No True Scotsmen, Religion and Criminality
This old chestnut. It rears its ugly head every so often when a believer is found to do some terrible crime. I think the last time I talked about it in this context was when Anders Breivik went and shot up a group of young political people in Norway. Let's first remind ourselves of the No True Scotsman (NTS) fallacy:
As wiki defines:
No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.
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The use of the term was advanced by British philosopher Antony Flew:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again”. Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing”. The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about anAberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing”.[2]
When the statement “all A are B” is qualified like this to exclude those A which are not B, this is a form of begging the question; the conclusion is assumed by the definition of “true A“.
The defence of accusations against Christians for X, Y and Z is often “well, that person cannot really be called a Christian”. Which leads on to calls for a usable definition of Christianity, which then entails Christianity being defined (in arguably an obvious manner) with precisely the denomination or worldview that is held by the person you are arguing with. In my previous piece on this, I talked about how Christian commentators in the States often claimed that people like Breivik weren't real Christians, but were not nearly so careful in their definitions when evaluating the crimes or horrors of apparent Muslims. There is some serious double standardry going on here!
Why bring this up again? Well, in the UK, we have been hit with a terrible example of criminality. As the BBC reported:
A British man has been given 22 life sentences after admitting 71 charges of sex abuse against children in Malaysia aged from six months to 12 years old.
Police believe Richard Huckle, 30, from Ashford, Kent, abused up to 200 children from mainly poor communities.
The Old Bailey judge described a 60-page paedophile manual Huckle wrote as a "truly evil document" and said he must serve at least 23 years in jail.
A woman in the public gallery shouted: "1,000 deaths is too good for you".
In online posts, Huckle had bragged: "Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids."
Commenting on one of his victims, he boasted: "I'd hit the jackpot, a 3yo girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care."
Huckle used the dark web to communicate with and coordinate other paedophiles:
He presented himself as a practising Christian and first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year when he was 18 or 19. He then went on to groom children while doing voluntary work....
Investigators found more than 20,000 indecent pictures and videos of his assaults on children, which were shared with paedophiles worldwide through a website hidden in the so-called dark web.
He even tried to make a business out of his abuse by crowd-funding the release of the images and was compiling a paedophile's manual at the time of his arrest by the NCA in December 2014.
It his Christianity that has caused some debate in some quarters. Alistair McBay of the National Secular Society has written a very interesting piece:
A spate of media reports have suggested that criminals convicted of sex abuse feigned their religion. NSS Vice-President Alistair McBay argues that the media shouldn't seek to protect religion from criticism by misrepresenting these cases.
A disturbing new trend is developing in the field of reporting on child sex abuse cases involving the religious, whether clergy or ordinary worshippers. It infers these criminals were not, perhaps even could not have been religious, because if they had been then obviously they would not have committed the crimes. Their faith is therefore not relevant to their criminality.
The most recent example involved the vile Richard Huckle, sentenced in London for a catalogue of horrific child sex offences in Malaysia. The Press Association report widely used around the globe referred to Huckle as "posing as a respectable Christian English teacher and philanthropist." The Times chose to say "Huckle posed as a Christian", adding that he then "used his religion to infiltrate an impoverished Malaysian community. The BBC ran with "He presented himself as a practising Christian", while the Daily Mail said "Huckle masqueraded as a devout Christian."
Huckle 'posed as a Christian'? He 'presented himself' and 'masqueraded' as one?
We know Huckle was a church-going Christian, brought up in a comfortable middle class Christian household, and stood 'hands clasped in prayer' in the dock as the life sentences, all 22 of them, were handed down. Once you have been caught, tried, found guilty and sent down, it hardly seems worthwhile to keep up any 'posing' as something you're not! The same inference, that a devout Christian faith was nothing more than a sham to conceal paedophilia, was also apparent in the sentencing of Anglican bishop Peter Ball, with the phrase that he used 'religion as a cloak' cropping up in court, although prosecuting counsel also said Ball was "highly regarded as a Godly man".
It is perhaps understandable that Christians may want to play down Huckle's Christian belief or its place in his criminality. But should we now conclude that all the Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist and Anglican clergy who have been found guilty of sexually abusing children were only 'posing' as vicars and priests, and their devoutness was just play-acting? Was Bishop Ball only 'masquerading' as a Godly man?
We have seen these inferences before. In May 2014, a Scotsman article headed "Religion mustn't cause violence" claimed religion could not be the cause of violence or abuse otherwise there would be no accounting for the millions of religious believers who were peaceful, tolerant and inclusive of those of all faiths and none. It's not too difficult to turn that statement around – religion can't be the cause of people doing good things, otherwise there would be no accounting for believers who commit crimes against humanity and justify their actions on the basis of their God's demands!
That "religion mustn't cause violence" was refreshed later that year, in an interview with Nazir Afzal who at that time led the Crown Prosecution Service action against child abuse and violence against women and young girls. Afzal said religion couldn't have been a factor because the Rotherham men were not religious and in any case substance abuse and rape were forbidden in Islam. Forbidden they may be, but that didn't stop two of those convicted of similar crimes in Derby in 2010, both devout Muslims and family men with children of their own, becoming "vodka-swilling, cocaine-binging paedophiles who spent every available moment randomly targeting young girls on the street, befriending them, and then horrifically abusing them."
I have always wondered about this concerning paedophile Catholic priests. Are they religious? Are they really religious and do they hold genuine beliefs? Because that must cause some serious cognitive dissonance or insanely complex cognitive contortions if they are. Or are they lying, and covering up a lack of belief in order to access their prey? And this problem of the NTS invariably comes up. Does simply self-identification as X means that one is X? Or is this defined by the success in exhibiting all the properties understood as defining X, by objective third parties? What if you had 95% of those properties? 73%?
And so on.
Indeed, we get back to my good ole favourite notion: that abstract labels do not exist. As a conceptual nominalist, explained at length in a number of previous posts, I deny the existence, outside of our conceiving brains, of abstract objects. As such, properties exist, but ascribing labels to properties and grouping properties into other labelled categories (Christian, Muslim) is a conceptual pastime; those categories do not exist in an ontic sense.
What this then means is that there literally is no true Scotsman, Muslim or Christian. Just like any defined word, it's whatever we agree (or even disagree) as defining these terms. We could all successfully agree that Huckle can be defined as a Christian. More likely, we will vary and disagree. And there simply is no right answer. Perhaps, then, it is about whether that term, "Christian", is successfully understood by a majority of people, and whether Huckle embodies these properties, as agreed by a majority. So, we need a survey...
Which is why this debate consistently comes to the fore.