I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I invented that arbitrary claim [...] to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims.
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
“I think he made one law of that kind [sc. one with no obvious reason why obeying it is a good idea] in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? [...] Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you to do something for which His bidding is the only reason? [...]
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.
That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it’s about abortion as a whole.
His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.
14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.
It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis’s religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.
I largely agree with what you’re saying here, but:
I’m afraid I don’t think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it’s ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it’s ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?
(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that’s what I know best, but I’m pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)
They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn’t say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.
I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.
This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.