tcpip | Atheist and Religous Meetings, Work-Related Activities

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Atheist and Religous Meetings, Work-Related Activities

Last Tuesday went to the Melbourne Atheist Society to hear Alex McCullie talk on "Progessive Christianity: A Secular Response". Alex claimed the theoretical and practical elements of progressive Christianity is really little different to an active secular humanist with the exception that they have a sense of a personal religious experience; so in other words he didn't have much of a response to offer! This Tuesday the Melbourne University Secular Society is holding an excellent forum on The Problem of Evil, with so absolutely top quality local speakers on the subject. Next month I am presenting at the Melbourne Atheist Society on "Atheist Support for Religious Freedom?" and this Sunday coming I am speaking at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on "The Other Half: The Universalist Tradition" (the Melbourne Church, coming from an English rather than American Unitarian tradition doesn't really have much Universalist influence). Last Sunday week at the same organisation I gave the service for Denis Fitzgerald, executive director of Catholic Social Services; I cited Óscar Romero and Populorum progressio.

Lateline reported last Thursday that Australian scientists are developing a new chemotherapy treatment, using a diamond-encrusted skin patch which slowly releases drugs into the body. Yes, that is me showing Dr. Amanda Barndard from CSIRO around the VPAC machine room. Have almost finished by first MBA assignment; a 3,000 word document on how VPAC is going to provide high-performance computing services in the future (actually, not that easy given item 2 of the organisation's constitutional objectives). Next assignment, due on Wednesday, is a Financial Management analysis. Apropos to this is an excellent article gaining wider circulation on how to manage IT staff; it's all about respect (hat-tip to

certifiedwaif). The analogy with medical staff was particularly well put.

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"Alex claimed the theoretical and practical elements of progressive Christianity is really little different to an active secular humanist with the exception that they have a sense of a personal religious experience; so in other words he didn't have much of a response to offer!"

Thanks for this. I have been making this argument off and on, and more on than off, for the last 7 years on LJ and it is still - for reasons that escape me - hard to get people to see to the relationship between secular humanism and progressive, or liberal Christianity.

"Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk."

- Habermas

I understand where Habermas is coming from with that quote, although I an prepared to rephrase it in a less exclusionary manner. Peter Gay wrote a very important book some decades back entitled "The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism" where does make the very important point that the 'return to the past' was not just an attempt at a Judeo-Christian revival to its origins but also a Hellenic pagan tradition with an acceptance of diversity of viewpoints and criticism.

Of course one of the side effects of this is whether we can legitimately state that expressions like universal human rights are, in fact, universal, or whether they are merely a peculiar cultural obsession of post-Christian Indo-Europeans.

Secular humanists often are more comfortable thinking their legacy is derived from paganism. This isn't the case. Nietzsche demolishes this whole concept by revealing a fundamentally anti-humanistic paganism that secular humanists would reject. I don't think Nietzsche is wrong here.

You can't always pick your parents.

I don't doubt there is a legacy of anti-humanist paganism, but there is also the same in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Whilst I remain unconvinced of either argument, Peter Gay does present a far more convincing (and I may add, a far better referenced) argument that either Habermas or Nietzsche. If you do get a chance I thoroughly recommend checking it out.

Personally I don't think that secular humanism comes from either Judeo-Christian or a pagan tradition. Rather I would suggest it is something achievable across cultures but found its expression in the European environment more due to technological development (particularly communications technology) that any other reason.

"If the faith of the Christian Church has grown weary and has forfeited its worldly dominion, the dominance of its God has not yet disappeared. Rather, its form has been disguised and its claims have hardened beyond recognition. In place of the authority of God and Church looms the authority of conscience, or the dominion of reason, or the God of historical progress, or the social instinct."

- Martin Heidegger

The more I study the pagan opposition to early Christianity, the more I doubt that modern humanists and classical pagans would have too much in common. Heidegger is correct here. Liberal secular humanism is just Christianity in a new disguise.

Well, if you're going to use Diocletian paganism as an example, yes, of course contemporary humanists would object. More realistically however one tends to look at Cicero, Hypatia of Alexandria, Alexander the Great, Solon, Epicurus, Democritus, Socrates, Aristotle etc.

Please...

"But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

"There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule."

- Aristotle

This doesn't seem compatible with humanistic ideas at all. Have you looked at Cicero's take on infanticide recently? How hard would it be to find other examples that are just as egregious?

I think you are hoping for different origins than really exist. You can be a total romantic, but that will not harmonize modern liberalism and ancient paganism. Heidegger and Habermas might disagree about everything else, but this they agree on.

"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts."

- Carl Scmitt

The "theological concepts" derive from the theology of Judeo-Christianity just the way Habermas and Heidegger say they do.

I am not particularly troubled by Aristotle's comments on slavery in this case, especially that he is associating it with disposition. In terms of practical reality it is well-known that he believed that slavery was temporal and a result of labour-specialisation; that it would not be needed; "if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." (Politics, Book I)

I should need to elucidate the numerous documents of Judeo-Christian support for slavery, without a doubt you are already aware of them.

The near-universal practise of infanticide was, of course, justified by those in that context. It is to the credit to the Judiac (and subsequently Christian and Moslem) to oppose it. But on that area you will find that my views are similar to those of Peter Singer who, in some cases, consider infanticide ethically just.

"You can be a total romantic, but that will not harmonize modern liberalism and ancient paganism."

As previously mentioned, I have no desire to do so. My claim is that the secular approach is universal and does not derive from either Hellenic polytheism or Judeo-Christianity monotheism, or any other religious tradition. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem!

I keep looking for the same egalitarian tropes common to secular humanism and paganism and I keep coming up empty. Paganism was all about hierarchy. Secular humanism is all about equality. This is one reason pagan authors, like Porphyry, criticized early Christianity. Given his criticism, it's hard for me to see Porphyry embracing secular humanism and seeing himself and his views and values as being compatible with it.

Ahh, in which case we're talking cross-purposes. The tradition that secular humanists look to in classic Hellenes is its rationality, materialism, lack of censorship etc.

And again, how many "classical pagan authors" who might be found to refute all of these things? Plato advocated metaphysics (non-materialism at its start) and strict state censorship. The idea that they would go along with today's secular humanism is appalling.

Anyone who critiques humanistic beliefs from a materialistic standpoint is dismissed by the humanists too. Are they really that "rational"?

Well you will note when I listed the classical sources I didn't include Plato. There's good reason for that.

I hope you won't cite Heraclitus, or the people who killed Socrates, either.

I can't say I see much similarity between paganism and secular humanism, but I can see a lot between it and liberal Judeo-Christianity.

To see secular humanism as an outgrowth of Christianity requires far too much cherry-picking for my liking. For starters one would have to dispense with the entire 'secular' component. The loathing of worldly knowledge by pious Christianity was a famous and consistent part of the post-classical mind.

As examples, one can St Jerome's terrible nightmare that the Almighty condemned him for being a Ciceronian, not a Christian (leaving him to abandon secular texts for 15 years and only then to take them up under the caveat of Deuteronomy XXI 11-13, a position followed by Augstine and St Peter Damian in the 11th century, and the abbot Hildershiem who compared natural studies as being a spy in the camp of the enemy. The earth indeed was the Devil's garden.

The second set of cherry-picking involved the profound anti-humanism prevalent in Christian action and thought. From Clovis' famous utterance "With this cross I conquer", Charlemagne's execution of thousands of pagans (and others e.g., Hypatia), the doctrines and practice in the Malleus Maleficarum, and the use of Christian doctrine to protect the institution of slavery. Heck, all the way up to you-know-who with ""I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."

No religion, monotheism nor pagan, has any particular claim on secular humanism. There have been elements of it found in all, but it belongs to none.

I think that Hegel himself provides the most prescient response to your objections in the way he describes the gradual process of secularization in the West. All of Western history, for him, is the way in which this process of secularization takes place - which is also why Nietzsche makes the same kinds of observations, but in a negative, critical sense. Rather than being opposed to Judeo-Christianity in some deep way, secular humanism is its ultimate development and natural outgrowth; the cat growing from the kitten.

The moral self-righteousness of the humanists is, for me, indistinguishable from that of "fundamentalists."

I refer to my earlier comments that this really comes down to improvements in communication technology. It wasn't until the breakup of the monotheistic power structures and the dead-hand that they exerted on worldly knowledge was there even the opportunity for political and investigative freedom. That instance occurred in Europe for a variety of factors (the combination of movable type plus alphabetic script). But it's too a stretch to suggest that these were a result of a Christian tradition, or even a rediscovery of the pagan classics. It could have just as easily happened elsewhere.

Sometimes the most profound changes in history have the origins of the right people and right things being present at the right time. Modernity for Europe is one of those.

People still feel guilty, and with the same degree of shame, but it's about other things than they used to. Now, they feel guilty for being racist, sexist, or homophobic. This is the process of the secularization of Judeo-Christian values. It's not hard to see these "crimes against humanism" proceeding from "the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love." A Christian-derived humanism can make universal human rights appeals in ways a parochial paganism never could and never wanted to.

Even Bush didn't justify his war in Iraq as a "crusade" but appealed to instead, to secular humanism's "human rights." Condi compared it to MLK's Civil Rights movement. In the end, liberal human rights humanists can be just as bent on domination and suppression as the Christians they came from. And, like the Christians, it's always for 'the best possible and most noble reasons."

Even Bush didn't justify his war in Iraq as a "crusade"

"This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."
George W. Bush, September 2001
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html

“We must never, ever,” she declared, “indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they’re culturally just not ready for freedom or they just aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities. We’ve heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East.” - Condi here.

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