The truth is there are two kind of charlatans: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you, and the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.
In Chesterton's time, the Medical Profession was not quite what is is today. This was before the discovery of antibiotica, and just two generations after Semmelweis had started to tell physicians to wash their hands after attending to each patient, in 1847.
Semmelweis' increasingly rather less than diplomatic letters (a classic case of a scientific genius attacking the establishment, even if he may have been less arrogant and had more proof than Galilei) on the matter to prominent European obstetricians was not received with gratitude, and even his wife believed he was losing his mind. Semmelweis was committed to a mental institution in 1865 and possible beaten to death by guards some weeks later.
People are still washing their hands over any responsibility.
In 1908, stories of bad doctors not curing people, while various "wise women" sometimes did, were more than faint memories.
The really equitable doctrine of what we owe to doctors and what to old women in villages has yet to be stated.
The arguments used by professional men of science that what they call quack remedies are superstitions is really an argument in a circle. It amounts to this, that the herbs used by an old women is untrustworthy because se is superstitious; and she is superstitious because she believes in such herbs. Her method is bad because she is stupid; but the main proof of her stupidity is that she pursues her own method. To put it shortly, the doctor does not believe in the old woman upon the ultimate ground that she does not believe in the doctor.
Chesterton uses this debate to show how much it really is about arguing in a circle.
The people of the East believe in miracles because they are ignorant. How do you know they are ignorant? Because they believe in miracles. Thomas Aquinas believed in Catholicism because he lived in a darkened age. Why was it a darkened age? It was darkened by Catholicism.
And as always it ends with Jones and logic.
Jones tells me that he saw the ghost of his uncle last Tuesday. But, of course, you wouldn't believe a liar like that - a man brazen enough to say that he saw a ghost last Tuesday. In short, the elephant stands on the tortoise and the tortoise stands - on the elephant. By such mental processes it is possible to escape from the narrow methods of deductive logic.
Chesterton's point here is not to say that trained and licenced medical practioners per definition are quacks. He is not slamming science. He is callling attention to something different. It is about the arrogance of professionals when confronted with amateurs. It is about the condescending views of many an academic when meeting the common man.
Today, Medicine is lightyears beyond 1908, not to mention 1865. Even if it now is rather vindicated, the pretense of the profession seems not that different to innocent bystanders. The wise women may not be so wise these days (at least the ones I have met at New Age gatherings are not). Still, it is good advice for skeptics like me, not to mention public figures like Damian Thompson or Michael Shermer, to step down from any arrogant platform.
Jones is still more interested in practice than in pretense.
My friend Jose (on Bede's discussion group) has translated some interesting passages from his fellow atheist, the Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno. Who sometimes is even more Catholic than the Pope."Sometimes 'rationalist' fundamentalism, in the shape of atheism, is presented as the prior, necessary, and even sufficient condition for the advancement of the nations, while religion (in general) is deemed responsible for backwardness and barbarism in human societies. This is purely idealistic naivety, a throwback to the Enlightenment mentality of the 18th century, which not only traditional Christian philosophers have responded to, but also Comte's positivists, Marxists (especially Lenin), and other critical movements such as the Frankfurt School led by Horkheimer and Adorno, wuth their renovated criticism of the Enlightenment.
Tertiary religions in general, and Christianity in particular, cannot be regarded as an irrational antithesis to the development of science and culture, as so many of those who espouse scientific fundamentalism (i.e. atheist 'radical rationalism') would have us believe. On the contrary, tertiary theology, and especially Christian theology has, thoughout its history, built a doctrinal edifice which can be seen as one of the most refined examples (when it comes to cultural development) of propositional science in the Aristotelian sense.
Anyone who is familiar with the Thomistic doctrine of transubstantiation cannot help but admire the refinement and subtlety of the theological theories, which have in turn often paved the way for ulterior philosophical or scientific concepts or ideas, even materialist ones.We have no alternative but to heap scorn on those who speak, in general, of the 'crudity' of theological reasoning and its backwardness, and who, in their naive adolescent idealism, believe that once religion is removed and atheism established, progress, welfare, peace and happiness will naturally follow."
Jose doesn't quite avoid to mention a certain set of new atheists (or El Nuevo Ateo, I presume) in this connection.
However, as Bueno does not, we will leave it to the reader's imagination.
Robert J. Sanders has an interesting essay on how the Name of God was profaned in the US by linking the Christian faith to a neo-conservative political agenda. Old news in more ways than one, still an interesting angle on the present presidential campaign where the "Christian Right" now fools fewer people than ever.He begins by painting a picture of a world soon to fall under the power of Satan. According to Robertson, conspiratorial forces, such as the Illuminati, the Masons, the national and international bankers, the United Nations, the liberals, and The Supreme Court are conspiring to create a world order against God. The only hope for the world is for Christians to take control of the U.S. government and impose the Ten Commandments. Unless that happens, there will "never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.
Viewing the world as a conspiracy is a surefoot way to diaster.
Once the Christian right gains control of the U.S. government, their next step is to "save" the world from the godless one-world government that is waiting in the wings. Here is Robertson,
Such a world government [the Satanic one] can come together only after the Christian United States is out of the way. ... With America still free and at large, Satan's schemes will at best be only partially successful. ... An independent America could point out Satan's lies. If America is free, people everywhere can hope for freedom. And if American goes down, all hope is lost to the rest of the world.
Sanders calls it nothing less than idolatry.
It places Christians on the top, rather than on the bottom as those who serve as Christ served. It makes the un-biblical claim that a Christian United States of America is the divinely anointed, holy nation by which God defeats Satan and saves the world.
So, how then, what is the best way to evaluate Robertson's theology? Sanders concludes with no surprises. Robertson is even (worse of all, some would say) un-American.
By the norms of orthodoxy, Robertson is a heretic. By Old Testament standards, he is a false prophet, telling the powerful what they want to hear. By the standards of America's founders, his agenda is un-American. It violates the founders' belief that America should not be governed by those who impose their sectarian religious practices upon others.
I have mixed feelings about Sanders' web site and book reviews. Still, one can almost forgive him for finding Harry Potter unsuited for children, when he finds Robertson unsuited for all.
So what did Chesterton write about one hundred years ago?The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself and then complaining that he is not free.
GKC is not impressed. He doesn't think it will matter much. For true martyrdom was about something different. To change the world it helps little to make pretences of suffering. Or to use violence, like fighting in the streets or making bombs like the anarchists or modern days terrorists.
You have to suffer, and sing praises while you do,
if men smiled and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental honesty; they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quite positive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinaory as conjuring.
The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?"
Naturally the skeptic is as always not quite satisfied.
The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as to suppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest, was that something had entered human psychology which was stronger than strong pain.
One conclusion, then, is to
strongly advice modern agitators, therefore, to give up this particular method: the method of making very big efforts to get a very small punishment.
Greenpeace and others may not quite take heed, still it is a rather good advice.
Of course, what Chesterton was writing about was womens' right to vote. In 1908 this was still a rather radical idea. Chesterton did not accept it, as his impression was that most women didn't want it. And he thought even less about the suffragettes' methods.
As a matter of fact, Miss Pankhurst is quite in earnest about votes for women. But she does not prove it by being chucked out of meetings. A person might be chucked out of meetings just as young men are chucked out of music-halls - for fun. But no man has himelf eaten by a lion as a personal advertisement.
Still, it is hard to avoid the fact that the suffragettes won. Women now are as powerless as men when it comes to complaining about the government's decisions. They can't even excuse themselves with not having the right to vote. And as long as they don't sing in joy about it, nothing will change.
Next Saturday the topic is Charlatans and Quacks. In short counterknowledge.
Christianity slowed the progress of science down or tried to stop it dead in its tracks every single hard-earned step of the way.
The question then is how long Loftus's variant of atheism will slow the progress of the Historical Sciences.
Anyone interested might do worse than check this article on some aspects of it. Or, if you are Norwegian inclined, my two chapters in the book "Tro og vitenskap - Sammenheng eller Sammenstøt" ("Faith and Science - Connection or Conflict?".
As a mostly finished chapter on the size of the universe, the aliens debate and Christianity, was dropped from my recent book on Dawkins and the New Atheists (again in Norwegian, alas (especially for my bank account)), it may surface somewhere later this year.
Before leaving for some major snow shuffling this weekend (one of the perils of having a family with a cabin in the mountains), a nod to Claw of the Councilator who made me aware of a Medievalist's take on Kingdom of Heaven.
Yesterdays' news in more senses than one, still rather hillarious.
We know Guy is a bad person, because he's rude and French and talks about God a lot. In fact, anytime anyone talks about God a lot in the movie, they're bad. Orlando, who is struggling with religious doubt brought on by the death of his wife and child, is good, but not really very good at making you understand that he's struggling with religious doubt unless he says outright, "I'm struggling with religious doubt," but he does say it, so don't worry. Then his dad dies, and they all decide to go see his lands in Jerusalem.
Let me sum it up like this: arrows, fire, and heroic speeches. For any scene, pick two of the three elements and mix them together. Every time there's a heroic speech, the movie grinds to a halt, because Orlando, God bless him, can't summon up masculine swagger to save his perfectly tousled head. It's like watching a kitten dressed up like George C. Scott's Patton. Sure, the big flag is behind him, but everything he says falls flat--especially the part where he tells the defenders of Jerusalem that their holy sites don't matter and that all religions are essentially crap. I think perhaps crusaders, even reluctant ones who are only there because they killed a priest who insulted their dead suicide wives, probably didn't shout those things to big mobs with weapons, even if they might have secretly believed them. Call me crazy.
This is the big problem with the movie, and it only gets worse when the Archbishop of Jerusalem instructs people, fearing they're all about to be captured, to 'covert to the heathen faith and repent later'. This is supposed to show that he's a craven fake, but not five minutes ago when Orlando was telling us, 'all religions are bunk,' we were supposed to see him as a champion of "the people" and a crack theological thinker.
Though, as we all know, the movie is not about the Crusades at all. It is Ridley Scott's take on politics in the 21th Century.
