How to Make Atheists

Vinoth Ramachandra

http://vinothramachandra.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/how-to-make-atheists/

I spoke at a Veritas Forum event in Columbia University, New York, a couple of nights ago. My dialogue partner, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Columbia and from an Indian Muslim background, made some scathing criticisms of the media for focusing so much on Islamist and Christian “extremists” as if they were representative of their respective faith communities. He made some equally scathing remarks about the Dawkinses and Dennets of this world whose militant atheism, in contrast to the irenic atheism of this professor, undermined the respectful tolerance of a liberal democracy.

I found myself gently defending the Dawkinses and Dennets of this world. Of course their arguments are often silly, directed at “straw men”. I have criticized them in my published writings. But the more time I spend in the US, the greater my sympathy for their strident attacks on Christians. If I grew up in the US I would probably be a hard-core atheist myself. Switch on “Christian television” and you would have to conclude that evangelical preachers were all con-men and Christians were the most gullible people on earth, easily parted from their money no less than their brains.

Popular Christian books, films and music reflect a narrow-minded subculture. It seems that being a ‘Bible-believing” Christian is to be politically right-wing, anti-evolutionary, anti-feminist and pro-Zionist. Further, the US is most divided and fragmented on a Sunday morning. I spoke at the University of Texas, Austin, two weeks ago, and was shocked to discover that there were over sixty different Christian groups on the campus, divided along ethnic, denominational and para-church lines. Clearly Christians cannot get on with each other; and reconciliation is not part of the good News of Jesus Christ in this corner of the world. But it is these “gospels” that are marketed globally because this is where the money is. Where would a “seeker” go to find authentic Christianity?

I have been privileged to meet and to be befriended by authentic Christians from all walks of life in the USA. I also know that there are outstanding American Christian thinkers and scholars, but that is only because I am a voracious reader. But so much excellent theology by Americans (and Europeans) is written for their fellow theologians, neither for the general reading public nor for the secular academy.

Travelling home on the subway, I got into a conversation with a Tibetan man, a professing atheist, who had been at the Columbia talk. He asked me what the phrase “dying to the old man” meant in Paul’s writings. I explained that it was not the Buddhist extinguishing of the (illusory) self, but rather re-directing one’s life away from self-centred ambition towards the love of Christ and the pursuit of his kingdom of justice and peace. Earlier that morning, my wife and I had lunched with an Indian student, a professing Christian. He is finishing his engineering studies at a prestigious local university. He told us that he wants to work with the US military because they were doing “cutting-edge” research. I asked him if he had ever thought of using his knowledge to re-direct technology towards global justice issues and the needs of the poor back in India or elsewhere. He looked at me with incomprehension. The thought had never entered his mind. Although brought up in India, and by godly parents, he never knew that more Indians had access to cable TV than to basic sanitation.

So a long and interesting day of human encounters. And I found myself wondering as I got into bed: who of these people I had met today was closest to the kingdom of God?

 

“Whistling in the Dark?” by Vinoth Ramachandra

http://vinothramachandra.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/whistling-in-the-dark/

Present-day discussions by Western philosophers about morality in general, and human rights in particular, are haunted by the challenge that Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) threw down more than a century ago. Once we abandon all reference to God, can we continue to talk about the “dignity” , “equality”, and “rights” of individual human beings – simply because they are human beings?

A right is a claim that somebody has to be treated in a certain way by others and not to be treated in certain other ways by others. To every claim-right there is a correlative duty. If X has a right against Y to Y’s doing or refraining from doing action A, then Y has a duty toward X to do or refrain from doing A.

Many of the rights we enjoy are socially generated, either by legislation or social practices. For example, if my employer promises to pay me a specific amount of money every month for the work that I do, then I have a right (a legitimate claim) against my employer if he were to break his promise. However, underlying that contractual right is also a natural right, one that is not socially conferred: for our right not to have our trust betrayed is a natural right, not a right we have on account of a human decision.

I said in my last posting (2 October) that we have come to recognize, and enshrine in various international declarations, a certain class of natural rights that are human rights. That is, rights that we possess simply by virtue of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens. These rights are inherent to the status of being human.

However, very rarely do we address the question Nietzsche posed. If human beings possess a worth that grounds the language of equality and rights, whence this worth? Worth cannot just float free; always there has to be something that gives the entity such worth as it has, some property, achievement, or relationship on which its worth supervenes.
There is a long line of Western philosophers, from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls, who have assumed- while not explicitly arguing for it- that the capacity for rational agency is what gives worth to human beings. But, as Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in his fine book Justice: Rights and Wrongs, those who can exercise this capacity for rational action better than others are then of greater worth than others. Indeed, a good many human beings, such as Alzheimer’s patients and those with severe mental impairment, will never be able to exercise this capacity. Wolterstorff asks: “Must we then expect that those human beings who lack the capacities mentioned, who cannot function as persons, will be endangered? Must we expect that our treatment of them will sooner or later be determined entirely by what best serves the life-goods of the rest of us, not by their right against us to our treating them in certain ways? I think we must.” (p.390)

Nietzsche despised the weak, the poor, and the maimed. He proposed a counter-Christian “moral code for physicians”- the physician, Nietzsche urged, should encourage in himself active contempt for the invalid, regarding him as a parasite on society when he comes to a certain stage of degeneration. But most secular thinkers, while honouring Nietzsche’s brilliance, have not bitten the bullet the way that Nietzsche did.

Wolterstorff argues that being loved by God, despite our flaws and irrespective of who we are, is what ultimately gives a human being great worth. And he quotes (on p.324) the Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, himself a secularist, who says with unusual candour:

“The secular philosophical tradition speaks of inalienable rights, inalienable dignity and of persons as ends in themselves. These are, I believe, ways of whistling in the dark, ways of trying to make secure to reason what reason cannot finally underwrite…. We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious, that they are ends in themselves, that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course, that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say that we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it. Be that as it may: each of them is problematic and contentious. Not one of them has the simple power of the religious ways of speaking.”

Gaita adds: “Where does that power come from? Not, I am quite sure, from esoteric theological or philosophical elaboration of what it means for something to be sacred. It derives from the unashamedly anthropomorphic character of the claim that we are sacred because God loves us, his children.”

 

Vinoth Ramachandra “Death, Thou Shalt Die”

“However, whenever I gazed at my father’s gradually shrinking and wizened frame, and grieved the loss of his fine mind, I would also think, “One day, he is going to be a glorious and radiant creature!” For as Christians, we don’t simply look back nostalgically to what people once were. We also look towards what they will become one day.”

 

Embryonic Humans

Vinoth Ramachandra
http://vinothramachandra.wordpress.com/

I am dismayed by the news that US President Barack Obama plans to lift restrictions on federal funding for embryo-destructive research on new stem cell lines.

Stem cells are cells with the capacity to turn into any other type of human cell, be it a bone, muscle or nerve cell. The popular media often speak as if all scientists are in favour of harvesting cells from human embryos for their potential use in a range of life-saving therapies, and that the arguments against it are posed by reactionary religious groups out to stymie ‘progress’. This is dangerously misleading. It perpetuates the self-serving myth of ’science as our saviour’ and the muddled view that science and religion are implacable foes.

We are all human animals. And the vast majority of us- all those who were not the products of monozygotic twinning (i.e., twinning from a single fertilized egg) – began our lives at conception. From a scientific point of view, there is no doubt at all concerning what the early embryo is. The early human embryo is a human being at the earliest stage of his or her development. Not a ‘potential’ human being, or a ‘pre’ human being, or a mass of cells, or mere tissue, but an individual member of the species Homo sapiens. The embryo is a new human being- the same self-directing human organism as the later child and adult. The changes from embryo to fetus to infant to adolescent to adult are merely changes in degree of natural development of the same individual.

Where moral reasoning enters is in the following argument. If we accept that human beings are intrinsically valuable and deserving of full moral respect by virtue of what they are (as opposed to what they either possess or achieve), does it not follow that they are intrinsically valuable from the point at which they come into being? In that case, embryo-destructive research would be a violation of the most fundamental human right, namely, the right to life of an innocent human being.

This is the argument that is powerfully advanced in a recent book simply called Embryo, authored by Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen.[1] George is a prolific writer and is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, while Tollefsen is a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina. Although they are both Christians, they do not evoke a single Biblical text or explicitly ‘religious’ argument. Their approach is based solely on scientific evidence, drawn from human embryology and developmental biology, and moral reasoning that is open to all. The authors are unafraid to tackle head-on the counter-views on the moral status of the embryo that have been put forward, whether they be ideas about the moment of ‘ensoulment’ or attributive views of personhood.

Much of the impetus toward embryonic stem cell research comes from the fact that there are thousands of ’surplus’ embryos produced by IVF techniques and condemned to perpetual cryopreservation or eventual incineration. This is certainly an unprecedented situation in human history- so many nascent human beings in a state of limbo with little hope of being brought to term. However, this is no argument for killing them, even for putative human benefits, for the same argument could be extended- and is rejected- for infants and children.

George and Tollefsen point out that ‘From the moral point of view, the certainty of death- whether in ninety years or nine minutes- does not alter our inherent dignity or relieve others of obligations to respect our lives. That someone will soon die, no matter what we do, is never a licence for killing him. That the human being whose death is imminent happens to be at an earlier or later stage of development is morally irrelevant. And that he or she came into existence this way rather than that way is scarcely any more relevant.’

Moreover, they urge that the practice of creating and freezing extra embryos as part of IVF treatment ’should come to an end if we wish to be a culture that treasures life and children, and not one that commodifies, instrumentalizes, and mechanizes them. Reform of the assisted reproduction industry should therefore rank high on a list of partial solutions to the moral and cultural question concerning excess human embryos.’ They commend the example of Italy: under Italian law, it is not permissible for couples to fertilize more than three eggs, and all successfully generated embryos must be implanted in the mother.

When, and even whether, embryonic stem cell research will prove to be therapeutically useful is a highly speculative matter, notwithstanding the inflated claims that have been made on its behalf. In contrast, adult stem cell research has already led to many therapeutic benefits, and it poses no ethical hazards. Similarly, recent studies have suggested that stem cells extracted from placental tissue may offer the same advantages scientists hope to obtain from embryonic stem cells.

Should we- scientists, entrepreneurs, legislators in rich nations- not be promoting these alternative avenues of research as top priority? Surely research that does not involve the production or killing of embryos should be what receives public funding from a government concerned to protect its most vulnerable citizens and to promote the well-being of all. And would it make a significant difference to popular perception if we started referring to ‘embryonic human beings’ rather than simply embryos?

[For more on the 'hype' surrounding embryonic stem cell research, see ch.5 of my Subverting Global Myths (2008)]
[1] Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Doubleday, 2008)

 

What of being a light unto the world?

I recall with some degree of stark clarity what Vinoth Ramachandra (South Asian Regional Secretary for IFES) said at an FES conference which I attended last year – I love God but I dislike Christians. That statement had a remarkable effect on those who were there. You could almost hear the collective gasps and see the stunned faces.

My first reflex was – wow, I agree. Well, I don’t dislike all Christians (and I’m sure Vinoth doesn’t, too), but the way certain Christians behave make you wonder, “What of being a light unto the world?” as we were commanded? What of reflecting in ourselves Christ the Saviour whom we are called to represent? Yet at the same time a voice accuses within: Consider that you might be one of those Christians you are talking about.

When we were called to “love one another”, many equated “love” with “nice-ness” and “pampering”. When we were called to rejoice and find joy in the Lord, many equated “joy” with “perpetual smiling – never mind if it’s fake”. But the problems of these assumptions are revealed when we look upon our role model – Jesus Christ of Nazareth. When I did a key word search on the NIV Bible – nowhere was it chronicled that “Jesus smiled” or “Jesus laughed”. It doesn’t mean Jesus never smiled in his 33 years of life on Earth, but probably means that smiling isn’t one of the criterion that makes a person Christian. These days church-goers smile to depict some form of welcome-ness and warmth to each other and newcomers – no wrong in that. But when the smiles are not accompanied by true compassion and concern, these smiles become nothing but a facade, what non-Christians call Christian Hypocrisy.

So the tricky bit comes when Christians see something wrong and do nothing to correct it, because they are too busy trying to be “nice”. But look, Jesus Christ didn’t try to be “nice” when people made a market out of the Holy Temple – He overturned the tables and chased the cattle and sheep out, saying,”Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!” He saw wrong and He acted immediately. Of course, He has the authority to do it and command it be done. But the key issue here is that Jesus did not step by and do nothing when there is wrong. Similarly, Christians have the responsibility of voicing out against the wrongs of society and defend the rights of the disadvantaged minorities. Christians are not called to be “nice”, but rather to “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:16). What does light do? It dispels darkness. In the same way, Christians are not to cower in the dark but rather be sources of light themselves. Only then can they claim that they are given authority by God to be disciples of Christ.

Our Lord is both the Lion and the Lamb. If we may imitate Him so, let us endeavor to seek out the true spirit of godly courage and sacrifice.