Keira Knightley Has Been Naughty
I know, a cheap provocative post title–but at least I’m not putting up any pics.
This article explains:
The atheist actress, star of A Dangerous Method, said she is desperate to be Catholic because she would “just get to ask for forgiveness”.
She added: “It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.
“It’s absolutely extraordinary. If only I wasn’t an atheist, I could get away with anything.
“You’d just ask for forgiveness and then you’d be forgiven.”
I don’t know the young woman’s personality well enough to tell if she is being snarky or sincere in these quotes. But for sure, the people on Facebook passing this around with approval, were interpreting the episode as yet another arrow in their quiver against idiot Christians. I have a few comments:
(1) Notice how the Christian (or other theists to whom this would apply, but I can speak more knowledgeably about Christians) is stuck no matter what. If his religious views require him to do things that are considered unpleasant by the average secular American–like getting up to go to church on Sunday, abstaining from masturbation, waiting for marriage, etc.–then the atheist ridicules the silly superstitions for their ridiculous hindrance of enjoyment. Yet, to the extent that the Christian’s views provide earthly comfort, this too is taken as further evidence of just how wrong these views must be.
(2) Ms. Knightley is certainly correct: It is very comforting to truly believe you have been absolved of your guilt for past offenses. The older I get (not that I’m Yoda or anything) I think you can understand more and more of people’s actions as hidden responses to their fear and guilt. Well say what you will about Christianity, but believing in an omnipotent Being who loves you unconditionally and is willing to forgive your sins, and who has built mansions in paradise for those who want to accept the kind offer…that’s a pretty good recipe for containing your fears and guilt in the present.
(3) I did a little searching and it appears that atheists are very underrepresented in prison populations. However, I wonder if there are better studies that correct for obvious factors like IQ etc. Even here, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were still a negative correlation. My seat-of-the-pants stereotype is that atheists tend to be more principled and rational, and thus wouldn’t be petty criminals, if only because they would see how dumb that lifestyle is. Unfortunately, I think people who don’t fear any God do a tremendous amount of damage in positions of high power, where they’re the ones determining who goes to prison. (Don’t get me wrong, throughout history there have been plenty of powerful people committing awful crimes, believing they were doing what God had commanded.)
(4) I really don’t understand why people are so outraged at God’s willingness to forgive. In a regular relationship with your friends, lovers, or family members, both sides screw up all the time. Is it the mark of a good friend who says, “I still remember that time you screwed me over 13 years ago; I am never ever letting that go”? Would that be conducive to healthy human relationships? Or is it better to forgive and forget?
“It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.”
If you are an atheist, why bother about guilt in the first place.
It’s not so much, “If you are an atheist,” but “If you are a materialist.” For the materialist, moral sentiments should lack any real significance.
Why?
If I may interlude…
Materialists believe human behavior is past causally determined. If behavior is past causally determined, then there is no choice. Without choice, there can be no morality.
Depends on what you mean by “choose”. If you mean, “evaluate different options and select one due to belief that the world would have a better state than if the other options were taken”, then you can choose even in a deterministic universe.
How so?
Why don’t you accept the argument that In a deterministic universe, your behavior is determined, and as such, there is no room for weighing or selecting among alternatives. It’s all a single inevitable history.
Egoist wrote:
Why don’t you accept the argument that In a deterministic universe, your behavior is determined, and as such, there is no room for weighing or selecting among alternatives[?]
Silas can’t help but reject your argument.
That’s a good point.
Because there are difference senses in which an action is determined, and different implications corresponding to different meanings, as I tried to give an example of in my post.
Under the (non-quantum) deterministic model, you:
– ARE making choices (in these sense above, but
– the choices could NOT be anything else,
– but a different worldstate would STILL (counterfactually) obtain if you *had* acted differently.
This is why you have to be careful in which implications you equate with each prong of what is meant by “free will”, etc. I’m drawing here on the treatment given in Gary Drescher’s Good and Real, by the way.
(Note that quantum phenomena can be coherently [hah!] described as deterministic but indeterminism *in measurement*, i.e. which part of the wavefunction you decohere to.)
Silas:
Under the (non-quantum) deterministic model, you:
ARE making choices (in these sense above, but
the choices could NOT be anything else
I can’t wrap my head around these two points.
When I see the first point, I think “OK, my future course of action could in reality be more than one course. I can choose which course to follow.”
When I see the second point, I think “OK, my future course of action can only ever be one particular path. I cannot choose which course to follow.”
I can’t hold both statements as true at the same time.
I’m drawing here on the treatment given in Gary Drescher’s Good and Real, by the way.
Thanks for the reference. I don’t have that book, but I did some digging online and I learned that Drescher gave an interpretation of Newcomb’s paradox.
Have you seen this video? Long argues that Newcomb’s paradox shows that we can’t coherently regard ourselves as past causally determined.
Since I don’t have Drescher’s book, could you tell me how Long’s interpretation lines up with Drescher’s?
don’t pirate G&R from avaxhome.ws
Anyway, would be glad to answer, but don’t have time to analyze Long’s position for comparison. But my previous reply was referring to my definition of “choice”, which was defined in the reply previous to it, and I think reading it in that context would make more sense (it’s a slightly non-standard definition of choice, but only slightly).
As for cashing out the meaning of “possible courses” of action, you need to first have a model for representing counterfactuals. If you can’t make any sense of counterfactuals, then there’s not much to discuss. But once you do, then my statements can make sense of “counterfactual surgery” (another ref: Judea Pearl’s handling of causality and causal diagrams): *if* this were different, then that would be different, and so on (which is consistent with the idea that “this” *can’t* be different, but it allowed lattitude in its meaning in this context).
This seems to assume materialism and determinism are coterminous. Is that true?
Compatibilism?
David Ramsay Steele’s book on athiesm advances a “materialist” position (rejecting all supernatural phenomena). but also rejects determinism. He has an interesting sidebar in the book on free will.
Because it’s not very plausible to suggest that moral truths are made up of matter and energy.
They aren’t made of God, either.
Want to try again, this time without category errors?
I made no category error.
“They aren’t made of God, either.”
And someone who thought that only God existed should also reject the existence of moral truths.
So then your criticism isn’t of *moral* truths per se, but that the truth of anything can’t “exist” in any materialist paradigm, because materialists think that only matter and energy “exist”. and (you suppose) that is the same sense of “exist” that you’re using here?
Want to try again, this time without category errors?
Silas is more punitive than the God of Moses.
So, atheists cannot determine what is morally right or wrong based upon reason? I reject that.
Reason doesn’t really say anything about right or wrong. All it will tell you is whether one set of ethical rules is logically consistent with another.
But atheists can still rely on moral intuition. The one wrinkle is that there seems to be no reason to think that unguided evolution would produce a “valid” (as opposed to useful) set of moral intuitions. But an atheist can still always make that leap of faith.
The atheist materialist, on the other hand…
Well, that consistency is what really matters as far as human thought is concerned, because we cannot think in any other terms. In the end, we are the only interpreters of our own judgements. Ask a wolf to conceive of god, and you’ll be met with a vicious bite.
God is merely the personification, or conceptualization, of our own reason. He is the “rule” that tells us right from wrong. However, as you can see, some rules are different than others, just as some concepts of God are different than others.
We are then only left with reason, or the agreement upon the rules of such.
“So, atheists cannot determine what is morally right or wrong based upon reason? I reject that.”
Atheists don’t believe in the kind of guilt that Christians think God is willing to forgive you.
Atheists can, of course, think in terms of moral obligations, e.g. toward other members of society. But failure to meet these obligations isn’t something you can make undone by praying from a Christian point of view.
In other words, suppose you were a Christian and had stolen something. You can get forgiveness for that from God and repair your relationship with God by praying and asking for it. But it’s wrong to think that you can pay off your debts to society by praying. Christians feel the same kind of guilt as Knightely even after they obtained forgiveness for their sins from God.
As a Christian, if you meet the man you have stolen from, you will not say: “Well, it’s right, I have stolen from you. But I just went to church and prayed it away, so get over it!”
Contrast this to the sentence “If only I wasn’t an atheist, I could get away with anything.” … She apparently doesn’t understand what she is talking about.
Well, she’s an actress, what do you expect? Not only can’t they change the oil on their car, they don’t even know that this must be done.
Don’t know if she was an actress actually, but I got it as a fun mail today so why not share it. Just unbelievable:
http://www.caliberforumz.com/showthread.php?t=30714
You made me click the title almost against my will, and no pics?!?
I’m atheist but, via Rothbard, developed an interest in and respect for Christianity. My pre-Rothbard view was roughly Keira’s; that forgiveness was carte blanche, unlimited swipes. I would’ve said the Nash is beg forgiveness, early and often. Now I get that you’ve got to be really sincere; you can’t fake it. Which kind of takes the bloom off that rose for Ms. Knightley.
My own stereotype on the prison-religion nexus is that strains of christianity that stress self-rationalization give a moral force to one’s natural temptation to rationalize immoral acts. So instead of having to rationalize the act (as an atheist), a christian from such a tradition need only rationalize to a single line of scripture, then they coast effortlessly to moral rationalization of the act itself.
Desperate to be Catholic…..to liberate herself from feelings of guilt…..yeah.
Possibly it’s just the way the newspaper edits the article, but she doesn’t come across as particularly sincere in her efforts to take onboard the Catholic faith, nor her efforts to seek forgiveness.
Rumour has it that God is nobody’s fool, speaking for myself I’ve never met the guy… but anyone who is going to the trouble of taking up a religion, probably wants to know that the boss is plausibly competent.
Normally I don’t read the Sunday posts, but I couldn’t resist since the title included a name of an attractive actress which made me curious (although I don’t really appreciate her acting…), so I’ll add my two coins for the ferryman here.
Of course there are less sins an atheist could commit since they for sure don’t care about what we could call “petty sins” (don’t have sex before marriage, don’t use condoms, don’t miss a mass etc…). Yet I think an atheist still has the problem of guilt, and would like to have the possibility to be just forgiven your “sins”. An omnipotent being that forgives you helps you to get along with your feeling of guilt. Of course to be forgiven you need to regret honestly what you have done. You should not regret because you fear hell, but because you should feel sorry for the harm you really caused. I just think that if this is true and God exists really that a much higher share of self-declared atheists will be welcomed by him in heaven than actual self-declared Christians, which would be perfectly analog to your prison data.
Except of course God is an egomaniac who first of all craves for recognition and keeps score of how often someone called his name, prayed, went to church etc. versus the amount of sins someone did, therefore more or less ignores if someone really lived a good life if he just worshipped enough.
“Yet I think an atheist still has the problem of guilt, and would like to have the possibility to be just forgiven your “sins”.”
A Christian doesn’t have that possibility, either. A Christian feels two kinds of guilt for his wrongdoings. Just as an atheist would, he feels that his deeds were wrong and an injustice upon the victim. Again, if you steel something from your brother, you feel guilt toward him. And you need to apologize and ask him for forgiveness.
On top of that, a christian feels that he has committed a crime against God. And he feels a separate kind of guilt on that score. And it is only this kind of guilt that you can make up for by asking forgiveness in a prayer. The guilt that you feel toward your brother is still there. Christians don’t have a way of making that go away either. There is really no difference to an atheist feeling of guilt.
I thought a bit about it, and first thought it’s right what you say, then no its wrong, now again I think by and large you are right, but I have a but to add. So I think even if you cannot really cancel out the let’s call it secular feeling of guilt that you have by being forgiven by God, I still think it helps and is comforting to get along. It helps to know someone who really cares about this is able to forgive you.
It’s a bit like a friend you talk to about problems you have, that are not solvable because of this talk, but it helps to get along, to bear the misery… So yes it really is by far not as easy as it may sound what Keira says, but there is some truth to it.
Bob didn’t mention this, although I’m certain he’s aware of it, so I will make it plain.
The Catholic sacrament of reconciliation (formally asking God for forgiveness of your sins through the priest) only absolves you of your sins if you take conscious acts to avoid sinning after reconciliation. It’s not like you can get drunk and get some whores all weekend, then get forgiven, then do it again the next weekend. Go, and sin no more.
Bob:”I really don’t understand why people are so outraged at God’s willingness to forgive.”
I think Bob more of us have objected to god’s willingness — eagerness actually — to punish forever. If you look at the Koran you will see god deliberately misleading some so that he may damn them. I recall similar passages in the Bible but none spring to mind right now.
Emo Phillips makes KK’s point:
“When I was a kid I prayed for a bicycle but then I learned prayer doesn’t work like that. So I stole one and prayed for forgiveness.”
Normally I don’t comment but just enjoy the delightful banter, but I feel compelled to ask….
What passages in the Quran does Allah deliberately mislead his creation?
I don’t think I’ve come across it.
Thanks much.
Just to warn you, ABT, I would say that there are blog comments in which Ken B. deliberately misleads his readers. Just FYI.
Yeah, I suspect Ken doesn’t have any examples from the Quran or Bible about deliberate misleading….
but I’m open to be shown something new
patiently waiting.
You posted this *after* I cited a passage. You disagree with the interpretation. That’s fine. Just don’t pretend that my citation is not directly on point, and that a straightforward interpretation of the passage I cited is what I said. Or from sura 74 and 14 and others “Allah misguides whom he wills”.
And please, don’t pretend Calvisnist predestination has no scriptural support. You don’t have to accept it, but it’s not a fraud upon the Bible to argue it.
I never argued anything about Calvinist predestination by the way. I am discussing the Quran.
So if you wanna interpret the Bible from the perspective of Calvinism predestination and more deterministic worlds then find the self-consistency of message within the text and more power to you!
Just don’t begin by speaking of Quran and then jumping to Bible. They are different texts and should be judge through their own lenses.
Bottomline: you can compare them, but you don’t find textual self-consistencies through cross-referencing.
and my bad about the delayed response… didn’t see your reply.
@ABT: You did write this I take it? “Yeah, I suspect Ken doesn’t have any examples from the Quran or Bible …” So I answered both prongs. Two prongs, two answers.
None of my citations or arguments rely on cross referencing; quite the reverse. it is apologists who must always ‘intertextualize’ to explain away plain text.
Oops Forgot to drop my middle intials …
Now Bob, just when we were getting along better!
@ABT: I am going from memory where to find them but here is one bit from Sura 2 (quoted not from memory but an online translation):
2:6 As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not.
2:7 Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
There are other passages as well. Allah makes it impossible for them to believe and then damns them.
The Quran is indeed littered with passages like this, but I believe your interpretation is incorrect.
Firstly, it cannot be read that Allah has mislead you but that there is a seal over your hearts, in that you will not believe even when shown evidences. So in this sense Allah is merely stating facts about the condition of some people on Earth. I cannot see how you can think Allah has mislead anyone… Allah is saying some people won’t ever believe because they do not consider the same evidences (e.g. evidences derived from belief in the Unseen whatever that Unseen may be) under any circumstance.
Secondly, and I believe Bob has been discussed before, but Allah (= to God of course) is without time. Meaning from the perspective of One who is timeless you have already lived and died and chosen and acted. Essentially we are playing “catch-up” for lack of better words. So Allah is informing you of the condition of non-believers and that some people will never believe. (See Sura Ikhlas for statements about timelessness)
Hope this helps, Ken!
No, the passage says Allah has sealed their hearts, not that they have sealed their hearts.
Your argument seems to be ‘Allah cannot actually misguide people because Allah is good, so the passage must be interpreted differently to mean something else.’ Perhaps, but Bob and others here also argue god is inscrutable which seems incompatible with that. To a non-believer the passages, and you concede there are many, or “allah misguides whom he wills” (in 14, 16, and others has a natural direct meaning.
An illustration. Here’s an example form a website engaging in exactly the sort of apologetics I think ABT is: putting forth
From http://www.islamic-life.com/forums/anti-islamic-refutations/allah-misguide-whimsically-2270
It’s not a translation issue. Allah is the active agent. It’s a matter of areguing the passage does not *really* mean what it plainly says.
You are missing the point of what I said Ken. And I may not have been clear.
When you interpret/analyze Quran (or any other text for that manner) it is up to the reader to retrieve the honesty of the text. The way to retrieve the honest meaning is to find the self-consistent message.
For example, if I’m reading a book and it says “My toilet is running”. To an american born and raised this obviously means the water won’t stop but some random Moroccan who knows British English won’t have any idea what it means and may take it as “WTF? how can a toilet run?!?” The wise person then reads and tries to understand sentences around it. And if it still isn’t clear, at the very least he should know his “interpretation” is wrong.
So similar to that example, Allah does not the way humans do. How do we know this or at least that your particular literal interpretation is incorrect? Well you’d have to understand the nature of Allah a bit better (to be clear you don’t need to know Allah in His entirety; just know what Allah is not within the text, not your pre-textual notion of what Allah is).
1) Allah has no beginning or end, and time does not apply to Him
Source: Sura 112 Ikhlas – Say O Muhammad ” He is Allah, the One, the Self-Sufficient, Sovereign, and the Eternal. He begets not, nor is he begotten and there is none like him.
Others if interested: Sura 3 Verse 2; Sura 20 Verse 111; Sura 2 Verse 255; those are the ones I know off-hand
Just taking this from the text itself, the consistent interpretation is Allah exists outside of the this Time and event-based plane. He isn’t waiting around for you to perform actions because you cannot wait if time doesn’t apply. Further, Allah doesn’t “do”, Allah says be and it is (I don’t think I have to source this, but if you want I can find the exact location).
So again I say, Allah is telling you as a matter of fact. Some will never believe because there is a seal over their hearts and because nothing in this world moves or exists without Allah’s sanction/permission then of course Allah has put a seal on their hearts because you chose to not accept the Bayyinat (clear evidence); He permitted your choice. And isn’t allowing one to make their own choices truly a great Mercy?
ps- this Mercy is of course consistent itself with many other passages that define Allah’s endless Mercy.
🙂
I will end this loooooooonnnggg reply with this passage to help clarify from Sura 16 Verse 33:
“ARE THEY [who deny the truth] but waiting for the angels to appear unto them, or for God’s judgment to become manifest? [29] Even thus did behave those [stubborn sinners] who lived before their time; and [when they were destroyed,] it was not God who wronged them, but it was they who had wronged themselves”
“I recall similar passages in the Bible but none spring to mind right now”
Pharoh in the exodus episode comes to mind.
And I second Peter. A Kera Knightley tag line and pictures of Joseph Fetz!!
🙂
I do have a bigger rack if that helps at all.
The Chicxulub crater with two milk duds thrown in would be a bigger rack.
Regarding (1), this is not so different from how believers view atheists, either. If people don’t have any hang-ups on masturbation or pre-marital sex, they are considered to have “loose morals.” If people spend their entire lives dedicated to doing nice things for people and standing up for what’s right, they’re told that “deeds aren’t enough to get to heaven.”
RPLong: There’s a larger point to what you’re saying here.
God’s like an anti-trust bureaucrat — at any moment you’re guilty of something.
Atheism is to anarchy as God is to the State.
For example:
Both God and the State assume Original Sin.
Both atheism and anarchy assume we’re neither innately evil nor innately good.
This is sort of ironic because Bob’s _Chaos Theory_ is one of the final nails in what may be the coffin of my longstanding minarchism.
God’s like an anti-trust bureaucrat — at any moment you’re guilty of something.
This is because the theist type of involuntary egoist cannot help but retain for himself final judgment over ALL things, and in the domain of judgments that are made for the purposes of enjoyment, there are both approvals and admonishments.
Do you think an “involuntary egoist” might be an oxymoron?
Not according to the definition I have in mind.
“Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (i.e. combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of “being exalted,” and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.” – Max Stirner
If voluntary vs. involuntary is too misleading, since they are terms used elsewhere in other contexts that mean something else, then you can use “acknowledged” and “unacknowledged” egoists, or aware and unaware, or accepting and denying, and so on.
Gotcha. He’s what you might get if the Apostle Paul got naughty with Ayn Rand.
Fair enough RPLong.
Re: Atheists in prison.
To get a straight comparison, you would probably need to include not just people who self-identify as atheist or agnostic, but also people who are atheist/agnostic but who call themselves “nothing in particular” or “nonreligious.” Certainly there is a big divergence between these groups when it comes to IQ.
Atheists like in the OP are attacking a straw man. They interpret “forgiveness” to mean “it’s okay to”. It’s not okay. No one’s saying that. But both atheists and christians agree that true changes of character make a moral difference. It wouldn’t make sense to think of OJ as “someone who murders” if you knew he had a substantial change of heart.
That is not necessarily true that Keira thinks that. I cannot read her mind, but she could plain and simply just mean the burden of guilt that you still have to bear especially if you changed your character to the better, which could be at least lightened by being a Christian who is (at least) forgiven by God.
I suppose it rather should be “…being a Christian whom is…”
I suppose it rather should be “…being a Christian whom is…”
No it shouldn’t. It would be right to say “who is forgiven.” If you’re worried about using the passive, then you could say “whom God forgives.” But saying “a Christian whom is forgiven” is sinful.
We have been subject to an object lesson.
Ken B. there is an alternate universe in which you and I are good buddies.
Is it one where Keira Knightley has a bigger rack than Joseph Fetz?
🙂
No, but why go to an alternative universe for that when Natalie Portman is already here in this one?
@Joseph Fetz: Good point.
@ Ken
The object is the subject, but the subject is not the object.
Thanks Bob for keeping me on the way of virtue. Glad that I kept that part in quotation marks, else I would have to pray now.. 🙂
Mr Murphy,
#4 is ludicrous. Of course people forgive each other within personal relationships all the time for small and large things but god forgives everything. I doubt my good friend would forgive me for killing his family or something heinous. but god forgives and praises these sorts of people throughout the Bible. Paul was a murderer and so was David. I grew up idolizing David but he is one reason i am no longer a Christian. He was a mass murderer, but a man of faith none the less. I dont get the morality of absolving people from truly evil acts. And god didn’t finish with David there he didnt receive justice for his only official murder (the one god condemned and didn’t command) god goes and kills his baby and gives his wives to his son. what justice, do evil and ask for forgiveness and other people will get punished. but as long as his guilt was absolved i guess its ok. i cant believe this is taught to children.