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The blog will resume on the 18th March 2019

The Guardian Today in Focus: The fall of Cardinal George Pell

One of Pope Francis’s trusted advisers is now the most senior member of the Catholic church to be convicted of child abuse. The Guardian’s Melissa Davey was in court every day and describes the trial that brought about Pell’s downfall. Plus: Alex Hern on Facebook’s decision to permanently ban the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

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The New York Times: The Dying Art of Disagreement (Sept. 24, 2017)

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.[...]

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo. [...]

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.[...]

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say. [...]

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

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The Times Literary Supplement: Believers without belief

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.[...]

Separating “faith” from “belief” also makes sense outside a religious context. Suppose a loved one is seriously ill and the prognosis is not good. You might say to that person, “I have faith that you’re going to live”. This does not necessarily mean that you believe that your loved one will live; you might be entirely realistic about the chances of survival. What you mean is that you are rooting for that possibility: you are personally committing to living in hope that the illness will be overcome. Faith is a matter of hopeful commitment. To take another example, anyone taking a cold hard look at the facts must accept that the odds of humans preventing climate catastrophe do not look great; certainly, it is more likely that we will fail than that we will succeed. Nonetheless, many continue to have faith that our species will rise to the occasion. Again, this is not a matter of believing, against all the evidence, that climate change will be dealt with. It rather means committing to live, and more importantly to act, in the hope of a better outcome. Such leaps of faith are not irrational; they are what give life meaning and significance. It would be a sad world if everyone apportioned their aspirations for the future in the manner of an insurance broker.[...]

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion. [...]

While many atheists will no doubt see the benefit of shared traditions, they may find it hard to see the point of prayer and worship. In response, the fictionalist will point out that we are not cold-blooded creatures of reason motivated purely by an accurate understanding of the world around us. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship.

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Pindex: Brexit 3: Globalists vs Nationalists. Facts, Illusions and Hidden Threats

Are nationalists really just racists? Or are globalists simply corporate sellouts? There are dark truths, strange surprises and true threats lurking in the shadows.

In Brexit part 3, we explore Trump’s nationalism, an alarming problem with the English identity, illusions about nationalists and globalists, and what it all means for Brexit.

Quartz: Working long hours and weekends affects men and women differently

Men in the study tended to work longer hours than the women, with almost half working longer than 35-40 hours, which was used in the study as the benchmark of a “standard” working week. Less than a quarter of women worked over the standard week hours, and half worked part time (compared to only 15% of men). Among men, working even the longest hours hours wasn’t associated with any significant increase in depressive symptoms, measured using a health questionnaire designed to study psychological distress.  

The researchers took into account other factors, including education level, marital status, the physicality of people’s jobs, chronic illness, and whether the subjects had children. Though it’s not touched on in this study, women with children are more likely to choose part-time work—often to the detriment of career and pay progression—while their male partners tend to work full-time, which accounts for some of that asymmetry. The UCL study found that if women were married and had children, they were less likely to work very long hours, while men in the same situation were more likely to.

Over two-thirds of the men and half the women worked weekends. Working weekends did have an effect on men’s wellbeing, but only when other factors were accounted for. Men with “poor psychosocial working conditions”—for example, being unhappy with their pay or their job—who also worked weekends were significantly more likely to be depressed than the rest of the population.

The researchers hypothesized that women who work very long hours might be working in male-dominated industries, while those working weekends were likely to be engaged in low-paid and arduous jobs like working on public transport, cleaning, and care-giving.

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