h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(mind you...the law came in before I was a Scot. and I didn't have anything to do with formulating it. but still!)

Of course it is still yours to be proud of. And in the pdf I quoted in "an Irish question" it goes on to say:

"It seems to me that the Church of Scotland has taken a wiser and more ethical course in side-stepping this aspect of the debate and pre-empting the arrival of the first cloned human baby. Although remaining vehemently opposed to reproductive cloning they do affirm that a cloned human should be regarded ontologically and teleologically as no different from any other human being - with the same rights and responsibilities before God and humanity.

[blockquote]For the avoidance of doubt: while the Board opposes the transfer of human cell nuclear replacement embryos to a womb, whether human or animal, or artificial (should such exist in the future), the Board believes that should this be done, the embryos concerned, and any babies into which they develop, should be cherished exactly as if they were created from human eggs and human sperm.[end blockquote]

Rather than insisting on the imago Dei necessarily originating from conception the church has affirmed a less prescriptive version of ensoulment. The church seems to infer that the exact point at which the soul is conferred cannot be known, rather, from 14 days and the development of the primitive streak, we are to regard ensoulment as having taken place."

http://fakerepublic.typepad.com/fake/files/clones_drones_and_souls.pdf p.9

So again, though it's not yours, you can take some pride in the Chuch of Scotland

I blogged on reproductive technology a while back:
http://bonoboworld.blogspot.com/2007/03/babys-got-blue-eyes.html


On the C of S...they can, unfortunately, be more conservative:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features...sopinon/display.var.1395270.0.0.php

Howver, Scotland retains its egalitarian, communitarian ethos. I have a good friend who was brought up by an abusive father in that most life-denying of faiths the Free Presbyterians. However, much as he hates the Wee Frees, he retains an admiration for his father for identifying himself with a faith that resolutely refused to accept hierarchy. In the John Knox tradition, no man would be allowed to come between them and their god. At least, that was the theory...

Radio 4's religious discussion programme is covering Atheism today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/beyond_belief/index.shtml
(streamed audio available after transmission)

That programme was interesting. You can still bring up the episode, using the pull-down box - religious programming has the privilege of having its content permanently available.

I've already mentioned it elsewhere...but in an attempt to get a discussion going, allow me to recycle my posts here, in edited form.



Unsurprisingly the presenter and two guests were religious - and somewhat showed a) their bias and b) lack of understanding. But AC Grayling made some trenchant atheistic points. They also featured an interview with Francis Collins, the Christian who ran the Human Genome Project (Christians like to trot him out as evidence that famous scientists are believers, therefore it must be true...). Grayling explained rather well why, despite Collins' views, religion remains incompatible with science. The others weren't having it - the presenter said it was 'an oversimplification' - but didn't really explain why.

A fascinating remark at the end from the theist woman:
"Religion isn't really to do with belief."

That certainly made me think. Many church/ mosque/ shul-goers maybe don't think so much about the theological underpinnings of their faith. They just turn up and go through the motions. Along with the lifestyle come various behavious which we can define as moral choices.

Now, the contention of the religious (I think the speaker was expressing this view) is that adherents get their morality from the religious teaching that underpins the faith community, but at one remove; they're following by example. I'd question that the teaching is necessary; we're capable of good behaviour without religion...although there are few if any identifiable non-faith communities to give moral leads. (Maybe not true. We're all part of secular communities. Taken as a whole, they're called 'society').

So...given that faith communities set moral examples, even without the need to go into their core beliefs...are they A Good Thing. Here AC Grayling's argument was persuasive. No. Morality is a developing, consensual process and draws on a wide range of sources. If you restrict your sources, you lose your moral lead. Grayling gave the example of changing attitudes towards homosexuality, on which religion still lags far behind the moral lead given by secular society.



But we all do that 'going through the motions' thing, don't we? I may be able to justify why I don't murder people from first principles, but that's not *really* the reason why I don't do it.

And now I'm thinking of the rationalisation of the kashrut laws I once heard from a Jewish speaker. The argument goes that if one is daily practicising moral choices over trivial matters such as whether to eat a bacon sandwhich, one is prepared for dealing with trickier matters. Except...what are the basic principles? The real-life tricky choices are when we really need something better than random irrationality.

"Now, the contention of the religious (I think the speaker was expressing this view) is that adherents get their morality from the religious teaching that underpins the faith community, but at one remove; they're following by example. I'd question that the teaching is necessary; we're capable of good behaviour without religion."

But are we capable of perfectly good behaviour without at least some teaching? I'm not saying it needs to be religiously based, but it appears to me that some moral instruction, no matter how flawed or how tenuous its fundamentals, is better than none at all.

Put another way: there appears to be a kind of spectrum in play: from the religious extreme that says that all morals need to be taught, to the materialist extreme that claims we absorb it anyway. All I'm saying is that if we consider education and instruction useful, there must be some middle range here. It's a combination of the two things - nature and nurture.

Maybe I've just witnessed far to many ignorant B's in my life..

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I thought the spectrum was going from 'all morals are inspired by god's teachings' to 'all morals are decided by humans, and passed along'.

I agree with Pedro. Morality can largely be thought of as a technology we've developed to allow us to get along within societies.

Having said that...there's bound to be some form of biological interplay. For example, we're probably programmed not to try and eat members of our family or social group, except when strictly necessary.

As for whether morality needs to be 'taught'. That's a tricky one. It depends what you mean by 'teach'. Take an analogy with language. We don't teach children all the language they acquire. They have an innate capacity for language, which we we seed with some basic material - but by-and-large language is something that's absorbed. Is morality the same?

And - to strain the analogy further - some bits of language we *do* have to be explicitly taught, like when we lok up sesquipedalian words in a dictionary. Similarly, we have to be taught non-obvious moral behaviours, such as "Thou shallt recycle."

Please don't take this as a comprehensive theory of moral development - but I observe that young children generally know full well when they're being naughty. What we actually teach them is that they can't get away with it.

Here's a new stormlet brewing. A film that won't be released till December has been attracting criticism for being too anti-religious for some, and not anti-religious enough for others.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/10/is_the_golden_compass_too_anti.html

It is "The Golden Compass", based on Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy. Pullman is delighted; such advance publicity is not granted to many films.

Ugh. One of our fundamentalist family members has already sent me a series of emails- via distribution list- imploring all "good" parents to refuse to take their children to the film and subject them to "satanic indoctrination".

Included in the email were several links, including some news articles and a Snopes write-up. It was apparent to me that whoever composed the email had not only not read Pullman's trilogy (which I recently read and rather enjoyed), but hadn't read any of the articles s/he had linked to, either.

Even when I still considered myself a devout Christian, I was open to criticism of organized religion and its involvement in society. I certainly wouldn't have assumed that any work of fiction written by an atheist was automatically "satanic". (But unfortunately, especially here in the US, that's what a lot of Christian churches teach- anything that isn't of God is of Satan. When I was around 11 or 12 years old, my mother went through my books, took anything that had fantasy or supernatural themes other than Christian ones, put them in the trash and burned them.)

I'd initially wanted to see the film, then when I heard that most references to "the Church" were being removed, so as not to offend the religious, I'd pretty much decided against. But if it's going to annoy so many people, how can I resist?

Irony of ironies, all is irony (saith the preacher).

Pullman's books are classed as "anti-Catholic" by Catholics. Howl!

Read the bloody books, won't you, before launching your missiles!

In His Dark Materials, the world is subtly (!) different, It has had the same history as ours up to the sixteenth century, but in the HDM universe the Reformation was successful, and Calvin became Pope! The Magesterium can hardly refer to the present Catholic Church if the Pope who set it up was an extreme Protestant!

Sometimes I despair of churchmen (and women too, though they haven't yet come out with idiocies to match the men). As when the Church of England bishop appeared in an interview along with Cleese and Palin and demonstrated stunningly woeful ignorance of what they actually said in The Life of Brian.

Well of course, without actually reading the books, wouldn't it be obvious to the Catholic higher-ups that "the Magesterium" would of course be a reference to the Catholic Church? I mean, they are the only one that matters.

Most of the missiles I've received have been slamming the trilogy's "dangerous" and "anti-Christian" message. Funny, I didn't pick up on that. What I came away with was the impression that organized religion mucking about in government is the bad thing. That and the notion that whatever "Authority" people choose to believe in is basically powerless, and it's his/her minions here on earth that are making life hell for other people.

I've never heard about that bishop and the Life of Brian!

Life of brian interview/discussion - it must be on youtube somewhere!

I'm definitely going to look for it on YouTube when I get home from work this evening. (We're not allowed streaming media at the office ) The suspense is going to drive me batty! It sounds like one of Those Things that are so stupid they have to be seen to be believed...

Can't find it on Youtube, but there is an extensive report here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Night,_Saturday_Morning

It was "Friday Night and Saturday Morning", 9th November 1979, and Cleese and Palin were opposed by the bishop of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge. The latter pair dug such holes for themselves, you really think they would have known better. Classic.

Psychocandy: >What I came away with was the impression that organized religion mucking about in government is the bad thing.

It's (HDM) a work of fiction, and as such the deductions we make really refer to ourselves more than to the characters in the book. Personally, I see the message that abducting children and parting them from the things that they love is the bad thing. Further than that, I see a message that corporations of any kind are liable to do inhuman things, and this includes churches, governments, businesses, sports clubs, idealistic movements, or anything where two or three are gathered together for a purpose.

This is also one of the messages of the wonderful book "The View from the Centre of the Universe" by Primack and Abrams. They report the scientific observation that intelligence can only occur in bodies in or about human size (give or take), for material reasons governing the internal communication within an organism.

From this it follows that we look in vain for human virtues in anything of cosmic size, or even of corporate size. A government or a church simply cannot think as well as a human.

as well as or just the same as? A corporate entity has different requirements to an individual human entity and as such some do 'think' very well since they have survived for a long time, and survival is the primary focus for a corporate entity.

> Personally, I see the message that abducting children and parting them from the things that they love is the bad thing<

Ooh, yes! I hadn't thought about it quite like that...

But destroying that part of us as children that allows us our individuality and our sense of awe and wonder at it all, to turn us into mindless drones (be it via religion or corporatization) is a very bad thing, too.

Thanks for digging up that link- I'm off to check that out.

Gosh this is a rich vein. I've been looking at blogs where people mention that this interview was the only time Michael Palin was seen to lose his temper. Which would be perfectly justified, heck the Ex-leper story is a sermon in itself, did they not see that?

Anyway, here is a reaction from Michael Palin from http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:gf9L1WBL3hcJ:orangecow.org/pythonet/michael-palin.html+Cleese+Palin+Bishop+Southwark+Muggeridge&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=ie&client=firefox-a

"I couldn't believe it afterwards when we finished the discussion in which they'd both [-- Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark --] said how pathetic, hopeless, meaningless and juvenile [Life of Brian] was, instead of there being any sort of division between us afterwards, they came up as though we'd all been 'show-biz' together, out doing an entertainment, with the bishop saying, 'That all seemed to go very well.' I hadn't realised they weren't actually being vindictive, they were just performing to the crowd. They were doing what they were supposed to do, they didn't want to be upstaged as performers, and of course it all made sense then."

Ictoan: >A corporate entity has different requirements to an individual human entity and as such some do 'think' very well since they have survived for a long time, and survival is the primary focus for a corporate entity.

Yes, but you do have to put 'think' into quotes, because the level of intellectual activity is more like that of an insect than a human. Insects do what it takes to survive, and so do corporations; big deal.