Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert, and it is quite certain that nearly all of the pestering Lewis was familiar with was done in the name of his own God. I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England, they would allow gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy.
The name of the book is God in the Dock because it is about accusations against God—and this is most properly an accusation against the Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) God. It would be hilariously ironic if Lewis were not using it that way.
IIRC, “God in the Dock” is the title of just one of the essays in the book, and many (most? all?) of the others aren’t particularly about “accusations against God”. The quotation in this thread, I think, comes from one of the ones that isn’t.
The quotation is from “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”, which is the first section of the longer, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics”, also published under the title “Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics”.
The essay called “God in the Dock” actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
The simple, emotional appeal (“Come to Jesus”) is still often successful. But those who, like myself, lack the gift for making it, had better not attempt it.
The quotation is from “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”, which is the first section of the latter, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics”, also published under the title “Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics”.
The essay called “God in the Dock” actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
The simple, emotional appeal (“Come to Jesus”) is still often successful. But those who, like myself, lack the gift for making it, had better not attempt it.
Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert,
How does that constitute the tyranny which he described?
I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England
Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful. What would happen if an army of Phil Goetz clones were made rulers of the US?
ETA: One might also compare and contrast the writings of Lewis (who did not become a tyrant), with, say, Mein Kampf (written by someone who did).
Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful.
Speculation about “an army of Lewis clones” is not (direct) speculation about Lewis becoming a tyrant, but about Lewis honestly implementing his principles. His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced (unless you actually do think Lewis would permit gay marriage and polygamy if he ran the country).
Speculation about “an army of Lewis clones” is not (direct) speculation about Lewis becoming a tyrant, but about Lewis honestly implementing his principles. His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced
When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis’ writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between “this is how people should live” and “people should be compelled to live so” then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis’ time, have behaved. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
(Yes, religious freedom includes the right to polygamy and prostitution.)
In fact I have several times explicitly stated the same thing you wrote here, as a critique of Eliezer’s outline of CEV, which assume (without even noticing it) that a moral belief implies an imperative to propagate itself.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis’ time, have behaved.
I prefer to determine what Lewis almost certainly believed by looking at what he certainly wrote. The very quote that started this discussion is explicitly saying the opposite.
Besides, it’s nearly five hundred years since the Thirty Years War knocked the stuffing out of Christian proselytisation by the sword, and the imperative to force people into belief, or at least practice, has been declining ever since. Further history here.
The fact that they no longer tell people to convert or die does not mean they grant freedom of religion. I’m not aware of any society with a Christian majority that has ever refrained from enforcing its moral rules on the rest of its society. I am aware of probably hundreds, if I added them up, throughout history, that have done so. Find me a dozen counterexamples and I’ll listen.
I assume Phil means that Christian-majority societies have tended to enforce not only Christian rules that are widely shared among non-Christians, but also Christian rules that are not. Phil, would you care to clarify?
I assume Phil means that Christian-majority societies have tended to enforce not only Christian rules that are widely shared among non-Christians, but also Christian rules that are not.
Well, all the examples cited in this thread are also widely shared among non-Christians.
Among examples of rules not widely shared among non-Christians that are enforced in present-day western countries, off the top of my head I can think of the ban on selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland, and bans on certain types of stem cell research in various countries. There probably are many more that don’t immediately spring to my mind.
I don’t think that the notion of limiting marriage to couples that are not of the same gender is exclusively a Christian concept. Until fairly recently, I don’t think that government recognition of same-sex marriage has been common even among jurisdictions that are not predominantly Christian. And, even today, it is hardly the case that same-sex marriage is forbidden only in countries with a majority Christian population.
Among examples of rules not widely shared among non-Christians that are enforced in present-day western countries, off the top of my head I can think of the ban on selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland
One could hardly come up with a worse example of a Christian-only prohibition. Alcohol is religiously forbidden to Moslems, and in some Moslem countries, legally forbidden on every day of the year, not just the selling of it, but the drinking. The punishment is flogging, or death for persistent offenders.
ETA: Ah, you said Western countries, which currently excludes all the Moslem states. But the Moslem populations of the West still have the religious prohibition.
“Prohibits alcohol on Good Friday” means “specifically prohibits alcohol on Good Friday”. Prohibiting it as a subset of a generic prohibition on all alcohol doesn’t count.
Why’s that relevant? The point (unless I’m misunderstanding badly) is that the ban is there because some Christians wanted it to be, that the great majority of the non-Christian population would likely prefer it not to be there, and that this is therefore an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
The fact that a small fraction of the non-Christian population might be happy enough for the rule to be there is irrelevant. If there were a law requiring everyone to go to church on Sundays there would probably be as large a fraction of the non-Christian population in favour; it would still (obviously, no?) be an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
If there were a law requiring everyone to go to church on Sundays
There have been such laws in the past, but is impossible for there to be such a law in the present day. There aren’t enough Christians to pass it or enforce it. Such laws were made when everyone was Christian. With increasing secularisation they fall away. Sunday trading, sale of alcohol on holy days, laws against the wrong sort of Christian and all non-Christians: in the countries of Christian traditions these have mostly disappeared. To point to a minor historical relic like the banning of alcohol sales on one day of the year (a ban with many loopholes in it) is not a good example of Christians imposing their rules on non-Christians.
Especially since alcohol is not even forbidden to Christians, whatever the day of the year.
So you’re suggesting that these rules weren’t a matter of Christians imposing on non-Christians when they were put in place (because everyone was Christian then) and aren’t now (because they have mostly fallen into disuse)?
Ingenious, but I’m not convinced, on two counts.
First (and less importantly), I am not convinced that “everyone was Christian” when those laws first came into being. There have always been dissenters of one sort or another. It was doubtless true that almost everyone was at least nominally Christian, though.
Second (and more importantly), at least some of those laws are still on the books—e.g., the law against selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland, or the restrictions on Sunday trading in the UK. They may indeed have been put in place as restrictions on a nation composed almost entirely (at least in principle) of Christians, but they are still there now and generally Christian legislators have shown little enthusiasm for ceasing to impose restrictions on non-Christian citizens. When the possibility of repealing such restrictions comes up, there is generally no shortage of Christian legislators speaking fervently in favour of keeping them on the basis of their religion.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing (and I don’t think anyone else is arguing) that restrictions on Sunday trading and alcohol on Good Friday constitute terrible oppression of non-Christian citizens by Christian legislators. They’re not a very big deal in practice.
Especially since alcohol is not even forbidden to Christians
The alcohol rule is not enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians, since neither Christians nor Catholics have a rule against buying alcohol on Good Friday. That law (which I only know about from this comment) is specifically Irish. It is not banning something for everyone which is against the rules for some; it is banning something for everyone which normally would not be against anyone’s rules.
(Which does not mean there are no cases of Christians enforcing specifically Christian rules on non-Christians; there are likely cases like that.)
It certainly is enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians. “Christian rule” here means not “rule found in the Bible” or “rule adhered to by at least 40% of Christians” or anything like that but “rule wanted only by Christians, for specifically Christianity-related reasons”.
The only plausible reason to forbid buying alcohol on Good Friday in particular is that among Christians Good Friday is a solemn holy day on which drunkenness would be exceptionally inappropriate.
(Other hypothetical things that I think would be “Christian rules” in the relevant sense, just to make sure my point is clear: A rule forbidding anyone to speak ill of any canonized Christian saint. A rule forbidding commercial transactions on Sundays. A rule obliging everyone to attend at least one service in an Anglican church every Sunday. None of these is regarded as obligatory by most Christians. Any of them, if made into law, would be an obvious example of Christians imposing Christianity-specific obligations on others. That the obligations aren’t readily derivable consequences of Christianity as such makes this worse if anything, not better.)
I agree with you on all the facts here, but I still don’t think talking about this as Christians enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians is a good way to think about it.
At least parts of Italy have a law against stores being open on Easter Sunday, although they are allowed to be open on other Sundays. You could say that they are enforcing a rule which simply has Christian motivations on non-Christians, and you would be right in a certain way, but I think wrong in a more important way. The real reason for the law is to make sure that employees can be at home celebrating Easter instead of working that day. The vast majority of those employees are Catholics, and even most of the non-Catholics have Catholic relatives, and would probably appreciate the day off as well.
And really this kind of discussion has very little to do with religion in general: you might as well say that laws against public nudity are enforcing special rules on people who believe it is ok to go around naked. The reason why some places have such laws is not a religious reason; it is because many people find it offensive. Of course it is true that societies where most people belong to a religion are going to have some laws that in some way are based on that religion. That does not tend to show that religious societies are especially tyrannical.
You may well be right about the Italian laws about Easter Sunday. It doesn’t look to me as if a parallel explanation can work for the “no alcohol on Good Friday” law, though. (It might for more general Sunday-trading restrictions.)
The reason why some places have such laws is not a religious reason; it is because many people find it offensive.
Rules against public nudity exist in lots of societies, even societies with different dominant religions. Only societies dominated by Christianity have rules against stores being open on Easter Sunday. This suggests that nudity laws are not religion-based and Easter Sunday laws are.
The reason why some places have such laws is not a religious reason; it is because many people find it offensive.
But do many people find it offensive because a religion told them so?
Religion is usually tightly intertwined with culture and disentangling them is not always possible. Many people find women whose face is open and whose hair is uncovered to be offensive. Take bikinis as an intermediate stage.
No, I don’t think people find nakedness offensive because a religion told them so. I think if religion tends to say that it is offensive, this is because people first found it offensive regardless of religion.
No, I can’t specify a particular degree. I suppose it depends on the individual and on circumstances.
Are you simply asking questions or are you implying that in fact people are not naturally uncomfortable with nakedness? If so, do you think it is also only religion that makes people uncomfortable with being touched on certain parts of the body without their consent? And if this is not only religious, why not? There is nothing painful about it. It is just contact, and you are anyway coming into contact with things all the time.
I don’t “know” that religion is not the cause, but as I said in the previous comment, I don’t think it is. One reason is that bans or at least taboos on nudity exist all over the world with very few exceptions, regardless of the religion in the region. Another reason is that religion tries to explain the ban in a way that wouldn’t be necessary, if it was inventing the ban. For example, Genesis says that the sin of Adam and Eve made them embarrassed about being naked. That is an attempt to explain a pre-existing feeling; if they were inventing a ban, they could have just said it is embarrassing because it is bad.
Well, I think people “naturally” tend to cover their genitals for a variety of reasons which we need not concern ourselves with. But beyond that, what do you need to cover is mostly cultural and I think that in this respect culture is mostly driven by religion.
For example, most pre-religious people do not care about women going topless. But Christianity is pretty sure women should cover their breasts. Traditional Judaism goes further and says that married women should also keep their head covered at all times, that’s why married Jewish Orthodox women wear wigs. Islam agrees that hair should be covered but in many places goes further and says most of the face should be hidden as well.
In, say, contemporary Christianity-based American culture women can’t normally go topless—that would be offensive to many people. But a hundred years ago a woman in bikini would also have been offensive. And a woman with uncovered head and open face would be offensive to some Muslims.
if they were inventing a ban, they could have just said it is embarrassing because it is bad.
I think religion is more sophisticated than that :-)
I am personally uncomfortable with men going topless. I do not have, and have never had, any religious opinions saying that it is wrong or even inappropriate for men to go topless. Obviously not everyone shares my personal feelings, but a good number of other people do. So your explanation still seems inadequate: the limitation to genitals is simply a common denominator. The feelings themselves vary between people in ways that do not necessarily correspond with religion.
Your feelings in this regard may be shaped by religion in a subtler way. Suppose, for instance, the following things are true:
The culture you’re in has been strongly shaped by Religion X.
Religion X has a strong tradition of modesty about bodies, extending to more or less every part of the body for which there isn’t common need to have it uncovered.
Not because of anything very specific in Religion X’s sacred writings or official dogma; but the tradition has grown up within Religion X and is widely held there.
As a result, in this culture it is usual for people to keep most of their bodies covered in public.
As a result, you are not used to seeing people more-than-usually uncovered in public.
Therefore, seeing people so may (1) just seem strange-and-therefore-uncomfortable to you, and/or (2) look like a signal of intimacy that’s uncomfortable outside contexts where intimacy would normally be signalled.
Once this effect is in play, it can continue even if Religion X becomes much less influential or loses its misgivings about exposing bodies: it’s traditional to keep most of your body covered up, so most people do, so doing otherwise makes people uncomfortable, so the tradition persists.
In such situations it’s difficult to tell how far Religion X really is the cause, though. It could just be a free-floating tradition. It could be a tradition with some other origin that Religion X has (at least within your culture) assimilated.
All of this is plausible but also consistent with the idea that Religion X took the tradition in the first place from culture, rather than inventing the tradition, as Lumifer at least seemed to be proposing at first.
When it comes to dresscode, there are a lot of cultural influences that have little to do with religion. In some cases not wearing a tie will be offensive.
If you wear sandals some people might disapprove of you if you also wear socks at the same time.
Of course. I’m talking about averages and broad trends. There is certainly a LOT of individual variation here.
I do not have, and have never had, any religious opinions saying that it is wrong
Beyond individual variation, you are, to a certain degree, a product of your culture. And your culture, I would expect, has been majorly influenced by religion.
The United States currently has a Christian majority. And to the best of my knowledge, a large majority of people in charge of the government in all Western countries are currently Christians. That is certainly true of the present Supreme Court in the United States which legalized gay marriage, which is currently composed of six Catholics and three Jews.
If being majority Christian means being tyrannical, the USA is currently a tyranny, and so is every other Western country.
In which case what does this have to do with C.S. Lewis?
I don’t think that is true? There is a huge contingent of evangelicals (last I checked, a bit under half of Americans believe in creationism), it only takes a few non-creationist but religious Christians to get to a majority.
I think you are missing a critical point—most people seriously don’t care about the age of the Earth, at all. So if you ask someone “did God create the Earth in its present form”, you are not identifying whether or not someone is a young Earth creationist, but simply giving the prompt “do you believe in God enough to say ‘yes’ on a random survey?”
One survey found that 25% of Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun. This seems like a non-religious question to me, and thus I am willing to take it as a general indicator of ‘how much Americans care about basic science’. So I would split that 42% into two groups: ‘Americans who strongly believe that God created the Universe in its present form’ = 17% (ish), ‘Americans who guessed wrong and/or would like to weakly signal that they are Christians’ = 25% (ish).
Most people just don’t care enough to alieve about science. However, I suspect that more people do care enough to alieve about politics, and are willing to base their political ingroup on religion.
Whether someone is an alieving Christian can be hard to determine because of where you set your threshhold—typically people act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others. But entirelyuseless brought it up in the context of the people who run the government and I think it’s exceptionally clear that most of them aren’t. I certainly doubt that the members of the Supreme Court who voted for gay marriage are either evangelicals or religious Christians.
Christianity is not a unified body of doctrine, and a very plausible explanation for why people typically “act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others” is that they in fact believe that some things are true but not others.
That’s the inverse of “no true Scotsman”. “No true Scotsman” refers to the situation where you arbitrarily exclude people who you don’t want to count as members of a class, by saying “that isn’t really Christian”. In this case, you can arbitrarily include people who you do want to count, by saying that any non-Christian things about them aren’t really non-Christian.
Then every Christian can count as a religious Christian.
It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
I believe, at this point, that it might be helpful to quote from “Dignitatis Humanae”, an official Vatican document on the subject of religious freedom:
This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom.
To elaborate slightly:
This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.
The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.(2) This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.
It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth. However, men cannot discharge these obligations in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed.
Now, I’m not saying that all denominations of Christianity have an equally strong stance in favour of religious freedom (I’ve heard about some extremely militant modern Protestant groups, particularly in America). But this is strong evidence that there is a rather large group of Catholics who do believe in the idea of religious freedom; and if Lewis had done so as well, then he would hardly be alone in this stance.
(Dignitatis Humanae was published about two years after Lewis’ death)
It’s true that Lewis separated religious and secular law, but presumably Lewis would want laws against, for instance, murder. It’s hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed idea of what constitutes “harmful things”, and not want laws against them.
One possible response is that the harmful things only harm oneself, but Lewis believed that such things harm society, not just oneself. Another possible response is that as a practical matter, it would be a bad idea to ban such things, but that only lasts as long as it’s practical—such principles would not lead to the conclusion “we should not ban gay marriage” but rather “we should only ban gay marriage if we can get away with it”.
It’s hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed
fnord
idea of what constitutes “harmful things”, and not want laws against them.
There it is again. You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about how he thought people should live, and why, yet did not lift a finger to compel them. In this, he follows the example of He who Lewis believed the Father of us all. You do not understand this. Well, I do not pretend to write better than Lewis.
BTW, to talk of “banning” gay marriage is tendentious, presupposing that it is and always has been a thing that can only fail of existence by being “banned”. What has actually happened in recent years is that there was no such thing recognised by church, state, or anyone, that a demand for social recognition of same-sex unions has developed, and that in various places, secular marriage has been so extended.
You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
I think it’s inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it anyway, given that
1) you don’t consider personal freedom good in itself or you don’t think the gain to personal freedom balances out the harm, and
2) it’s practical to ban it
I wouldn’t ban alcohol, because of points 1 and 2. Note that if by “harmful” you mean “harmful, in the net” #1 is equivalent to saying that alcohol isn’t harmful.
I am skeptical that Lewis believed #1. I find it hard to think that Lewis believed that divorce is harmful by itself but has enough good effects to more than balance out the harm.
And refusing to ban things based solely on #2 would mean only conditionally refusing to ban them. If you don’t want to ban divorce based on #2 and society changed so that you could ban divorces without nasty side effects, you should then ban it.
Lewis actually said he didn’t want to ban divorce, but his rationale could equally apply to banning murder—it’s incoherent.
I don’t think I understand your argument about #1. Surely there’s a difference between thinking
that X is harmful on net, but that banning X would also be harmful because personal freedom is good, and that the latter outweighs the former
and thinking
that X is not harmful on net.
For instance, suppose someone believes the following things:
Drinking alcoholic drinks is generally harmful overall to the people who do it.
The fact that consumption of alcohol is widespread in our society is, on balance, harmful to our society.
Banning the consumption of alcohol would make the world a worse place, not because the effects of reduced alcohol consumption would overall be bad but because
compulsion is bad, even when the thing you’re compelling is itself good, and
the intrusion into people’s lives required for enforcement would also be harmful, and
some likely consequences of prohibition (black markets etc.) would also be harmful, and
the precedent might lead to more prohibitions that would be harmful on balance in similar ways.
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it. And it seems to me that there’s no particular impossibility in supposing that Lewis held a position like this regarding same-sex sex and divorce, or that he would have held a similar position on same-sex marriage if the question had come up and he’d taken it seriously.
(I don’t hold such a position regarding alcohol consumption, same-sex sex, same-sex marriage, or divorce, but I think I do regarding lying for small-scale personal gain and callous indifference to the troubles of one’s neighbours.)
“Harmful on net” means “after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful”.
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”. I doubt it.
I understand what “harmful on net” means, and I’m not sure why you think I don’t. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be “harmful on net”, and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, “is drinking alcohol harmful on net?” and “is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?” are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what argument you’re making. It appears to have the form “Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder” and I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition.
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn’t describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn’t outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say “almost” rather than an unqualified “yes”.)
The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”.
I don’t know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society’s general presumption against the idea. For what it’s worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals’ lives; it’s hard to see how there’d be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Nevertheless, I agree with all of what you just said. To it I would add that Jiro is still unconsciously assuming (I say unconsciously, because everything he is saying presupposes it, yet he never says it) that laws and punishment are all about adding up the good and the bad and seeing how the sum comes out. This is the very theory that Lewis was arguing against.
I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder.
Of course there are differences. But the differences lead into my other objection, which is that, as the old joke goes, now we’re just arguing about the price. If he supports laws against murder because murder does a lot of harm compared to compulsion and stopping it has few side effects, then if he were to be convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few side effects, he would support laws aganst divorce.
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else. And likewise, his belief in the degree of harm done by divorce is arbitrary. His religion happened not to say that that particular sin was harmful enough to justify banning. But it could have said that. And given a long list of sins, it would be a pretty big coincidence if it didn’t say that for at least one of them, just by chance.
(I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him something is bad enough to ban. His interpretation of his own religion is biased by this desire, so he’ll always interpret his own religion as saying that a sin isn’t bad enough to ban. In that case, I need not fear Lewis banning anything. I guess that’s a defense of Lewis, but I would then note that this kind of bias seems to be pretty rare among religious believers who don’t like divorce, gay marriage, etc.)
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
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.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary. Of course they are not arbitrary, even assuming that his religion is false.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary.
We’re on LW. I’m assuming something that just about everyone here assumes anyway. Or at least close to it.
(I’m sure some people would argue that Lewis’s religion’s claims aren’t arbitrary because competition between memes ensures that religions which say extreme things about sins won’t last until the modern era. If so, fine, it’s not arbitrary in that sense.)
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.” You can apply it to anyone, saying anything; which is to say, that it carries no force ever.
I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him
bong!!! But thank you for playing.
This is Bulverism, and not even Bulverism about a real characteristic, but about one you have just made up.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.”
No, it isn’t. Religions tell people arbitrary things. Reasoning processes do not.
This is Bulverism
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do. Furthermore, it’s not Bulverism anyway because I have no need to prove his positions false—we’re on LW and it can be taken for granted that everyone here thinks gay marriage should be allowed and nobody here thinks divorce and polygamy should be illegal.
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do, and the idea of not banning things you don’t like is to you practically a contradiction in terms. But it’s all right for you to ban things, because you would be banning the right things, the sufficient proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees with you, but it’s wrong for Lewis to ban things, because he would be banning the wrongs things, the proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees they’re the wrong things. We are right because we are right, and everyone else is wrong because they are wrong.
Thanks you for setting out your epistemology so clearly.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do,
No, it’s what people like him would do. Religious people have a really bad record with respect to believing arbitrary things are bad and then banning them. Your idea that I think he would ban things because I would ban things is pulled out of thin air. I think that people would do lots of things I don’t do.
“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question—how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.
My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
“It’s what people like him would do” is just plain false. He is quite clear there that the fact that he does not want to ban divorce for other people is not arbitrary, but reasoned, and he would apply the same thing to anything else which was specific to his religion.
Notice that that description doesn’t contain a claim that divorce hurts anyone other than the people getting divorced. So it doesn’t generalize to things which Lewis believes are banned by his religion because they harm others.
Also, it generalizes poorly to things like gay marriage. There used to be a time when nobody accepted gay marriage. Someone like Lewis could, while staying consistent with the above argument, claim that since gay marriage was universally abhorred, a law against it is not a Christian-specific law but a State-specific law.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone? Since he compared divorce to that himself, fully understanding that the prohibition on wine looks arbitrary to other people, he would be fully capable of realizing that it would look arbitrary even if he himself had such a belief.
But besides that, as I’ve said all along, Lewis’s beliefs are not arbitrary. He would be unlikely to believe a religion that taught something like that about wine, and if he did accept the religion in general, he would be unlikely to accept that particular belief. And even if he did, the awareness that it looks arbitrary to other people could be sufficient reason for him not to ban it, by the same argument he made explicitly.
The gay marriage argument is irrelevant. Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it. Neither would you, if you had lived at that time and been in charge of England. That does not mean that Lewis or anyone else was tyrannical or would have been.
Your whole argument is based on a strawman of religious beliefs as arbitrary beliefs. One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary, since if Jiro had believed something different, he would have had different beliefs.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone?
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it.
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced (unless you actually do think Lewis would permit gay marriage and polygamy if he ran the country).
No country permited gay marrige until about 20 years ago and western countries haven’t permitted polygammy for millenia. Are you saying they were all tyranical?
It’s “tyranny” in the sense that Lewis describes: using force to be a moral busybody.
It may not be tyranny if by tyranny if your definition of tyranny requires a certain amount of being a moral busybody, and just a little bit isn’t enough to count as tyranny. I suspect that this is the definition you’re using, but Lewis’s definition doesn’t contain a quantity threshhold.
(The title is taken from the title of one of the essays. It was published well after Lewis died, so I assume he didn’t intend them to be a book at all.)
It would still be hilariously ironic if Lewis made such an observation, and didn’t explain how he and his God are not such moral busybodies. It would be another example to add to my list of examples of people whose criticism of others is accidentally truer criticism of themselves.
Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert, and it is quite certain that nearly all of the pestering Lewis was familiar with was done in the name of his own God. I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England, they would allow gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy.
The name of the book is God in the Dock because it is about accusations against God—and this is most properly an accusation against the Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) God. It would be hilariously ironic if Lewis were not using it that way.
IIRC, “God in the Dock” is the title of just one of the essays in the book, and many (most? all?) of the others aren’t particularly about “accusations against God”. The quotation in this thread, I think, comes from one of the ones that isn’t.
The quotation is from “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”, which is the first section of the longer, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics”, also published under the title “Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics”.
The essay called “God in the Dock” actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
The quotation is from “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”, which is the first section of the latter, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics”, also published under the title “Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics”.
The essay called “God in the Dock” actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
How does that constitute the tyranny which he described?
Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful. What would happen if an army of Phil Goetz clones were made rulers of the US?
ETA: One might also compare and contrast the writings of Lewis (who did not become a tyrant), with, say, Mein Kampf (written by someone who did).
Speculation about “an army of Lewis clones” is not (direct) speculation about Lewis becoming a tyrant, but about Lewis honestly implementing his principles. His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced (unless you actually do think Lewis would permit gay marriage and polygamy if he ran the country).
When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis’ writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between “this is how people should live” and “people should be compelled to live so” then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis’ time, have behaved. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
(Yes, religious freedom includes the right to polygamy and prostitution.)
In fact I have several times explicitly stated the same thing you wrote here, as a critique of Eliezer’s outline of CEV, which assume (without even noticing it) that a moral belief implies an imperative to propagate itself.
I prefer to determine what Lewis almost certainly believed by looking at what he certainly wrote. The very quote that started this discussion is explicitly saying the opposite.
Besides, it’s nearly five hundred years since the Thirty Years War knocked the stuffing out of Christian proselytisation by the sword, and the imperative to force people into belief, or at least practice, has been declining ever since. Further history here.
The fact that they no longer tell people to convert or die does not mean they grant freedom of religion. I’m not aware of any society with a Christian majority that has ever refrained from enforcing its moral rules on the rest of its society. I am aware of probably hundreds, if I added them up, throughout history, that have done so. Find me a dozen counterexamples and I’ll listen.
Yes, most Christian societies have laws against murder, then again so do most non-Christian societies.
I assume Phil means that Christian-majority societies have tended to enforce not only Christian rules that are widely shared among non-Christians, but also Christian rules that are not. Phil, would you care to clarify?
Well, all the examples cited in this thread are also widely shared among non-Christians.
Much less widely than the prohibition on murder.
Among examples of rules not widely shared among non-Christians that are enforced in present-day western countries, off the top of my head I can think of the ban on selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland, and bans on certain types of stem cell research in various countries. There probably are many more that don’t immediately spring to my mind.
Sunday blue laws (bans on selling alcohol in the USA on Sundays.)
Heterosexual-only marriage.
I suppose having Christmas be a Federal holiday technically counts as well.
I don’t think that the notion of limiting marriage to couples that are not of the same gender is exclusively a Christian concept. Until fairly recently, I don’t think that government recognition of same-sex marriage has been common even among jurisdictions that are not predominantly Christian. And, even today, it is hardly the case that same-sex marriage is forbidden only in countries with a majority Christian population.
One could hardly come up with a worse example of a Christian-only prohibition. Alcohol is religiously forbidden to Moslems, and in some Moslem countries, legally forbidden on every day of the year, not just the selling of it, but the drinking. The punishment is flogging, or death for persistent offenders.
ETA: Ah, you said Western countries, which currently excludes all the Moslem states. But the Moslem populations of the West still have the religious prohibition.
“Prohibits alcohol on Good Friday” means “specifically prohibits alcohol on Good Friday”. Prohibiting it as a subset of a generic prohibition on all alcohol doesn’t count.
Which is a sliver of a prohibition. And even that got trumped by commercial lobbying by pubs on a Good Friday when there was a big football match.
Why’s that relevant? The point (unless I’m misunderstanding badly) is that the ban is there because some Christians wanted it to be, that the great majority of the non-Christian population would likely prefer it not to be there, and that this is therefore an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
The fact that a small fraction of the non-Christian population might be happy enough for the rule to be there is irrelevant. If there were a law requiring everyone to go to church on Sundays there would probably be as large a fraction of the non-Christian population in favour; it would still (obviously, no?) be an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
There have been such laws in the past, but is impossible for there to be such a law in the present day. There aren’t enough Christians to pass it or enforce it. Such laws were made when everyone was Christian. With increasing secularisation they fall away. Sunday trading, sale of alcohol on holy days, laws against the wrong sort of Christian and all non-Christians: in the countries of Christian traditions these have mostly disappeared. To point to a minor historical relic like the banning of alcohol sales on one day of the year (a ban with many loopholes in it) is not a good example of Christians imposing their rules on non-Christians.
Especially since alcohol is not even forbidden to Christians, whatever the day of the year.
So you’re suggesting that these rules weren’t a matter of Christians imposing on non-Christians when they were put in place (because everyone was Christian then) and aren’t now (because they have mostly fallen into disuse)?
Ingenious, but I’m not convinced, on two counts.
First (and less importantly), I am not convinced that “everyone was Christian” when those laws first came into being. There have always been dissenters of one sort or another. It was doubtless true that almost everyone was at least nominally Christian, though.
Second (and more importantly), at least some of those laws are still on the books—e.g., the law against selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland, or the restrictions on Sunday trading in the UK. They may indeed have been put in place as restrictions on a nation composed almost entirely (at least in principle) of Christians, but they are still there now and generally Christian legislators have shown little enthusiasm for ceasing to impose restrictions on non-Christian citizens. When the possibility of repealing such restrictions comes up, there is generally no shortage of Christian legislators speaking fervently in favour of keeping them on the basis of their religion.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing (and I don’t think anyone else is arguing) that restrictions on Sunday trading and alcohol on Good Friday constitute terrible oppression of non-Christian citizens by Christian legislators. They’re not a very big deal in practice.
See my reply to entirelyuseless.
Lot’s of societies have laws banning conducting of various types of business on major holidays.
The first thing that pops into my head is monogamy.
That was a Greco-Roman idea the Christianity inherited.
Not just inherited. In Christianity marriage is a sacrament, as opposed to a convention of social arrangement.
The alcohol rule is not enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians, since neither Christians nor Catholics have a rule against buying alcohol on Good Friday. That law (which I only know about from this comment) is specifically Irish. It is not banning something for everyone which is against the rules for some; it is banning something for everyone which normally would not be against anyone’s rules.
(Which does not mean there are no cases of Christians enforcing specifically Christian rules on non-Christians; there are likely cases like that.)
It certainly is enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians. “Christian rule” here means not “rule found in the Bible” or “rule adhered to by at least 40% of Christians” or anything like that but “rule wanted only by Christians, for specifically Christianity-related reasons”.
The only plausible reason to forbid buying alcohol on Good Friday in particular is that among Christians Good Friday is a solemn holy day on which drunkenness would be exceptionally inappropriate.
(Other hypothetical things that I think would be “Christian rules” in the relevant sense, just to make sure my point is clear: A rule forbidding anyone to speak ill of any canonized Christian saint. A rule forbidding commercial transactions on Sundays. A rule obliging everyone to attend at least one service in an Anglican church every Sunday. None of these is regarded as obligatory by most Christians. Any of them, if made into law, would be an obvious example of Christians imposing Christianity-specific obligations on others. That the obligations aren’t readily derivable consequences of Christianity as such makes this worse if anything, not better.)
I agree with you on all the facts here, but I still don’t think talking about this as Christians enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians is a good way to think about it.
At least parts of Italy have a law against stores being open on Easter Sunday, although they are allowed to be open on other Sundays. You could say that they are enforcing a rule which simply has Christian motivations on non-Christians, and you would be right in a certain way, but I think wrong in a more important way. The real reason for the law is to make sure that employees can be at home celebrating Easter instead of working that day. The vast majority of those employees are Catholics, and even most of the non-Catholics have Catholic relatives, and would probably appreciate the day off as well.
And really this kind of discussion has very little to do with religion in general: you might as well say that laws against public nudity are enforcing special rules on people who believe it is ok to go around naked. The reason why some places have such laws is not a religious reason; it is because many people find it offensive. Of course it is true that societies where most people belong to a religion are going to have some laws that in some way are based on that religion. That does not tend to show that religious societies are especially tyrannical.
You may well be right about the Italian laws about Easter Sunday. It doesn’t look to me as if a parallel explanation can work for the “no alcohol on Good Friday” law, though. (It might for more general Sunday-trading restrictions.)
Rules against public nudity exist in lots of societies, even societies with different dominant religions. Only societies dominated by Christianity have rules against stores being open on Easter Sunday. This suggests that nudity laws are not religion-based and Easter Sunday laws are.
But do many people find it offensive because a religion told them so?
Religion is usually tightly intertwined with culture and disentangling them is not always possible. Many people find women whose face is open and whose hair is uncovered to be offensive. Take bikinis as an intermediate stage.
No, I don’t think people find nakedness offensive because a religion told them so. I think if religion tends to say that it is offensive, this is because people first found it offensive regardless of religion.
So, can you specify the particular degree of nakedness that people “first” find offensive, before any religious influence? And how do you know that?
No, I can’t specify a particular degree. I suppose it depends on the individual and on circumstances.
Are you simply asking questions or are you implying that in fact people are not naturally uncomfortable with nakedness? If so, do you think it is also only religion that makes people uncomfortable with being touched on certain parts of the body without their consent? And if this is not only religious, why not? There is nothing painful about it. It is just contact, and you are anyway coming into contact with things all the time.
I don’t “know” that religion is not the cause, but as I said in the previous comment, I don’t think it is. One reason is that bans or at least taboos on nudity exist all over the world with very few exceptions, regardless of the religion in the region. Another reason is that religion tries to explain the ban in a way that wouldn’t be necessary, if it was inventing the ban. For example, Genesis says that the sin of Adam and Eve made them embarrassed about being naked. That is an attempt to explain a pre-existing feeling; if they were inventing a ban, they could have just said it is embarrassing because it is bad.
Well, I think people “naturally” tend to cover their genitals for a variety of reasons which we need not concern ourselves with. But beyond that, what do you need to cover is mostly cultural and I think that in this respect culture is mostly driven by religion.
For example, most pre-religious people do not care about women going topless. But Christianity is pretty sure women should cover their breasts. Traditional Judaism goes further and says that married women should also keep their head covered at all times, that’s why married Jewish Orthodox women wear wigs. Islam agrees that hair should be covered but in many places goes further and says most of the face should be hidden as well.
In, say, contemporary Christianity-based American culture women can’t normally go topless—that would be offensive to many people. But a hundred years ago a woman in bikini would also have been offensive. And a woman with uncovered head and open face would be offensive to some Muslims.
I think religion is more sophisticated than that :-)
I am personally uncomfortable with men going topless. I do not have, and have never had, any religious opinions saying that it is wrong or even inappropriate for men to go topless. Obviously not everyone shares my personal feelings, but a good number of other people do. So your explanation still seems inadequate: the limitation to genitals is simply a common denominator. The feelings themselves vary between people in ways that do not necessarily correspond with religion.
Your feelings in this regard may be shaped by religion in a subtler way. Suppose, for instance, the following things are true:
The culture you’re in has been strongly shaped by Religion X.
Religion X has a strong tradition of modesty about bodies, extending to more or less every part of the body for which there isn’t common need to have it uncovered.
Not because of anything very specific in Religion X’s sacred writings or official dogma; but the tradition has grown up within Religion X and is widely held there.
As a result, in this culture it is usual for people to keep most of their bodies covered in public.
As a result, you are not used to seeing people more-than-usually uncovered in public.
Therefore, seeing people so may (1) just seem strange-and-therefore-uncomfortable to you, and/or (2) look like a signal of intimacy that’s uncomfortable outside contexts where intimacy would normally be signalled.
Once this effect is in play, it can continue even if Religion X becomes much less influential or loses its misgivings about exposing bodies: it’s traditional to keep most of your body covered up, so most people do, so doing otherwise makes people uncomfortable, so the tradition persists.
In such situations it’s difficult to tell how far Religion X really is the cause, though. It could just be a free-floating tradition. It could be a tradition with some other origin that Religion X has (at least within your culture) assimilated.
All of this is plausible but also consistent with the idea that Religion X took the tradition in the first place from culture, rather than inventing the tradition, as Lumifer at least seemed to be proposing at first.
Let me quote myself: “Religion is usually tightly intertwined with culture and disentangling them is not always possible”.
Yes, that was the point of my last paragraph.
When it comes to dresscode, there are a lot of cultural influences that have little to do with religion. In some cases not wearing a tie will be offensive.
If you wear sandals some people might disapprove of you if you also wear socks at the same time.
Of course. I’m talking about averages and broad trends. There is certainly a LOT of individual variation here.
Beyond individual variation, you are, to a certain degree, a product of your culture. And your culture, I would expect, has been majorly influenced by religion.
What do you mean with “pre-religious people”? Most hunter gather tribes we know of have their gods.
Pre- organized religion.
The United States currently has a Christian majority. And to the best of my knowledge, a large majority of people in charge of the government in all Western countries are currently Christians. That is certainly true of the present Supreme Court in the United States which legalized gay marriage, which is currently composed of six Catholics and three Jews.
If being majority Christian means being tyrannical, the USA is currently a tyranny, and so is every other Western country.
In which case what does this have to do with C.S. Lewis?
The US is majority Christian, but not majority alieving-Christians.
I don’t think that is true? There is a huge contingent of evangelicals (last I checked, a bit under half of Americans believe in creationism), it only takes a few non-creationist but religious Christians to get to a majority.
I think you are missing a critical point—most people seriously don’t care about the age of the Earth, at all. So if you ask someone “did God create the Earth in its present form”, you are not identifying whether or not someone is a young Earth creationist, but simply giving the prompt “do you believe in God enough to say ‘yes’ on a random survey?”
One survey found that 25% of Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun. This seems like a non-religious question to me, and thus I am willing to take it as a general indicator of ‘how much Americans care about basic science’. So I would split that 42% into two groups: ‘Americans who strongly believe that God created the Universe in its present form’ = 17% (ish), ‘Americans who guessed wrong and/or would like to weakly signal that they are Christians’ = 25% (ish).
Most people just don’t care enough to alieve about science. However, I suspect that more people do care enough to alieve about politics, and are willing to base their political ingroup on religion.
Whether someone is an alieving Christian can be hard to determine because of where you set your threshhold—typically people act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others. But entirelyuseless brought it up in the context of the people who run the government and I think it’s exceptionally clear that most of them aren’t. I certainly doubt that the members of the Supreme Court who voted for gay marriage are either evangelicals or religious Christians.
Christianity is not a unified body of doctrine, and a very plausible explanation for why people typically “act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others” is that they in fact believe that some things are true but not others.
That’s the inverse of “no true Scotsman”. “No true Scotsman” refers to the situation where you arbitrarily exclude people who you don’t want to count as members of a class, by saying “that isn’t really Christian”. In this case, you can arbitrarily include people who you do want to count, by saying that any non-Christian things about them aren’t really non-Christian.
Then every Christian can count as a religious Christian.
From talking about C.S. Lewis, the conversation has now floated up to the outer edges of the atmosphere.
I believe, at this point, that it might be helpful to quote from “Dignitatis Humanae”, an official Vatican document on the subject of religious freedom:
To elaborate slightly:
Now, I’m not saying that all denominations of Christianity have an equally strong stance in favour of religious freedom (I’ve heard about some extremely militant modern Protestant groups, particularly in America). But this is strong evidence that there is a rather large group of Catholics who do believe in the idea of religious freedom; and if Lewis had done so as well, then he would hardly be alone in this stance.
(Dignitatis Humanae was published about two years after Lewis’ death)
And yet the Catholic Church and its members still work to ban birth-control in countries where it thinks that’s possible.
I don’t care what they say they do. I care what they do.
I don’t see what that has to do with religious freedom. They’re not stopping anyone from being muslim, or protestant, or atheist.
It’s true that Lewis separated religious and secular law, but presumably Lewis would want laws against, for instance, murder. It’s hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed idea of what constitutes “harmful things”, and not want laws against them.
One possible response is that the harmful things only harm oneself, but Lewis believed that such things harm society, not just oneself. Another possible response is that as a practical matter, it would be a bad idea to ban such things, but that only lasts as long as it’s practical—such principles would not lead to the conclusion “we should not ban gay marriage” but rather “we should only ban gay marriage if we can get away with it”.
fnord
There it is again. You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about how he thought people should live, and why, yet did not lift a finger to compel them. In this, he follows the example of He who Lewis believed the Father of us all. You do not understand this. Well, I do not pretend to write better than Lewis.
BTW, to talk of “banning” gay marriage is tendentious, presupposing that it is and always has been a thing that can only fail of existence by being “banned”. What has actually happened in recent years is that there was no such thing recognised by church, state, or anyone, that a demand for social recognition of same-sex unions has developed, and that in various places, secular marriage has been so extended.
I think it’s inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it anyway, given that
1) you don’t consider personal freedom good in itself or you don’t think the gain to personal freedom balances out the harm, and 2) it’s practical to ban it
I wouldn’t ban alcohol, because of points 1 and 2. Note that if by “harmful” you mean “harmful, in the net” #1 is equivalent to saying that alcohol isn’t harmful.
I am skeptical that Lewis believed #1. I find it hard to think that Lewis believed that divorce is harmful by itself but has enough good effects to more than balance out the harm.
And refusing to ban things based solely on #2 would mean only conditionally refusing to ban them. If you don’t want to ban divorce based on #2 and society changed so that you could ban divorces without nasty side effects, you should then ban it.
Lewis actually said he didn’t want to ban divorce, but his rationale could equally apply to banning murder—it’s incoherent.
I don’t think I understand your argument about #1. Surely there’s a difference between thinking
that X is harmful on net, but that banning X would also be harmful because personal freedom is good, and that the latter outweighs the former
and thinking
that X is not harmful on net.
For instance, suppose someone believes the following things:
Drinking alcoholic drinks is generally harmful overall to the people who do it.
The fact that consumption of alcohol is widespread in our society is, on balance, harmful to our society.
Banning the consumption of alcohol would make the world a worse place, not because the effects of reduced alcohol consumption would overall be bad but because
compulsion is bad, even when the thing you’re compelling is itself good, and
the intrusion into people’s lives required for enforcement would also be harmful, and
some likely consequences of prohibition (black markets etc.) would also be harmful, and
the precedent might lead to more prohibitions that would be harmful on balance in similar ways.
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it. And it seems to me that there’s no particular impossibility in supposing that Lewis held a position like this regarding same-sex sex and divorce, or that he would have held a similar position on same-sex marriage if the question had come up and he’d taken it seriously.
(I don’t hold such a position regarding alcohol consumption, same-sex sex, same-sex marriage, or divorce, but I think I do regarding lying for small-scale personal gain and callous indifference to the troubles of one’s neighbours.)
“Harmful on net” means “after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful”.
The first part of that doesn’t work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren’t as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes “would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage”. I doubt it.
I understand what “harmful on net” means, and I’m not sure why you think I don’t. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be “harmful on net”, and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, “is drinking alcohol harmful on net?” and “is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?” are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what argument you’re making. It appears to have the form “Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder” and I don’t even understand how anything of that form could be right—because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn’t describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn’t outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say “almost” rather than an unqualified “yes”.)
I don’t know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society’s general presumption against the idea. For what it’s worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals’ lives; it’s hard to see how there’d be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Nevertheless, I agree with all of what you just said. To it I would add that Jiro is still unconsciously assuming (I say unconsciously, because everything he is saying presupposes it, yet he never says it) that laws and punishment are all about adding up the good and the bad and seeing how the sum comes out. This is the very theory that Lewis was arguing against.
Of course there are differences. But the differences lead into my other objection, which is that, as the old joke goes, now we’re just arguing about the price. If he supports laws against murder because murder does a lot of harm compared to compulsion and stopping it has few side effects, then if he were to be convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few side effects, he would support laws aganst divorce.
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It’s arbitrary—if his religion had said something else, he’d have believed something else. And likewise, his belief in the degree of harm done by divorce is arbitrary. His religion happened not to say that that particular sin was harmful enough to justify banning. But it could have said that. And given a long list of sins, it would be a pretty big coincidence if it didn’t say that for at least one of them, just by chance.
(I suppose there’s another possibility: Lewis doesn’t want his religion to tell him something is bad enough to ban. His interpretation of his own religion is biased by this desire, so he’ll always interpret his own religion as saying that a sin isn’t bad enough to ban. In that case, I need not fear Lewis banning anything. I guess that’s a defense of Lewis, but I would then note that this kind of bias seems to be pretty rare among religious believers who don’t like divorce, gay marriage, etc.)
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong—there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I’m now not quite sure what argument you’re making here. I originally thought it was something like “Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it’s tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he’s being hypocritical”. But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so “If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce” gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you’re making it?
...wrong?
The canonical exchange, IIRC goes as follows:
-- What kind of woman do you take me for?!
-- I think we’ve already established that, now we’re just arguing about the price.
Yes, wrong, for the reason I already gave. I’ll be more explicit:
What “we’ve already established” is that the woman is prepared to have sex with the man for $1M (or whatever the figure is), but that isn’t the same thing as being prepared to do it for (say) $1000, and the “kind of woman” someone’s shown to be by the former is not the same as the “kind of woman” they’re shown to be by the latter. You can apply some term (e.g., “prostitute”) to both, but prostitute-in-sense-1 and prostitute-in-sense2 are very different predicates, apply to very different sets of people, and justify somewhat different sets of inferences about the person in question.
I’ll make it more personal. I would not be willing to have sex with you (in the doubtless extremely unlikely event that you wanted me to) for, say, $100k. I would consider it a betrayal of my wife; I would consider it a violation of my marriage vows; I would be concerned about the possibility of damaging or breaking my marriage; knowing nothing about you, I would have to consider the possibility of contracting an STD; I am not much interested in casual sex; I’m pretty sure you’re male and I happen to be male and boringly heterosexual. These things matter to me, and they matter a lot. But make it a billion dollars and I’m pretty sure I’d consent, simply on effective-altruism grounds; I could do so damn much good with, say, half the takings as to outweigh those reasons, however compelling I find them.
To consider that the latter indicates “what kind of man” I am and puts me in the same pigeonhole as someone who will happily have sex with strangers for $100 a time is rather like saying that there’s no real difference in religious position between an atheist who is 99.9% confident there are no gods of any sort, and a fundamentalist who is 99.999% confident that there is exactly one, namely his own, simply because a sufficiently enormous quantity of evidence might turn one of them into the other.
(I do not, as it happens, share the widespread view that there is something terribly wrong with the “kind of woman” who is willing to have sex with strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, nor do I think that being that “kind of woman” is good evidence of any more general moral deficiency; but I don’t think my opinion on any of this would be very different if I did. E.g., I do think there is something terribly wrong with the kind of person who is willing to kill strangers in exchange for moderate sums of money, but I think I would be willing to carry out an assassination for a billion dollars if I were really sure of getting the money and remaining unarrested for long enough to give a lot of it to effective charities, and confident that the assassination wasn’t going to do an amount of harm comparable to the good I could thereby do.)
You are just arguing definitions. It’s pretty clear that the conversation, real or not, riffs on the classification of women into two kinds: those who will sleep with a man for money, and those who will not. You may find this classification inadequate or not matching your personal views, but that does not make it “wrong”. It just makes you have a different opinion and prefer a different classification scheme.
The point (and I apologize for not being more explicit about it) is that this binary classification is unsatisfactory not only for prostitution but also for tyranny, which is what the joke was here being used as an analogy to, and that I find Jiro’s argument unconvincing for (inter alia) the same reason as I think the man in the joke is incorrect (albeit funny).
Yes. He believes that arbitrary things are bad. Belief that arbitrary things are bad would lead to tyranny unless we get very lucky and he happens, by chance, not to think any of them are bad enough to ban. Of course, he wouldn’t think of it as tyranny, he’d think of it as “not allowing people the freedom to hurt others” or some such.
But religion has a habit of tossing weird things into the mix that nobody would ever believe otherwise. Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion? Or believe in 7 literal day creation? People whose religion is similar to Lewis believe those things, and it’s pure chance that Lewis’s branch doesn’t (at least for creation, Lewis didn’t say much about abortion).
Would anyone believe that killing a newly born baby is murder without the influence of religion?
Actually, religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion.
I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa’s point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)
Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by “religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion”. If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?
I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.
Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.
Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book “Through a Window.” While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.
I was referring to ritual child sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures.
But cultures with relatively low population counts compared to centuries of populous Christian countries.
Given ritual adult sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures, what does this prove?
In general, that religiosity does not prevent atrocious behavior, and if you need some special insight to stop killing babies, religion is not it.
Dozens? I only know of one, the pre-Jewish Semites.
Assorted examples from other cultures.
You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless’s probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.
I am not sure where you are going with all of this.
I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.
But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as “eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else.” So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.
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.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis’s religion are arbitrary. Of course they are not arbitrary, even assuming that his religion is false.
We’re on LW. I’m assuming something that just about everyone here assumes anyway. Or at least close to it.
(I’m sure some people would argue that Lewis’s religion’s claims aren’t arbitrary because competition between memes ensures that religions which say extreme things about sins won’t last until the modern era. If so, fine, it’s not arbitrary in that sense.)
Most people on LW would assume that his religion is wrong, but not that it is entirely arbitrary.
This is a universal argument. “Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless.” You can apply it to anyone, saying anything; which is to say, that it carries no force ever.
bong!!! But thank you for playing.
This is Bulverism, and not even Bulverism about a real characteristic, but about one you have just made up.
No, it isn’t. Religions tell people arbitrary things. Reasoning processes do not.
The question is “would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins”. Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it’s a question of what he would do. Furthermore, it’s not Bulverism anyway because I have no need to prove his positions false—we’re on LW and it can be taken for granted that everyone here thinks gay marriage should be allowed and nobody here thinks divorce and polygamy should be illegal.
And of course to you, what he would do is to ban things, because that is what you would do, and the idea of not banning things you don’t like is to you practically a contradiction in terms. But it’s all right for you to ban things, because you would be banning the right things, the sufficient proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees with you, but it’s wrong for Lewis to ban things, because he would be banning the wrongs things, the proof of which is that everyone in your circle agrees they’re the wrong things. We are right because we are right, and everyone else is wrong because they are wrong.
Thanks you for setting out your epistemology so clearly.
No, it’s what people like him would do. Religious people have a really bad record with respect to believing arbitrary things are bad and then banning them. Your idea that I think he would ban things because I would ban things is pulled out of thin air. I think that people would do lots of things I don’t do.
This is from Lewis:
“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question—how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
“It’s what people like him would do” is just plain false. He is quite clear there that the fact that he does not want to ban divorce for other people is not arbitrary, but reasoned, and he would apply the same thing to anything else which was specific to his religion.
Notice that that description doesn’t contain a claim that divorce hurts anyone other than the people getting divorced. So it doesn’t generalize to things which Lewis believes are banned by his religion because they harm others.
Also, it generalizes poorly to things like gay marriage. There used to be a time when nobody accepted gay marriage. Someone like Lewis could, while staying consistent with the above argument, claim that since gay marriage was universally abhorred, a law against it is not a Christian-specific law but a State-specific law.
Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone? Since he compared divorce to that himself, fully understanding that the prohibition on wine looks arbitrary to other people, he would be fully capable of realizing that it would look arbitrary even if he himself had such a belief.
But besides that, as I’ve said all along, Lewis’s beliefs are not arbitrary. He would be unlikely to believe a religion that taught something like that about wine, and if he did accept the religion in general, he would be unlikely to accept that particular belief. And even if he did, the awareness that it looks arbitrary to other people could be sufficient reason for him not to ban it, by the same argument he made explicitly.
The gay marriage argument is irrelevant. Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it. Neither would you, if you had lived at that time and been in charge of England. That does not mean that Lewis or anyone else was tyrannical or would have been.
Your whole argument is based on a strawman of religious beliefs as arbitrary beliefs. One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary, since if Jiro had believed something different, he would have had different beliefs.
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
Where are you getting this from? Not from any reading of Lewis, it seems.
C.S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism”
I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
Lewis, however, does believe that God makes moral claims and that he (Lewis) can know what at least some of them are.
Also, Lewis adopted his religion an adult; if it had said something different, he might not have adopted it.
No country permited gay marrige until about 20 years ago and western countries haven’t permitted polygammy for millenia. Are you saying they were all tyranical?
It’s “tyranny” in the sense that Lewis describes: using force to be a moral busybody.
It may not be tyranny if by tyranny if your definition of tyranny requires a certain amount of being a moral busybody, and just a little bit isn’t enough to count as tyranny. I suspect that this is the definition you’re using, but Lewis’s definition doesn’t contain a quantity threshhold.
The book is a collection. Lewis did not choose the title.
(The title is taken from the title of one of the essays. It was published well after Lewis died, so I assume he didn’t intend them to be a book at all.)
It would still be hilariously ironic if Lewis made such an observation, and didn’t explain how he and his God are not such moral busybodies. It would be another example to add to my list of examples of people whose criticism of others is accidentally truer criticism of themselves.