Category Errors

[elfs]

So, the irresponsible Terry Eagleton has taken out his droll pen to criticize Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. Botton's essay, if there's anything to be said for it, is a rather entertaining and pointless book, but Eagleton makes a tragic category error early in his evicerations look less responsible than he promises with his chosen tone:

The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised.

Free speech and civil rights are categorically different from belief in the supernatural, so much so that it's hard to see how Eagleton leaps from one to the other with any responsibility. The first two are civil issues, the latter personal. Debates about whether people should have free speech (which are real, and ongoing; see SOPA, PIPA, and PCIPA) continue to this day, and one is not "patronized" when the question is engaged: passionate about either granting that right, or restricting it for ideological reasons, but hardly "patronized."

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I've always been somewhat worried by the people who claim that religion is the only incentive they have for not killing each other. It makes me feel that religion is filled with sociopaths.

One need only look at any other herd or pack animal and see a disturbing lack of bishops to realize that social animals have reasons for not killing one another.

But even if we disregard that. The reasons for not killing one another greatly exceed religion. Most of us are wired with a desire to live and we aren't lining up to be killed. So if someone is going about killing others, the rest of us have a desire to stop that person because it could be us or someone we care about some day. It should also be clear to anyone with a normally functioning brain that you cannot kill enough of whoever you feel is worth killing to do anything more than make them martyrs for their side. Killing your enemy will nearly always hurt your side more than theirs.

Murder is, of course an extreme example, used to make the point but you can find similar examples for most other things that make us 'civil'. People don't like liars so you have an incentive not to lie which has nothing to do with being a just or moral person.