Godless science fiction writers; godless science fiction

Via Pharyngula I found this slighty odd warning to beware science fiction. Only slightly odd, because it contains a grain of truth: there is a serious tension between the assumptions of science fiction and a worldview based on a doctrine of biblical inerrancy or priestly authority, and it's not surprising that the majority of well-known science fiction writers reject any conventional sort of religion.

When Udo Schuklenk and I put together 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, we had no trouble finding people from the science fiction community who were enthusiastic about the project. If there's ever a sequel, we'll find others of equal stature. (It's also true that many or most mainstream authors are atheists, or at least not conventionally religious, but in my experience it is considerably more difficult to find mainstream authors who are prepared to give priority to public criticism of religion.)

The author of this anti-sf screed, apparently one David Cloud, laments that, Science fiction takes the reader into a strange world without God. Oh, there might be "a god," a "force," but it is definitely not the God of the Bible, and the prominent names in this field are atheists. He concludes: Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware! 

Leave aside the fact that Sagan and Asimov were not evolutionary scientists - Sagan was an astronomer/astrophysicist and Asimov a biochemist rather than an evolutionary biologist. It's true that science fiction arose in response to developments in science and technology, but not just to the theory of biological evolution.

Most of the article is devoted to listing various people who were famously associated with sf, with brief descriptions to warn us of their godless ways. For example, Robert A. Heinlein is described as follows: Consider ROBERT HEINLEIN, called “the dean of science fiction writers.” He rejected the Bible and promoted "free sex." His book "Stranger in a Strange Land" is considered "the unofficial bible of the hippie movement." Heinlein was a nudist and practiced "polyandry." He promoted agnosticism in his sci-fi books.

This is all slightly odd, particularly the bit about "polyandry" - I don't think the author knows what this word means. I suspect he's looking for the word "polyamory". Still, it's not wildly wrong: Stranger in a Stranger Land was, indeed, a kind of bible for the hippie movement, and somewhat beyond that; and it remains influential on many people for its critique of monogamy (among other things).

Mr Cloud gets nuances wrong throughout, but his overall message of warning is not crazy if you buy into his fundamentalist religiosity in the first place. If you are a Young Earth Creationist and a supporter of religious sexual morality, science fiction is not going to be for you. By its nature, science fiction promotes rational thought and subverts traditional religious worldviews. To understand this, we should see science fiction as a cultural phenomenon produced by distinctive historical circumstances.

Even before the era of modern technoscience, human societies had, of course, always experienced change - from wars, famines, and plagues, for example - but the idea of future societies with radically different social and economic organisation was probably unthinkable before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the transformation of societies by the irreversible advance of technology became apparent only in the nineteenth (see Robert Scholes's excellent little book, Structural Fabulation, for more on this). For the first time, it became possible to think of a future greatly different from the present as a result of continuing changes in technology and scientifically-based knowledge. As science began to investigate the very small, the very distant, and the long history of the world and its many forms of life, a new understanding of the cosmos emerged during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, scientists were starting to describe the extreme vastness of space and the astonishing depth of time. A far more precise understanding of the magnitudes involved was worked out through the twentieth century and up to the present day.

Thus, humanity's understanding of its own place in the cosmos altered drastically over a period of just a few hundred years. Homo sapiens came to be understood as a product of vast space and deep time, a species with an evolutionary origin and a psychological nature honed by millions of years of Darwinian adaptation. Nothing in this picture refers to a god, let alone to humanity as the focus of a god's concern. Though the scientific picture of the cosmos remains incomplete, much of it is now well-evidenced and too robust for any reversal to be imagined. The basic propositions of biological evolution, for example, are now so well-supported by evidence that they should be accepted as facts.

The scientific picture destroys old concepts of human exceptionalism, while offering marvels more astonishing (if less intuitive to beings like us) than anything found in pre-scientific mythmaking. Thus, the last few centuries - since Galileo, say - have seen a breakthrough in conceptualising the cosmos, the past, the future, and ourselves. This has offered new opportunities for storytelling. 

During the nineteenth century, imaginative writers increasingly speculated about technological devices not yet invented; conceived of diverse possible futures; or filled the immense universe, the imaginary future, and the deep past with exotic locations for tales of adventure and heroism. As the pace of social, scientific, and technological change accelerated during the twentieth century, narratives of technological innovation and futuristic prospects became even more culturally prominent. Science fiction, as the emerging genre came to be known in the 1930s, expanded into new media such as radio, cinema, comics, and television.

That does not mean that science fiction is monolithic in its attitudes to science and technology. While science fiction gives at least nominal assent to the emerging scientific picture off the cosmos, the scientific picture is often presented in a greatly distorted and simplified form. Furthermore, although typical science fiction narratives raise questions about the effects of technological development on individual humans and human society, some are far more optimistic than others. Many sf authors evidently see technoscience as a blessing, many others as a curse. Optimists imagine the development of a more mature, less warlike, humanity, the wise integration of technoscience into society, and expansion into space. Pessimists emphasise the dangers of science and technology, often illustrated by narratives set in unpleasant future societies - and even more often dramatised by the rampages of new kinds of monsters (think, for a start, of Dr Frankenstein's creation, then track forward to the giant reptiles and insects of 1950s movies, and to the many science-based monsters of present-day sf).

With all these differences among individual works and authors, however, science fiction assumes, and thus promotes, the essential truth of the emerging scientific picture. It also assumes that human societies are open to change, including change in such things as religious beliefs. While there are narratives in which such institutions as the Roman Catholic Church prevail into the deep future, the general attitude to religion is a more anthropological one: the various future or alien religions depicted by science fiction writers are not affirmed as true, but are scrutinised for their wisdom or lack of it, used to drive the plot forward, or created simply to give extra depth and detail to fictional societies. The implicit message is that current religions are merely the mythologies of current societies, and they will not necessarily persist in times to come, even if something about human psychology drives us to create religion or myth of some kind or other.

It follows that science fiction really is dangerous from the viewpoint of religious fundamentalists, or even from that of a "moderate" religious person who sees her particular religion, claims about the supernatural and all, as actually true. Science fiction, even when it presents simplified, distorted, or laughably incorrect science, tends to undermine traditional religious pictures of the universe and our place in it. That, of course, need not be a bad thing!

Edited: to pick up a fair point made over at RichardDawkins.net.

New issue of The Philosophers' Magazine

I've just received my author's copy of the new issue (i.e. the hardcopy version) of The Philosophers' Magazine (issue # 48: first quarter 2010). It's in a handsome format and contains much of interest, including much to argue with. My piece, "Voicing our disbelief" is one of a number of relatively short comments (about 1500 words as I recall) on the phenomenon of "the New Atheism". I can tell that I'll dislike some of these when I read them - or at least strongly disagree with them - but controversy and debate are all to the good in philosophy.

Amongst it there is an interview with Michael J. Sandel that is almost guaranteed to annoy me. But there's also an interview with Daniel Dennett, which I've already read and enjoyed very much. In all, a nice magazine. The editors, production staff, and others who have put it together, should take a bow. My article is available on the magazine's website, but this hardcopy edition, which (I assume) includes stuff not available online, is worth a look.

Voicing disbelief

My new article in The Philosophers' Magazine is online today ... over here, where it has been attracting quite a lot of attention. It's been linked by various other sites, but I must say that some of the discussion is rather bemusing. Even if we stick to the comments on the original website for the magazine, it's difficult to be sure what some of them have to do with the article itself. But then there's this sort of thing. At least it's refreshing when right-wing Christian fundamentalists accuse people like me of being, in essence, nothing more than fearful supporters of progressive political positions. It's a change from the more common assertion that we are part of a neo-liberal, vaguely right-wing, plot to keep America in a perpetual state of war against Islam.

Anyway, read the article ... and, hopefully, enjoy.

Udo Schuklenk on human dignity again

Here is Udo's latest take on the nebulous concept of "human dignity" - a concept that I consider to be essentially a myth, at best a false rationalisation of other, more specific and genuine values.

Udo is seeking feedback, so feel free to give him some. As far as I'm concerned, he is on the right track. There is no special moral "dignity" or "worth" that goes with being human, i.e. the species Homo sapiens (as opposed to having such characteristics as sentience, personhood, vulnerability to disappointment and psychological suffering, and so on). That's not to deny the possibility of some acceptable degree of speciesism: if, for example, we just do value the continuation of our species, not as a means to some other end but as an end in itself, then it is rational for us to develop social norms that might achieve this. Thus, in a Battlestar Galactica situation, where our species is almost extinct after a terrible attack by powerful and malevolent Cylons, strongly pro-natalist social norms might be rationally justified in a way that they are not in actual societies where the rational imperative is more to retard population growth.

Surely, though, the preservation of Homo sapiens is not all that we value, or even a very important source of our morality. For example, we value the amelioration of suffering for all sentient living things, regardless of species - don't we?

Indeed, imagine that there are other species of intelligent lifeforms with which we are capable of social interaction, and that we and they have collaborated to establish thriving multi-species societies. If some loyalties (e.g. to a philosophical tradition, or an artistic practice) crossed the species boundaries, why would anyone necessarily think the preservation of one or another species more important than the preservation of something else that she is loyal to? In that context, what would be so great about the preservation of something that happens to have a certain sort of DNA? Mightn't it be more important to preserve the tradition of Vogon poetry? Okay, bad example - but you get the idea.

The concept of human dignity has some useful work to do if it is (no more than) a sort of code for the idea that human beings of all so-called "races" (a very dubious biological concept) are really very similar, and have very similar moral claims to our kindness and consideration. Yes, "human dignity" is a good, because familiar, phrase to signal our repudiation of Nazism and all kinds of racism. But once attempts are made to use it as a more precise moral concept, within an ethical system, it becomes a false rationalisation of our morality. It can then lead to absurd results, such as the idea that the destruction of a human embryo, or even a zygote, is of similar moral significance to the murder of a fully-formed human child or adult who has hopes, fears, physical and psychological sensitivities, and everything else that goes with personhood. Used as it is by conservative moralists of various kinds, "human dignity" is a concept that we'd be better off without; the sooner that particular meme is expunged from our systems of formal ethics, the happier I'll be.

Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes

I'm reposting the material below, written by Michael Nugent at the blasphemy.ie site. I think it is self-explanatory, and won't editorialise at length about it. Suffice to say that this law is not only bad for Ireland - it sets a very dangerous precedent for other countries. In particular, it becomes much harder to criticise oppressive blasphemy laws in Muslim countries and various developing countries when a liberal democracy such as Ireland has enacted such a law. Even if the law is interpreted narrowly by the Irish courts (as I expect it will be), similar words might be applied expansively in less liberal jurisdictions.

All in all, this law should be repealed, and we should all make a lot of noise, in our countries, emphasising that such laws are totally unacceptable.

Pass it on.

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From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.

This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly. Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.

Publication of 25 blasphemous quotes

In this context we now publish a list of 25 blasphemous quotes, which have previously been published by or uttered by or attributed to Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Mark Twain, Tom Lehrer, Randy Newman, James Kirkup, Monty Python, Rev Ian Paisley, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Frank Zappa, Salman Rushdie, Bjork, Amanda Donohoe, George Carlin, Paul Woodfull, Jerry Springer the Opera, Tim Minchin, Richard Dawkins, Pope Benedict XVI, Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Ian O’Doherty, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Dermot Ahern.

Despite these quotes being abusive and insulting in relation to matters held sacred by various religions, we unreservedly support the right of these people to have published or uttered them, and we unreservedly support the right of any Irish citizen to make comparable statements about matters held sacred by any religion without fear of being criminalised, and without having to prove to a court that a reasonable person would find any particular value in the statement.

Campaign begins to repeal the Irish blasphemy law

We ask Fianna Fail and the Green Party to repeal their anachronistic blasphemy law, as part of the revision of the Defamation Act that is included within the Act. We ask them to hold a referendum to remove the reference to blasphemy from the Irish Constitution.

We also ask all TDs and Senators to support a referendum to remove references to God from the Irish Constitution, including the clauses that prevent atheists from being appointed as President of Ireland or as a Judge without swearing a religious oath asking God to direct them in their work.

If you run a website, blog or other media publication, please feel free to republish this statement and the list of quotes yourself, in order to show your support for the campaign to repeal the Irish blasphemy law and to promote a rational, ethical, secular Ireland.

List of 25 Blasphemous Quotes Published by Atheist Ireland

1. Jesus Christ, when asked if he was the son of God, in Matthew 26:64: “Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” According to the Christian Bible, the Jewish chief priests and elders and council deemed this statement by Jesus to be blasphemous, and they sentenced Jesus to death for saying it.

2. Jesus Christ, talking to Jews about their God, in John 8:44: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” This is one of several chapters in the Christian Bible that can give a scriptural foundation to Christian anti-Semitism. The first part of John 8, the story of “whoever is without sin cast the first stone”, was not in the original version, but was added centuries later. The original John 8 is a debate between Jesus and some Jews. In brief, Jesus calls the Jews who disbelieve him sons of the Devil, the Jews try to stone him, and Jesus runs away and hides.

3. Muhammad, quoted in Hadith of Bukhari, Vol 1 Book 8 Hadith 427: “May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their prophets.” This quote is attributed to Muhammad on his death-bed as a warning to Muslims not to copy this practice of the Jews and Christians. It is one of several passages in the Koran and in Hadith that can give a scriptural foundation to Islamic anti-Semitism, including the assertion in Sura 5:60 that Allah cursed Jews and turned some of them into apes and swine.

4. Mark Twain, describing the Christian Bible in Letters from the Earth, 1909: “Also it has another name - The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies… But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy - he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty… What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.” Twain’s book was published posthumously in 1939. His daughter, Clara Clemens, at first objected to it being published, but later changed her mind in 1960 when she believed that public opinion had grown more tolerant of the expression of such ideas. That was half a century before Fianna Fail and the Green Party imposed a new blasphemy law on the people of Ireland.

5. Tom Lehrer, The Vatican Rag, 1963: “Get in line in that processional, step into that small confessional. There, the guy who’s got religion’ll tell you if your sin’s original. If it is, try playing it safer, drink the wine and chew the wafer. Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!”

6. Randy Newman, God’s Song, 1972: “And the Lord said: I burn down your cities - how blind you must be. I take from you your children, and you say how blessed are we. You all must be crazy to put your faith in me. That’s why I love mankind.”

7. James Kirkup, The Love That Dares to Speak its Name, 1976: “While they prepared the tomb I kept guard over him. His mother and the Magdalen had gone to fetch clean linen to shroud his nakedness. I was alone with him… I laid my lips around the tip of that great cock, the instrument of our salvation, our eternal joy. The shaft, still throbbed, anointed with death’s final ejaculation.” This extract is from a poem that led to the last successful blasphemy prosecution in Britain, when Denis Lemon was given a suspended prison sentence after he published it in the now-defunct magazine Gay News. In 2002, a public reading of the poem, on the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, failed to lead to any prosecution. In 2008, the British Parliament abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.

8. Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath, in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979: “Look, I had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.”

9. Rev Ian Paisley MEP to the Pope in the European Parliament, 1988: “I denounce you as the Antichrist.” Paisley’s website describes the Antichrist as being “a liar, the true son of the father of lies, the original liar from the beginning… he will imitate Christ, a diabolical imitation, Satan transformed into an angel of light, which will deceive the world.”

10. Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1989: “In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: ‘Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.’ Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken.”

11. Frank Zappa, 1989: “If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good - and cares about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.”

12. Salman Rushdie, 1990: “The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.” In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because of blasphemous passages in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

13. Bjork, 1995: “I do not believe in religion, but if I had to choose one it would be Buddhism. It seems more livable, closer to men… I’ve been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.”

14. Amanda Donohoe on her role in the Ken Russell movie Lair of the White Worm, 1995: “Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can’t embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages, and that persecution still goes on today all over the world.”

15. George Carlin, 1999: “Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!”

16. Paul Woodfull as Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly, The Ballad of Jaysus Christ, 2000: “He said me ma’s a virgin and sure no one disagreed, Cause they knew a lad who walks on water’s handy with his feet… Jaysus oh Jaysus, as cool as bleedin’ ice, With all the scrubbers in Israel he could not be enticed, Jaysus oh Jaysus, it’s funny you never rode, Cause it’s you I do be shoutin’ for each time I shoot me load.”

17. Jesus Christ, in Jerry Springer The Opera, 2003: “Actually, I’m a bit gay.” In 2005, the Christian Institute tried to bring a prosecution against the BBC for screening Jerry Springer the Opera, but the UK courts refused to issue a summons.

18. Tim Minchin, Ten-foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins, 2005: “So you’re gonna live in paradise, With a ten-foot cock and a few hundred virgins, So you’re gonna sacrifice your life, For a shot at the greener grass, And when the Lord comes down with his shiny rod of judgment, He’s gonna kick my heathen ass.”

19. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, 2006: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” In 2007 Turkish publisher Erol Karaaslan was charged with the crime of insulting believers for publishing a Turkish translation of The God Delusion. He was acquitted in 2008, but another charge was brought in 2009. Karaaslan told the court that “it is a right to criticise religions and beliefs as part of the freedom of thought and expression.”

20. Pope Benedict XVI quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor, 2006: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” This statement has already led to both outrage and condemnation of the outrage. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim body, said it was a “character assassination of the prophet Muhammad”. The Malaysian Prime Minister said that “the Pope must not take lightly the spread of outrage that has been created.” Pakistan’s foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence”. The European Commission said that “reactions which are disproportionate and which are tantamount to rejecting freedom of speech are unacceptable.”

21. Christopher Hitchens in God is not Great, 2007: “There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all… Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require… It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender’ as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.”

22. PZ Myers, on the Roman Catholic communion host, 2008: “You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god, and that this omnipotent being who created the universe can actually be seriously harmed by some third-rate liberal intellectual at a third-rate university… However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel.”

23. Ian O’Doherty, 2009: “(If defamation of religion was illegal) it would be a crime for me to say that the notion of transubstantiation is so ridiculous that even a small child should be able to see the insanity and utter physical impossibility of a piece of bread and some wine somehow taking on corporeal form. It would be a crime for me to say that Islam is a backward desert superstition that has no place in modern, enlightened Europe and it would be a crime to point out that Jewish settlers in Israel who believe they have a God given right to take the land are, frankly, mad. All the above assertions will, no doubt, offend someone or other.”

24. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, 2009: “Whether a person is atheist or any other, there is in fact in my view something not totally human if they leave out the transcendent… we call it God… I think that if you leave that out you are not fully human.” Because atheism is not a religion, the Irish blasphemy law does not protect atheists from abusive and insulting statements about their fundamental beliefs. While atheists are not seeking such protection, we include the statement here to point out that it is discriminatory that this law does not hold all citizens equal.

25. Dermot Ahern, Irish Minister for Justice, introducing his blasphemy law at an Oireachtas Justice Committee meeting, 2009, and referring to comments made about him personally: “They are blasphemous.” Deputy Pat Rabbitte replied: “Given the Minister’s self-image, it could very well be that we are blaspheming,” and Minister Ahern replied: “Deputy Rabbitte says that I am close to the baby Jesus, I am so pure.” So here we have an Irish Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.

Finally, as a bonus, Micheal Martin, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, opposing attempts by Islamic States to make defamation of religion a crime at UN level, 2009: “We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.” Just months after Minister Martin made this comment, his colleague Dermot Ahern introduced Ireland’s new blasphemy law.

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Happy New Year to all!!

I'll be back with some more substantial posts - I promise. For now, let me wish everyone Happy New Year.

For me, it will be my first year in a new home since ... well ... 1990. Jenny and I lived in our Montague Street house in Melbourne for 20 years, so it was a big wrench to move from it. There are many memories associated with that house, not least of some wild and wonderful New Years' parties.

However, we're now happily installed in the new house. The only problems are that we still have about 35 of the original 100 boxes to unpack, our cat seems to have been reprogrammed to be much more nocturnal (leading to some sleepless nights for us), and of course there are people in Melbourne whom we already miss. But we'll be visiting you guys ... and expecting visits in return!

Big thanks to Amanda Pitcairn and John Earle for seeing in the New Year with us last night (and in fine style). Frantic waves to Alison Goodman and Ron Gallagher, whose party we would have gone to if we'd been in Melbourne - hope it went well, guys.

My grand project for 2010 is the Next Book. There's some interest in this Out There in publisher land, but not a contract as yet, so I'll wish myself good luck with it and hope that it comes to fruition. There's a lot of work to do before I can start writing seriously, although I already have a lot of rough material lying around to draw upon. The book is meant to be a philosophical examination of the concept of freedom of religion - a very ambitious topic, though this particular book will be relatively short and introductory, not some huge, comprehensive, bug-crushing tome. The difficulty won't relate so much to the actual writing of it. Like most people with solid professional writing experience, I can write fast when I really need to. It's more the project of making sense of the literature that already exists, including the voluminous, and ambiguous, American case law. Some of the issues are contentious and emotional, and I already know that my tentative views will not only not please everyone ... as a matter of fact, they won't entirely please anyone.

Still, that's all ahead at the moment.

Looking back at 2009 ... it was an extraordinary year at my end. It involved three overseas trips, one of them six weeks long; the publication of a book (50 Voices of Disbelief) that is undoubtedly my most important so far; meeting many wonderful people and making new friends; some high-profile speaking and media engagements; shifting house by about 1000 kilometres; and ... unfortunately, quite a lot of illness. The heavy travel schedule in the second half of the year really knocked me around, partly, it seems, because I have some allergic reactions that tend to trigger bronchitis. I'm fine now, but wondering how much overseas travel I should be risking in the future.

I'm hoping for a quieter year in 2010, focused on (a) much high-quality time with the people I love and (b) getting a helluva lot of good work done. I have no particular resolutions apart from my perennial ambition to lose a few kilos. The tasks are pretty much set out for me at this stage, but we'll see what happens. My next public appearance will be on John Safran and Father Bob Maguire's JJJ radio program this coming Thursday evening, 7 January, and we'll take it from there.

Best wishes to all my friends and loved ones. May you do things that astound the world - preferably in a good way.

Facebook group for 50 Voices of Disbelief reaches 1000 members

Yes, we passed 1000 members today. I never thought we'd obtain anything like that level of support, so thanks to everyone who has joined the Facebook group for 50 Voices of Disbelief. That's thrilling and amazing.

Now, y'all - if you like what you read, don't forget to spread the word.

Edited: to provide link.

Happy last few days of the second last year of the first decade of the new millennium

In a few days we will reach the end of the "noughties". No doubt about that. 1980 was not part of the 1970s, for example. 1990 was not part of the 1980s. (The '60s were an aberration - depending on where you live, they started in about 1966 and ended at some point between 1974 and 1979.)

Anyway, we are seeing lists everywhere of "best of the noughties", "key events of the noughties", etc., and this is perfectly accurate. It's also accurate to talk about "best of the past decade" ... in the same sense that if we were back in, say, 1995 we could accurately talk about "best of the past decade" ... meaning the years 1986-95 inclusive. A decade is simply a period of ten years.

What we can't say, though, is "best of the first decade of the new millennium" or "best of the first decade of the new century". For better or worse, the twenty-first century and the third millennium AD (or CE) did not begin until 1 January 2001. That's because we use a calendar that goes straight from 1 BC (or BCE) to 1 AD. There is no "Year Zero" in between. Thus, the first ten years AD on the calendar don't end until the end of 10 AD. Again, the first hundred years AD don't end until the end of 100 AD. And the first thousand years don't end until the end of 1000 AD. The twentieth century began on 1 January 1901 and the twenty-first century began on 1 January 2001.

Thus, the first decade of the new century and millenium also began on 1 January 2001 ... and it still has more than a year to run.

This isn't very difficult to understand once it's explained, and it does make some difference to the world. The symbolic importance of various dates could be lost if we didn't apply the calendar correctly. Two examples are very obvious to me: first, the federation of the Commonwealth of Australia took place on 1 January 1901, and hence on the first day of the twentieth century. I'd hate to erase the date's calendar significance unnecessarily. Second, the movie and book of 2001: A Space Odyssey are set in the first (not second) year of the new millennium. There could be many other such examples, and I don't see the point of messing around with this kind of symbolism, just because the big media corporations couldn't wait an extra year to hold a grand New Millennium party ten years ago. I mean, look folks ... the concept is just not that difficult.

It's also annoying being thought of as pedantic and elitist - even somehow undemocratic - if you try to explain it. But all that said, I well recall the famous and apposite lines from William Blake:

You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.

Blake pretty much sums it up. So, let's agree on this much: it's the end of the noughties, whatever else it is. Sigh. Anyone want to make a list?

Singer/radical life extension post

See my post about this over here at Sentient Developments.

After proud knowledge

Cross-posted at Sentient Developments .

I'm currently reading a book that has been sitting on my shelves, unbroached as far as I can recall, for too many years: The Proud Knowledge: Poetry, Insight and the Self, 1620-1920, by John Holloway (London: Routledge, 1977).

The Proud Knowledge has certain annoying features. One is a generally disdainful or arrogant attitude on the part of the author. He dismisses Robert Southey's then-enormously popular but now-almost-unread narrative poems, The Curse of Kehama and Thelaba the Destroyer, as "ridiculous works" (p. 94) and almost valueless, despite their influence on the likes of Keats and Shelley. Well - perhaps so. I can't say otherwise, since I, like most people these days, have never read them. Perhaps they really are dreadful. But Holloway rather loses my sympathy when he faintly praises Southey's occasional descriptive passages of merit, facility for prosody, and varied style (pp. 102-103), then adds: But in the main, those two poems more or less fulfilled for their time the function fulfilled in recent times by films in gorgeous technicolour of the Orient, and by science fiction and possibly by a novel like The Lord of the Rings. Scenery, romantic affairs, fantastic travel, cosmic warfare, other grandiose but trifling thrills, make their stock in trade. (p. 103) Despite its haughty tone, this passage actually makes The Curse of Kehama and Thelaba the Destroyer sound pretty interesting! Maybe their popularity, including with Keats and Shelley, wasn't just an aberration of literary taste. As I read Holloway's description, I start to wonder whether Southey's narratives really are as bad as is commonly assumed - whether they might not, in fact, be pretty good and just waiting to be rediscovered (perhaps by Hollywood screenwriters). 

Southey was, of course, rendered a ridiculous figure by Byron's satirical attacks (as was Thomas Shadwell by Dryden's at an earlier time). He is best known as a radical-turned-conservative and a literary dunce ... but surely anything worth being compared to science fiction and The Lord of the Rings must at least have suspense and entertainment value.

Nearly as annoying is Holloway's assumption that anyone reading his scholarly work must be fluent not only in English but also French, Latin, and ancient Greek. His pages are peppered with quotations in these languages - without translations. Now, anybody who has read widely in the history of ideas is likely to have picked up some useful Greek and Latin words and phrases, while my French is at least good enough for me to cope easily with many of the shorter quotations. But I am not inclined to struggle, my Babelfish in hand, with solid blocks of literary French whose full significance might well elude a sophisticated native of Paris. I realise that Holloway's attitude was still common in the 1970s among British literary academics, so the book is a product of its time, but it's nonetheless annoying to be told, in effect, that you are not wanted as a reader unless your fluency in foreign languages matches the author's. If Holloway finds it so easy, why not provide his own translations and potentially expand his readership?

All that said, the book is worth a reading. Holloway is dealing with the solitary quest for deep knowledge, undertaken by so many of the English poets from the sixteenth century through to the time of the high Modernists (and perhaps beyond). He offers the insight, obvious once pointed out, that this was simply not a theme in English poetry before the modern period. Instead, the lyric meditations of Donne and his predecessors tended to fall back on a body of generally-available cultural wisdom, associated with Christian doctrine. By Milton's time, this is being questioned (even though Milton does attempt to justify the ways of God to Man), and by the time of the Romantics we see great poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley embarking on their own far-flung intellectual quests. Even when the wisdom they bring back resembles conventional religious reassurances, it is hard won through individual experience and insight - often involving epiphanic moments. Objects and events are now observed with a new intensity, by poets attempting to understand them for themselves, rather than being analogised to aspects of the traditional, commonly-available wisdom. The Romantic poets achieve, or affect to achieve, a special knowledge unavailable to more prosaic or city-bound souls - or in some cases they come to see the proud, solitary quest as essentially destructive, as chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that leads only to despair or desolation.

In literary terms, of course, much has been gained by our culture - namely the mighty works of the Romantics and those who followed (among them, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and Eliot). At one point, early in his book, Holloway lucidly expresses what was lost - if "loss" is the best way to describe the subversion of false certainties. Discussing Henry Vaughan's "Cock-Crowing", he observes: In these facts about the task undertaken by the poem, I see signs of two great convictions which have lain at the heart of civilization over long periods in the past, but do so no longer. The first is, that man [sic] was the primary entity in the cosmos, and that the other orders of creation were secondary entities of which the significance was in the end derivative. The second, that the great and essential truths which map out the human situation do not await discovery, or even constant re-discovery, but have been established long ago, and once for all. The poet's task is therefore to present truth rather than explore it; and the quality of attention which he brings to his experience reflects that guiding fact. (p. 57) Exactly right. By the time of the Metaphysical poets, these convictions are coming under pressure, but even John Donne (so it seems to me, and evidently to Holloway) is always quick to grasp the traditional, culturally-available knowledge, however much he may rely upon new forms of learning for his ingenious figures of speech.

Writing during the Enlightenment, the great Augustans seem to me (though Holloway might not agree with this formulation, since he pretty much skips from Milton to Blake) almost reactionary figures, attempting to hold on to old certainties and values, despite the drift of the times. In any event, the traditional, culturally-available knowledge is losing its prestige throughout the Enlightenment and appears to require defence, restatement, qualification, and some kind of harmonisation with the down-to-earth knowledge of the politically ascendant bourgeoisie.

But of course, it is the Romantics who first valorise the enterprise of poetry as a lonely quest for unique insights: insights possibly reaffirming the traditional dogma, in some ways - or to some extent - but quite possibly antithetical to it. Even in moments when they opposed the moods of their times, the Romantics were products of a breakdown in the long-accepted synthesis of ideas in Christian Europe - as, of course, are we.

What's more, there is no going back; and why would we want to, when the new era has produced extraordinary beauties of its own? Without the breakdown of the traditional wisdom - most prominent, perhaps, in the seventeenth century - we would have nothing remotely like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley (or Mary Shelley!), Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Hardy, Yeats, or poor, nostalgic T.S. Eliot - much less Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, or Ted Hughes ... or even Milton, Dryden, and Pope. This is even before we step beyond the canon of English poetry, into other cultures, other literary domains (such as the science fiction that Holloway evidently scorns), or other artforms.

What comes next remains to be seen. Holloway seems to apprehend the impending close of our era of quests for "proud knowledge" - and he may even be correct, though the arguments need to be made out and examined. Most certainly, however, we cannot return, like contrite runaway children, to a time when ideas of human exceptionalism and received wisdom were unchallenged. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" as Eliot asked. However we answer, we can only go forward, and there's no good reason that I can see to do so in a chastened or bleak spirit. We have learned much, and we can continue with a fitting optimism.