The Good

'The Good': Is Morality still Needed? 

Do we have, or desire, or need a set of moral rules, or a moral compass?  My answer is "Yes!" We are social animals and need (and desire) a set of rules. But we do already have some guidance; partly in our instincts (the compass), partly acquired culturally (in our historic religions) and partly acquired individually (from parents and from 'life').

Can our historic religions provide? My answer is "No!"  Most have lost their authority by deploying  guesses, half-truths, myths, and arrogance.  Religion in the West, is today largely abandoned; devalued by its arrogance; recklessly challenging science, offering barmy claims, and making empty promises. (See my essay "The Rise and Fall of Christendom." (yet to be written) 

I am talking of Europe, and of now, in the twenty first century. So, I am also talking about Christianity (still the world's leading 'faith' system, apparently).  Science has, to a considerable extent, replaced religion; stolen its thunder and its arrogance; explained the motions of the planets, the weather, procreation, and (to some extent) disease. Science has expanded the universe a million-fold and relegated mankind and our little planet from the status of sovereign to be just another infinitesimal speck on an infinitesimal speck near the edge of the the universe.  

Very few people would claim that there is no difference between good and bad behaviour. Nor would most people deny that they prefer the good. It can be hard to decide for any one action whether it is good or bad. For example, people may vote either way on the assassination of Julius Caesar. That being the case, it is even harder to define what we mean in general by good and bad behaviour.  Most adults (though to varying extents) feel they know the difference. But, if you ask from whence we get that feeling, there is little agreement. Maybe it comes partly from our genes, partly from our earliest childhood, and partly from subsequent experience. There is scope here, for acute and methodical observers to spend a lifetime studying and processing data; comparing people from different backgrounds, rich/poor households, large/small families, good/bad schools, provision/absence of religious instruction. But I think that study has yet to begin. 

        Most simple experiments are unethical. For example, that of the Scottish king, James IV,  who put two new-born babies on Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth with a dumb nurse, hoping they would emerge speaking the UR-language; Sanskrit or Hebrew. Or that of Japanese Emperors in the period of competing religions (1560 - 1614), who assigned one noble to live as Christian, another as Buddhist, etc. 

The value to a society of having a clear exposition of what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' behaviour has been so great that every human civilisation (that we know anything about) seems to have 'evolved' a set of moral rules and 'invented' a religious myth to justify it. 

These sets of rules, the lists of 'to-do' and 'to-not-do', are interestingly similar, comparing one civilisation with another. (Tell the truth, honour the elderly, do not kill, do not steal, do not sleep with your wife's sister.) Their corresponding religious myths, by contrast, are sufficiently different to occasion wars, and genocides. 

A different, and perhaps separate, question concerns the presence, or absence, of a mind, or a will, behind everything, guiding, planning, intending, and above all caring. Such a mind is to me both incredible on the one hand, as too obviously human, and showing too little evidence of supra-terrestial interests and concerns. And, on the other hand, the existence of such a mind seems repeatedly contradicted by events: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Malaysian tsunami of 2004.

But, to many people, both complex and simple people, the absence of such a mind seems intolerable. 

What is to be done? We could [1] postulate such a mind; pretend it exists. If the claim is believed, it would give the believer purpose, and at the same time authorise the rules. But it is deceitful.  It would require of the priests extraordinary insight and consistency, or they would slide into [2]  a cloud of prevarications, obfuscations, hints and ambiguities which is what Christianity now offers. Or [3] we could try to generate such a mind collectively, to care for the needs of each other, using the collective wisdom of the best guides, past and present, continuously updating the rules by judging each new situation afresh; each participant telling only what is true for himself, or herself. This is essentially what Quakers do. (Perhaps it is like a collective, synthetic, substitute for God?) 

I find repugnant the idea of telling a giant lie. Nor does obfuscation and prevarication appeal any better. I advocate a deliberate system of mutual support, and caring; for those who want it, and want to provide it. 

There is a caveat. If the group is too small it can fall under the sway of a single charismatic leader (See my essay on 'Death Cults'.) Quakers have, so far, avoided this danger by linking local meetings together into area meetings, and these into yet larger 'Yearly' meetings.

(Fine)

Why I am a Quaker

If you are interested, please read this very compact little essay again from the top. (Da capo al Fine) That will tell you why I am a Quaker. 

(Comments are welcome direct to: Cawstein@gmail.com)

Mad Cults & Minority Beliefs

 Mad Cults & Minority Beliefs.

I wonder how interested we should be in those murderous cults of the postwar era that led their devotees to commit mass suicide. It is such a bizarre extreme that interest seems somewhat ghoulish.  Dutch tulip-mania was odd. Christianity is odd, and in some forms very odd. But these cults strike me as impossible to understand.

I am thinking of the seventies cult of "the jungle poisoner", Jim Jones of Jonestown, and his "Peoples Temple" cult that culminated in 1978 with 'revolutionary suicide' in the Guyanan jungle. And of David Koresh's "Branch Davidian" cult that ended (in 1993) in the  Mount Carmel siege near Waco (Texas). The third example that comes to mind is less well known in the Anglophone world; it climaxed in French-speaking Switzerland in the nineties. I looked it up on Wikipedia  –– 'L' Ordre du Temple Solaire'. 

"The Order of the Solar Temple (French: Ordre du Temple solaire, OTS), or simply the Solar Temple, was a French-speaking religious group, often described as a cult, notorious for the mass deaths of many of its members in several mass murders and suicides throughout the 1990s. The OTS was a neo-Templar movement, claiming to be a continuation of the Knights Templar, and incorporated a mix of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and New Age ideas. It was led by Joseph Di Mambro, with Luc Jouret as a spokesman and second in command. It was founded in 1984, in Geneva, Switzerland."

It seems to me that these three murderous cults of the postwar era were each started by charismatic pranksters who were amused at their ability to hoodwink people, but who grew to believe their own nonsense, even to death. This Swiss cult was said to contain many "intelligent middle class adherents". (!)

Part of my interest comes from the realisation that essentially all religions are cults; it is hard to find a definition of a cult that does not include the Church of England. There may be a spectrum, running from Jim Jones on the one hand to the archbishop of Canterbury and the Quakers on the other. But Quakerism is undeniably a cult; its followers proudly and stubbornly following their charismatic (though long dead) leader. On that spectrum running from Jim Jones to George Fox there lies all the great religious names: Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Guru Nanak,......; men with magnetism, and a message that appeals.  

The number of adherents who follow a cult determines its social standing but that may depend on marketing as much as on appeal; think of Spanish thumb-screws and the 'Auto da Fé '. 

Popularity may relate less to the plausibility of the claims, than to their desirability, their ability to meet a human need. Some people crave status. But many people need a friend, and many need hope.  

I have remarked elsewhere [1] that the outstanding popularity of Christianity as a world religion may derive from the hope of life after death. After all, how plausible is 'life after death'? And how desireable? 

The Quaker cult seems to be 'odd man out' in that there seems to be essentially no claim. Followers are offered (a) friendship, and (b) the sense of doing the right thing. Nothing more (in the present century). That may be why the cult is dwindling. 

[1] https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2023/12/life-after-death.html

God: non-existent but important

God for Atheists.

Dear X,

I find it frustrating to hear you expound yet again your problems with Faith and Doubt and to be unable to comment. So here I try to begin a dialogue. My challenge to you is to see how far down the page you are willing to read. For, as you have nurtured your doubt for so long, I suspect you ‘need’ it and will not welcome a re-thinking of your position. 

I want to expound a view of God which I do not claim is unique to me, but which I have not heard expounded by anyone else, except in parts. My thesis could be called “God for atheists”; the title of my recent book (***). I suppose I started writing it as an apology to my children for my not being as dismissive as they of the whole religious business. But that was more than 20 years ago.

So I am talking first to 'atheists' to say “Not so fast! Do not dismiss this whole bundle of ideas, hopes, and myths, which has loomed so large in the history of mankind since the beginning of thought itself. You may be 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'!” 

But secondly (and this is the more difficult part), I am talking to those who do 'believe in God', and who practice religion. I wish to ask, with sufficient humility and politeness, could it be that you are misunderstanding the nature of God, asking perhaps the wrong questions, accepting too literally the answers provided by previous generations. 

The logic of my argument can be stated succinctly, though to convince an audience embedded in a different world of ideas my exposition would need space; space to introduce ideas gradually, with repetition and illustration. The following is only the bald logic of my argument.

[1]  God surely does not exist. If he did, he would resemble everything else, and we would face the 'regression problem' of who ‘created’ God.

[2]  What, in any case, is existence? We do not know any thing that does not exist. Every THING we know has mass, extension, and duration. It is difficult (nigh impossible) to talk of types of non-existent reality. Take a knotted string; the string exists, but what about the knot? It contributes no extra weight. Yet different observers can view it objectively. We hesitate to say that it does not exist. Take pi, or infinity, or guilt; they certainly do not exist in the way that stone does, or magnetism.

[3]  So there can ‘be' things that do not exist, and they can be discussed objectively, and have meaning; like a unicorn; like patriotism.

[4]  ‘God’ for Newton was the total mass of the universe; for Einstein perhaps the total energy of the universe. It is fairly easy to go along with such definitions even if we do not understand them, but it is quite clear that such concepts of God lack all the human features that made God feared, obeyed, loved, and indeed worshipped. Man has clearly made God in his own image, for God commands, judges, and forgives. 

[5]  Let us make it quite clear that we are now talking about a third and altogether different concept, a Humane God; not the God of Magic (which is incredible), nor the God of Physics (which for most of us is incomprehensible, and in any case does not care sufficiently about us personally). We make this clear to get Richard Dawkins off our backs. 

[6]  Many people, perhaps most, will acknowledge a sense of right and wrong, contrition, a hope for forgiveness, and gratitude. There is (objectively) a cloud of ideas in the collective heads of mankind which we have projected onto the God of Magic. Like the image of a man behind the mirror, it is meaningful, can be discussed objectively, but does not exist; at least not there – behind the mirror. 

[7]  Yet the cloudy 'Humane God' is terribly important for man as a thinking, social, animal; it is needed as the foundation for morals. 

[8]  If you ask yourself, “Who says abortion is wrong?”, or “To whom can I turn for forgiveness?” the answer emerges very clearly that our 'Humane God' resides in the heads of our fellow men. “Whenever two or three of you come together in my name, I am there with you.”  See, for example, the Quakers, who conduct all their business “in the presence of God”.

[9]  How much better is it to have a concept of God that can be easily accessed for advice, and love, and that cannot be doubted, compared with a magical God who spins matter out of nothing, who raises souls (and even bodies) from the dead, but who covers thousands of innocent believers in mountains of mud, and who in any case we cannot believe in? 

(*** “God for atheists” (2019) by Ian West, ISBN-13 : ‎978-1728393995; available online from Amazon, Blackwells, Biblio, or any good bookshop, or direct from the author. )

Yours sincerely, Ian West