Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Students who want to study a subject must be open to new ideas, and should not request a warning so that they can withdraw from hearing and evaluating certain ideas that they may find emotionally upsetting.
Someone who ventures into the public, secular world must be prepared to encounter people whose moral and religious practices they find offensive. I think it is inappropriate to consider those people as being rude for merely being true to their beliefs.
Of course, that does not mean you have to agree with those beliefs. But as long as the other people are simply participating in public life (and not, eg, attempting to proselytize over-vigorously), I don’t think a charge of rudeness is appropriate.
In the election we just had in Canada, there was an election issue about whether a woman could wear a veil during a citizenship ceremony (assuming she unveiled in private to a woman official of the court to verify her identity). The losing Conservatives were pressing a court case to try to force her to unveil in public during the ceremony, as I understand it.
They lost the election badly. Not just for that issue, of course, but for their limited vision of tolerance and acceptance which characterized many of their policies. Good riddance.
Yikes, I reckon there’s two or three potentially incendiary topics intertwined here.
Hospitality
The norms relating to hospitality:
To answer Erik’s rather leading question, “Is it some ancient tradition at your place, going back generations, that every visitor should get a meal, and when the visitor doesn’t want it, she’s a bigot?”, Firstly, the term petrushka used was “food bigot“, which is a different kettle of fish.
Secondly, YES, such a person would be being extremely rude, by declining to participate in proffered-and-accepted hospitality. Yes, this is an ancient tradition at my place, going back generations. I refer you to the Glencoe Massacre – it is the breach of the rules of hospitality more than the murders that really horrifies the Highlands. See also “The Scottish Play”. Similarly, my wife is of Italian heritage: serving food to guests, and their voicing their enjoyment of the food, is an essential aspect of hospitality. That goes back generations too.
Tolerate, or Judge
Tolerance for the cultural norms of other tribes, and assessing to what extent these cultural norms are freely chosen both present challenges. IMHO, if an adult woman freely chooses to wear or not wear a hijab or niqaab then everyone else should butt out. Legislation (whether of the Saudi or Turkish flavor) and harassment strike me as wrong.
But there are a couple of continuums (?) here:
The pressure to conform to a cultural norm can be extreme, and juveniles cannot truly consent, making the assessment of “freely chosen” problematic.
The “I find your cultural norm reprehensible” judgement arises from the differing views of costs and benefits: does one view have a claim to the higher ground?
Thus I do see a problem with a woman who insists on wearing a burqa while giving testimony in an English court. I have heard a sensitive and compelling defense of the Indian caste system, but I still can’t really get on board. Then there’s genital mutilation: I’m rather judgmental about the female variety.
But on what basis? There’s the rub.
I’m not afraid of the Amish. Or of orthodox Jews.
I’m still not afraid of the Amish. Or of orthodox Jews.
I guess I still don’t get it. She came to your home, but in doing so somehow became asocial in not eating?
Here’s a rule I try to follow. If someone does something that offends me or angers me I look to myself in order to ascertain why I am offended or angered. Perhaps I need to change.
Mung. I have been nothing but change all my life. I have deferred to every nutty thing said by friends and relatives and guests. I am always the placator in every family dispute.
A while back a friend of the family lost a daughter, the mother of three children. Custody went to the divorced father, despised by everyone. The grieving one turned to me for advice.
I do not go around mocking religion or lecturing guests.
But this is the internet, and I do not need to submit to ideas and customs I think are rude and disrespectful. The same book that sets the dietary code also prescribes death to homosexuals. Both rules have the same source and merit the same degree of respect.
Always interesting when incompatible viewpoints clash. In such cases, the advantage seems to lie with the more aggressive, less tolerant viewpoint. I suppose that someone who tolerates almost nothing can feel that the person who tolerates nearly everything is the hypocrite for refusing to tolerate a few things. Once again, we see the human mind as a dichotomizing engine, equating all DEGREES of intolerance as all equally falling on the “yes” side of the “intolerant, yes or no” question.
When the terrorist clashes with the pacifists, the pacifists tend to lose. Islam has no platitudes about turning the other cheek, and according to a Pew survey, the majority of “moderate” Muslims oppose the terrorists but support death for apostasy. Intense tribalism rewards our need for close community at an equal cost to society generally. So we’re back to debating whether the effort to encourage a greater degree of tolerance represents a “war” against those less tolerant.
I do not judge bad manners as anything other than bad manners. Someone suggested a rational solution to the situation I submitted. If you have special food requirements, bring your own food. Or suggest a source for acceptably prepared food.
So as a host, you would be less annoyed by someone bringing their own food knowing you had prepared food for them? Or less annoyed if they told you how you should prepare the food for all guests? Or less annoyed if they demanded specially prepared good?
Seems to me that you are going to be inconvenienced, and probably irritated, by THEIR intolerance. Which is just my point – that the more intolerant and inflexible person is the cause of the friction. To accommodate them, you must do things their way, because they’re not about to do things any way other than their own.
There isn’t a place to meet halfway in all situations, but where it’s possible, that’s the place to meet. If one person is willing to go there and the other is not, it’s the other person generating the problems.
No one says you have to be “afraid” of them to despise their prevalent child abuse – physical and sexual – which is kept hidden by their in-group norms that require families NOT to involve the “gentile” police/child protective services, upon pain of being thrown out of the only community they have ever known if they do tell. Undeserved respect in the US for religion also helps protect the abusers, because if the victims/families finally do get desperate enough to involve secular authorities, they are likely to be turned back because no one wants to make a case against “religious freedom”.
As usual, the religious moderates provide cover for the extremists and the wicked.
Yep. And people who don’t want to hear the disrespect they deserve for clinging to such stupid tribal beliefs, should stop acting on those beliefs.
No one is asking them to drop their bigoted and anti-social beliefs, just to stop acting on them. That may sound like it’s exactly the same thing in the end, but it’s really not.
Do I need to draw out the moral to apply to the Levitican rules?
I think that correctly captures Wittgenstein’s view of the matter. I haven’t read anything by Putnam on religion or religious discourse.
As indicated earlier, it’s generally perilous to quote something by Putnam that’s more than a few months old as representative of his current position. I have no idea about that, myself, but I will say that it’s not a position that does much for me personally. I (along with keiths!) have indicated above an approach I find more congenial.
Incidentally, I don’t know how one could reconcile the Wittgensteinian position summarized above with a deflationary theory of truth: those seem incompatible to me. But I don’t deny that Putnam is considerably smarter than I am.
Erik, I’m still waiting for you to explain what a “near-historical flood” is and what you’ve learned from the rabbis about this.
On the whole I’d agree.
I’m talking about being in a public place or general social situation and having one’s face masked. What has that to do with religious practices?
I’m not concerned with religious belief. I’m concerned about people in public places and general social situations having their face completely obscured.
I always remove my sunglasses when not needed to shade my eyes from strong sunlight or when talking to someone. There are reasons for people to be masked. I accept a welder wearing a welder’s mask when welding, a skier wearing a mask while skiing, a motorcyclist wearing a full-face helmet when motorcycling. I don’t consider it acceptable to conduct a conversation with a motorcyclist while she is wearing a helmet. Nor are helmeted motorcyclists allowed to enter banks or stores here.
That is a good example of why people should not be allowed to mask the face in such situations.
France has a law that restricts the obscuring of the face in public. The penalty for infringement is minor but the penalty for inciting someone else is quite severe.
Democracy rules!
I would be hypocritical if I weren’t willing to accommodate special diets. I can’t eat beef. Or anything having beef broth. Not even onion soup. It makes me very sick. Most people can serve things I can eat without special trouble.
The person in question shared a house with my daughter in college an has been a good friend for over 20 years. She is now married to an orthodox rabbi.
I am not openly critical of her, but in the privacy of an internet forum, I can complain. It is one of many tribal practices I find offensive.
Can you ever! 😉
Burqas and veils.
But also people who wear surgical masks because they think it will protect them from viruses. People with personality quirks. Lone rangers.
I’m sure people wearing surgical masks could be persuaded to remove them in a conversational situation. I’m hard of hearing and seeing people’s lips is a great help.
Three different things to consider:
1. Finding someone’s acts to be offensive. That is your privilege, although in some circumstances it might be argued that such feelings are not apt.
2. Thinking someone is rude simply because they act in a way you find offensive. You may or may not be right. For the dinner guest who wanted to attend but kept her religious beliefs, I personally would not consider such a person rude and so I would not consider feelings that the person was rude to be apt.
3. Someone who believes they have a right not to be offended by others legal acts. I don’t think that such a right exists.
Not sure what is religious about a burqa or a veil. Or genital mutilation of young girls now I think of it.
Try this. Say Naturism was a religion. Is it OK for Naturists to exercise their religious right to be naked in public and general social situations. There is someone called the Naked Rambler.
I don’t think it is up to others to judge religious acts that other adults voluntarily embrace. I think the best one can argue for is that everyone has a right to live in a society where all points of view are available so that adults can make their own choices.
Genital mutilation of children is a different discussion. I suspect a full discussion would have to include male circumcision, although female “circumcision” seems significantly more pernicious to me.
In a secular society, individual religious practices do not give one the right to break the law. I did say “legal” acts in one of my previous posts.
Which is not what I think I’m doing.
Up to the point where one person’s freedom is detrimental to the freedom of others. I see no justification for needing to go about with the face masked in public. It’s intimidatory. And I see no religious aspect to it at all.
Indeed and it has no religious basis. I just see masking up as the same, less pernicious certainly, type of cultural pressure and subjugation of women.
Frankly I see less justification for imprisoning the Naked Rambler. It seems quite harmless.
Perceiving rudeness is personal. I would not perceive rudeness if not eating were the result of a weight loss diet or a medical problem. What I perceive as rude is eating beforehand, rather than bringing acceptable food.
It’s not like this person was a business client or a casual short term friend. She could easily have come to some compromise with my daughter.
But the truth is I am unsympathetic to any cultural practice whose sole purpose is to divide people from each other and reinforce tribalism. I think a competent sociologist would know that taboos have the purpose of reinforcing tribal separation.
I note that not many Jews, not even orthodox Jews, advocate killing homosexuals, and yet there it is, right next to the dietary rules.
I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner by my Jewish roommate. His family served ham. Not just to me.
Naked Rambler should be forced to wear a burqa.
Are you saying a person is acting rudely if they do not subscribe to your religious views?
It seems your argument is:
1. An orthodox Jew believes X.
2. An orthodox Jew believes Y.
X is clearly immoral. Therefore Y is immoral.
In this 2012 book (based on 2007 conference but probably edited in 2010 or so), Putnam says that he believes
– in “Fregean disquotation”: disquotation is an important property but not all there is to say about truth (Putnam is not a vanilla deflationist and I should not have described him with that word).
– that correctness criteria must be appropriate to the kind of statement,
– that, nonetheless, a type of correspondence and disquotation applies to empirical statements about states of affairs, although even here it can vary; eg weighing meat at butcher versus in a food laboratory
I think these understandings are supported by his mid-2015 blog posts on his contextual approach to truth and meaning, but I may be misunderstanding those brief descriptions*.
So I take that to mean that Putnam would understand the truth of
– “snow is white” in terms of ordinary language
– “the universe is expanding” in terms of his version of scientific realism
– “murdering innocents intentionally is wrong” in terms of his ethical approach, which he calls objective but without ontology
– “God exists” some other way.
I also do not know of any extensive writing he has done as a philosopher about religion where he talks about truth and meaning. In his 2010 Science and Philosophy, which I believe was written for this 2010 book, he does say that his religious beliefs are somewhere between Dewey and Buber, and that he believes God exists in the way Dewey did, that is “as an ideal”. But he leaves it at that.
—————————-
* In these blog posts, he refers to a 2015 paper which you can find a pdf of here that he says desribes his views on truth. I’ve read it, but not closely, and think that it is mainly about how to understand Tarski’s T-convention and why naturalizating does not mean reduction to physics. I did not see anything detailed about his contextual approach to truth in it.
BruceS,
Coincidentally, on another board I belong to, there was a brief discussion on Putnam regarding fact and value, and a friend posted this old Putnam bit:
http://inters.org/Putnam-Fact-Value
I responded as follows:
ETA:
I just noticed that Larry (who, incidentally was a student of Albritton’s and took a course or two with Putnam in grad school) has responded thusly:
walto,
Reciprocating Bill is a fan, I believe. He shared Putnam’s views on causation, which I found to be thought provoking.
Putnam is definitely one of the great minds of our time. What’s weird is that I haven’t staked out his house, which I now know is only a couple miles from here.
W
That isn’t what I said or intended. I did not label them as moral or immoral. That is for you to decide. What I said was they have the same source and merit the same degree of respect. It’s up to you to accept or reject them.
That’s what I said. Now if they come directly from God, believers are bound to abide by both. If they are priestly inventions, then believers can make of them what they will. The cultural practices can evolve.
My own take? They are both silly, and enforcing food taboos to the point of alienating friends is uncalled for. Enforcing a death penalty, criminal.
No, that’s not the logic at all. Petrushka has already responded, and I want to throw in my answer anyways.
People of the book claim to be following the rules from their book. As petrushka says, the rule about not cooking the meat with the milk is in the same place as the rule about executing homosexual men. But they pick and choose – they’re full of excuses why they no longer execute queer folk (thank god!) but the bottom line is that the rules they pick to incorporate into their 21st century fantasy world are the rules which still promote their tribal isolation, while not making them (obviously) criminal in the larger world.
Is it immoral to execute gay men simply for being homosexual? Of course it is. Is it immoral to advocate against homosexuality? Yep, that too. But god never came back to revise the pages of Leviticus. To the extent that Orthodox Jews have given up the testament stance against homosexuality and have come to peace with (though not embrace) a 21st century human reality that queer people are equally human, they’ve done so without the benefit of a message from the lord. Yay for them!
Yet then why do the dietary laws still stand?
It’s immoral to keep kosher when the burden of arranging a family’s life so that the dietary laws could be successfully followed falls solely to the wife/mother — as it always does.
So the Orthodox leaders have given up one deadly immorality, murdering gays, while cherry-picking other not-quite-so-deadly immoralities with which to maintain their ugly tribal identity.
Since the rules all come from the same pages of the same books, that makes them hypocrites as well as immoral sexist tribal bastards.
It is true that I changed “rude” to “immoral”. Given that one of the points was about killing gays, I thought it would be flippant to use “rude”.
As best I understand your point (and hotshoe’s), you are saying that religious people must be true to the literal reading of every word of their Scriptures. If they are not, then none of their beliefs deserves respect. (Or at least if they come to dinner but still follow their dietary practices, then they are being rude.)
I don’t agree that religious people cannot evolve their understandings of their religious texts, for reasons KN has explained much better than I could earlier in the thread.
So I will leave it at that.
In the 2013 book I linked, there is a long essay on his moral views (by his wife) which re-emphasizes his view that fact/value is a continuum, without denying that there are simple cases at the extremes of that continuum. His reply says that her summary gives a very good precis of his current views (except for some details on skepticism).
He has a 2016 book coming out on “Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity” (which is also the title of the truth essay I linked) which I suppose will give latest ideas on the topic.
In the 2012 book he repeats his rejection of a vanilla correspondence theory. In the 2015 essay I linked, he says it is incorrect to read Tarski as supporting a correspondence theory. But I did not see anything that essay that directly talked about his latest views on truth and reference, although I suppose his criticism of that view of Tarski as well as other criticism of deflationist views of reference could be taken as hints.
I have not yet attempted his “Meaning of Meaning” or some of the essays on his language philosophy or externalism in the books I linked, but I do understand him to still support meaning as a complex “vector” quantity (which I think means multi-dimensional, given his math background), and so that too seems inconsistent with a vanilla correspondence theory of truth.
(BTW, in the 2015 paper he says he does agree with a variety of metaphysical realism as espoused by Tim Maudlin. But I’ll leave for another thread.)
BruceS,
As I said on the other board, I don’t agree that fact/value is a continuum. I think all values depend on facts, and some facts depend on values, but nothing of great metaphysical interest follows from those.
“Somewhere between Dewey and Buber” is precisely how I’d describe my religious beliefs, too. If I were to call them “beliefs.” Which I don’t. Not anymore.
That’s not what I said and not what I meant.
I said all commandments and religious codes merit the same degree of respect. I am sorry this distinction is so difficult to comprehend.
So, since irony fails, I will spell it out. (I thought I had spelled it out)
If the rules are direct commandments from god, it seems imprudent to pick and choose which ones you are going to take seriously.
If the rules are cultural inventions, then it makes sense to examine them the way we examine manners and customs and laws and regulations. By their social effects and social consequences. We can ask the same questions about them that we ask about speed limits and environmental regulations.
Now I can inject my personal prejudice. I think grownups should be aware that dietary taboos are customs and not the word of God. The business of stoning people should be a clue that these are bronze age tribal customs that can be abrogated in the interests of sharing friendship or hospitality.
Eating is a bonding ritual. They even wrote a song about it.
Refusing to share bread in another person’s home is insulting.
How on Earth do get that from anything I’ve written? I’m a convinced secularist and support freedom of expression including religious belief. Demanding the right to parade in public with the face fully obscured has nothing to do with religious belief.
Are you sure you get the last word on that point?
That part is correct for sure.
Of course it has something to do with religion, but the real issue is behavior. Nations and governments may guarantee freedom of conscience, but not freedom to act on any and all beliefs.
We have laws, for example requiring medical treatment for children.
Governments have the legal right to impose dress restrictions, including restrictions on public nudity.
One of the advantages of having this kind of regulation rest with government is that laws can change and evolve.
There is no last word.
I don’t disagree with you, petrushka. My point with Alan was that I don’t think it much matters whether certain positions are considered religious or not.
I’m not a supporter of any supposed “natural right to religious freedom,” as you may know.
I’m sure I don’t. Not even my wife listens to me!
Mine probably would–at least if you were disagreeing with me.
walto,
🙂
I think all rights are won or lost through politics. I don’t like politics, in fact I hate politics, but it’s better than the alternatives.
No. Religion is not the issue. Obscuring the face in a public or general social situation is unacceptable social behaviour. Social interaction relies on visual clues and visual expression is essential to proper communication and understanding. I think people who fail to see this problem are being obtuse and people who fail to acknowledge this problem are being overly politically correct.
What religious doctrine commands women to completely cover the face in public and in general social situations?