Each volume contains approximately 700 biographies. How many should each working party be entitled to choose? Should Tasmania, for instance, have as many entries as New South Wales? The fairest course has seemed to be to make the number of entries proportional to the population of the state in the period under consideration. This is explained in the preface to each volume. For the present period (1981–90), my predecessor, Professor John Ritchie, obtained from the Bureau of Statistics information regarding the mean population of each state and territory for the decade, and then allocated a quota to each state working party commensurate with that figure. (State working parties then ceded a proportion of their quota to allow for the Commonwealth and Armed Services lists.) It caused no one any surprise or distress to find that New South Wales and Victoria thus had very long lists of subjects, and Western Australia and Tasmania very short ones.

The population-based quotas are the only quotas applied. The selecting is then left to the judgment of the various working parties, who also nominate authors and allocate word limits (from 500 to 6000) to each entry. If they choose to check their lists to ascertain that they are not dominated by politicians, soldiers and clergy, or to ensure that women and indigenous Australians are fairly represented, then we are grateful to them for doing so – and I am sure our readers are, too.

There must be an element of subjectivity in the selection. One cannot measure the significance of the life of an individual with the scientific precision used to measure his or her height or blood pressure. Moreover, the ADB is not simply a roll call of the great and the good. As is spelt out more fully in the preface to each volume, in its pages are the infamous as well as the famous, and even some whose modest lives are included simply because they illuminate a particular aspect of the Australian experience. The ADB has never claimed to have drawn up the definitive list of the most famous or most worthy people to have died in each period. What it has always done, and proudly continues to do, is to present in each volume about 700 carefully selected, thoroughly researched and well-written lives of individuals who have helped to make Australia the country that it is today.

Di Langmore, ADB, Canberra, ACT

Against bigotry

Dear Editor,

Tamas Pataki’s essay ‘Against Religion’ (ABR, February 2006) should be taken as a corrective by anyone who has ever come under the influence of religious fundamentalism, or who has ever seen a loved one’s mind tangled or warped by jumped-up saviours, fanatics or cults. A hallmark of fatuous gurus and intimidatory revelations, whatever religious tradition they spring from, is an almost hysterical insistence on having ultimate answers and always being right, without a shadow of a doubt. The shadow, however, remains, and the dark side of illusory certainty is a punitive and vengeful puritanism that must always keep doubt at bay, precisely by destroying it.

Pataki plausibly identifies a driven, infantile quality behind such fanaticism: a denial of human vulnerability and mortality. Such feelings are understandable, and one can be very sympathetic. A step-up from the comfort blanket is to possess a unique talismanic, cosmic fix or magic bullet – whether a direct line to the deity or a prophetic key – able to protect the elect from the indiscriminate cruelties of what is often an unpredictable and dangerous world. Pataki is especially welcome and timely now that fundamentalists increasingly range at home, pumping up their political muscle by loudly entering current public debates. (One thinks of evolution vs intelligent design in science courses, changing abortion laws, making RU486 more easily available etc.).

More generally, I don’t think Pataki is just speaking to the converted (I mean, to atheists or agnostics) in his interrogation of the religious impulse. The devout should also find much to consider in his analysis. I doubt that it contains anything that will upset a moderate Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, as he or she will clearly discern the philosopher’s honesty and intellectual rigour, and deeper care for free intellectual enquiry, tolerance and mutual respect – all central to any religion able to call itself great.

John Jenkins, Kangaroo Ground, Vic.

Two cheers for Pataki

Dear Editor,

Tamas Pataki deserves at least two cheers for his essay ‘Against Religion’, but I hesitate to give him the full round. I go along with most of his critique of these Middle Eastern monotheistic religions that have, as he puts it, ‘complicated religious sensibility’. The idea that there is just one God somewhere up there who created and somehow still controls it all, and who has given a chosen people or prophet a special book of instructions authorising punishment of those who choose not to believe in it, is surely one of the worst ideas mankind has ever had.

But the ironies of history are infinite, and although a secular-minded historian, I am acutely aware that our Western liberal right of dissent, which allows sceptics like Pataki to publish such essays, is closely tied up with our particular religious tradition. That right to dissent began as the right of the individual to reject the orthodoxies of the Church, though it took several centuries of post-Reformation struggle for it to be generally accepted, and eventually extended to a right to dissent (peaceably) from the state as well. Our religious institutions, by their capacity to challenge the state and by their own internal divisions, have helped us gain that basic right to dissent. So I am inclined to keep one of my cheers for the Church while rejecting, with Pataki and many others, its monotheistic faith.

J.S. Gregory, Balwyn, Vic.

J.J. Haldane responds to Tamas Pataki

Dear Editor,

Having recently had drawn to my attention Tamas Pataki’s article ‘Against Religion’ (ABR, February 2006), I read it with interest. He sets out clearly a line of psychological analysis of religious attachment that has great imaginative appeal, ironically not unlike that he ascribes to religion itself.

Storytelling is a perennial attraction for narrators and audiences, but the question of objective truth is neither diminished nor enhanced by the power of narrative. Moreover the possibility of one kind of explanation does not, as a matter of logic, exclude that of another: in other words, there may be several diverse and non-competing explanations of why people believe as they do. The fact that a belief may be comforting (or challenging) says nothing about whether it is true or reasonable.

Furthermore, any group identity may become ‘an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression’, and the charge of ‘deceit and self-deception’ can as easily be brought against secular ideologies as against religious ones. When Pataki writes that, ‘Thought, unguided by reason or self-understanding, captive to infantile needs for attachment and omnipotence, becomes more or less fantastic and delusional’, he could as easily be describing the excesses of a political ideology, or a version of depth psychology, as a religious system.

Pataki immediately proceeds to quote a passage from my book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Religion (2003), in which I speculate about the nature of post-mortem existence and states that ‘the kind of religious picture described by Haldane is not refuted by psychology; but it fades in the light of psychological understanding’. The recognition that it is not refuted acknowledges the difference between (possible) psychological motivation and truth. But once that allowance is made the burden falls upon the critic to engage the non-psychological case for religious truth, and that Pataki conspicuously fails to do. He writes ‘there are insuperable philosophical difficulties with the conception of an afterlife described by Haldane’, but that is an assertion not an argument.

The simple, obvious and long recognised fact is that psychological theory may indeed be relevant to understanding the forms and modes of religious (and other fundamental) beliefs; what it does not begin to do, however, is tell us whether or not they are true. To establish that one needs to do more than spin a series of just-so stories about the genesis of beliefs.

J.J. Haldane, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Old habits

Dear Editor,

Matthew Lamb, in his review of Henry Reynolds’s Nowhere People (ABR, April 2006) has Charles Darwin appearing in the late 1800s. As a matter of fact, Darwin, whose The Origin of Species was published in 1859, died on 19 April 1882.

As an aside, in spite of Darwin’s theory positing biological and moral kinship and placing us firmly at home in the natural world, the overwhelming majority of neo-Darwinists and humanists utilise the theory of evolution to justify continued human exploitation of all other creatures. Old habits seemingly die slowly.

Thomas Ryan, Goulds Country, Tas.

Barking up the wrong tree

Dear Editor,

In spruiking for poetry as a potential agent of ‘moral and rhetorical’ influence (ABR, March 2006), David McCooey seems to me to be barking up the wrong critical tree altogether. I only know that if I ever catch myself being worked upon by a writer, it’s a sure sign that what I’m reading isn’t a poem – not a real one.

Oliver Dennis, South Yarra, Vic.