On Rationality

So, among the myriad sins of the New York Times is that they let Stanley Fish blog, which seems unfair, like how people used to make bears dance. This meandering shout-out to Terry Eagleton has mostly attracted criticisms of Eagleton, but since I haven't read Eagleton (nor will my limited book budget stretch to buying publications I already know are idiotic from the quotes pulled by its supporters) I'll settle for stepping up to Fish on the nonsense he's peddling.

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.

Of course, what religion does exactly is not a question any of this lot are interested in answering. This appeal to literature and ballet is smoke and mirrors, because then they'd be in agreement with the atheists. We're happy to treat the Bible as a work of literature, fold RE classes into English classes and regard somebody who treats the New Testament as a guide to life with much the same suspicion as we'd regard somebody who treats the Iliad as a guide to life. But no, religion isn't just literature, it's something more. Well, then, what the bloody hell is it?

After what? Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most general terms: “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.”

ARGH. You know, what I find the most apoplexy-inducing thing in this paragraph is Fish's blithe "of course", there. It really exposes the poverty of these arguments. Fish and Eagleton happily excoriate atheists for not understanding "what religion is going for". Look how stupid Hitchens is for thinking that religion explains the world! And then, "of course" Fish and Eagleton can't tell us what religion is for. Do you know, at the end of this article Fish has the nerve to sigh over how irritating it is to waste energy over the "shallow arguments" of "school-yard atheists"? I think I need to go to bed.

The Swift Defense

Auntie reports that the Rev. Peter Mullen, a Church of England vicar, is in trouble for, well, posting this on his blog:

It is time that religious believers began to recommend specific utilitarian discouragements of homosexual practices after the style of warnings on cigarette packets: Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS. In addition the obscene "gay pride" parades and carnivals should be banned for they give rise to passive corruption, comparable to passive smoking. Young people forced to witness these excrescences are corrupted by them.

Mullen sadly lacks the courage to stand by this, resorting as he does to that refuge of cowards, the I Was Only Joking Defense, coupled here with the Some Of My Best Friends Defense:

I wrote some satirical things on my blog and anybody with an ounce of sense of humour or any understanding of the tradition of English satire would immediately assume that they're light-hearted jokes. I certainly have nothing against homosexuals. Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion. What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality.

I can't imagine they'll stay his friends for long. But you can judge for yourselves how funny Mullen is; though he has removed his blog from the web, Google's all-seeing eye has it. A scan reveals Cullen not to be one of life's great thinkers, still less a noted wit. Some highlights:

Since [gay former MP Matthew] Parris will not dirty his hands by entering theological discussions with his readers, perhaps I might answer for religious believers in the purely utilitarian terms which even the lofty Parris is bound to engage with. We disapprove of homosexuality because it is clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections, and because it is a cause of fatal disease. The AIDS pandemic was originally caused by promiscuous homosexual behaviour. Such promiscuity is itself an evil because its perpetrators merely use others indiscriminately for their own gratification, treating their fellows as sex objects and as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. I should have thought that Parris, having rejected religious belief, might want to construct his moral beliefs on this Kantian humanistic imperative. But I suspect he is not really interested in morality of any kind - except as a special plea to excuse his lust for gratification at whatever cost to human dignity and the sanctity of human life.

I'll wager Mullen's routine has 'em rolling in the pews of a Sunday. There's some corkers in here, from labelling "clearly unnatural" behaviour observed in monkeys, turtles, birds, bees and educated fleas, to the apparent believe that sex between male homosexuals involves some sort of genesis whereby virii spring into existence ex verpa, via Mullen's impressive ability to see into the hearts and minds of England's homosexuals (a power perhaps worthy of this blog's namesake) and use of Kant as an argument-winning trump card regardless of his relevance to the discussion.

In my neverending struggle to see everyone's good side (I'm prematurely campaigning for my own canonisation), Mullen does have a talent for verse - the above-linked Google cache contains a clever ditty about a civil ceremony to which Mullen predictably objected. It's no substitute for decency or intellect, but you take what you're given.