One reason I’m an Atheist (Guest Post)

 

A fortnight ago I published Matter of Facts’ first ever guest post from my friend Helen arguing amongst other things for the beauty of a Christian worldview. In this response from a non-religious viewpoint Robin McGhee argues that a world without God is potentially far more beautiful than one with:

I find atheism is often defined more by being against religion than for anything else. Many prominent atheists have made their theological careers primarily by attacking religion instead of constructing something positive. Names like Richard Dawkins, Robert Ingersoll, and Christopher Hitchens are associated with opposition to religion rather than positive statements about atheism. I don’t think this is healthy. It forces the argument to be debated on religious terms. Why, many atheists have asked, should it be us facing the burden of proof? Likewise, we should not be the ones who ignore the positive benefits of our beliefs.

By contrast, arguments for religious belief are routinely articulated almost entirely by pointing out the positives. Yahweh is a loving god. Islam is a religion of peace. Believe in Christianity and you will be saved. This is what Helen says in her guest post on this blog. It is a very pleasing argument. Accentuating the positive rather than deriding your opponents makes it far easier to gloss over the basic metaphysical problems underpinning your philosophy.

I am attracted to atheism because it offers a more beautiful depiction of the world than religious faith could ever offer.

If you don’t believe in god, you hopefully understand the logical consequences. You were not created for any purpose, there is no afterlife, everything you’ve ever known and loved will be destroyed and all memories of it erased, and the Universe itself, and with it the laws of physics which enable your existence, will shrivel to nothingness in the course of billions of years. I like these thoughts. They give a lot of freedom. It’s much nicer to know you can do or think whatever you want than live according by the rules of a deity to whose absolute control you never gave any consent. It is especially wonderful to view the world as it is, a product of chance, with all the complexities and beauties an object of even greater fascination and delight as a result.

Sometimes I have tried to imagine how I would see the world if I were a practising Christian. I feel it would be a much less interesting, and considerably less welcoming, world. Instead of acknowledging a world created by amazing coincidences, I would feel compelled to ask searing moral questions about the causes of its hardships, and ignore its beauty. Instead of complete freedom to choose my own direction and meaning in life, I would feel compelled to see my purpose as serving a deity who might never makes its presence known to me, and whose edicts and proclamations are frequently confusing. It would be a life of direction, but not a direction of my choosing- I might not feel comfortable with it, but I would feel like I had to struggle on unless I renounced my religion. My implied criticism of him earlier notwithstanding, Christopher Hitchens’ point that to believe in Christian doctrine is like living in a divine North Korea is strikingly accurate. And his flourish that, at least, you can die in North Korea- while for Christians, to die is just the start of it- is especially pertinent when even the most liberal monotheists routinely believe in a divinely-ordained afterlife.

I embrace atheism because it allows us to understand our own freedom and power, and also our own fallacies. If I become crippled by illness or misfortune, I do not have to question the foundations of my own faith and worry about whether this is part of a divine plan. I can understand that we’re just molecules and this is the sort of thing molecules do to each other. Moreover, I can place my trust in human remedies to solve my problems, rather than prostrating myself before a god who I must constantly worry doesn’t care about my problems.

These are only some of the reasons for being an atheist. I have hardly delved at all into criticisms of religion per se. No doubt the reader is already aware of the main ones. However, I would ask any religious readers to reconsider their faith in a divine being, and recognise the beauty and freedom of a world without god.

America’s incarceration addiction

America has 5% of the world’s people but 25% of its prisoners

What’s more even the American states that imprison the fewest people such as Vermont, still have a greater proportion of their populations in jail than virtually every country in OECD.

The explanation seems to be America’s drug laws:

Probably the biggest driver of this growth has been ever-harsher drug penalties. In response to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, Congress and state legislatures began passing laws that meted out mandatory-minimum sentences for drug-related crimes. These were intended to help nab major traffickers, but the sentences were triggered by the possession of tiny quantities of drugs: five grams of crack, for instance, resulted in a mandatory-minimum sentence of five years. Conspiracy laws made everyone involved in a drug-running operation legally liable for all of the operation’s activities: a child hired for a few dollars a day to act as a lookout at the door of a crack house was on the hook for all the drugs sold in that house and all the crimes associated with their sale. These sorts of laws kept America’s prison population growing even as its crime rate declined.

The Balkans: a not so far away land of which we still know little

A century after an assassination in the Balkans plunged Europe into the Great War – and twenty years after the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia – Westerners are still embarrassingly ignorant of what remains a crucial region

Me visiting Sarajevo in 2011

A SMALL TOWN FAR FAR AWAY

On April 21 1913 Scutari – a town that lay in what was then the European territories of the Ottoman Empire – fell to Montenegrin and Serb forces after a siege lasting several months. In one sense there was nothing especially remarkable about the fall of an Ottoman town. ‘The First Balkan War’ was underway at the time during which an alliance of states and nationalist movements across the Balkans pushed the once mighty Empire out of Europe and back into its Anatolian heartlands. However, the taking of Scutari was to prove uniquely problematic for efforts to end the conflict.

In 1912, the British foreign secretary Edward Grey chaired a Conference of Ambassadors which drew up a plan for a post-Ottoman Balkans. That plan had given Scutari to the newly independent Albania. Therefore as far as the international community was concerned, the Serbian and Montenegrin forces needed to leave the city. They refused – they hoped that by remaining in Scutari they could bring about its annexation to Montenegro and expand the Serb sphere of influence.

This was an incredibly dangerous gamble for it threatened a much wider conflict than between Albanian and Serbia and Montenegro. The Austro-Hungarian Empire regarded Serbia as a menace and might be willing to use force to prevent it expanding. Serbia meanwhile was allied with Russia. Therefore, it was conceivable these two powers could go to war over Scutari. And if that happened then Germany would quite probably come to Austria-Hungary’s aid, as France (and possibly Britain) might to Russia’s. Grey wound up lamenting the prospect of a general European war being caused by a dispute over “a few villages on the Albanian border” – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Chamberlain’s ridiculing of the notion of fighting Hitler for the sake of Czechoslovakia, “a faraway land of which we know little.”

A HISTORY OF INTERVENTION

In the end Scutari, did not of course lead to a war. Britain and Italy sent warships to sit off the coast of Albania in a display which successfully intimidated the Serb forces into withdrawing. This was not, however, to be the last time that Western militaries would be sent the Balkans. Most spectacularly and destructively, following the assassination a century ago today in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne – his country blamed Serbia and declared war on it. This triggered the interlocking network of alliances which brought the Europe’s Great Powers into the ‘Great War’ which left millions dead. There would be plenty more examples to come: British forces would fight the Axis in Greece during WWII and would then take part in a civil war there between monarchists and communists in arguably the first conflict of the Cold War, and then in the 1990s NATO would intervene not once but twice to prevent Muslim populations being ethnically cleansed by Serbian nationalists.

“WHY ARE YOU GOING ON HOLIDAY TO A WARZONE?”

Given all of this history it is striking how little understood the Balkans is in America or Western Europe. In a piece for the New Yorker, the Yugoslav-born journalist Tea Obrecht lamented that the lethal floods which struck Bosnia and Serbia last month leaving thousands homeless and causing billions of pounds of damage were all but ignored by the Western media until (the Serbian) Novak Djokovic called them out for it on twitter. She observes that:

The former Yugoslavia has never been especially fashionable. Its countries are “somewhere, over there” in the back end of Europe, crouching between the desirable vacation mainstays of Italy and Greece. Sure, the Dalmatian coast is pretty nice, and if you can afford it there are good times to be had on Hvar. These days, Bosnia and Croatia offer inexpensive stopovers for summer inter-railing, Dubrovnik and Belgrade are ports of call on European tours, and Novi Sad has cemented its place in pop culture as the home of the legendary Exit music festival. The former Yugoslavia has contributed legendary athletes, from Vlade Divac to Jelena Janković to Edin Džeko, to a range of sports; meanwhile, in the diaspora, the voices of Balkan doctors, scientists, and professors are taking root in Western institutions. This has been a significant upswing from the kind of associations that plagued the Balkans in the early nineties: shuffling, gaunt-faced refugees; or aviator-masked, machine-gun-wielding paramilitary; the ubiquitous wool-clad septuagenarian leaning on a rake in the foreground of a panorama detailing the ashen remains of his farm and the minefield beyond.

Nevertheless, these stale tropes have been reinforced again and again, hammered into reality by distance and laziness and inscrutability. They have become familiar and inextricable items in the ex-Yugoslavia package. On hearing that you’re from those parts, people at barbecues say “I was over there in 1973, and it was absolutely beautiful—its terrible what happened”, while you nod and brace yourself for the inevitable follow-up: “is it getting any better?” You explain that you go back frequently; that yes, Twitter is totally a thing in the Balkans; and of course, it’s quite safe to travel there now—except, perhaps, like other soccer-happy regions, during major club and World Cup qualification matches. If, like me, you are of mixed background, you explain that your family is full of Bosnians and Slovenes and Serbs alike, completely upending the flashcard facts people employ for making sense of the region: Serbs as nationalistic savages; Bosnians as godforsaken peasants; Croats as the good-looking, rough-around-the-edges émigrés that your hairdresser dated in her early twenties—casually, of course.

Obrecht might lament that her friends slip into thinking about the people of the Balkans in terms of stereotypes. I’m just impressed they are aware enough of the region to have stereotypes about its people.

When last year, I was showed a student from Pristina a spare room me and my housemates were trying to let out, it transpired I was the first person she had spoken to in the UK who knew Pristina was in Kosovo!

CLUELESS IN HOLLYWOOD

However, my favourite example of ignorance of the Balkans comes from of all places 24 [spoilers for seasons 1-3 ahead]. As fans of the show will know the early seasons revolve around the blowback from a Special Forces raid led by the show’s hero Jack Bauer which aimed to assassinate a Serbian general and war criminal named Victor Drazen. However, as this storyline plays out it becomes clear that the show’s writers don’t know and haven’t bothered to find out even quite basic details about the Balkans. So for example, in the course of a single episode the raid is described as happening in both Bosnia and Kosovo!

Do not ask this man for directions to Pristina!

These are two very distinct countries. True they do have some similarities; they were both part of the Ottoman Empire and the Former Yugoslavia, Islam is the largest religion in both and they were both involved in wars with Serbia which led to NATO interventions. However, getting from one to the other would involve passing through a 100 KMs of Serbia or Montenegro. The majority of Kosovars are ethnic Albanians who (naturally) speak Albanian, while Bosnians are Serbo-Croat speaking Slavs. And even in the Yugoslav years they were part of different republics. So a scriptwriter confusing the two countries is roughly equivalent to someone writing a WWII film and getting France and Poland mixed up.

The scriptwriters make further errors which demonstrate this was not an anomaly. They christen Drazen as the “Butcher of Belgrade”, raising the question of why – a desire to be alliterative aside – a Serb general would be butchering the Serb population of Serbia’s capital. Probably the worst example, however, is when season 3’s big bad, an MI6 officer named Stephen Saunders, the only surviving member of the team Bauer took into Drazen’s compound tells Jack that he was captured and tortured by the “Bosnian secret police.” This is dumb for two reasons. Firstly, the raid is supposed to have happened around 1999, by which point Bosnia was a multi-party democracy administered by the UN, hence rather unlikely to have a secret police?* And even if it did why would they be torturing – rather than giving a beer to – someone who’d killed a Serb war criminal who they would regard as an enemy!

Now I don’t expect much by way of accuracy from the ostentatiously ludicrous 24. That said, knowing the difference between Kosovo and Bosnia is a very low bar for the writers to clear. And they seem able to avoid these errors in other parts of the world: there is much to complain about in season 4’s depiction of a Turkish Islamist terror group but at least its members don’t suddenly become Uzbeks or Arabs! The depressing conclusion I take away from this is that being involved in wars in Bosnia and Kosovo has not led us Westerners to acquiring the basic knowledge of the region in which they lie to enable us to tell them apart. Rather, we have lazily elided them in our minds as places war happens.

A REGION THAT STILL MATTERS

This matters because from a Western point of view the Balkans remains an important region:

• If there is a further enlargement of the EU, it will be into the Balkans. Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia are now members. Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are candidate countries. Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo would like to follow. So the future shape of the Union may very much depend on the Balkans.
• The reason it took on such strategic significance in the run up to WWI is that it exists at the confluence of Western and Central Europe, the Slavic world and the Middle East. It still does.
• If we are in for a new period of tension between Russia and the West, the Balkans might well become an arena for Putin to make trouble in. Russia has historic links and as recently as 1999, Russian and NATO forces in Kosovo came close to fighting over control of Pristina Airport.
• There are large diasporas of Balkan people throughout the West. There are half a million people of Croatian descent in the US alone.
• While the risks of ethnic conflict and political authoritarianism have receded since the dark days of the 1990s, they have not gone away. Bosnia has seen the most improvement of any country on Foreign Policy’s Index of Fragile States but other Balkan nations notably recession mired Greece have become less stable. If the promise of EU enlargement is withdrawn and Russia starts playing a disruptive role things could become nasty again.
• There are large Muslim populations in the Balkans. This has led some to worry that it might become a source of Jihadis. However, there is also a possibility that its long established tradition of moderate and distinctly European Islam means it could serve as a template for relations between Muslims and their compatriots in the rest of Europe.
• Bosnia has recently seen some dramatic protests, which predictably the Western media largely ignored.

So while events in the Balkans probably are not about to have the world shattering impact they had a century ago, it is still a region both politicians and the public should pay attention to.
Yet we have such an attitude of complacent ignorance regarding South-Eastern Europe that if something of equivalent importance to the Sarajevo assassination did happen in the Balkans I am not sure we’d either notice or understand it.

 

*I appreciate a UN administered democracy is something of a contradiction in terms!

Minions improve everything, even the World Cup!

Here comes Africa

This graph from Vox shows the proportions of the World’s population living on each continent:

 

Notice how the share for Africa consistently grows such that by 2100 it is projected to have a third of the World’s people.

Belle (Review)

Austin meets Amistad in a superior costume drama

Belle is this year’s second film about race and slavery. The first, the Best Picture winning 12 Years a Slave, was an unremittingly violent study of life on a Louisiana cotton plantation. Belle by contrast is an apparently gentle Jane Austen pastiche overflowing with baronets and bonnets.

Given this comparison you expect Belle to wind up looking rather trivial or perhaps even objectionable. In fact, while Belle is not a masterpiece like 12 Years, it serves as a pleasing and insightful compliment to its Oscar winning thematic brethren.

While it might appear a strange concept to make a Georgian Costume Drama about slavery, it actually recalls a long running academic debate. The celebrated Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said argued that Austen’s Mansfield Park was greatly influenced by being set in a nation at the heart of an empire. So for example, he notes characters who derive their livelihood from holdings in Antigua. While Said’s theory is controversial, the idea of seeing how British High Society is entangled with empire is an intriguing one, and Belle runs with it.

Like Mansfield Park it is the story of a young woman sent to live on her Uncle and Aunt’s estate. However, this one is based on real characters and events. In this case that woman is Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw – who Dr Who fans might recognise as Martha’s sister who almost got eaten by Mark Gatiss) the daughter of a white officer in the Royal Navy and a free slave. Her uncle played by Tom Wilkinson is the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield. The story follows both Dido’s difficulties living as a woman of colour in a racist society and how her life is affected by a seminal slavery case Lord Mansfield is judging.

This remarkable (and real) historical co-incidence is fleshed out into an engaging story. It’s delivered with through some compelling performances and it retains some nice Austinesque flairs: “Sir!!! You’re manners are as none-existent as your brother’s fortune!!!”

It’s also rather insightful about how different hierarchies interact , what is sometimes called intersectionality. Dido is trapped in a kind of limbo. Elevated by her wealth, class and lineage but burdened by her race, such that it is, for example, not considered proper for her to eat with either her family or their servants.

And it can’t easily be dismissed as being soft. It’s a much gentler watch than 12 years but the horror of slavery is still pretty clear. The central court case turns on the events of the Zong Massacre in which 142 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard and drowned by their captors during their passage across the Atlantic. The horror of this event was made even worse by the venal motive for it; the crew hoped to claim insurance money for the loss of their “cargo.” While this happens off camera, it is actually a greater atrocity than any of the lynchings, beatings and rapes depicted in 12 years. Belle also points on occasion to the vulnerability of black women to sexual violence. It may not have 12 Years’ overt brutality but the darkness is there.

Despite all this it’s not a perfect film. For most of its length it avoids becoming schmaltzy but does sometimes tip over into that direction. This matter is not helped by an awful violin heavy soundtrack which becomes intrusively loud at key moments. Oh and if you know Oxford, you’ll spend much of the film’s second half thinking things like: “that’s the Sheldonian not the Royal Courts of Justice!”

Verdict: 7/10 – it has its flaws but it’s a clever use of an apparently comfortable genre to explore a dark part of our history

How different Christian denominations see each other

Not sure I agree with (or even understand) all of these but it amused me nonetheless

HT: Karl Barth for Dummies

The Bourne prolonging

Matt Damon is reportedly returning to play Jason Bourne. Here are 5 reasons he shouldn’t.

The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum are not just some of the best action films ever made; if you ask me they are some of the best films of any genre ever made. They are smart, disciplined and engrossing, and they are still one of best attempts at cinema which engages with the murky side of the War on Terror. So you could be forgiven for assuming that the rumour that Matt Damon will once again play the titular amnesiac assassin would be welcome.

While Holywood has of late developed a knack for taking apparently exhausted franchises and finding new life in them, I sadly don’t expect this to happen to the Bourne franchise. The most obvious reason to think this was how staggeringly mediocre the Legacy – the fourth film tagged onto the trilogy – was. Now you could argue that was a) just a fluke or b) an illustration of the folly of trying to make a Bourne film with no Jason Bourne, I think there are good reasons to think that adding to the original trilogy will not end well.

1. The films had a very clear (and now completed) arc

Beneath all the shaky cam, parkour and killing people with pens; the Bourne films had a very human narrative arc. When at the start of the Identity we first encounter Jason Bourne on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean, he has absolutely no recollection of who he is. By the end of the Ultimatum he has looked into the eyes of the man who effected his transformation from ordinary soldier to superior assassin and told him “I remember.” Bourne’s very literal identity crisis was the motor of the films and by the close of the trilogy it had been fittingly resolved. Further films are superfluous.

Worse than that new films risk undoing that resolution and thereby mucks up the thematic coherence of the trilogy. This has already happen with the Legacy. If you watch the first three films, you see a man triumph over the machine that first tried to control and then destroy him. However, to create perils for its new characters to face, the Legacy had to undo that triumph and reveal that Bourne hadn’t after all overcome the CIA’s sinister programs.

2. It is not the kind of fictional universe that benefits from being stretched

The Bourne films were always more about tautness and efficiency than grandiosity. If you were to begin binge watching the Bourne trilogy at the same time that a friend (with much less discerning taste in films) started marathoning Lord of the Rings; provided you skipped four minutes of credits you could go back and watch it all over again and still finish at the same time they did.[1]

The Bourne films have just as much of everything as they need and no more. This is a great strength if they are taken on their own terms. However, it becomes a problem if you are trying to find extra material for new films. If something is very tight, it will tear if you stretch it.

This became apparent in the Legacy. Its attempt to broaden the world led to it making the mistake of investigating the origins of the treadstone assassins and it turned out mystery was more interesting than genetic mumbo jumbo. Four films in the revelation of yet another CIA program to produce superspies seemed silly rather than shocking. In fact, it so struggled to find new material that a chunk of its runtime was just recycled footage from the Ultimatum.

The take away from this is that no every franchise can be Marvel. If you can draw on an incomprehensibly vast science fiction universe based on tens of thousands of comics finding material for nine films is rather easier than if you have a few Robert Ludlum novels which you departed from the plot of at the start of your second film. Of course, you can just invent new stuff – and that’s what the Bourne films have been doing for pretty much their whole run – but at a certain point the question has to be asked if there is any good reason to just create a whole new series; other of course than studio executives’ desire to put the word ‘Bourne’ on the poster.

3. The success of the originals was always about more than Damon

Giving character to a man with no identity is clearly a challenge. And had Damon not pulled it off, there would have been a void at the heart of these films. It is proof that despite his occasional lapses in judgement in choosing films that he’s a seriously talented actor.

Nonetheless, had a good lead actor been enough to make a good film. If it had been then casting Jeremy Renner in The Legacy would have ensured its success.

However, films are a team effort and the success of the original trilogy relied on a lot of people. Obviously, directors Paul Greengrass and Doug Liman but also writer Tony Gilroy, composer Jonathan Powell, the supporting cast especially Joan Allen and loads of people I don’t realise exist. Therefore bringing back Damon won’t recapture what was special about the first three films.

Damon directed by Paul Greengrass is quite a different proposition from Damon directed by someone who’s made some Fast and Furious films as Bourne 5 will potentially be.

4. Universal clearly has no idea what to do with the franchise

Not only was The Legacy a mess (and worse than that a cynical mess) but roping Damon back in feels desperate. Lin feels like an odd choice to direct Bourne 5. It just doesn’t feel like there is anyone who is guiding it properly.

5. The Bourne legacy (ahem!) lives on in other films

When the Bourne Identity first came along it was a real a novelty. It and especially the Greengrass directed sequels demonstrated that just because a film was part of a franchise didn’t stop it being excellent.

And other franchises have taken that lesson to heart. Most obviously the Bond films have changed massively in response to the Bourne films. The last Bond film made before The Identity featured an invisible car. Now, it has a gritty and believable tone with a director and star every bit the match for Greengrass and Damon. And it’s not stopped there; when I reviewed of all things Captain America 2, I couldn’t help noticing the Bourne influence and it was all the better for it.

These films are far more fitting successors to the Bourne trilogy than the Legacy and whatever Universal cook up in Bourne 5.

 

 

[1] I am assuming here that your hypothetical friend is watching the extended editions of Lord of the Rings. But even if they watched the original theatrical runtime versions they’d still be watching the Two Towers when you finished.

Vaccines are awesome!

Source: New Scientist

Films have been lying to you about duct tape

You know that scene in virtually every thriller where someone is tied up with duct tape over their mouth? Well it turns out that duct tape doesn’t really work as a gag!

Hat Tip: the Smithsonian Magazine