This is Amusing . . .

. . . but it seems like a strange article to appear on the website of a Catholic newspaper. It amuses me. I am amused.

Just Link-Surfing

Some time ago I read somewhere an explanation about how one can choose beliefs that struck me as extremely silly. The author claimed that since "believe" is a verb, and since verbs are actions, and since we have to choose to act, that it just stands to reason that we can choose to believe things. I've been writing about that argument as I remember it, but since I can't find it I don't feel comfortable sharing my argument yet. It could be that I misremember, or that I've invented a memory. I don't know. I thought it was in Paul E. Little's Know Why You Believe, but a quick flip-through hasn't even revealed a sensible section of the book for that to appear in.

So I was tooling around the internet trying to find some references to that argument when I came across another at a site called 1 in Faith: A Christian Bible Study. The sentence I liked about this argument was this:

In English the verb for faith is "to believe," as faith does not have its own verb.

The author's right of course. If I have a belief about something, I believe it, but if I have faith in something I don't faithe it. This contributes to the confusion in our discourse about belief. There's more to their argument that I don't appreciate as much--such as trying to completely separate faith in something from the belief that the something exists--but this is a useful nugget.

Now I just need to find that original bit I was looking for.

Another Interesting Article

Karen Armstrong has an article at WaPo discussing the differences between faith and belief. She seems to suffer from a healthy dose of the genetic fallacy, and also seems to put a bit too much stock into vocabulary dictating reality, but it's a pretty interesting read.

Even more interesting is Paula Kirby's skeptical response.

File Under: Duh

This just in: Catholics want Jews to be Catholics.

This also just in: Jews are pissed that Catholics want Jews to be Catholics, and are determined to try to convince Jews to be Catholics, even though there has apparently been an agreement that Catholics who want Jews to be Catholics don't try to convince Jews to be Catholics.

Got that?

Challenging The Litmus Test

Emily Breder, a writer for Examiner.com, has posted an interview with Erik Curren, a candidate for Virginia's General Assembly, and a Democrat who's running against Republican Dickie Bell for retiring Republican Chris Saxman's seat. The situation is interesting, because while Curren describes himself as Christian, he also engages in some dharma practice--mostly sitting and walking meditation. The reason that is notable, I think is that he's willing to challenge the unofficial religious litmus test in a presumed Republican district, and in Virginia. His adherence to Buddhist practices has the potential to alienate voters in a decidedly Christian community.

It's common knowledge that atheists and agnostics have met with no success in pursuing public office when open about their propositional attitudes. We haven't seen Wiccans or Satanists or Jains in American government. We finally have a Muslim senator in Minnesota's Keith Ellison, and Jewish people in congress are nothing new, but the attitude that a candidate must be Christian to even be considered still holds strong. Curren may not win his district, but I think it's important that he campaigns as he is.

Curren's closing comment for the interview expresses some nice thoughts:

I would call on all people of faith, whether Buddhist or otherwise, to stand up for freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, wherever they are. Whether it’s in the United States, where sometimes people are sold short or where there’s such a pressure to hide your faith. To other countries, where there may be… stronger consequences for practicing your faith. I would ask all people of good faith, even people who are not believers, to stand up for religious freedom or the freedom not to have any religion. This is an issue for everyone today. And for us to have the kind of world we want for our kids and our grandkids, a world where we can live with each other, the first thing we need to do is not just respect other people’s faith, but value it and encourage it.

A little bit of excess pathos, but still important ideas.

Curren goes into more detail on his campaign site, if you're interested.

(via The Buddhist Channel)

The Limits of Faith

People living closer to the action have probably already heard about this case, in which a Wisconsin family failed to get their daughter medical care--opting instead to pray--and watched her die of untreated diabetes. Let's let the family explain:

Leilani Neumann said during videotaped testimony that the family believes the Bible says healing comes from God and that she never expected her daughter to die. The Neumanns said the girl had not been to a doctor since she was 3.

A criminal complaint said Dale Neumann told police he believed God would heal his daughter right up until she stopped breathing. He also "professed to believe God was going to bring Madeline back to life."

This case is a good example of why Richard Dawkins and Cristopher Hitchens (and to a lesser extent Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) write against religious faith in such polarizing terms. Dawkins even calls religious indoctrination child abuse in his book The God Delusion. I don't know about indoctrination, but this kind of nonsense certainly can't be explained away with vague pronouncements of freedom of religion.

To give some idea of how avoidable this death was, here's the testimony of medical experts:

Madeline's gradually declining health would have gotten acute three or four days before she died as her body began shutting down. But despite being unresponsive and in a coma, the girl could have been saved very late into the day of her death with the proper treatment.

Even people who don't wield the First Amendment in a case like this can have variations of this disorder. "It's what I believe," they say. "My belief's as valid as yours." I've even heard people talking about their own "subjective truth," as if that made any sense. But not all beliefs are valid, and there are times when the evidence has to overrule conviction. That's why actual thinkers get so frustrated with Holocaust deniers and Young Earth Creationists and people who believe God will cure diabetes or raise children from the dead because somebody wrote something 1900 years ago about a guy who lived forty years before that who is alleged to have done those things.

Talk About Single Issue

President Obama has identified the woman he would like as the next Surgeon General, an office that directs the government's efforts on the entire range of medical issues. The Washington Posts's Cheryl W. Thompson takes this opportunity to say, "But she's Catholic! She'd have conflict about abortion!"

Abortion is only one out of thousands of issues the SG will face, and sure it's a contentious issue in American society and in political marketing--but it's not contentious as a legal issue or in the medical field. We have thirty-six years of legal decisions establishing a woman's right to an abortion, and as I understand it the SG has no input there.

This is a non-issue, except to the point of whether Dr. Regina Benjamin feels she can do the job or not. If legal abortion is a problem for her, then she shouldn't take the job. If she can work in that atmosphere (even if she'd make different decisions for herself in a pregnant patient's position), then she should.

Faith in Science

An interesting issue brought forth by Michael Gerson at the Washington Post the other day (not to say that it's a terribly interesting editorial) about religious scientists. He identifies two competing schools of thought regarding scientists (whose jobs require that they work with empirical data exclusively) who believe in supernatural beings.

On the side that is uneasy about this relationship:

For some scientists, this combination of scientific excellence and religious faith is contradictory -- like being a geneticist and believing in unicorns or astrology. "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs," says Peter Atkins of Oxford University. "But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because [religion and science] are such alien categories of knowledge." Behind this assertion lies the assumption that the scientific category of knowledge has superseded the religious one.

The problem I have with Atkins's position is that I don't understand what he means by being "a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word." To be a scientist is to be employed as one who does science, isn't it? Can't you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and work in a lab? Maybe Atkins is making some kind of essentialist claim--I don't know. Also, I think his use of the word "knowledge" is problematic here. Certainly science and religion are competing systems of truth claims, but "knowledge" implies truth, not just truth claims. It seems he's asserting two categories of truth, and I don't see that.

Gerson goes on to explain the views of another scientist, Francis Collins, who is also an evangelical Christian, who insists "that there are two categories of knowledge, two ways of knowing. And though they are different, they are not 'alien' to one another, or contradictory." Eventually he stakes the position that

[f]or Collins, modern science and Christianity are not competing answers to the same question; they are ways of thinking about two very different sets of questions, both of which should be taken seriously.

I don't know that Christianity has ever given good reason why its truth-claims should be taken seriously. I guess I'll have to read Collins's book myself.

Aside from all of that, I have to accept Gerson's final premise: "that anti-supernaturalism is not a litmus test at the highest levels of science." Now if we could just get the religionists to apply that principle to religious tests for public office.