Parliament of the World's Religions - the gist of what I plan to say

I want to make two or three points:

(1) There is no one theory of the good or version of the good life that fits all.

(2) There may be some values that I and/or most secularists stress - kindness, sympathy, reason and science, creativity, individual freedom, tolerance of difference.

(3) But the essential thing is the need for us all, from within our comprehensive views of the world, to abjure the use of state power to impose our contestable views of the good on others. We should stick with persuasion. Secularists should take this view (though they don't always) and so should religious people (though they often do not). This would include freedom of religion but also much more, such as free speech and the Millian harm principle. Reasonable religious people should sign on to a framework of secular political principles such as these. If they don't, they will be regarded as unreasonable by liberal secularists and will have to take the consequences of that.

My considered opinion on Robert Wright's new article in Foreign Policy

I take no delight in the impolite spite of Robby Wright. His screed is in need of some serious mothereffin’ rigour. It’s got vigour, but I figure that it’s not worth a widow’s mite – no! It’s kind of a slow bleed of real thought. It’s caught up short in the nets of error. It’s trite ... a kind of thinking-lite. Yo! An unpedigreed stampede of special pleading for creeds and misdeeds and the seeds of religious terror ... all keyed to mislead. It’s like Wright has smoked too much weed or got too greedy, and now he’s a satellite. An acolyte. A parasite on superstition. So ... he’s turned off the light of reason, looking for a coming season when it gets him a treasonous prize that he jealously eyes, an unrighteous type of commission. His ambition has made him unwise: so now he’s a temporiser, when he ought to be a despiser and a pulveriser. A mighty criticiser. No, no. It’s a hideous sight, a benighted blight that we need to fight without inhibition. If we proceed, we're guaranteed to succeed and lead to its demolition!

What I think of Dick Gross's piece in today's Sydney Morning Herald

I'm feelin' kinda cross when I read that screed of motherfuckin' dross by Dicky Gross. Yeah! It's fairy-floss! It's a total loss. The guy is a tosser. An embosser. His job is a rort. He hasn't really thought. He ought to do some kind of investigation. Haha! Put his mind to some real examination of the motherfuckin' facts. Right now, it's fraught with cracks. It's just too lax.

Aurealis Awards finalists

2009 FINALISTS


best science fiction novel

Andrew McGahan, Wonders of a Godless World, Allen & Unwin

Sean Williams, The Grand Conjunction, Astropolis Book Three, Orbit


best science fiction short story

Peter M. Ball, ‘Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens’, Apex Magazine May 2009

Peter M. Ball, ‘To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer's Lament’, Apex Magazine October 2009

Christopher Green, ‘A Hundredth Name’, Abyss & Apex Magazine #31

Greg Mellor, ‘Defence of the Realm’, Cosmos #25

Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn, ‘Soulmates’ Asimov's September 2009


best fantasy novel

Peter M. Ball, Horn, Twelfth Planet Press

Trudi Canavan, Magician's Apprentice, Orbit

Glenda Larke, The Last Stormlord, HarperVoyager

K.E. Mills, Witches Incorporated, HarperVoyager

K.J. Taylor, The Dark Griffin, HarperVoyager


best fantasy short story

Christopher Green, ‘Father’s Kill’, Beneath Ceaseless Skies #24

Ian McHugh, 'Once a Month, On a Sunday’, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #40, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd

Tansy Rayner Roberts, ‘Siren Beat’, Roadkill/Siren Beat, Twelfth Planet Press

Angela Slatter, ‘Words’ The Lifted Brow #5

Lucy Sussex, ‘Something Better than Death’, Aurealis #42, Chimaera Publications


best horror novel

Peter M. Ball, Horn, Twelfth Planet Press

Honey Brown, Red Queen, Penguin Australia

Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path, Hachette Australia

Tracey O’Hara, Night's Cold Kiss, HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Kaaron Warren. Slights, Angry Robot Books


best horror short story

Felicity Dowker, ‘Jesse's Gift’, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #40, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd

Christopher Green, 'Having Faith', Nossa Morte, February 2009

Paul Haines, 'Wives', X6, Coeur de Lion Publishing

Paul Haines, 'Slice of Life - A Spot of Liver', Slice of Life, The Mayne Press

Andrew J. McKiernan, 'The Message', Midnight Echoes, Australian Horror Writers Association


best anthology

Alisa Krasnostein (editor), New Ceres Nights, Twelfth Planet Press

Keith Stevenson (editor), X6, Coeur de Lion Publishing

Jonathan Strahan (editor), Eclipse 2, Night Shade Books

Jonathan Strahan (editor), Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books

Jonathan Strahan (editor), The New Space Opera 2, Harper Eos


best collection

Deborah Biancotti & Alisa Krasnostein (editors), A Book of Endings, Twelfth Planet Press

Greg Egan, Oceanic, Gollancz

Paul Haines & Geoff Maloney (editors), Slice of Life, The Mayne Press

Robbie Matthews & Donna Hanson (editors), Johnny Phillips Werewolf Detective, Australian Speculative Fiction


best illustated book/graphic novel

Nathan Jurevicius, Scarygirl, Allen & Unwin

Bruce Mutard, The Silence, Allen & Unwin

Emily Rodda & Marc McBride, Secrets of Deltora, Scholastic Australia

Madeleine Rosca, Hollow Fields, Seven Seas Entertainment


best young adult novel

Kate Forsyth, The Puzzle Ring, Pan Macmillan

Cassandra Golds, The Museum of Mary Child, Puffin Books

Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, Allen & Unwin

Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan Trilogy: Book One, Penguin

Sean Williams, Scarecrow, HarperCollins Publishers Australia


best young adult short story

Joanne Anderton, ‘Dragon Bones’, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #39, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd

Sue Isle, ‘Paper Dragons’, Shiny #5, Twelfth Planet Press

Ian McHugh, ‘Once a Month, on a Sunday’, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #40, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd

Tansy Rayner Roberts, ‘Like Us, Shiny #5, Twelfth Planet Press

Cat Sparks, ‘Seventeen’, Masques, CSFG

best children’s novel

Deborah Abela, The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen, Random House Australia

Kate Constable, Cicada Summer, Allen & Unwin

Jen Storer, Tensy Farlow and the Home for Mislaid Children, Penguin/Viking

Gabrielle Wang, A Ghost in My Suitcase, Puffin Books


best children’s illustrated work/picture book

Graeme Base, Enigma, Penguin/Viking

Anna Fienberg (author), Kim Gamble (illustrator), Tashi and the Golem, Allen & Unwin

Pamela Freeman (author), Kim Gamble (illustrator), Victor's Challenge, Walker Books Australia

Dan McGuiness, Pilot and Huxley, Omnibus Books

Gregory Rogers, The Hero of Little Street, Allen & Unwin

Jollimore on Armstrong

First, I tip my hat to Jerry Coyne for blogging about this superb review by Troy Jollimore of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. Jollimore dissects Armstrong's work brilliantly, and Coyne's discussion is absolutely right.

Says Jollimore:

She is entirely correct that atheistic critiques aimed at naive strict literalist readings of holy texts can take us only so far. Mocking the angry, cruel, unjust deity of the Old Testament, or reminding literalists that the world is considerably more than 4,000 [Russell: this should be 6000, but that doesn't affect the point] years old, has little force against the moderate, nonfundamentalist faithful. More powerful skeptical critiques, though, do not presuppose Scriptural literalism. They rely on the Darwinian view of how complex life evolved on this planet, or the existence of serious evil and injustice—things that are well-established and pretty much impossible reasonably to deny and, at the same time, extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with any view of God-as-designer/caretaker, or with any other traditional form of theistic belief.


He then says, in response to the idea that religion is not about belief:

Armstrong may perhaps make a plausible claim in asserting that faith, as understood by mainstream religious traditions before the advent of modernity, involved more than “mere” belief in the modern sense; but if the problem with religious life is that it encourages false, absurd, unjustified beliefs, showing that it does other things as well is not sufficient. What must be shown is that religion does not involve belief, and not merely that it involves other things in addition to belief. So long as religious worldviews differ in certain important ways from that held by the nonreligious, one can still complain that that worldview is poorly founded and, to a large degree, implausible.

Perhaps most importantly:

[Armstrong's] rejection of the theistic God, and acknowledgment that the problem of evil cannot be swept away through theodicy, might sound like music to atheists’ ears. And what could any skeptic find objectionable about revelation once we accept Maximus’ view that “[p]aradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God”? Surely if this view were widely accepted the most serious problems with religion would simply dissipate. Would people who admitted that they “knew nothing about” God’s will support laws to prevent “unholy” same-sex marriages? Would people who saw God as “that mystery, which defies description” be moved to reject Darwinian views of evolution, contra all the available evidence?

Yes, if religion generally took a non-literalist form that involved such modest admissions of not knowing, together with an unwillingness to impose an oppressive morality via the coercive power of the state ... then I, for one, would have no problem with it. Indeed, I do have no problem with religious people who are like that (as I've said repeatedly on this blog). But that is not typical of religion in the world today. On the contrary, religious leaders typically claim epistemic and moral authority, and they do not hesitate to call on the secular arm to force their miserable, oppressive moralities on others, even non-believers.

The estimable Jerry Coyne is on a roll this week. He's been commanding in his replies to supposedly "sophisticated" theologies such as those of John Haught and Karen Armstrong. Commenting on Jollimore's piece, he says:

Where, I ask, is all the sophisticated theology that we atheists are supposed to have ignored? All the stuff I read — Eagleton, Haught, Armstrong, ad nauseum, is laughable: pathetic attempts to rationalize the existence of God in a world where he not only refuses to exhibit himself, but runs the show as if he doesn’t care.

For myself, I have only one quibble with Jollimore. There is one point where I think he is too quick to dismiss an argument from Armstrong that actually has some force. He quotes Armstrong as saying:

Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, do [the new atheists] face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the means of creating a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.

Put this way, the argument is surely simplistic. For a start, it is not at all clear that the New Atheists are so naive. Nor is it obvious that "people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work" are stuck with a choice between religion and nihilism and its dreadful "effect" (whatever this is - I wish Armstrong would tell us). On the contrary, many people who are not high-powered scientists or academics, or creative spirits of one kind or another, are able to live happy and meaningful lives without religion, so Armstrong is exaggerating here. Nonetheless, I think there's a legitimate point somewhere in the vicinity.

Jollimore replies:

Richard Dawkins, for one, has written quite movingly, in “Unweaving the Rainbow” and elsewhere, on the way an appreciation of the nature of the universe, as revealed by science, can inspire and inform a sense of wonder and meaning. There is no apparent reason to assume that skepticism must inevitably lead to nihilism. Nor, for that matter, should we assume that a religion based on an ineffable, unreachable mystery of which we know nothing, and which does not even exist in any sense of “exist” that makes sense to us, will be an effective stay against nihilism. Armstrong takes the link between religion and meaningfulness to be too obvious to be worth spelling out. In fact the link is not obvious at all; it is merely conventional - a matter of so-called common sense.

Well, I agree that the link is not obvious, and nor does it apply in every case. Nor, at its worst, need it lead to anything as extreme as nihilism. For all that, I think that we need to take care with this one. Religion can fulfil psychological needs that may be difficult to fulfil in other ways - at least for some people. Writing in another context, about "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus, I put this quite strongly:

The dynamics of our society's cultural development often seem to involve an interplay between those who accept something like the vision expressed in "The Myth of Sisyphus" and those who find it either incomprehensible or too frightening to contemplate. However, those who accept it might ask themselves how society would need to evolve before the absurdity described by Camus could be psychologically tolerable for ordinary people with ordinary problems and commitments.

I stand by that. The full force of existential absurdity may well be difficult for many people to face. There's a risk, of course, that we might patronise these people and offer them religion as a noble lie, something I don't suggest. But we should at least consider their interests, and try to put ourselves in their shoes for a moment. Some of us may find it easy to obtain a sense of meaning simply from our human-scale involvements - from such things as loving, and being loved by, important people in our lives. It is understandable, however, if others seek comfort from a view of the world that offers intuitive meaning, unfailing consolation, and transcendent hope, the very things that are not, alas, found in any clear-sighted understanding of the human condition. Camus was right about that.

Of course, Dawkins and Jollimore are correct that science opens up wondrous vistas, but, then again, scientific explanations can easily defy, or defeat, our comprehension. Indeed, there may simply be no coherent way for beings like us to make intuitive sense of the mathematical formalisms of our deepest theories - I'm thinking here of quantum mechanics. It is one thing to be told by Camus that the universe does not suffer or yearn as we do, that it is indifferent to us and alien to our emotions. That's all too true, as far as it goes. It's another to investigate what science has to offer ... and then realise that we cannot understand the ultimate workings of the cosmos at all. On any plausible interpretation of the facts, it's mind-boggling. It leads to psychological vertigo.

Dawkins does a wonderful job of describing the amazing phenomena revealed by science, but his success at this does not prove that the scientific picture should be enough for ordinary people who seek to live meaningful lives within human societies. With great lucidity, he has expressed his delight in the true explanation of a rainbow and in the fact that, "on the time-scale of [a] trilobite" the distant past described in ancient myth and epic is "scarcely yesterday". But although this is important, it can take us only so far.

I don't see any simple or complete answer to the problem. Without such an answer, however, traditional religious views of the world will never entirely lose their hold on large numbers of ordinary people who find science insufficient for their emotional needs.

Of course, I have no respect for the false certainties offered by traditional religion, especially when religious organisations and leaders attempt to impose their views by means of secular force. Too much is at stake for us to succumb to this. The ubiquitous bullying from cardinals, preachers, imams, and god-men is completely unacceptable and must be resisted with all our intelligence and passion. But we must also work - gradually and realistically - towards a world in which religious certainties are not so relevant, and their loss is not so poignant. And we need compassion for religious people who find it hard to let go.

All that said, Jollimore does a superb job in showing how Armstrong's view of religion fails to add up. It provides neither a stable solution to the quest for meaning nor a sustainable political modus vivendi. Indeed, Jollimore points out, the subjectivist element in Armstrong's thinking could even license fanatism and mutual intolerance.

Do read the entire review; despite my one quibble, where I think somewhat more needs to be said, Jollimore is eminently sensible. His is, as Coyne is astute to notice, a valuable voice in contemporary debates about science and religion.

Edit: I see that Ophelia Benson has also blogged usefully about this - perhaps even before Jerry Coyne did.

You too can write like this!

The epistemology of history as such asks to be read as the legitimation of the nation-state. However, the emergence of desire invests itself in the authentication of the gendered body. At the same time, the eroticization of post-capitalist hegemony replays (in parodic form) the systemization of agency, and the eroticization of normative value(s) is homologous with the construction of the image. Accordingly, the logic of praxis invests itself in the fantasy of the public sphere.

Thus, I conclude that (first) the poetics of pop culture asks to be read as the discourse of pedagogical institutions. And (second) it is all too clear that the linguistic construction of desire, which has become so familiar in the modern age, under late capitalism, invests itself in the engendering of the image.

===

Just go here to learn how to write like that, and you'll be fine.

Jenny's trip report - WFC

Jenny and I attended the World Fantasy Convention, in San Jose, at the end of October, with Jen going over a few days ahead of me. We had a great time, and I can totally recommend this annual convention as a superb place to make friends and do business.

Jenny was one of the judges for the World Fantasy Awards this time round. She says:

"Well, I hope I was a good judge for the World Fantasy Awards 2009. My lovely fellow-judges (Chris Roberson, Delia Sherman, Ellen Klages and Peter Heck, all rather better-known than me) seemed confident that our judging got the special Big Elephant Stamp of Fantasy Approval."

Read on ...

Ophelia Benson on divine hiddenness.

"One compelling reason not to believe the standard-issue God exists is the conspicuous fact that no one knows anything at all about it. That’s a tacit part of the definition of God – a supernatural being that no one knows anything about. The claims that are made about God bear no resemblance to genuine knowledge. This becomes immediately apparent if you try adding details to God’s CV: God is the eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient creator of the universe, and has blue eyes. You see how it works. Eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient are all simply ideal characteristics that a God ought to have; blue eyes, on the other hand, are particular, and if you say God has them it suddenly becomes obvious that no one knows that, and by implication that no one knows anything else either."

Read on.

Pamela Sargent reviews The Priestess and the Slave

I missed this great (if brief) review of Jenny's The Priestess and the Slave when it appeared earlier in the year. Have a look.

Evolutionary arms race

The barfly is involved in a fierce evolutionary arms race against the lounge lizard, much like cheetahs are against gazelles (or perhaps I should have put that the other way around). I just thought I'd pass on this well-known fact for those few who were unaware. Jerry Coyne has never revealed the point on his blog, so the responsibility has fallen on me.

If I were more artistic, I'd create an illustration to make the point more powerfully. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. If anyone provides a suitable one with no copyright issues, I'll reward him or her by displaying it here. (Think of this as a competition if you like.)