Here is Iain's work, archived before he can delete it.
I have been having a rather heated tete a tete with Bruce Everett over at Grods during which he trots about all of his usual lines about just how evil I am so imagine my surprise when I read the post that I’m considering below.
What?!?!
I’m not one to attack religious beliefs if someone isn’t trying to stuff them down my throat, either at my door on a Sunday morning or by attempts to seize power through the Commonwealth. Still this one, if true, really requires some serious criticism. This is what can happen if you let supernaturalism co-opt your moral decision making.
Having read a great deal of his previous rants about the evils of fundamentalist Christianity I don’t for one minute buy what he is selling in his introduction. The way that he pilloried George Pell for his stance on abortion or his reminding of his parishioners, who happen to be members of parliament about what their faith tells them about morality and how that should be reflected in their votes is not the work of someone as tolerant as he claims here.
“A man in southern India has married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony in a bid to atone for stoning two dogs to death, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.”
(AP, 2007)
Repeat after me. “Whaaaaat?!?!”
Ok fair’s fair, I too find this news item rather shocking and looking at the link I find a rather sad tale of a simple man seeking karmic atonement for his past sins. Sins that he thinks have resulted in his personal misfortunes.
I mean, the marriage to the dog is flat out bizarre, but things often seem bizarre to outsiders. I’m assuming that the marriage won’t be consummated, so I won’t criticise the marriage itself on moral grounds. The marriage itself, based on what has been said, seems like a pet registration with ceremony.
This is a good example of the leftist mindset with regard to marriage in general, to the leftist marriage is nothing special and there should be no restrictions upon who can enter into such contracts. Consent is an essential element of any marriage and lacking any ability to speak no dog is capable of giving consent so this union should be condemned on that basis alone. Everett however seems OK with this and dismisses any moral qualms about the “marriage” none the less.
The guy (P. Selvakumar) stoned two dogs to death and then blames his ailments on his misdeed. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, maybe not.
Stoning the dogs was apparently immoral because the spirits (or whatever supernatural force) deigned fit to cause him personal detriment. What if he didn’t develop health complaints? The apparent motivation for this marriage was his ailment, for which he sort out help from an astrologer.
Even atheist secularist like me consider deliberate act of cruelty animals to be something of more consequence than a “misdeed” and those acts are not “apparently immoral” they are immoral, especially from a Hindu point of view which sees all life as being sacred. Minions of the left are so often keen to talk about being culturally sensitive until it ceases to be convenient to do so then the deride other cultural and faith traditions as Everett does here.
You can see how supernaturalism has facilitated a kind of defacto moral egoism in this scenario. Imagine this in the news; “Man drives truck through preschool killing 11 and is given a clean bill of health, so all is well. Later stated that his self-interest has been served well. He was initially worried that he’d have to serve a prison sentence because he is prone to headaches in such instances.”.
I ‘m damned if I can work out what he is saying this for, so no Bruce I can’t see that supernaturalism has facilitated any thing at all at least not from his attempt at a metaphor in the sentence above.
I don’t have a Rolex. I suffer from Rolex-deficiency. Perhaps I’ll ask a Tarot reader to tell me how to arbitrarily appease the spirits for my wrong doing, and my personal fortune will increase! Maybe they will tell me to serenade a teapot.
So Everett wants a flash timepiece but what does that have to do with the poor chap who has married a dog in India? Very little I think I suspect that he is trying to make a point about the futility of trusting astrologers or following their prescriptions to happiness. But you never know when you delve into his prose what he is actually on about.
The arbitrary nature of the penance should worry people as well. Personally, I like my penances to be utilitarian and relevant. Cause X amount of harm? Then you have to alleviate a net amount of harm equal to X. But what happens when the penance doesn’t logically follow the crime?
The problem here is that Everett is trying to judge a situation through a catholic notion of penance when he should be considering it in terms Hindu notions of Karma, an altogether different set of moral principles. So having committed acts of cruelty to two dogs under Hindu notions of morality it is entirely consistent that the atonement should also concern a dog or dogs, remembering of course that unlike the Abrahamic cosmological theology the Hindu sees ALL creatures as sacred and having souls, not as mere things as Everett’s writing would imply.
Why not go to a psychic faire and get a moral reading? “I annexed Poland and was a little unkind to Jews, homosexuals, the disabled and burned art to get back at those art teachers who failed me. What? All I have to do is rent a holiday cottage on the coast with an octopus each winter solstice for the rest of my life? Sweet!”
Talk about labouring a point this is the second go at making the same point, that psychics and soothsayers et all are silly. I actually agree that they are but why does he have use a sledge hammer to break that rather small nut?
Of course, the dubious nature of the egoism in these examples aside, such ambiguity, the absence of a requirement for a reasoned link between transgression X and consequence Y, essentially allows you to hand out any penance for any crime. It’s not only marrying dogs and entering into real estate deals with cephalopods that pass the benchmark when reason doesn’t matter. “Kill member X of outgroup Y” makes it past as well, as does “empty the contents of your savings account into my wallet”.
This is the perfect example of Everett passing judgement on someone motivated by a Hindu sensibility and mindset with an inappropriate reasoning and an inappropriate assumptions of morality, because to a Hindu there is a clear and ethically consistent link between the sin and the penance here (although I think that the notion of marrying the bitch actually does take it too far). The snails and wallets stuff is just window dressing to show Everett’s contempt for all theists
Thank Dog we are only talking about canine marriage. Still, it’s a pity the guy wasn’t properly made to make amends for cruelty to animals. Selvakumar should perhaps spend the rest of his life laboring in a dog shelter for his cruelty. At least until he realises that it’s not about his best interests, it’s about the dog’s suffering.
~ Bruce
In his conclusion Everett repeats his cultural arrogance in suggesting that Selvakumar is not making a suitable atonement for his cruelty because in Karmic terms Selvakumar certainly is, the excesses of calling it a marriage not withstanding.
