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Dec. 20th, 2004 08:59 amNormally the standard of letters in the SMH is a little higher than today's responses to Adele Horin's column The godless, humanist kids are all right. Very briefly, Horin is argues that people can be moral without the need for religious authority; her kids are an example. Some of the letters are examples of the lazy reading I was kvetching about a few entires back.
Horin: My children weren't cajoled or indoctrinated into atheism - and they weren't always non-scripture. Indeed, to our surprise they excelled in their primary school immersion in old and new testaments.
Letter writer: Has Adele's family really looked fairly at the evidence for God, supplied amply in His historical personal intervention in Jesus Christ?
(This reminds me of the alt.satanism FAQ: "8. Have you considered the message of The Bible?" "Yes.")
Horin: My mother, a practising Jew ... Jewish youth groups ... bar-mitzvah ceremony ... Rosh Hashanah ...
Letter writer: She does not specifically mention any other religious group apart from Christians.
Others raise better points. Horin is wrong to automatically identify Christianity with conservativism. To be fair, she feels under siege, as do many of us after a year of triumphs for the extreme religious right. But pissing off moderate and liberal believers (of any stripe) is a huge mistake, especially right now; we need a unified front to battle the extremists. (Even I'm pissed off at being described as pursing my lips because Horin's kids have no faith; I don't give a toss what they believe.) A couple of letter writers have pointed out Jesus' radical, rebellious agenda (one wonderfully suggests that at the wedding in Cana, we can be sure he turned the water into chardonnay).
One letter writer raises a point which has long troubled philosophers:
Adele Horin has raised her godless, humanist kids to be unselfish and fair, but also to ask "why" and demand evidence. She may run into some problems once her kids start asking why they have to be unselfish and fair, since without any appeal to a "higher authority" she's pretty much left with "because I say so". They'll soon start questioning that too.
Sophie J. Kunze, Penrith, December 18.
The idea here is that morality has to come from some authoritative source - we can't decide for ourselves what's right or wrong. As it's exhausting to battle with yourself over moral issues, it must be a great relief to be able to point to God or whoever and say "It's right because He says so." This is not as simple as it looks, though. In an interview, Zen practioner Alan Watts points out that if you accord authority to a teacher or a text, ultimately you yourself are the source of that authority. There's no way to escape moral responsibility by handing it off to someone else; in the end it's still your decision.
There's also a fascinating puzzle raised by Socrates - is an action good because God commands it, or does God command the action because it is good? Where God's commands (as interpreted through the filter of human agendas, prejudice, and stupidity) don't appear to make any sense, this can leave us with no better explanation than "Well, there must be some good reason for it, or God wouldn't have said that", which is not very satisfactory. This is linked to the problem of why we ought to do what God tells us (other than because he can crush us like bugs, which is an excellent reason to obey but not a very good basis for morality), even when we can see for ourselves the harm we're doing.
So I think that letter dodges some major philosophical problems. But it also contains a crucial point the writer might not have recognised: believer and believers (of every kind) often share the same agenda - an unselfish, fair world. They may come at it from wildly different angles but it's the same goal. An obvious Australian example is the churches' opposition to mandatory detention of asylum seekers and their support of asylum seekers living in the community, an opposition shared by Horin and a self-identified conservative Christian letter writer. In the face of extremism moderates and liberals of every belief ought to be examining what we have in common, what kind of world we all want.
Horin: My children weren't cajoled or indoctrinated into atheism - and they weren't always non-scripture. Indeed, to our surprise they excelled in their primary school immersion in old and new testaments.
Letter writer: Has Adele's family really looked fairly at the evidence for God, supplied amply in His historical personal intervention in Jesus Christ?
(This reminds me of the alt.satanism FAQ: "8. Have you considered the message of The Bible?" "Yes.")
Horin: My mother, a practising Jew ... Jewish youth groups ... bar-mitzvah ceremony ... Rosh Hashanah ...
Letter writer: She does not specifically mention any other religious group apart from Christians.
Others raise better points. Horin is wrong to automatically identify Christianity with conservativism. To be fair, she feels under siege, as do many of us after a year of triumphs for the extreme religious right. But pissing off moderate and liberal believers (of any stripe) is a huge mistake, especially right now; we need a unified front to battle the extremists. (Even I'm pissed off at being described as pursing my lips because Horin's kids have no faith; I don't give a toss what they believe.) A couple of letter writers have pointed out Jesus' radical, rebellious agenda (one wonderfully suggests that at the wedding in Cana, we can be sure he turned the water into chardonnay).
One letter writer raises a point which has long troubled philosophers:
Adele Horin has raised her godless, humanist kids to be unselfish and fair, but also to ask "why" and demand evidence. She may run into some problems once her kids start asking why they have to be unselfish and fair, since without any appeal to a "higher authority" she's pretty much left with "because I say so". They'll soon start questioning that too.
Sophie J. Kunze, Penrith, December 18.
The idea here is that morality has to come from some authoritative source - we can't decide for ourselves what's right or wrong. As it's exhausting to battle with yourself over moral issues, it must be a great relief to be able to point to God or whoever and say "It's right because He says so." This is not as simple as it looks, though. In an interview, Zen practioner Alan Watts points out that if you accord authority to a teacher or a text, ultimately you yourself are the source of that authority. There's no way to escape moral responsibility by handing it off to someone else; in the end it's still your decision.
There's also a fascinating puzzle raised by Socrates - is an action good because God commands it, or does God command the action because it is good? Where God's commands (as interpreted through the filter of human agendas, prejudice, and stupidity) don't appear to make any sense, this can leave us with no better explanation than "Well, there must be some good reason for it, or God wouldn't have said that", which is not very satisfactory. This is linked to the problem of why we ought to do what God tells us (other than because he can crush us like bugs, which is an excellent reason to obey but not a very good basis for morality), even when we can see for ourselves the harm we're doing.
So I think that letter dodges some major philosophical problems. But it also contains a crucial point the writer might not have recognised: believer and believers (of every kind) often share the same agenda - an unselfish, fair world. They may come at it from wildly different angles but it's the same goal. An obvious Australian example is the churches' opposition to mandatory detention of asylum seekers and their support of asylum seekers living in the community, an opposition shared by Horin and a self-identified conservative Christian letter writer. In the face of extremism moderates and liberals of every belief ought to be examining what we have in common, what kind of world we all want.
