Farewell Fear by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple [Dalrymple, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780985439477
Google: XvLNkQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0985439475
Barnesnoble: 0985439475
Goodreads: 16106386
Publisher: New English Review Press
Published: 2012-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

22 - A Version of Conversion

Many years ago, as a student, I read a paper in a medical journal that described four cases of religious conversion under the influence of temporal lobe epilepsy. At the time the paper delighted me, for I was not merely non-religious but anti-religious. It encouraged me to think of religious belief or experience as pathological in origin, though of course this was itself a pretty elementary error of logic, unworthy of the rationalist that I fondly supposed that I was.

The psychological, sociological or other origins of a belief tell us nothing about its truth. The fact that I believe that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 mainly because my teacher would rap me over the knuckles with her ruler if I did not answer her question about it with sufficient celerity does not mean that the Battle of Hastings did not take place in 1066 - or, for that matter, that it did. The Marxist notion that being determines consciousness and not consciousness being might serve as a rough and ready empirical generalisation, but cannot possibly be an invariant epistemological principle. The origin of many of our beliefs about the world, but by no means all or even most of them, is no doubt to be explained by our particular circumstances. So while I doubt that there is anyone who never uses ad hominem arguments, I equally doubt whether there is anyone who uses only ad hominem arguments.

I mention this as a preliminary to an examination of one of the most peculiar recent cases of religious conversion, that of Lauren Booth, half-sister-in-law to Mr Anthony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Islam. I write half-sister-in-law because she is half-sister to Cherie, Mr Blair's wife, and we live in a world in which the relationship of full sibling is becoming ever-rarer, like some insects or birds. The conversion of Lauren Booth, not surprisingly, made a few headlines.

In this case it is perfectly justified to resort to ad hominem remarks because Lauren Booth herself has advanced no other arguments or reasons than ad hominem ones for her own conversion.

She does not say, for example, that she became convinced that there was only one God and that Mohammed was his Prophet. On her own admission, she had read only a hundred pages of the Koran at the time of her conversion, so there was no possibility that she was persuaded by the sheer intellectual force of that document. To me, in any case, the Koran seems a terrible mish-mash (just as Carlyle described it); I fail to understand how anybody could be convinced by it intellectually. And only intellectual arguments call for replies that are not ad hominem.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.