Letter to Mark Vernon at the Guardian

 Mark Vernon, philosopher and former priest.

Dear Mark.

I read your articles on line and think they are among the best on the site. Obviously you must have a lot in common with Karen Armstrong. But what exactly will Alan Rushbridger have to say? Does he have a real unmediated view on anything? If I lay my hands over the Guardian and moan a little in prayer and ask for spiritual guidance on what the overall viewpoint of Rushbridger's Guardian is -because I won't read it anywhere in the paper -I would come up with:

Highly principled insightful and brave, whilst at the same time shallow opportunistic and cowardly.

And I suppose that odd mixture, that response reflects my view of Rushbridger's approach. Now to me, that particular combination of qualities is one that precisely reflects the moral outlook of a humanist and a pragmatist. All pragmaticians must be agnostics. As a pragmatist whether to believe or not is both a clear and a contradictory choice. The nature of belief itself  and the ability to be certain is at issue in pragmatics.

Alan Rushbridger, whose smile is touch fatuous, but I think it is probably because he guesses he thinks he knows what you are thinking.

In other words, because you don't believe in any ultimate moral arbitration of anything, you can allow slippage and inconsistency and tell everyone to get lost, on occasion. But, because you also recognise that all thought is actually sustained by belief and knowledge of the world, therefore what concerns you more as a moral enterprise are facts.

Not because you believe in the absolute reality of 'facts', necessarily, but because 'facts' are very strong beliefs and those facts that you choose to uphold and reinforce have power because they are at the substrate of political, economic, social thought. That is probably close to the truth about Rushbridger's viewpoint. I am guessing.

Karen Armstrong, rescuing universalist babies 
from the gray bathwater of theology

What religious facts should we uphold?

Armstrong's response will probably, going on what I have read and heard of her, be that we should uphold the positive values of religion and she is hot on the universal kindness and tolerance, isn't she. Does this mean the debate will actually be about whether religious belief can ever be 'tolerant'?

So your debate will probably be about the absolutism present in religious thought in contrast to the universalism - deconstructed - of the values of love and tolerance in religious thought, making the point that this universalism and the tendency to universalise value itself is a positive outlook that, if reshaped, can overcome the discourse about the other and introduce another discourse. The question of belief fixation and certainty.

Now I notice the title of the talk you will hold in St Paul's tomorrow, 13th December, at 6.30 : 'Uncertain minds'.

The mainstream endlessly  plagiarises Robert Anton Wilson. 
Mark Vernon even has his beard.

This seems interesting, but isn't it also banal. I don't see anything new in it. Or is this perhaps missionary work for a agnosticism. A riff on Robert Anton Wilson's 'Maybe' logic. The logic whereby if you preface all statements with 'Maybe' then they can at least be entertained.

Maybe there is only one God and his name is Allah and maybe there is only one prophet and his name is Mohamed.

Maybe!

Maybe there is only one God and Jesus Christ was his incarnation on earth and God is a trinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit and Jehovah.

Maybe, who knows really. What do you mean by that statement?

Maybe, the Jewish people were chosen by God to fulfill his plan for Earth and the Jewish Messiah will come soon.

Maybe. Doesn't sound very universal though.

Maybe, just maybe, when we die we are reincarnated depending on the nature of our actions on this earth, whether they have been good or bad.


Well, I suppose. Could be.

Maybe everything is an illusion and we shouldn't be horrible or nice or anything really but just recognise that everything manifested is an illusion that causes suffering and we should be companionable and point this out to our poputchiki.


A bit nihilistic, but I guess. Whatever. 

The angel Moroni...


Moroni?


Yes Moroni,what of it?


Sorry,continue.


The Angel Moroni gave tablets of gold with instructions to Joseph Smith who lived in a flat in New York and the thirteenth tribe of Israel were probably the Toltecs.

Well, it's a stretch, but we agnostics can entertain most ideas before we chucking them out or inviting them to stay a bit longer so, OK. I guess. Joseph Smith, right. Hm.

And maybe humans are divided into Alpha, Beta and so on and some are superior because they have no imperfections.

No. There you can get lost! Sorry. And so on.

Until perhaps you get to the Anand Marg, Satanistas and Dianetics and the like, and the more medieval, prehistoric calf-seething strands where I would draw the line and say.

Well no, actually, that's not going to work. In fact definitely not. I choose to reject this belief utterly.

Of course maybe logic is beyond the clacking whirring thinking of rationalists, but the clacking, ticking thought of rationalist atheists is not beyond the pragmatism of agnostics.

We can think like them if we choose. In many ways all arguments for a rationalist atheists ignore the central role of belief. They believe in external logics, as if thought was mathematical. Of course it isn't and they are irrational to believe it is, they should read their Kurt Godel himself rather than their rationalist bowdlerizations.

Of course the poor man went mad. He was a rationalist.

Is a Kurt Godel the one on the floor or the one standing up?

I once had a conversation with Jean Aitcheson* about Deidre Wilson, one is a lexicologist and the other a pragmatist and linguist. Wilson's idea, with Dan Sperber, was to conflate all of the Gricean Maxims into one: Relevance.

Jean Aitcheson: pondering not clambering

What she said was very interesting. She said that Diedre Wilson was very clever indeed. But that you make choices. By developing Gricean Maxims into one overarching theory she was like a monkey climbing a ladder. Or as Inspector Clouseau, would say, a minkey.

Best wishes,

Phil Hall  

Jean is currently Emiritus Rupert Murdochus Professor of  Language and Communication at Oxford University - I kid you not.