Dear Squeers,

I find it pointless to discuss much of anything with those who have a literal belief in scripture. I may have crossed the line in ridiculing those religionists like George who do not have a simplistic belief but have a religious sense – a sense of the numinous which I don’t have. There are many wonderful people who have such feelings. Actually there are wonderful people who have other beliefs that I find unacceptable.

I felt your post might have been inspired by mine and felt a bit guilty for it. I don’t believe Marx was eminently reasonable. He was a latter day St. Augustine for people who could no longer accept the supernatural but would subscribe to unprovable propositions if the prophesies they justified were in accordance with their desires. I think he was a brilliant and eloquent theologian with a messianic vision and inspired people to follow him. He offered a certainty for believers. However, perhaps another time, as you say. Perhaps not if you are a ‘true believer’. There usually is a little point in arguing with a true believer. I don’t believe I am one, but maybe I am kidding myself. I have the sense, maybe false, that you are one.

I think you are quite an intelligent person. However, that can be compatible with being a true believer.

Whether humanism is tantamount to a religion depends on one’s definition of religion and humanism. I was irritated that you referred to Marx as a humanist. He does not fit my definition of a humanist. I started a string which defined a humanist.

At this time I am interested in writing more on the separation of religion and state.

Dear Davidf,
I find your last post extraordinary and am finally losing patience, especially as it seems to me I’ve strained to be restrained in response to what I can only call your reactionary, inflammatory and, frankly, irrational comments on the Marx topic. Out of respect and a desire not to offend I have conceded considerable ground in not offering counter-argument to the piles of corpses you love to invoke in place of sober critique. On the one or two occasions that I was obliged, and in a position, to put you in your place, I still did so as seemingly as possible (I refer to your first citation of the Manifesto some threads back, and On the Jewish Question recently) and have not had a considered rejoinder, apart from more corpses (It’s starting to look like Marx was single-handedly responsible for wiping out all the millions of the 20th century)!
As for how you can be agonising over whether I am a “true believer” or not is beyond me after everything I’ve said on various threads you’ve been privy to. I can only surmise that you dote more on your own prosaic thought than mine, or that you distrust it. I go on so much about my general unbelief I feel I must be becoming a bore!
I can assure you I am not a true believer in anything, including Marxism. There is no denying, however, that Marx’s thought is both rigorous (on capitalism) and profound (on alienation and other matters).
I did indeed mean to provoke you by comparing Humanism with religion (certainly you’ve provoked me!) and I’ll be only too happy to lay out not "my" case, but a body of thought on the topic (if I can reconcile the effort with the time I have available). Btw, I’m inclined to agree that anarchism, or “Bartleby politics”, is the best way to proceed.
Sincerely..

Dear Squeers,

Piles of corpses are not conducive to sober critique. However, look at my last post. 'corpse' is not even mentioned.

The last sentence of "On the Jewish Question" is, "The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism." A Nazi could have written that sentence. Do you believe that at any time Judaism has controlled European society?

Were it not for his ancestry Marx in that respect could have been a Nazi.

"reactionary, inflammatory and, irrational" are not words of rational argument. I have not used such words to describe you. The fact that you reacted with such words indicates that somehow I have touched a nerve. Maybe you are not a true believer, but you sure sound bothered.

You did not provoke me by comparing humanism with religion. I have heard that before. You provoked me by calling Marx a humanist. I pointed out that he advocated a tyrannical state in the Manifesto and in that same document regarded the protection we have against arbitrary state action as unnecessary. Those are not the sentiments of a humanist. I believe it was up to you to make a rejoinder when I pointed that those attitudes were consistent with the behaviour of the Marxist states. That was a valid criticism.

I repeat one of his points: "Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state." That is incompatible with free expression. The Soviet Union allowed only official publications. That was compatible with the Manifesto.

Dear Dan,
>>I admire your ambition to try and round off this discussion<<
If you read carefully my posts you will see that I wanted to “round off” the discussion between Oliver and myself - about the belief in Sagan’s "The (physical) cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be" and the alternative - that this thread diverted into, when I thought nobody else was reading. Then the discussion took other directions (other people “pontificating” on things, i.e. history, the Bible, where I was not knowledgeable enough and could only learn from them) and my last quote referred only to Oliver’s speculations about God. I am not aware of any conclusion except that Oliver and I agreed to disagree (about Sagan or no-Sagan) after we both tried to make our positions as clear as possible.

“The teachings of most mainstream religions are consistent with evolution.”
This is a statement that I thought you knew I agreed with (although I used the term 'compatible' instead of 'consistent'); it is also known that you and most atheists disagree with it. I did not think I had anything to add to that, and am sorry if my discussion with Oliver about what one can or cannot believe distracted you too much.

So if you want me to “address the issue”, you have to state explicitly what you want, although I doubt I can convince you (or e.g. Dawkins and those who agree with him) about the consistency issue.

Dear Squeers,
>>I am not a true believer in anything<<
I have already been accused of being facetious in this thread, so perhaps I should be carefull, but this statement somehow reminds me of Monsieur Jourdain before he made the discovery that he has "been speaking prose all my life, and didn't even know it!" (Molière :-)).

Dear George,
Thanks for the explanation. I probably wasn’t reading your post carefully enough.

Severin,
Thanks for the ABC article. I can agree with its premise that we need to press on with encouraging science literacy. However, I disagree with its view of science literacy.

I don’t think science literacy is aided by a questionnaire containing philosophically based or controversial questions and then moaning when the respondents don’t give the answers you expect. Science literacy is not about memorising the correct answers. Rather, it has something to do with the thinking processes that allow you to come to the answer.

For example, for roughly 50 years, from the time the planet Pluto was discovered in 1929 until when someone came to realise Pluto had a moon, people thought that Pluto was only a little smaller in mass than the earth. It is now accepted that Pluto is about 1/500th in mass by comparison. So, for a long time a great number of scientists were wrong about the mass of Pluto by a factor of about 400.

So if they included a question on Pluto during this time period, they might have been thrilled at the high number of ‘correct’ responses from people who were getting the answer quite wrong, but faithfully repeating what they had learned in science class.

The article claims that people need science literacy so that they can make good decisions when voting in elections. Their attitude seems to be that they want to ‘educate’ the populace into making the ‘right’ choices, i.e. the ones they agree with.

So when the people of the questionnaire ask whether humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, they shouldn’t be so quick to say that the answer is, of course, no. The subject is philosophically based. There is historical and scientific evidence to say that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans. For the historical, one could look to legends and ancient art. For an ancient written document with a pretty good description of a dinosaur, look at the book of Job, chapter s 40 & 41.

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Dear all,
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A very good friend of mine presents the case for the existence of Jesus as follows and I would be interested to read your comments.

Internal evidence:

(a) Epistles of St Paul: 1 Thessalonians, written about 20 years after the alleged Resurrection. If Jesus had not lived, how did the Christian community of Thessalonica grow up so quickly?

(b) 1 Corinthians 15.3-11, written about 25 years after the alleged Resurrection. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to 500 people “most of whom are still alive, though some have died’. This was a claim easily refuted if it were false.

(c) The four gospels, Mark (65), Matthew and Luke (who both used Mark and added from other sources) about 80, and John soon after 90, present a clear and consistent picture of the central figure of whom they were writing, though dates not 100% certain.

External evidence:

Suetonius (69-140) writes damningly of Christians in Rome about 49 AD as ‘a class of men given to a new and wicked superstition’ and speaks of disturbances in Rome at that time in this way: ‘Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome’. It is believed that the reference to Chrestus is to Christus or Christ. It corroborates what we know from other sources that there were Christians in Rome by 49.

Tacitus (55-120), Governor of the province of Asia, writes about the fire in Rome in AD 64. In his Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus describes how Nero placed the blame on Christians. He writes: ‘Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a deadly superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City [Rome] where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular’.

Continued …

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