Secular Right

I can’t believe I sat through this whole thing — it’s two hours, and not really my cup of tea. Hitch is always entertaining, but there’s really nothing new here if you’ve read his books. Must have been a slow afternoon. I confess I got the clip from far-lefty science blogger P.Z. Myers.

It speaks well of Hitch that he’d go up against five, count ’em five, believers; though when you get into it you realize the competition wasn’t all that fierce, and Hitch has done enough of this stuff on his book tours he can pretty much phone it in.   Still, I though Hitch was nonplussed a couple of times. His best moment was in the question period at the end, when asked what he thought of believers who didn’t evangelize.

I found myself thinking (and not at all originally, of course) that the Afterlife business is a really big divider. If you can swallow that, the rest of religion goes down pretty easily; and if not, not.

Weird to see that one guy keep pounding on those Scholastic word-game arguments for the existence of God. Is that stuff still current in theology departments? I thought of young Bertie Russell in Trinity Lane, throwing his can of tobacco in the air and exclaiming: “Great God in boots! — the ontological argument is sound!” He’d just been converted (though very temporarily) to Hegelianism … yet this guy says Hegel never put forward an ontological argument.

Heather:

I must say, I think you were a bit unkind to David Brooks there. I speak as someone with mixed feelings about Brooks, who, when he departs from what he’s really good at — observational sociology — usually fails to impress. See me on Brooks here, for example.

I think Brooks has grasped that what’s going on in the human sciences is hugely important, probably revolutionary, and he wants to write and talk about it; but he doesn’t want to step over any of the bright lines drawn around these topics by the politically correct intellectual establishment. He doesn’t want to be Larry Summersed or James Watsoned. In my opinion, the straddle he’s attempting is impossible & his venture into the human sciences will end with a wipe-out, but we’ll see.

In any case I’m glad to have a prominent general-interest columnist talking about human nature studies. Who knows? — perhaps he’ll find some way to bring the topic of human biodiversity into the domain of respectable discourse. That would be a step towards sane policies on, for example, immigration and education. But this is probably too much to hope for.

It’s nice that he’s discovered David Hume, though. (The original one, not our own learned list member.)

The resolution recently passed by the UN’s entertaingly mis-labeled Human Rights Council on the topic of “religious defamation” is, of course, nonsense and dangerous nonsense at that. The Economist does a good job here  of explaining why, but one particular point cannot be emphasized enough:

The [UN] resolution says “defamation of religions” is a “serious affront to human dignity” which can “restrict the freedom” of those who are defamed, and may also lead to the incitement of violence. But there is an insidious blurring of categories here, which becomes plain when you compare this resolution with the more rigorous language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in a spirit of revulsion over the evils of fascism. This asserts the right of human beings in ways that are now entrenched in the theory and (most of the time) the practice of liberal democracy. It upholds the right of people to live in freedom from persecution and arbitrary arrest; to hold any faith or none; to change religion; and to enjoy freedom of expression, which by any fair definition includes freedom to agree or disagree with the tenets of any religion. In other words, it protects individuals—not religions, or any other set of beliefs. And this is a vital distinction. For it is not possible systematically to protect religions or their followers from offence without infringing the right of individuals.

No it’s not. And nor should governments (let alone the ‘international community’) even try to do so.

It’s certainly to be hoped that (at least when it is deserved) some degree of good manners be shown when discussing matters of religion, but the essence of good manners are that they are voluntary. The increasing effort by some groups (and Islamists are not the only ones to blame in this respect) to pressure governments to legislate in defense of  those groups’ ‘rights’ not to be ‘offended’ at affronts to their particular versions of the sacred is a cancer eating away at the principle of free speech, a cancer that is, quite clearly, metastasizing fast.