Tag: religion

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In which Harry demonstrates his pedantic soul

A local free magazine that came through the door includes a few hundred words of Buddhist-inspired wisdom. The column starts:

As a child, were you encouraged to aim for perfection*?

The footnote at the bottom of the page explains:

The word * ‘perfection’ comes originally from the Greek ‘telios’ meaning ‘completeness’, ‘purpose’

The first thing that bothered me about that was — how much of a tin ear for language do you need to believe that ‘perfect’ could possibly derive from ‘telios’?

Even if ‘perfect’ did come from a Greek word meaning ‘completeness’, ‘purpose’ — how would it prove anything? What difference would the Greek root mean to a discussion in English? Words change their meaning. Over two thousand years and a shift from one language to another, the meanings can change really quite a lot.

In fact it derives (via Old French) from the Latin perfectus ‘completed,’ from the verb perficere, from per– ‘through, completely’ + facere ‘do.’ The outlines of which I guessed, although the details came from a dictionary.

A bit of googling reveals that there is a connection between ‘perfect’ and ‘telios’, though. Teleios (τελειος) is indeed a Greek word for perfect, and it’s regularly translated as perfectus in the Vulgate and ‘perfect’ in the KJV (I did check, but you’ll have to take my word for it).

However, although teleios does mean ‘perfect’ and ‘complete’, it doesn’t apparently mean ‘purpose’. But it’s derived from telos (τέλος), which means ‘purpose’ or ‘aim’ (hence ‘teleology’); presumably because something which is complete is something which has achieved its aim.

So we can reconstruct the idea as it was presumably originally told to her:

“In Greek, the word for ‘perfect’ meant something which had fulfilled its purpose.”

As I said, arguments from etymology are daft anyway; but at least this version has a certain fortune-cookie aphoristic quality to it. It approaches the idea of ‘perfection’ from a slightly different angle. The version in the column

The word * ‘perfection’ comes originally from the Greek ‘telios’ meaning ‘completeness’, ‘purpose’

is not only obviously false, it also garbles the point of the original observation. How could you write that down and not think “hang on a minute, I don’t think I’ve got that quite right”?

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Evil Empire II – the sequel

Alan Sullivan says:

Robert Spencer has written a book to challenge conventional views of Islam. He contends that the jihadists have interpreted their tradition correctly. It is the ‘religion of peace’ apologists who promulgate a heresy. The Islam of Osama bin Laden is quite authentic. I wonder if the American President realizes this, but attempts to conjure a milder version of Islam by promoting a fraud, or whether he’s simply clueless. The latter, I fear.

I have various problems with this. Firstly I have a general uneasiness about people who proffer opinions about the ‘correct’ form of religions which they themselves are not members of. This isn’t out of some kind of cultural relativism; I just think it’s dishonest for George Bush, or Tony Blair, or, I assume, Robert Spencer, to claim to identify the true nature of Islam when they presumably believe that Muhammed was a false prophet and that all forms of Islam are, fundamentally, false. I certainly feel that for myself; as an atheist I’m not about to offer an opinion about the ‘true’ version of Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism – what the hell would it mean?

Islamic cultures have varied considerably from place to place and over the 1400 years of its existence. Theological interpretations have also varied. I have strong opinions about some kinds of society and behaviour being preferable to others, and for that reason I would look favourably on any strands of Islam that tend to fit with my views; but I’m not about argue the case in terms of Islamic theology. It would be intellectually dishonest and, I should think, counter-productive. If you can persuade people of the moral case, they’ll find ways to adapt the religion to fit. That’s what Christianity has always done.

I’m especially uneasy with the use of terms like ‘heresy’. I can see no reason at all to start using the language of fundamentalists and arguing on their terms.

I also don’t see what the advantage is of branding Islam as some kind of evil ideology fundamentally opposed to the Western way of life. It’s not a polticial system like Nazism, with a single leader and administration that can be conquered, or even a broader ideology like communism which is the product of a recent historical moment and which can easily(!) be replaced by a new political structure; it’s a centuries-old religion which is a deeply-held part of the identity of what, 1.5 billion people? What are you going to do to combat that – invest in missionaries? As far as I can tell, the only advantage to be gained by demonising Islam is that, by dehumanising Muslims, you make it easier to blow them up. But again, are you going to blow up all 1.5 billion, in an attempt to exterminate the religion from the surface of the earth? Obviously you can start with the most threatening states, like Iran, and pick off the Islamic world one country at a time, but I can’t help feeling that all the other Islamic countries would start getting pretty peeved pretty quickly, and you might find it rapidly got harder to keep the situation under control.

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Sevilla

Seville! City of tiny platesful of food!

The food has indeed been yummy. Garlic prawns, morcilla (the local version of black pudding), scrambled eggs with garlic shoots and ham, etc etc. I haven’t been getting my 5 servings of fruit and vegetable a day, mind you. Even if you count bread and breadsticklets as seperate vegetables. The trouble is, you order a half portion of ham or prawns or something and they bring loads of bread with it, and that’s pretty much a reasonable meal. Being Easter, it’s also the city of men in pointy hats. With, on the one hand, men in loafers, neat blue jeans, smart shirts, cashmere jumpers tied around their shoulders and designer sunglasses, and on the other, long parades of people in penitential hoods marching through the streets, it feels a bit like turning up to a party and realising no one told you the dresscode was ’80s or KKK’.

I can’t quite get around the sheer number of people taking part in the parades. Each one seems to have hundreds of participants, in pointy hoods carrying candles, in floppy hoods carrying crosses, a few carrying incense or the main figures of Christ or the Virgin, and a largish band to play dirges and thump drums. Since each church in Seville has a parade, and there are a lot of churches in Seville, it must represent a significant proportion of the city population every year. I’m sure the degree of real religious feeling varies – it seems like it’s as much an expression of local tradition now as a display of penitence – but a lot of it must be heartfelt. It gives me the creeps rather. An upbringing in a country where people who deny the literal truth of the resurrection get chosen as bishops is no preparation for mass displays of fervour.

On Maundy Thursday, lots of women appeared wearing mantillas. And dark glasses.

Trivia of the day: one of the statues of the Virgin is called the Macarena, after the area of Seville where the church is, many Seville women get named Macarena after the Virgin; the cheesy pop classic is named after one of these women.

If you’re ever in Seville, I’d definitely recommend the Real Alcazar, the Islamic/Renaissance palace started by the Almohads, and continued both in the Moorish and classical styles by the Spanish kings after the reconquest. It has large and rather lovely gardens which are almost as good as the palace itself. It’s a kind of second-rate version of Alhambra, but Alhambra sets such a high standard that second-rate is pretty good. I’ve always loved the idea of a house built around a central courtyard, but of course in Britain you wouldn’t be building a shady oasis, you’d be building a dingy hole that, at best, spent much of the year acting as a windbreak.

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Atheism again

I said a few posts ago, about my own atheism, “I don’t believe in unicorns either, but I’m not about to go to any meetings about it.” Well, I haven’t been going to any atheist meetings, but I have been reading the comment threads at Pharyngula, which is a pretty good internet equivalent.

My own stance on evolution and religion is hard-line: I think the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, that anyone who doesn’t accept it is just plain wrong, and that standard compromise of evolution being somehow guided by God is just a muddle-headed cop-out. I get as angry as the next atheist at attempts to get creationism/ID taught in biology lessons. And as a social liberal, I don’t have much time for Christian fundamentalism in any circumstance, and I’ve done my fair share of internet Christian-baiting.

And yet, despite my own intellectual intolerance and the fact I share all the biases of the commenters at Pharyngula, I still find the atmosphere there toxic. There’s so much energy being expended on hostility and derision, such a sense of superiority on display. Anyone who rejects evolution – or believes in God, really – must obviously be an idiot or a liar. There’s not even an attempt to empathise with anyone who values faith over reason.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting soft. Or maybe I just recognise my own worse qualities in the people there. I should probably say, to be fair, that not everyone there matches the description I’ve just given. Perhaps no-one does, really; but that’s the overall tone of the site. And I should also point out the endless provocation from the anti-evolution people. But still. I’m tempted to say that I think it’s bad strategy, that they’re alienating more people than they’re persuading, but I have no idea. What I do think is that, for want of a less spiritually loaded term, it’s just bad karma.

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more atheism

I think I’ll move this out of the comments into its own post:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

from here via Metafilter. I have to admit, as a white middle-class straight man, I never expected to see myself appearing at the bottom of a list like that.

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It’s a whole different world.

This article about atheists in Texas (via Pharyngula) is just mind-bogglingly odd to me. I grew up in secular, middle-class London where the default position was a casual agnosticism, so the image of atheists as a secretive minority, afraid to give their name in a newspaper interview, seems surreal. The flipside of that is the presentation of atheists as fiercely rationalist and potentially campaigning ideologues, who go to atheist meetings. What do you do at an atheist meeting? All sit in a room together not believing? It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Just like Christians, most of the non-believers I know are that way because they were brought up like that. I’m wary of attempts to make atheism into either an alternate belief system or a political cause. I mean, I don’t believe in unicorns either, but I’m not about to go to any meetings about it.

Of course, I can see that if I lived in America, it might seem more important, both because of the overwhelmingly religious culture and because the constitutional separation of church and state makes it into a political issue. There’s an irony in the fact that in the UK, which has a constitutional intertwining of church and state, we tend to be suspicious of overt religiosity in our politicians, while American politics practically demands it.

I remember a few years ago reading an article in the Economist which argued, in the context of abortion, that the US Constitution actually tended to inflame political debates, because the insistence on absolute and inalienable rights makes both sides inflexible and removes the chance of compromise. Specifically, it means that, whereas in Europe, the focus of the debate tends to move quite rapidly onto specifics which can be farmed off onto technical committees – the maximum age of a fetus that can be aborted, whether a woman has to see a doctor before getting an abortion – in the States, there’s always this central totemic Supreme Court decision that hangs over the whole subject, and the possibility of the decision being overturned. Once the sides have branded themselves in the rhetoric of absolute rights – the ‘right to life’ and the ‘right to choose’ – it becomes all-or-nothing. Similarly with obscenity and hate-speech laws vs. free speech, or the right to bear arms.

I don’t know whether the separation of church and state has played an important part in shaping American religious culture; the French, who have the same constitutional separation, seem to be pretty Godless. It certainly politicises the debate on teaching evolution in schools and prevents the obvious compromise of teaching Genesis in religious education classes and Darwin in biology, though. And although I completely agree that natural selection is the only origin theory children should be taught in biology, the debate shouldn’t be about constitutionality. It should be about teaching the overwhelming scientific consensus.