Gay Marriage, Natural Law and Ethics

In a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine, Robert George, a Princeton law professor and preeminent right wing intellectual, makes his case against same sex marriage.

“Ordinary friendships wouldn’t be friendships anymore if they involved bodily sharing,” he explained to me. “If I, despite being a married man, had this female friend of mine and I said, ‘Well, gosh, why don’t we do some bodily sharing,’ and we had straightforward sexual intercourse, well, that wouldn’t be friendship or marriage. It is bodily, O.K., but it is not part of a comprehensive sharing of life. My comprehensive sharing of life is with my wife, which I just now violated.” But just as friendships with sex are not friendships, marriage without sex is not marriage. Sex, George said, is the key to this “comprehensive unity.” He then imagined himself as a man with no interest in sex who proposed to seal a romance by committing to play tennis only with his beloved. Breaking that promise, he said, would not be adultery.

The second step is more complicated, and more graphic. George argues that only vaginal intercourse — “procreative-type” sex acts, as George puts it — can consummate this “multilevel” mind-body union. Only in reproduction, unlike digestion, circulation, respiration or any other bodily function, do two individuals perform a single function and thus become, in effect, “one organism.” Each opposite-sex partner is incomplete for the task; yet together they create a “one-flesh union,” in the language of Scripture. “Their bodies become one (they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together) in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way in which one’s heart, lungs and other organs form a unity by coordinating for the biological good of the whole,” George writes in a draft of his latest essay on the subject. Unloving sex between married partners does not perform the same multilevel function, he argues, nor does oral or anal sex — even between loving spouses.

Notice his heavy reliance on biology.  His case lies in the details of copulation.  The claim is that vaginal intercourse, as a “procreative-type sex act”, possesses some quality that is essential to marriage.  The way George’s ethical theory relies on the biological details of sex seems rather absurd to me.  Why should biology be coupled to ethics in this way?  I hope no one resurrects the argument that evolution should guide ethical theories, I’d rather not live in that society.  Heck, just think about animal life on the plains of the Serengeti, should that inform your ethical theories?

Clearly George is not advocating resurrecting Hitler-esque ethical practices.  I just don’t understand how he and his ilk choose which parts of biology should inform human ethics and which parts of nature should not.

Update:

Upon further reflection I don’t think my above objection really addresses George’s argument, but I do think my objection is pertinent for simplistic arguments against homosexuality of the ick-that’s-not-natural variety.

I think my initial reaction to the article is more appropriate: where’s the argument?  Why is procreation so integral to marriage that it is morally wrong to be in a romantic relationship that can’t perform “procreative sex-acts”?  No further argument is given for this beyond the unsupported claim that humans were designed for such relationships and the implicit assumption that behaving contrary to this design is immoral.

Best Christmas Blog Post

Once again, Mr. Hayes has written a beautiful post, this time about what Christmas means to him.  Here’s the first bit:

For those of us who grew up in nominally Christian countries, the Christmas season is an annual time that evokes memories of every previous year of our lives. Christmas is like a string on which the beads of all our years are strung together into a more or less coherent whole. Having lived through the better part of sixty-five years and gone through just about enough transitions, I find my thoughts and emotions around Christmas are pretty complex. Let me try to tease some of them apart…

Poll of Philosophers: God, Free Will, etc.

A fascinating poll of 3226 of philosophers (professors, graduate students and PhDs) was undertaken about some of the central questions in the field.  Here’s two of the questions most will be familiar with:

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Accept or lean toward: compatibilism	550 / 931 (59%)
Other	139 / 931 (14.9%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism	128 / 931 (13.7%)
Accept or lean toward: no free will	114 / 931 (12.2%)

God: theism or atheism?

Accept or lean toward: atheism	678 / 931 (72.8%)
Accept or lean toward: theism	136 / 931 (14.6%)
Other	117 / 931 (12.5%)

Here’s more info about the poll and the rest of the poll results are here.

If you’re unfamiliar with the terms in the free will debate check out the Wikipedia entry on free will.  It should be noted that most of the those surveyed here are either Americans or Britons and identify with the analytic tradition of philosophy.

I was mildly surprised at the high number of atheists and low number of theists.

(via The Daily Dish)

A Spiritual Autobiography: From Seventh-Day Adventist to Charismatic Christian to Agnostic Liberal Christian. Part II

In a previous post I wrote about my Seventh-day Adventist upbringing and ended with a description of my conversion to charismatic Christianity.  Here I’ll briefly describe the events that led up to my rejection of the Christian God and attempt to interpret why and how these events led to such a radical change in my beliefs.

After two years of being a charismatic Christian, the central focus of my spiritual life was seeking God’s presence.  Being in God’s presence, which happened while singing praise songs or during private prayer and Bible study, always meant a spiritual high–a time when I felt that God was personally communicating something to me.  Usually God was communicating his love for me, at other times it was a specific Bible text or an impression to pray for someone. While these special times lasted I felt like I was on top of the world, but after two years of being a charismatic such divine visits became few and far in between.  When I wasn’t in God’s presence (which was most of the time), I experienced withdrawals and depression and generally felt guilty for not sharing with others the wonders of experiencing and knowing God.

While I was on this emotional rollarcoaster, my faith was challenged in other ways.  I began conversing with a friendly atheist who directed me to authors like Nietzche that directly challenged my Christian worldview. I also realized that all the miracles I had witnessed could be explained without invoking God.  Moreover, I began to see that the people in my church were, like everyone else, flawed human beings. After about eight months of these difficulties, my faith, which had been all the while slowly slipping away, completely disappeared.  My emotional rollarcoaster flattened out, and I no longer felt plagued by depression and guilt.

I’ve analyzed this crucial period in my life again and again, and I’m still not sure what really caused my loss of faith.  Was I just seeking emotional equilibrium after being on a spiritual and emotional rollercoaster for too long?  Was being exposed to an intelligent and kind atheist too much for my naive faith?  Or did the heretical ideas I learned lead me to lose my faith for intellectual reasons?  To boil it down, did I become a non-believer for emotional reasons and only later invent a memory of internal intellectual debate?  Or did the emotional reasons instigate a real period of objective rational philosophical investigation that led me to reject Christianity?  As I remember, the latter option is closer to the truth.

Memory is a fickle thing.  As Julian Barnes puts it:

Psychologists tell us we exaggerate the stability of our past beliefs.  Perhaps this is a way of asserting our shaky selfhood; also, of congratulating ourselves, as on a greater achievement, when we rethink those beliefs…

As my interest in philosophy and science has increased over the years, perhaps my memory has colored in my deconversion story, making it a story of my “heroic” choice to reject the comfort of Christianity in the face of such compelling arguments for atheism.  Maybe my memory is fickle, but for the time being I’ll stick with what it tells me.

In part III of this series I’ll recount how I eventually drifted to the place I’m at today: some fuzzy ill-defined land of atheism, agnostism, Liberal Christianity, and Adventism.

To be continued.

Islamophobia watch: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I couldn’t agree more with Chris Schoen’s analysis of  Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay in the csmonitor.  The title says it all:

Swiss ban on minarets was a vote for tolerance and inclusion

Indeed, you can’t get much more “Orwellian” than that.

Pakistan’s view of the West

I’ve stumbled on several fascinating bits of news about Pakistani’s views of America and the West recently.

At the New York Times there has recently been a blog post on the abundance of conspiracy theories in Pakistan about America (or the West).  Apparently some (or many? or a few?) Pakistanis are susceptible to theories on the West’s involvement in their troubles (e.g. Bin Ladin may be Jewish) which far exceed the West’s actual involvement.

The Times also posted a fascinating video featuring Pakistani pop musicians and their unwillingness to risk blaming Islamic extremists for some of Pakistan’s problems (for fear of reprisals).  When politics does appear in their lyrics they tend to blame America and the West for their troubles:

Then I stumbled upon a fascinating conversation on the 3 quark daily (3qd) about a New York Times video of Todd Shea, an American who founded a remote hospital in rural Pakistan where the recent earthquake hit.  The video depicts Shea as an average uneducated American who is highly motivated to help the poor have access to decent healthcare.  In the comments below the video on the 3qd site, two people start accusing Todd Shea of some rather outlandish things:

[Shea's motivations for coming to Pakistan could be the] CIA, almost free ganja…..low rent, celebrity, exercising power over the powerless in the name of empowering them.   -Maniza

(ganja = marijuana)

Maniza later writes:

But now he lives in a huge mansion—in the mountains—(yes it is a HUGE mansion) in which space is let out for sick villagers

Eventually Shea himself joins in the conversation saying that he found the website by googling his name along with the New York Times video.  Responding to Shea’s appearance in the comments another commenter writes:

Are you Washington’s PR man? Googling yourself means you take your public image very seriously.  -Manas Shaikh

The above is just a sampling of some of the more outrageous responses from an Indian Muslim, Manas Shaikh, who presumably has a similar perspective as some Pakistani Muslims, and Maniza, who is Pakistani and also one of the contributors to 3qd.  (I should also note that there were commenters, possibly Pakistanis, that defended Shea.)

Given America’s foreign policy record in the Muslim world, I can understand why conspiracy theories about America would abound among the uneducated, but these tidbits suggest that such conspiracies may be widespread among educated Pakistanis as well.

A Spiritual Autobiography: From Seventh-Day Adventist to Charismatic Christian to Agnostic Liberal Christian. Part I

When I look back on my religious life I often want to see a narrative, a story arc that begins with my Adventist upbringing and ends (as of now) with my agnostic Liberal Christianity. I suppose it’s natural to want to see my life as a coherent sensical narrative. However, a more honest view of life can be found in Julian Barnes’ autobiographical musings on death and God entitled Nothing to Be Frightened of:

[Human life is] a span of conciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children grow up on the whole to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.

I wish I could say that my spiritual life has followed, as Barnes puts it, “a comprehensible plot,” but I agree with him that it hasn’t.  It would make sense for me to have arrived at my disbelief in a personal God simply by realizing that the evidence and logic supporting my faith were merely wishful thinking and rationalization. But no, my life story isn’t that “comprehensible.”

Being raised in an Adventist home means a number of things. On one hand, Adventists are typical conservative evangelical Christians. They read the Bible very literally–for example, they believe Earth is less than 10,000 years old and was created in six literal 24-hour days and the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation can help us understand world events and the end times before Jesus comes again. On the other hand Adventists are different from many other Christians. They don’t dance, drink, or smoke and many are vegetarians. Most Adventists think they are in possession of very distinctive and extremely important Truths that almost all other conservative Christians lack and which will play a crucial role in the end times. Adventists worship on and observe the seventh-day Sabbath as practicing Jews do. Also, many Adventist children in the US attend Adventist schools for all of their education. I, for example, attended Adventist schools all my life (except for graduate school) in which 80% to 90% of my classmates were Adventist. All in all, the Adventism in which I’ve been raised is a very American, yet insular, subculture.

My commitment to the Adventist form of Christianity took a turn when I was in high school. During this time my parents became involved with a peculiar Adventist church that had fully embraced charismatic Christianity while eschewing Adventism’s sectarian nature and some of its distinctive beliefs. Thus began my gradual conversion to a form of charismatic Christianity that emphasized one’s relationship with Jesus and the miraculous gifts of the spirit over specific doctrine. And so my worldview radically changed to one akin to primitive animistic mythologies. I thought that specific evil spirits were not just responsible for (some of) the immoral behavior of individuals but were also behind the evil characteristics of cities, cultures, and nations (e.g. I believed that the pattern of organized crime in Chicago was due to some organized crime spirit). I heard and read stories about evil spirits being excorcized or causing objects to fly around rooms.  More often I read and heard about supernatural phenomena associated with God. Routinely I heard people speaking in tongues and prophesying about (usually) good things that were going to happen to a specific person.

This transformation affected my behavior as well. I put great stock in any feelings and/or sensations I had during my daily prayers and Bible reading sessions, thinking that they were God’s way of communicating to me. I stopped reading novels and science books and instead exclusively read charismatic Christian books. I constantly felt that I should be sharing with others the wonderful experiences I had been having with God but almost always did not follow through (this was a constant source of guilt). In particular, I placed great importance on the feeling of closeness I experienced with Jesus while singing praise songs in Church and during private devotions.

To be continued Continued here.

“Two plus two f—ing equals four, you cretin!”

“I am not defending the “style” of the New Atheists. ‘Two plus two f—ing equals four, you cretin!’ is not a pedagogic or discursive methodology I find attractive.”

Brilliant.

(found in the second comment on this post)

The Pretentiousness of Artificiality

(via Abstruse Goose)

Michael Shermer on New Atheism

Occasionally you read an essay that feels like a breath of fresh air amidst an intractable debate.  In this case the debate regards how atheists (or Liberal Christians such as myself) should interact with religionists.  Should we tell them their beliefs are ignorant and stupid and comparable to a belief in Santa Claus like Dawkins does?  Or should we have respect for religionists and their beliefs and recognize that it is possible to be a serious intellectual and a believer.  Honestly I see both sides making good points but in the end I think the latter more tolerant approach is generally more useful and so does Michael Shermer.  Here’s the best part of his recent essay in the Huffington Post:

What is the right way to respond to theists and/or theism? That is the question asked at every atheism/humanism conference I’ve attended the past several years. The answer is simple: there is no one “right way.” There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context. Sometimes a head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault á la Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Jerry Coyne is the way to go. Sometimes a more conciliatory approach á la Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or your humble servant is best. It all depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish. When I debate creationists — whether of the Young Earth, Old Earth, or the Intelligent Design species — I try to take a Dawkinsonian/Coyneian approach and slam-dunk their flawed arguments and duplicitous claims without an ounce of accommodationism (although I am, by nature and upbringing, polite and respectful). Christopher Hitchens’s recent body slam he and Stephen Fry gave the Catholic Church for its stance on women’s rights, birth control, and Third World poverty would have brought tears to my eyes had I not been cheering so fervently.

On the other hand, if it is our goal to educate everyone on earth to the power and wonders of science (as it is the Skeptics Society and www.skeptic.com) and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems (as it is my personal goal), then we need as many people as we can get on board with a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere … pick your battle). If you insist that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs before they are allowed to join the common fight against these scourges of humanity, you have just alienated the vast majority of the world’s population from your project.

To what end? So you can stand up tall and proud and proclaim ” … but I never gave an inch to those faith heads!”? Well good for you! Just keep on playing “Nearer my Atheism to Thee” while the ship of humanity slips further into the depths of disaster.

The last paragraph captures what I think is an extremely important aspect of this debate.  There are more pressing issues in the world than converting everyone to atheism.  If religious fundamentalism really is blocking us from improving the world (which to some degree it probably is) then attempting to create a mass movement for atheism isn’t necessarily the answer.  I suspect it would be far more profitable to publicly advocate for more moderate and flexible forms of faith.