To quote:
One highly-placed source in the Vatican said: “This could have very severe repercussions and is embarrassing for the British government - one has to question whether the action taken is enough.
“It is disgusting. Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See has been in to see the Secretary of State and explain what happened and this will all be relayed to the Pope.
“It’s even possible the trip could be cancelled as this matter is hugely offensive.”
Cardinal Renato Martino, the former head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said: “The British government has invited the Pope as its guest and he should be treated with respect.
“To make a mockery of his beliefs and the beliefs of millions of Catholics not just in Britain but across the world is very offensive indeed.”
Notice the immaturity here? No, not the civil servant who made the original joke - people are entitled to make jokes. I mean the immaturity of these Vatican officials who can't look at it with any sense of proportion. Grow up, children!
About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
Monday, April 26, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
There's matter in't indeed, if he be angry.
It appear that some Vatican hierarchs are angry about a joke within the British Foreign Office, where a junior-ish civil servant brainstormed about various unlikely activities for the pope when he visits the UK. They're so angry that some of them supposedly regret the plan for the forthcoming papal visit. Too bad that these regrets will come to nothing and that the British are going to go ahead and waste millions of dollars (and, no, Herr Ratzinger won't be arrested for alleged crimes committed outside of British jurisdiction).
Of course, British government officials have issued an apology - what else could they do, tell the pope to grow up and get a sense of humour? Well, that might have been an idea!
As a matter of fact, the Foreign Office suggestions make a lot more sense than the pope's typical activities on such visits.
How many times does it need to be said? The pope is not some kind of moral leader. If anything, quite the opposite. He is the head of a very large, very wealthy, overly powerful religious cult whose "moral" teachings are based on morbid attitudes to the human mind and body. However much or little Ratzinger may be personally implicated in the cover up of child sex abuse cases within the Church - and I'm not following the detail all that closely - he deserves no particular respect in any event. Certainly not the ludicrous deference that he's accustomed to. He's not anyone's holy father, and the sooner his organisation collapses like a house of cards the better. That's not to deny that there are good, compassionate people in the Church, but they could find a healthier environment outside it.
Not necessary (overall, you understand) to destroy sculpture of Muhammad
These women Muslim lawyers carefully considered the issue, you see, and decided that destruction is not necessary. Well, thank Zeus for that.
Federal government wimps out on human rights charter
The Australian government has wimped out by rejecting the concept of a charter of rights to create quasi-constitutional protections at the federal level. This outcome renders the entire elaborate process of the Brennan committee's work last year essentially a waste of money - and of everybody's time. So much effort and public money to avoid any decisive outcome.
Instead, the federal government will introduce a new framework that requires bills to contain ministerial statements of human rights compatibility. These statements are meant to ensure that Commonwealth legislation complies with international obligations, most obviously the many UN conventions to which Australia is a party. That is unsatisfactory, because it provides no basis to test the veracity of these ministerial statements in the courts (or before some other suitably authoritative body). In addition, a parliamentary committee on human rights will be established. That's a joke - essentially we are relying on members of parliament to regulate themselves, when we know that MPs need patronage from higher-level politicians and we've often seen how tempted governments are to overstep the bounds. If ever there's an area where self-regulation is totally inappropriate, surely this is it. An independent and authoritative watchdog was required, whether or not it took the form of a Chapter III court.
To be honest, I had no high hopes for this exercise, especially when it became plain that most members of the committee didn't really get it: I think that Mary Kostakidis probably did, but I have little faith in the others. Frank Brennan, who headed up the consultation committee, is no great friend of individual liberty, and the committee was unwilling even to take note of a glaringly obvious fact: it was working in the year when civil liberties advocates were supporting the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. That was something to celebrate and emphasise, but it never got a mention. (Was the committee prompted to mention it by anybody? Yes, it was prompted by me - but perhaps by no one it considered important.) Instead, there was a blinkered concentration on what currently happens to be in the heavily-compromised instruments of international law.
There was, moreover, far too much emphasis throughout the exercise on positive rights to resources from the government; the level of these should not, in my view, be justiciable. Its emphasis on positive rights to such things as housing made the committee unnecessarily vulnerable to the charge that it was (thinking of) handing power to unelected judges. Such an accusation is much more difficult to make out - indeed, it is fundamentally flawed - when purely negative rights are involved. The courts should not be deciding on levels of government benefits, but they certainly should be deciding when the boundaries of government authority have been overstepped.
What was desperately needed, at a time when individual freedom, including freedom of speech, is under constant attack from many sides, was a very strong recommitment to liberal principles - to individual freedom in general; to the separation of church and state; to limits on arbitrary government power to punish or detain; and, above all, to freedom of speech. Where these fundamental liberties clash with international human rights law (which provides inadequate protection to free speech, in particular), well ... so much for international human rights law.
Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person in Australia who is saying these things in public. Neither side of politics shows much commitment to individual freedom. There's nothing much that I can do about that by myself - believe me, I've tried my heart out with no real impact - so does anyone care to join me? Maybe someone with more access to publishers and the news media? Hmmm?
Instead, the federal government will introduce a new framework that requires bills to contain ministerial statements of human rights compatibility. These statements are meant to ensure that Commonwealth legislation complies with international obligations, most obviously the many UN conventions to which Australia is a party. That is unsatisfactory, because it provides no basis to test the veracity of these ministerial statements in the courts (or before some other suitably authoritative body). In addition, a parliamentary committee on human rights will be established. That's a joke - essentially we are relying on members of parliament to regulate themselves, when we know that MPs need patronage from higher-level politicians and we've often seen how tempted governments are to overstep the bounds. If ever there's an area where self-regulation is totally inappropriate, surely this is it. An independent and authoritative watchdog was required, whether or not it took the form of a Chapter III court.
To be honest, I had no high hopes for this exercise, especially when it became plain that most members of the committee didn't really get it: I think that Mary Kostakidis probably did, but I have little faith in the others. Frank Brennan, who headed up the consultation committee, is no great friend of individual liberty, and the committee was unwilling even to take note of a glaringly obvious fact: it was working in the year when civil liberties advocates were supporting the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. That was something to celebrate and emphasise, but it never got a mention. (Was the committee prompted to mention it by anybody? Yes, it was prompted by me - but perhaps by no one it considered important.) Instead, there was a blinkered concentration on what currently happens to be in the heavily-compromised instruments of international law.
There was, moreover, far too much emphasis throughout the exercise on positive rights to resources from the government; the level of these should not, in my view, be justiciable. Its emphasis on positive rights to such things as housing made the committee unnecessarily vulnerable to the charge that it was (thinking of) handing power to unelected judges. Such an accusation is much more difficult to make out - indeed, it is fundamentally flawed - when purely negative rights are involved. The courts should not be deciding on levels of government benefits, but they certainly should be deciding when the boundaries of government authority have been overstepped.
What was desperately needed, at a time when individual freedom, including freedom of speech, is under constant attack from many sides, was a very strong recommitment to liberal principles - to individual freedom in general; to the separation of church and state; to limits on arbitrary government power to punish or detain; and, above all, to freedom of speech. Where these fundamental liberties clash with international human rights law (which provides inadequate protection to free speech, in particular), well ... so much for international human rights law.
Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person in Australia who is saying these things in public. Neither side of politics shows much commitment to individual freedom. There's nothing much that I can do about that by myself - believe me, I've tried my heart out with no real impact - so does anyone care to join me? Maybe someone with more access to publishers and the news media? Hmmm?
Saturday, April 24, 2010
More on the National Prayer Day case
As I reported about a week ago , a federal District Court in the US recently struck down a statute providing for a "national day of prayer": Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Obama (15 April 2010). At the time, I said that I had no idea whether the administration would appeal, but it soon became obvious that an appeal would be lodged. Sure enough, this has now happened.
This case still strikes me as a no-brainer. An institution such as National Prayer Day clearly gives government endorsement to a form of religion, and any statute that underpins National Prayer Day is to that extent repugnant to the US Constitution - more specifically the First Amendment, which forbids any law concerning an establishment of religion.
Nonetheless, there is some room for the argument that certain relatively minor endorsements of religion by the government are constitutionally acceptable. Given that fact, and given that the administration is under political pressure to defend National Prayer day and other government-level endorsements of religious belief, it is not surprising that an appeal was filed. I'm not especially troubled by this - all litigants have a right to appeal and test the law - but there's one aspect that does worry me. The appeal does not merely dispute Judge Crabb's opinion on the merits. Much worse, it attempts to deny the Freedom from Religion Foundation's standing to pursue its case against National Prayer Day in the first place.
This is an appalling development because it has the potential to render laws that breach the Constitution almost invulnerable to legal challenge whenever the breach is a mere endorsement of religion by the government and doesn't compel any conduct from citizens. While more tangibly oppressive laws might still be open to attack in the courts, in appropriate cases, an unconstitutional law whose forbidden effect is "only" government endorsement of a religious viewpoint, affecting all citizens in a relatively inchoate way, would not be. This would create injustice.
A law with broad effect on everybody in the society, but not damaging anyone in particular, should be open to challenge from any concerned citizen. Otherwise, the legislature is free to enact whatever unconstitutional laws of this kind it wishes, and no one will have standing to do anything about it in the courts. Surely that can't be right.
My fear, however, is that the courts might be tempted to go along with such an approach, since it would enable them to dodge the merits of many unconstitutional but popular laws. That temptation should be resisted. The constitution is the consitution, the legislatures of the US have no business in enacting laws that contravene it, and the courts should face up squarely to cases where contraventions are alleged. A law whose unconstitutionality affects every citizen, rather than altering the rights of some particular category of persons, must not be saved by the contrivance that there is no class of people with standing to challenge.
As the current batch of cases works its way through the courts, some American laws that endorse religion may end up surviving on the basis that they do not "really" endorse religion at all. Rather, goes the argument, they merely use high-blown traditional rhetoric: they make reference to an unspecified god in order to provide a ceremonial aura of solemnity. This argument can be applied to the expression "In God we trust" on the legal tender of the United States of America, to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and to the use of religious language and ritual in various formal settings, such as prayers and invocations of God in legislative chambers and courtrooms. The courts are not willing to say that any constitutional breach is de minimis (trivial) so they prefer to find a doctrine to support the claim that there's no breach at all. Hence, they have been developing a doctrine of "ceremonial deism" to cover some of these situations.
At the moment, we don't know which words and practices (if any) will be saved on the basis that they merely use the language of ceremonial deism to impart a sense of solemnity. The idea of ceremonial deism is still at an early stage and has not been fully thought through; we'll need to see more decisions from the courts, especially the US Supreme Court. Clearly, many religious people will not be happy if cherished words such as "under God" in the pledge survive only as ceremonial deism, because such words do have religious, not merely ceremonial, significance for many Americans. If the courts save some words and practices on the basis that they are ceremonial and don't literally mean what they say, that's a somewhat Pyrrhic victory for the religious. Nonetheless, it is likely that this doctrine will be developed and applied to various factual situations, if only because it provides the courts with a pragmatic way to save some laws that are too popular to strike down without risking social unrest.
Be that as it may, the present case is not one where the law can be saved on the basis that it is merely ceremonial. National Prayer Day and its supporting legislation don't provide a case where flowery traditional language is attached to something of independent seriousness and importance, such as a pledge of allegiance to the nation, or the nation's legal currency, or the functioning of organs of government such as courts and legislatures. Rather, National Prayer Day stands alone as a call to the citizens to engage in acts of prayer, presumably to a deity that answers prayers or takes some gratification in hearing them. While there is always a modicum of doubt available, particularly when the relevant legal doctrine is so undercooked, National Prayer Day seems more straightforward than the other obvious cases. As Judge Crabb said in her opinion:
It goes beyond mere "acknowledgment" of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context. In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.
Exactly so, and the government should not be doing that. The impugned law has no plausible secular purpose whatsoever, not even a ceremonial one. On its face, easily confirmed by the legislative history, it clearly amounts to government urging of citizens to engage in a distinctively religious practice. If the courts can save National Prayer Day, they can save almost anything, since this is such a weak case for the ceremonial deism theory or anything like it.
Judge Crabb was right to find that the National Prayer Day legislation is unconstitutional. The appeal court - and the Supreme Court if the case ends up there - should have the integrity and courage to reject the administration's appeal.
This case still strikes me as a no-brainer. An institution such as National Prayer Day clearly gives government endorsement to a form of religion, and any statute that underpins National Prayer Day is to that extent repugnant to the US Constitution - more specifically the First Amendment, which forbids any law concerning an establishment of religion.
Nonetheless, there is some room for the argument that certain relatively minor endorsements of religion by the government are constitutionally acceptable. Given that fact, and given that the administration is under political pressure to defend National Prayer day and other government-level endorsements of religious belief, it is not surprising that an appeal was filed. I'm not especially troubled by this - all litigants have a right to appeal and test the law - but there's one aspect that does worry me. The appeal does not merely dispute Judge Crabb's opinion on the merits. Much worse, it attempts to deny the Freedom from Religion Foundation's standing to pursue its case against National Prayer Day in the first place.
This is an appalling development because it has the potential to render laws that breach the Constitution almost invulnerable to legal challenge whenever the breach is a mere endorsement of religion by the government and doesn't compel any conduct from citizens. While more tangibly oppressive laws might still be open to attack in the courts, in appropriate cases, an unconstitutional law whose forbidden effect is "only" government endorsement of a religious viewpoint, affecting all citizens in a relatively inchoate way, would not be. This would create injustice.
A law with broad effect on everybody in the society, but not damaging anyone in particular, should be open to challenge from any concerned citizen. Otherwise, the legislature is free to enact whatever unconstitutional laws of this kind it wishes, and no one will have standing to do anything about it in the courts. Surely that can't be right.
My fear, however, is that the courts might be tempted to go along with such an approach, since it would enable them to dodge the merits of many unconstitutional but popular laws. That temptation should be resisted. The constitution is the consitution, the legislatures of the US have no business in enacting laws that contravene it, and the courts should face up squarely to cases where contraventions are alleged. A law whose unconstitutionality affects every citizen, rather than altering the rights of some particular category of persons, must not be saved by the contrivance that there is no class of people with standing to challenge.
As the current batch of cases works its way through the courts, some American laws that endorse religion may end up surviving on the basis that they do not "really" endorse religion at all. Rather, goes the argument, they merely use high-blown traditional rhetoric: they make reference to an unspecified god in order to provide a ceremonial aura of solemnity. This argument can be applied to the expression "In God we trust" on the legal tender of the United States of America, to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and to the use of religious language and ritual in various formal settings, such as prayers and invocations of God in legislative chambers and courtrooms. The courts are not willing to say that any constitutional breach is de minimis (trivial) so they prefer to find a doctrine to support the claim that there's no breach at all. Hence, they have been developing a doctrine of "ceremonial deism" to cover some of these situations.
At the moment, we don't know which words and practices (if any) will be saved on the basis that they merely use the language of ceremonial deism to impart a sense of solemnity. The idea of ceremonial deism is still at an early stage and has not been fully thought through; we'll need to see more decisions from the courts, especially the US Supreme Court. Clearly, many religious people will not be happy if cherished words such as "under God" in the pledge survive only as ceremonial deism, because such words do have religious, not merely ceremonial, significance for many Americans. If the courts save some words and practices on the basis that they are ceremonial and don't literally mean what they say, that's a somewhat Pyrrhic victory for the religious. Nonetheless, it is likely that this doctrine will be developed and applied to various factual situations, if only because it provides the courts with a pragmatic way to save some laws that are too popular to strike down without risking social unrest.
Be that as it may, the present case is not one where the law can be saved on the basis that it is merely ceremonial. National Prayer Day and its supporting legislation don't provide a case where flowery traditional language is attached to something of independent seriousness and importance, such as a pledge of allegiance to the nation, or the nation's legal currency, or the functioning of organs of government such as courts and legislatures. Rather, National Prayer Day stands alone as a call to the citizens to engage in acts of prayer, presumably to a deity that answers prayers or takes some gratification in hearing them. While there is always a modicum of doubt available, particularly when the relevant legal doctrine is so undercooked, National Prayer Day seems more straightforward than the other obvious cases. As Judge Crabb said in her opinion:
It goes beyond mere "acknowledgment" of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context. In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.
Exactly so, and the government should not be doing that. The impugned law has no plausible secular purpose whatsoever, not even a ceremonial one. On its face, easily confirmed by the legislative history, it clearly amounts to government urging of citizens to engage in a distinctively religious practice. If the courts can save National Prayer Day, they can save almost anything, since this is such a weak case for the ceremonial deism theory or anything like it.
Judge Crabb was right to find that the National Prayer Day legislation is unconstitutional. The appeal court - and the Supreme Court if the case ends up there - should have the integrity and courage to reject the administration's appeal.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Oh noes, Hans Küng is too evident!
The renowned Catholic intellectual Hans Küng is too damn evident. In the French sense, of course. Not only did he buy himself a (gasp!) nice car nearly over 40years ago at the time of Vatican II; he has now said what many others are thinking about the morally and intellectually bankrupt Catholic Church.
His advice is probably good, but les salauds (to use another French expression) won't take it.
His advice is probably good, but les salauds (to use another French expression) won't take it.
Jenny sells a new story to Cosmos magazine
News like this could cause earthquakes and other dramatic geological events. Read all about it on Jenny Blackford's Living in the Past blog over yonder.
Marke but this flea
After the publication of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, many quick, opportunistic books were written in reply. Dawkins responded by referring to their authors, among them David B. Hart, as his "fleas", referencing a poem by W.B. Yeats.
Well, Hart has now published a long rant at the theocratic apologetics site FirstThings, which advertises itself as advancing "a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." Hart's piece stands as a sort of review of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (surprise! surprise! he didn't like it), but it goes on to attack the "New Atheism" more generally, with particular attention to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and A.C. Grayling.
Much of the rant consists of an attempt to defend the hopeless Argument from Contingency. All things that we see are contingent: i.e., they might not have existed. Sure, there might be causal explanations for their existence, but if you trace those causes back far enough, you still come to something that (logically speaking) might not have existed, so eventually (it's claimed) you need to postulate something that "necessarily exists" in order to explain the whole shebang. This is God, or so the argument runs.
But for a start, even if God does exist he (logically) might not have. Turning this around, it's logically possible, even in a world where God exists, that he mightn't have existed. There's nothing self-contradictory about a description of a world with no omnipotent, omniscient, angry, wine-loving, shellfish-abominating being. (Note: by "world" here we don't mean "physical universe"; we mean the entirety of reality including whatever spooky, non-physical ontology it might have.) The concept "God", however exactly we define that concept, is not instantiated in the actual world as a matter of logical necessity any more than the concept "neoconservative wanker" is (the world just happens to contain a lot of neoconservative wankers; as far as logic is concerned, it might not have). Even if God happened to exist, it would still be logically possible that "God" is an uninstantiated concept.
Meanwhile, there's no reason at all to worry that it's logically possible that whatever things do happen to exist might not have, or that it's logically possible that different things might have existed. Sure, the world - including any spooky ontology it might involve - could (where "could" refers to logical possibility) have been different. So what? It's a brute fact, not something required by logic, that the world is as it happens to be. Who would ever think otherwise, unless in the grip of a religion? Even Hart ultimately distances himself from the argument, sensing its sad lack of legs.
The Argument from Contingency gets nowhere, and it acquires whatever thin veneer of plausibility it might have only by relying covertly on archaic concepts of necessary being and the like.
Alas, you can have a concept, and attach to it the high falutin' formula "absolute actuality", but you do not thereby guarantee that the concept is instantiated in the real world. Thus, God would be just as contingent as anything else.
You'd think the numerous historical failures (including that of Goedel!) to get an ontological argument off the ground for more than a few confused seconds would provide enough warning as to why contingency arguments inevitably crash down in flames. If ontological arguments fail, you don't have a necessarily-actualised concept of God, but if you don't have that you don't a decent argument from contingency. The Argument from Contingency is parasitic on the Ontological Argument.
Ontological arguments always fail, once they are carefully picked apart, because you can't just take the concept of some sort of substantial, if spooky, thing that is imagined to have various specific properties - e.g. being omnipotent, loving wine, hating shellfish, ordering genocides, prying into people's bedrooms, and so on - then define the concept into being actualised. It doesn't work that way.
Commenters at Dawkins' site are having a field day with Hart.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Talk at Macquarie University
Tomorrow - or technically today, since it's after midnight - I'll be popping down to Sydney to give a talk at Macquarie University, to the redoubtable Macquarie University Atheist League.
This is the same student organisation that recently hosted a debate between Dan Barker and Cardinal George Pell, when Barker was visiting Australia (there were a couple of other debates, too, involving Barker, who gave very generously of his time).
My topic is "Church/State Separation and the Harm Principle", and I'll be sweeping through history and philosophy to argue for a purely secular state that protects worldly things ... rather than trying to discover and enforce the all-things-considered "right" morality. I'll begin with the political triumph of Christianity in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, describe the spirit of intolerance and persecution that the churches have displayed ever since, hit some high spots with John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and segue into a few observations about the culture war that we are involved in today. The case I'll be making should appeal not only to atheists and other secular folks, but also to Christians who are prepared to consider it seriously. After all, Locke developed his ideas for the benefit of the Christian churches and sects of his time, who'd been at each other's throats for 170 years since Luther's challenge to the Catholic hegemony in the early decades of the previous century. Indeed, Locke thought that there perfectly good secular reasons to persecute atheists!
But when the Lockle's ideas are taken to their logical, and very plausible, conclusion, they have much to offer atheists and rationalists, as well as thoughtful Christians. Indeed, they have the potential to prove more than contemporary theoconservatives are ready to stomach - that's one reason, it seems to me, why we have a culture war.
I'm looking forward to this gig, so before I go to bed I'll be praying to Apollo - who seems like the right god on this occasion - that it all falls into place.
This is the same student organisation that recently hosted a debate between Dan Barker and Cardinal George Pell, when Barker was visiting Australia (there were a couple of other debates, too, involving Barker, who gave very generously of his time).
My topic is "Church/State Separation and the Harm Principle", and I'll be sweeping through history and philosophy to argue for a purely secular state that protects worldly things ... rather than trying to discover and enforce the all-things-considered "right" morality. I'll begin with the political triumph of Christianity in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, describe the spirit of intolerance and persecution that the churches have displayed ever since, hit some high spots with John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and segue into a few observations about the culture war that we are involved in today. The case I'll be making should appeal not only to atheists and other secular folks, but also to Christians who are prepared to consider it seriously. After all, Locke developed his ideas for the benefit of the Christian churches and sects of his time, who'd been at each other's throats for 170 years since Luther's challenge to the Catholic hegemony in the early decades of the previous century. Indeed, Locke thought that there perfectly good secular reasons to persecute atheists!
But when the Lockle's ideas are taken to their logical, and very plausible, conclusion, they have much to offer atheists and rationalists, as well as thoughtful Christians. Indeed, they have the potential to prove more than contemporary theoconservatives are ready to stomach - that's one reason, it seems to me, why we have a culture war.
I'm looking forward to this gig, so before I go to bed I'll be praying to Apollo - who seems like the right god on this occasion - that it all falls into place.
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