Australian PM Gillard not religious

Comments (10)

1. A prediction: they won’t have anything to say. Yet.

   Their pathetic whining won’t stand on its own. It needs muscle behind it, be it popular opinion, News Limited, certain politicians or whatever.

   Should, Sagan forbid, Tony Abbott make significant headway over Gillard in the polls; should the Libs’ election become a foregone conclusion, then the men in dresses will pipe up.

   They are, like Prince Edmund the Black Adder, only as powerful as the muscle apparently supporting them. Alone they are snivelling whingers almost everyone cheerfully ignores. I think they know this, and right now, they’re smart enough to shut up until Gillard becomes unpopular.

   The bottom line: they have no real influence of their own left.

2. When asked whether she believes in God, she stated point blank “no”. Which makes her an atheist, regardless of Wilkins’ misrepresentations of that term.

   1. I happen to agree with you. However: she’s a non-theist, and I think that’s a much bigger deal than whether non-theist and atheist are in fact synonymous.

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4. I have a problem with people saying that we should respect other people’s genuinely held beliefs. We should certainly respect their right to hold such beliefs, but not necessarily the beliefs themselves.

   1. No, you respect the people, not the beliefs. You respect that they hold the beliefs. You do not make fun of them for holding beliefs that are different from your own. You do not try to mimic their beliefs for your own purposes. That is what I like about it.

      1. Amen.

      2. I am more in agreement with Richard Carter here than with John. One can respect someone’s right (e.g., legal right) to hold a daft belief – even when you don’t respect their right to act upon it.

         I am not sure what it means to “respect that they hold the beliefs”. I ‘acknowledge’ that they hold the beliefs, but presumably that doesn’t quite cut it.

         And sure, you do not make fun of people for holding beliefs that are different from your own merely on the grounds that they are different. That’s not a good reason for making fun of others holding beliefs different from one’s own.

         On the other hand, if someone holds a belief in the absence of any supporting evidence, and in the presence of evidence strongly supportive of contrary beliefs, then making fun of the belief (and of the people holding it) may be fair enough. Ridicule has its place, however small it may be, in rational discourse.

      3. I am also more in agreement with myself here. If people have genuinely held but crazy beliefs, we show them more respect by pointing out (hopefully politely) that their beliefs are crazy than by pretending to respect those crazy beliefs.

5. Ive never read an anthropological or ethnological paper that has identified a daft belief. Insanity is also not generaly used as an interpretive tool.

   If a belief is not culturaly fit it is not going to survive.

   If you went in to the field to study contemporary beliefs taking the view that they are things that are genuinely held ( a beleif does require an extensive evidence base even if such evidence is fictive) but crazy you ain’t going to get very far.

   I use the rule of thumb that people are not generaly mad or particularly stupid (although it does often appear that way at first glance) but are experts when it comes to manipulating and using ethnological material.

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