inaccurate. Most modern versions translate the Greek word translated here as 'evidence' as rather 'assurance' or 'conviction'. Which undermines Zwartz’ next point...)

Interestingly, faith is linked with evidence, and is indeed here seen as a form of evidence (... even in this anonymous first century sermon, faith has nothing to do with evidence as we now understand the word. In the 16th century 'evidence' was more closely related to 'evident' and meant 'obvious to the sight' or 'clear to the understanding'. The implication that Christian faith is somehow evidential in the modern sense of the word is quite tendentious.) In many exchanges with atheists over the years, I have been told that faith is irrational and therefore delusional, in contrast with their stance, which they say is clear-sighted and rational. (The discussion in this and ensuing paragraphs is predicated on muddying the distinction between the two main meanings of 'faith' which the Oxford dictionary sets out as follows:

faith₁ = complete trust or confidence in someone or something;

faith₂ = strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.

Faith₁may be justified or unjustified, rational or irrational, depending on the reliability of the evidence and reasoning that lead you to have such faith in someone or something. Faith₂ is always irrational, because you start with the faith, and no evidence or reasoning can count against it. By blurring the distinction, Zwartz is attempting to claim the virtues of the first sense to cover the shortcomings of the second.)

It seems to me that such a belief requires an entirely uncritical faith, combined with a lack of self-knowledge. (Zwartz begins his argument by casting a skeptical pall over all our knowledge while at the same time accusing his opponents of relying on faith anyway as much as he does. This is a dangerous move as it seems to lead to the conclusion that neither the atheist nor the religious position is justified)

For if one thing is clear in the 21st century, it is that we are not transparent to ourselves, especially when we think we are. David Hume, the 18th century philosopher, observed with some justice that reason is – and ought to be – the slave of our passions. (This famous statement by David Hume appears in A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, 'Of the Passions', Part III, 'Of the Will and Direct Passions', Section iii, 'Of the Influencing Motives of the Will'. Its relevance to Zwartz’ criticism of atheists is difficult to see. The difference between atheists and believers is metaphysical and epistemological. Believers assert God exists. Atheists assert that God doesn’t exist, or at least that there is no compelling evidence that he does. Believers say they have faith in God’s existence and attributes. Atheists argue faith cannot be a path to knowledge, only evidence and reason can. But in the passage quoted, Hume is discussing neither metaphysics nor epistemology, but ethics, and in particular, asking what guides our actions, our reason or our passions. In this Section, Hume argues that 'reason alone can never produce an action or give rise to volition.' Moreover 'Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse'. Therefore, according to Hume, when we talk about the 'the combat of passion and of reason' we don’t talk 'strictly and philosophically'. In other words, in terms of volition, motivation, the will, 'reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions'. But this says nothing about the place of reason in deciding what does or does not exist, and how we know. Its placement here is obfuscating.)

We think we are employing unalloyed reason but often little understand how much it is shaped by our preferences, prejudices or unconscious influences of which we are unaware. (Zwartz seems to be referring here to those 19th and 20th century thinkers who held that the beliefs and conduct of human beings are not, as a matter of empirical fact, guided by reason, but rather by false conscious engendered variously by economic class (Karl Marx); or by their unconscious impulses (Sigmund Freud); or by their educational, cultural and social background (Karl Mannheim). But this is not the end of the story. Armed with this knowledge, the modern critical thinker does two things: first, being aware of possible biases in one’s thought, one takes steps to minimise them by, eg, specifically looking for and guarding against such distortions, and second, by not relying solely on one’s own possibly biased personal conclusions but on matching these with 'the non-collusive agreement of independent observers', which is more or less what the scientific community does. Science, and reason, always regard their conclusions as provisional and subject to amendment in the light of further knowledge. On the other hand faith₂, based as it usually is on a one-off revelation, is set in stone (literally in the case of Moses) and whatever initial human 'preferences, prejudices or unconscious influences' shaped and perhaps distorted the belief in the first place remain quarantined from the implications of future discoveries.)

Often what we regard as reason is much adulterated by its near-cousin, rationalisation. We use reason to justify a position or decision we have already taken – or, to put it more poetically as Blaise Pascal did, 'the heart has its reasons which reason does not know'. (The famous quote from Blaise Pascal, 'The heart has its reasons which reason does not know' (Pensées #423) is indeed poetic, so its meaning is metaphorical rather than literal and it has been interpreted in various ways by readers. However it almost certainly does not mean what Zwartz claims it means. Clearly it is not a poetic restatement of: 'we use reason to justify a position or decision we have already taken'. In the next 'Pensée' (#424) Pascal explains 'It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, and not by the reason.' This seems to undermine somewhat Zwartz’ case for faith being a form of reason. Indeed, Pascal seems to be tending towards the 'polar opposites' position that Zwartz dismisses.)

In fact, faith and reason are not polar opposites, (To assert that faith is irrational is not the same thing as asserting that faith and reason are 'polar opposites') as my atheist friends often aver, but exist on a continuum (There is no conceivable continuum on which reason and faith both appear. They clearly occupy quite distinct sematic spaces, in both senses of the word 'faith') and can overlap and reinforce each other.

Sometimes we may trust one person but not another without being able to explain precisely why. It is a combination of reason – judging argument, motive, demeanour and so on – and non-rational but real perceptions of body language, and doubtless many more factors. But it is perfectly reasonable – in the sense that anyone can understand it – to speak of having faith in someone we trust. (True, our daily lives could not operate if we never had any trust or confidence in some people and some things – faith₁ if you like – but this trust or confidence is not a blanket acceptance; it needs to be selective, evidence based and, dare I say, tinged with at least a modicum of skepticism, depending on the situation. Many people have suffered greatly because of an unskeptical faith in eg a confidence trickster, scammer or dubious product, or even, as recent experience has shown us, in a major bank.)

Indeed, our daily lives could not operate if we never employed faith but acted on the basis of sceptical philosophy. We don't know that the next tram will arrive, (This is not a happy example for Zwartz – any time spent at a Melbourne tram stop will reveal that there is a considerable amount of skepticism among prospective passengers about when and even if the next tram will arrive!) but we believe it will, and the fact that we are sometimes wrong does not disturb that faith. (This is simply not true. In the case of faith₁ the more often our trust and confidence are violated the less faith we have in future outcomes, until there comes a point when we lose faith altogether. It is only in the case of faith₂ that disconfirming instances seem to have no effect on belief and are always rationalized away.)

We operate with the best knowledge available, often including faith. (This is a category mistake. Zwartz makes faith a category of knowledge, which it is not. The knowledge we possess may be the basis for faith₁ in eg the stock market, but this faith is a product of that knowledge, not an element of it.) We spend decades investing in superannuation built partly on the premise that the sharemarket rises over time, despite oscillations.

That belief is based on history, analysis and wide knowledge, but also no small modicum of faith. (The category mistake is repeated. We don’t combine history, analysis, knowledge and faith to gain our confidence in the stock market. Our confidence is our faith; they are the same thing. We combine history, analysis and knowledge and this supports our confidence or faith. Zwartz say as much himself in the next sentence: 'When market experts talk of … confidence … they are really talking of faith'.) And, thus far, it has worked. When market experts talk of the confidence necessary for people to invest and for growth to happen, they are really talking of faith.

For the religious believer, faith (For the religious believer, faith here is faith₂ and we cannot draw conclusions about it on the basis of the discussion of faith₁ above) combines many of these same properties: analysis, experience, the promptings of the heart. (Zwartz is disingenuous here. In fact the only property of faith₂ he lists here that is the same as one of those he lists for faith₁ above is ‘analysis’. ‘Experience’ and ‘the promptings of the heart’ are mentioned here for the first time. This is a further attempt to illegitimately claim for faith₂ the justifications of faith₁.) That is no guarantee it is justified, but none of us operates on the basis of guarantees. (Perhaps, but experience and the promptings of my heart tell me I can have more faith₁ even in Melbourne’s public transport system than I can in God’s alleged custodianship of the universe.)

Can an Atheist Have a Religious Experience?

Posted by Ian Robinson On 13 March, 2015 26 October, 2016

The following article was first aired (in abridged form) at the 63rd Rationalist Society conference in April 2000 at Box Hill. The topic was "Spirituality without Religion". It was then published in issue 54 of the Australian Rationalist journal, Winter 2000.

In April 2015, a rabbi happened to read it and sent the following message:

I was on the web, trying to recall the signs of a mystical experience. And, one page led me to you. I thank you for what you do. (I am ordained as a rabbi, but deeply, and publicly, am foremost committed to being a rational, humanist.)

Blessings on your work. Rb.

First a word about the topic of the conference as a whole - "spirituality without religion". Take religion. Why would anybody want to reject religion as a meaningful part of their lives, whether or not the beliefs of that religion can be asserted to be true, when many studies have shown that subjective feelings of happiness and satisfaction in life are highly correlated with religious belief. The facts are pretty unequivocal - religious people are on the whole happier than non-religious people. For the atheist apparently, life's a bitch and then you die! So why are we all here? Why aren't we all at the Synagogue today or getting ready to go to Church tomorrow?

If we want to be happy little vegemites we shouldn't even be congregating here wondering if we can have spirituality without religion, we should be embracing the whole religious system.

Be that as it may, many people today cannot accept any more as literal truths the main tenets of the traditional religions - for example:

that god is a person, and usually male,
that god chose the Jewish people and gave them Palestine (you'd think if he really liked them he would have given them Bali or at least Majorca),
that god lives in a high place called heaven,
that if we are good, when we die our bodies will be resurrected and we will live there with him , or
that if we have been bad we will either go to a place of eternal punishment or else be reincarnated as a lower form of life, such as a cockroach or a liberal politician,
that only males can go to heaven, where all their needs will be tended to by beautiful maidens called houris,
and so on.

Yet many of these same people who reject religious belief still feel that there is a deeper dimension to life, some kind of, for want of a better word, 'spiritual' presence in the universe. Often this sense of the numinous, as Philip Adams perhaps somewhat inaccurately labels it, derives directly from what I have called here, again for want of a better word, a 'religious experience' - an experience which is too compelling to be rejected out of hand as a mere aberration. [I shall say shortly exactly what I have in mind by the term 'religious experience'. ]

For many people, even some who are atheists or agnostics, such 'religious experiences' invite, almost demand, a more sympathetic, detailed and extended response than knee- jerk materialist reductionism would allow them. So the questions I hope to explore, if not definitively answer, in this paper are: What is an open-minded but sceptical rationalist to make of this spiritual impulse? How can it be integrated into an atheist world view? And most importantly, what are its implications for how we live our lives?

What I am referring to when I talk about a religious experience are those experiences that have been called by a wide variety of names - higher consciousness, the mystical, the numinous, peak experience, altered state of consciousness, awakening, satori, samadhi, nirvana, cosmic consciousness, and so on. I don't want to get into a discussion of terminology here, apart from noticing the positive evaluation built in to many of these appellations. I acknowledge that many of these names have specific nuances of meaning within particular cultures but I don't want to get into semantics and I want to be as inclusive a possible in considering a wide range of similar experiences. Nor am I claiming that such experiences are the only kind of experiences that might be described as religious. The use of the epithet 'religious experience' juxtaposed as it was with 'atheist' in the title of this talk was designed to be provocative rather than accurate.

From now on I will try to be more accurate, without I hope being less provocative.

It is worth noting at this point that one of the most common characteristics of mystical experiences, as reported by their experiencers [or is it experiencees?] is that they are ineffable, unable to be put into words, incapable of accurate description. So it is perhaps surprising that there are so many descriptions of them about in the literature. It would seem that people who have these experiences are unable to shut up about them while at the same time maintaining that nothing they say does any justice to what they are talking about. But this may be being unfair because if these experiences are as common as it appears then there must be many more people around who have had the experience but have not spoken out.

If the mystical experience is indeed ineffable, perhaps we should stop here and go to lunch. We could take comfort in the words of the Chinese classic, the Dao De Jing - The Book of the Way and its Virtue - which begins:

The way that can be spoken of Is not the true way;

The name that can be named Is not the constant name.

Dao De Jing, Book One I, 1 (Penguin translation)

and later on states:

One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.

Dao De Jing, Book Two, LVI, 128 (Penguin translation)

Or, in the words of the ancient Indian text, the Kena Upanishad:

He who says that Brahman [Spirit] is not known, knows truly; he who claims that he knows, knows nothing.

But like the character in the famous Monty Python sketch you have all paid your money and you are expecting a day and a half of discussion, if not argument, and there are three more speakers to go so we had better press on.

Examples of 'religious' experiences

Here are some typical examples of what I am calling here 'religious' or 'mystical' experiences:

1. One person who thought he knew, but did not speak, at least about his mystical experience was the seventeenth century French scientist and writer Blaise Pascal. The following inscription was on a scrap of paper found, after he died, sewn up in the lining of his doublet:

From about half past ten in the evening to about half an hour after midnight.

Fire.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, Not the God of the philosophers and scholars. Absolute certainty: Beyond reason. Joy. Peace.

Forgetfulness of the world and everything but God. The world has not known thee, but I have known thee.

Joy! joy! Joy! tears of joy!

2. Mystical experiences can often be triggered by the beauty or grandeur of nature. This is what happened to the great Indian poet and Nobel Laureate for Literature Rabindranath Tagore as he watched a sunset:

As I was watching it, suddenly, in a moment, a veil seemed to be lifted from my eyes. I found the world wrapped in an inexpressible glory with its waves of joy and beauty bursting and breaking on all sides. The thick cloud of sorrow that lay on my heart in many folds was pierced through and through by the light of the world, which was everywhere radiant.

There was nothing and no one whom I did not love at that moment.

Rabindranath Tagore as reported in a letter to his friend C. F. Andrews

3. But it is not just poets that have these experiences. John Buchan, later to become an intelligence officer in World War I, the author most famously of The Thirty-Nine Steps and eventually Governor-General of Canada, was farming out on the South African veldt when he had this experience:

Next morning I bathed in one of the Malmani pools - and icy cold it was - and then basked in the early sunshine while breakfast was cooking. The water made a pleasant music, and near was a covert of willows filled with singing birds. Then and there came on me the hour of revelation, when, though savagely hungry, I forgot about breakfast. Scents, sights, and sounds blended into a harmony so perfect it transcended human expression, even human thought. It was like a glimpse of the peace of eternity.

John Buchan. Memory Hold-the-Door.

4. Although it seems easy to have ecstatic thoughts when confronted with something of utter beauty, perhaps the real test is if you can have a spiritual experience arising out of the mundane or the ugly. It is entirely plausible that someone might be able, like William Blake,

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

William Blake. Auguries of Innocence

but can someone see a world in a plastic bag or heaven in a toxic chemical dump?

Something like this happens in one of the most interesting recent Hollywood films, the Academy Award winning American Beauty. The disturbed and disturbing American teenager Ricky offers to show his girlfriend Jane "the most beautiful thing I have ever filmed". The video image he is refering to is of an old plastic bag blowing about in the wind, and Ricky says:

It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing. And there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was just … dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That's the day I realised that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.

…

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it … and my heart's going to cave in.

Alan Ball. American Beauty: The Shooting Script

These words are echoed by the film's hero, Lester, in the final scene of the film, although it's interesting to note that while Ricky's heart was going to cave in, Lester's is going to explode:

… it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst … and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life …

Alan Ball. American Beauty: The Shooting Script

This is a truly profound film, although its profundity is so subtly woven into the narrative fabric that it went over the heads of many people. He who has eyes to see.

5. Sometimes mystical experiences occur at times of great hardship or distress. Winifred Holtby, the English novelist, editor and feminist, was at the height of her powers at thirty three when she was told she had only two years to live. Weak, unable to work, tired and dispirited, one day she was walking up a hill when she came to a water trough whose surface had frozen over, and there were a number of thirsty lambs gathered around it:

She broke the ice for them with her stick, and as she did so heard a voice within her saying 'Having nothing, yet possessing all things'. It was so distinct that she looked around startled, but she was alone with the lambs on the top of the hill. Suddenly, in a flash, the grief, the bitterness, the sense of frustration disappeared; all desire to possess power and glory for herself vanished away, and never came back. … The moment of 'conversion' … she said with tears in her eyes, was the supreme spiritual experience of her life.

Winifred Holtby as told to Vera Brittain: Testament of Friendship.

6. Sometimes the experience can come after many years of religious discipline, as is the case with Zen Zen means 'meditation', so Zen Buddhism means simply 'meditation Buddhism' and the most common form of meditation practiced is 'za zen' - sitting meditation. The ultimate aim of this meditation is 'satori' - awakening or enlightenment, but such enlightenment is not easily come by. It is seen as the result of a long period of training and practice, as Shui'chi Kitahara, a Japanese Zen practitioner, explains in his imperfect English:

In the morning of the fifth day, I got up at five and began to sit. I returned to the state of the previous night. And unexpectedly soon a conversion came. In less than ten minutes I reached a wonderful state of mind. It was quite different from any which I had experienced in sie za [sitting quietly] or other practices. It was a state of mind, uncomparably quiet, clear and serene, without any obstruction. I gazed it. Entering this state of mind, I was filled with the feeling of appreciation, beyond usual joy, … and tears began to flow from closed eyes. … a state of mind of forgiving all, sympathising all, and further free from all bondages.

Shui'chi Kitahara. Psychologia, 6, 1963.

7. Sometimes the experience can be the actual genesis of a religious life:

I felt a great inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for the one word: joy, joy! … And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my … enlightenment.

An Inuit shaman. Reported in Knud Rasmussen: The Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.

These are the words of an Canadian Inuit describing how he came to be a shaman for his tribe.

8. Sometimes the experience just comes on someone without warning, as in this experience described by William James:

But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, … the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love … it seemed to fan me like immense wings.

No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other.

William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Experiences of this kind are not as uncommon as is sometimes believed. A survey in 1973 by Erika Bourguinon of the ethnographic literature on 488 societies world-wide found that 437 of them (just under 90%) had one or more institutionalised, culturally patterned forms of altered states of consciousness. And various general surveys of western societies, such as the Gallup Poll, have reported between 43 and 76 percent of adults having such mystical experiences. One of the interesting findings is that very few children have them. They seem mainly to affect adults.

Interpreting 'religious' experience

Now it is very important, in examining these experiences to distinguish between the experience itself and the cultural baggage in which it comes wrapped. There is no such thing as a raw experience. All our experiences are mediated by our mental apparatus. This was pointed out early last century by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the great Indian philosopher, who was also President of his country from 1962 to 1967. In his very influential book An Idealist View of Life (1932) he wrote:

In the utterances of the seers, we have to distinguish the given and the interpreted elements. What is regarded as immediately given may be the product of inference. Immediacy does not mean absence of psychological mediation, but only non-mediation by conscious thought. Ideas which seem to come to us with compelling force, without any mediate intellectual process of which we are aware, are generally the results of previous training in traditions imparted to us in earlier years.

Radhakrishnan, p 77.

Which explains of course why Hindus don't have visions of the Virgin Mary and Christians don't have visions of the Buddha.

Something is directly experienced but it is unconsciously interpreted in the terms of the tradition in which the individual is trained. The frame of reference which each individual adopts is determined by hereditary and culture.

Radhakrishnan, p 78.

Radhakrishnan adds:

Among the religious teachers of the world, Buddha is marked out as the one who admitted the reality of the religious experience and yet refused to interpret it as a revelation of anything beyond itself. For him the view that the experience gives us direct contact with God is an interpretation and not an immediate datum. Buddha gives us a report of the experience rather than an interpretation of it, though strictly speaking there are no experiences which we do not interpret.

Radhakrishnan, p 78.

And there of course is the rub - 'strictly speaking there are no experiences which we do not interpret'. If we are to get to the bottom of this mystical experience business we must start speaking strictly. It does make a huge difference if there are in fact 'no experiences which we do not interpret' - but more of that later.

Can we say anything about the experiential core of such experiences. Attempts to do this are not new. In fact one of the most comprehensive and still classic investigations was by one of the founding fathers of psychology, William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (1902). James singled out four main characteristics of these experiences.

Ineffability of 'religious' experience

One of course was ineffability, of which we have already spoken. Mystical states are so different from our ordinary states of consciousness that it is difficult to convey in their import and grandeur to another person. For this reason much mystical literature is filled with paradox, symbolism and metaphor. Because the experiences are individual and private, we have no common language with which to talk about them. The unknown is described in terms of the known. Experiencers have no recourse but to resort to symbolic and metaphorical language to describe such things as the mystical union with god or the universe typical of these experiences.

THE MYSTICAL UNION MAY BE SYMBOLISED BY THE MELDING OF INANIMATE OBJECTS OR MATERIALS, for example:

the individual is the spark or the wood or the wax or the iron that is burnt or melted or tempered in the fire of god,
the individual is the soil that is dissolved in the water of god,
the individual is the river which flows into and is absorbed by the ocean of god;

THE MYSTICAL UNION MAY BE SYMBOLISED BY THE WAY THE BODY APPROPRIATES NATURAL ELEMENTS, for example:

seeing the light,
receiving the breath of the spirit (the word spirit is itself deeply metaphorical, coming of course from the Latin spiritus meaning 'breath'),
imbibing of food and drink, usually, water, milk, fish, bread or wine ("Take, eat; this is my Body which is given for you; … Drink ye all of this; for this is my blood … which is shed for you … ");

THE MYSTICAL UNION MAY BE SYMBOLISED BY HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

father/son,
wife/husband ('Brides of Christ'),
lover/loved one (as in the poems of the Sufi mystic, Rumi)

Now the danger here is that the symbolic or metaphorical nature of this religious language can be forgotten and the words can be taken literally. The wafer of bread becomes literally the body of Jesus (which bit, one might well wonder), the wine is transubstantiated into the real blood of Jesus, heaven is literally 'up there' and Jesus himself literally ascended to heaven by being bodily lifted into the air. Mythologist Joseph Campbell is fond of pointing out that if Jesus literally ascended bodily into the heavens, even if he was travelling at the speed of light, the fastest possible speed, he could not have got even out of the Milky Way yet, a mere 1,967 years later, because our Galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across.

Campbell believes that this mistake, of taking symbols and metaphors literally, infects particularly the Judeo-Christian religions including Islam. He recounts how a Jewish friend of his staying in a hotel in Guatemala mentioned to the local chambermaid that she came from Jerusalem. "What!" said the maid. "You are from the sky?" Campbell points out that this is one common misinterpretation of the symbol of the promised land, that it is a place in the sky. The other common misinterpretation is that it's a piece of real estate in the Middle East. "The Christian tradition has one mistake, the Hebrew tradition has the other. "

The mistaken literalisation and reification of religious symbols and metaphors is something that does not occur so readily in Eastern and indigenous traditions.

Campbell cites the old Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, who described how in his imagination he had pictured himself having a mystical vision on the central mountain of the world, which in his view was nowhere near Jerusalem, but Harney Peak in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but then Black Elk shows a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of religious language than some Jewish and Christian theologians, because he adds decisively: "But anywhere is the centre of the world. " He knew it was not a geographical location but a symbol.

So one of the difficulties in understanding the experiences of the mystics is in untangling the underlying nature of the experience, if any, from the symbolic and metaphorical language in which it is necessarily expressed.

Passivity of 'religious' experience

The second aspect of these experiences cited by William James is passivity. The experiencer, or in this case undoubtedly the experiencee, feels swept up and held by a superior power. Now this is certainly true of most Western experiencees - firstly the experience is something that happens to them, not something they do, and secondly, it is so huge, awesome and overwhelming that it is assumed it cannot come just from inside them but must come, not from just any outside source, but from a very powerful outside source at that. But Westerners come from a tradition which emphasises a transcendental deity and it may be that this idea of god as outside the physical universe predisposes them to interpret their experience in this way.

By contrast, in many Eastern traditions god is seen as immanent in the universe and in particular in human beings, so there is no contradiction between seeing the experience as both part of oneself and divine at the same time. Also in these traditions there is often a conscious attempt to reach such states through techniques such as meditation, yoga and various other rituals and regimens. So in these cases the experience may seem more like an achievement of the individual than a visitation from outside forces.

Although in most of these traditions it is commonplace to point out that "trying to achieve enlightenment" is a surefire method of not doing so.

The passivity is often accompanied, according to James, by sensations of separation from bodily consciousness, disembodied feelings which have now come to be called OBEs - Out-of-Body Experiences. In considering the significance of OBEs it is necessary to say something more about human perception.

The perceptual system

We all know the old saying "Seeing is believing" and we all place a huge amount of reliance on our sense of sight to give us accurate information about our environment. Most of the time this confidence is warranted but not because "seeing" is in fact "believing". In actual fact "Believing is seeing", while not entirely accurate either, is at least much closer to the truth than its converse.

There are many experiments that demonstrate the primacy of the mind over the eyes. For example, when subjects in a dark room are told a stationary point of light is moving and spelling out a word, they will see it move and spell out a word.

We tend to imagine that we are like movie cameras, looking out through the lenses of our eyes, receiving a more or less accurate visual impression of our environment directly onto the film stock of our minds, images we then apprehend as our visual field. In the words of Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive. " We think that what we get is precisely what we see.

However we now know that this is not the case. We are more like television cameras than movie cameras. A television camera samples the information from the light rays coming through the lens and sends it down a series of wires where it is processed electronically to produce the image we see on the television screen. And we can control many aspects of this image. Even the most basic TV set has controls for colour, brightness and contrast, and with more sophisticated processors we can do almost anything we want with the picture.

Similarly, our eyes and nervous system and brain together constitute a highly sophisticated information processing system that takes in the information from the light coming to the eyes and processes it to construct the image we 'see'. But the light rays are not the only source of information that this process utilises. It also takes into account such things as our previous experiences and memories, our expectations of what we will see, the degree and focus of our attention and the purposes of our perception, and uses all this information to present to the mind an image of the world AS IF we were looking out the windows of our eyes. Or rather, AS IF we are looking out from a point mid-way between them on the bridge of our nose. Because although we have two eyes, we see only one image. Our binocular information processing system does enable our view to be three dimensional, making it more sophisticated than the two dimensional television screen, but it is still mediated, just as the television image is, in fact more so.

There are a number of things that need to be noted here. One is that although the picture we have of the world is a mental construct it had better be a pretty accurate one if we are going to survive in the world. Obviously from an evolutionary point of view there is a strong survival imperative in getting it more or less right.

More importantly it can be seen that there is no logical necessity that this is the only form in which our visual field might be presented to us. We are so used to seeing reality in this way that it seems like a given to us, but there are other ways the same information could be structured and presented. For example, we could see our environment as if looking down on it from above, like a map. This is precisely what radar does. Radar receives signals coming in to it from the environment around it, just like the human eye, but is designed to process them on to the screen in a map-like view. There is no logical reason why the human brain should not do the same thing - present the mind with a map-like image of its environment, just as a radar does. There may of course be very good adaptive reasons why the human perceptual system developed in the way it did, but I don't know if anybody has ever tried to spell them out. The way we see the world may not be as inevitable as it seems.

In fact, seeing the world AS IF we are looking out from a single point is quite a sophisticated and complicated way of doing it. It requires very complex data processing. Consider the fact that, from the Palaeolithic cave paintings before 10,000BCE, through Egyptian and Greek and Medieval painting to the early fifteenth century, when the secrets of perspective drawing were discovered by the Florentines, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the painter Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone, nicknamed Masaccio, in Renaissance Italy, it took Western artists more than twelve thousand years to work out how to represent the visual field accurately on a two- dimensional surface. And this still has to be learned by human children. When children are young they draw a glass like this -

and not like this -

and the houses along a street like this:

Now in art education classes we were always told that this was because the children were drawing what they knew rather than what they saw. They knew the top of the glass was circular so that's how they drew it and the bottom was flat (otherwise it would roll over) so they drew it flat. But what if this was actually how young children SAW a glass. What if the human perceptual system has to be trained, as visual artists have to be, in order to see the world from a single point in perspective? I don't know if anybody has ever researched this possibility, or even how you would go about it.

Now the point of these speculations is to demonstrate that there is more than one way to visually represent an environment and that a perspective view is a highly complex, sophisticated way, compared to the relatively straight-forward map-like overhead view constructed by a radar. Which leads us back to OBEs - Out-of-Body Experiences.

They are most frequently reported as part of either a religious experience or a Near- Death Experience (NDE). English psychologist Susan Blackmore has suggested that OBEs occur during NDEs because when people are close to death the amount sensory input reaching the brain is limited. Moreover, the amount of blood and therefore of oxygen available to the human organism is extremely restricted and for survival needs to be concentrated on the life support organs of the body - the heart and lungs and so on. She has suggested that, in order to conserve energy, parts of the brain may reduce their activity and instead of trying to maintain the energy expensive construct of a perspective view of the environment, the brain may opt for the simpler less energy consuming map-like construct, thus giving the subject the feeling of being outside of their body looking down on themselves. So this unusual experience of seeming to be outside one's body may be explained naturally in terms of the energy economics of a stressed physiological system - the brain organising things in a different way for a change - rather than being labelled as a supernatural occurrence.

And in the case of religious experiences, often they are also associated with significantly reduced mental and physiological activity, and from a psychological point of view, a subjective sense that the self is no longer separate from the rest of the universe but has dissolved into it. If there is no self to look out through the window of the eyes, it makes no sense to construct a world view AS IF a self is looking out. Thus a similar mechanism may occur but on a more cosmic scale. People involved in NDEs typically see the operating theatre, or the accident site from above. During my first mystical experience I felt I could see the whole of the world, perhaps even the universe, as if from a great height - I especially noticed Paris with the Eiffel Tower and Moscow, even though I had never been to either of those places. Other people have reported similar experiences as part of their mystic visions. So from a psychological point of view, both the slowing of brain activity and the loss of a sense of self typically accompanying religious experience would lead one to expect the experience of separation from the body, that does in fact occur.

Noetic quality of 'religious experience

The third characteristic of these experiences that William James notes is what he calls their 'noetic' quality. 'Noetic' comes from the ancient Greek word nohtoV [noËtos] = 'perceptible, intelligible', and has come to mean in English 'of or pertaining to the mind or intellect; characterised by or consisting in intellectual activity' [OED].

James claims that mystical experiences are noetic in the sense that they are states of knowledge, insight, awareness, revelation or illumination beyond the grasp of the intellect, for example an awareness of unity with the absolute, or of the immortality of the soul. But this seems to be a contradiction. How can they be both mental states characterised by/consisting in intellectual activity and states of knowledge beyond the intellect? Moreover this knowledge claim seems to beg the question raised by Radhakrishnan about the mediated content of all such experiences.

Nevertheless, the 'noetic' aspect of religious experience has been used to claim the experience gives us direct knowledge of God or at least of a spiritual realm. This involves drawing parallels between the phenomenology of religious experience and that of ordinary sensory experience and arguing by analogy that if the latter give us valid knowledge of the external world, the former must give us valid knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as we saw above, ordinary sensory perception is not in itself direct knowledge of anything - the world we see and hear is a construct of our brains and it is only knowledge to the extent that it meets other criteria - most especially what Douglas Gasking, my old philosophy Professor, used to call 'the non-collusive agreement of independent observers'. If I think I see a physical object I can confirm it is really there by taking a number of steps: trying to see it from another angle, finding out if I can touch it as well, seeing if it's still there next week, trying to do things with it and last but certainly not least asking other people if they can see it too. None of this is possible with religious experience.

This argument also falls down because although some aspects of the experiences may be very similar, as we have seen, there are also huge differences between them, especially with regard to content, to such an extent that they may be contradictory - if one is true then the other must be false and vice versa - so that religious experience in general cannot be counted as knowledge of anything. Of course the fact that they are contradictory does not mean that any particular experience is not direct knowledge of god, but that is a different argument. One cannot claim that religious experiences as a class are such direct experiences.

A second argument for the existence of god that is based on religious experience is inferential: It is argued that because religious experience is widespread, has a common phenomenological core and a common core of interpretation, these facts need explanation. It is concluded that the most plausible explanation is that god does in fact exist. However, as we shall see shortly, there is a respectable naturalistic explanation that may be just as, if not more plausible.

Transience of 'religious' experience

The fourth and final characteristic of religious experience noted by William James is its transiency. Mystical experiences tend to be fleeting in linear time - most last only a few seconds, some a few minutes. The problem this creates is that discussion of these experiences is almost exclusively discussion of the experiencers' memories of them, not directly of the experiences themselves. If we are having a discussion about the aesthetic experience of looking at a painting such as Picasso's "Weeping Woman" and there is any uncertainty we can actually go back to the National Gallery of Victoria and re- experience looking at it (assuming someone hasn't run off with it again). But in considering mystical experiences we are relying almost entirely on people's memories of these experiences, often recollected many years later. And we know that memory is a very unreliable instrument, because like our visual perceptions, our memories are constructs, and even more than perceptions they are affected by extrinsic factors and change over time.

1. When we recall events we forget or leave out parts of the experience in order to enhance its psychological meaning, at the expense of accuracy of recall. Memories change over time to produce a "better story". We've all had the experience of slightly altering the events when we retell something that's happened to us in order to make it a funnier, more interesting or more moving Well, our brains are doing this kind of thing unconsciously with our 'memories' all the time, re-constructing them to make them more meaningful and make them fit with our pre-existing beliefs and desires, and with our subsequent experiences.

2. Memory is even more susceptible to social influence and pressures than perception. Partly because such forces have longer to work on it. We have seen this recently with the phenomenon of False Memory Syndrome - people being induced through suggestion to believe things happened in their childhood that never actually occurred. The starkest example was the English woman in her twenties who became thoroughly convinced she had a previously suppressed memory of being raped by her father, but medical examination subsequently revealed that she was still a virgin.

3. One of the further dangerous aspects of relying on memory that recent research has brought out is that there is no correlation between the degree of confidence a person has in a memory and the accuracy of that Certainty is no guarantee of verisimilitude. The sincerity, determination or even obstinacy with which a person presents their memory of a religious experience cannot be taken as evidence for the exactness of their description, either of what happened or of how they reacted to it.

Let us examine more closely what happens when we have a mystical experience. In the first place there are a number of states or activities that can trigger such experiences, such as:

fasting
fever
fatigue
drugs
over-breathing
under-breathing
excitement
chanting
dancing
sensory deprivation.

All these physiological states can alter ordinary consciousness and allow unconscious feelings and images to rise into consciousness.

At a psychological level, as we change our mode of attention and put aside our usual conscious thoughts, for example by

listening to music
meditating
experiencing some awe-inspiring, exhilarating aspect of nature (alpine crags, a storm at sea, the sky at night)
being in a new, unusual and demanding environment.

then ecstatic feelings and images may emerge into our consciousness.

Deprivation, which is often carried to extremes in the quest for mystical enlightenment, typically leads to altered states of consciousness. Experiments in flotation tanks show that after many hours of sensory deprivation people experience complex, dynamic and often realistic hallucinations. This can also happen in real life situations - two miners who were trapped underground in total darkness for six days reported 'seeing' strange lights, doorways, marble stairs, a beautiful garden and, wait for it, women with radiant bodies.

Most if not all mystical experiences occur in extreme circumstances of some kind, either physiological or psychological (or even, in the case of some mass hallucinations, sociological). The visions and images and feelings that occur at this time can be understood in terms of the way we naturally respond to such abnormal situations, and do not need a supernatural explanation.

These visions and images are typically accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy. How do we explain this? Human (and animal) brains produce their own opiate-like drugs called endorphins that are synthesised in the brain and released into the cerebro-spinal fluid which bathes the cells of the brain and spinal cord. Endorphins have a variety of effects including analgesia [elimination of pain] and the inducement of intense pleasure, peace and calm. They can be released in various circumstances including stress, sickness, hypoxia (lack of oxygen, such as might occur during under-breathing or a meditative trance), hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar, such as might occur from fasting).

Endorphins can also set off seizures in the limbic system and the temporal lobe of the cortex and there is much evidence that unstable temporal lobe activity is associated with mystical experience. Although the exact mechanism may not be known, the immediate cause of the feeling of ecstasy in mystical experience is almost certainly the secretion of endorphins.

The self and the conscious mind

The mystical experience also involves a feeling of loss or dissipation of the self and integration or union with the universe. Because we view our Self with a capital S as a given, something essential, persisting and 'REAL', this experience seems bizarre. But once we realise that the 'Self', like our perceptions of the external world, is just another mental construct, the experience becomes less problematic.

Psychologists believe that newborn babies have no sense of self, and it is only after time and experience that they begin to distinguish between themselves and the rest of the environment, and the sense of self develops. But this is not a matter of gradually learning about a pre-existing entity. It is a matter of gradually constructing a mental model of 'self', facilitated, indeed encouraged, by the way we are brought up. The young learner of language discovers that she is allowed to say 'I am drinking my milk' but not 'I am gurgling my tummy'. She has to learn to understand what people mean by 'I didn't mean to do that' or 'You shouldn't have done that'. Systematically she is taught to use the words 'I', 'me' and 'myself' as though they referred to an autonomous and persistent thing. Humans learn to separate this self from its body, as though they were two different things and learn to attribute actions and choices to this thing. But it is purely a mental construct. There is in fact no physical or mental entity apart from this construct that is the self. Unlike our mental models of the world around us, there is no other reality that the concept of 'self' corresponds to or tries to model.

If this is the case, the feeling of loss of self and union with the absolute that occurs in mystical experience may be explained by the breakdown of this mental concept of 'self', which may occur through sensory deprivation, anoxia (lack of oxygen), or erratic temporal lobe activity brought on by the same sorts of conditions that created the other observed effects of mystical experiences.

The idea that self is a construct is a difficult idea for many people to accept. But it gets worse. There is experimental evidence that self-consciousness may be an irrelevant epi- phenomenon accompanying brain activity. Even when we think we, our Self, is doing something this may be an illusion. Most of us have had the experience of for example driving along a familiar route and when we get there realising that we have been totally unaware of the journey, because our minds have been elsewhere. Our bodies and brains have successfully negotiated some pretty complex tasks with out the assistance of a conscious 'self'.

Consider these two experiments carried out by Californian neuroscientist, Benjamin Libet.

1. In the first, Libet gave subjects a tactile stimulus and measured the time of their reaction and their conscious perception of that His findings were surprising:

A touch on the skin occurred at A and was signalled to the cortex at B. At C the subject reacted, for example, by pressing a button. However the subject was not conscious of the sensation nor of his own reaction until the instant marked D. Nevertheless the subjects felt that C was a conscious act.

2. In the second experiment, subjects in the laboratory were asked to it around and to take their time and to flex their wrists whenever they wanted to. EEG electrodes were used to measure the brain activity associated with this decision. They were also asked to note the precise time they made their decision to act. Libet then timed the three events - the decision, the brain activity and the flexing - and found that the conscious decision to act actually came after the start of the brain activity that produced the In other words, the brain was 'acting' before the conscious decision to act was made.

So not only is the self an illusion, perhaps the self-consciousness that constructed the concept of self is an irrelevance. But if so, why are we conscious? What is the evolutionary survival value if it is a kind of theatrical afterthought to otherwise seemingly self-sufficient physiological processes? What is the adaptive purpose of consciousness? Perhaps there is none. Some features of an organism can exist as the harmless by-products of evolutionary adaptations for other purposes. We humans find ourselves in possession of an entire collection of abilities that have no obvious selective advantage. Few people have had more children because they could solve differential equations or play chess blindfolded.

Memes

A recent explanation for the development of the conscious mind has arisen out of Richard Dawkins' proposal, in his book The Selfish Gene, of the concept of the 'meme'. The meme is a unit of culture, spread by imitation, such as at the simplest level wearing a baseball hat back-to-front. Ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories are all memes. Memes, like genes, are replicators. In her new book, The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore argues that we are all the products of our memes just as we are the products of our genes, but memes, like genes, care only for their own propagation. Memes, according to Blackmore, "are stored in human brains (or books or inventions) and passed on by imitation". They can pass vertically, as from parent to child, but - unlike genes - they can also pass horizontally in peer groups and obliquely as from uncle to niece. Each of us is a meme machine. Over the years memes have proliferated in such numbers that individuals, competing to imitate the best imitators, needed bigger and bigger brains to contain the flood. Now human heads are so big they barely squeeze through the birth canal.

The theory of memes as self replicating ideas in the substrata of human minds, co- existing with self replicating genes in the substrata of human bodies, explains many baffling phenomena of life, from seemingly irrational religious beliefs through to why people are altruistic and to which pop tunes, films, and toys sales at Christmas are the most successful. For example, our proclivity for recreational sex (which if we take proper precautions does not allow us to spread our genes) is explained by Blackmore as a means of attracting partners who will spread our memes. Blackmore makes a compelling case that our inner self, the 'inner me', is an illusion, a creation of the memes for the sake of their own replication. According to this view, we are nothing more than machines for spreading memes.

Conclusion

If the characteristics of mystical experiences can be understood in the above ways, is there then no value or significance in them? Of course there is. To explain something is not necessarily to explain it away.

To take a parallel example, the fact that we now know a great deal about the physiology and psychology of human sexuality does not detract one iota from the wonderful experience of falling in love. We do not say that love is no longer important or valuable or worth giving or receiving, worth striving for and even dying for, simply because we now understand it better. Knowing that it's all 'just chemistry' doesn't stop the chemistry from functioning, often in a quite overwhelming way.

Mystical experiences are intrinsically worth having for the feelings of ecstasy and connectedness they involve. I know of no-one who regrets having such an experience nor anyone who wouldn't want to have the experience again if this was possible.

Moreover, the experiences seem to have a uniformly beneficial effect on people's subsequent lives. The fact that they involve a sense of oneness and union with the rest of the universe can only have positive outcomes for the peace and ecology of the planet. They seem to focus and concentrate our feelings of awe about the vastness and mystery of the universe, but without alienating us from it, because at the same time they underline and emphasise our own essential place in it.

And, if we can get beyond their cultural accretions, the familiar and learnt images we usually dress the experiences in, and pay attention to their core significance, they may teach us a very important basic truth about ourselves, that is, that self is a mental construct. In a sense, an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but an illusion none the less. And knowing the self is a mental construct can have profound beneficial effects on the way you lead your life.

Organised religions have always had an uneasy relationship with mystics, at worst persecuting them and at best trying to shoe-horn their experiences into pre-existing sets of religious beliefs. But if such experiences are to become simply adjuncts to the creeds and rituals of entrenched religious hierarchies, what is the point or value in them? An atheist, approaching the mystical without this religious baggage, has perhaps a better chance of making it a life-enhancing and life-changing experience.

To radically misquote Karl Marx, religions have merely interpreted the mystical experience in terms of their various dogmas; the point is, to be changed by it.

Badmouthing god: blasphemy and freedom of expression

Posted by Ian Robinson On 15 January, 2015 6 September, 2016

THE trouble with freedom of expression is that it applies to our enemies as well as our friends. We have to grant it to those we despise as well as those we admire. It applies equally to the most despicable expressions of the human psyche and to the loftiest and most elevated.

[The following article was first published in the Australian Rationalist, no 72, Summer 2006]

The price one pays for living in a free and democratic society is that one is sometimes confronted with words and images that one does not like or, worse, finds abhorrent. I personally find the images of a suffering man nailed to a cross displayed by Christian churches to be horrific and obscene. But my taking offence at them is not a reason to have them removed. Likewise, a Muslim, for perhaps less coherent reasons, may not like to see images of the Prophet Muhammad. However in a free society such images are bound to crop up from time to time and the Muslim will just have to grin and bear it.[quote align="center" color="#999999"]The fact that the principle of free speech gives us the right to do something does not mean that we ought to do it at every available opportunity. In many circumstances, it would simply be bad manners. If we are going to deliberately offend someone, we need a good reason, not just a right, to do so.[/quote]

Of course in a civil society, which respects diverse beliefs, it would be rude and provocative to deliberately thrust statues of a man nailed to a cross in my face, or to continually confront a devout Muslim with images of Muhammad. The fact that the principle of free speech gives us the right to do something does not mean that we ought to do it at every available opportunity. In many circumstances, it would simply be bad manners. If we are going to deliberately offend someone, we need a good reason, not just a right, to do so.

In addition, while freedom of expression is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, it is not an absolute. We can't say anything we want to say any time we want to say it. Even in a liberal, democratic, multicultural society there are limits to our freedom to speak or write. But because there are illiberal, undemocratic, mono-cultural forces operating in any society that will attempt to use such limitations as a launching pad for extending the curbs of free speech beyond what is acceptable, we need to treat all attempts to restrict freedom of expression with great scepticism. Free speech must be taken as the norm, and the onus must be on those who wish to introduce restrictions to justify such proposed restrictions in liberal, democratic terms on a case-by case basis.

What are the limitations that a liberal, democratic, multicultural society will place on free speech? As we have indicated, politeness and respect for others may impose some constraints, but certainly no blanket restrictions. And there are other considerations that may limit the unfettered exercise of freedom of expression.

Intellectual property rights

One set of limitations concerns intellectual property rights. We ought not and cannot take someone else's creation and either claim it as our own or profit from it in the marketplace. This 'copyright' should extend for the lifetime of the author. Whether it should extend after the death of the author is a more debatable point. There is an argument that it should continue for a short time after the author's death so that his or her dependants may continue to benefit from it. When the English copyright laws were first framed, life expectancy was low and fifty years after death was considered a fair time for which to extend copyright protection. Now that life expectancy is considerably higher and people are living into their seventies and eighties, we can safely assume that in most cases an author's dependants will be well and truly adults and no longer dependent when the author dies. Therefore we should be looking to reduce the time that copyright protection lasts for after the author's death: perhaps twenty or twenty-five years would be a reasonable duration. However what we have seen instead is an unjustified and unjustifiable increase of copyright protection to seventy years after death, under the terms of the disastrous Free Trade Agreement with the US. The supporters of liberal, democratic principles were not strong enough to prevent this change being forced on us by the illiberal, undemocratic, commercial forces that promoted it.

Publishing lies

Another limitation on freedom of speech is the restriction on publishing lies about people. However there are two aspects to this: the private and the public. My own view is that our private lives should be just that, and that no one has the right to publish descriptions or pictures of it in any way, whether the facts are true or not, and whether the subjects are famous or not. That fact that a person enters public life, whether as a businessperson or a politician or an actor in a soap opera, should not ipso facto open up their private life to the prurient inspection of all and sundry. It is only when one's private actions impinge on the public arena, for example if you are using business funds to pay prostitutes or sleeping with the producer in order to get cast in better parts, that these actions become open for public scrutiny. Public actions, on the other hand - actions taken in the pursuit of political, social, cultural or economic ends, which by definition take place in the public arena and affect other members of the community - need to be under constant scrutiny, and people need to be able to say what they think is happening without fear of a defamation suit, even if they can't prove it in strict legal terms. If there is a genuine public interest in knowing a piece of information, the test should be not whether an allegation is true or not, but whether someone had reasonable grounds for believing it to be true. Defamation suits have too frequently been used to squash debate on important issues of public interest (see the Australian Rationalist, no. 57, Autumn 2001 for a plethora of examples) and have acted as successful curbs on criticism and dissent because the onus is on the defendant to prove their statements in strict legal terms, which may not be practically possible.

Confidences

Third, in a civil society it is important in some circumstances to be able to tell people things in confidence. For this reason, the freedom of certain members of society - lawyers, priests, doctors, psychologists etc - to speak out may be limited by principles of confidentiality. In practice, this issue usually comes up in the negative: the authorities want to find out what these people know about someone, and these people claim the privilege of confidentiality to avoid having to reveal it. The concept of 'Commercial in Confidence' has been broadly used to stop inquiring minds digging away for the truth. The extent to which such confidentiality principles apply in matters of public interest is arguable. For example, the public often has a genuine interest in the outcome of a law case, and in such instances it may be that 'confidential settlements' should be illegal. However, arguing this case is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Breaching the peace?

We next come to a group of restrictions on freedom of speech that is more problematic and less clear-cut - that is, restrictions on statements that might incite breaches of the peace or criminal acts that are not in the 'national interest'. It is a fact of political history that the struggles to achieve many of the most important advances in the growth of democracy, and of free speech itself, have involved breaches of the peace and acts that, according to the government of the day, were criminal and against their view of what constituted the 'national interest'. So attempts to limit freedom of speech on such grounds need to be treated with caution. They may simply equate to entrenched political groups trying to shore up their position.

Obscenity and blasphemy

Finally, there are the old and perennial offences of obscenity and blasphemy. The reality of both of these alleged transgressions is so much in the eye of the beholder that they defy adequate legal definition. Trying to ban obscenity and blasphemy is a bit like trying to make beauty compulsory: each of us has such an individual and idiosyncratic view of what constitutes beauty that this is unachievable.[quote align="center" color="#999999"]Trying to ban obscenity and blasphemy is a bit like trying to make beauty compulsory: one person's obscenity is another person's erotica; one person's blasphemy is another person's legitimate satire on religion[/quote]

The same is true of obscenity and blasphemy: one person's obscenity is another person's erotica; one person's blasphemy is another person's legitimate satire on religion. In a multicultural, democratic society, why should religion and religious beliefs be especially privileged and protected from criticism? Believers just have to be tolerant and accepting like the rest of us, and put up with things they are not happy about in the interests of freedom of speech, a greater good. As George Orwell remarked, free speech involves being able to tell people things they don't want to hear: it involves accepting as utterable what you find difficult to deal with, licensing the lowest common denominator and permitting the pernicious, all in the knowledge that a greater good is being served. Without freedom of speech, a liberal, democratic, multicultural society is doomed.

Which brings us to the furor over the depiction of Muhammad in cartoons in Denmark. The prohibition on visual representations of the Prophet does not come from the Qur'an. Many religions use visual imagery extensively to reinforce their message: witness the use of icons in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the magnificent tradition of religious art in Western Europe. But the worshipping of 'graven images' is specifically forbidden in the Jewish Ten Commandments, and some Christian sects subsequently adopted this prohibition. By a twist of fate, one of the early conquests of Islam was such a group and, Islam being a religion that borrowed heavily from its immediate environment, the Muslim tradition then developed so that pictures of Muhammad were not allowed. This was not a universally accepted tradition, and there are more than a few examples in Islamic art of such portraits, however most Muslims today do follow the tradition. Still, this does not mean that non-Muslims should be bound by this prohibition. This would be like saying that nobody anywhere in the world should eat red meat on Friday because it is a Roman Catholic tradition not to do so.

What happened in Denmark was that there was a perception that Muslims were trying to impose de facto censorship on non-Muslims by intimidating them into accepting the traditional Muslim ban. Artists were too frightened of retaliation to make representations of the Prophet for legitimate purposes, such as illustrating a book about Muhammad's life. So in publishing the cartoons, the Danish paper was making a stand for freedom of speech. Unfortunately, two things happened. In the first place, the cartoons were not very good, and at least one of them was provocatively offensive. However Muslim offence could have been contained if the moderate Muslim clerics had been able to meet with authorities to voice their concern. The second unfortunate thing was that the authorities refused to meet with these clerics, and the Muslims felt that they were not being taken seriously. The issue was then taken out of the hands of the moderates and hijacked by radical Muslim clerics, who toured the Middle East stirring up trouble, using dishonest tactics such as including pictures of Muhammad as a pig, which were not part of the original Danish cartoons, in the dossier of alleged offensive cartoons. More tolerance on both sides could have avoided this situation.

All of which set me to thinking: was it possible to draw a cartoon which was genuinely amusing and which satirised the situation without actually offending Muslims by depicting Muhammad? Here is my modest attempt.

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On Secular Humanism being a Religion

Posted by Ian Robinson On 11 January, 2015 6 September, 2016

Church and State

IN 2006, the Rationalist Society joined with the Council of Australian Humanist Societies and the Australian National Secular Association to sponsor a National Conference on "Separating Church and State: Keeping God out of Government".

The Conference was publicised to a wide range of interested groups, including religious groups.

The Publicity Officer (PR) received the following email from one of those religious groups:

Dear PR,

According to the Supreme Court of the USA in 1961 Secular Humanism is a RELIGION. Are you going to ban them (perhaps yourself) from politics too?

Everyone has a 'religion' - even no religion means you 'believe' something - so if you keep people who believe something out of politics then in reality you have no politicians.

Can you tell me if it is only Christian belief that you think should be excluded? If not which other ones do you also discriminate against.

Peter P Stokes, Co-founder and Executive Officer Salt Shakers Inc.

The Publicity Officer replied with:

Thanks for your interest, Peter.

Alas, I am but the messenger and hold no opinion either way, though I suspect the debate is a little more complex than you've taken it to be. If you'd like, I could forward your message on to the organisers for a more considered response.

Regards, PR

Peter Stokes then responded with:

Yes, I would like you to pass it on to someone who has thought it through.

Just the messenger? I am disappointed that you sent me, and presumably many others, an email on something you hold no opinion about. Is it not time that you did have an opinion, before you send out such emails again?

Why should it be more complex? Was I being logical? Yes. Did my logic not make sense? Please consider and let me know.

Peter P Stokes, Co-founder and Executive Officer Salt Shakers Inc

Ian Robinson, then President of the Rationalist Society, then sent to following to Stokes:

Dear Peter,

Our PR officer recently sent you an invitation to a conference we are sponsoring to discuss the problem of the separation of Church and State. In a rather provocative reply to him you made a false statement, jumped to a number of unwarranted conclusions, undermined the significance of the word 'religion ' and were unkind to our PR person. You have asked for a response to the issues you raise and I am happy to oblige on behalf of the organisers.

(1) ln your first email you stated: 'According to the Supreme Court of the USA in 1961 Secular Humanism is a RELIGION.'

This is simply not true. The fact is that in the case of Torcaso v Watkins ( 1961), one of the ruling Judges, Justice Black, in an 'obiter dictum', or personal opinion appended to the judgement, wrote: 'Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.'

However, such 'obiter dicta' are not a formal part of the Supreme Court judgement; they are simply the personal opinion of one of the judges, neither part of nor necessary to the final result, and have no legal force whatsoever.

So the most you can say is 'According to one US Supreme Court judge in a non-binding aside ... ' However, when you look at the full quote it is clear that he is speaking very loosely and colloquially and little comfort for your position can really be gained from it. And anyway he is probably wrong: many Buddhists, for example, claim Buddhism is NOT a religion, precisely because they don't believe in God.

(2) You go on to say: 'Are you going to ban them (perhaps yourself) from politics too?'

You seem to assume that the conference is about banning people. The conference is about discussing issues around the topic and we have speakers from a wide range of positions, including Christian, addressing the participants. Nobody is 'banned', as long as they come, to both the conference and to public life in general, in a spirit of sharing, free exchange of opinions and respect for others' views.

The position I would take is that in a robust democracy everybody is entitled to express an opinion, but that political decisions should be taken not on the grounds that they accord with the religious beliefs of any particular person or group within the community, but because they are for the good of the community as a whole; ie we shouldn't do something because Allah prescribed it the Qur'an, but because it is in the public interest. I'm sure you would agree. And the same applies to any other set of religious beliefs.

(3) You claim that "Everyone has a 'religion' - even no religion means you 'believe' something"

This seems to me to be an illogical position. Surely not all beliefs are 'religious' beliefs. There is clearly a distinction to be made between beliefs that are religious (e.g that God exists) and beliefs that are not religious (e.g that Carlton will win the 2006 AFL Premiership). So it is logically possible that someone might not have any beliefs that are of the kind that could be classified as religious and only possess beliefs that are of the non-religious type.

Your reply would presumably be that absence of belief in religion, or failure to believe that anything that might be called 'God' exists, are in fact beliefs of the kind that might be correctly labeled religious. However, to not have a particular belief does not entail having a different belief, but simply being free of beliefs about that subject altogether, just as not to have a certain feeling does not mean you have the feeling of not having the first mentioned feeling, and not to have a particular impulse does not imply you have any other impulse. If I fail to believe that anything that might be called 'God' exists, this doesn't mean I have some beliefs about 'God'; on the contrary, it means I don't have any beliefs about 'God', and it is hard to see how not having any beliefs about something could sensibly count as a belief - it is rather, the absence of a belief.

However, some atheists and humanists go beyond not believing that God exists and actually affirm the truth of 'God does not exist'. This is certainly a belief, but is it a religious belief? It seems to me that one of the key criteria of whether a belief is a religious belief or not must be whether it includes or implies the truth of the statement 'God exists'. By definition, the belief that 'God does not exist' does not imply this statement, in fact it states the opposite, and therefore it cannot be counted as a religious belief.

If you want to water down the meaning of 'religious' to such an extent that the belief that 'God does not exist' counts as a 'religious belief', I believe you have made the term virtually meaningless. Very little is gained (at best, you might claim a few cheap debating points against those pesky heathens) and a great deal is lost (you have separated the idea of belief in God from the idea of religion, with which it has for so long been conjoined). If this makes you feel better, far be it from me to deny you that pleasure, but my friendly advice would be that the gains are not worth the losses.

As an afterthought, it may be plausible to claim that atheism or secular humanism are 'religions' in a metaphorical sense, in the same way that some people claim that Communism is a 'religion' or that barracking for Collingwood is a 'religion'. [My personal belief is that both should be stamped out!] What this means is that believing in Communism and barracking for Collingwood share certain things in common with holding religious beliefs that make the metaphor salient and useful in understanding them, but they are not literally 'religions' in the proper sense of the word. In a similar way, one might plausibly argue that non-religious beliefs such as atheism and secular humanism share with religious beliefs such things as an interest in metaphysics and in ethics that make them metaphorically 'religious'. But as a student and supporter of logic, you will know that a metaphor cannot be the basis for a logical argument or a definition. You cannot make a stick to beat atheism out of such a move.

(4) You state: 'so if you keep people who believe something out of politics then in reality you have no politicians'. Again, an unwarranted assumption. We don't want to 'keep people who believe something out of politics', but we do want to keep the political and the religious spheres apart. Politics should be driven by belief in political principles such as equality, liberty and the common good, and religious beliefs per se have no place in political decision making. Jesus himself was very clear on this point: 'Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's.' How can we disagree with this?

Once you allow religion to enter politics directly you open a Pandora's box, for the question then becomes 'which religion?' - Islam? Hinduism? Voodoo? People who argue for a place for religion in politics generally mean a place for their religion exclusively, and not a place for all religions, which is neither egalitarian nor democratic. And we are all in favour of democracy.

(5) You ask: 'Can you tell me if it is only Christian belief that you think should be excluded? If not which other ones do you also discriminate against?'

There is no question of excluding religious beliefs, just of confining them to the private sphere. This applies to non-religious beliefs such as atheism and humanism also. Politicians shouldn't argue that some decision should be taken purely on the grounds that it is consistent with humanism, any more than Christianity. They must advance political arguments in terms of political principles such as liberty and equality and democracy and justice to support those decisions.

(6) You rather unkindly chide our PR person, who is just doing his job: 'Just the messenger? I am disappointed that you sent me, and presumably many others, an email on something you hold no opinion about. ls it not time that you did have an opinion, before you send out such emails again?' PR is not a member of any of the sponsoring organisations. He has been employed to publicise the conference. The flier was sent in good faith to a number of religious organisations which he thought might be interested in participating in the debate. You are welcome to avail yourselves of the opportunity. Or not, as you wish.

(7) You conclude with three short questions:

Question: 'Why should it [the issue] be more complex [than my view]?' Answer: It is more complex than you imagine because you made the unwarranted assumption that this was just another bit of simplistic religion bashing, rather than an invitation to participate in meaningful dialogue about complex political, social and ethical questions around balancing the competing needs and interests that are involved.

Question: 'Was I being logical? Yes.' Correct Answer: No. You boldly answer this question yourself in the affirmative, but it is clear from the above points that the correct answer to this question is 'No'.

Question: 'Did my logic not make sense?' Answer: In as far as there was any logic it didn't make much sense and in as far as it did make sense, the sense was arguably wrong.

In conclusion, I have had a look at your website and you seem to be a hardworking and well-meaning group promoting Christian belief in a wide range of areas. I even agree with you on some issues. However, where we principally disagree is whether for example in the case of recognizing same-sex couples, what the Bible seems to say about the issue is binding on or even relevant to non-Christians, and more importantly, whether such considerations should be part of the political debate in society at large. Certainly Christians can assert that for them a same-sex union is not a marriage, and can discourage it amongst themselves, but they shouldn't try to impose this belief on others simply because it is their belief. Socio-political arguments about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage should be based on considerations of our common humanity, not on one sect's dogma. This is in part what separating Church and State means. My personal belief is that there are significant problems with extending the concept of marriage to include same-sex marriage, similar to the problem discussed above of extending the meaning of 'religion ' to include atheism, but I am still mulling over the problem and haven't come to a conclusion. I note in passing that there are many people who claim to be both Christian AND homosexual, so there is inconclusiveness about the question amongst your team as well.

I hope you come to the conference and express your views. If you do, please introduce yourself to me, as I would be happy to meet you and discuss these issues further.

Yours Sincerely,

Ian Robinson President, Rationalist Society of Australia

Peter Stokes did not respond, and did not take up the invitation to attend the Conference.

[table “28” not found /]

Letter: on Terrorism and Freedom

Posted by Ian Robinson On 8 January, 2015 9 September, 2016

In his seminal essay "Religion and Respect" Cambridge Professor of Philosophy Simon Blackburn ventures a secular definition of the sacred: "To regard something as sacred is to see it as marking a boundary to what may be done. Something is regarded as sacred when it is not to be sacrificed to other things, not to be weighed in a cost-benefit analysis, not to be touched". In a free civilised society, freedom of speech is sacred in this sense. The Paris assassins have crossed the boundary and attacked one of our sacred values and this is not to be tolerated. Many of our forebears died to establish freedom of expression as a sacred value and we must honour their sacrifice by defending it with all the strength we can muster.

Ian Robinson

8 January 2015

[table “28” not found /]

The truth about Jesus

Posted by Ian Robinson On 10 December, 2014 26 October, 2016

Sifting through what little evidence there is about the origins of Christianity...

The truth about Jesus is that we just don’t know what the truth about Jesus is. There are of course a number of accounts of his life and words, and some of the deeds described and the sayings quoted may well have occurred or been said. But the problem is that the only accounts we have have been through such a tenuous transmission process and contain so many contradictions that it is nigh impossible to say with any certainty which bits are true and which are not.

We know that Christians existed back then, but the evidence for the existence of the religion’s purported founder is so shaky that many have argued that no such person as Jesus ever existed. It can’t be proved, but I believe, on the balance of probabilities, that there was indeed a Nazarene preacher called Jesus living and working in Palestine around 30CE. However there are a multiplicity of problems in being certain about much else about him.

Let’s examine the fragile thread that gives us the stories about Jesus we have today.

The first important fact is that Jesus spoke and preached in Aramaic, the common Palestinian language of the day. But the accounts we have of him were written in Greek. The ease with which things can be “lost in translation” is evident. Without any Aramaic originals we have no way of knowing to what extent our Greek texts are accurate translations of what Jesus actually said.

Second, we have no eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life. Even if we did, this would not bring a great deal of certainty. American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, among others, has conducted extensive research that challenges the credibility of eyewitness accounts. In the 1990s, when forensic DNA testing first began exonerating previously convicted people, 52 of the first 62 convictions overturned by new DNA evidence involved mistaken eyewitness testimony.

Third, the written accounts we have are transcriptions of already unreliable oral stories that were passed down from person to person for a number of decades before they were written down. The oral transmission of stories is subject to multiple sources of distortion and is of very low reliability. A number of processes well documented by narratologists come into play. For example, storytellers rationalise stories, that is make changes that seem to them to make the story more consistent or coherent or more in line with their purpose or their audience’s expectations; they elaborate, add details that make the story more graphic or gripping or amazing; they personalise, that is they move the events of the story to their own experience or that of a close relative or friend, which gives it greater immediacy and credence; and finally, they mythologise, that is, if they are telling the story of a heroic figure, they introduce story elements that mirror the mythic stories of other cultural heroes, elements which the audience will expect to hear.[quote align="center" color="#999999"]the stories about Jesus’ life follow the hero paradigm remarkably closely, which raises the suspicion that the mythic aspects of his story ... are no more true that those attributed to King Arthur[/quote]

This certainly seems to have happened in Jesus’ case: folklorists have analysed hero myths and established the “ideal type” of the hero story and they have found that the stories recorded about Jesus’ life follow this hero paradigm remarkably closely, which raises the suspicion that the mythic aspects of his story, such as his miraculous conception, are no more true that those attributed to King Arthur or Jason or Siegfried.

It should be made clear that such processes are not always deliberate attempts to distort or deceive, but simply reflect the natural and admirable propensity of people telling stories to try to make them as meaningful and as compelling as possible for the listener.

We should also bear in mind that the fairly rigid boundary that exists today between fantasising and describing, between fiction and non-fiction, did not exist in the first century – there was no tradition of fact-finding investigative journalism – and the factual and the fabulous sat easily together in the narrative tradition of the time, as any reading of the classics will reveal.

There is no reason to suppose that such processes as outlined above did not operate on the transmission of the stories circulating in the first century about Jesus. Nor must we forget that most of these stories were not told dispassionately, just for information, but with the purpose of convincing the listener that the hero of the stories, Jesus, was someone worth believing in and worth following – this intention must have influenced the way the tales were told.[quote align="center" color="#999999"]when ... the authors of the gospels started to write down their stories of Jesus, they had no single reliable source of information but a multitude of conflicting stories and theories about Jesus.[/quote]

So when people such as the authors of the gospels started to write down their stories of Jesus, towards the end of the century, they had no single reliable source of information but a multitude of conflicting stories and theories about Jesus to choose from. Most of them are now lost, suppressed by the Church, although a few resurfaced at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.

Moreover, the writers of the Gospels were themselves hardly disinterested parties. They were committed Christians and their versions of Jesus’ story were written to confirm and strengthen the Christian community in its faith. On top of that, each writer had his own particular agenda and message about Jesus which he wished to push. For example, for Matthew, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, for Luke, he was the saviour of the whole world, and they each constructed their narratives accordingly.

Each evangelist tells a different version of the story and the versions are far from consistent. The myriad contradictions are not denied by Christians, who spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to resolve them. What is disputed is the ultimate significance of the multiple contradictions, which believers try to minimise. But contradiction in evidence is seen as a key indicator of falsehood in many contexts. Police during interrogations, and barristers in courtroom cross-examination, will variously attempt to catch their subjects out in contradictions and inconsistencies in order to show they are not telling the truth.

Ironically. the Bible itself insists on consistency: in the story of “Susannah and the Elders”, Daniel convicts the two Elders of lying because their accounts differ (in a fairly insignificant particular) and this is accepted by the populace (and by God) as proof of their perfidy. On this criteria, the four Gospels must be untrue.

Be that as it may, the fact is that if they contradict each other they can’t all be true. Perhaps none of them are, or perhaps each of them contains some truth and some falsehood. But in the absence of other evidence, it is impossible to tell which bits are which, so even if we had authenticated manuscripts by each of the four purported authors we would not be in a position to make any reliable statements about what Jesus said or did. Hardly a secure basis for a religious worldview!

But of course we don’t have any such thing. We only have copies, and handwritten copies at that. For the first one thousand five hundred years the way the gospels were transmitted was by painstaking letter-by-letter transcription by multiple hands of varying levels of skill. The opportunities for making mistakes were numerous. And again, the transcribers were not disinterested and were not above making changes and additions when it suited their purposes. The most egregious example is probably the addition of a dozen verses at the end of Mark’s Gospel, describing the alleged resurrection, but there would have been many more of various degrees of significance.

Moreover, the earliest copies of the gospels in Greek that we have date from about 200 AD. Plenty of time for errors to creep in. Variations within the extant Greek texts are by no means rare. In 1707, when Oxford scholar John Mill finally compared the 100 oldest and most reliable Greek Gospel manuscripts then available, he found over 30,000 differences between them. Now we have many more manuscripts and the differences between them have grown exponentially. This testifies to the unreliability of the copying process.

The advent of printing in the fifteenth century meant that large numbers of identical copies of existing texts could be distributed, which did nothing to rectify the inaccuracies, deliberate or accidental, that were already in them. And there was still the possibility of typesetting errors, which then became fixed and widely disseminated.

So it seems as time went on, the stories about Jesus available to us deviated more and more. In the early years the deviations – mainly additions – would have been quite substantial, as a diversity of stories about Jesus were incorporated. During the ensuing millennium the deviations – mainly transcription errors– would have been less prevalent, and during the last half century would have dropped away to virtually zero.[quote align="center" color="#999999"]the probability is at best no more than one third of the Gospels account of Jesus is true. Unfortunately we do not know which parts make up that third[/quote]

So how much is now true? For the sake of argument, let’s express it in numerical terms: suppose the average deviation from the truth each year since Jesus’ life and death has been only 0.05% per annum. This is a conservative estimate – the actual average deviation rate is probably much higher. But taking 0.05% per annum as our minimum, then this means that the probability is at best no more than one third of the Gospels account of Jesus is true. Unfortunately we do not know which parts make up that third. We can however make some educated guesses.

It is most likely that, if anything, it is the plain facts of Jesus’ life that are true. It is not likely that storytellers would speak or write truly about someone being born of a virgin, performing a series of miracles, and rising from the dead, and then invent a totally fictional character called “Jesus of Nazareth”, to whom all these amazing things allegedly happened. What is far more likely, to the point of being the only rational conclusion to draw, is that the true bits concern a Nazarene preacher called Jesus who flourished in first century Palestine and who fell foul of the Romans and was executed; and that all the other stories about virgin birth and miracles and resurrection and ascension are fictional – later accretions to the myth that developed.

So, on the balance of probabilities, the truth about Jesus is that there may have been someone of that name in Galilee in the first century who preached the immanent apocalypse, and who went to Jerusalem in about the year 30, and in the words of the Creed, “was crucified, dead and buried”. But there is nothing else about Jesus we can claim is true, or even to claim as probable. The whole edifice of the Christian religion is based of a flimsy tissue of myths which have a purely human origin.

Rationalism and the Meaning of Life

Posted by Ian Robinson On 19 August, 2014 8 October, 2014

As Editor of the Australian Rationalist and later as President of the Rationalist Society of Australia I was often called upon to justify the rationalist stance on life. It was easy to argue for the importance of only accepting conclusions on the basis of evidence and reasoning, and to extol the merits of those values that make a rational society possible, such as a free, compulsory and secular education system, freedom of speech facilitating unfettered access to information and means of communication, an independent, courageous and accountable media, and an open and secular democracy that strives to provide the fullest extent of individual liberties consistent with social justice.

These were the values that the Australian Rationalist strove to advance, and, when violated, it was quick to criticise the perpetrator(s).

We seemed to be on shakier ground, however, when confronted with those who said “That’s all very well, but there has to be something more to life than that”. It is easy to dismiss such concerns as naïve and unsophisticated but I think they need to be taken seriously. A complete rationalist philosophy must say something meaningful about our place in the world. I have been progressively developing a position on this over the last decade.

If it is true, as it almost certainly is, that, in the words of the English novelist, Julian Barnes: "...life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us", then what is the meaning of it all?

Human life is not intrinsically meaningful. If it is to have meaning, this meaning must be given to it. The atheist or rationalist position is that we each give our own meaning to our lives by an act of will: we decide what the purpose or purposes of our lives will be, we decide its significance. It seems to me that this rationalist answer is far more satisfying than the religious answer, that the meaning of our lives is imposed on us from the outside by a deity, for his or her own purposes. The notion that we are pawns in god’s game makes our individual lives less, not more, meaningful.

Nor need the rationalist response be a mere bowing to inevitability. It can be a conscious act of embracing the world -- what Robert Solomon called “the thoughtful love of life”. This means consciously and actively embracing one’s own life as the fortuitous outcome of 14 billion years of interaction between assorted particles of matter. Accepting death as a natural end to one’s life, and not clinging desperately to fantasies about a better life hereafter. Accepting that life can be tragic, that disaster can strike one at any time, and there are no imaginary friends looking after us and protecting us from evil. Seeing oneself as (a small) part of a grand and epic narrative that started with the big bang and progressed down through the formation of the galaxies and stars and planets, to the dawn of self-replicating life, to the blooming of a myriad forms of that life and to the evolution of the human species, celebrating the wonder of our species’ survival, and the scientific, artistic and social achievements of human civilisation, without minimising its capacity for destructiveness and the infliction of pain on others. Putting one’s trust in the natural world as the only world we have and seeing ourselves as an integral part of it, rather than as a special and favoured case that deserves exceptional treatment. Involving oneself passionately in life and throwing oneself into it with all the mindfulness, and all the enthusiasm, and all the dedication, and all the discrimination, and all the thoughtfulness, and all the joyfulness, and all the care that one can muster.

As Charles Darwin wrote in the concluding sentence of The Origin of Species, “[t]here is grandeur in this view of life”.

However, no-one is compelled logically to approach life in this way. There are no deductive or inductive arguments why anybody should accept it. But, as the great Cambridge thinker Frank Plumpton Ramsay pointed out in 1925, there may be a good pragmatic reason:

“I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn't. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one's activities.”

It’s your choice.

This article was printed in the Australian Rationalist, June 2013.

What Lies Ahead?

Posted by Ian Robinson On 15 August, 2014 21 September, 2016

When I was at secondary school, my English class studied a collection of essays, one of which analysed the methods of Nazi propaganda in the Thirties. There were, I recall, three components of this: an element of truth; gross exaggeration; and constant repetition. I have been starkly reminded of this trilogy by the recent behaviour of Tony Abbott and his opposition colleagues.

The elements of truth the opposition are exploiting are, first, that the Prime Minister did make a commitment before the last election not to introduce a tax on carbon; and second, that she has indeed put forward a proposal for a price on carbon as an interim measure before a future carbon trading scheme is introduced a few years down the track. No-one disputes either of these facts.

Abbott’s exaggerations of these basic facts are gross and wilful distortions of the real situation.

Firstly, a broken commitment is not “lie”. They are clearly two distinct things and one would hope that the leader of an opposition would know the moral difference. To keep calling what Julia Gillard said a “lie” is to misuse language, disfigure the debate and debase politics.

The Tuesday papers featured stories about Victorian Liberal Premier Ted Baillieu breaking a pre-election promise on teachers’ salaries. Is Tony Abbott going to attack Ted Baillieu for “lying” too?

Although in general it is not commendable to break commitments, it is not even clear that this is what has happened here. The Prime Minister’s promise was premised on her leading a majority government after the election. This didn’t happen, so it could be argued that this pre-election commitment was thereby null and void. Gillard ended up running a minority government and she therefore had to work out a compromise with the other stake-holders.

Perhaps in hindsight she should have made this clearer at the time by saying “a majority government lead by me”, but at the time no-one was really taking seriously the possibility of a hung parliament and shared government was not on the agenda. However, it should have been obvious to anybody who thought about it that “majority government” was implied in her statement, because, logically, one cannot make firm commitments on behalf of a possible future minority government, since one does not have the unfettered power to carry them out.

So, ironically, Tony Abbott calling what Julia Gillard said a “lie” may itself be an example of what Adolf Hitler called a “big lie”, that is a lie so “colossal” that it has a “certain force of credibility” because the populace “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously” (Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X).

Secondly, a price on carbon is not “a great big new tax on everybody”. It is precisely a tax on the carbon polluters, and who could argue with that? It is true that the polluters will try to pass the cost on to consumers, but the government have said they will use money collected to ameliorate the effects of this on the community.

Moreover, to the extent that there may be price increases, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The increases will only be to those prices which arise out of environmentally damaging carbon-emitting processes. Part of the plan is to make the use of such carbon-emitting technologies more expensive and thus discourage people from using them. There is no magic cost-free way of making a transition from a society based on a wasteful and polluting carbon-emitting technology to a society based on more planet-friendly practices. We all have to pay our share to save the environment and the human race.

For the repetitions, just watch the TV and listen to the radio! Every time an opposition politician gets the opportunity, they reiterate the deceptive “lie” claim and the warped “tax” claim over and over again. This happens with such predictable regularity it cannot be mere co-incidence. There is clearly a conscious, concerted and calculated propaganda campaign of Goebbelesque proportions under way. Who in the Liberal Party dreamt this up? At what Shadow Cabinet meeting was it agreed to, at whose suggestion?

By exaggerating a promise that might not have even been broken into a “lie to the Australian people”, and by exaggerating a charge on carbon polluters into a “huge tax on everyone”, and by repeating these exaggerations ad infinitum and ad nauseam, Tony Abbott and the opposition risk lowering the level of political debate in contemporary Australia to that of Germany in the Thirties.

One trusts that the Australian people are sophisticated enough to see through this vicious and cynical grab for public support.

No-one is claiming Tony Abbott is a Nazi, but one has to ask why he, and the party he leads, are so doggedly using such discredited Nazi propaganda techniques?

March 2011

Ian Robinson Author

Faith that is not justified?

Can an Atheist Have a Religious Experience?

Examples of 'religious' experiences

Interpreting 'religious' experience

Ineffability of 'religious' experience

Passivity of 'religious' experience

The perceptual system

Noetic quality of 'religious experience

Transience of 'religious' experience

The self and the conscious mind

Memes

Conclusion

Further reading:

Badmouthing god: blasphemy and freedom of expression

Intellectual property rights

Publishing lies

Confidences

Breaching the peace?

Obscenity and blasphemy

On Secular Humanism being a Religion

Letter: on Terrorism and Freedom

The truth about Jesus

Rationalism and the Meaning of Life

What Lies Ahead?