Month: May 2009

At Peace With Agnosticism

Contra Stanley Fish, Matt Taibbi takes a stand for agnostics everywhere:

As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell — namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without religion, therefore we must have religion.

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself.

But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have  inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

The Age Of Mass Distraction – And Loss

Laura Miller asks, "why can't we concentrate?":

Winifred Gallagher's new book, "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" argues that it's high time we take more deliberate control of this stuff. "The skillful management of attention," she writes, "is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships." Because we can only attend to a tiny portion of the sensory cacophony around us, the elements we choose to focus on — the very stuff of our reality — is a creation, adeptly edited, providing us with a workable but highly selective version of the world and our own existence. Your very self, "stored in your memory," is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can't remember what you never noticed to begin with.

Buddhisms, Ctd

A reader writes:

I'm often struck by how people find in Eastern traditions valuable insights — which is great — and act as though they were not available in the West — which is a little frustrating and probably a serious indictment of modern education. The lLoyalo Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises.

Since Ignatius is right smack in the middle of Western culture, he is of little interest to many who have dismissed such teachings a priori in favor of non-Western sources. This is fine if they find these same valuable ideas there. But it's equally true that Ignatius has taught hundreds of thousands of people for half a millennium the value in the ability "to conquer oneself and to regulate one's life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment." He devised (or synthesized from sources ancient, medieval, and modern) a means to a greater degree of freedom from one's own likes, dislikes, comforts, wants, needs, drives, appetites and passions, so that the soul may choose based solely on what it discerns as God's will is for it.

The difference in the Buddhist way and the Christian, of course, is that the soul radically attaches itself to God before it is free to experience complete freedom of choice in all else. Also that typically Western concept of the "inordinate." Moderation is so Pauline and Ignatian. But is this really a contradiction of Buddhism?

Born Godless, Ctd

Julian Sanchez responds to Andrew Stuttaford's post on children of non-believers turning to religion:

…a secularist who wants to ensure his kids aren’t easy prey for nutty doctrines has an alternative to inoculating them with some gelded lo-carb form of faith. Instead, he can try to supply them with the array of tools needed to satisfy the needs religion answers, to interpret the experiences religion purports to explain, and to grapple with the questions to which religion promises pat answers.

Inevitably, a thoughtful and independent child will reject some of the parent’s preferred tools and lenses. But they’ll probably end up looking for ways to improve or replace those particular tools and lenses, not for the wonder tonic that does it all. They’ll have the same holes in their hearts we all do from time to time, but less use for the blunt God-shaped plug we carve when we’re trying to fill them all at the same time.

Why Fear The Racist? Ctd

Noah Millman rounds up all the links to the Saletan and McWhorter back and forth over the racial achievement gap. Millman interjects:

I want to ask a question with more complex ramifications. How committed should we be, as a society, to the identification of fairness with meritocracy? “Fairness” is a bedrock principle for a healthy society; a society that abandons any pretense at treating members fairly won’t be a society at all for very long. But “meritocracy” means much more than this: it specifies how rulers are to be chosen, and how goods are to be distributed, and, in our society, says that it is right and fair for rulers to be chosen and goods to be distributed according to a scale in which talent, and particularly talent at passing tests, predominates.

 And there are social systems that work differently – that distribute goods and power based on seniority, or brute strength, or social position, or deeds of honor, or demonstrated piety, or, for that matter, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. I’m not arguing here for any of these alternatives, or for any other one that I haven’t mentioned. I’m merely pointing out that both McWhorter and Saletan implicitly endorse that identification of “fairness” with “meritocracy” and that, if the problems they are both concerned with prove to be as persistent and difficult as they both fear, that identification will probably need to be questioned.