Tag: Dialogue

Hatred and liberty cannot coexist

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks pic 3 Copy

I have been following Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, for a while on Twitter and have greatly enjoyed his writings ever since. Today’s post on his website is no exception and is well worth reading in full. Kicking off with a great quote by Martin Luther King:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness …

he then goes on to discuss one of the instructions Moses gives to his people: “Do not hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land.” (Deuteronomy 23: 8). Lord Sacks emphasizes how counter-intuitive a law this is, given the exploitation and slavery the Israelites suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, instead of a spell of hospitality that the quote may suggest. His key point though is that hatred makes us slaves of the past and allows for past wrongs to persist in us even after they occurred. This does not mean that injustice ought to be forgotten, but only that its remembrance is to serve the purpose of prevention rather than retaliation. The key paragraph from Lord Sacks’s exegesis to me is the following though:

Hatred and liberty cannot coexist. A free people does not hate its former enemies; if it does, it is not yet ready for freedom. To create a non-persecuting society out of people who have been persecuted, you have to break the chains of the past; rob memory of its sting; sublimate pain into constructive energy and the determination to build a different future.

In many ways this is similar also to what St. Augustine, whose feast it is today, said:

“[He] he shall neither hate the man because of his vice, nor love the vice because of the man, but hate the vice and love the man. For the vice being cursed, all that ought to be loved, and nothing that ought to be hated, will remain.” (The City of God, 14:6)

Here Lord Sacks’ words can be read as saying that a fault’s or wrongdoing’s ‘cure’ needs to be accelerated and that those who have been wronged can take the first step. Maybe hatred is not a feeling I have myself, but there are certainly past events that have hurt or saddened me and I will strive to apply Lord Sacks’s advice to my attitude to them.

Gang up on the green!

Temple gardens

The last week has seen a discouraging pair of shots being fired between the religious and atheists camps in the form of an article in the Catholic Herald by Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith and a response to it by the biologist Prof. Jerry A. Coyne.1

I will leave it to you to read the two articles for yourself and won’t attempt to challenge the many individual shots fired by the two sides, as tempting as that is. The problem of evil, Nietzsche’s philosophy, nihilism, alternative theories of meaning, the nature of empirical observation, inference, theoretical parsimony and (lack of) evidence for God are all used as bullets, but without any attention paid to attempting a meeting of minds and certainly without any effort made to apply the principle of charity by either side.

Instead of going into the pair of arguments point–by–point, I would just like to throw the following into the mix (one each as criticisms of the two protagonists):

  1. Prof. Coyne, isn’t it the case that a given set of empirical data can be the basis of multiple, alternative inferences? Stating that the character of our universe being the opposite of what would be expected given a loving and powerful god is an “inference from evidence” is all well and good, but I’d argue that so would be the inference that our universe is exactly what would be expected given a loving and powerful god. What is inferred from evidence does not derive from it in a causal way (seeing a dropping apple does not cause a specific theory of gravity to be posited by an observer) and neither does a given (set of) evidence only lend itself to the definition of a single, specific theory to be inferred from it. Just looking at the playing filed of contemporary physics (or probably any other field of rational enquiry) ought to be enough to settle this point. Please, don’t take this as me saying that scientific theories are feelings or that they are arbitrary. That is not what I believe at all. I have a deep admiration for science, derive great satisfaction from participating in its advancement (admittedly in a minuscule way as far as my contribution goes) and fully subscribe to its enormous value. While I wholeheartedly agree with Prof. Dawkins and you that we can all be moral without a belief in god, I would also like to suggest that the religious views you attack are caricatures, assuming no intelligence on the part of those who hold them – not a great basis for dialogue.
  2. Fr. Lucie–Smith, isn’t it the case that the feeling of indifference, the unanswered call for justice and the lack of clarity of purpose that you attribute to atheists is precisely what Jesus felt in his abandonment on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mathew 27:45)? And isn’t it then more fitting to engage in a dialogue with atheists that seeks to tease out the common ground between what is accessible to us without the benefit of a faith, which we, Catholics, believe to be a gift (“Faith is an entirely free gift that God makes to man.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, §162)? Please, don’t take this the wrong way, but what did you seek to achieve with your article, beyond ridiculing a ridiculous interpretation of another’s words?

So, potentially having made two fresh enemies, let me suggest that we are looking at the wrong battle lines altogether! The fight ought not to be between atheists and religious but between the rational atheists and religious on the one hand and those who act without employing reason or who abuse reason for selfish and immoral ends on the other – and those come in both flavors. Let me just give two examples that shocked and saddened me recently: first the ‘Christian’ idiot who killed seven at a Sikh gurdwara in Milwaukee and second the ‘atheist’ Chinese state whose officials have performed a forced abortion on a 7–month–old foetus. And these are just two outrageous and reprehensible events picked almost at random from the last two weeks.

For us, who do clearly have differences that I don’t mean to belittle, but who subscribe to both rationality and morality, to squabble with each other is both an offense to reason and to God and I wish that we would learn from the inhabitants of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, where “[b]lack and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”

1 Thanks to Luke Coppen for his excellent daily ‘Catholic must-reads’ and Twitter feed, where I first read about these articles.