ABORTION AND/AS/VS. HONOR KILLING. A pretty fascinating post, with no conclusions but some provocative questions.

I especially liked the description of how people can believe something is wrong, but it's the right thing to do--this comes up all the time at the pregnancy center--and the acknowledgment that contemporary American elites also operate with an honor/shame culture when it comes to women's reproductive capacities. The insistent, inaccurate identification of non-elite women's choices with shame, and elite women's choices with responsibility, was one of my least favorite things about Red Families vs. Blue Families. (I suspect the "Tiger Mom" fight/"mommy wars" in general reflect honor/shame culture around motherhood as well.)

And I really liked this point:

Volf, writing some guidelines for dialogue between Christians and Muslims, quotes another scholar saying that in any such discussion there are four participants: you and me, and your image of me and my image of you. Volf adds another dyad to that equation: my image of myself, and your image of yourself.

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I CANNOT POSSIBLY TOP CAMASSIA'S POST TITLE but you should know that she continued our secular-morality discussion from last week, here, and I replied in comments.

ETA: Oh, possibly my old post about St. Anselm would be relevant??

HE LOVED SOMEBODY BUT IT WASN'T ME: A bit more on whether there are secular reasons. This post is fairly tentative.

Camassia replies to me and Fish and Steven Smith here. I will concur in part and dissent in part!

First, Fish and Smith are both using a philosophically sketchy definition of "religion." They seem to be influenced by the (Rawlsian??? is he to blame for this??) notion that all "comprehensive doctrines" are suspect in the public sphere. They're also talking about a fairly specific kind of religion--I don't think this discussion would make much sense if you assumed that "religion" referred to vodoun, or the Greek pantheon, or (maybe?) Shintoism.

I do think they're right to say you can't get teleology from undirected nature--you need a Creator--and that most moral arguments do rely on teleology. Most moral arguments rely on an account of human nature which is about what humans should be, not what humans demonstrably are. In fact I'm not sure how you'd get a moral, "should" argument from a bare evidentiary "are" claim.

And so I'm not fully on board with Camassia's proposed knot-cutting:

This experience of looking at yourself as if you were someone else, and liking or disliking what you see — in other words, having a conscience — is essentially a brute fact for nearly all people. They have varying explanations of why it exists, or they may have no explanation, but still it’s there. And this experience compels at least a rudimentary morality; if you like people who are good to you, then you must be good to them, if you are going to like yourself. By the same token, if you respect people who don’t take crap from you, you’re going to be uncompromising towards others if you want to respect yourself. I didn’t say this was all warm and fuzzy. But it’s also why I don’t entirely agree with Fish’s claim that ideas like justice and equality are totally empty without God. The ability to see yourself as a person among persons, to put yourself in another’s place, implies a certain equality, or at least similarity. There’s a certain justice that comes when you dislike yourself in proportion to the cause you’ve given someone to dislike you. And — this is the less obvious point — this identification with others also means that you assume other people have that capacity, and can therefore make claims on them. I think this is why these words have meaning for people, even if they can’t agree on precisely what they mean or how to apply them to a given situation.

Because I agree that we are able to see ourselves in another's place... sometimes. We are able to extend empathy, and derive "should"s, morality, from that empathy.

But within this human-scale morality, can we ever say you should love someone you don't? Can we say to the Spartan citizen that he should see himself in the face of the helot?

So yeah: Justice and equality are not totally empty without (a specific conception of) God. But I do think they're importantly empty.

As I understand it, both Judaism and Christianity cut the knot by identifying the source and summit of morality with a Person, thus a possible object of our love. God is not an abstraction but a powerful dude working in history; God is not just a big goon, but the essence of goodness. God is simultaneously (among many other things!) a specific beloved, and that-which-is-to-be-loved. So to say, "Why should I love God?" is a question which--if you are actually talking about this God, and not denying that He exists or that He is what Jews and Christians say He is--simply unravels.

Obviously none of that is an argument for the existence of this God. Which may be why this kind of argument rarely plays a role in conversion! But I think possibly this line of thinking influences Fish and Smith when they say that morality doesn't really get off the ground without some smuggled incense in the balloon.

(...Hmm, I think that metaphor probably fails at physics. Heh.)

[edited: I think perhaps the next place to go is the Birthday Cake of Existence: What do we do when our moral claims appear to conflict with our metaphysical beliefs? There's more than one option!]

And had I known, Blog Watch, she said,
What this night I did see,
I'd ha' ta'en out your twa een
And put in twa of tree...

(...Sorry.)

Camassia writes the only interesting post I've read on the theology of Twilight!

Jesse Walker lists the ten best movies of 1989.

And Jesus, a wealthy young man: "'That's so pathetic, to say that Jesus was struggling alone in the dust and dirt,' Anderson says. 'That just makes no sense whatsoever. He was constantly in a state of wealth.'" Thanks--I think--to the Rattus.

Oh life looked so rosy in the blogwatch,
But I'll be a friend and I'll tell you what's in store...

Belated Halloweenery edition.

Camassia on Synetic Theater's Dracula adaptation. I strongly second her belief that Synetic should've stayed wordless; the best moments of the production were all dance, from the snaky vampire women to the eerie invisible horse. (That horse really should NOT have worked--it should've evoked memories of Monty Python members banging coconuts--and yet the amazing lighting work and the actor's total commitment to the moment made his galloping seem terrifying, not silly.)

Dresden Codak: 42 Essential Third-Act Twists. FOOD STARTS EATING PEOPLE.

Pumpkin Gutter: This may be the most fabulous thing ever. Iron Pumpkin, embryo pumpkin, American Gothic pumpkin, braces pumpkin, scary eye pumpkin, tarantula pumpkin... there's something here for everyone (in the Addams Family). Sadly, I forget where I found this.

Sean Collins: Reviewing Al Columbia's Pim and Francie:

But moreover, these scary stories and disturbing images are all so gorgeously awful that they appear to have corrupted the book itself. They look like they've emerged from the ether, seared or stained themselves partly onto the pages, then burned out, or been extinguished when the nominal author shut his sketchbook and hurled it across the room or tore up the pages in terror.

MORE.

Plus, he reviews Paranormal Activity. While he ended up with a different overall stance on the movie than I did, I really liked a lot of his review, e.g.:

...For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren't flickering--something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would--only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.

But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just...stood there, for hours and hours. That's pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. ...These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They're purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone's doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable.

(whole thing--plus comments-boxing!)

Basically, the buzz around PA has made me really want to rewatch The Blair Witch Project--especially since I am in the minority who really liked the Heather character!--so that's probably good.

I tapped her on the blogwatch and said, "Do you have a beau?"
She looked at me and smiled and said she did not know...

Camassia: A correction, re: sincerism! And a post about revenge and divergent views of authority.

Sean Collins: "Is it too much to ask for horror art to inflict emotional damage?"

(I think I'd also add a category for horror art which provokes teshuvah/repentance. Some horror I've seen and loved does neither for me--Suspiria is amazing, just incredible art, but I don't think it "traumatized" me in the way Sean means, nor did it provoke any change in my behavior. But a lot of other movies--Vertigo, obviously, but also Ringu and Barton Fink--seem to me to have the potential to provoke a change in self-understanding which wreaks itself through the emotions, but beyond them, into actions.* Anyway, yeah, I get behind Sean's cri de coeur!)

(*If you think you hear a faint echo of my disagreement with Sean about the ending of Eyes Wide Shut, you're right. On the other hand, I think Sean could have easily rebutted my points in that disagreement by saying that the movie itself has the capacity to provoke teshuvah, whether or not Tom Cruise's character actually ends up there. I think that's true, and it's a very strong point against that aspect of my criticism of the movie.)

Also, this comic sounds like it might echo intriguingly against "Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden," which is the only Eudora Welty story I really love.

VJ Morton has a huge raft of reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival. I've added at least three movies to my Netflix "save" queue on his recommendation, and will be keeping my eye out to see if any of them open in theaters down here.