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Should I assist the “new evangelisation”?

Well well. I just got a rather weird email contact via my main blog, from a Father Giovanni Maria Leonardi, who is …

…a Capuchin monk of the Holy House of Loreto in Marche in the centre of
Italy.

Riiiiight …

Through the site www.santafamigliatv.it we
are committed via Internet for the new evangelization.

he says.

… ooookay. So what is he contacting me about?

To this aim, we ask you for one of your film footage. (any format DVD,
VHS, minicassette) you have already realized, so as to include in our
Schedules and our Archives.

Wait, what? O_o Almost makes me want to make a video wherein I say what I actually think about religion, and send them that.

Meaning and Purpose: God or Me?

5 November, 2013 Raphael Fraser Reply

Friday Filisophy has had a bit of an unplanned hiatus, which I shall begin to rectify, at least a little, today. I think, read, and watch a fair bit relating at least tangentially to meaning: the meaning and purpose of our lives. In a way that’s the biggest question for every one of us; without a sense of meaning and purpose we can feel empty and lost.

People seem to have always sought meaning, in various ways. One way has been – and is – through religion. Needless to say, I don’t believe that’s the only, the best, or even a good way of finding meaning and purpose, but millions upon millions appear to.

I thought what I might do today is present summaries of a couple of different notions of how we came to be and what that says about our purpose, and the meaning of our lives. In the interest of not being a dick, I shall present them without comment (save for the inevitable difference in tone that will no doubt creep into each summary).

First:

In the beginning there was a magic all-powerful and all-knowing dude who created the entire universe – including you and me – from nothing. Despite being unimaginably powerful and removed from us by a gulf more vast than separates us from single-celled organisms, this being for some reason needs and demands your worship and love, and if he doesn’t get it, will cast you into an eternity of dreadful torment when you die. The purpose of your life then is explicitly to worship and glorify this being; everything you do should be in his name and for his glory.

Second:

You and I are star-stuff made flesh. In Carl Sagan’s words: “… a way for the universe to look at itself”. We are the results of billions of years of chance, combining elements forged in stars and supernovae, come together briefly to make you, me, everyone we love (and everyone we waste time hating). We are here in this configuration for about 0.00058% of the time the universe has existed. So far. Then the star-stuff that makes us will return to the universe to form part of someone or something else. Our very transience is what leads to our purpose: to make it count. The meaning of our lives is no more nor less than what we make it during our fraction of a cosmic second on this earth.

My comment to the ACL

21 October, 2013 Raphael Fraser 2 comments

Mitch Sullivan, one of my twitter friends, posted a link to a post by the Australian Christian Lobby, about the ethics classes that happily look like thy will go ahead. I was moved to comment, but aince I doubt my comment will make it through moderation I will reproduce it here:

Mitch, I agree entirely – though often in stronger language, perhaps because I have children soon to start school.

The objection you mention (that SRE chikdren will miss out) is a demonstration of the complete failure of logic that provides the bedrock on which religion survives. A complaint that SRE kids miss out by not attending the ethics classes is an overt admission that SRE is not concerned with ethical thought and behaviour. However, when asked why state schools in a secular nation should provide religious instruction, that is the reason trotted out.

The Churches cannot have it both ways. If SRE is valuable, then children attending it are not disadvantaged, and the ethics classes are simply addressing the disadvantage currently suffered by all other children in state schools. Conversely, if SRE kids are disadvantaged by not attending ethics classes, then SRE has no value other than religious indoctrination, and therefore has no place in state schools.

Please, pick an argument and stick to it.

OK Gillard, Now What?

8 September, 2013 Raphael Fraser 2 comments

Right. So. Australia does finally have a new government. Of sorts. Congratulations to Julia Gillard and the Labor party – and biggest congratulations to the Greens, with 9 seats in the Senate, Yeah baby!

However…

That was frakkin’ ridiculous. Gillard, Labor, you need to sort your shit out. Srsly. We came thiiiiis close || to becoming a theocracy with Tony Abbott channelling George bloody Pell. That shouldn’t have happened, and I don’t think it needed to. I present humbly (or perhaps not so humbly) my recommendations to your government:

Ditch Conroy’s filter.

It’s an odious, loathsome idea, condemned by every rational person outside China, Saudi Arabia etc. And quite apart from that it Will. Not. Work. Just add a ? to the end of the url and you’ll be able to go to any website on the list. That gets blocked? Add another character. FFS. And there are half a dozen other easy and quick ways around it. The list will leak, and be a great directory of suggested dodgy sites for anyone who wants to know. And finally, most of the really bad stuff isn’t on the web. The World Wide Web does not equal the Internet, and most of the bad stuff (so I hear from people who know more about this than I) is circulated via all those back alleys of the Internet, rather than the glossy shop fronts of the WWW.

So chuck it. It was a major point of difference between you and the Coalition, and one that was clearly in their favour.

Stop being dicks about marriage.

Let people get married to the people they love. SRSLY. It doesn’t matter if they’re straight, gay, bi, male, female, transgender, what-bloody-ever. Just stop being dicks. Stop pandering to loud conservative idiot pressure groups. I’m about 80% sure I read recently that most of Australia really doesn’t have a problem with the idea of gay marriage. It’s just loud noisome twits like George Pell and Jim Wallace et al.

For who do you work? The religious right, or the majority of the people of Australia?

Meaningful action on pollution

Australia is right up there with the worst per capita CO2 emitters in the world. Some hard action is going to be needed – the coal industry’s unhappiness notwithstanding. It is not an issue that can be sensibly ignored, nor is it rational to withold action until we can say with 100% certainty that it is all anthropogenic. By then it is likely to be too late. Sure, Australia can’t fix the whole world, but that’s not a reason to let your own backyard go to shit. Nor is other countries’ reluctance to act justification for inaction.

Stop unfairly privileging religion.

What is it? Twenty-two million dollars MOAR for school chaplaincy? Untrained, ideologically-based, exclusionary … Simply, efforts at indoctrination. What about more school counsellors? More training and support for school counsellors.

And Special Religious Education. Bloody hell. School time made available for religious instruction? That should be down to parents. End of story. And if you don’t want to do the religious stuff you can’t have actual teaching and learning happen? Ethics. Ethics classes would address in reality what SRE is ostensibly there for – and at which it is demonstrably failing: just look around you. Look at what the SRE “teachers” are teaching. As we’ve seen up in Queensland, they can be shoving young earth creationism down our kids’ throats. SRE is about indoctrinating children into christianity, pure and simple. That has no place in schools.

Aren’t we all supposed to be equal?

And on that note, how is it that by calling your organisation a religion, you can avoid paying taxes and rates? That’s just wrong – at a very basic level. They argue that they do good charitable work. Fine. Set up your charity, open the books, and be not-for-profit and tax-exempt. The church itself is not a charity; being a church does not equal doing charitable work. If a church has a charity, that charity can fairly be tax-exempt, but not the church itself. That’s simply unjust. The same argument applies against their exemption from paying rates.

To Stay in Government:

In all seriousness, Prime Minister Gillard, the closeness of this election should serve as ample demonstration you and your party need to take a good hard look at what you are doing. The above are a few things which honestly are simple, sensible, and just; they would differentiate your party from the Coalition (such differentiation being sadly lacking at the moment), and I think (for what my opinion is worth) they would increase your chances of remaining in government 3 years hence.

The Meaning of Life – Only What You take With You

27 August, 2013 Raphael Fraser Reply

42 of course is the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the Universe, and everything. Sadly, while the Great One, Douglas Adams, gave us the answer, he did not make so free with the question – so we’re a bit buggered there. However, I’m going to have a crack at laying out a different answer, to perhaps more obvious questions.

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while, and had a final spur to blither about it after readibg a couple of Atheist Climber’s recent posts: one where he wrote about the Universe not caring a whit for us; and a subsequent one wherein he described the “uncaring universe” post as being ‘a bit bleak’. I don’t think it’s bleak at all, and I got motivated to try to explain why.

One of the most foolish things sometimes said about atheists is that because we don’t believe in god/s our lives lack meaning and purpose. True, I don’t believe there is any overall intrinsic purpose to our existence; I do not believe we are here in order to glorify god/s or even to glorify the Universe itself in some pantheistic way. As far as can be figured out by better minds than mine, we just happen to be here, and we just happen to be here for timeframes absolutely inconsequential on a cosmological scale. Oh, and the Universe probably just happens to exist as well. So no, I don’t think there is any god/s-given purpose or intrinsic meaning to life, the Universe, or indeed everything.

So do I despair? Do I quail under the night sky in waves of existential angst?

Nup.

Continuing the theme begun in my posts about “oracular ethics” (philosophy by way of the Matrix) I would like to illustrate why not, by reference to a couple of fantastic movies: The Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator 2. Though neither of them exactly discuss the meaning of life, really I just want to use a couple of quotes.

When Luke is on Dagobah studying under Yoda, one of their training sessions ends up by a cave. Yoda tells Luke it is strong with the Dark Side of the Force, and of course follows up with: “In you must go”. Luke, being a fraidy-cat, asks “what’s in there”, to which Yoda replies “Only what you take with you”. Luke of course, buckles on his weapons belt, and takes with him his fear and anger. In the cave then he sees a Vader simulacrum and fights it and yadayadayada .. the point it: the cave was nothing; other than being strong in the Dark Side, there was nothing about the cave but potential. When Luke took his fear and anger into the cave, it suddenly did have a purpose and meaning – a dark one.

You can see where I’m going with this, I imagine – but I’ll still give my Terminator example.

In Terminator 2, there’s an important passage that John Connor’s made his father remember in the future and say to Sarah Connor in the present. I’m going to take one line from that: “there is no fate but what we make”. Similarly to Yoda’s little bit of Zen, it’s presenting the idea that we make our own purpose.

That purpose can vary greatly. For example:

People are funny: they spend money they don’t have, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like.

That’s a purpose, a meaning … I suppose. Increasingly it seems to be the primary meaning a lot of people invest their lives with. It’s pretty empty though. On the other hand, I have found meaning and purpose in caring. I care for my family: for my wife and children, my parents, my sisters and grandmother, my wider family, my friends, other humans, other animals and plants, the Earth itself…. There is meaning. There is purpose. And it doesn’t require a deus ex machina (or deus ex Universa ); it doesn’t require the Universe to care about me, or to have any grand design itself. It just requires me to be a little bit thoughtful.

And hopeful 8)

Body in Mind