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Michele Bachmann’s Antichrist Problem
by rjosephhoffmann
You saw it, right? Michele Bachmann, God’s little darling, quit her Church. Her gay-hating, anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-Black, anti-choice, anti-science Church.
Those of you who thought that Southern Baptists and the Assembly of God had the monopoly on Weird Religion, think again. America is multi-cultural, after all–like Bill Murray (as John Winger) reminds us in Stripes,
“We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse.”
If that doesn’t quite compute with what you thought the Pilgrim Fathers brought to these shores–all that beeswax about freedom of worship and conscience–then you didn’t deserve your B- in American history. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t have learned this in American history because the schools actually don’t teach it. Nobody (in America anyway) wants to think of America as Europe’s dumping ground for religious misfits and zealots. It spoils all our stories about grandparents, forty acres and a mule and Ellis Island. And it’s only when their crazy descendants surface in modern political debates that we’re reminded of what it means to be wretched refuse.
The fact is, most of multidenominational America was monocultural at the start. America was a big enough country to make room for Dunkards and Mennonites and Amish farmers, apple-butter-making, wine tippling German Benedictines in Missouri and tight-lipped Presbyterians in North Carolina. No one in 1850 would have been surprised at the repetitious ethnicity of the surnames on church rolls. Just like no one cared much about what the pols were doing in Washington as long as it didn’t reach into the hills of Tennessee or the woods of Maine. Churches weren’t melting pots or even pots to melt thinks in: they were mechanisms for preserving ethnic difference, family custom, ancestral languages, inherited prejudices. –Special ways of loving the God who died on the cross for your sins and invented the shotgun so’s you could protect your special interpretation of what that meant and sing the songs your grandpa sang.
A midwestern Benedictine of Conception Abbey
Their apartheid from each other was taken for granted. Their separateness from the federal government, on the other hand, had to be guaranteed by Constitutional authority, spelled out by a generation of pretty smart men whose influence did not last much into the following century except on the coinage. Mark Twain’s famous experiment in ecumenism says it all.
Which brings me to the latest example of cultural atavism: Michele Marie Bachmann, née Amble, of Iowa-Norwegian-Lutheran stock. (Where did you think those cute, semi-round vowels and troubled, vacant blue eyes come from?).
The stock went down when it was reported that the particular branch of Lutheranism that MB and her Christian counselor-husband Marcus belonged to, the Wisconsin Evangelical Synod of the Lutheran Church, was a sect caught in a time-warp of seventeenth century religious polemic. Rumour has it that German sociologists were convinced that the last traces of their kind were wiped out in the Thirty Years War, which ended in 1648. But no, they survived and swam all the way to Stillwater, Minnesota to form the Salem Lutheran Church, a retail outlet of the Wisconsin Synod consisting of 800 smiling, toothy, salvation-confident members.
In the main, they believe in all the things other Lutherans believed four hundred years ago before there was a United States, or a Charles Darwin or a Hubble Telescope. Among these things they believe that Christians should be “obedient” to governing authorities–not because the Constitution recommends it, but because the Bible says so:
“We believe that not only the church but also the state, that is, all governmental authority, has been instituted by God. “The authorities that exist have been established by God” (Romans 13:1). Christians will, therefore, for conscience’s sake obey the government that rules over them (Romans 13:5) unless that government commands them to disobey God (Acts 5:29).” Being a good citizen is a concession to the state, which insofar as it has any right to govern at all gets it from God. This puts the citizen in the stressful condition of always needing to remind the state of its obligation to the Church, which is, of course, not something the First Amendment talks about.
Importantly, Luther was able to side with the divinely appointed authorities against the zealous, protestant German peasants because Luther thought the state represented God, just like Michele Bachmann thinks the Republican Party does today.
Luther also believed the Pope was the antichrist. So does Michele Bachmann’s minister, er–ex-minister–and so does her Church. Luther wore the plain brown robe of an Augustinian monk. The pope got to dress up, drink better wine, and create new doctrines and sacraments. In historical context, the contempt between Luther and the papacy was personal (the pope called him a goring German boar, though it sounds better in Latin), so a little hyperbole can be forgiven. But something tells me that the use of the phrase in the Salem Lutheran Church doesn’t bother to mention this. And even Lutheran theologians who aren’t Salemites end up spewing gibberish when they try to explain:
“Luther’s point was, that in his view, the pope was so obstructing the gospel of God’s free love in Jesus, even though he wore all the trappings of a leader in the church…He was functioning as the New Testament describes … the Antichrist.” (Valparaiso religion professor George Heider). All clear? Benedict XVI is not the antichrist. He just plays one on TV.
America has been blessed with a rich array of religious craziness, so why pick on this sect, numbering about 420,000 adherents nation-wide, with over 60,000 of those located in Bachmann’s homestate of Minnesota. After all, they can’t be as bad at the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church or the Dove World Outreach Center, storefront for the antics of the reverend Terry Jones.
At the risk of misstating the obvious, it’s because neither of those groups or their simian cousins has yet produced a viable presidential candidate. One by the way who was permitted to slither away from her cultural-religious home and into a more mainsteam evangelical church (Eagle Brook Church) in Stillwater, one than openly opposes lynching.
Her erstwhile pastor “accepted” her resignation on June 27, 2011–within arm’s length of her announcement of wanting to be the next commander-in-chief of God’s armies. The resignation is characterized by that free exercise of conscience and aspiration to go where God leads that typifies Ms. Bachmann’s commitment to the creation of a Christian republic.
I’m not sure I agree with Christopher Hitchens that religion poisons everything. But it does make things rancid. In fact, I’m not really interested in what Wisconsin Synod Lutherans believe because we have a document that protects us from it.
But a lot of what they believe is incarnate in Michele Bachmann: her positions on global warming (hoax, because not mentioned as a sign of the apocalypse in Mark 13); health care (interference with God’s schedule); same sex marriage (you’ve got to be kidding); abortion (your comment here), and the Constitution (the writ of Christian men, like John Quincy Adams [sic] not to be distinguished from the Pilgrims of Plymouth colony in their aspirations). Bachmann’s entire social policy and cultural framework has been shaped by the Synod she’s just left behind.
What is even more repugnant however is that Bachmann calculated her move fairly skilfully, so as to preclude it being an issue in a political contest. She knows that Minnesota is not all Lutherans. Those wine-making German monks occupied land not otherwise reserved for protesant dairy cows–and Catholic faithful are a powerful electoral force. Stillwater is a skip away from St Paul, the Catholic twin of Minneapolis, where every Sunday a priest will hold forth from the magnificently rennovated pulpit of the cathedral with a sermon about protecting unborn life being the first duty of a Christian. Catholic politicians who vote otherwise and against the wisdom of Holy Mother Church? Screw ‘em, and don’t use a condom.
Michele Bachmann knows that she is toast within her own state without the Catholic vote, or more exactly that insofar as there is a Catholic vote any more it is an anti-abortion vote, an anti-gay vote–a “family values” vote. That’s why when pressed at a forum about the pope being antichrist, Bachmann said passionately and completely mistakenly,
“Well that’s a false statement that was made, and I spoke with my pastor earlier today about that as well, and he was absolutely appalled that someone would put that out. It’s abhorrent, it’s religious bigotry. I love Catholics, I’m a Christian, and my church does not believe that the Pope is the Anti-Christ, that’s absolutely false.”
Much as Ms Bachmann’s bigotry flickers beneath this denial, it’s nothing compared to the Catholic traducers who are trying to rescue her for the cause.
In a recent statement on Bachmann’s religious views, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said “It’s regrettable that there are still strains of anti-Catholicism in some Protestant circles… But we find no evidence of any bigotry on the part of Rep. Michele Bachmann. Indeed, she has condemned anti-Catholicism. Just as President Barack Obama is not responsible for the views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rep. Bachmann must be judged on the basis of her own record.”
Jeremiah Wright
The same Church that threw Ted Kennedy to the wolves and vowed to keep John Kerry from receiving communion in the Boston archdiocese has made Michele Bachmann an honorary Catholic. And why? Because she has become a champion for the moral and cultural backwardness that Catholic orthodoxy has come to symbolize.
But that’s not the most noxious part of the Catholic League’s endorsement. They want us to see a moral equivalence between the Jeremiah Wright crisis of 2008 and Bachmann’s potential religious liabilities in 2012.
There’s a problem with this “equivalence,” of course. It’s that Barack Obama didn’t believe most of the things, at least most of the angriest things, Jeremiah Wright spouted in his sermons, and everyone knew it. Michele Bachmann believes almost everything her church teaches about the Bible, sex, sexuality, evolution, creation, government–you name it.
In fact, she probably believes it more strongly and is in a position to do more about it than any pastor or member of her denomination. The ancient virus of a regressive American protestantism flows in her blood and influences every part of her social agenda.
She can’t resign from that.
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Published: July 20, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: abortion : Catholic Church : Catholic League : Family Values : Michele Bachmann : Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Church ..
One Response to “Michele Bachmann’s Antichrist Problem”
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ruth
August 8, 2011 at 10:45 am
What a beautiful, profound article! I hope to read this again and again. This should be published everywhere. Thank you for this meaningful insight.
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Quodlibet: Of Gay and Plural Marriage
by rjosephhoffmann
Does the irreversible trend toward legalizing same-sex marriage augur good tidings for proponents of polygamy, especially the reconstruction Mormons (Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints) and other groups who support the practice?
An article in the July 20 New York Times raises the question, and another by Joanna Brooks, who was raised a conservative Mormon, hints at how lively this discussion is going to be—or already is.
Or will the noise stop when the definition of marriage contained in the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which defines a legitimate marriage as a union of one man and one woman is repealed.
Until the twelfth century the Christian church was not very interested in marriage, and when it got interested in it it was mainly because there were financial implications for the Church.
Rome needed to ensure that estates and the financial holdings of lords and barons were legitimately passed on and that anything due to the church came to the church. Some of these dues (called benefices) were paid to bishop-princes under the feudal regime, so it was to the Church’s advantage to have a trusted priest or bishop as the church’s official “witness” (the term still used in the Catholic protocol for matrimony) on the scene to seal the deal.
“Holy wedlock” was a church-approved contract; whatever else being a bastard meant, it meant primarily that the church did not recognize a boy as the rightful heir of his father’s property, money, or titles.
As for the common people, the Church took on marriage as a sacrament somewhat grudgingly after centuries of being happy to let the peasants do it the way they had done it for ages, on the ruins of the Roman empire: at home, in bed, with relatives drinking and cheering the couple on.
The glamification of marriage is a relatively modern affair. Without the development of the “romantic theory” of matrimony, it’s hard to imagine anyone picketing for the right to take on the burden of a permanent opposite-sex relationship.
In Judaism and Christianity, and later in Islam, it had been primarily a contractual matter—easier to wriggle out of in Judaism and Islam than in Christianity because of some highly problematical words that were misappropriated to Jesus (Matt. 5:32 ; 19:9; Luke 16:18; Mark 10:2-12) about divorce in the Gospels. Paul has no use for marriage, and the church fathers regarded it as a necessary evil for people who didn’t have the spiritual stamina for celibacy and virginity. –If you were wondering about why the Catholic church has maintained its weird two-track system for ministers and ordinary folk, it goes back to the Church’s early contempt for the married state–a contempt that reaches exquisite spasms of intolerance in writers like Tertullian, the most hateful of all Christian writers, and Augustine.
Wives should be veiled but not pregnant
True, marriage was popular among protestants from the 16th century onward, but it wasn’t a sacrament. Luther defends it ( Estate of Marriage, 1522) as an “ordinance”—an arrangement—given by God for the production of families. In fact, Luther’s famous treatise on the subject reminds the Church that for most of its history it regarded marriage as a second class ritual, useful for relieving aches, pains and passion and primarily good for populating the world with new Christians. He also entertained three reasons for divorce: impotence, adultery, and refusal to fulfill conjugal duty. In other words, whatever doesn’t lead “naturally” from sex to legitimate offspring.
Which brings me to the point. A great deal of the same-sex marriage defense has been framed in romantic terms: Why should two people who love each other not be permitted the freedom to be together, sleep together, share lives and income and tragedies and life’s joys together?
The answer is (has to be in the modern, secular sense) No reason at all. The state has no reason and probably no justification for impeding the pursuit of happiness. To arrive at this answer, however, the state is obliged to redefine marriage in strictly secular terms, and to reject most of the symbolism and above all the “properties” that have been part of the popular understanding of marriage, an understanding heavily tinctured by theological canons and legal thought.
What has been going on in the legislatures of New England, New York and elsewhere is as much a process of rethinking as insisting, but rethinking the definition in historical context needs to be done if we want to avoid the impression that being pro-same sex marriage is simply being iconoclastic towards the “institution” itself. If something goes, does everything go?
The old, legalistic and Aristotelian thinking behind the “sacrament” of marriage dies hard. So does its biblical sanction, or justification. A lot of conservatives will point to the Adam and Eve story as a tale of the first marriage. That’s hogwash of course. God does not marry them, he just “makes” them (in two very different tales) and they do the rest, according to command (Gen 1.28).
But “the rest” is probably what matters most in the biblical context: they have children, lots of children. When God gets tired of their habits and floods the world, he starts out with a “good family”, Noah and company, whose proficiency at carpentry is only exceeded by a commitment to repopulating the devastated earth.
Noah’s Family: Time for multiplying
When the Hebrews first become aware of their minority status in a hostile environment, they looked to a patriarch whose preoccupation is with having descendants—the story of Abraham and Sarah and Haggar and Sarah, again, is all about developing the critical mass of Hebrews needed to make God’s name strong among his enemies (Genesis 26.4ff). Increase is everything in threatened or endangered groups. Ask any anthropologist.
The paradigms of reproductive success, however, are the kings: David with his wives and lovers, and Solomon with his international harem of 1000 women. No self-respecting Jew aspired to such bounty, but (like Tevye) he could admire it.
Reverence for large families as a symbol of doing your duty for “the people of Israel” emerges as the primary justification for marriage. It also explains why stories about barrenness and impotence feature so proiminently in Hebrew lore: what could be worse than a father who can’t do his bit for the tribe? What can be more humiliating (think Job) than losing your spawn? What is more disgraceful than a barren woman, like (at least temporarily) Rebecca or Sarah? The fear of childlessness even sneaks into the New Testament in the pilfered story of Elizabeth (Luke 1.36), mother of John the Baptist.
It’s well known that religious minorities, especially tribal minorities, have always followed similar logic, though not always in clear cut ways. If Jesus said anything about marriage it was probably forgotten in the eschatological fervor of the early community. That’s why Paul make so little (or inconsistent) sense when he talks about it.
But by the time the second century rolls around, a man writing in Paul’s name, and against the “heresy” of radical anti-marriage sects like the gnostics and Marcionites, is teaching that”a woman is saved by childbearing” (1 Timothy 2.15). Marriage becomes important, in other words, because the church recognized that its future (almost tribally construed) depended on a stable supply of cradle Christians— something the more puritanitical and perfectionist bishops didn’t provide. Interestingly, the non-celibate writer of 1 Timothy thinks bishops should be married–to one woman.
In every place where Christianity flourished centuries later, especially in colonial and missionary cultures, the ideal of a large family had everything to do with the “sanctity” of marriage: this was its primary definition. Love had nothing to do with it.
Which explains a great deal about Mormonism. As an old “new religion,” Mormonism could draw on its own desert and exodus experiences: Ohio, Missouri, Illinois (where Joseph Smith was killed), Utah. The myth of a persecuted remnant drove them on; they created their own class of martyrs ( just like the ancient Hebrews and early Christians) and took care of keeping the numbers up through “plural marriages.”
Before it was finally repudiated in 1904, the practice was an “open secret” in the denomination. But there was nothing un-Biblical about it. We have no idea whether all early Christians were monogamous and some reason to think some weren’t. What we do know is that when monogamy has become a norm in religion—as in most parts of Islam–it is attached to financial rather than moral considerations.
What we also know is that from Genesis onward, and from the religious traditions that correspond with it, marriage is a fertility covenant. Adam does not love Eve, and we have no idea how Solomon felt about his 700 wives and 300 concubines—in fact, only one, Naamah the Ammonite is given a name. David gets Bathsheva pregnant after arranging her husband’s death, and receives as punishment not forty lashes but this: “Before your very eyes I the Lord will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight (2 Samuel 2.10ff.).
Bathsheba
Personally, I think history tells us a lot about human nature but very little about how “institutions” and the definitions that describe them can be transformed. I doubt there is any logical argument within the current thinking about same-sex marriage that entitles us to think that what’s good for gays is good for Mormons, or others who espouse plural marriage.
The rationale for plural marriage belongs to the sociology of the practice at a time when threatened minorities considered procreation a method of survival. That rationale is no longer persuasive, no longer needed: religions that are losing members will end with a whimper and will almost certainly not be able to sustain themselves by reformulating their marriage codes.
Having said this, it is no accident that the religion that still extols marriage primarily as a fertility covenant (and has stressed this doctrine in its Gospel of Life theology) is also the one most viciously opposed to same-sex marriage.
The defense of gay marriage is something else: it reflects the development, over time, of love and emotional attachment as the primary criteria for the right [sic] of marriage and at least implicitly rules out fertility and procreation—the old biblical and ecclesiastic rationales—as defining properties or necessary ends. That is where we are in history.
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Published: July 22, 2011
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Tags: Catholic Church : gay marriage : Latter Days Saints : matrimony : Mormon Church : Plural Marriage : Polygamy : sacraments : same-sex marriage ..
11 Responses to “Quodlibet: Of Gay and Plural Marriage”
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steph
July 22, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Veeery good post. Rights and rites… Today I think marriage is a ritual about declaration of love. Love between two human beings, and a ceremony which will entitle them to particular legal rights. And whatever Mark’s source (Mark probably being the source for Matthew and Luke) that ‘instruction’ has been inappropriately applied to modern contexts. A plausible reason for it being originally articulated in such a way, might be that it would ensure the protection of women and their children from being cast out with no means of financial support. Nothing endures but change – they all said it in different ways. Just as a woman and her children are protected by law in divorce now, marriage is no longer needed to increase the population. We have an overload crisis. Marriage is for love first. Between two people. How can you love more than one?
Many wives today, is like open and honest adultery, at best, adultery without deceit and lies. Some people stay together because of ‘the children’. Some people shouldn’t have children, particularly right wing American politicians. Some people just shouldn’t get married. Some priests should get married. Gay couples, should be allowed to get married if they want to because marriage is about love between two human beings. We all need love for spiritual, physical and intellectual fulfillment and companionship. And fun and a future. Love makes people happy. Let gay couples be happy. Let those many wives find one love each… But don’t let that man in a white robe kiss any more babies please.
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steph
July 23, 2011 at 10:44 am
Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. You can’t have one without the other, so let the gay and merry couple dance down the avenue and raise your glasses and drink to
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rjosephhoffmann
July 23, 2011 at 10:59 am
In the horse and carriage analogy, what sex is the horse?
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steph
July 23, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Which sex is the carriage?
steph
July 23, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Whatever sex you like.
x
steph
July 25, 2011 at 3:53 pm
The horse will be a mare or a gelded stallion. Stallions are frisky and temperamental and liable to bolt and upset the carriage. I was employed as a groom and rider on an Appaloosa horse stud a while ago now, in Takapau, near Onga Onga where my sister’s farm was before they moved up to Te Pohue, near Napier. I looked after Bold Warrior, formerly a champion steeplechaser. He was nearly 19 hands tall and I sometimes used a fence to mount him but he never bolted because he was so collosal and overweight I almost did the splits to sit astride him and he was an elderly gentlemen anyway at 17 years old. He’d had his day with mares, poor soul, and had never pulled a carriage. He was incredibly fine and handsome though and had a beautiful sweet and gentle nature.
Mike Wilson
July 23, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Funny thing about groups wanting to get back to the Old Testament standards of marriage. Have seen an example of a happy polygamous marriage in it?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 23, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Good point. The beginning of marriage is the beginning of jealousy, and polygamy doesn’t seem to have reduced the risks.
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steph
July 25, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Mum said some people are born jealous and other people don’t have a jealous bone in them. I think she was right. She wasn’t generally wrong about anything that mattered.
steph
July 23, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Marriage is only the beginning of jealousy if the marriage isn’t a consequence of a couple’s love for each other. Because love isn’t love without trust. But a marriage to a man with more than one wife can’t be a marriage of trust because it’s unbalanced and he can’t love all his wives simultaneously. Therefore it can’t be a marriage of love. I’ve witnessed many marriages without love. Often they end messily or happily in divorce. But I’ve also seen enough meaningful marriages, including in my own family, which are all about love and trust.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 16, 2013 at 6:15 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
I am almost alone (maybe Jeremy Irons is with me), but I am still not on board with gay marriage. This makes me a one eyed, probably dead pig. But please understand, I love an argument. Marriage has never been about love; and as divorce rates among gays show, it still isn’t.
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Secular Rock and Religious Roll
by rjosephhoffmann
Get ready to rock America: Deliverance from the forces of darkness and superstition is at hand. No, I’m not talking about the Republicans being on vacation.
I’m talking about the fact that the “Rock Beyond Belief” concert at Fort Bragg is going to happen sometime in March of next year. Hooah!
In its tireless quest to appear newsworthy, the headline-chasing Center for Inquiry has spotted another star to hitch its galumping wagon to. Here’s the Flash:
The secular festival Rock Beyond Belief will now cometo fruition at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, March 31, 2012, after military authorities there reversed course and approved the event that will feature an array of music and speakers including famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
The Rock Beyond Belief event was planned in response to Fort Bragg’s sponsorship,endorsement, and overwhelming support of the Billy Graham EvangelicalAssociation’s Christian evangelical concert, called Rock the Fort, held last year. When secularists around the country protested the government’s support of this event and requested that it be canceled, officials at Fort Bragg justified their support by stating the same level of support would be provided to anyone who organized a similar event.
That pledge proved to be untrue when Fort Bragg officials, led by garrison commander Col. Stephen J. Sicinski, initially denied Rock Beyond Belief organizers the use of an outdoor venue and financial support. The Center for Inquiry (CFI) previously condemned those discriminatory actions as both an outrageous misuse of power and potentially illegal, and applauds the base’s decision to approve and support Rock Beyond Belief.
Speaking only for myself, I can’t find the drama here, the Superman moment where America wins.
For one thing, there is an actual musical genre called Christian rock and it wouldn’t surprise me if some soldiers liked it. Including soldiers who weren’t Christians. Given low wages and precious few other rewards for fighting two wars that nobody wants and the nation can’t afford, let ‘em have what they like as long as they don’t scare the horses–the way they did at Abu Ghraib.
But othwerwise, as far as I know, rock is rock, and I don’t know that adding Richard Dawkins to the mix (even if he wears tight jeans and has his nose pierced for the occasion) creates a new genre called secular rock.
I always thought “secular” was taken for granted for music that doesn’t come out of a hymnal or a concert repertoire. To the best of my recollection, most of the bad-ass lyrics I have to listen to as my daughter surfs the FM waves on my car radio are secular, but mainly just bad (how’s your Bruno Mars knowledge: would ya take a grenade for me?).
True, they don’t include commercials from A C Grayling or supportive messages from Sam Harris on twilighting your faith and teaching others to do the same, but that’s the price we pay for life in a democracy, sort of. If there’s a chance the atheist horsemen will be touring (sort of like the Three Tenors but without Ave Maria) I want tickets. Heck, I even offer my services as their booking agent. The only thing is, they can’t use regular rock spiked with a message and call it secular rock, as though they’re as smart as Lady Gaga or Stone Temple Pilots or Pearl Jam. They have to write and sing their own atheist songs, just like the Christian rockers sing about Jesus. They have to play their own gee-tars. They have to wear T-shirts and have a name. I suggest the GnuTonians. Otherwise, no deal.
The GnuTonians, Coming to a Military Base Near You!
Secularists are really bad at negotiating these teachable moments. It might have been the understandable position of the much maligned base commander, Colonel Sicinski, who finally approved the concert, that 98% of what soldiers listen to is secular rock. After all, this wasn’t a debate about church music, and balancing an evangelical rock event with a secular rock event makes about as much sense as balancing feathers and bricks, or rocks if you’ll forgive the obvious. Enter the Myth of the Persecuted Atheist: If they [overprivileged religious persons] get their event, we want ours. Poor Colonel Sicinski, just trying to do his job in an atmosphere where new atheist Christian-sniffers are looking for new ways to be outraged.
At least, however, the Rock Beyond Belief (get it?) organizers had the courtesy to be civil and grateful to the Colonel: ”Colonel Sicinski, Fort Bragg’s Garrison Commander has now approved the event in full, and we’re extremely grateful to him for this opportunity.” –Not CFI, which implies his actions were “an outrageous misuse of power.” Nothing is really exciting unless it’s outrageous or illegal, is it? Perhaps the story behind the story is why the event became polarized and litigious so quickly, when clearly the Colonel was not balancing two apposites–like hard- and soft- rock- likers where demand could be easily understood and accommodated. Give him a break. This isn’t Iran. The food is much better there.
There’s another something wrong with Rock Beyond Belief and all the joining-the-cause pedantry that CFI does these days as it tries to squeeze a little more juice out of its withering fruit. In offering its shrinking volume of customers this kind of news, they are really attempting to spin false victories for Godlessness and Country out of utterly dumb facts. The spectacle of an organization that now chases more famous ambulances to the scene just so it can get its name in the blogroll and call it a victory for freethought is just a little pathetic, don’t you think?
Do I think atheists should have the same right to hold a messaged-rock concert same as evangelical Christians? Sure I do. I suppose Catholics, Jews, Pastafarians and Nuwabianists need to chime in to assert their rights while the environment is sweet for everybody’s songs. Everybody but Unitarians. They have really bad music.
But equal is equal, fair is fair, and the braintrust at CFI seems to think that secular rock needs defending. As soon as I know what that is, I’m there–on the side of truth, justice, and free inquiry. If they play Freedom, I may just go myself. But then we have to let the NeoNazis do their thing. White Boss or The Dentists, anyone? Anyone? Now that will test Colonel Sicinski’s powers of judgement –and his memory.
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Published: August 3, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: agnosticism : atheism : Billy Graham : CFI : Christian rock : Fort Bragg : revivials : Rock Beyond Belief ..
10 Responses to “Secular Rock and Religious Roll”
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Dan
August 4, 2011 at 1:14 am
A day’s worth of rock your balls off tunes, a few beers, and Richard Dawkins doing his best impersonation of a motivational speaker. What has the world come to?
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Scott
August 4, 2011 at 9:10 am
Well, if there are any oinostofarians there then that will be reason to attend…..maybe. One would need lots of wine before listening to Dawkins, for sure.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 4, 2011 at 9:27 am
After your balls are rocked off he can explain that the temporary exhilaration caused by the deafening music is really a successful species adaptation that permits us to tune out dull lectures on adaptaion.
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Dan
August 4, 2011 at 7:18 pm
On the plus side, it isn’t PZ Myers doing the talking. One would surely need a full frontal lobotomy to sit through that — yeesh.
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steph
August 4, 2011 at 11:01 am
Imagine Dawkins squeezing into skinny jeans, with his hairy knees peeping through the specially crafted knee rips, and a safety pin through his nose. Will he spike his hair and dye it? The CFI seem to think that even drinking out of a coffee cup has to be carefully identified as a non religious event. How careful are they going to be when selecting secular music? Half the music I like will probably be disqualified because of religious innuendo – Cohen: Hallellujah, Zeppelin: Stairway to Heaven. Probably even the Sex Pistols version of God save the Queen won’t fit the criteria. I’ll stick to my own choice on my own personal stereo, without the nauseatingly ‘selfish genetically free from belief meme’ lectures. Perhaps they should stick to songs with lyrics such as this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8
Jimi Hendrix’s Freedom should be adopted as the new planet anthem, or at least replace America’s spangled ‘land of the free’. It is my new anthem anyway. Freedom from definition. Freedom to live. Freedom, so I can give. Right on, straight ahead, stay up and straight ahead. Freedom.
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Dwight Jones
August 4, 2011 at 11:24 am
Bravo as always, Joe,
I now listen only to a radio station in Canada that is all music, all in French. – http://www.radio-canada.ca/espace_musique/ – no ads, everything new to me. Relearning the language so that I can boycott North America entirely – from France/Holland.
I read http://english.aljazeera.net/ just to get some balance against ‘serious’ news. Pretty soon the broadcast TV networks will arise again, being free during a Depression, and I just did sixty years of that, thank you – need some freedom myself.
R.I.P. CFI
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Mike Wilson
August 5, 2011 at 1:01 am
OMG. That line up looked dreadful. I can see why no one would want to waste taxpayer money on such a dreadful event. It was a gross parody of a right to life rally. Look at the music for this so called rock event; A scholar with a thesis, at a rock show? “Spoonboy – David Combs’ solo side project balances the deep philosophical questions of the day with the optimism of youth consistently delivered through super catchy melodies.” um, skip it. They could have done better with Marilyn Manson or Slayer. These bands sound like kids carnival acts.
Then the speakers! it is a weird mirror image of an evangelical revival. Their is a “former” evangelical preacher. A son of weird racist barbaric preacher, which reminds me of the practice of evangelist with reformed whores, ex hedonist and atheist. Bloggers, heads of atheist organization, and Richard dawkins the odd Ozzy Osbourne of this Ozz Fest. Worlds most square ‘Gathering of the Juggalos”.
The impression is that atheism is a terribly dreary faith. Its like the science club organizing the prom.
I would like to ask what you think of this, When some one says “twilighting your faith” that sounds like a dark message, like the opposite we would expect from a hero advising comrades in a story. Isn’t faith derived from a word that carries the meaning of trust? I mean we have faith in lots of things, Perhaps it is irrational, but I often assure my self that life has a purpose for me. I try to trust that to be true, or have faith in it. It might be accurate to say you don’t really know, but living with that anxiety is crippling to enjoying ones life, which is its purpose. Is the atheist message not truly liberating or positive?
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steph
August 5, 2011 at 8:53 pm
“Atheist message”? Like the “Christian message” of salvation or prosperity? Hypothetical atheist message: Liberation and prosperity, announced by heros and champions with causes and bandwagons. (I’ve just been reading an atheist called J.C.) I’m always suspicious of messages and messengers. Messages are reminiscent of manifestos which are reminiscent of Bibles – all incestuously related. And a national anthem at a rock concert? Does it fit with music reflecting revolution and freedom? Patriotism is a kind of religion, a conviction that your land is best. It makes enemies of the rest of humanity.
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The Morons of Rock « Brain Puke says:
January 27, 2012 at 10:12 pm
[...] more discusion of the Rock Against Faith event, http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/secular-rock-and-religious-roll/ Advertisement GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); [...]
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John Lenz
September 4, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Do you love rock?I like listenrock community !
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
God Responds to Rick Perry’s Prayer
by rjosephhoffmann
At a Christian prayer rally called “The Response“ in Austin, Texas on August 6th, Governor Rick Perry closed his remarks on the state of the nation with the following prayer:
“Father, our heart breaks for America, We see discord at home, we see fear in the marketplace, we see anger in the halls of government. And as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us. And for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”
In unusually swift turnaround time, the Texas Governor’s office received the following reply from God at 4.30 PM, CST:
“Dear Governor Perry, Rick if I may–
My heart breaks too. It breaks everytime I hear the voices of brainlesss politicians saying out loud what they know in their cheating hearts isn’t true. Most world leaders don’t do this anymore. It’s a blessing, really. Lets me get on with my nap. But even when I was younger I didn’t listen. Speaking of cheating hearts, I love that song. How does it go again? I’m guessing that it and Turkey in the Straw are the only songs you know, so I thought I’d mention it. I’ve always believed in finding the common ground. Just ask the Palestinians. That’s called jest, Rick. It wouldn’t hurt you to smile at something other than Yo Mama jokes.
One of the few places where Nazi airheads like you still get an audience is America. Especially Texas. And Pakistan and places like that. Places where there are lots of guns. With all those guns, I don’t think I’d be much good to you really. Never learned to use one. My brother Zeus used to be good with thunderbolts. Guns, not so much.
Just a couple of corrections, though. Since you’ve only got fourscore years and ten and have used up more than two thirds of that already, no reason to waste your breath asking for things that I can’t make can’t happen in your lifetime.
First of all, I don’t have any control over the marketplace. That’s way out of my league, complexity-wise. I didn’t even give instructions for the ark–it was Noah’s idea. He was afraid it wouldn’t float, so he reckoned that if everybody in his family drowned he could just say, “Don’t blame me. God gave me the plan.” A lot of my official story, the one that’s in the book you keep in your top desk drawer next to your old copies of Maxim, is like that–stuff that you humans screwed up and came crying to me too late when it was already fucked. It worked for a couple of thousand years, but it’s played hell with my reputation.
No one could decide whether I was a sadistic old bastard who liked hurting people who couldn’t keep my rules or a nice old dad-type who sends a helping hand when things look hopeless. Like when junior runs his credit card into the ground in his first semster at Amherst. Or when the bills come due on all the wars you Texas boys seem to like so much. Or when your daddy had that chat with the dean about whether you were going to be able to graduate with a 1.o average. Money talks Rick. God doesn’t.
Let me tell you something else, Rick: I didn’t give you those commandments and I didn’t send my only begotten son to help you out. I don’t care whose ox gores a foreigner or what you do with your neighbour’s ass. And I certainly never had an interest in first century Palestinian virgins. They’re all stories Rick, stories.
The fact is, I’ve never really done anything, so you can’t count on me to change the market place, or people’s cheatin’ hearts, or fish you out of the financial swamp you’re making for yourself. You know how you prayed to me (you used to call me “Merciful God” and cry when you were loaded) to make “everything OK” with the girl you thought you got pregnant ? Sorry I couldn’t help–not even offer you a tissue.
I didn’t create you, or your lovely wife, Anita Thigpen, or anybody else. I didn’t even make the little green apples. And I hate it when people call me “Father”. I mean for Christ sake, you’re sixty years old. Grow up a little. How much protecting and saving do you need at your age? It reminds me of the time Abraham came running to me when it was pretty clear that Sodom was going down the sewer. “Won’t you help us?,” he said, “What if I find a few good men who believe in you?” “Believe in me? What does that even mean? It won’t make any difference,” I said. “It’s going down.” And down it went. I know, I know: in the black Bible book in your top drawer you have Abraham’s version–but that’s the way it really happened. Sodom was a cesspool, full of people whose ways were continually evil, like Texas. Shit happens because people like you make it happen and then expect me to clean it up. Not my fault, Rick. Your fault.
I know you’ve heard a lot of stories, Rick, and you’ve sung about how great I am, but really I’m just an idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a great big idea, in the right minds, so when imbeciles like you treat me like a slot machine asking for divine mercy, favor, protection and toys I have to laugh. Is it only cowboys like you who got straight D’s in college that still believe in a god so softheaded that he would protect bumblers like you from certain disaster, a God just like your daddy, Joe Ray.
A first-class, omnipotent God would make sure you fail–maybe even wipe Texas off the face of the continent just as a precaution . But it’s not in my power to do that or improve America’s credit rating, anymore than I can raise the average IQ of the Tea Party. Maybe being good with a grenade launcher will help. But I’m skeptical. I’m about as effective as your idea of me, and your idea of me is–well–pathetic.
Frankly Governor, if I did exist I’d have gone to school, and read books, and learned some science–learned about the way the world really happened, and how good governments operate, and what we can do to help each other out by using our brains. I wouldn’t have wasted my time jumping out of planes, setting off fire crackers in the men’s toilet at fraternity parties, chasing skirt and pretending that the world was all ok because my Imaginary Friend would always make things better when I got caught. I wouldn’t waste my time making deserts out of gardens the way you have and then praying to a supreme being for more rain and another chance. You humans have always been a big disappointment on the evolutionary tree, but you Republican humans are really making survival of the fittest an act of faith.
So, Rick, much as I hate to disappoint you, and I hope I have, there is no quick fix here, no prayable moment.
To quote someone I’ve always admired named Benjamin Franklin, God helps those who help themselves, not buggers like you who don’t use the brains Nature gave you.
Yours,
God
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Published: August 7, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Debt Crisis : Fundamentalism : Prayer : religion : Republicans : Rick Perry : Tea Party : Texas ..
19 Responses to “God Responds to Rick Perry’s Prayer”
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steph
August 7, 2011 at 7:53 pm
I’m not even American but the American “situation” – recent events, people in power – break my heart too. This is completely flaming brilliant. It’s eloquent, classy and hilarious. God is a comedian, but Rick is too pathetic to laugh. It was cathartic to read, so thank you. Purifying. Please forward it to Rick and the rest of the preposterous circus of clowns. The tragedy is that they’re hard to tell apart.
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Gene Smith
August 7, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Native Texan here, laughing my butt off! R.Joseph you are one hell of a funny writer. Good to know all that education wasn’t wasted!
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Scott
August 7, 2011 at 9:54 pm
“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh” or something like that.
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steph
August 7, 2011 at 10:07 pm
I think Voltaire is supposed to have said something like that. This audience isn’t though, and I doubt that “Nazi airheads” are clever enough to get his jokes. :-)
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Nicola Mundie
August 8, 2011 at 7:30 am
Thats brilliant, and i class myself as a texan born in the wrong place.
I really must buy more of your books.
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Scott
August 8, 2011 at 10:21 am
Here’s nightmare: Tricky Ricky Perry running for pres and Michele Bachmann as running mate, or vice versa. Wait a minute……the nightmare is coming true!!
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Gene Smith
August 8, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Two possible Dream Tickets:
The PP ticket: Perry/Palin & Bachmann Perry Overdrive
And before somebody says “nightmare”…would you want actual sane competent people on the Republican ticket? I certainly don’t!
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Michael Wilson
August 8, 2011 at 8:35 pm
My worry is “any of the above” may beat the incumbent in 2012. At this point I have to disagree with those that hope the GOP will run a nut to give O a better chance. I am reminded of the situation in which the National Socialist candidate was give the Chancellorship because it was thought “that guy has no support”.
rjosephhoffmann
August 8, 2011 at 10:44 pm
I agree that O needs a worthy opponent. Pause. Hmmm. I suppose Romney passes the sanity test.
steph
August 8, 2011 at 11:13 am
Have to reread it today for relief. Quite possibly the best satire ever. Real BITE where it counts.
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Scott
August 8, 2011 at 11:43 am
I reread this morning, I think Perry said ” our farts break for America” after all, how could a heartless man and his ilk have something break that they don’t possess?
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rjosephhoffmann
August 8, 2011 at 12:49 pm
@Scott: I’m sure that’s right ;)
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Dwight Jones
August 9, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Since Michael Moore is angling for Matt Damon to run, maybe God has some words of advice for young Matt?
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rjosephhoffmann
August 9, 2011 at 1:59 pm
I hope it’s that he should have taken that part in “The Town” when Ben Affleck offered it to him.
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Gene Smith
August 9, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Surely She couldn’t still be annoyed over DOGMA…
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rjosephhoffmann
August 9, 2011 at 2:11 pm
‘) Ha! Great film. Based on the Newsweek cover, I suspect Michele is really Michael Bachmann from Des Moines, the renowned transvestite dancer from the Lido Club there. Sure had me fooled.
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Gene Smith
August 9, 2011 at 2:39 pm
The funny thing about DOGMA and the religious furore & fuss that surrounded it is that I can’t watch it without being inspired. Funny as hell, too…but…inspiring.
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Scott
August 11, 2011 at 10:44 am
Okay, I just can’t stop reading this one. Please remove it from your site (;
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bdeye51Briab Iverson
August 15, 2011 at 2:34 am
Metaphorically speaking, from the writings of the Country & Western philosopher Roger Miller… ‘Good ain’t for ever and bad ain’t for good’. Which I guess means things will change but like the bible, being clear and understandable do not seem to be a target of either narrative. I mean Roger speaks of finding his true love as is evidenced by her mixing sugar with the candy and the soup. And the result is that he’s getting “… fat from the candy and sick from the soup”. As disciple Gomer liked to said so damned often, “Surprise, surprise”. There are other translations, like WTF.
Maybe we should be more like God Andy. Give ‘em a night in jail, then go fishing, and come home to Aunt Bea’s pie.
Unfortunately, Deputy Barney (Rick and his ilk) have just settled for hurlin’ cowpies and hoping that they will turn into fertilizer and that they will make thing good things grow. Not going to happen. There’ll be dead zones and lot’s of dead and, hurting people explained away as fodder for Andy and Barney and Opie will not be coming.
Maybe some one warned him. First class seat are all taken but empty. Second class may may be empty
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Convictions are Killing Us
by rjosephhoffmann
"One Nation, in Jesus' Name, with God's Justice for all."
The second Republican presidential debate confirmed all suspicions that we are confronted by intellectual pygmies vying for the chiefdom of the American tribes.
The promised entry of Rick Perry into the race, and if we’re lucky (and her van stops long enough for her to make further wowsers about American history) Sarah Grizzly-Mom Palin, won’t substantially raise the intellectual ante or the tone of discussion.
"The British are coming! Oh, you are British..."
What all of these aspirants have in common besides being emblematic of how easy it is to succeed in American politics is that all claim to have convictions. Lots of ’em
We’ve all seen small candidates in our time. We’ve even seen an amazingly stupid underachiever hold on to the office of president for eight interminable years, once presumably because he won the election. But we’ve never seen it this bad.
And the reason we’ve never seen it this bad is because three, at least, of the wannabes keep talking about their convictions–not ideas, but beliefs they hold doggedly and think other Americans, as Americans, should hold them too.
Some of these convictions are religious. Some are economic, and some are social. But their classification doesn’t matter: there is no high falutin’ epistemology involved in having these core convictions, because, according to this troop, convictions are what made America great and what keeps America going–one nation under God, in whom we trust.
In the Republican debate, when she wasn’t just venting gas about making Obama a One Term President, an idea overwhelming in its piscatorial crassness, Michele Bachmann said a number of times that she has more convictions than any of her competitors. ”I have demonstrated leadership and the courage of my convictions to change Washington, stop wasteful spending, lower taxes, put Americans back to work and turn our economy around….”
She also has convictions about lightbulbs, fuel emissions, gays, the “unborn,” as she sepulchrally calls fetuses, the nature of marriage, and a dozen other things that flow from her weird teaology.
Michele Bachmann and some of her two dozen foster convictions
She’s doubly dangerous because like a lot of people with convictions, she can’t admit when she’s wrong: take the “Our founding fathers worked night and day to abolish slavery”- comment. Not only historically outlandish but perverse in her attempt to defend her wrongness. The “founding father” she tried to name (9 years old at independence and 19 when the Constitutional convention was convened) was the son of a real founding father whose views on God, religion and the Bible Michele Bachmann would find disturbing, if not incomprehensible.
On Saturday, the cast of this folies bizzare will be joined by an aging fraternity lout who is not only unimpressed by the concept of separation of church and state but frankly can’t bother to make the distinction.
That would be a scandalous posture if most Americans cared a farthing about the Constitution, but polls have repeatedly shown that if the document were up for grabs today it wouldn’t look much like the Enlightenment icon we possess, warty amendments, like the Eighteenth, and all.
No one really wants to contemplate what a President Perry would say if a committee of Pentecostal ministers suggested amending “We the People” to “We the Christian People of the United States,” or putting a tasteful cameo of Jesus in the center of our currency to mark us out as a holy nation of God-fearers, beloved and protected by the Almighty.
Two of the contenders, Romney and Huntsman, are Mormons, a group so strange in its beliefs that the best that can be said about them is that they aren’t scientologists. The remainder, in shades of ecclesial gray are simply losers, though “Rick” Santorum is also a religious nutcase and Catholic pro-life extremist who refuses to attend any Masses that aren’t in Latin.
In additon to the six children Santorum holds up as proof of his commitment to the Gospel of Life, his wife Karen in 1996 gave birth to a son (Gabriel Michael) when she was twenty weeks pregnant. The dead fetus (born with a closed posterior urethral valve) was brought home and “introduced” to the other children as their brother. The couple slept with the fetus overnight before returning it to the hospital the next day. The story is told in lurid detail by Michael Sokolove in his 2005 New York Times Magazine feature ”The Believer.” In the same piece, Santorum is quoted as saying that in his view George W. Bush was the first “Catholic president of the United States,” and that John F. Kennedy “shed his Catholicism.” Convictions.
The Republican race for the nomination is not about choosing the most qualified candidate but about trying to determine who’s the least crazy.
Unfortunately, the American people have a huge appetite for crazy–prime time Jersey Shore and Biggest Loser crazy. Their political focus on winners and losers, American idol-style, is so far removed from the debates, the ideas, the burning issues that formed the republic that history is only considered a distraction, and a boring one at that. I can easily imagine viewers who wondered if, at the end of the debate, the participants would be called over in small groups by Tyra Banks. In my mind, she’s wearing something silky in red, white and blue, with dangly silver star earrings: ”Jon, you’ve got a lot of talent. I really expected you to shine out there tonight. But you just didn’t come through. Your sentences were too long and I just felt you were holding back.” –Or maybe that wouldn’t be a worse process than the one we have.
We liked your number--we really did--but you just didn't, you know...
As it is, in the discounted political process we’re stuck with, convictions matter more than facts and looking decisive carries more weight than being right. The media calls it optics. Winners and losers are determined by how tenaciously wrong opinions and worthless convictions can be defended. Who cares when John Quincy Adams lived? It’s my conviction that my contempt for pro-choice Americans is the real American value: end of story. The optics of conviction-holding may be the most serious threat democracy has ever faced.
There are certainly things that disappoint me about Barack Obama. But I sense that he wouldn’t lie to me about history, or claim to know something for certain that he doesn’t know. Maybe that comes from his being a college lecturer, or just a nice guy, since truth-telling and history were not his predecessor’s strong suit.
But unless history proves me wrong (and not his slanderers) Obama is as close as we’re likely to get in the twenty-first century to a politician still in touch with the spirit of the founders, still interested in the American experiment as an experiment and a work in progress. As a matter of experience he understands that America isn’t finished. As a matter of dogma, his opponents believe that America reached its pinnacle of perfection in some golden age, whose mythical history they have substituted for the far messier but real story of America’s past.
That “scholarly,” tentative view of democracy as an idea in need of exploration and improvement is a dangerous one in Rick Perry’s done-deal Exceptional America, where God is king, presidents are his stewards, and only men with strong religious convictions are entitled to serve.
The political free fall in which we find ourselves is frightening enough without the supernatural maps being offered by the Republican horde. This is too far down the road from John Kennedy’s most famous dictum about religion for any of us to feel complacent: ”I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.” Where did we make that wrong turn? And where did these guides come from?
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Published: August 12, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Barack Obama : Campaign 2012 : Catholic : Democrats : Jon Huntsman : Lincoln : Michele Bachmann : religion : Republican : Republican debate : Rick Perry : Rick Santorum : Ron Paul : Sarah Palin : Tim Pawlenty ..
22 Responses to “Convictions are Killing Us”
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Scott
August 12, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Jesus on the bill isn’t too far fetched for these nutbags; after all, money is indeed “the principle God of this world”.(not to mention for them).
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kip152
August 12, 2011 at 1:56 pm
As a matter of experience he understands that America isn’t finished…
And republicans, especially those running to unseat the President, think America was perfect back in 1776, and that we need to go backwards.
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Mike Wilson
August 12, 2011 at 2:04 pm
I’m shocked Bachman polls so well. I think the press has low expectations, if doesn’t do anything batty, they think she’s done well but her answers were vapid. And I know it is not polite to talk about the ladies features, and maybe the grass was distorting my perceptions, but she looked a little like the predator. For balance Tim Pawlenty is just to goofy looking to be president, we decided that back with Dukakis.
I like candidates that actually articulate ideas, which seemed like to domain of Gingrich (also not a handsome man) and Paul. Paul, while consistent and bold, is also wackadodle.
On the positive side, most of the discussion of social issues was coming from the single digit candidates, and I presume most of them will be packing up the campaign on Monday as only one will be able to claim the ever shrinking moral majority vote.
It is unfortunate that the Democratic candidate will not have to explain himself to fellow democrats this year, it is always nice to at least feel their are options.
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Gene Smith
August 12, 2011 at 3:28 pm
You just don’t disappoint, do you? I have been happily and hilariously reading through dear old cynic, H.L. Mencken quotes and yours are a nice match. Thanks.
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Gene Smith
August 12, 2011 at 3:30 pm
And here’s one to match your theme today: “The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”
H. L. Mencken
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rjosephhoffmann
August 12, 2011 at 3:36 pm
If only Mencken were around to take this crowd on: he would consider this the final triumph of the booboisie. Did you see http://reason.com/archives/2003/02/01/scourge-of-the-booboisie
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steph
August 12, 2011 at 4:04 pm
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Ironically an American diplomat H.M. Browne, was posted to New Zealand as an ambassador for Reagan. Browne owned a racehorse called ‘Lacka Reason’. Our Prime Minister noted the fact that the name appropriately reflected Reagan’s foreign policy. Things have only got worse.
These Republicans are surely certifiably insane by normal standards. I can’t distinguish between them. They’re all far gone. The prospect of Republican leadership is unbearable and our hearts break for you and the planet. Please America, Obama has only been there one term. He’s educated, he has hope and ideas, and he’s not a liar. He didn’t fix everything in his first term, and you haven’t even got free health care … yet. But you never will if the Republicans hold the purses. Obama is playing a game with atrocious rules. Isn’t it the current structure of American government that needs to change, not the leader or party? Countries change electoral systems all the time by referrendum… but I’ve read so many people blaming Obama for everything, calling him vile names and promising not to vote at all. Please give him a chance. If the tea drinking lunatics take over the assylum, the flood gates open and the Exodus begins, when we take you into our homes, I hope you can say you voted. Don’t give up, kia kaha…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(The Second Coming W.B. Yeats)
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bubbarich
August 12, 2011 at 5:16 pm
Your dismissive comments about Mormons probably play to your audience, but may undermine an otherwise interesting essay for more educated readers. Mormons tend to be highly educated, and work very well in most academic, political, and business arenas. The religion is built with an adaptive element (similar to the Catholic Church, as opposed to “Book” Protestants) that can serve it and society very well. Unfortunately, in the last few (10-15) years, that has also allowed it to do a cultural retrenchment started by Nutcase Cold Warrior Ezra Benson and some others around him. Romney and Huntsman (even more than Romney) represent a much more liberal straing that still survives. Probably the most liberal strain to survive in the current GOP. I think they’d both be decent choices for a good campaign and election, much more than Mama Grizzly was. What, specifically, about Huntsman’s political ideas do you find crazy, ridiculous, or dangerously reactionary?
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rjosephhoffmann
August 12, 2011 at 7:30 pm
Let me hear Romney and Huntsman say about Mormonism what Kennedy said about Catholicism; then we can talk “adaptation”
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bubbarich
August 14, 2011 at 12:27 am
Unfortunately, the religious right support they desperately need won’t let them say anything like that. They’re left trying to NOT say that, while at the same time trying to promise to the religious right that what they will push is a Bible Belt Jesus that the right can support. And the Jesus taught in the Mormon Church is extremely white-bread, probably more so than in at least the Pentecostal wing of evangelical Christianity. If anything, your dismissive mockery and comparisons to Xenu would likely help more Evangelicals to see that it’s not very strange compared to their beliefs, especially not when you plot $cientology on the axis.
Both Huntsman and Romney are in the liberal wing of the Church, although Romney started trying to sound wingnutty in 2008. But near as I can tell, they’re both using wingnutty words to try to get those votes, but they’re still both preaching mostly what’s left of the liberal side of the Republican party. Huntsman is doing that much more than Romney; he’s really the only major candidate who sounds like a liberal Republican. It’s a part of the Republican Party I’d like to keep alive, because I think the spectre of Palin really allowed Obama to get away without clarifying any positions at all, except “I’m not Bush!”
I don’t want the religious games, especially ignorant religious games, to remove the chance to get a more moderate, reasonable candidate for the GOP. I’m fairly terrified that this sort of brinksmanship will end up letting a kook like Bachmann in, then it would just take a bad month in the stock market, bad unemployment, or a foreign adventure to sink the current president, and we’d have an Evangelical Dominionist slouching us off towards Bethlehem.
barrettpashak
August 12, 2011 at 6:47 pm
I have no sympathy for those who whine about the Right, and at the same time cast doubts about the historicity of Christ. Even the Republicans’ distortions of Christ’s doctrine are better than the baloney of the Christ mythers. The Christ mythers are trying to strip us of the very best weapon we have against the Right, namely, Christ’s life and words. Shame.
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steph
August 12, 2011 at 8:22 pm
I think they like to be called “Jesus mythicists”. This label is precious to them. There is a difference however between historical arguments for a man called Jesus and a Christ myth which has evolved out of arguably earlier tradition and “doctrine” of the Christian church and your allusion to a “doctrine of Christ”. However I’m not sure what ‘mythers’ you’re referring to. And I have a suspicion that genuine Jesus mythtics represent a very minor group in America and aren’t very noticeable anywhere else… They live on the internet, or inside it.
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ken
August 13, 2011 at 7:02 pm
I don’t mind the “Jesus mythicists.”
It’s those “Apollonius of Tyana” mythicists who really get under my skin.
rjosephhoffmann
August 12, 2011 at 10:35 pm
I see no connection between the myth discussion and this post. Most of what passes for the teaching of Jesus is just what his advertisers think he said or would like him to say anyway.
Reply
steph
August 12, 2011 at 11:49 pm
There isn’t any connection at all. And we don’t know Jesus’ life and words and the best ‘weapons’ against the Republicans are common sense and voting against them withOUT religion.
barrettpashak
August 15, 2011 at 11:03 am
I see no connection between the myth discussion and this post.
No? You state that some religious beliefs are ridiculous, and imply that this has a bearing on the political situation. I am merely stating that some of the beliefs that one finds on the other side of the political divide are at least as ridiculous; and some, like mythicism, are downright dangerous.
Most of what passes for the teaching of Jesus is just what his advertisers think he said or would like him to say anyway.
This is the kind of casual cheap shot one would expect from anonymous web trolls, rather than from someone who evidently takes great pride in some kind of Oxford connection. It is further proof of the spreading cancer of ignorance of Biblical literature and history. There is effectively nothing to distinguish your position from that of the New Atheists whom you pretend to decry.
rjosephhoffmann
August 15, 2011 at 11:29 am
Barrett–I do apologize: I really didn’t mean what I said as a cheap shot. And you know that I’m opposed to the short cuts used by the mythtics. It has become almost impossible to have a sane conversation about the topic, and I have noticed, like you, a convergence of dogmatism and bigotry on the subject between new atheism and mythticism. I’m interested in the reasons this is happening, because the question of God’s existence and the question of the historical Jesus are widely different questions at a procedural and even 9especially?) epistemological level. I would never say that we cannot know anything about a historical Jesus; I do say that informed skepticism is a valuable mindset through which to develop procedures.
Dan Gillson
August 13, 2011 at 12:50 am
I have so many convictions right now, I run for president. Go USA!
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ken
August 13, 2011 at 6:58 pm
I’m glad I cancelled my cable subscription and went back to a roof antenna, so that I don’t have to be a witness to this three ring circus.
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Scott
August 15, 2011 at 10:33 am
A fair number of comments about “going backwards”. There’s certainly no way we can go backwards; the better question is in what direction we’re moving into the future. Does everyone want a more centalized society or is more personal freedom of greater importance?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
August 15, 2011 at 10:43 am
Scott: do you mean we’re stuck in reverse with nowhere “back’ to go to, or that in general it’s impossible to repeat what we;ve already done?
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Scott
August 15, 2011 at 11:50 am
There’s no going “back” like some, if not all of the Republican contenders (pretenders?) want us to believe. Yes, we want to preserve, or perhaps better stated “conserve” some things; just exactly what to conserve is an excellent question.
Repeat what we’ve already done? We’ve been doing that and continue to do so. For example: lots of people think socialism is good, many think it’s great. Looking back at the past century, however, is enough to give one pause; about 100,000,000 lives of pause. We keep repeating many of the same things, we just try to tweak them and think they’ll work better. Not that I’m opposed to tweaking, but tweaking in human matters sometimes leads to some rather disastrous results.
Slow gradual change is usually the most beneficial way to go about things. Yep, this is my conservative side (:
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The Idiot Hero and Other Rick Perry Tropes
by rjosephhoffmann
I am doing my best to understand Rick Perry’s appeal, even to the point of asking facebook friends whether it’s his rugged good looks that’s causing hearts to beat a little faster than they’re beating for Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann .
The answer seems to be yes: to a point.
A 2006 article in The Economist discusses how the evolutionary advantage of looking a little (how shall we say) novo erectus seems to communicate to females the survival benefit of choosing men with conspicuously high testosterone levels. It’s what groups like when they feel a threat to their survival, and in these troublous times, when Washington teeters and the Rapture looms, Rick may just be the man with a plan:
“…Research has suggested that, regardless of their average preferences, women are most attracted to hyper-masculine features when they are most likely to conceive, and that the effect is particularly exaggerated in women who are in stable relationships. Evolution has thus arranged things so that if a woman does cuckold her man, she is likely to gain the maximum advantage in terms of children with good immune systems, and sons who will have similarly rakish good looks and behaviour.”
The downside is that men of this variety are also the most likely to love you and leave you. A good reason to wonder whether you want the relationship to begin with. Are you listening, America?
There are other tropes we can use. A handy website on the topic of Anti-Intellectualism as depicted in pop culture offers several, so I decided to compare the Rick Perry we know and are destined to know a whole lot better with the typology that TV, movies, anime/ manga, you name it–throws up. Here’s what I came up with:
1. The Idiot Hero. Basically an action figure (a common character in shounen action series) the idiot hero has a short attention span and is too stupid to be afraid of imminent peril. The trope also includes elements of This Loser Is You: His appeal comes from encouraging the audience to believe that “If this idiot can do this, so can I”– a huge incentive in American politics where the statement “Anyone can grow up to be president of the United States” is convertible with “Anyone is dumb enough to be president of the United States.”
Even in a nation of dummies, the idiot hero is so dumb that the dumbest onlooker feels superior. Think Homer Simpson, Family Guy, American Dad. Now, put them in the White House, boots on desk, and watch things explode.
2. The Fool. Not to be confused with the British trope (as for example Archibald in the P.G. Wodehouse story), the American Fool is distinguished by admirable imbecility that is not only forgivable but likable, and to be emulated by “real men.”
The trope is often associated with an unusual physical characteristics like craggy facial features or Christian hair.
Christian Hair
Idiot Heroes and Fools enjoy fighting, seek out conflict (e.g., the bar room brawl, a quintessentially American fracas) and almost always end up hurting other people. They are usually shown smiling amiably as bombs explode around them and walk away from the devastation they have caused with hair intact [cf. George W. Bush, 2000-2008]
3. The Texas (aka I Ain’t No Pussy) Messiah. The Messiah trope in comic book terms is a naive figure who “loves everyone. Loves them with a deep, spiritual love that means they will shake heaven and earth, destroy gods and planets, bring nations to their knees, etc., for the person they just met yesterday. They will believe the best of everyone, and constantly give someone a second chance.”
The Texas Messiah thinks people should take care of themselves, and people who don’t ought to have the crap beaten out of them. If people are unemployed, it’s their fault because they’re lazy bystanders along the track of life. If people are ill, they are probably being punished by God for some sin they thought they got away with in Mexico. If people are old, they should consider the alternative and make sure their taxes are paid, unless they are billionaires–in which case they can live as long as they want tax free because God has proved that he loves them.
4. Texas Badass. The Badass, subspecies Texas Badass, is a man beyond the age of twenty five who still thinks he’s the meanest motherfucker in the universe. A Badass is successful if he can convince his followers that he has balls of steel, or in the case of women badass heroes, that she has boobs of steel like Action Girl. This means no mercy for those who disagree with you. No compromise with people who have insulted you or your grandma’s pie. No pat on the back for someone who called you a pinhead (See Fool) in public or said that you really didn’t know how to fly a fighter jet or use a grenade launcher in a cow pasture.
You look okay in a suit, though you’re tough to fit in the collar department and your throat sags, but you’re really only at home in jeans and look just fine in fatigues and lace-up army boots. When some Butterballs says ”You’re not as big as you think you are” you’ve dropped your pants to around your knees in seconds, snarling “Grab your ankles, Little Joe.” Someday, you will morph into Badass Abnormal. That’s when an ordinary person can shoot lightning bolts out of their hands and punch deities in the balls. But for now you’ve got those pussy Democrats for practice.
5. Determinator: A determinator is a type of crouching moron (q.v.) who is also skilled at obfuscating stupidity. Tact and diplomacy are marks of weakness: there is no problem so small that F-16s and boots on the ground cannot solve it. Drones are a pussy’s way to settle scores because only real men can be idiot heroes and go on the quest…
“The Determinator does not Know When to Fold ‘Em, and it’s a waste of time to tell them the odds. No one can reason with them. They’ll do whatever they have to without question.”
The question of right and wrong is irrelevant to the Determinator because his real stupidity rather than his obfuscating stupidity determines the course of action. Facts cloud judgment. Science is useless, school is for losers, and plans are what gays make.
The Determinator is on a quest, which may be delusional, and driven by the conviction that he is the one chosen to fulfill the mission and that everyone who challenges him is a man-eating Demon like Vallejo, though possibly smokin’ hot. Demons only understand one thing: the Bible.
The Determinator is operating under the will of a higher power and unlike his followers he knows this higher power on a first-name, personal, suds-and-sausage basis.
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Published: August 15, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: 2012 election : anime : anti-intellectualism in America : Comic book heroes : Manga : Rick Perry ..
18 Responses to “The Idiot Hero and Other Rick Perry Tropes”
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steph
August 15, 2011 at 4:44 pm
It is appalling that this is a perfectly reasonable assessment in the run-up to an American Presidential election… If I was voting for someone on rugged good looks alone, whatever they are, I’d vote Obama. He’s gorgeous. Gorgeous smile, brilliant eyes, tall and slim with graceful glide – I bet he can dance. Damn he’s probably too young and married.
Rick Perry, Boy Scout: as governor he has lowered property taxes, maintained a ban on same-sex marriage and supports the amendment to prevent it, supports prohibiting stem cell research and presided over the executions of more than 200 people. He doesn’t believe in global warming, and he supports the teaching of intelligent design in schools, and supports prayer in schools saying it isn’t establishing a religion. Always deeply religious – he just led a prayer rally for 30,000 people, “and as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us. And for that we cry out for your forgiveness…” He opposes restrictions on the “constitutional right” to bear arms… most of his far right policies are guided by faith. He is a fundamentalist nutjob. “The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we inhabit are not only critical elements in the quality of life we enjoy – they are a reflection of the majesty of our Creator.”
Intellectual deficiency: “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” This, coming from the Bold Leader of a state with … no income tax.
Let us all kneel and pray that Rick Perry never becomes president.
Thank you for an excellent (and witty) post in these dark days…
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Dan Gillson
August 15, 2011 at 5:32 pm
It’s time to fight fire with fire! A secularist candidate with real action hero potential! I nominate the ruggedly handsome Sam Harris!
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rjosephhoffmann
August 15, 2011 at 5:33 pm
But can he kill squirrels with grenades?
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Dan Gillson
August 15, 2011 at 10:40 pm
That depends. Do you know if he throws like a girl or like an action hero?
steph
August 15, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Hells bells Dan, that’s harristical – imagine that! When his mouth slides up at the corners in a superficial ‘smile’, his eyes don’t move. His lips curl creepily and make him look like the devil. But when Sam dropped out of high school he was high on ecstasy and went all spiritual and mythtical and new agey. He got up and wandered off to India and Nepal, to meditate with Hindu and Buddhist gurus to meditate and reach some sort of ‘loving state’. But in any case he hasn’t got the ‘rugged good look’. He’s only got a set of convictions, poles apart from the Tea Partiers, but equally as dangerous. Mind you I bet he’s scared of squirrels, which is just as well because I like squirrels. But crikey, this is American politics, and anything goes…
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Dan Gillson
August 15, 2011 at 10:42 pm
He may not have rugged good looks now, but he has potential! All he needs is to grow some stubble and get his face messed up a bit. Why, he’d be a real Charles Bronson then.
Stevie Gamble
August 15, 2011 at 6:21 pm
I hesitate to quibble over petty details but the Economist is not noted for the number of scientists it employs. The evidence, or at least the evidence that can be retrieved by a quick Google Scholar, suggests that male baldness is associated with high levels of testosterone, not the reverse.
But your observations have otherwise fallen on fruitful ground; having looked at that awful picture of the hair I have made a mental note to never shag a Christian again…
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Gene Smith
August 15, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Rick Perry wouldn’t understand most of this. Just enough to take umbrage, would be my guess. And no, he would *not* have to look up “umbrage.” He has people for that.
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vinnyjh
August 15, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Elizabeth Warren for President!
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rjosephhoffmann
August 15, 2011 at 8:56 pm
An idealist! I thought we were fresh out.
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vinnyjh
August 15, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Is that idealism? That strikes me as kind of sad. I consider myself a firm believer in Lily Tomlin’s wisdom: “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”
steph
August 16, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Honestly, Obama is sophisticated elegance but not ‘rugged good looks’. He’s the best man to lead America at the moment, in my opinion. Real rugged good looks wouldn’t get elected in America. Rugged good looks don’t wear suits and ties or have artificially white hollywood teeth, like that Perry creep, who looks alot like alot of other American Republicans. The hair on rugged good looks, is never combed like that, or short. It is never clean shaven. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but rugged good looks is a mountain man. It’s a forester, with wild and unruly hair, unshaven and wirey, with tough weathered skin. It wears a forlorn expression with big soft eyes that look like they want to hug trees and rabbits. It has dirt under its fingernails from the vegetable garden, which it has dug behind its little dark cottage, hidden in the forest under the mountain. It wears a big floppy woollen bush shirt with the sleeves rolled up, over grubby trows which it has patched itself, and if it ever goes to town, rugged good looks pulls on a clean pair of jeans which it has scrubbed in the creek, and boots which it spits on to shine. But when it breaks into a huge cheerful smile, its whole ruggedly good looking face cracks up and its eyes light up like a lantern and scrunch and sparkle with crows feet corners. Unelectable though – too much of a pacifist greeny and probably totally anti social. But ruggedly appealing.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 18, 2011 at 6:58 am
@Stephanie Sounds like a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Paul Bunyan. A lot of people will be living in the woods and washing clothes in the crick in this economy.
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steph
August 20, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Pretty poser Paul Hogan and podgy Mr Bunyan? I’ve failed abysmally in my description – too grotesquely superficial. It’s a rich life in the forest I’m referring too but not everybody knows how to live it well, and there’s no more room in the forest I’m thinking of.
steph
August 22, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Paul – I should have asked my giantologist friend. I had assumed John. Paul Bunyan seems to be an American tradition and part of American culture even exploited by Disney which was never part of my childhood experience. Paul Bunyan is also probably electable unlike my ruggedly good looking imaginary friend.
Mike Wilson
August 18, 2011 at 3:20 am
Steph, I think there might be a job as campaign adviser for the person that explain why Obama is the best choice to president in under 60 seconds.
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steph
August 20, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Because anyone else will destroy the planet in 60 seconds. Long live the revolution (after Obama is elected).
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steph
August 20, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Another thing Mike. I don’t think Obama is the best choice for president at all. Neither is Hilary. But whoever wins the Democrat primaries, I would rather see them than a loon. Obama has been an enormous disappointment so far as his global promises go and hasn’t delivered at all. And obviously his domestic policies haven’t been any better. He hasn’t delivered free public health care (which IS a basic human right as opposed to owning blinking guns), and he hasn’t improved education or implemented a fair tax system. He’s been weak. He’s not much of a socialist, he’s not very green, and some of his policies are squarely right wing. However the best people for the ‘job’ either aren’t standing or haven’t a show in hell of being elected, whereas a Republican swing looks a likely scenario. Obama still has a support base which would stand him a chance, if swinging liberals, disappointed with Obama, don’t slide away. If they slide away, I betcha the Repos win and that terrifies me. At best, a Republican win will be more likely to encourage anarchy and revolution. As far as campaign adviser goes – that’s a job for you. America is the last place on the planet I’d move to. :-)
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Does Atheism Hate Women?
by rjosephhoffmann
“The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger. -Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley)
++++++++++++
There’s been a stir on the subject of misogyny within the atheist “community” lately, with predictable cracks and fissures between the male-guru caste of new atheism and their anointed bloggers, and a number of outspoken atheist women who say, in a nutshell, Enough is enough.
Rebecca Watson
The origins of the latest tension are explored in an article by Julia Galef for Religion Dispatches. In it she examines an “incident” involving Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson and an unnamed man at a July Skeptics’ conference.
Watson produced a video on the episode which has become a point of reference in a larger discussion of the status of women in the atheist and skeptics movement.
New atheist hierarch Richard Dawkins and outspoken anti-religionist P Z Myers responded to Watson’s concerns, Myers with unusual tenderness, and Dawkins by suggesting that “zero harm” had come to her in the “elevator incident” (Watson was propositioned), suggesting that (a) her situation could not be compared to the indignities foisted on women in Islamic theocracies (small comfort if not irrelevant) and (b) the incident itself had no specific relevance to the atheist community, being part of much broader social patterns of marginalization (read: the genus of sexism is not atheism).
The remarks were interpreted as male thuggery and seemed to lend credence to Watson’s complaint: Even atheist men are Martians. Many of us back on earth were unaware that the simple profession of atheism had taken us to equality-heaven.
I knew this was coming. A-many years ago, when Madalyn “Murray” O’Hair was dubbed the most hated women in America by no less a cultural beacon than Life Magazine, atheism was closely identified with the ridicule of religion, a kind of cultural side-show that seemed strategically incapable of making itself sexy and appealing to large numbers of people. Those who watched her did so for the same reason they watched other freak TV sensations like Tiny Tim and the Loud Family.
There wasn’t much more to it: Try repeating the mantra “There is no God” fifty times, eyes shut. Feel better? Of course not. It’s like saying the rosary.
Madalyn O'Hair
Now try lighting in to some of the absurd beliefs that religious people want to perpetrate on non-religious people (some of them lost or dormant battles, but not forgotten): there’s a better life after this one, if you play your cards right; prayer and Bible readings in school, creation science, God on the currency, myths of the “Christian” founders, selective ignorance of the First Amendment, especially in political seasons, and a dozen or so social and even economic policy issues for which the engodded public think the Bible has the answer–beginning with the “right” to life, death with dignity, and harvesting stem cells in medical research (the last, not an issue in 1972).
Strictly speaking, these issues are independent of the God-question and in some cultures where spiritual traditions and ideas of the divine flourish these issues are irrelevant.
But this is America, and to the degree that domestic atheism is at least as much about how religion expresses itself in real time as it is about metaphysics, women until very recently have been under-represented in the fray.
It did not begin with Rebecca Watson’s video, or a proposition in an elevator that could have as easily happened at a real estate brokers’ convention. But the video has raised the spectre that big top modern atheism, as opposed to the atheism of the fringe solists like O’Hair, may have developed along hierarchical lines not altogether different from the religious structures it condemns: a community of bishops (like Dawkins), priests, and down-the-scale nuns with little to say about the agenda, the issues, or how the show is run.
It also raises the question of why God-denial requires or assumes any ethic at all, or at least one transcending what we expect of real estate brokers.
*****
About the same time as Madalyn was doing the talk-show circuit in the seventies, another formidable presence, this one in England, was speaking out about atheism, sexuality, and secular values: her name is Barbara Smoker (b. 1923), and she presided with magisterial importance over various British humanist groups, including the National Secular Society, and at the post-biblical age of eight-eight is a current Honorary Vice Presdient of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.
Smoker, with whom I was once associated through the Council for the Critical Study of Religion in Oxford, far outdistanced her male contemporaries as an advocate for euthanasia, non-religious marriage and naming ceremonies, and separation of religion and state (which, recall, are not officially separate in the United Kingdom).
Hardly any work being pursued in these areas today by secularist and humanist organizations does not owe something to Smoker. Equally outspoken humanist advocates followed in her footsteps–notably Jane Wynne Wilson in England and June Maxwell in Scotland. If their sex, in any sense, marginalized them in the movement it did nothing to impair their organizational abilities or distract them from their goals.
The difference between Smoker and O’Hair is, or was, a difference of cultural contexts and métier, as the French say. O’Hair’s battle–to the extent it was ever coherent–was uphill and almost hopeless in God-besotted America. What it gained in media coverage it lost in influence.
Smoker, with plenty of help from her intellectual consort Harold John Blackham (d. 2009) and dozens of friends within the British Humanist Association–many of them academics–worked at a distinct advantage. –Interestingly, both Smoker and O’Hair were army veterans, neither “highly” educated, but tactically smart and possessed of a certain battlefield savvy that made them both personally formidable and able to stand up for their unbelief.
Whether their Gibraltar-like advocacy excited onlookers or turned them off is anybody’s guess–the Church of England and the Catholic Church had at least one thing in common in 1970: their hatred of Barbara Smoker. And while atheist advocacy does not have a strong record of success in über-religious America, unbelief in Europe has been the result of cultural forces (collectively, “secularization”) which nourished humanist advocacy but are not explained by it. Smoker prided herself on a terse and effective literary style; O’Hair (who was five years Smoker’s senior and a dismal prose stylist) on stump speeches, “encounters,” and interviews. The clear impression is, however, where the atheism of the era was concerned, there be women.
Barbara Smoker
*****
And yet. The new atheism and even its weirdly named predecessor “secular humanism” has primarily been a man’s movement with female contributors, financial supporters, and fans.
I can point to a dozen names of personalities–Margaret Downey, Ophelia Benson, Greta Christina, and a range of younger women such as CFI’s Lauren Becker and Debbie Goddard, and Watson herself–who were energized for unbelief before the current wave of atheism washed onto the scene, beginning roughly, if not exactly, with the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2005.
As other literati joined ranks the fan club grew. That the team was half British (Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the British side, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, though Oxford-educated, on Yankee Doodle’s) and highly intellectual situated its influence within the ranks of the university educated–especially young secularists, the culturally disaffected, and those who were simply fed up with the nostrums of religion. Its intellectual base distinguished it from the rough n’ tumble atheism of the previous generation, the names of whose promoters were conspicuously absent from the New York Times best sellers’ list.
Humanist groups, skeptical groups, and secular groups–whose edges often blur–were equally affected. And I think it would be fair to say that while the horsemen were men, the base included women and men in surprisingly equal measure.
Ophelia Benson
There are also some key women independent thinkers, who would probably prefer to be judged by their work rather than their political allegiance to a movement: Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose work on Doubt is a thoughtful exploration of the integrity of skepticism as an act of faith in human reason; Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism), who is on record as deploring indiscriminate nastiness towards all religion; and, above all, Rebecca N. Goldstein, whose new work of fiction (36 Arguments for the Existence of God) is an ironic and deflationary account of philosophical atheism (and thus also of faith) quite unlike anything that has hit the market before now.
Not all women atheists were movement atheists, and some, just like their male counterparts, were squeamish about the requirement to self-identify with an atheism that was simply about hating religion.
There is, bluntly put, now as then, no shortage of women writing and speaking out on the subject of unbelief, though in my opinion the most eloquent and creative ones are not necessarily the ones that get the most attention, nor are they the ones who feel entirely comfortable with the intellectual constraints imposed by “movement atheism” and labels like new atheism. They are also the ones least likely to think that their nuanced approach to the topic is in any sense less deserving of credit than the flatfooted atheism of their activist contemporaries.
*****
At least some of the blame for the constraints felt by women involved closely in atheist advocacy has to be pinned on the movement itself and on organisations like the American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry (CFI) with their almost unpunctuated history of men on top.
Kurtz
The secular movements that were founded after World War II included theorists like Corliss Lamont and Paul Kurtz, who absconded from AHA to found the constituent bodies of the Center for Inquiry. Collectively, along with other groups, like O’Hair’s former bailiwick American Atheists, they laid much of the groundwork that made (an ungrateful) new atheism possible.
Secular sectarianism (seculatarianism?) emerged early on between these groups and became entrenched in the way the organizations competed with each other for supporters and did business.
While women’s and later gay and lesbian rights movements swirled outside the doors, for example, the humanist movement paid only glancing attention to them. The recipient of the 1975 Humanist of the Year Award and a contender for the title most influential feminist of her generation, Betty Friedan, went so far as to question whether humanism was suited to pursue the feminist agenda. Part of her concern, as expressed in a 1988 address to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, was that movement humanism did not seem fully engaged in the social and equality- battles of the generation–that secular humanism was theoretical while women’s equality and civil rights issues were practical.
Scores of atheist writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, musicians and others declined to self-identify as “atheist,” not because their unbelief was tepid, nor even because the position was politically unpopular and even, sometimes, economically risky, but because the whole style of American atheism–in particular its science worship, religion-bashing, and naive view of cultural intellectual history–made the option unappealing. In fact, the degree to which American atheism was marked by contrarian impulses and a odd kind of humanistic anti-intellectualism has yet to be fully explored–and won’t be here.
But turf was turf: Paul Kurtz, to take one example, was determined not to have secular humanism identified with the the bold, brash, ridicule-based (and gaffe-prone) atheism of Madalyn O’Hair, whom he more than once accused of giving atheism a bad name. Thus was born the “Let’s not call it atheism” form of atheism, a move that created further divisions between full-frontalists (“Atheist and Proud of It”) and fig-leafers (“Ethically Disposed Philosophical Naturalist”).
By the same token, even the erstwhile “Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism” (now the Council for Secular Humanism), wasn’t very “democratic” when it came to women. I can remember any number of all-male meetings where the principals around the table wondered why more women weren’t signing on, why more women didn’t accept invitations to speak at CFI conferences, or why, if they did accept, sometimes changed their mind late in the game. When, in 2004, I organized a conference on the topic of religious violence which included eight women, all experts on the subject, out of a dozen speakers, a senior CFI operant at the opening cocktail hour asked, in all earnestness and simplicity, when the scholars (already all present) were going to arrive. No one savoured the moment more than the women.
*****
And so, the question lingers, why have things not changed more quickly? Why is organized humanism more like the Catholic Church than a big tent?
I have two answers.
One is that the primary targets of movement humanism and atheism were, in the early days, men–and the battle, like all battles, was joined (mainly) by other men. It’s easy to forget that beginning with the unctuous born-againism of Billy Graham and the faith-healing Oral Roberts, America’s repetitive Great Awakenings in the latter part of the twentieth century were associated with protestant prophets: Graham himself, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, and spit on the floor and call it polish charismatics like Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, and countless others.
Some, like Bakker, were merely crooks; the majority of others a Crayola box of charlatans. The threat of extreme forms of evangelical protestantism in political terms (which was real then and real now) seemed to call for a response that was not “mere” atheism but mobilization of large numbers of smart people who (before the rise of the “Moral Majority” and its lineal descendant, the Tea Party) thought that protestant fundamentalism existed only on the fringes of American Christianity.
Evangelical Fright
To their credit, Kurtz’s organizations rejected that premise and actively sought to combine a critique of religious dogmatism with education in the democratic and secular values that the Christian Right regarded as un-American.
Women were certainly part of the demographics of the disaffected, the escapees, but ex-born-again protestant males formed a significant majority of converts to the secular humanist form of unbelief. Former Roman Catholics, adrift from the dogmatism of their church and its sexist politics (since unmasked as a pedophile paradise) were the second largest demographic, with secular Jews coming in at a healthy third–and increasing numbers of ex-Muslims at the dawn of the new millennium.
There were women within each group–talented, engaging, brilliant women. But the “authoritative” voices–the teachers–were still almost exclusively male.
The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of O’Hair and her family in 1995 and subsequent (2001) discovery of her chainsawed remains on a Texas ranch was the conclusion of a sordid chapter in the history of American atheism. O’Hair’s estranged son William testified that his mother had a tendency to hire “violent atheist criminals” because “She got a sense of power out of having men in her employ who had taken human life.” The net benefit to secular humanism, which had always seen her as a PR problem, may have been minimal, but the damage to atheism in America, and perhaps also to large-scale women’s involvement in movement atheism, courtesy its female prophet, was enormous.
Studies of religious cults in my own tendentious field are instructive: while women often form the backbone of support for the leaders of religious-social groups, the “authority structure” normally consists of a charismatic leader who achieves prophetic status and beta- and gamma- followers who perform secondary services, the value of which is determined by the prophet himself. (Think Jesus-disciples-women attendants.) It’s easy to overstate the relevance of this sociology, but what Rebecca Watson experienced was at least a vestigial form of secular tribalism.
In my opinion, it used to be far worse–though to the extent prophets remain males, the potential for abuse will always exist. If anything, the new atheism reasserted the primacy of male opinion about God, while at the same time elevating the discussion in a way that made the atheist “option” intellectually respectable, as it had not been under O’Hair. Doubtless the male leaders do not (cannot?) see it this way because their status depends on the willingness of women to acquiesce in their authority. It’s an old pattern.
The second reason for the implicit misogyny of the atheist community is more complicated, more directly explanatory, and might be instead a reason why women have often bypassed atheism in favour of other, more pragmatic, struggles.
As a graduate student at Harvard in the ‘seventies, there was never a time when I sensed that women were ”underrepresented” or voiceless. The professoriate, still largely male, was changing–but the student body of the Divinity School, where most Godtalk was analyzed, was equally or about equally divided between men and women.
Harvard moreover was a microcosm of the secularisation of liberal religion in America during that era, and also expressed the fact that in most Christian denominations the carriers of tradition and the demographic majority of adherents are women. And while male voices still tried to dominate the discussion professionally (as in published books and papers), women had seized the conversation.
While O’Hair did what she did, hundreds, if not thousands, of women were radicalized–in the positive sense of that word–in the liberal divinity schools of North America in the seventies and eighties, which were more closely in touch with radical trends in European universities and European feminist theology and philosophy than any equivalent groups in America. By contrast with the generation of women theologians concerned with questions of religion and secularization between 1970 and 2000, the contributions of women associated with movement atheism was, to be kind, unimpressive.
Judith Plaskow
With its visceral tendency to dismiss theology as intellectual chintz, both men and women atheists have habitually overlooked the fact that the best and the most scorching critiques of religion in the last third of the twentieth century were produced by theologians, many of them women. Furthermore, they did this not just against the odds but within structures, both ecclesiastical and academic, where male authority had predominated for centuries.
For many, the question of God’s existence was yesterday’s news; it had been soundly laid to rest in the nineteenth century. The burning questions were now about the social implications of that death for systems still governed by male privilege based (directly or indirectly) on metaphors of male sovereignty over women.
To name only three of dozens of these women: Mary Daly, who died in 2010, was one of the first Americans to bring the discussion of repressive patriarchal structures based on biblical and other religious images to English speaking readers. Trained in Europe, her first book, the Church and the Second Sex (1968) drew on the feminist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, and her more popular book, Beyond God the Father (1973), challenged the authority structure of the Catholic Church directly as being an antiquated system of privilege based on outdated images drawn from tribal societies where God is an alpha-male who dominates others through physical stength, abuse, sexual dominance, and the demand for obedience:
“Patriarchy is the homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents…. Women who are Pirates in a phallocentric society are involved in a complex operation. First, it is necessary to Plunder — that is, righteously rip off — gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must Smuggle back to other women our Plundered treasures. In order to invert strategies that will be big and bold enough for the next millennium, it is crucial that women share our experiences: the chances we have taken and the choices that have kept us alive. They are my Pirate’s battle cry and wake-up call for women who I want to hear….• The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic ‘civilization’ in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power.”
Rosemary Radford Ruether, who along with Daly (in Gyn-ecology, 1978) styled herself an eco-feminist, was one of the first women theologians to apply the Reformation idea of freedom of conscience to the early debate about abortion in the United States, challenged traditional ideas about God, and implicated the Church (in her 1974 book, Faith and Fratricide) in the pepetuation not only of anti-Semitism (which, she alleges, it virtually invented) but in the modern political plight of the Palestinian people.
As to Christianity’s record:
“Christianity is riddled by hierarchy and patriarchy… a social order in which chaste women on their wedding night were in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes. . . . Modern societies have sought to change this situation, allowing women education, legal autonomy, paid employment and personal freedom. But the sexual morality of traditional puritanical patriarchal Christianity has never been adequately rethought.”
The critique continues in the work of countless women theologians and religious studies scholars; Ursula King (Religion and Gender, 1995); Hedwig Myer-Wilmes (Rebellion on the Borders, 1995); Judith Plaskow (Standing again at Sinai), Luise Schotroff (Lydia’s Impatient Sisters, 2000), Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza (In Memory of Her, 1983, 1994), Phyliss Trible (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1978).
Almost every issue the religious right considered “pivotal” and defining for their understanding of Christianity is explored and deconstructed in these works, perhaps most memorably in the work of my former Harvard classmate Daphne Hampson who was one of the first writers to use the term “Post-Christian” to describe the critical work in religion that future generations of theologians needed to do:
“I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimise a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is. But for myself…I am not an atheist.”
For many observers of the current crisis about women’s voices, the question has to become, Where are you looking, and what are you hearing? Are you aware of these voices? Or is half a century of women’s thinking and writing about the very structures that atheist women are only beginning to consider irrelevant to your analysis of religion? Does the fact that their battles were fought with the Church or within the repressive institutions they tried to change nullify their critique or make it incomplete?
If the complaint against their writing is that they did not go far enough, the question then becomes How far is far enough? And since when is mere polemic a worthy substitute for profound analysis of religious belief and hardcore scholarship in history and anthropology? What additional weight is achieved by self-identifying as an atheist when the concept and images of the biblical and koranic god have already been carefully and systematically dismantled and when the conversation has, frankly, moved on to questions about values and ethics ?
That is what the atheology of the Dalys, the Hampsons, the Tribles and dozens of others has provided, with intellectual rigour and sophistication. Furthermore, there are virtually no male voices here to distract us from their project–no one to say, “Come up to my room and we can compare notes.”
I very much doubt that the paradigm for women in the atheist movement will be greatly enriched by simply accepting the bluff and underanalyzed paradigms of the male atheist polemicists–who, by the way, based on more than a glance at their bibliographies and footnotes, are equally unacquainted with this strand of feminist thinking about God. Why am I not surprised? Forgive us our debts.
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Published: August 20, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : religion : R. Joseph Hoffmann : humanism : Paul Kurtz : Richard Dawkins : secular humanism : Center for Inquiry : Sam Harris : american humanist association : Harvard Divinity School : Daniel Dennett : PZ Myers : Skepchick : Rebecca Watson : atheist misogyny : Mary Daly : Rosemary Radford Ruether : Daphne Hampson : Post-Christianity : atheology : Phyliss Trible : Jennifer Michael Hecht : Religion Dispatches : Ophelia Benson : Rebecca N. Goldstein : liberal theology : Betty Friedan ..
52 Responses to “Does Atheism Hate Women?”
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stevie
August 20, 2011 at 8:21 pm
I think I can add two points which may be worth considering; the first lies fairly and sqarely in the social history of science in England and goes some way to explain why Richard Dawkins is the way he is.
Back in the mists of time, when he was studying biology, it was a truth universally recognised that only cissies did biology.
Mathematicians were gods, and although manly men could aspire to real science like physics, or, possibly, chemistry if the physicists were in a good mood, biology was a ‘soft’ science, and we all know that soft does not cut the mustard.
Dawkins has spent his life trying to prove he’s not a cissie, and can cut the mustard; simple charity suggests we not dwell overly long on that.
Dawkins had the added disadvantage of being wholly incapable of the real science which had overtaken him in his chosen subject decades ago; he has been reduced to the pitiful level of a character in evolutionary biology bingo.
Once you grasp that point then you begin to understand the reasons behind his apparently random swipe at Rebecca…
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rjosephhoffmann
August 20, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Interesting Stevie: thanks for this. In the long run, it doesn’t say anything ultimately damning about RD and I think Rebecca deserves a lot of credit for calling attention to the incident.
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stevie
August 21, 2011 at 5:47 pm
As do I; Rebecca has been vilified and has responded with great courage and dignity. As she has noted she expects that RD will continue to make cartloads of money, and I am sure she is right.
There is, after all, a large market for people who believe that buying a particular book will demonstrate their intellectual superiority without ever having to do anything which requires intellectual ability. But that takes us back to the dumbing down of atheism, and I’m pretty sure you are bored by that.
I think the important question is whether playing evolutionary biology bingo is simply perpetuating Victorian stereotypes of male and female. Of course, I think the answer to that one is in the affirmative, but then I’ve spent too much of my life being told that I think like a man to have much confidence that those stereotypes are going to go away once the dinosaurs of RD’s generation fulfil their biological destiny by dying…
rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Oh my. But of the 4 so-called horsemen, stallions I mean, only 1 was under 60….
rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 6:04 pm
And no, I want atheism to be as sophisticated and global and sexless as we have a right to expect it to be.
steph
August 20, 2011 at 10:48 pm
It’s a very interesting, and very sad, post. I always preferred stairs to lifts. I like running up and down hills anyway and I always find small places and closed doors claustraphobic. I’ve only ever really belonged to protest ‘movements’ such as anti war, peace and greenie type things. Theatres and wineries have been the only ‘organisations’ that I’ve been employed by. Religion and sex has been irrelevant. In any case these movements and organisations were in a country where, during the last decade, the four most powerful positions in the country were held by women, and it was the first to give women the vote. In my opinion RD is deluded about many things, including the history of religions and what ‘god’ can mean. He seems very naive about these things, as do many atheist scientists. I have noticed ‘enough is enough’ being employed by atheists in America where they are a minority. It stands out to me, because it is the same mantra used by the patriarchal fundamentalist Destiny Church in New Zealand, which is an American import, but small and insignificant (unlike MacDonalds which is equally damaging and regrettably more influential). The male members, dressed in black, chanted ‘enough is enough’ indignantly, as they marched all the way to parliament a decade ago, in protest at our legalisation of civil unions and prostitution. Oddly I always associate that phrase with them – they shouted it so angrily and loudly.
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Ophelia Benson
August 21, 2011 at 1:03 pm
I’d love to add a random snippet of autobiography for you too, but I can’t think of anything relevant. I never can.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 1:06 pm
You have sharp elbows!
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Ophelia Benson
August 21, 2011 at 2:21 pm
True!
Dan Gillson
August 21, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Found it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia_Benson
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Sili
August 23, 2011 at 4:33 pm
It still doesn’t matter, but seeing your picture up there I want to repeat my claims that 1) you’re not ugly, 2) you should be on the Skepchick calendar.
Sorry.
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steph
August 21, 2011 at 3:10 pm
mine are spikier.
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stevie
August 22, 2011 at 11:15 am
Would I be pushing my luck too far by inviting you to include humanist in your specifications?
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 11:27 am
and humanism…of course
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Gene Smith
August 22, 2011 at 11:39 am
You know, it occurs to me as I read this, that one big reason why America is “God-besotted” is that religion fills a void left by the maniacal individualism constantly promoted as the real basis of the “American Way.” Curiously, the American version of religion strongly reinforces this “lone hero” approach to…well, everything. I suspect this is a strong component of its continued survival as a political and cultural force. I don’t know that it is intentional…I merely note it.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 11:42 am
Cowboys, rugged individualism, and God at your right side close to your trigger finger, it’s a powerful partnership.
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steph
August 22, 2011 at 8:03 pm
You might like this Gene:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/american-heroes/
“Belief in heroes and belief in the gods have been connected since the dawn of civilization. America’s obsession with heroes is just another part of its social pathology, the other side of which is religious lunacy.”
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Godless
August 22, 2011 at 2:13 pm
“For many, the question of God’s existence was yesterday’s news; it had been soundly laid to rest in the nineteenth century.”
I’ve heard this before, but I’m confused by it. Is this common among religious believers in America? Or is this only something that theologians and others involved in divinity schools know?
On the ground, belief in god seems to be strong. If god’s existence has been accepted since the 19th century, why does religion, particularly Christianity, still exist in America? The religion is based on a god, so I don’t see how it would have survived god’s death.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I could have been more clear, I think: I am arguing for an atheism that builds on what radical theology and feminist theology had explored in the last part of C XX. A lot of these theologians had no wish to bring religion down with God, and that may seem like a fatal inconsistency (though not all religions have gods). There are certainly points where feminist critique of patriarchal god language and concepts of God is useful to atheists, and others where it looks a little anemic. Yes, it is true that liberal theology, esp in the works of Strauss, Feuerbach, and even theologically trained Marxists like Bauer (who believed Cty was a myth) gave up thinking that the word God meant anything, and I still find their reasoning and historical work valuable.
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Godless
August 30, 2011 at 9:31 am
Interesting, thanks for the response. I’m going to check out the people you mentioned.
stevie
August 22, 2011 at 7:44 pm
‘There are certainly points where feminist critique of patriarchal god language and concepts of God is useful to atheists, and others where it looks a little anemic.’
One possible reason for the apparent anemia is that the feminist critique of the patriarchy finds it difficult to discover much in the way of any meaningful distinction between patriarchal god language and patriarchal atheist language.
As Rebecca has discovered, to her cost, criticising the latter leads to very direct threats to her physical safety; if you take a look at those screenshots of the people who think she should be raped and tortured and killed for, say, failing to denounce male circumcision, it is pretty obvious that there are quite a few guys out there whose notion of reasoned discourse falls a very long way short of anything involving a synapse or two.
And yet no-one is calling them on it,…
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Veronica
August 23, 2011 at 4:27 pm
The New Atheism seems to be very much invested in the idea that misogyny is largely the result of religion (which is why Dawkins jumped straight to be-burqa-ed Muslimas), and therefore, via rational self-interest, all women should be atheists.
Then, when women don’t show up in “the movement,” it’s seen as a sign that women must be irrational–and therefore deserving of the sort of ladder theory, ev psych, “nice guy” sexism you find all over the “skeptical” blogosphere.
They aren’t going to look in feminist circles for female atheists, despite the fact that MOST female atheists I know are feminists, because that might expose a sort of nasty truth–that the female atheist community avoids them.
Occasionally, you run across a male atheist that figures this out. Generally, it results in a conversation where women swear fealty more to feminism than movement atheism, are Part of The Problem. This never gets connected to the “rational self-interest” that atheist women aren’t supposed to be acting on.
They can’t see how weird it is that they totally feel entitled to state that a woman that is both an atheist and a feminist has a Holy Obligation to identify primarily as an atheist, or they’re harming the Glorious Cause. And, they can’t conceive of sexism as something that might be more a product of social structure than “irrationality” and religion.
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stevie
August 24, 2011 at 4:39 pm
This is very familiar; it seems strange that so few people can grasp that a woman’s rational self-interest would inevitably result in her strongly objecting to the presence of a guy who appears to be trying to put the moves on her in an otherwise deserted hotel lift at 4am…
It’s time for another weekly roundup of interesting links! « The House of Vines says:
August 22, 2011 at 11:53 pm
[...] this rabbit, atheists hate women: the video has raised the spectre that big top modern atheism, as opposed to the atheism of the [...]
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Franklin Percival
August 23, 2011 at 3:20 am
Seems to me that we buy ourselves a problem when we conflate the consideration of the religion hypothesis/es with gender relations. If I choose to accept the existence of a god, I may be deluded, but I am intellectually bound to accept that female and male persons are equally worthy of respect as human beings. If I am rational and reject the religion hypothesis, I am still bound to acknowledge sexual equality. There are two different narratives here, and bundling them together, particularly as one is an ethically neutral line of scientific enquiry,whereas the other involves real people and is intensely ethical.
The overt quasi-religiosity of ‘The New Atheism’ and ‘The Atheist Movement’ does not have any relevance for me, because if there is no god one does not need to bury her with enormous carbon footprints every few months. The energy and treasure expended on such activities would be more fruitfully applied to legally reducing religion’s influence, surely? This would not preclude our best efforts to improve the field of ethnic or gender equality.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 23, 2011 at 9:26 am
@Franklin: yes, I agree that the question of sexual equality and the question of the existence of God are two different narratives. They are bound together, however, in history, text and imagery, which are concrete expressions of the conception and in the “power structures” that such imagery supports. I think it is perfectly legitimate therefore for women, theologians and secularists, to conduct the discussion at that level. It is also interesting to consider whether any perfectly abstract philosophical construct of God (God minus attributes of power and authority) bears any meaning. The theologians perhaps erred in thinking that “God” could become gender neutral, and that thus/therefore the concept could be remodeled, spared and retrieved. I don’t think that that project is useful and some of their discussions look dated and naive.
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bubbarich
August 23, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Rebecca Watson made a very valid comment about “the incident.” Dawkins made a very ham-handed and stereotypically Oxbridge Male response to her. I agree completely with you about that.
However, during the later back-and-forth on the issue, Rebecca Watson herself, and much worse from some of her fans, stepped way beyond the bounds of rationality, and even beyond offended victim of sexism. Her attack on Stef McGraw (“ignorant of feminism”?) was at least heavy-handed. Worst was the insistence that SHE SAID SHE WAS SLEEPY was some sort of gospel message that should have eliminated any possibility that she would ever do anything else. And the people who are saying it are saying it so intensely that it almost sounds like stupidity, instead of the disingenuous crap I suspect it is.
It was a good issue to raise. It’s part of very, very complex social negotiations that we make all of the time, and a lot of people obviously need to learn and be able to communicate better, and especially not intentionally isolate a woman. The atheists in the world are still negotiating sexual mores in a way that’s completely unsettled right now. And there are many, many people among the “thought leaders” of the atheists right now who are VERY sexually active and VERY sexually aggressive, both men and women. This is going to make an already very complex social negotiation much more complex, even if you’re not one of the sexual butterflies of the movement.
This is what irritates me the most: Rebecca’s insults against anybody who would doubt that her intentions are always crystal clear to everyone. And ESPECIALLY when she actually seriously added “But I said I was tired and going to bed.” I can believe she would say that, as we often tend to prioritize things we say ourself, but the number of people who have repeated those words as gospel is a little disturbing.
At best this guy was a clueless nerd who felt threatening to Rebecca through the alcohol-4am haze. At worst he was a predator who makes a habit of isolating women like that. But some of Rebecca’s attacks after her initial comments have been more about bizarre personal power (“BUT I SAID”) that serve only to keep her fans inflamed and distract from the good point she was making.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 23, 2011 at 4:59 pm
The point Rich makes is interesting, above. I don’t think that there is an “atheist” context for this incident–at all–shoot me, but what you say is poignant: “The atheists in the world are still negotiating sexual mores in a way that’s completely unsettled right now. And there are many, many people among the “thought leaders” of the atheists right now who are VERY sexually active and VERY sexually aggressive, both men and women.” As a cultural subset, does this make the atheist community any different from say a secular society that is sexually confused between the mixed messages conveyed in media, music, you name it??
Reply
stevie
August 24, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Shooting you would be too kind; I expect more of you than the ‘we are all confused’ gambit.
My daughter was an ardent fan of the Spice Girls, which certainly freaked me out at the time; I dealt with it by enrolling her in a martial arts class, on the principle that girl power has to be more than a marketing tool. She proved to be rather good at it, and in a fair fight I would back her against around 80% of the population, male and female.
In an unfair fight I would back her against around 95% of the population, male and female, since no one who wants to win fights fair. And they don’t give you the nice gold embroidery on your black belt if you haven’t grasped the point that you fight to win; if you are not going to win then you run.
So, anyone stupid enough to intrude upon her personal space would almost certainly regret it, but very few people do intrude on her personal space; people have to be pretty dumb not to realise that she is predator, not prey. Rebecca does not have those skills…
Franklin Percival
August 25, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Stevie,you would be more comprehensible if you could manage to write in English!
Reply
Scott
August 27, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Atheism doesn’t hate women. There are, however, certain atheist males who think the domain belongs to them. If atheism belongs to anyone, it belongs to the atheist.
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J. Quinton
August 30, 2011 at 3:11 pm
the incident itself had no specific relevance to the atheist community, being part of much broader social patterns of marginalization (read: the genus of sexism is not atheism).
I dated a couple of engineers while in undergrad. I’m not sure of the stats, and I’ve never been to an atheist/skeptic conference, but I would wager to guess that the male:female ratio is pretty heavily skewed towards the male at these conferences much like the classes that my engineering girlfriends attended. Especially since, across all societies, women seem to be more religious than men (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201009/why-are-women-more-religious-men-ii).
While not as blatant as the elevator guy incident, I did hear complaints from those girlfriends of mine about similar marginalization; mainly being oogled at unashamedly by potential male colleagues or clumsy propositions by classmates.
So I think the elevator incident had more to do with a sort of “sausage party” effect than some latent atheist sexism.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 30, 2011 at 4:28 pm
I think many of us want to think that atheism has an implicitly superior moral position because it rejects the gods patriarchy. But translating that assumption into practice isn’t all that easy. Dawkins’s comments were, at least, clumsy on this score but also suggest that the sources of sexism are more entrenched in behaviour than non-believing males might want to think. No one is surprised; even a free love advocate like Russell was egregiously sexist, though his atheist credentials were pretty impressive.
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Grog
July 26, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Why should any of think anything of the sort? Atheism is the non-belief in deities. It has nothing to do with “superior moral position[s].” Why put such extra baggage on a very simple idea. You are talking about something else, give it a different name.
adamwho
July 24, 2012 at 2:17 pm
I would like to see some evidence that atheism/skepticism/secularism is more sexist than any other similar group/organization. I am certain if you polled the membership of such groups you would find near unanimous agreement on womens rights issues that surpass the US national average.
I would like to see some evidence that atheist/skeptic/secular conferences are more sexists than other conferences. It is not the possible for conference organizers to regulate member behavior after conference hours in bars, hotels, or online, such areas are the domain of the police, hotel/bar owners and online moderators.
The evidence I see paints a the opposite picture. Attempts at gender balance and actively recruiting female speakers, as well as extensive anti-harassment policies imply that atheist/skeptics/secular organizations are better than many (most?).
The suggestion, without evidence, that atheist/skeptic/secular conferences are unsafe for women is irresponsible and damaging to the movement.
To many, it seems like RW, with her various boycotts and free use of generalizations, has used her position in the atheist/secular community to promote a divisive form of feminism that blames men for all the problems of women. In this case skeptic/atheist men.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 24, 2012 at 4:20 pm
@Adam: I share most of your view of this, actually. Finally atheism, secularism, humanism, and the other ism will have to negotiate a solution, but the special needs and interests are very firmly entrenched.
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Stevie Gamble
July 25, 2012 at 8:51 am
On the other hand, when I read women being criticised for behaving in a way which is “damaging to the movement” I wonder why a supposedly rational human being would do anything other than press the delete button.
It’s 2012, in case you hadn’t noticed, and believe it or not women are entitled to express their views without being lectured about their need not to damage any movement, regardless of what that particular movement is.
Equally I would expect some evidence beyond your personal belief and your pictures. Perhaps you could provide some evidence in support of them?
Reply
adamwho
July 25, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Making accusations against a whole movement without evidence, isn’t “expressing your views”, at best is irrational at worse it is lying.
Pointing that out, especially in the atheist/rationalist/skeptic movement, that such accusations are lies, certainly isn’t suppression of views nor is it sexist. Maybe some women claim an exception from dishonest accusations and wild generalizations.
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Stevie Gamble
July 25, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Still no evidence; we are back to your conviction that there is a movement, sorry, a whole movement, which needs protecting from women expressing views you don’t like.
You appear incapable of grasping that reasoned discourse involves both evidence and reasoning; so far you have provided neither.
If you want to contend that someone is lying then you have to identify the lie in question and demonstrate, by citing evidence, that it is a lie.
Frankly, if you haven’t grasped the fundamentals of reasoned discourse by now you would be better off canning the conferences and going back to school to learn them. This is called rational self-interest and if you do it then someday you may be employable…
adamwho
July 25, 2012 at 4:14 pm
@Stevie Gamble
What a strange argument. The atheist/secular/skeptic movement is the collection of authors/scientists/speakers, the interested people in such subjects, and the many conferences and organizations associated within these subjects. Such a ‘movement’ obviously exists.
Second, concerning the damage being done. Specifically, accusations have been made that TAM (a major skeptic convention) is unsafe and unconcerned about women, this is patently false as shown by a complete lack of sexual harassment complaints at the conference. Additionally, TAM has gone to great lengths to maintain equal billing for men and women speakers and actively recruits women.
Third, the evidence that it is damaging to the movement (specifically to TAM in this example) is the drop in female attendance because of women citing these alarmist accusations. Additionally, there has been a year plus flame war across blogs and even in the media about these accusations.
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 3:28 am
Checking the TAM 2012 website, it seems that of 35 speakers listed, 15 are female.
http://www.amazingmeeting.com/TAM2012/
This is not to say that there isn’t an issue regarding sexism in atheism. Personally, I would say that there is, but that it’s somewhat overstated at times, IMO.
As in ‘implicit misogyny in the atheist community…’ for example. :)
rjosephhoffmann
July 25, 2012 at 11:20 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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davidjohnmills
July 25, 2012 at 11:49 am
Nice post. I wouldn’t want to say much, since nearly everything has been said in comments above. I’d be willing to take a punt that ‘atheist communities’ are a tad more egalitarian than, say, an ‘average community’, but nonetheless, this does not warrant a pat on the back, since any degree of sexism (personally I’m very careful about reserving terms like ‘mysogyny’ for actual women-hatred) is regrettable, and Dawkins was generally criticized by atheists generally for his ‘midlife/older man’s gaff’, albeit it may not have been as clear cut or the ensuing kerfuffle as one-sided as reported.
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steph
July 25, 2012 at 2:51 pm
This isn’t about ordinary atheists living peacefully in mixed societies with people of other mild faiths and origins, under secular egalitarian governments where society reflects egalitarianism, like Northern Ireland or New Zealand where, last decade, the five most powerful positions in the country were held (coincidentally not design) by women. The Prime Minister (happens to be a quiet atheist), leader of the opposition (liberal Christian), Leader of the House (probably agnostic), Governor General (not sure), Chief Justice (who knows), and Attorney-General (don’t know and obviously completely irrelevant as with all). It’s not even about ordinary quiet atheists living in America or Canada or anywhere. This post is about atheists in particular movements and ‘communities’ where atheism is central (and there are prophets, heroes and messiahs).
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davidjohnmills
July 25, 2012 at 5:57 pm
I know that steph. When I said ‘atheist communities’, I meant just that, not ‘atheists living in wider communities’.
steph
July 26, 2012 at 9:30 am
Jolly good. Then you’ll realise that egalitarianism is a reflection of the standards of a secular society (whether or not the leaders and teachers are religious or not), and not the atheists in it. Taking punts and speculating about particular groups in social contexts other than yours, is not sufficient compared with experience
Stevie Gamble
July 26, 2012 at 7:03 am
Your entire first paragraph is a classic straw man argument; at no point did I suggest that ‘the whole movement’ does not exist. The fact that you are reduced to inventing non-existent statements to refute says a great deal about your inability to find something rational to contribute to the discussion.
The sun is shining, and I am therefore departing to the garden to enjoy the English summer while it lasts. In my absence you could try putting together a rational response, hard as that may be for you, which replies to what I did write.
As a general guide, however, strive to bear in mind for the future that kicking off anything with an obvious straw man means that nobody with an iq above 100 is going to bother to read any further…
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davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 8:40 am
On a tangental note, mentions of atheism being ‘quasi-religious’ and talk of it having messiahs and prophets generally raises a smile from me. :)
Oh, I get the analogy, but I think it’s more than a bit stretched.
Which political/social ‘movement’ is not at least somewhat like religion. Which religion is not at least somewhat somewhat like a political/social movement? What cheese isn’t at least somewhat chalkish? :)
Reply
steph
July 26, 2012 at 9:17 am
I don’t eat cheese, but no camembert or brie is the least bit chalkish. People are not consistent. People vary geographically according to social and political context. We are not talking about Belfast. It is not a ‘stretched’ analogy in view of the particular movements and ‘communities’ being discussed. Personal belief in atheism or a religion is certainly not ‘somewhat like’ a political movement or even necessarily a social one.
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Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Religion/Politics/Atheism are the same three corners of a point, it appears to me – all about survival, power and agrandisment (we won’t argue spelling here, thank you).
My proposition is that once something becomes a ‘movement’, it ceases to have any rational base.
Care to argue?
Luv, f.
Reply
steph
July 29, 2012 at 8:26 pm
On the button Franklin.
Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 9:46 pm
I made a proposition. You are making assumptions. This will not get us anywhere.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
How Atheism Lost the War of Ideas
by rjosephhoffmann
(c) 2011, extract from from The Fall and Winter of Secular Humanism
In 1921 Luigi Pirandello wrote an absurdist drama that became his landmark contribution to twentieth century literature, Six characters in search of an author. In the play according to the playwright’s instructions, the six ownerless characters enter from the rear interrupting the rehearsal of another Pirandello play. A “tenuous light” surrounds them—the “faint breath of their fantastic reality.” With embarrassment, the Father explains to the angry Manager that they are in search of an author. When the Manager replies that he has no time for madmen, the Father rejoins that he must know that life is full of absurdities that do not need to appear plausible since they are true. To reverse this process is the madness of acting: that is, “to create credible situations, in order that they may appear true.”
Every religion, every political system, exists to soften the inherent absurdity and ultimate cruelty of life, and to create a reality that appears true to believers: one–society or government–is not more “plausible” or true than the other–religion or philosophy. Both, over time, have been in the business of producing the artifice of civilization and culture that we regard as the primary location of human beings. As Freud recognized, we create culture at the expense of freedom. We maintain it at the cost of self-actualization. The stage-set we call civilization, the set we built for ourselves through collective and largely unconscious struggle, is no more real than the stage sets Pirandello’s characters create for their own temporary existence.
True, we have developed the wherewithal to change the set, learned to expand the horizons of civilization beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, and developed systems of decryption that answer questions about how the set works, how we ourselves are constructed, how we have evolved. That is what science is. The frantic search for an author: that is what religion is, and like the characters in Pirandello’s drama, without that knowledge the attempt to construct our life is limited to piecing scenes together: “Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn’t exist.”
***
The death of any movement begins with fissiparation. Almost instinctively, early Christianity even before it was a force to reckon with, knew that the essential threat to its existence would come from those who differed over the finer details of the faith–not from Jews or pagans who rejected it wholesale. Christianity succeeded organically well into the Renaissance by insisting on a core message and core ritual practices and belief. The creeds–self-referring statements of faith–of the ancient churches may have cost it a few friends, but created a bureaucratic structure that has lasted centuries longer than equally unwavering philosophies such as communism and national socialism. That is not accidental, because while the basic needs of people in relation to society are as simple as a loaf of bread or a supply of water, the needs of people in relation to religion are as fugitive as ideas of God and eternal happiness, and failure to fulfill them more difficult to see as a negation of religion’s promises. The government that cannot provide bread will not survive for long. The religion that cannot provide God will simply change the nature of the search or find new places to look.
When the Christian church in the west did break apart in the sixteenth century, it did so for two reasons: first, Rome had lost the power to control dissident opinion as effectively as it had in previous centuries. There were various reasons for this, but the main one was distraction. Since the late Middle Ages, popes had been forced to defend their claim of political superiority and territorial rights against a half dozen ambitious princes who had come to see Rome as a political rival to their own national agendas. Though the quarrels (known officially as the Investiture Controversy) always were coded in theological language, the secular aspirations of the opposing powers was plain. Compromising on some theological issues was always seen as preferable to alienating powerful allies on which the papacy depended for its own prestige. The only question was whether the state exceeded the Church in power or whether the spiritual authority of the church was superior to the powers of prince and magistrate. There was no talk of “abolition” of one by the other because the power of each was derived from a common hierarchy that required God, as celestial sovereign, at the top
Second, however, Rome itself was in spiritual and moral crisis. What is often said erroneously about the moral decay of Rome at the time of the Christian insurgence of the fourth century can fairly be said about Christianity in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the protestant movement. While centers of culture, intellectual vigour and reform certainly existed, the Church of the commoners was characterrized by superstition, enforced credulity, and doctrinal rigidity. Luther’s purview in Wittenberg as a university professor established him as one of the enlightened, but his agonized concern for the latter made him a reformer. It was this unique combination of intellectualism, concern for the moral condition of the church he served, and the distractedness of the church that made the reformation possible.
"Give us a king!"
The patterns established by the rupture continued: no longer subject to governing authority, a message control center, protestantism devolved into a hundred competing theologies and practices. The charismatic, quietist, and Evangelical streams of practice already stood at the outflow of the Reformation and continued through the twentieth century. They were not the end of the process. The Church of God in Christ, Unification theology, Jonestown, fundamentalism and Dominionism all lay ahead. Each one of them (like their 16th century prototypes) claimed to possess the correct recipe for church-state relations. Increasingly the conservative protestant movement became convinced that that recipe was expressed in the symbolism of Israel’s rejection of God in favour of monarchy (or sovereignty, or big government), and called for a return to the humility, obedience, and faithfulness they thought characterized the people of Israel before they became rebellious, arrogant, and sinful. By 1954 the question of God, at least in the United States, had become inseparable once again from the question of the powers of government.
[Next: The secular movement in Europe and America]
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Published: September 23, 2011
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2 Responses to “How Atheism Lost the War of Ideas”
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Dan Gillson
September 24, 2011 at 1:57 pm
I’m not sure how the title relates to the article. Would you perhaps explain that to me?
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stevie
September 24, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Not for Publication
Many years ago I had a distinctly fraught conversation with my headmistress on the question of why I was turning down PPE in favour of reading Combined Honours in Drama and Theatre Arts and Sociology at a redbrick university.
In fairness to her I should note that she was not primarily concerned about league tables; if she had been then she could simply have trumpetted the fact that there were 18 places in the drama department that year, with over 5000 people applying for them, and that one of her pupils had won one.
In fairness to myself I should note that without me there would have been no Combined Honours in those subjects, since the sociology department had responded to its unwanted fashionability by requiring students to pass at least first year statistics before giving them a degree. Fashionable and numerate do not automatically go hand in hand, and thus the discovery of someone in the National Youth Theatre who was studying maths, english and politics at A level was taken as an auspicious omen.
My headmistress has passed on to wherever headmistresses go; were she still here I would have emailed the article to her, heavily annotated with the things which are wildly wrong, together with an equally lengthy list of the things which are subtly wrong, and she might, perhaps, have finally understood why I wanted to learn about human beings, both up close and personal, and in the thing which Maggie Thatcher denied existed, society.
I really should go and take some more antibiotics, since I am currently endeavouring to stay out of hospital, but I leave you with a possibility which may not have occurred to you; Pirandello was shaped by his surroundings in the same way that he sought to shape them. But playwrights are always aware of earlier playwrights and their plays, and that is a form of shaping which tends to be overlooked by people who have not spent their lives immersed in it. That’s why Pirandello set it in a rehearsal of one of his own plays…
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Me the People
by rjosephhoffmann
Don’t call me The American People. Not unless you mean it. And not unless I hear a compliment when I hear you say it instead of a subtle reference to “typical voters who share my narrow, profit-mongering, and religiously backward view of America.”
Mitch McConnell. the turtlefaced Senate minority leader with a heart of mould, says The American People will not be fooled “this time around” by tax and spend Democrats. Eric Cantor says The American People want a balanced budget–just like they expect to have every month when they make decisions about eating out at restaurants or paying the mortgage (Odd equivalence that: eating at Denny’s once a month and health care for the poor).
Michele Bachmann, the intelligent Christian’s Sarah Palin surrogate, says the American people deserve to keep what they earn and that the Income Tax Amendment (that’s XVI if you’re counting) is unconstitutional. In fact, in an extraordinary moment last week, she said that The American People had decisively spoken in her favor at the Iowa caucus where she received 28% of 17,000 votes, a number comparable to a high school election for student council president. Sarah Palin, when she was interesting, said she was in touch with The American People and knew what they wanted–in language only a little reminiscent of what an employee of Shady Lady Ranch in Nye, Nevada, might say.
The Democrats aren’t blameless, of course. They use this fustian all the time. Just like having to wear flag pins in their lapel and sing “God Bless America” on cue, they have to counter references to the American People with references to the American People. But I have to say that when they do, there seems to be at least a glimmer of good intent to it–an evocation of “real people” who do their own laundry and have to check their bank balance before getting the car fixed, rather than people, like the Tea Party crowd, who actually enjoy wearing jackets and ties and going to church. Alas, many people who do their own laundry and wear wife beaters on Sunday while they enjoy a football game on their 72 inch HDTV (fully paid up in 18 months) actually think the well-pressed set on the links are the best ones to look out for their welfare. The American People is a many-splintered thing,
$12.95, a small price to be an American
I think it boils down to this: when the Democrats use the phrase, they are actually referring to other people. When the Repblicans use it, they mean themselves and the like-minded individuals they play golf with. The American People need to wake up and smell the difference.
And why do they use it–or rather, why do the Republicans use the phrase to the point of making me want to burn a flag using campaign posters of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell as kindling?
Because they can’t say “God.” Oh sure, certified evangelical nutters like Rick Perry can get away with talking about Christian America and what God has done for the country and how The American People are basically decent and good (implication: because they are Christian and know who to thank for that).
But a politician who spoke about God all the time would probably lose people’s attention after a while, even in this preternaturally religious country. ”I ask my colleagues to pass this Deregulation of Oil Companies bill without delay because it’s what God demands and what Jesus would do” sounds a little tetched after all. Better to say, “What the American People want and the American People deserve.” Say it often enough and the association will become natural: two wills happily joined in political wedlock, incarnate in We the People. It all sounds pretty good until you look at the priesthood that presides over this “secular” sanctuary. We the People are no more recognizable from their invocations than God is in the prayers of pedophile priests.
Can we do anything about this, or will we just have to put up with the cynical use of our collective name (and will) being taken in vain? After all, we put them there, and we permit the sacrilege to go on.
Maybe the fatal flaw in the argument for the wisdom of The American People is the tsunami called the 2010 Mid-term election. Unlike God in the official theology, We the People are sometimes impatient, dumb, and prone to make mistakes that injure us. It was fine when We the People were Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton speaking for acquiescent farmers and merchants. Not so good when We are Perry, Romney, Boehner, and Bachmann framing ideas for suits, corporate thieves, the merely uninformed and NASCAR reactionaries.
But unlike the real God (or unreal god) who gets invoked all the time, I think the (real) American People, hapless and reckless beasts that we are, deserve better. Stop treating us like ancient deities who just need a little incense on the fire, a sheaf of burning wheat, a few prayers, and an occasional virgin-sacrifice to keep us happy. Stop thinking you know what We want–or worse, being so priestly in the discharge of your duties that you think that what you want and what we want is the same thing. Clearly it isn’t, and just as clearly the polls say that The American People would like to round you up and drive you out of town. But because it’s expensive for us to keep the buildings open and pay the heating bill, we have to vote for more of you in 2012, just to keep the People’s House occupied. Taxes my axes.
I suggest a national The American People Won’t be Appeased, Bought, Cajoled or Lied To campaign before this election cycle renders the phrase meaningless.
I‘ll be happy to serve as president of this coalition. I think the American People deserve that. You can thank me later for my service.
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Published: September 25, 2011
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Tags: 16th Amendment : 2012 election : Barack Obama : Michele Bachmann : Mitt Romney : politics : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Rick Perry ..
12 Responses to “Me the People”
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secomasam
September 25, 2011 at 4:36 am
Nice topics
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stevie
September 25, 2011 at 10:09 am
It should be remembered, for those of us who may be tempted to pass by on the other side of the road, that the ‘America’ hallucinated by Bachmann et al is not slow in seeking to impart its visions on this side of the pond as well as elsewhere in the wide world.
We recently had to fend off an attempt to change our laws by an anti-choice group who titled themselves ‘The right to know’; it will probably come as no surprise to discover that in their view the right to know did not include the right to know where their money was coming from.
That money could have been spent on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending those in hospital and prisons and so forth, but it wasn’t.
Odd, really, since the people doing the spending profess to be Christians, whilst studiously ignoring what Jesus had to say about what they should be doing with their money…
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Dwight Jones
September 25, 2011 at 11:09 am
You are thus appointed and anointed, Joe. Now go forth and crucify.
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Scott
September 25, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Guess it depends on what one wants: Socialism Lite (Republican) or just down to home plain old Socialism (Democrat) I choose neither; we already have to many who want to put jack boots to our throats.
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Herb Van Fleet
September 25, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Excellent post, as usual. I just have one comment. Well, one comment and one question. First, as someone, probably famous, once said, “Never underestimate the stupidity of the American voter.” And also, could you give me the directions to the “Shady Lady Ranch” in Nevada?
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rjosephhoffmann
September 25, 2011 at 7:10 pm
@herb: Tsl tsk. You can GPS it–if you like global positions.
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Mike Wilson
September 25, 2011 at 4:24 pm
The fellow with the bandana and sign seems like the sort that would do his own shopping and check his bank account before he had his car fixed. Have you seen him on the links or getting his Sunday suit tailored?
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rjosephhoffmann
September 25, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Ah, you mean the mandarin? He’s just fodder for the links crew–the “merely uninformed”–but I dare say he does his own gun shopping.
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steph
September 25, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Herb… I think everyone famous has said it, at least twice, as well as the rest of us.
Behold the new messiah (who will not crucify except metaphorically). You have alot of work to do: change the ‘democratic’ system and end barbaric death penalty, implement free public healthcare, and kick out the creationists, fix the tax system, sack all the “global warming is a liberal conspiracy” (creation) ‘scientists’, end the robot drones and indiscriminate slaughter, halt the building of the super gitmo in Afghanistan and stop all the wars, bring all the troops home and get out of bed with Israel… Oh Lordy Lordy there’s too much to do!
It’s still an excellent post as usual.
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rjosephhoffmann
September 25, 2011 at 7:25 pm
@Steph The democratic system is completely subverted when (as in America) the election cycle is endless. It is back to back marathon football matches with no half time. Everything is political, nothing really “statesmanly”, and alas I include Obama in that assertion, though he’s the least of a thousand evils. Executing people by firing squad–or at all is barbarous, yet the country is willing to engage in sober discussions about what constitutes torture. A debate about the environment can’t go on because pollution is just the reflection of a healthy carbon based lifestyle that makes the plutocrats richer. Fighting endless wars that have long since ceased to be of interest to anyone except the generals and don’t seem to have any purpose except to save face for tottering US military prestige (whatever that is). Israel–a joke, though (he says sheepishly) the Brits did more to create the problem originally than the Americans and now with typical but certain aplomb act as though it is only America’s problem… where to begin. I do think extending the length of a presidential term would help–to five or six years with one repeat. But essentially I think the American system is broken, when members of congress elected just a year ago, and having done nothing since of any merit, are now out trying to save their seats for the next round. this isn’t government–it’s a Disneyland ride. The big question is, if America had been an ancient city state, would its politics be described by one of the tragedians as a fall from greatness or by Aristophanes as greatness that never was. i have my theory, of course.
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steph
September 26, 2011 at 12:12 pm
All regrettably true. And this broke isn’t fixable. You can’t stop this rollercoaster. War has been normalised, and it’s still the same people in positions of influence. The tragedians would have created some previous mythical Golden Age from which it fell, but Aristophanes is on the button. And it was far too big, with too many Puritans and far too much power, ever the be great.
Stevie
September 29, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Joe
Sadly, I just don’t see you as Lysistrata.
Not even with major surgery and an excellent endocrinologist…
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Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist
by rjosephhoffmann
Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist
by rjosephhoffmann
I’ve been puzzling for a few months now why the discourse between hardshell and softshell atheists has taken such a nasty turn. Can’t crabs just learn to live together–scuttling from side to side without disturbing each other’s tranquility?
True, when I first detected the trend among the leading atheist commandos (variously Gnus, News, EZs and Full-frontals) I said they were behaving like jerks, which of course got me called worse names by their fans. All of a sudden I felt as unwelcome among the Baptism-revokers as Garp did when he stumbled into a meeting of the Ellen Jamesians.
Think of me as the little engine that couldn’t, the Doubting Thomas who tanked. I guess if I had been among the apostles on the day after the resurrection and had been invited to place my fingers in Jesus’ wounds, I would just have said, “Naw, I’ll take your word for it.”
I am a soft-shell atheist, someone who periodically lapses into doubt about the premises and sincerity of his unbelief. I am an unbeliever with a soft spot for religion–that’s the truth of it. In darker moments, I sometimes entertain the suspicion that there may be some kind of god. Then I look at my online bank balance, or a Republican presidential debate, and realize how foolish I’ve been.
But I’m also one who feels that atheism has a job to do: protecting believers from themselves and the rest of humanity from absurd and extreme ideas. Atheism has to be outwardly directed at religion, its historical opposite, and isn’t at its best when it begins to obsess about degrees, vintages, and levels of unbelief. Even though these exist.
At first the debate within was between so-called “accommodationists” and “confrontationists.” I think the terms are imbecilic, but apparently the former are those who think conversation between believers and non believers can be civil. The latter follow a somewhat different model of discourse, as between an annoyed pet owner shouting at a dog who’s just peed on the chair leg again.
Some accommodationists think that atheists should engage in interfaith dialogue with believers of various brightnesses, as long as both parties to the discussion are unarmed and everyone agrees that Ben and Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” is the best ice cream ever made and that Kristin Chenoweth’s version of “Taylor the Latte Boy” is awesome. I’m not that extreme, of course–just a backslider who needs a little stained glass and Bach in his life now and again.
But confrontationists are tough. They are the real deal. You can keep your ice cream and your god–and don’t even think about using the courtier’s reply when they call you out as a dick because they have that page in their Atheist Pride Handbook bookmarked, you conceited, theistic, knee-bending pillock.
All kinds of silly images come to mind when I read what the angriest of the atheist brood say, but the dominant one lately is a continually pissed off and ineffectual Yosemite Sam waving his pistols in the air and shouting “It’s time to stop pussyfootin’ around. You Bible-totin’ swamp cabbages and your lily-livered compadres better run for cover. Our day has come and it isn’t the rapture, varmint.”
Hard-shell Atheist in Uniform
The level of pure nastiness has now reached such comic proportions that the real danger faced by the hardshell atheists is the risk of appearing clownish and absurd without being especially funny.
That is a sad state to be in when you are supposed to be advocating for science and reason. So we have to ask why the “confrontationists” are in such a bad mood. All we know is that ice cream won’t fix it.
I have a theory about this. As often happens in the history of movements beginning with a- they seem to be have learned how to behave from the movement they’re rebelling against. Hardshell atheists are behaving like craven theists.
One of the things that irritated ancient nations about the Jews was the CPT, the Chosen People Thing. Judaism at its peak was a tiny and exclusivist sect among the religions of the Middle East. Its purity codes and laws were famous for being as prickly and picky as their God was about who got to call him Father. Having conversations or social relations with non-Jews was not only not recommended, it was not tolerated. (It’s one of the charges against Jesus: a publican is a non Jew). Accommodation was not an option. The Egyptians hated it, then the Persians (a little less), the Babylonians and finally the Romans. Later the medieval Europeans codified the hatred, and of course, the Germans decided to take matters into their own hands. The Final Solution is what happened when talking, compression, and eviction notices didn’t work.
The Christians got a version of the CPT by default when they canonized the Old Testament and proclaimed themselves the New Israel. The Muslims had no choice but to follow suit: their religion is the end of prophecy and their way is the only straight way to God.
One of the things, I suspect, that most irritates atheists about the book religions is this sometimes implicit (and sometimes grating) ideology that you are either inside or outside the faith, and if you’re outside, forget you. But salvation was never about saving everybody. In most denominations, God doesn’t want that. He wants the ones who shine the brightest.
Odd, isn’t it, that the evangelical atheists have adopted a fairly toxic version of the same narrative toward members of their own tribe. Yet who can deny that their total commitment to the Non-existence of God is another outbreak of CPT. They are behaving religiously, aping the worst features of the religious attitudes and behaviors they profess to condemn.
They–the hardshells–will call me wrong, of course, as well as seriously confused and (heh) accommodating. They will say that I’m just being an idiot (again) for equating supernaturalism and superstition (= religion) with logic and science. Don’t I get why this analogy is so bad? It is so bad because this time the chosen have been self-selected by their ingenuity and intellectual excellence, not by some imaginary celestial power.
To which I have to say, in my defense, Don’t you get that the God who doesn’t exist now—the one you don’t believe in—didn’t exist then either? The god of religious exclusivism is the god fabricated by people who already believed in the superiority of their ways, their laws, their customs, and their intrinsic value. It’s the feeling right and thinking that because you are, you are also special and need not discuss your ideas with people who dramatically oppose you that leads to the mistrust, the suspicion, the animosity. Atheists who wonder why they are mistrusted can begin with the anguish the Jews felt when the Romans began a centuries-long tradition of vituperation against the CPT.
But lackaday dee misery me. This post will be greeted with the same disdain I have come to expect from atheists. They will find a straw man in here somewhere and put a hat on him. This will be called a screed or a diatribe. I will be asked where my evidence is for saying these things. (Hint: everywhere) I will be told that I don’t want dialogue, or that I’mcoddling religionists, that this post is a troll in some endless private conversation among certified members about the evils of (all) religion or that I am arrogant (though arrogant prick is my favorite obloquy) or that I am an undercover agent for the Church of God. Actually, the last has not yet been suggested so feel free to use it. And don’t let the fact that there are literally dozens of fairly intelligent people chiming in on this message to the atheist hordes; write it off to my envy at not being Richard Dawkins. Damn.
Now for the best part. It may surprise you to learn that, for everything said here, I am not really a fan of dialogue with faith communities. As far as I am concerned ecumenism and interfaith dialogue are simply activities of groups that interact at a social level, without really getting into the nitty gritty of how they are different, or why they might be wrong. There are two kinds: the merely boring and the pissing contest, but both are ultimately ineffectual.
Atheism–just an opinion, mind you–has no clear place in such a discussion; to mean anything at all, it must be premised on some form of the proposal (a) that God does not exist (b) that this belief has social and moral consequences, especially in terms of human decision-making and (c) that the world we create through these decisions is accountable only to us—that we are the source and the end of our actions. I personally agree with one of the most outspoken hard-shell atheist writers when she sees atheism as something that happens person to person and individual to individual. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to people who are religious. But do you really need a committee (or a community) to do it in?
But I am in favor of atheists, hard- and soft-shell, being concerned about language, self-image, the quality of their critique of religion, and their capacity to describe their life-stance in a positive form. I am interested in narrative control and a literary style that corresponds in form to methods and aims that have often (think Sartre) been elegant. That makes me an elitist, not a cowboy, I know. But the funny thing about Yosemite Sam is that he’ll always shoot first and ask questions later. And people begin to wonder about people like that.
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Published: September 27, 2011
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6 Responses to “Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist”
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Dwight Jones
September 27, 2011 at 9:36 am
You are never better than when you are PZ-ed off about the newly bright, Joe. These most addictive writings deserve to be frontal and centre in the Guardian or some such refuge. Vitamins for my soul.
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Gene Smith
September 27, 2011 at 10:07 am
Thank you. I don’t feel quite as alone. I get really tired of being thought a closet atheist by believers and a closet believer by atheists. Really, really tired. And, yes…you likely will get a nasty response, I’m sure. Nothing will piss a doctrinaire atheist off more than suggesting that they are behaving like the flip side of the religious coin. Nothing.
My own feelings are closer to J.B.S. Haldane’s comment that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. And, granting the universe the same respect and deference I might show a creator god, I have to conclude there may be a thing or two of which I am unaware. Seems like keeping anything like an open mind is about the most unpopular thing there is.
So, again I say: Thank You.
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steph
September 27, 2011 at 3:43 pm
“If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of a pen”, said Camus, to me.
Another thing – Helen Clark said in defence at a regularly repeated attack, “Of course New Zealand is not anti-American”. It’s the only untruth I can remember of her. Too much power, too much influence, too much religion and that includes the anti stuff. Another world. SNTS, those that be in ivory towers, surprisingly are completely unaware of mythticism and the whole New Atheism phenomenon in America. That’s an appalling example of narrow agendas in particular disciplines, but I’m not surprised either.
And the best always comes around again with seconds and thirds and again later on at night with a gin. Too memorable to forget and too good not to repeat. Thank you, welcome to the rest of the world.
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Aurore Boréale
September 28, 2011 at 2:08 am
Lets forget the word religion altogether. Let’s take on all decisions and values in life based on the imaginary instead of the concrete. Would our governments run better? Would our food taste better? Would we have more orgasms during sex? I have no doubt that the answer is No. Basing one’s opinions on concrete reality has undeniable merits. When one lives in an imaginary pseudo-reality, one constantly refuses to see what is in front of our face, and constntly makes up “value systems” to sustain his/her imaginary world. I say this from a perspective you may not be accustomed to… I was atheist before the word was popular, I have never had any love for the wish-washy word ‘agnostic’, I really wish Huxley and his biased view of the world would have stayed out of this debate! My grandmother saw her life’s love thwarted by her religious parents (and his parents… of a different religion). My mother mother was turned over to an aunt and grandma left that god-fearing land called Newfoundland. Atheism has stuck in our family and everyone since has been free from that lunacy. So I’m certainly no new/gnu. But I must thank the gnu movement for allowing me to “come out of the closet” to a degree… I’ve not necessarily hidden being atheist from anyone, but I also did not express those thoughts EVER publicly, now I see the reason for speaking up. Religion in pseudo-secular countries such as Canada, or European Nations, is on the rise due to religious third world immigration for the economic provision of cheap labour. Religion is exactly like neo-liberal economy, it is growth driven, and growing it is, because we atheists have been silenced by politeness. Well I am polite on the topic no more. I call my self an ole’atheist, and the more agnostic/Humanists I meet, the more I want to place those in the same category as faithers… because of their belief that we can simply remove god from christianity, replace all instances of “god” with “human”, keep a majority of the dirty ole book, and all is good. But in fact, ‘god’ was just a front for power mongers, it has always been about humans’ pleasure/wealth/happiness first and foremost, above all other lifeforms. IMHO those atheists are wrong. There is absolutely no value in spending hours and days and months discussing atheists perspectives on the world, if we’re not really going to make a change. Why bother??? As for Jews… the Romans didn’t “start” anything. Jews have been complaining about “not being treated like god’s favourites by other human tribes” well before the Romans started pissing them off. Israel is the ultimate disaster for secular thought. Previous to WWI, secular-diaspora-jews (I can’t stand the concept of ‘secular-Jew’… that would make me a secular-catholic FFS!) fought for zionism, a principally nationalistic approach to being wandering semites throughout Eurasia, following the rise of Islam… the same way that Christians first escaped from the tyranny of Jews, but ex-Christians have not generally made a lifestory about their exodus from “the sacred land”. The Balfour agreement was brought about by a secular Jew basically by a “secular” chemist who was proposing to provide continued access to WWI bomb making ingredients in exchange for British support for the creation of Israel. The concept of a being Jewish without religion was developed around that time pretty much with the sole purpose of creating Israel. It’s only then that there was a ‘rapprochement’ between Jews and Christians. In fact, it was between war-making and Christianity.
In the end, to say that atheists have no business in faith discussions is the wrong question to ask. The question is not faith, it is the control faithers have over our society. Personally I don’t really care what goes on in theocratic countries, it’s THEIR country, may they do with it what they wish… as long as their policies don’t have international repercussions. It is a battle of willpower, do people with imaginary friends control my country or do realists control my country. That is a political decision, and I’m quite happy atheists are finally a part of the political process, having been excluded from it for thousands of years.
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steph
September 30, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Thomas Huxley and his grandson Julian contributed alot of value in the history of ideas. Creative imaginations and great insights. Considering Thomas didn’t even have the chance to bump into the Big Bang theory in his lifetime… “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats). As for sex and religion, I think Anatole France got it right: “Christianity did alot for love by making it a sin.”
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steph
September 30, 2011 at 11:00 am
Too irrelevant? Inconsequential? Silly old bear.
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Five Good Things About Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann
Five Good Things about Atheism (Recycled from The New Oxonian)
by rjosephhoffmann
It seems I cannot win.
Meself
When I chart the vague, occasional and ambiguous virtues of religion (mainly historical) I am accused of being intellectually soft. When I tell atheists they run the risk of turning their social solidarity into tent revivals or support groups I risk expulsion from the ranks of the Unbaptized and Wannabe Unbaptized.
It is a terrible position to be in, I can tell you, and I have no one to blame but myself.
To make amends and win back my disillusioned readers I am devoting this blog to the good things about atheism.
As far as I can tell, there are five:
1. Atheism is probably right: there is almost certainly no God. At least not the kind of pluriform god described by the world’s religions. If there were, we would know it in the way we know other things, like potholes and rainbows, and we would know it not because of syllogisms that begin “All things that exist were created,” or through the contradictory revelations of competing sects.
We would know it because we are hardwired to know.
The weakest argument of all, of course, is existence since existence raises the question of God; it does not answer it. The difference between a god who is hidden (invisible), or does not wish to be known (elusive), or cannot be demonstrated rationally is the same thing as a God who may as well not exist. Not to assign homework but have a look at John Wisdom’s famousparable recited in Antony Flew’s essay, “Theology and Falsification,” (1968).
2. Atheism is courageous. Not valorous perhaps, not deserving of medals. But it takes a certain amount of courage not to believe what a vast majority of other people believe to be true. You learned that much as a kid, when a teacher said to you, after some minor tragedy in the playground, “Just because your best friend decides to jump over a fence onto a busy road doesn’t mean you need to do it too.”
The pressure to believe in God is enormous in twenty-first century society, and all but irresistible in certain sectors of America–the fundamental international base line for irrationality. Having to be religious or needing not to seem irreligious is the greatest tragedy of American public life and a sure recipe for the nation’s future mediocrity. It dominates political campaigns and the way kids learn history in Texas.
Texas edits textbooks
Theological differences aside, what Muslims and Christians and other godfearers have in common is an illusion that they are willing to defend aggressively–in certain cases murderously.
Even when it does not reach that level of viciousness, it can make the life of the uncommitted, unfaithed and unchurched miserable. Atheists deserve credit for having to put up with this stupidity. That is bravery, defined as forbearance.
Many atheists realize that the fervour displayed by religious extremists has deep psychological roots–that history has witnessed its bloodiest moments when causes were already lost. The legalization of Christianity (312?) came within three years of the final assault against Christians by the last “pagan” emperor. The greater number of the wars of religion (1562-1592) occurred after the Council of Trent (adj. 1563) had made Catholic doctrine unassailable–written in stone–for Catholics and completely unacceptable for Protestants. The Holocaust happened largely because Rassenhasse flowed naturally from two done deals: worldwide economic collapse and Germany’s humiliation in the Great War of 1914-1918. The Klan became most violent when its utility as an instrument of southern “justice” was finished.
Most of the available signs suggest that religion will not succumb to creeping irrelevance in the next six months. Religions become violent and aggressive as they struggle for breath. The substitution of emotion and blind, often illiterate, faith in support of threadbare dogmatic assertions is part of this struggle. So is an unwillingness to accept any alternative consensus to replace the old religious one.
Atheism symbolizes not just unbelief in God but the nature of that alternative consensus. That is why atheism is especially opprobrious to belief in an a era when most questions are settled by science and investigation.
Yet even without the security of dogma, religions usually provide for the emotional needs of their adherents in ways that science does not. They have had centuries, for example, to convince people that the miseries endured in this life are simply a preparation for a better one to come. A purposeless world acquires meaning as a “testing ground” for initiation into future glory. There is no art of consolation for the atheist, just the world as it is. Granny may have lost the power of speech after her third stroke, but she knows there is a wolf behind the door: religion knows this instinctively.
Being an atheist may be a bit lonely, but better “Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” (And Socrates was courageous, too.)
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space. Atheists know that the world we live in is dominated by religion: spires, minarets, ceremonial prayers, political rhetoric and posturing, ethical discussion. I am not convinced (alas) that atheists are “brighter” than anyone else, but they have to imagine ungiven alternatives and worlds of thought that have not been handed to them by tradition and custom.
Imagination however is that two-way street between vision and delusion. The given myths and symbols of a culture are imposed, not arrived at or deduced, and if not imposed then “imparted” by traditions. Jung was wrong.
Collective Unconscious?
Skeptics and unbelievers from Shelley and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) to Richard Feynman, John Ellis, Ljon Tichy and Einstein in the sciences, Sir Michael Tippet, Bartok, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovitch in music, Bukoswki, Camus, Somerset Maugham, Joyce Carol Oates, Vonnegut in literature, have been imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, mental adventurers.
Far too often, unfortunately, atheists are the worst advocates for imagination.
They rather nervously limit their interest to the scientific imagination. They don’t see a connection between Monod and Camus. They consider their unbelief a “scientific” and “rational” position, not an imaginative one. When confronted with photographs of the Taj Mahal or recordings of Bach’s B-minor Mass, they point to shots from the Hubble telescope or (my personal favorite) soundtracks of earth auroral kilometric radiation.
Instead of owning the arts, they play the part of intellectual bullies who think poetry is for mental sissies.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have come to the conclusion that this is because they equate the imagination with the imaginary and the imaginary with the supernatural. The imagination produced religion, of course, hence the gods, but that does not mean that it is governed by religion, because if it were we never would have got round to science. The poet Charles Bukowski summed it up nicely in a 1988 interview: “For those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
4. Atheism is an ethical position. That does not make being an atheist a “moral” stance, but it does raise a question about whether it is possible to be good with God. Only an individual free from the commandments of religion and the threat of heaven and hell deserves credit (or blame) for his decisions, actions, and omissions. Atheists are required to assume that responsibility fully. Religious people are not.
This is why anyone who teaches his children that the story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament is a “moral fable” is just as bad as the fundamentalist who teaches it as history. What would you say about a brutish dog-owner who told his naturally stupid dog to piss anywhere but in the flower garden, then hied him to a shelter the minute he did what he couldn’t help doing to begin with? That is the story of Adam, without the benefit of two millennia of theology to disguise its simplest elements.
Bad Dog
Modern Christian theology has attempted to emphasize the love, mercy and compassion of this God: he is a God of second chances–redemption–after all.
But mainly the Christian message is little more than an attempt to rehabilitate God under the guise of teaching that it’s the humans who needed rehabilitating. They had to be given one more chance at the flowers in order to to show that God, after his initial temper tantrum, is really full of kindness and patience. That’s basically what the “New” Testament tries to do, after all, though in a highly problematical way.
At a basic level, an atheist is likely to detect that there is no ethical content to the stories of religion. The prototypes are Adam, the disobedient, Job, the sufferer, Noah, the obedient, and Abraham, the faithful.
But these figures are not ethical paragons. They are examples of the types of behavior religion requires. Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice. That is not the kind of good any rational being would aspire to–and one of the reasons certain interpreters, like Augustine, thought that what was squandered in Eden was reason. But ethics is about reflection, discrimination, freedom, and decision. Religion, strictly and fairly speaking, does not provide for that; only unbelief does. If Augustine had understood things properly, he would have spit in God’s eye and said that Adam’s only rational choice was to do what he did, affirm who and what he was, and get on with his life without Yahweh. Instead, he creeps out of the garden, takes his punishment like a beaten spaniel, and lives in the hope that his master will throw him the occasional bone.
The expulsion from Eden
To the extent that modern liberal theologies try to say that religions have endorsed a policy of choice and reflection all along, the rebuttal is history.
5. Atheists are socially tolerant. By this, I mean that they do not have a history of violence against beliefs and practices they may privately abhor. They do not burn down churches, black or white. No matter how ardent their unbelief, they do not bomb mosques or blow themselves up at Sunday Mass to reduce the number of Catholics in the world. They are not responsible for the Arab-Israeli border wars. They have not created tens of thousands of displaced people in resettlement camps in Lebanon or torn whole African nations apart. In general, they do not mistake adventurism for preemptive wars.
They may support separation of church and state in sometimes strident ways, but not violent ways: you will not see gangs of secularists tearing down nativity scenes at Christmas or storming historic court houses to get icons of the ten commandments removed from public view. –Even if they think these public displays of devotion are inappropriate and teach people bad habits.
All of these things are pretty obvious, even to believers whose gurus talk incessantly about the secular humanist and atheist “threat” without ever being able (successfully) to put a face on it. But they need to be recorded because religious people often assume that tolerance can only be practised within a religious or inter-religious context, Catholic to Baptist, Christian to Jew and Muslim. But atheism stands outside this circle.
Atheism, as atheism, stands as the rejection of all religious beliefs: it is befuddling to believers how such a position deserves tolerating at all. If there has to be an enemy–something a majority can identify as uniformly despicable–atheism has to be it. That is whyhoi polloi in the darkest days of the communist threat, especially those who had no idea what the social and economic program of the Soviet Union was, considered the worst sin of the “Reds” in Russia, China, and Europe their disbelief in God.
As with goodness, tolerance needs to be exhibited non-coercively. Not because Jesus said “Love your enemies,” or because Muhammad preached sparing unbelievers, provided they capitulated to Islam. Not even because John Paul II apologized to Galileo in absentia. What supports the suggestion that atheists are tolerant (and need to continue to be seen as being tolerant) is that the virtue of tolerance emerges naturally from the rational premises of unbelief. What atheism says is that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence, not by force of arms or the power of priests and mullahs.
While atheists will never experience mass conversions to their cause “like a mighty wind” after a speech by a pentecostal preacher, the individual changes of mind from belief to skepticism will depend as much on the tone as on the substance of their message. By the same token, what atheist would trust the unbelieving equivalent of a spiritual awakening? It doesn’t happen that way. It happens one by one. Slowly. Just ask an atheist about how he “became” an unbeliever, and I wager that you will hear a life story, or something about how things just didn’t add up–a process, not a sudden emotional shudder but often a painful change of heart and (especially) mind.
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Published: September 29, 2011
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4 Responses to “Five Good Things About Atheism”
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Stevie
September 29, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Actually, nowadays it’s six;
‘Atheism is the cool new thing.’
It must be true because the Archbishop of Canterbury has said so.
Of course, it may have been an act of Machiavellian cunning on his part, unworthy of a Prince of the Church, aimed at those of us who would rather crawl over broken glass than search for cool, new things…
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The Big Idea » R. Joseph Hoffmann says:
December 6, 2011 at 11:09 pm
[...] is because he is brave. In Five Good Things About Atheism, I gave as reason number one that atheism is probably “right”: there is no God or [...]
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The Big Idea « The New Oxonian says:
December 7, 2011 at 11:59 am
[...] is because he is brave. In Five Good Things About Atheism, I gave as reason number one that atheism is probably “right”: there is no God or [...]
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The Big Idea: « The New Oxonian says:
May 12, 2012 at 9:50 pm
[...] is because he is brave. In Five Good Things About Atheism, I gave as reason number one that atheism is probably “right”: there is no God or [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Is “God” Invulnerable?
by rjosephhoffmann
Is “God” Invulnerable?
by rjosephhoffmann
Paul Tillich died while I was still in high school. But the embers of his theological revolution–equivalent in theology to Bultmann’s in biblical studies–were still warm by the time I got to Harvard Divinity School, where he taught from 1955 to 1962. I read him assiduously, ran yellow highlighters dry illuminating “key” passages, and wrote the word “Yes!” in the margins more often than Molly Bloom gasps it in the last chapter of Ulysses.
It isn’t that I now regard Tillich as less profound than I did three decades ago. It’s that I now realize he was methadone for religion- recoverers. His key works–The Religious Situation, The Shaking of the Foundations, the multipart, unbearably dense Systematic Theology(especially disliked in Britain when it appeared), andDynamics of Faith–reveal a soul committed to taking the sting out of what many theologians before Tillich called “the modern situation.”
The modern situation was basically scientific knowledge–the growing conviction that what we see is all we get, and that if we can’t see it we just need better techniques for seeing it. The glaring exception to this optimism, this faith in scientific know-how–a 1950′s word–was God, about whom it was widely supposed that no lens powerful enough, no jet-propulsion engine fast enough and no controlled experiment sophisticated enough was ever going to discover him. God was safe, in a weird kind of way, because he was, to use the catchphrase of the time, “Wholly Other.”
There were two ways of dealing with the vulnerability of God to the modern situation. One was to say that God is immune from scientific discovery because he is known only through faith. Bring on your historical criticism, your naturalistic assaults, your so-called “facts,” your rock and roll. The bigness of God just shows the puniness of your methods. To try this course, however, entailed a repudiation of the idea that God can be known rationally and that faith and reason were compatible rather than hostile modes of determining truth–a rejection, in other words, of the whole previous history of theology, especially Catholic theology.
The other way was to exploit post-positivism, or a theological construction of “Popperism.” This tactic relied on the philosophical premise that while God can be postulated on reasonable grounds (analogically, for example: shoes have makers so universes have creators) “he” cannot actually be falsified (we know where the shoemaker’s house is; we see him going to it at five o’clock; but we don’t know where God lives as he is thought to be invisible). We can’t quite be certain that he doesn’t exist, on the same grounds we can’t falsify the existence of anything we haven’t seen, and some propositions (or assertions) about God are tenable, even if implausible, when alternative explanations are considered.
Part of this “propositional” strategy hearkened back to ontology, the idea that God is not directly experienced or instantiated in creation and so in some sense must be greater than it, prior to it, or transcendent, in a way that beggars ordinary description. Theology had never succeeded in reconciling the claim of biblical revelation with the “classical” attributes of god’s aseity and impassibility (i.e., a supreme being cannot change or suffer–”he” is what he is, as Yahweh sniffs in Exodus 3.14), so uncertainty was a kind of safe epistemological cloud to wrap discussion in–in addition to which it had a certain (unrelated) currency in atomic physics which leant it a kind of dubious respectability. This approach preserved the bare notion of the rationality of religious belief, leaving theology room to exploit the doctrine that Christianity is all about faith and hope, the “certainty of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1).
Faith seeking understanding?
Both positions were so intellectually flimsy (and apologetic) that theologians had to go a long way to create a vocabulary that made them independently and mutually impressive. That goal, I write to say, was never achieved. Claims were made and games were played, but theology did not succeed in preserving the life of its divine protagonist–not even in the totally cynical and ephemeral God is dead theology of the ‘sixties.
ii
Beginning before the publication of Karl Barth’s “neo-orthodox” tome, The Epistle to the Romans (1922), where the Swiss theologian reaffirms for protestants everywhere the primacy of faith, “serious” theology became enamoured of the idea that God as God is invulnerable to scientific thought, as the term was understood in the mid-twentieth century.
There were plenty of medieval (and later) parallels to this way of thinking, ranging from mysticism to the “apophatic” theology of some of the scholastics, which even included the acknowledgement that the statement “God exists,” if it means existence of a temporal, durable, knowable kind, is false.
“God does not exist but nothing else matters.”
In most areas of life, to say something doesn’t exist means you don’t need to be concerned about it: it can’t bite you or lend you money. In theology, however, this sublime non-existence evoked awe, mystery, dread, and reverence–the very things you don’t get in the morning with coffee and toast. It can even give your own pathetic existence meaning if you just embrace its awesomeness. Authentically.
Modern discussions of existence as a mere temporal condition of being, especially Heidegger’s, emboldened theologians to think outside the box, with Heidegger being to the thought of the day what Aristotle was to the thirteenth century Church. Thus Rudolph Bultmann could write this confrontational paragraph in his essay “The New Testament and Mythology” (1941):
The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings — the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his demons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thought and guide his purposes. He may grant him heavenly visions. He may allow him to hear his word of succor or demand. He may give him the supernatural power of his Spirit. History does not follow a smooth unbroken course; it is set in motion and controlled by these supernatural powers. This æon is held in bondage by Satan, sin, and death (for “powers” is precisely what they are), and hastens towards its end. That end will come very soon, and will take the form of a cosmic catastrophe. It will be inaugurated by the “woes” of the last time. Then the Judge will come from heaven, the dead will rise, the last judgment will take place, and men will enter into eternal salvation or damnation…”
None of this is literally true–indeed, has already proved not to be true, Bultmann said; none of these things will happen in the way they are described. Called “demythologization,” Bultmann’s program did not call for a simple recognition that (most) modern people find the biblical landscape fantastic and absurd, but an aggressive embrace of methods that would strip mythology away and leave in its place the bare “kerygma”–the message.
Bultmann
While Bultmann could be cagey about the implications of this message, especially in correspondence with critics like Barth (who refused to accept Bultmann’s defintion of myth) he essentially embraced the axiom of Rudolph Otto (overlaid with Heidegger’s phenomenology) that “God is wholly Other” than the categories we associate with existence. It was the theological equivalent of hitting the target in front of you and hearing your opponent say, “That isn’t the target you needed to hit.”
Theologians spent the next forty years coming to terms with the contours (and dead-ends) of Bultmann’s thought. His contribution to biblical studies was to persuade timid seminarians, accustomed to treating the biblical text with reverence rather than historical skepticism, that in taking a knife to scripture they were not making it bleed away its life. They were saving it from the cancer of obsolete thoughts and ideas–freeing the message of authentic existence to be itself, making faith a “choice” rather than blind obedience to discredited ideas and dogmas. Like all closed systems, it made sense from the inside.
While there was much to admire here there was almost no one to admire it: a program for liberal biblical scholars to consider, conservatives to eschew, and almost everyone else to ignore. Looking back on his legacy from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it looks strangely like a plant bred only for the hothouse of academic theology and not suited for life in real weather.
The term “demythologization” acquired a voltage among under-read–especially Catholic and evangelical scholars–that was only rivaled by the word “atheism.” Not an elegant prose stylist (most German academic theology of the period was pure fustian) Bultmann was at least considered dangerous in the establishment he was trying to save from intellectual disgrace.
iii
In systematic theology the task was roughly the same, though the tracks did not always run parallel and (perhaps surprisingly) the historical track was often more radical than the theological one as “demythologization” merged with the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a boutique of approaches that put the biblical text at the mercy of historical criticism.
Tillich in 1957, while still at Harvard, addressed the question of God and the modern situation directly in a Garvin Lecture called “The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge.” His key theological slogans are all present in this lecture: God is not a “being,” but the ground of all being–being itself. All language about God is symbolic rather than realistic, including the meaning of the concept of God–which is not the same as the symbol. It is impossible to describe God or to say anything “non-symbolic” about him.
Like other existentialists Tillich was confronted not just by the problems entailed for theology by God’s non-existence but by the implications of that recognition for human existence itself. Sartre, among others, had described the sense of emptiness brought on by the end of God’s moral reign as despair, nausea, freedom without purpose. Tillich thought that Christianity’s emphasis on faith was both an acknowledgement that the concept of a literal God was done for (that is, something implicit in faith itself) but also an opening to being. In a vocabulary that sometimes rivals Heidegger’s for pure self-indulgence, this is variously described as the “God above god,” “Being itself,” and “ultimate concern.” It is whatever humans regard as sacred, numinous, holy (in traditional language), but so overwhelming that it requires total surrender. The God of theological theism is no longer the cure but the source of doubt and despair. He
…deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with recent tyrants with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implication. (The Courage to Be, 135)
Tillich’s theism was pure humanism in a different and slightly dishonest wrapper. He confesses as much in his Garvin Lecture when he says that far from science creating the modern situation of universal doubt, it is “the wisdom of twentieth century art, literature, drama and poetry…which reveals man’s predicament: his having to die, his being estranged, his being threatened with the loss of meaning, his becoming an object among other objects” (Idea of God, 108). God for Tillich is non-objectifiable, thus crumbles when he is made into what the French theologian Gabriel Vahanian called a “cultural artifact,” an idol. Tillich’s theology was at bottom a religious answer to the question Sartre said it was cowardly to answer religiously.
We are already writing the history of post-modernism, and the histories of existentialism are legion. It’s a history of malaise and post-War exhaustion conceived as a general theory of the “human predicament,” the “modern situation.” Tillich believed that by admitting to the collapse of the literal god-concept, the God of religious authority (an admission that by no means all Christians would have joined him in making!) an epistemological substitute could arise to save us from the mess we have made of our world, our society, our disoriented and alienated selves. But the distance between a God who could disappear into the vortex (a favourite image of the period) of despair and anxiety and be purified and strengthened by it (Tillich) and God as “absence, the solitude of man” (Sartre) defined the distance between a reupholstered illusion and the reality that had made atheism an option forced by twentieth century realities. Both thinkers agreed on the non-existence of God. Yet for Tillich, that was no reason to sacrifice a symbol.
Tillich
The invulnerators were obviously infected with the spirit of their own formative fantasy, the resurrection, which saw the death of the human Jesus as the prelude to his immortal reign. Christians as Christians clung to a highly material view of that belief, and the associated belief that as it was for Jesus, so it would be for them–a little less royal but every bit as everlasting.
Tillich’s attempt to recast Christianity in the vulgate of the 1950′s is stale, but not merely stale because it is dated: stale because it is pedantic and wrong–atheism dressed as a bishop, when it was perfectly possible to dress in shirt and trousers and say what you really think and mean: The God of Christian theism is a story. He does not exist. All theological projects to prove his existence have failed. The historical and critical work of the last two centuries have made his existence absurd to increasing numbers of people, making religious beliefs harder to maintain and defend. This has turned millions of people into seekers, and created a situation which humankind has not encountered before. Its outcome is still unknown.
That is what Tillich should have confessed because it is what he thought. Yet his solution was to offer sedatives and linguistic figments to people whose imagination, courage and intellect he didn’t trust. Methadone, as I said, for religion-recovery.
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Published: September 30, 2011
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5 Responses to “Is “God” Invulnerable?”
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Tristan Vick
September 30, 2011 at 7:04 am
I’ve never read Tillich, but he is definitely on my must read list.
Personally, I think Robert G. Ingersoll sold me on the notion that if there is a higher power than nature in the universe, or outside it, then this power is most probably going to interact on nature leaving traces of itself–evidence–behind. If not, then of what practical use could such a power be?
A power which doesn’t affect us and isn’t detectable, is for a lack of a better word, irrelevant.
But believers and people of faith do not profess to believe in a God which is irrelevant. The profess to believe in something which is ALL powerful.
I’m not an evidentialist, but I come close. I actually break it down to something more basic still. I look at whether the words we are using to describe a thing which is said to exist in reality actually relates back to the thing, i.e. I look to see if the referent support the belief in it.
I recently wrote an article which tackles Reformed Epistemology, and it’s failure to establish a coherent referent which would justify even the most basic belief. (Without getting technical, even basic beliefs must be assumed to be referring to something real, if not, then confusion arises as to what the basic belief refers to, that is to say, even basic beliefs must anchor themselves in referents).
Take a look if you’re interested.
http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.com/2011/09/religious-epistemology-series-parts-1-4.html
Cheers!
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steph
October 2, 2011 at 11:11 pm
A power which doesn’t affect us and isn’t detectable, is for a lack of a better word, irrelevant.
But believers and people of faith do not profess to believe in a God which is irrelevant. The profess to believe in something which is ALL powerful.
That’s interesting. While possibilty of me believing in any idea of gods have always been irrelevant to me personally, what you say is not actually true of all religious people. Many religious people, have come to believe that the so called ‘problem of evil’, for want of a better phrase, means that the idea of god is not that of an omnipitent god at all.
And many other religious people, realise with the developments of science and progress in knowledge and education, that the world is just a puzzling place, while their ideas of god if they still have them, are fairly agnostic at best.
Ergo, they don’t believe that an unknowable idea is irrelevant, and it’s not irrelevant to ‘believe’ in something that cannot be detected.
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Tristan Vick
October 5, 2011 at 12:30 am
@Steph
Oh, I agree with you that people have various reasons for holding their beliefs. My observation was more along the lines of justification of the beliefs, rather than professions of belief.
Anyone can profess to believe something. Even belief in belief itself.
What I was looking at, in this case, was specific claims, or properties, attributed to God–such as omnipotence or omnipresence and how the evidence just blows up such a notion–therefore the belief isn’t technically a true belief (even when it is believed as such). People can still hold false, or irrelevant beliefs, while being under the impression that they are true. In which case, it would be a matter of testing these beliefs… to see whether or not the rationalization the person of faith is utilizing is necessarily sound or not.
And as you pointed out, there are many other types of beliefs with regard to how people justify their belief in the supernatural. I guess what I would be careful to point out is that, whether they realize it or not, their justifications aren’t always clear. Once we begin to look more closely at the concepts being discussed, that’s when we see that many of the definitions are in conflict, or inadequate, or self negating. With so many unclear and/or problematic definitions floating around, it isn’t always clear as to what is *actually being discussed at all. Even though believers are in general agreement that whatever it is, is called “God.”
It may not be a problem for the general person of faith–who is less concerned about justification of a belief than simply holding on to it–but for someone concerned with whether or not their beliefs amount to anything, I think may find it, at the very least, a little troubling.
Indeed, most of the best rationalizations for belief in God still are tethered to analogies and metaphors which refer to things in the world, but never to God. God is said to exist beyond reality. Proving, beyond a reason of a doubt, that “God,” whatever it is, is a flawed concept.
If there were a referent, however, an actual object in reality which is existent, a deity of sorts, that we could test–or indirectly test the effects of (after all it is a power)–then we could rely on the actual evidence for what constitutes or makes up this “God” instead of saying things like he is intangible, transcendent, and outside of space and time.
Which, when you pause to think about it, is basically the same as admitting we just don’t know… and that no one ever will. I propose, if God is real, we could verify the properties of God by studying the tangible Power which exists rather than what is merely said to (merely) exist. Which, in my opinion, is a lot better than saying the Power exists outside of our capacity of detection but that it exists none-the-less, which is a cop-out if you ask me.
If you can’t detect it, then you can’t confirm its existence, so it makes little to no sense whatever to claim that it exists–let alone ascribe properties to it.
Anyway, I suppose if theology ever made a lick of sense, we’d rely on that to inform ourselves about the world, instead of , well, you know, science.
Gene Smith
September 30, 2011 at 9:44 am
Hmm… You know, dear old Alan Watts had some interesting observations about Protestants and their idolatry of The Word. It occurs to me that there are many rooms in the mansion of fundamentalism.
All these arguments hinge on “what I think is real and what you think is not.” And why is science “more real?” Because it produces results. It’s the “magic” that works consistently. But, when you boil it all down, reason is The Most Important Thing because…because it’s all we poor jumped-up monkeys have, right?
And so it attains an importance – a desperate importance – of religious proportions…and gets argued just like religious dogma. Only…it’s not dogma – its reason! And nothing of importance can exist outside it. How do we know? Because we have reasoned it. Therefore, it must be true. Or, at least, it’s the only truth we’ve got…the only truth we *can* have.
So many angry angels dancing on the head of this pin.
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Tristan Vick
October 5, 2011 at 12:14 am
@Steph
Oh, I agree with you that people have various reasons for holding their beliefs. My observation was more along the lines of justification of the beliefs, rather than professions of belief.
Anyone can profess to believe something. Even belief in belief itself.
What I was looking at, in this case, was specific claims, or properties, attributed to God–such as omnipotence or omnipresence and how the evidence just blows up such a notion–therefore the belief isn’t technically a true belief (even when it is believed as such). People can still hold false, or irrelevant believe, while being under the impression that they are true. In which case, it would be a matter of testing these beliefs… to see whether or not the rationalization the person of faith is utilizing is necessarily sound or not.
And as you pointed out, there are many other types of beliefs with regard to how people justify their belief in the supernatural. I guess what I would be careful to point out is that, whether they realize it or not, their justifications aren’t always clear. Once we begin to look more closely at the concepts being discussed, that’s when we see that many of the definitions are in conflict, or inadequate, or self negating. With so many unclear and/or problematic definitions floating around, it isn’t always clear as to what is *actually being discussed–even though believers are in general agreement that whatever it is, is called “God.”
It may not be a problem for the general person of faith–who is less concerned about justification of a belief than simply holding on to it–but for someone concerned with whether or not their beliefs amount to anything, I think may find it, at the very least, a little troubling that their best rationalizations for belief in God still are tethered to analogies and metaphors, but not anything in reality. Proving, beyond a reason of a doubt, that “God,” whatever it is, is a flawed concept.
If there were a referent, an actual object in reality, an existent deity of sorts, then we could rely on the actual evidence for what constitutes or makes up God–and instead of saying things like he is intangible, transcendent, and outside of space and time… which is the same as admitting we just don’t know… we could verify the properties of God by studying the tangible Power which exists rather than what is merely said to exist. Which, in my opinion, is a lot better than saying the Power exists outside of our capacity of detection but that it exists none-the-less, which is a cop out if you ask me. If you can’t detect it, then you can’t confirm it’s existence, so it is incorrect to say it exists.
Anyway, I suppose if theology ever made sense, we’d rely on that to inform ourselves about the world, instead of , well, you know, science.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The ‘Catholic’ Thing and the Allegory of the Leggy Brunette
by rjosephhoffmann
Two articles on the “value” of Catholic education got me thinking about my own recently.
Both pieces are nostalgic and mainly wrong. One, from former LA mayor Richard Riordan spearheads a drive for $100,000,000 for Catholic schools in his region, thrumping the well-known fact that inner city public schools have failed, that charter schools are expensive and aren’t much better, while Catholic schools send most of their graduates on to college and provide “beliefs, values and standards that children will carry all their lives. They provide a safe learning environment for those from high-crime neighborhoods as well as structure and a faith-based education.” Does anyone see a stop sign here?
What Riordan doesn’t want to stress is that in the last forty years, and in Los Angeles like everywhere else, Catholic schools lost all of their nuns (who, by the way, were indentured teachers), most of the curriculum that made their brand distinctive, fully half of their student population nationwide (in one Miami school, St Monica, from 368 students in 2004 to 196 in 2008 when closure was mandated), and much of the financial support of their parishes. If there ever was a golden age of Catholic education, the age is long gone. New school closures, consolidations and transfers from parochial to charter school status are announced every month.
Rescuing parochial schools is not a way to rescue public education; it’s a way to sink both. My younger daughter, in fact, benefited from a “Catholic education” in the largely dysfunctional innards of Buffalo, New York, a few years ago. That education set me back about $10,000 in a single year, not including loafers. But this was not your average parochial parish school–the kind I went to, virtually for pin money. It was a private Catholic “convent” school for girls, a sister institution to the academically reputable Jesuit boys academy, Canisius Prep. Even here, Catholic “identity” was a romantic notion: other than the school president and a confused and veilless retired nun who showed up at special events, the convent was empty and Catholic consciousness was mainly limited to the school uniform and a graduation Mass.
The average downtown parochial school suffers from the same uncertainties, tensions, and personnel issues that most public city schools suffer from–underpaid faculty, multilingualism, economic distress, to which has to be added despair and increasing irrelevance. Throwing gobs of money at the sinking ship won’t raise it. Throwing city kids into the remaining parish schools–a remedy that might have worked a generation or more ago–won’t work now.
But most of all, throwing Catholic values at the public system (without any discussion of what these values might be) is just a very bad idea–one which once upon a less desperate time would have met with stiff political resistance.
Better days?
Perhaps the cynicism of asking non-Catholics to entrust saving city schools to Catholic education is obvious. Less obvious is the premise put forward by Paul Wallace in his reaction to comments made by Richard Dawkins concerning the religious “identity” imposed on children by parents. Dawkins’s comments coincide with the founding in Britain of the first “atheist college” by A.C. Grayling and some of his associates (really an option for degree validation within the sprawling and often academically sketchy University of London) and, of course, the publication of his children’s book, The Magic of Reality.
The faith-values that Riordan thinks might benefit intellectual deadened and deadend “inner city youth” (and which Dawkins thinks amount to the imposition of magical thinking and indoctrination in unsupportable beliefs), Wallace says are essentially benign. Moreover, they are “values” that no child is going to avoid merely by receiving a science-friendly education: the competition for attention and credence is intense in our culture, the argument runs, and “no child can stand above the fray of competing worldviews and let reason eliminate all but the best, like a cautious consumer.”
Recalling a classroom experience with a certain Father Kavanaugh who encouraged students to question the core premises of their belief, Wallace says,
Imagine it! Who are you? Do you disbelieve in God? Why? Do you disbelieve in God because your mother disbelieves in God? Do you believe there’s no God because smart people told you so? Precisely what God do you not believe in? Might there be another you could believe in?, etc.
What many Catholics know, and what Richard Dawkins appears not to, is that the idea of children moving through life without serious intellectual and moral direction—in this insane world, of all places—is a terrible joke and a recipe for social catastrophe.
In reality, Wallace’s argument is the intellectual equivalent of Riordan’s economic one: “Catholic education” offers students the tools for critical thinking: it begins from faith but does not ask people to stop with faith. Catholicism, it’s argued, has a long history of asking questions about itself, questions not substantially different, even if differently intoned, by atheists: Who are you? Do you believe in God? Why? Why do you believe God loves you? Do you believe God loves you because your priest told you so? As the destination is at least as important as the starting point, why should a student choose unbelief over belief as the only right road for getting there?
It’s a fair but I think fatally flawed question and since others are answering it with favorite stories from their days at St Ignatius School for Recalcitrant Youth, let me have a turn.
***
I escaped from the designs of Irish-born nuns and randy priests unmolested (knuckles intact, surplice unruffled) but not unaffected. My Catholic training–like the sort described by Julian Baggini in his little Oxford introduction to Atheism–was basically benign. In primary school, I loved religion classes. In high school, what we had begun to call “theology,” (and now, where it exists, is called religion) and in university, philosophy. It seemed a natural progression.
I make no grandiose claims or accusations about the role of the Church in education. Catholicism contrary to popular belief did not “cause” the dark ages and without the university system incumbent in the medieval monasteries, things would have been dark a lot longer.
Professional Catholic-haters–and there are many–point not just to a history of psychological and physical abuse during the worst episodes of church history–Jew-killing, inquisitions, Magdalene laundries, and predatory pastors for starters–but to the ongoing role of the church in opposing scientific research, women’s reproductive rights, and the intimidation of Catholic politicians who differ from their Church’s theology on a range of issues that have nothing to do with Rome’s vaunted magisterium: its teaching “authority” in matters of faith (relatively unimpactful) and morals (the bedroom).
The acceptable modern argument against Catholic education, however, really goes back only to Pope Pius IX and his campaign against “modernism” (read: modern scholarship and science) in the Syllabus of Errors, promulgated in 1864. It was then that Catholic universities took a southward turn, failed to promote the natural sciences, and found themselves in thrall to a papacy whose greatest contribution was to pronounce itself infallible. There is no doubt that the legacy of Pio Nono was the Church’s most shameful intellectual moment since the Inquisition. By the same token, it corresponded to the death throes of a church that had lost power, prestige, land, and authority all over Europe–the beginning of the secular era. Not coincidentally, Catholic or “parochial” education as it came to exist, especially as an alternative school system in Britain and the United States, dates from the same unpromising period.
Pope Pius IX
And yet. In a world where Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Martha Coakley can be threatened by their Church with excommunication for their stand on abortion –but not Rick Santorum (who is renowned for having introduced a dead fetus to his living children as their brother), or Scott Brown, a good Catholic boy from a lapsed family that had turned divorce into a recreational activity–the very idea that Catholic education produces mono-opinionated troglodytes is clearly absurd.
But it does seem to produce an unusual number of intellectual apostates and satirists. I submit that the reason the Church has produced comedians like George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Julia Sweeney and Bill Maher is that Catholic training is a survival lesson in enduring contradictions. Would you walk across the street to buy a ticket to see a “Christian” comedian? Not likely. Protestant comedy is inherent in the seriousness with which its practitioners take their dogmas. A Muslim funny man? Pfffft. Remember Denmark?
Jewish? of course, fellow sufferers in being smart, guilty, alienated and irreverent. In fact the only difference between a Catholic comedian and a Jewish comedian is that the Catholic is told he has to feel contrition for his abuse of the Church while the Jew is simply plunged into a perpetual state of unforgivable remorse for not being Jewish enough.
But the key thing (and why isn’t anybody getting this?) is living with contradiction. Catholics perfected this more than a thousand years ago when they started talking about faith and reason being compatible means of getting to the same intellectual end: certainty about God.
It was never an even match: Ubi fides est ratio fallitur (“Where reason fails, faith prevails”), and there was always a penchant for mystery when reasons weren’t at hand for particular beliefs–like the Trinity. But reason had a place at the table, and reason was an honorable way to get to God. It would take until the Reformation for faith to take center position and stay there in a way that leads finally to Michele Bachmann.
Faith is what made this country what it is.
In my academic work, I never miss a chance these days not to re-read Aquinas on the subject of faith and reason, and you can bet on the fact that most Catholics, whenever they passed through the system, but especially those who went through after about 1975, have never read a paraphrased tiddle of his work. Yet it’s Aquinas whose transformative work on Aristotle still forms the fundament of christian doctrine in the Roman tradition. Try these on for size:
Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not. God should not be called an individual substance, since the principal of individuation is matter.
or this:
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
–and especially this (are you reading Rick perry?)
Beware of the person of one book.
According to the most learned voices the church has produced, the human race is essentially ignorant of God’s attributes and the Bible is a book of poetry that cloaks his identity in allegory. Yet the Catholic faithful have had to wrestle with some of the most explicit images of God (and Jesus as his incarnation) ever manufactured–think Michelangelo, think Botticelli and a hundred others. Catholic churches are stuffed with images ranging from the merely explicit to the grotesque–Jesuses hanging on the cross, weighed down with the sins of the world. To complete the dramatis personae, there are images of his family (blessed, persevering mother, carpenter father) and an array of saints “who have done his will throughout the ages.” Plenty to keep the eyes occupied and the mind numb.
This is an impressive explosion of love, though sadistic and highly invalued around the edges. It is also highly specific. Not taking account of regional variations and post-Vatican II injunctions about keeping things iconically simple, walking into a Catholic church is a little like taking out your family album. You already know who’s in it because you’ve seen it all before. But it’s nice to visit, nice to feed your memory.
God the father (1654) in papal attire with the whole world in his hands
Yet the official philosopher, that lover of wisdom and angelic doctor, Aquinas tells us that this God “is not even an individual substance.” Not even knowable as an integer but only in terms of what cannot be said about him. You see what I mean: contradiction–a long history of squirmy little boys and girls paying homage in the light of flickering candles to images and formulations that the church officially teaches have no greater relevance to the reality of the subject than the shadows in Plato’s cave to the world beyond.
Many of these children, with respect to what they think is the core of their religion, will remain children their whole life long. The lucky ones will leave and become comedians. The unfortunate ones will become politicians and try to have their Church and leave it too.
It’s as if to say: Today class we are going to discuss Wisdom. Wisdom is beauty in the mind. It is seductive. It is desirable. It is what we all long to possess, the object of all our intellectual drive and energy. The only thing that will give us satisfaction. Do you see this picture of a leggy brunette? Look closely. Wisdom is nothing like that.
Wisdom
And that of course is just the problem; Catholicism does not resolve the Platonic allegory for believers. It preserves it. It encourages it. From the time of the church fathers, the founders of the church’s intellectual tradition, the church of the orthodox bishops was not the same church as the church of believers. From time to time they would gently remind the flock (the word speaks volumes) that they were not to actually worship the images. But in the same breath they would condemn to the pains of a nonfigurative hell anyone who refused to believe that a little bread and wine held aloft by a priest was, in actuality, the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
At the core of Catholicism is living with appearance and reality, with the contradiction between what our eyes and minds tell us and what we are told is true.
These contradictions are very old, and they have now become the familiar devotions of a billion people, more or less, around the world. Their propagation does not render them harmless, and their historical success does not make them a recipe for educational practice.
Given that the educational goal set by Plato was for the prisoners to escape from the world of appearances into the world of knowledge where they would see the shadows for what they are, and the enforced darkness of an institution that still goads people to view the images as good enough, which model would you choose for your children?
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Published: October 2, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: anti-science : Catholic Church : Catholic education : Los Angeles Times : modernist crisis : Paul Wallace : Pius IX : public education : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Religion Dispatches : Richard Dawkins : RichardRiordan : school closures : The Magic of Reality ..
11 Responses to “The ‘Catholic’ Thing and the Allegory of the Leggy Brunette”
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Dwight Jones
October 2, 2011 at 9:41 am
All of which begs the question, for me : when is someone going to assemble a (non-atheist) humanist curriculum or direction in education?
Lots of (shared) evidence here that we can’t look back, or go there, but whither otherwise? Might humanism become a theme within charter schools?
Reply
Gene Smith
October 2, 2011 at 11:30 am
I’m pretty sure that humanism can become a theme about the same time that education becomes a theme. In a time when we aren’t even faintly clear on just what we mean by “educated,” how can any of this work?
I had the good fortune to have my daughter go through a great public school. The mystery to me remains how so many intelligent humans come out of what is laughingly referred to as our educational system.
If there are miracles…then that’s one!
Reply
Dwight Jones
October 2, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Gene sed “The mystery to me remains how so many intelligent humans come out of what is laughingly referred to as our educational system.”
As RJoe maintains, the Catholic virus is benign.
In the second installment, it comes alive as humanism, religion is a vein, and you have to find it. But when you do…
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
October 2, 2011 at 8:52 pm
@Dwight: for many it’s benign, those who may have natural immunity or resistance. For many it isn’t. I recall a decade ago that scientists were working on the problem of why there were people out there with an immunity to HIV–something along those lines. However I don’t think the purpose of Catholic education is to impart immunity to the teaching of the Church; it’s to get people to accept and follow.
Reply
Dwight Jones
October 2, 2011 at 9:07 pm
@Joe “… for many it’s benign, those who may have natural immunity or resistance. For many it isn’t.”
So we lighten ship.
“To be an error and to be cast out is a part of God’s design.”
- William Blake
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
October 2, 2011 at 9:14 pm
Darwin could not have said it better.
Reply
Dwight Jones
October 2, 2011 at 9:15 pm
I was hoping for Machiavelli.
Reply
scott
October 3, 2011 at 10:04 am
Perhaps Nietzche is right after all:”Christianity is Platonism for the masses”. Rightfully so, people prefer images to the real thing. Perhaps the full image is just too hard to bear?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
October 3, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Burning bushes rather than direct sight. Clouds of unknowing. It has its appeal.
Reply
Scott
October 3, 2011 at 11:21 pm
Shadows on the wall of the cave, “eidos”, chairness, whiteness; I guess they have there appeal, too (;
Reply
representations of God, Images of God says:
October 5, 2011 at 3:26 am
[...] First of all, God has no shape or form – therefore no image of God can exist. However He can take any shape or form and often times we mistake that image of God with God, then we start fighting each other over who is right. Anyway… all is how it should be. Here you find some images you can use as representations of God that are in no way accurate. On this subject see: http://rootedradical.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/everyday-prayers-by-scotty-smith/ Additionally you can check out: http://lifeafterministry.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/nauvoo-and-salt-lake-temples-4/ Additionally on this topic you can read: http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/the-catholic-thing-and-the-allegory-of-the-leggy-bru… [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
God Matters
by rjosephhoffmann
I have argued against theologians like Richard Swinburne that they play a dangerous game in moving from abstracted notions of God to specific characteristics of God and the doctrines of Christianity. In the long run, the snowman they build feature by feature is still snow. It will melt. Both believing and unbelieving philosophers of religion have played this game for a very long time–perhaps since the time of Aquinas–but the bottom line is: No one is an atheist on general principles. There is some X that you reject, and that X comes with attributes or “properties” attached. Any working notion of ontology requires not merely existence but attribution.
This is why the most damaging arguments against ontology, going back to the eighteenth century, begin with the criticism that “existence” is a state (being) and not a property. Anselm had argued against his hypothetical unbeliever that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived [to exist],” and then took the leap to existence by stating that the existence of the greatest conceivable thing can not be merely conceptual since perfection requires actuality. Anselm limited this state of perfection to being and not to racehorses or desert islands because ordinary things can be conceived in degrees but not in states of perfection. God thus becomes a supreme case of perfection existing in actuality because it cannot simply exist in the mind for — “Si enim vel in solo intellectu est potest cogitari esse et in re quod maius est” (Proslogion 2). Now that you have the snow, it is possible to add goodness (Aquinas’s summum bonum), and the so-called Omni-properties of God (knowledge, presence, benevolence, etc.) as well as the Not-properties of God: infinite, immutable, impassible, etc. Snowman, meet your maker.
It is perfectly possible to believe in snow without believing in snowmen. But in historical theology we have long come to accept that the God of the western tradition, and by and large the God rejected by the first brave souls of the pre-Enlightenment, like John Biddle in 1615, is more slush than shape–to wit, Biddle on trying to make sense of the Trinity:
“The major premise is quite clear inasmuch as if we say that the Holy Spirit is God and yet distinguished from God then it implies a contradiction. The minor premise that the Holy Spirit is distinguished from God if it is taken personally and not essentially is against all reason:First, it is impossible for any man to distinguish the Person from the Essence of God, and not to frame two Beings or Things in his mind. Consequently, he will be forced to the conclusion that there are two Gods.Secondly, if the Person be distinguished from the Essence of God, the Person would be some Independent Thing. Therefore it would either be finite or infinite. If finite then God would be a finite thing since according to the Church everything in God is God Himself. So the conclusion is absurd. If infinite then there will be two infinites in God, and consequently the two Gods which is more absurd than the former argument.Thirdly, to speak of God taken impersonally is ridiculous, as it is admitted by everyone that God is the Name of a Person, who with absolute sovereignty rules over all. None but a person can rule over others therefore to take otherwise than personally is to take Him otherwise than He is.”
Granted that the early atheist thinkers were less concerned with the Big Picture than with dismantling inherited beliefs member by member. Many had long since concluded that the wheels of theology spun around doctrines rather than biblical texts, which had been gratuitously laid on or cherry picked to support beliefs that otherwise had been fashioned by councils without any scriptural warrants at all. A classic case, as it relates to Biddle’s long winded dilemma, above, was the so-called Johannine Comma. Based on a sequence of extra words which appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in some early printed editions of the Greek New Testament:
ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες [ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, ὁ Πατήρ, ὁ Λόγος, καὶ τὸ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα· καὶ οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς ἔν εἰσι. 8 καὶ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες ἐν τῇ γῇ] τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα, καὶ οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν
and which were included by the King James translators, thus:
“For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth], the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one…”
Is this not the Trinity, beloved of both Catholic and Protestants since the fourth century? Well, no, because the italicized words are absent from Greek manuscripts, and only appear in the text of four late medieval manuscripts where they seem to be the helpful clarification of a zealous copyist, originating as his marginal note. Think of it as new snow.
The point of these examples is that modern unbelief is highly confused about the difference between snow and snowmen, between being and somethingness. Simply put, what does it mean to say “I don’t believe in God,” if (as many atheists have reminded me) that is all an atheist is required to say to be a member of the club? My query is really the same at Robert Frost’s poetical question in “Mending Wall”: “Before I build a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense.”
I maintain that it is impossible to accept Anselm’s ontological argument. Kant was right. “Existence is not a predicate.” The ontological argument illicitly treats existence as a property that things can either possess or lack: to say that a thing exists is not to “attribute” existence to that thing, but to say that the concept of that thing is exemplified–expressed and experienced–in the world. Exemplification requires attributes. That is why the obscure language and syllogisms of philosophy (for the above, e.g.: “S is p” is true iff there is something in the world that is S, satisfying the description “is p”) have never really appealed to robust varsity atheists. But Kant’s critique of ontology slices both ways: if ontology is defeasible because existence is not a predicate, it means that the statements God exists is not falsifiable because there is nothing in the world corresponding to God, at least not of the S is p variety.
Kant
Many atheists know this, and they also know that their rejection of “theism” (a very funny word derived from the Greek θεός — a god, hence, a-theism, being without such a belief) is not based on snowflakes but fully formed snowmen: the God of “Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) “theism” who comes to us in a manifestly literary, messy, and inconsistent way in scripture. You cannot be an atheist in the abstract; you have to be an atheist in terms of attributions that have been applied in specific historical moments and which can be traced to particular historical contexts–such as the legislative “creation” of the Trinity in 325 AD. You must be walling out something.
I am perfectly at home with this kind of unbelief, comfortable with the truism that most people are atheists with respect to 99% of all the gods who were ever believed to exist. The statement is inadvertently poignant because it suggests that what we find it easy to contradict or reject are specific “attributes” or characterizations, and then to construct from these a more complete rejection of the whole picture. Every clever schoolkid knows the game and the logic: How can a God who is all good tolerate famine, cancer, premature death? How can a God who is all-wise put the prostate near to the male urinary tract (was he cutting costs?); Why would a God who is all powerful not create us, like Adam, in a post-adolescent, decision-making state free from high school, acne, and nagging parents? Note that what is being rejected are the attributes laid on this God, attributes which are construed from “S”: the state of existence as we know it.
Conveniently, for unbelievers, the rejection of attributes is facilitated by books thought toreveal the nature and purposes of God himself, especially the Bible and the Koran. The existence of texts that were never designed for use in philosophical and theological argument is a treasure chest for unbelievers–full of informal literary proofs that the God made from scriptural snow doesn’t correspond to the God made from theological snow: His whole story is an epic tragedy that could have been avoided if he had but exercised his omniscience and power at the beginning of time, avoided making fruit trees, or refrained from making Adam, or simply said “Apology accepted” when the First Couple betrayed his sole commandment. The manifest insufficiency and limitedness of this literary deity measured by the philosophical yardstick brought into the Church with theology–moments of remorse (Genesis 6,6) and petulance (6.1-16) and violence–flood, war, disease, death–makes the job of the skeptic a walk in the Garden.
What the unbeliever discovers in an amateur way is the composite nature of tradition: God-traditions that developed in Jerusalem and Athens being spliced together with sometimes implausible ingenuity and impossible contiguity. The illegitimate move is for the skeptic to conclude that the process of development is in some sense a “system” of untruths devised by ignorant or malicious men to keep the facts hidden or science suppressed. The real story, like all real stories, is much more complicated. But science does not emerge from the total exposure of the God traditions as deliberately false–the wreckage of a false system on the shoals of fact. It arises because of the inadequacy of the explanatory power of religion: the appearance of nature beneath the melting snow, to cop a phrase from Emerson.
End of winter
I think it is important, if only at an educational level, for unbelievers to avoid the error to which their commitment easily gives rise. One is a version of what W.K. Wimsatt called in 1954, in conjunction with literary criticism, the “affective” fallacy. He used the expression to mean that the ultimate value of a piece of literature (or art) cannot be established on the basis of how it affects a reader or viewer:
“The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism [ . . . which . . .] begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism [with the result that] the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.”
Applied to the God traditions, atheists are fairly quick to judge religion solely on the basis of its (presumed) affect on believers, such that the details of the question of God’s existence and the implications of belief for everyday life disappear. We can see this tendency especially in the writings of atheists who cherry pick the toxic texts of scripture to conclude that believers who accept such stories as true are delusional or dysfunctional. I remember listening passively at an Easter Vigil celebration many years ago as the following, called the “Song of Moses” from Exodus 15, was read out:
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord:
‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2The Lord is my strength and my might,*
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.
4‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea;
his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea.*
5The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
6Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.
7In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
you sent out your fury, it consumed them like stubble.
8At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up,
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
9The enemy said, “I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.”
10You blew with your wind, the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
11‘Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders?
12You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
Invested with the spirit of Monty Python, I struggled not to laugh: God is great–just look how many Egyptians he killed, how many wives would now be husbandless, how many daughters fatherless. The vast majority of worshipers around me listened inattentively. Some slept. It was the drone of words. The same liturgy would have been performed in 1278. But no one would have heard very much because it would have been executed only in Latin.
To be affected by such passages (even if the effect is indifference) is a function of human perception. To conclude that the people who endure such banality in the name of religion need to be rescued from their belief in the God who seems to like to drown people or reduce their sinful cities to ashes is the affective fallacy. For every smitten, leprous evildoer and every reference to Israel behaving like a whore, there are passages of immense beauty, human pathos, literary quality and even historical importance.
To deny this human quality is to make the text disappear in the interest of sticking to a narrow and unformed reaction to it, normally based on a lack of familiarity with Hebrew (or Hellenistic) literary tradition, story telling, and historical context. Ironically, it is precisely this same lack of familiarity that permits a fundamentalist to accept “the Bible” in its undifferentiated and inspired totality as the word of God–whose imperfections can be overlooked as part of a divine plan that the book does not reveal in its entirety: 1 Corinthians 13.12.
A healthy skepticism is always preferable to uninformed credulity. But I maintain that unbelievers are often terribly credulous when it comes to their view of the positions they have taken. The fact that biblical passages can be shocking to modern sensibilities has no bearing on their “truth” at a literary, cultural, or experiential level. Nor can the value be determined by taking an average of nice texts and nasty texts without exploring individual judgments and categories. “Everything,” Jacques Barzun once told a resolute graduate student who had made up her mind about what a poem really meant, “is a seminar.” Without the seminar, we turn impressions into conclusions, and that is where the affective fallacy leaves us.
Barzun
To say that one does not believe in the God whose attributes are those (more or less, and with no consistency) described in the Bible puts the unbeliever in the company of hundreds of thousands of believers. To say that one does not accept the God of theology, with or without the reconcilable attributes of literary biblical tradition, probably would not greatly reduce that company.
The remaining issue, as John Wisdom once put it, is whether believing in a God without attributes is possible at all, or no different from not believing in God.
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Published: October 3, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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4 Responses to “God Matters”
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Gene Smith
October 3, 2011 at 2:25 pm
You know, I’m completely in awe of your scholarship. Completely. But, I keep wondering if a-theists shouldn’t really be called anti-theists. You guys don’t seem to be able to separate spiritual musings from political angst.
Arguments about God/not-God seem to inevitably get mired in playing the other guy’s game. If we’re going to be anti-theists, then we have to be just as literal – maybe *more* literal – than fundamentalists to argue the point.
We don’t question whether investigating angels dancing on a pin is a mug’s game…nosirree! We are going to measure that pinhead and then extrapolate Biblical angelic dimensions to *prove*…well, something-or-other. That believers can’t measure. Or don’t care about measurement.
My approach (if it can be dignified with that word) is to imagine that the Bible and other religious mythology may represent a genuine insight someone had in the distant past. Never mind that it may have been rigorously misunderstood and misused for centuries since. Once upon a time, some superior human had an insight, or revelation, or moment of enlightenment and it seemed important enough that it has survived to this day…even if in bowdlerized form.
So my personal question is: How might this be true? In what way might this make sense? I can’t bring myself to imagine that I will somehow induce religious idiots to abandon their idiocy or increase their respect for rational thought or science in any way. So I ask myself instead, what that original insight might have been.
I make not even the tiniest claim to scholarship. The sum total of my scholarship could be added to the Widow’s Mite and not register on any scale. My insights are purely that…and I make no claim beyond that. I surely will under no circumstances attempt to “prove” them! That simply seems silly and pointless to me.
An example: one of the Biblical stories that always bothered me was Moses being excluded from the Promised Land. Was that God just being chickenshit to show that he could if he wanted to? It just seemed utterly unfair.
But what if Moses is an ancient Hebrew version of the ego? And the Promised Land is enlightenment? Now it makes perfect sense. The ego guides you to enlightenment. They journey may be long and seem indirect and pointless (more Biblical stuff)…but when “you” finally arrive…”you” cannot enter. That “you” has to be abandoned to enter. Not obliterated…not destroyed…it just can’t be “in charge” any more.
Came to me one morning in church, listening to the lesson – just like you.
Same is true for lots of either impenetrable or seemingly silly Biblical stuff. What if the Holy Trinity is just another culture’s description of the Tao in action? God = the immaterial source – the field of possibility in physics terms, and The Son = matter, literally the “word” made flesh. That leaves Mister or Ms Holy Ghost as the process of the immaterial becoming material and the material headed home to immateriality.
I’m not saying it’s TRUE. I make no claims of PROOF. I’m just saying that, looked at in that way, it makes sense. At least to me. And I’m all I’ve got to work with.
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rjosephhoffmann
October 3, 2011 at 7:44 pm
@Gene – I am a very poor atheist in the same way that some people are very poor Catholics. I cannot swallow atheism entire; the excessive ranting newish type actually looks the evil twin of dominionism in Xty. Nor am I happy with saying that we may as well shut up about what we can’t know on purely naturalistic grounds. The greatest refutation of a thoroughgoing naturalism is human experience, and human experience includes religion.In any event, I suppose I am atheistic towards most of what has historically been postulated about God, but only really antagonistic when these postulates are put forward by people far more certain than I am as “solutions” to problems. But to be a-theistic in that sense really isn’t to be an atheist in the impossibilist sense (“I believe there is not God” vs ‘I do not believe in [x] God”). If anything, my atheism is just a denial of the picture we have, not a denial of all possible pictures. And if that weren’t so, I would happily shut up. To make things slightly more confusing for myself, i rather like some elements of the picture we have.
.
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steph
October 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Very nice post. I agree “a healthy skepticism is always preferable to uninformed credulity”, and Yeats agrees: “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity…”.
Speaking with some Christians (and two ministers) it would seem as if the notion of the “existence” of God has more or less lost its meaning. It’s not so much whether something or other is “believable”, but “What’s it all about”. God(s) of religions is coming to be seen I think as an anachronism, culturally constructed in specific historical contexts and ideas evolve.
Some churches teach “Christianity” not “theism”. That is they teach values, community, social justice issues and so on. God, or ideas of and even metaphors God are becoming increasing irrelevant in some societies and churches. There is more confessed agnosticism than belief in an unknowable thing. And then there is fundamentalism but that hasn’t really been prominent in, or even part of my cultural environments where we have the secular atheistic/agnostic Christianities taught by the likes of Jim Veitch and Lloyd Geering – Christianity without God.
To be an atheist is to maintain the existence of God, as Ursula Le Guin expressed it, and that seems a fair enough statement to me. I think to be an atheist you have to have believed and unbelieved… and I never believed so I don’t want the label. And the ‘atheist’ baggage is too heavy. I travel light.
The history of theology, to some extent at least, seems to me like the history of mistakes. A bit like cuttlefish, spraying too much ink and clouding the waters, it functions to justify itself in a world of its own creation, seeking knowledge through faith in… I’m never quite sure. Theologians are incredibly fascinating things to study.
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November Biblical Studies Carnival: The Undead Edition « The Musings of Thomas Verenna says:
October 29, 2011 at 2:29 am
[...] Hoffmann discusses how God Matters (in what way, you’ll have to read to find out). He also has a prelude to the winder season [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
What an Unbeliever Believes: A Prelude to Winter in a Secular Season
by rjosephhoffmann
I am a humanist. I do not believe in an afterlife but (to quote Woody), “Just in case, I’m bringing a change of underwear.”
I don’t deny or affirm the existence of God, any god. There have been so many, and all of them had their vague charms and serious hang-ups, ranging from the violent to the sexually perverse. Who could know which to worship? No one. That’s why we usually end up with the god our grandfathers worshiped.
Whether there is a God or not is simply of no consequence to me, and if the truth be told, can anyone in raw honesty claim that the God they pray to for answers, solutions, reversal of fortune, pie-in-the-sky or redress of grievances ever–ever answers their calls. Of course not. I can still see the pious face of a too-close relative asking me, as my mother lay dying in a hospital ICU, whether I believed God answered prayer. “It depends,” I said. “What are we praying for?”
In the paragraph above: the part where I said “is of absolutely no consequence to me.” That was a lie. It is of enormous consequence, and you are lying too if you say it isn’t. If you are a believer, it is what ultimately matters. If you are an atheist, it is what ultimately matters.
Squirm though you may. Notice that I completed the last sentence with no reference to Richard Dawkins or his feckless bulldog, PZ Myers whose lives would be infinitely emptier if it did not ultimately matter.
I am an Unbeliever, of sorts. Joylessly so. I have no axe to swing at the necks of believers. I dislike the word “agnostic.” It sounds as precious in tone and as pretentious as the era when it was coined. It sounds as though we wait patiently for some impossible verdict to emerge from the skies confirming our hunch that we were right to disbelieve all along, Descartes and Pascal be fucked. But it’s not really about evidence, is it? It’s about hunches.
I am not an atheist. Not on Friday. But it is a noble thing to be, done for the right reasons.
There are plenty of good reasons to be an atheist–most of them originating in our human disappointment that the world is not better than it is, and that, for there to be a God, he needs to be better than he seems. Or, at least less adept at hiding his perfection.
But you see the problem with that.
Goodness and imperfection are terms we provide for a world we can see and a God we don’t.
Taken as it is, the world is the world. Taken as he may be, God can be anything at all. I’m not surprised by the fact, human and resourceful as we are, that religion has stepped in as our primitive instrument, in all its imaginative and creative power, to fill in the vast blank canvas that gives us the nature (and picture) of God.
But let’s be clear that God and religion are two different things, and that atheists err when they say “Religion gave us God.”
What religion gave us is an implausible image of God taken from a naive and indefensible view of nature. I find my atheist friends, even the “famous” ones, making this categorical error all the time.
There are also some very silly reasons to be an atheist. The silliest is the belief that the world wasn’t made by God because God doesn’t exist and that people who think this are stupid and ignorant of science.
There are so many fallacies packed into that premise that it’s a bit hard to know where to begin picking. But perhaps this analogy will help:
This clock wasn’t made by Mr Jones because I made Mr Jones up in my head. It was actually made by a clockmaker whose name is lost in the rubbish of history, so if you continue to think Mr Jones made it just because I said so, you’re ignorant.
No, that is not a broadside in favor of intelligent design (though I happen to think the atheist approach to the question is often tremulously visceral); it’s a statement about how we form premises.
The existence of a created order–a universe–will ultimately and always come down to a choice between the infinity of chance and the economy of causation. Whatever the choice, my causation is not muscled and bearded and biblical.
The unreal gods of the human imagination from Marduk to God the Father are. If horses made gods gods would be horses. Xenophanes.
That much we can know.
I am a realist. I believe (with a fair number of thinkers, ancient and modern) that human nature is fundamentally about intelligence and that the world (by which I really mean human civilization) would be much further on if we stopped abusing it.
I regret to say, religion has not been the best use of our intelligence, and it has proven remarkably puissant in retarding it. Science is always to be preferred, except in its applied, for-profit form (as in weapons research) because it expands our vision and understanding of the world while religion beckons us, however poetically, to a constricted view of cosmic and human origins.
To be a realist makes me something of a pessimist (a term going out of fashion) not because I don’t believe in the capacity of human nature to become what it seems designed to be, but because–realistically–we have become as flabby in our thinking as we have become corpulent of mortal coil.Obese America is also fuckwit America. Anti-Enlightenment America. Tea Party America.There may well be countries in the world, developed, developing and undeveloped that have higher illiteracy rates, worse schools and universities, and greater obstacles to face in providing access to education at any level.
Yet America, it seems to me, is the greatest anti-intellectual country of all. Even if America continues to monopolize the Nobel Prize, it has the humiliation of having the worst public school system in among G-20 nations.
Being a realist means we can’t do or know everything–with a tip of the hat to my scientifically progressive friends whose promethean visions I find engendered with a kind of cultic spirituality that makes me squirm.
Science after all, like religion, was created by us.
One of our tasks is to learn and teach its secrets and take it away from the priestly caste it has created. That means: learn some science.
When I hear the chorus of scientific naturalists moaning that hoi polloi are dim, that the secret to intellectual salvation comes through a door locked by secrecy and formulas the laity are unable to cipher, I’m always reminded of the ancient hierophants who guarded their own secrets closely and made sure they were passed down only through a priestly elite.
And even though I know–theoretically–that science does not encourage secrecy in that sense and is–theoretically–democratic in its outreach, in practice it has been very bad in communicating and exegeting its mysteries beyond the gates of MIT and CalTech.
In other words, is it only religion we must blame for the scientific illiteracy of the masses? Religion was good at propagating its truths; science needs to get better. It does not need to shout at the victims of the religious right and the failed school system that its “product” is unschooled and threatens to bring the roof down around our ears.
Our political system in in bondage to the Philistines. God is the cheap and lazy man’s answer. Thus, it–he– will always have an appeal, and in America, as it runs, increasing appeal. The sort of education capable of making democracy a feasible alternative to intellectual failure requires far more exertion.
But in the end, I am a humanist.
Humanism incorporates the rest of it, the unbelieving, the realistic, the pessimistically hopeful. It also includes the aesthetic, and this can be something of a dilemma at this time of year–which, by the way, I am happy to call Christmas and not “the Holiday season” or “Winterfest” or “Solstice.” Winter is not to be feted but avoided. Saturnalia (the Roman Solstice holiday celebrated on December 17th) was just like its replacement, Christmas, a religious holiday in honor of the birth of a god, though a lot more fun.
And I have a weak spot. I actually love religious music. Bach and Handel spun the most amazing cantatas and oratorios out of the Christian myth. They are irreplaceably wonderful.
Beyond that, the sheer melodic simplicity of “Silent Night” (perhaps the best song ever written) and the shivering loneliness of “In the Bleak Midwinter” stir the poet in any human soul. “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
Think of that the next time you’re shoveling out from the latest snow squall. No one should object to a little religious indulgence. If you feel guilty, work it off at the lab.
I don’t believe that Jesus, if there was one, was born in a manger, but I think the idea of pure, naked, vulnerable–even unwelcome–humanity as expressed in religious nativity art and poetry is humbling and moving. And I think the end of the same story, as an allegory of our humanity, naked and vulnerable at the end, is not a contradiction of dignity but an acknowledgment of mortality.
It is something we will all have to do eventually–face our end, I mean.
For the humanist that confrontation underscores our belief that a human life is what we’ve got to work with. That we do not seek our rewards, satisfactions or compensation in some unplotted and mythical kingdom.
It is an intelligent, humanistically compelling thing (as philosophers used to remind us), to see the art of dying as the other side of the art of living well.
Humanists need constantly to remind themselves that non-belief is not the same as living well or facing death courageously. I think, personally, that mangers and crosses are as relevant to my humanity as the visions of Apollo and the pleasures of Dionysus. They are what matter. They are balance and proportion, 阴阳, yin and yang, not that which is opposite, but that which cannot be measured in ordinary terms.
Use the myths wisely, but use the myths.
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Published: October 6, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann .
5 Responses to “What an Unbeliever Believes: A Prelude to Winter in a Secular Season”
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Gene Smith says:
October 6, 2011 at 9:28 am
Nice. Again I am moved to say Thank You.
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scott says:
October 6, 2011 at 10:00 am
You mentioned Handel and Bach, don’t forget Haydn (:
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steph says:
October 7, 2011 at 12:42 am
I really really like this post and empathise with the sentiment. “What religion gave us is an implausible image of God taken from a naive and indefensible view of nature” couldn’t have been better expressed. However I’m not sure I’m an “unbeliever” because I’m not sure what I’m unbelieving, and religions as beliefs never really featured until I went to university and studied history and humanity and society.
In environments where no religion is particularly overt, I’m not sure non religious people think much about anything goddish like that. We all did science. And the reality is we’re only human and can’t know everything and I’m happy with what we do know (Big Bang, evolution – which negated the need any self contemplation on other unknowable ‘realities’) and hopeful to learn more. When religions are part of a multi culture, but beliefs are pretty personal, they aren’t generally part of conversation or society. Therefore I’m not sure what to make of the idea that anything could exist, and if whether it does exist or not, is necessarily a relevant idea. It’s sort of foreign and I’m scared of saying its an irrelevant idea because that suggests to you I’m not being truthful, and I am, but I’m not sure what to make of it. I never think about it for myself. I suppose the sensible answer is yes. So yes it matters, whatever that means. Now I’ve really confused myself. I’ve never been religious, or atheist or even agnostic, or anything. Humanist means so many different things to different people – it’s been hijacked. I know what it means to me and it has nothing to do with believing or not believing in ‘gods’ and its about honesty, compassion, empathy, social justice, nature, imagination and learning – a whole lot of things, for which I’m grateful that you write about all the time. I am a fruiterian though and Green. May my feelings about the sea are ‘god’ feelings. I don’t think so – it’s more a sense of passion and freedom.
Van Gogh wrote that he sometimes has “a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” Ever since I was small I’ve slept with curtains and windows wide open so I can gaze up at the stars. Wonderful sense of awe, and a thrill of imagining my own insignificance, nothing matters. Religions are part of cultures and its art, music and symbols have always inspired imagination and are things I couldn’t live without. Live well, die well, “oh starry starry night, this is how I want to die”*. And then the light’s out – that’s the end. My death doesn’t matter – what’s hard to deal with is the end of others.
*Anne Sexton
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steph says:
October 8, 2011 at 2:57 pm
You called it your love for religious music your ‘weak spot’. Never having been affilitiated with any religion, I don’t think it is ‘weak’ and quoted Van Gogh. I too have “a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion” – for want of a better word, and not so terrible. I like the metaphor, I feel “religious”. And all the renaissance religious art, the epitome being Michelangelo, Bach and Handel, all the wonderful religiously inspired poetry, is very much part of, an essential part of, what it means to be religious for me. As well as “painting the stars”. It’s all an expression of the passion, the ‘reverence’ for life and nature, the emotional soul surges and desires, the feelings of inspiration, sort of thing. My god experience or feeling, perhaps. Maybe I can call it all “God”. I like metaphors from religion. And in a sense, Van Gogh’s painting, Donovan’s praise to him in Starry Starry NIght, and Anne Sexton’s poem, are a holy trinity, one in essence.
It’s just that it is a very powerful post and I’ve been thinking about it alot.
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November Biblical Studies Carnival: The Undead Edition « The Musings of Thomas Verenna says:
October 29, 2011 at 2:29 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann discusses how God Matters (in what way, you’ll have to read to find out). He also has a prelude to the winder season with a post on what unbelievers believe. [...]
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The God Viruses
by rjosephhoffmann
From N.O., December 2010
I never saw a purple meme
I never saw a brown one.
Maybe they’re polyethylene
Maybe you could drown one.
Here is some practical advice to readers: When an author claims that he (or she) has a PhD, beg to discover where he acquired it.
Obviously this is not necessary if the author isn’t using his credentials to support an otherwise half-cooked hypothesis, but if the hypothesis appears to be half- cooked, it’s important to know how it passed muster: what peers reviewed it, what graduate committee passed it, or snickered behind their hands when they turned it down as a thesis. It is also useful to know if the person signing copies of his latest oeuvre on alien plant life at Borders has a PhD in Renaissance literature from Temple, or something more….germane.
I was recently and justly upbraided by a reader when I stated that Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins were “mediocre scholars,” and (suitably contrite) amended my comment to say “in religion.” I could as easily have said “have no credentials in the study of religion that would lend authority to their work.” Anymore than I would have if I developed a learned but totally flawed and useless hypothesis about evolutionary biology. –Or wrote a book tantalizingly called The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God (2010, by a systems engineer named Craig A. James) or its twin, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (2009 by a school psychologist, Darrel Ray.)
Yes, I know these have been around for awhile. Yes, it is shameful that I’m just getting around to reading them. Finally I was suckered by the promo on Amazon.com that said those of us who were feeling peckish after the dinner provided by Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens could find a repast in these authors. Niggardly though my esteem for the “New Atheists,” I was feeling a bit hungry. But what a bad meal.
The new genre of opportunists is proving the axiom correct: “In the beginning was the word. At the end, just the cliché.” They are also proving that there is a reason why, no matter how intellectually omnivorous a specialist in dairy science (for example) may personally feel, he shouldn’t do knee surgery. Likewise, the benefit of having grown up in a church-going family with a Bible in the top drawer of the sideboard doesn’t make an engineer or educationist a religious studies scholar.
Both James and Ray pump their books by saying that their “groundbreaking studies” (naturally) go beyond analogy. In other words, the fact that viruses make you sick and can kill you and the idea that religions can make you mentally sick or sexually dysfunctional is not a comparison but a correlation. Except, in both cases, there is no correlation; there is only analogy. In the case of The Religion Virus, spread out over ten sermonic and loosely organized chapters that read like a sophomore research paper—the kind where the thesis is so starved for persuasive sources that it eventually dies of exertion—the writer moves freely from a discussion of the “general all-purpose God meme” which he associates with animism and some discredited research on Papua New Guinea to a discussion of seven other memes which he claims are “synergistic” and can be compared to the mutation of genes in biological evolution. These trends, he thinks, coalesce in Yahweh (never mind that no one really calls him that but scholars), the “meme that we in the western world call God.”
Craig A. James
Reading the dissociated conjectures of James’s book, interrupted by dubious data, surveys, informal interviews and too many personal recollections and reminiscences (called “interludes” here) about his leaving the God-meme behind, reminds me of some of the reconstructionist history I’ve had to read over the years, the kind of thing that argues that Columbus was a Jew or (long before Dan Brown) that Jesus’ DNA survives in the bloodline established for his caliphate through Mary Magdalene. Yet another case of the facts not fitting the theory and changing the facts, except even more wildly careless about what a “fact” is and who decides.
Take this evocative paragraph:
“By the time Jesus was born polytheism was still widespread but monotheism had a solid stronghold among the Jews. In spite of being a minority view the Yahweh meme had developed all of the critical features that made Yahweh into a viable monotheistic deity….Yahweh was no longer a specialist God of war. Now he could answer all prayers. Instead of merely demanding loyalty he now claimed to be the only God. He had shed his jealousy of other Gods and instead simply denied they existed. Yahweh claimed to be the only God, a much more sophisticated meme than mere jealousy. He began actively to destroy other religions. He told the Jews to vandalize or destroy their temples. Violence against other religions was a virtue not a sin. He shed his regional association[s] and could be worshiped anywhere. He had changed from an earthly corporeal god to an ethereal overpowering figure whose very presence could overwhelm a human. He was no longer subject to the moral judgment of mere humans through natural philosophy and logic. And was instead transformed into the fundamental source of all morality….”
The book ranges on like this for 200 colloquial and illucid pages, reaching its sort-of climax in the following mission statement:
“…If we step back and look at all this activity [religion] through the looking glass [sic] of cultural evolution science, that is, memetics, we see that each person and each house of worship is just one more step in the hundred-thousand-year evolution of religion viruses that infect our brains” (194).
But no matter how far back I stand, I still can’t forget what I see up close. For starters: (a) Polytheism is not a precursor of monotheism and cultural historians have by and large rejected the teleological views of eighteenth century philosophy and nineteenth century anthropology that this error propagated, especially among philosophers who teethed on Hume; (b) It is internally inconsistent to his own case, and violates everything scholars know about the history of the biblical text and its development, to argue that Yahweh, having forsaken his role as a god of war then moved on to command violence against other religions and their destruction; (c) If anything, the God of Palestinian Jews becomes more isolated and regionally specific, not less, and the Hellenistic transmission of the God-idea (not meme) through Christianity fissiparates into the trinity to becomes less restrictive and virtually polytheistic, restoring particular specialized facets to God through a compartmentalization of his “revealed” activities. (d) The God of the Hebrew Bible was never “subject to the moral judgment of human beings through natural philosophy and logic” (what civilization is he trekking through?) and was regarded, anachronistically, as the source of right conduct (morality is not a good word in this context; wrongdoing and law-breaking are) even before the law was given on Sinai. What Exodus and Deuteronomy spell out in laws, Genesis collapses into an unmistakable poetic introduction on the price of disobedience.
Religion Memes (1,000,000 X magnification)
For the alleged memes or memeplexes to operate in anything approaching an evolutionary way, it would be important to get the chronology right, the data right, the lines of transmission right, the cultural syncretism right, none of which are right in this book. A “viable monotheistic deity,” you say? There is no historical or textual support for this view: But for the rise of the Christian movement, which wasn’t exactly servile to Hebrew monotheism anyway, the religion of the Jews was about an inch away from being discarded or subsumed by those “still-widespread polytheists” called Romans and it was not the tenacity of the Jewish God idea that saved it.
Politically unpopular, demographically Judaism was virtually untenable. There is nothing inherent in the nature of a “monotheistic” religion that guarantees its survival or explains its adaptation, anymore than the fact that Mediterranean and bedouin-desert cultures got more sun explains the fall of multi-god religion. Yes, that has been seriously argued.
Apparently historical fact makes no claim against a “memeplex,” especially when the architecture of the memeplex can be changed, like Playdoh, by the “scientist” to suit his private theories of how it all happened. It also shows that while writers like Mr. Ray (The God Virus) can invoke “cultural evolution science” against religion, their simplistic Evangelical understanding of history has not changed since their church-going days. It seems to me that if a meme is going to be described, you at least need to know where to findit. Ray seems to have found his in his Church of Christ heritage, and in beliefs about the Bible that originate with pastors who hadn’t read any other books. It permits him to expound on the God-meme without taking into account the billion religious people across the globe who aren’t monotheists and hundreds of thousands more who seem to have developed an immunity to the infection. When he talks about religion, like Parson Thwackum, he means Christianity—the one he knows best and in a disquieting kind of way seems to think is a suitable paradigm for explaining other aspects of the memetic theory.
In fact, Ray’s own peculiar paradigm of Christianity could not even be used to explain Presbyterianism or Roman Catholicism. But that doesn’t prevent him talking about the “Roman Catholic virus” in pseudoscientific language derived from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and “Viruses of the Mind,” both of which have achieved not just celebrity but canonical status among meme-believers:
“Christianity uses guilt to ensure sexual and marital fidelity as well as fidelity to the Church. Guilt is an important cause of sexual dysfunction in males and females. Sex for pleasure, from religion’s point of view, is a waste of energy, especially if it detracts from propagation of the God virus. For that reason, sexual pleasure is seen as suspect in Catholicism.” (103).
No, he said staring down the passage in front of him, this is not why sexual pleasure is “suspect” in Catholicism. The Church fathers (some anyway) endorsed celibacy and prized virginity above marriage and sexual encounter because they were saturated with Plato’s notions of greater and lesser good. Human appetite being what it is, such dissuasion against pleasure was never a powerful incentive to holiness except among the monastic minority, who were notoriously slipshod about the purity-meme. By the twelfth century it–the rhetoric–had failed. Especially among the higher clergy who were not known for sexual dysfunction, or moderation, and the peasantry, who could not read. By the fifteenth century Christian art was sensuous and erotic and the church was in the marriage business for good. In the sixteenth, Catholicism was in an isolated position with regard to the pleasure-principle, and still is.
The hop-scotching between premises is bad enough from a logical point of view, but it is also deplorable in personifying “religion” as a complex of ideas interested in its own viral propagation.
Even if memes had an existence any more substantial than the reality proposed for them by Dawkins and, until 2010 by Susan Blackmore (before her very sensible recantation of her view of memes as “real replicators” and thus equatable to biological viruses), their development, adaptation, selection and exportation from culture to culture would still be fraught with inexactness. The cultural equivalent of a genome project would not only involve what is but the multiple variants of what has been and what might have been if an opposing army had won (as in the example of Judaism above) or a particular emperor had ordered a religious genocide. The invention of an ever-more complex algebra to explain the anomalies involved in this new hieropany is not impressive even when done by people who think they know what they’re doing. But when done by people who simply believe the people who think they know what they’re doing, it is simply a case of quoting the bishop, a form of scholasticism in which quibbles and variant data that would be vitally important in real science are smoothed over and discarded in the interest of a master-hypothesis. At a certain point in building a meme-complex, the variants overpower the thesis: science becomes science fiction. The memeplex is no longer an explanatory entity but a blob that swallows data for its supper.
It is a fact, for example, that grasshoppers infected with the hairworm (spinochordodes tellinnii) are more likely to jump into ponds where the hairworm propagates itself. But it is only analogous that “all kinds of infectious memes thrive in religions, in spite of being false, such as the idea of a creator god, virgin births, the subservience of women, transubstantiation and many more” and that people infected with such ideas hop into the congenial atmosphere of churches where the infectious memes thrive (Blackmore in 2002). Let’s not forget war, male impotence, and the near recession of 2008.
Let me repeat: the problem is not with theorizing about memes and memeplexes, non-existent as Dawkins’s God as they may be. They have a use as analogues and modes of comparison, like Jung’s archetypes (the theory they most closely resemble). It is the easy abuse to which memes can be put, like Filipino workers in the Arab world, that troubles me—the cult following that’s always the signal of bad science. Atheists who profess to believe only what can be seen under a microscope or otherwise detected by observable effects have accepted the jargon and complexity of meme theory in the same way that Romans turned on to the salvation theologies of the mystery religions. This is just an analogy of course: I would not suggest for a moment a correlation between ancient Romans and modern pseudoscience, as though a jargon-loving-oversimplification meme could be replicated.
Memes are not snake oil. But they are not needed to understand the transmission, tenacity, adaptation, recombination and endurance of the symbols and practices we associate with the religious life.
They are probably not even the best agents for developing a “new paradigm” for understanding religion, judging from recent attempts to cut templates to fit all possible data. The greatest hazard they pose is reductivism in the assessment of religion, because science is necessarily a reduction to simplest elements and processes. A true memetic theory of religion, for example would be indifferent to the effects of replication. It would be neutral, [perhaps even admiring?) of religion’s awesome adaptive abilities (which I do not believe exist). But a true memetic theory does not exist, which is why depending on your orientation towards religion, you may see the meme as contagion or simply as adaptation. Not, however, as the cultural equivalent of HIV-AIDS or a Doomsday virus.
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Published: October 6, 2011
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2 Responses to “The God Viruses”
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MKR
October 7, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Joe, you should make a pair of reviews out of this article and post them at Amazon.com on the respective books’ pages. If your charges are just (I haven’t seen the books, but I have read much writing in their vein), prospective buyers should at least have the chance to hear from a professional scholar of religion about how poorly informed the books are. Many writers seem to be convinced that religion is so inherently stupid that it can’t even *be* a subject of genuine scholarly study, or at least that it doesn’t deserve to be.
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Craig A. James
October 11, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Go for it … the best thing an author can hope for is to be legitimized by criticism.
http://religionvirus.blogspot.com/2011/02/religion-virus-gets-cred-first-real.html
By the way, you could at least get my occupation right. I’m not a “systems engineer” … that’s some other guy with the same name.
Craig A. James
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
A Little History
by rjosephhoffmann
(N.O. April 2011)
So when the mob had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” 18 For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him…“Barabbas,”
they shouted. (Matthew 27.15f.)
While the Church and the Mosque deserve full marks for perfecting prejudice and instituting successive reigns of terror that afflict some parts of the world even today, it was a short article in the New York Times that made me think about the role of mobs in history.
CBS reporter Lara Logan is speaking publicly for the first time about how between 200 and 300 men sexually assaulted her in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in February.
Logan, who was covering the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s government, told The New York Times a mob separated her from her producer and bodyguard, then tore off her clothes, groped and beat her over the course of about 25 minutes.
“For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Logan told the newspaper.
“My clothes were torn to pieces,” she recalled.
“What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”
February seems long ago in the swift stream of world politics and non-stories about birth certificates and Lindsay Lohan’s jail time. But recall that the story being broadcast while all of this was happening was the dawning of the “Arab Spring.” How can tens of thousands of people calling for the overthrow of a strong-man dictator be wrong?
Human-rightists for the most part were overjoyed at the scenes out of Egypt. Obama issued mild, and then as the temperature rose, more direct threats: Mubarak must go. Now. Egyptian dissidents in London and New York talked about a hunger for “real” democracy.
A couple of (highly skeptical) university friends of mine at the Ain Shams said, How can the west be so gullible? Another: Don’t you notice how few women’s faces are in the crowd? We were assured that this was not just a public display of testosterone or a prelude to a religiously fanatical regime that despises women making a power grab. Meanwhile, in a huddle in Tahrir square, Laura Logan was being handraped by 150 Muslim men.
Logan
From Diocletian to Hitler, Franco to Milošević , the fickleness of crowds is something politicans can rely on.
Diocletian used the religion card–Roman religion–to incite crowds in Corinth to riot by accusing Christian women of being prostitutes, just as his predecessors had used the charge of venality and corruption against the Bacchic cults. In fourth century Alexandria, the unpopular but formidable bishop Athanasius incited crowds to riot and to lynch an opposing bishop named Georgius. Inciting crowds to riot, by different factions supporting different causes, was a well-developed art in the ancient world.
For every auto da fe performed by the Inquisition, there were hungry gaggles of women and men waiting for the faggots to be lit and the flames to rise–or the noose to be fixed. And of more recent vintage, Slobodan Milošević fanned the fire of “Greater Serbian” nationalism by manipulating crowds and promoting xenophobia toward the other ethnicities in Yugoslavia. Ethnic Albanians were commonly characterised in the media as anti-Yugoslav counter-revolutionaries, rapists, and a threat to the Serb nation.
The modern American tendency is to respect crowds as an outpouring of public opinion–the will of the people–even though crowds have been uniquely implausible sources of real government from the beginning of recorded history. Hobbes, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, each slightly differently, saw crowds and “mobs” as being linked to fear, something that extends, as Corey Robin says in his study of the subject, from within the recesses of the mass psyche to the uppermost reaches of government, but which can be motivated and manipulated at both ends, the popular and the “sovereign.” Crowds make history. If an angry crowd is a mob–an emotionally bonded entity demanding change or rights–then a peaceful crowd is democracy in action, but often, with equally uncertain effect.
In America, the ambivalent admiration for numbers has to do with a view of national origins that still infects our understanding of history. The schoolhouse legend of the American revolution gives us the righteous colonials and the wicked, simpering British. Paine’s nostrum (“It is absurd for an island to rule a continent”) speaks to the same mentality, but at a time when the population of the United States was about 1,500,000, and of Britain about 7,000,000. In its cartoon version, it gives us leather-clad warriors hiding behind oak trees picking off ranks of disciplined British baddies with their squirrel guns.
Until a generation ago, textbook versions of How the West Was Won weren’t much better, though the evidence of the ghastliness of the Europeans over two hundred years of encounters with native North and South American civilisations was harder to bury or gloss over.
When I want sanity in such matters, I usually turn to the eminently sane Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, a book first written on a dare in 1936 just after Gombrich had finished his PhD in art history at the University of Vienna. Of the religious hubris and human greed that motivated the “discoverers” like Cortez and their legal successors, the inheritors of colonial rule in North America, incuding the United States armies of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Gombrich says;
In all parts of America the Europeans proceeded to exterminate the ancient, cultivated peoples in the most horrendous ways. This chapter in the history of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it. (LHW, 2005 ed.: p 195)
Gombrich wrote A Little History for a series called in German Wissenschaft für Kinder(Knowledge for Children), and it was meant to be a basic introduction to world history, written in a way that would appeal to the natural curiosity of kids between ten and thirteen–a spur to find out more about their world and their past. The dare was laid down by Walter Neurath, who also founded the publishing house Thames and Hudson in London: it is one thing to write history for adults. It is another to boil it down to entertaining essences for children. Gombrich thought he could do it.
Like many “assimilated” Austrian Jews of his era, Gombrich could write more sensitively about Christianity than many of his Christian contemporaries. He was a writer with enormous historical intuition for what really mattered. It was Gombrich (who had been hired by the BBC to monitor German radio broadcasts in 1945) who announced to Churchill that the playing of a Bruckner symphony written for Wagner’s death (Symphony No. 7) meant that Hitler was dead. A significant part of being a good historian, he believed is having good instincts, a good eye, and an excess of curiosity about how things got to be the way they are.
Because history, for Gombrich, entailed a personal encounter with the events and ideas of the past, it was probably impossible for him to write the kind of “scientific” history that was then the trend in German education and was making inroads in both the United States and Britain. Besides, if he had written that kind of history what child would have read it? There are hardly any books as good for the purpose even today–which explains whyA Little History has remained in print in both English and German for 75 years.
If there is a “theme” in the book, it’s that the past is an ambiguous teacher and the source of unlikely outcomes. Above all it is “our story,” and as such a tale of remarkable highs and despicable, regrettable lows–ups and downs rather than “progress.”
E.H. Gombrich
Gombrich is not a Hegelian; he is well beyond the view (that feeds finally into Marx) that history is material progression of ideas and events in constant dynamic relation and flow. He is no positivist: history relies as much on uncontrollable variables as on the verification of data. With Karl Popper, one of Gombrich’s closest friends, he effectively sunk the Enlightenment belief that history behaves like science: science itself is not free of ideological presuppositions.
In the Comtean system that had influenced historiography (the philosophy of historical narrative) throughout the nineteenth century, history can be chopped into discrete periods, from the superstitious to the scientific corresponding to modes of experience and interpretation. In such a system, the “scientific” period marks the end of a process: the period in which knowledge is associated with (virtually synonymous to) experience, evidence and positive verification. A similar movement in philosophy gave us naturalism. To the extent imagination, emotion, and morality play a role in historical development, it is largely incidental–flavour not substance: science itself is thought to constitute an adequate critique of metaphysics.
Reign of Terror
Gombrich’s most famous assault on positivist thinking is also his most subtle. It comes in his chapter on the French Revolution, which in the nineteenth century both French patriots and American philosphers saw in terms of the victory of reason over the pomp of aristocracy and the blindness of a capitulating first estate, the Catholic Church. In fact, the Revolution was watched closely, by legislators in America, by poets in England and by Turkish-Ottomans on the fringes of Vienna. Burke’s famousRemarks (1790) capsulized the concern of many British conservatives that revolution fervor would spread like wildfire ‘and by emulation”:
Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors, until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.
But the young Wordworth, enflamed with enthusiasm for the revolutionary idea, and who participated in Jacobin mob protests at the age of 19, carrying the British flag:
[...] ‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unique sounds.
The soil of common life, was, at that time,
Too hot to tread upon. (Prelude, 9.163-9)…
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!” (The Prelude, x. 690-4.)
But neither Burke nor Wordsworth nor a hundred similar scraps of “evidence” tell us much about the meaning of the Revolution. Is it coextensive with its social, religious, economic and political outcomes? Or is there more to the story than that? To answer that question, you have to ask whether history is a set of conclusions based on the accumulation of evidence, a task that permits us to develop a picture of “what really happened,” or whether the story of what really happened far exceeds the bits that make the picture possible. The role of emotion, enthusiasm, mobs, and revolutionary fervor, combined with the disjunct between the expectation of the revolutionaries and the outcome–the French Republic of 1792–were strong disconfirmation that history could be reduced to its interpreted effects. In any event, as Eric Osborne has said of the end of the Comtean mindset, history was not like stamp-collecting.
Comte
Gombrich was one of the first historians to challenge the positivist idea that the Middle Ages had been “dark” (a term that came from the poet Petrarch’s complaint about the quality of Latin literature in the fourteenth century). It was instead the end of a long period of political and economic collapse brought on by constant migrations into the ruins of the Empire by northern opportunists who gradually (centuries, not years) became shapers of a new world order.
According to Gombrich, what the middle ages produced was a “starry sky,” where people could again find their way by using points of reference that had been obscured by centuries of collapse, such that people who lived in constant fear of death and violence “no longer lost their way entirely.” The philosophers of the Enlightenment, proud of their location in history, had forgotten that one part of this process was the rediscovery of learning, the resurgence of debate, and the creation of universities like Paris in 1170 and Oxford in 1249. It was also a period, especially between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, when the Church lost more power to secular authority than in any period prior to the Reformation.
Investiture Controversy woodcut
But Gombrich goes one step further. The Enlightenment itself, the fountainhead of both good ideas and hopelessly naive ones, is problematical. While most people associate intellectuals like Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau with the period on its French side, Gombrich remarks that France was surprisingly immune from effects that were being felt in England, Russia (with Katherine the Great) and even Poland. Later historians have corroborated the view that the French Revolution and the subsequent reign of terror stands in stark contrast to the relatively calm transition from the Declaration of American Independence in 1776 to the ratification of the Constitution of 1789, a scant thirteen-year period where many of the people who were there at the beginning were also there at the end. Yet salons and cafe culture in America were decidedly minuscule compared to the culture of Paris and the European capitals in the eighteenth century. Why were the two revolutions so different when their slogans, and ends, were remarkably the same?
The Boston “Massacre”
Mobs played a relatively minor role in the American revolt; a major one in France. Was America more protestant, more controlled, France more susceptible to gallic passion? Does geography and scant settlement mean that crowds were harder to muster, or the degree of illiteracy mean that written broadsides slower to affect passions? How does positivist historiography settle the question for us?
Gombrich’s focus is on the role of the people–their susceptibility to demagoguery, the idols of the tribe, the promise of quick justice for enemies of an emotional cause and a knack for misreading the consequences of their actions. For the Comteans (Comte himself was born in 1798, just after the worst of the troubles had abated), the Revolution cleared away abuses, the “elegant, prinked, powdered and perfumed” aristocratic privilege, and a whimsical, ostentatious monarchy that had lost touch with the people. When the dust settled and the revolutionary zeal subsided, the reign of reason was secure and adaptable for use in Comte’s theory of history from religious darkness to scientific light.
July 14, 1789
But this was pure metaphysics. This is not what “really” happened. Gombrich reminds his youthful readers that the reign of terror was meant to be the reign of reason. Following the execution of Louis XVI, Maximilien Robespierre in dry lawyerly fashion
had Christianity declared an ancient superstition and abolished God by decree…. A printer’s young bride wearing a white dress and and a blue cloak representing the goddess of Reason was led through the streets and people were invited to worship her.
When the moderate Jacobin, Georges Danton, asked for an end to the introduction of the new cult of reason, compassion for opponents of the regime, and that the beheading of people opposed to exceses of the Revolution be terminated and mercy be shown, Robespierre declared that only enemies of Reason ask for mercy on behalf of criminals.
So Danton too was beheaded, and Robespierre had his final victory. But soon [he declared] that the executions had hardly begun, that freedom’s enemies are all around and that vice was triumphant, and that the country was in peril.
Written in 1936, it’s not hard to cipher what new cult of personality Gombrich has in purview in writing this lesson plan for young readers. It is hard to imagine any book specifically for children written today would address the irrational aspects of the human story in such a direct way.
It seems so long ago, the events Gombrich describes. But only in February 2011, amidst similar excesses and cries of freedom and justice and the dawn of democracy, a woman reporter is raped by mobs. Crowds riot in Syria, and bands of faceless rebels are the beneficiaries of Western military assistance because, we can only assume, they care about liberty. But who knows? In the photographs, they look a lot like mobs throughout history.
Gombrich stood at the beginning of a new generation of historians who knew that all history is the history of working things out. ”Religion” has been a constant source of distress. But on the occasions when it has been outlawed–as in the Reign of Terror or the communist revolutions of the twentieth century–the secular options have not been inspiring. The will of God and the rejection of God have led to the same results.
It tells us on the one hand that God — or a God who could be anything like a loving and merciful father — is either nonexistent or completely immoral. And it tells us on the other that whichever is the case, we are still stuck with the “passional tendencies” that keep history from moving in a straight line, divisible by periods, or equal in moral intelligence to its technological successes.
FOOTNOTE: I am not sure that genius runs in families, but look at the root of the word genius.
Ernst Gombrich and his distinguished pianist-wife Ilse, had only one child, Richard Gombrich. One of the nicest as well as finest scholars Oxford has ever had the good sense to keep, Richard Gombrich retired from full-time teaching in 2004 on mandatory retirement. The most prominent Indologist since Max Müller , Gombrich is also a strong critic of contemporary trends in British higher education.
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Published: October 7, 2011
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One Response to “A Little History”
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scott
October 10, 2011 at 5:02 pm
I take it then, that your essay and Gombrich contain the most devastating attack on the “religion” of Marxism to date. There is no single, coherent evolutionary process to history; in fact, it appears to be a jumbled mess until the more patient can have a look at it.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Killing “Humanism”: Definition by a Thousand Cuts
by rjosephhoffmann
It is a — most — provoking — thing,’ Humpty said at last, `when a person doesn’t know a cravat from a belt!’ `I know it’s very ignorant of me,’ Alice said, in so humble a tone that Humpty Dumpty relented.
Preliminary: Of Words in General
Writing in defense of the language he loved and hated, H.L. Mencken wrote in The Smart Set for 1921 that “When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language decide to call it a freight train instead of a goods train, they are ‘right’; then the first is correct usage and the second a dialect.”
He was speaking of one of the minor irritants of usage that separate American and British speakers, “divided by a common language,” into those who love English because it isn’t French and those who value it primarily because it isn’t Spanish. –The perennial war between Britspeak and Amerispeak shows illiteracy on both sides of the water, however. About a third of our English words are French derivatives (about 28% Latin), and neither the linguistically recusant hillbillies in Tennessee nor bankers in Fleet Street could give an Anglo-Saxon farmer of the year 1065 the time of day in a language he could understand. Lingua Anglorum non mortuus est, but boy has it changed. Shift happens, linguistically speaking.
Modern linguistics was not really influenced by Mencken as such, but the “usage factor” has become a standard measure of what defines a language in practical terms. Living languages “obey” the habits of living speakers, described not prescribed. If, to turn it around, two-thirds of people no longer know what a goods train is, then maybe it’s time to call it a freight train.
Besides, rightness and wrongness surely don’t hang on idiomatic differences–whether the British cringe when they hear an American saying “gotten” for “got” or “normalcy” for “normality” or “dude” for “bloke.” Whether I’m pissed, pissed off or told to piss off, I know it’s time to go home. (It’s the syme the ‘ole world ovah. Now, Nigel: say fævah, favour, father). We have made so much of these issues for so long now (so bloody long now) that we all know what the other means, more or less. And the discussion–which might have been infinitely fascinating cocktail chit in the 1920’s, when there really was a smart set, and when we began to encounter each other as hateful cousins in great numbers after a century and a half of virtual separation–is frankly a little boring.
I do agree with Tolkien, though: American women all talk like they have a clothes peg (sorry, pin) over their nose.
Language is made up of words, and words are the primary agents of change. Once upon a time nice meant foolish; now it means nice. Egregious meant great, as in wonderful. Awful meant what we now mean by awesome and a guy was always a bad guy—like Guy Fawkes, and now has become the most gender-neutral pronoun in the language–as in, Really, you guys. A knave was just a boy (is it anything now?) and a silly girl wasn’t a giggly maid but a virgin. To interfere meant to have sex with, now it means interrupting someone in medias res, so to speak. Kill used to mean torture (as in “That joke just kills me”), but now is always used to mean to do away with/someone in. I’m hot can mean a couple of things. I’m cool, likewise. I’m gay probably means only one thing today—because when the winds of change have done their work, old meanings can be swept away entirely. And all that jazz.
Although not the only mechanism we possess to convey meaning, words are the most efficient because with them we can create nuance and abstraction, write poetry, form concepts, discuss the origins of the universe, fractals, Leibnitz, and our neighbour’s mysterious parties. And while many meaning-changes or semantic shifts can be explained in terms of processes which diachronic (historical) linguistics can classify (narrowing, elevation, metaphor, antiphrasis metonymy, etc.) other words with a specific history and semantic lode are less susceptible to shift—especially when they are concept-driven or definitional.
For example. To define capitalism as a process of collectivizing wealth and redistributing it to people on the basis of need would not get us very far in understanding the economic preferences of the Western democracies. To define prostitution as the practice of absolute chastity before and during marriage would be at least a little confusing. Classicism does not describe the political system of ancient Greece but its emphasis on balance, order and harmony in architecture and ideas, even though these ideals are (sort of) reflected in the political structures in Greek antiquity. Democratic, until fairly recently, did not describe an architectural style, though “Stalinist” can refer to an aesthetic or a system. True, some words (but not definitional ones), through a process called “auto-antonymy,” become their complementary opposite (That dress is so bad! = so good, or so hot), but native speakers will know how to flip the meaning from usage and context, with a minimum of intellectual exertion.
Of a Particular Word: Humanism
The unique message of humanism on the current world scene is its commitment to scientific naturalism. Most world views accepted today are spiritual, mystical, or theological in character. They have their origins in ancient pre-urban, nomadic, and agricultural societies of the past, not in the modern industrial or postindustrial global information culture that is emerging. Scientific naturalism enables human beings to construct a coherent world view disentangled from metaphysics or theology and based on the sciences. Humanist Manifesto 2000 (Paul Kurtz)
Over at New Oxonian, I have written several pieces about the difference between movement, meaning organization-based humanism (secular, new, religious, ethical, neo, and trans-) and wholecloth humanism, on the analogy that these snippets have been selectively cut from the much broader historical phenomenon known simply as humanism.
The snipping is primarily a British and American pastime, just as the founding of organizations to promote a certain understanding of “humanism” (secular, political, and anti-theistic) has primarily unfurled as an Anglo-American project. Any standard dictionary will attest to the success of this project: normally the first definition given is a movement-humanism definition, with the laudable exception of Webster’s. –Leave it to the Americans to get something right in the long run, as Churchill once famously remarked.
My contention is that this snipping away has resulted in a technical reductio ad absurdum—a lessening and deadening of the whole concept originally conveyed by the term humanism. Linguists (Ullmann [1962] being the most famous) have called the process semantic pejoration or weakening–much like defining democracy as “one man one vote” or puritans as early American fundamentalist Christians, 10% true but 90% misleading and thus 100% wrong. The tendency to turn the phenomenon called humanism into one of its multifarious effects or “tendencies” has not only turned humanism into a parody of itself, but the whole process has been done in such an artless way that the term has lost both integrity and valence: Humanism (recall Sartre’s famous quip about “existentialism”) now means so many different things that it has ceased to mean anything at all.
Hardly better is the Humpty-Dumpty insistence by some humanist organizations that humanism is non-theistic, secular, grounded in Enlightenment endorsements of “science” and “reason,” inherently and unarguably aligned with progressive politics and social movements, and committed to global ethics and values, in a circuitous way that embraces the principles of documents like the International Declaration of Human Rights but seems grotesquely ignorant of basic facts about its genesis–for example, that the famous Catholic-Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain was one of its principal authors.
This ignorance extends systematically to the role of religion in every progressive social and political movement since the time of the Revolution (including the Revolution), Abolition, women’s rights, civil rights, poverty alleviation, and economic and environmental activism. In fact, in its anti-theistic fervor, it is difficult to imagine a cause or movement so embarrassingly mistaken about the factors of cultural change as so-called ‘secular’ humanism. It is equally difficult to locate a movement more craven in its lack of serious accomplishments in any of the areas it professes to care about: Baptists and Quakers did more for free speech. Unitarians more for secularism and education (think, Harvard) and Catholics more for the poor and for building schools and hospitals. Add the Jews, the African American Church and a few other liberal denominations that the secular humanists never mention and you have roughly a capsule of America. Humanism was never irrelevant before ”secular humanism” made it irrelevant in marginalizing it from the great social and political ideas of the time in favor of a crabbed and jaundiced view of religion in general. In a word, “secular humanism” has been disastrous on almost every front, but primarily in robbing humanism of its pedigree as a light in the darkness.
Just off the boat
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***
Basically the history of humanism is a story of cultic emanations from original purposes. The term itself had some currency in the Renaissance and perhaps its finest early articulation is Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. Anyone who has read the turgid twentieth century humanist “manifestos” and has not read Pico should be deeply ashamed. But, simply, the denotative meaning of the term came to be “learning.”
Critics and reformers like Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and even an intellectually pretentious monarch like the second Henry Tudor could lay claim to the name as easily as Galileo, Boccaccio, Macchiaveli, Miguel Servetus, Marsilio Ficino, Petrarch, Montaigne, a significant number of popes (Pius II, Sixtus II and Leo X) and members of the Roman curia. This humanism was decisively not secular, not atheistic, and not very democratic and progressive. Its models were largely situated in antiquity and the new “science” of philology. Its first great victory was Lorenzo Valla’s discovery that the “Donation of Constantine,” thought to confer unlimited powers of government on the bishop of Rome, was a medieval forgery.
But it was rationalistic: The Cambridge History of Philosophy peals, “Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing on the human mind, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity—with all its distinct capabilities, talents, worries, problems, possibilities—was the center of interest. It has been said that medieval thinkers philosophized on their knees, but, bolstered by the new studies, they dared to stand up and to rise to full stature.” I am far from agreeing with the characterisation; but it isn’t all wrong.
It is difficult in our century, on the other side of this linguistic narrowing, to imagine the time when humanism was confident enough to incorporate the religious imagination in its understanding of man, nature and society rather than seeking to exclude it from the picture as a long history of unreason and error to which the human animal was prone prior to the Enlightenment, that magical period when (it’s unhistorically alleged) the human race woke from its long superstitious religious slumber.
The Enlightenment Myth: Humanism and Humeanism
Of course we never really woke up because we were never sound asleep. The idea that we were comes from epoch-making historiographers (like the flatulent but always amusing Gibbon) of the 18th century who saw the Renaissance as too garish, the middle ages too dark, and everything prior to that except a few classical philosophers as too superstitious.
This jaded Humean perspective (no one had ever been more wrong, more convincing, nor more influential about the origins of monotheism) is what, in dilute form, defined the idea of progress and the various scientific materialisms that climaxed in Darwin and his explanatory template—one that fed social theory, psychology and the sciences for the next century and a half, in various ways, and one that substituted know-how for belief-in.
A 2009 article in the Economist suggests,
There has long been a tension between seeking perfection in life or in the afterlife. Optimists in the Enlightenment and the 19th century came to believe that the mass of humanity could one day lead happy and worthy lives here on Earth. Like Madach’s Adam, they were bursting with ideas for how the world might become a better place…. Some thought God would bring about the New Jerusalem, others looked to history or evolution. Some thought people would improve if left to themselves, others thought they should be forced to be free; some believed in the nation, others in the end of nations; some wanted a perfect language, others universal education; some put their hope in science, others in commerce; some had faith in wise legislation, others in anarchy. Intellectual life was teeming with grand ideas. For most people, the question was not whether progress would happen, but how….The idea of progress forms the backdrop to a society. In the extreme, without the possibility of progress of any sort, your gain is someone else’s loss. If human behaviour is unreformable, social policy can only ever be about trying to cage the ape within. Society must in principle be able to move towards its ideals, such as equality and freedom, or they are no more than cant and self-delusion. So it matters if people lose their faith in progress. And it is worth thinking about how to restore it.”[i]
Humanism, however, was not inherently “progressive.” The scientistic form of the idea of progress inherited from the 18th century was inherently uncritical–and still, as scientific naturalism, largely is.
While the reasons for its distrust of “progress” are complex, they extend to the Church’s claim of “continuing revelation” and doctrinal development as part of an organic evolution in Christianity. The history of their era had created in the early humanists a deep distrust of so-called development: “progress” and evolutionary processes were things to be examined, inquired into, deconstructed, not respected. In fact its earliest achievements were conservative, or at least restorative, and focused on ideas, forms, texts and institutions—especially the Church–that had aged badly and were considered, in various degrees, corrupt.
Only through a generous application of the term generous has humanism been understood as a partisan movement for championing whatever sacred cows happen to be grazing in the trendy pastures of interest groups. As a “spirit”– long before the term Zeitgeist came to inhabit the intellectual world after Hegel–humanism was a touchstone that could invalidate as easily as it could inspire progressive ideologies—part of the reason for both the late-Marxist and early Heideggeran discomfort with the word and attempts to reform it. In colloquial terms, humanism was nobody’s baby.
In fact, the essential impulses of humanism were somewhat puritanical, as in the original sense, purifying–which is why, in its methods, the humanist approach suited the reformers who saw religion as an inheritance of aggregated errors in text and teaching. They did not form a unified front, however: Humanism was a modality, not a party or a cause. That distinction went to the terms “protestant” and Catholic.” Its insistence on criticism and the authority of the human intellect was not abstract but concrete: Neither Calvin nor Montaigne in their different spheres believed in the unaided, untaught or unformed “reason” of the common man–and except for a few romantics like Rousseau (who never met an English Baptist or a North Carolina Methodist), no one in the Enlightenment did either.
Ironically, this skepticism about the “availability” of reason fit perfectly with the Church’s traditional teaching about the fall of man being essentially proved by his mulish stupidity. It was one of the reasons the Church’s relatively well-educated hierarchy insisted on the authority of a magisterium, a teaching authority over the common man. And who, who has witnessed the American electoral process at work, would say that the Church was wrong?
A Very Little History
Much of “secular” humanism’s complaint about ninnyhammer fundamentalists is simply a remnant of the belief that not everyone enjoys the same capacity to reason—an idea that extends from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell and Avitall Ronnell . Humanism has always depended on an élite because since the beginning it has placed human intelligence at the center of its vision of the world. It is at its worst in the definition wars: a “democratic” movement, an “ethical” worldview, a “progressive” life-stance, a global vision. Whatever contribution the humanist modality has made to these areas of life and interest, they do not add up to whole cloth humanism. And the various “humanist manifestos” have been little short of thievery in eviscerating the term of its modal power and turning a spirit into slogans, banal aphorisms, and more recently billboards: You can be good without God. You don’t need God to be loved. No God, no problem. I suppose it would be irrelevant to the proponents of this insipidity that humanism could not have done what it managed to do if it had begun with these proposals.
In fact, the attempts of movement-humanists to flip the meaning of the term has been degenerative, conceptually sloppy, and subversive. Like many linguistic changes however, the mutually contradictory attempts to redefine and reclaim the term have been based on a wrong understanding of what a limited and informed understanding of humanism might entail.
Although “humanism” is considered nascent in the classical period, it was only descriptively used in an antiquarian sense when Georg Voigt employed it in 1856 to describe the classical learning of the Renaissance.
Much more significant was its use by the “father” of cultural historians, Jacob Burckhardt as a moment (Augenblick) when …
“both sides of human consciousness – the side turned to the world and that turned inward – lay, as it were, beneath a common veil, dreaming or half awake. The veil was woven of faith, childlike prejudices, and illusion; seen through it, world and history appeared in strange hues; man recognized himself only as a member of a race, a nation, a party, a corporation, a family, or in some other general category. It was in Italy that this veil first melted into thin air, and awakened an objective perception and treatment of the state and all things of this world in general; but by its side, and with full power, there also arose the subjective; man becomes a self-aware individual and recognises himself as such.”
That is, humanism was that moment when “humanity” became self-aware—and why, incidentally, the story of Adam becomes vitally important to thinkers like Pico and Madach: as the expulsion from Eden is not seen as a fall of man but as the rise of human responsibility. It paved the way for enormous changes in the university schools of the 17th and 18th century leading finally to Bacon’s Novum Organum and the rejection of tradition (and traditional teachers like Aristotle) as the font of all wisdom.
Without these changes, the Enlightenment would have been a flick in the dark. But the key point is that humanism did not as such align itself with causes. It remained, strictly speaking, the property of the philosophers, “literary” men and women (literae humaniores–humane letters—another name for classics), and, as the word became popular, men of science.
Humanism was not the sum of the socially progressive movements that learning made possible; it was the learning and impulse that created cultural balance and platonic “justice” in a systematic and speciesized form. The early humanists would have declared that learning is the counterweight to all claims of authority and all forms of activism used in favor of (or against) such authority: the Catholic church of their day would have been interchangeable with the “progressive” social and economic regimes of the twentieth century.
As a word, humanism has been associated with everything from anarchy (Prudhomme) to the cult of feeling (Renan) to opposition to organized religion (young Marx and the left Hegelians). The fabriquet “secular humanism” to mean a humanism stripped of religious affections and committed to the propagation of “democratic values” and ethical ideals is perhaps the most crippled attempt to sell shreds as cloth or own the baby.
It is especially noxious, however as a usurpation of the term that advocates humanism being closely identified with “secularism” and “non-theism.” Its narrow focus on the practice of science and the use of “reason”–whatever that term is thought to mean–has achieved such hyperbolic and absurd levels that one could be forgiven for wondering why the term humanism (as opposed to atheosecularism, for example) is used at all.
As an historical linguist, I think I know the answer: it’s the desire for prestige-value fueled by what’s known as morphological plasticity—as when Congressmen appeal to the eight lone friends still listening to them as “the American People.”
The effect of the subversion of the idea of humanism by the atheosecularists has been to create a three-headed dog, defined primarily by (a) an American context, specifically identified with native religious yahooism; (b) the endorsement of the “universal” relevance of certain slogans associated with American political culture—especially “democracy,” “free speech” and “secularism”; and (c) under the banner of “reason,” the imposition of a naturalistic or atheist framework and a superstitious (and unproblematised view) of the Enlightenment, Darwin and his successors, and scientific progress. If one wanted to use the periphrasis “real lady” for prostitute, this is the linguists’ ideal example.
From this beast, the most avid secular humanists profess to have derived an ethics–applicable, naturally, to the whole world (not in His hands) but unsurprisingly a little sketchy in particulars.
Secular humanist ethics obliges the human-valuer only to believe in the first three principles and act accordingly. Erasmus, says Dutch cheese.
Linguistically, I am not an “originalist.” But I do believe that words, like movements, can be subverted–not only by scoundrels in search of respectability but even even by well-intentioned users.
The Duke and the Dauphin: British and French royalty on the Mississippi
There is no apostolic succession of meaning to the word humanism. Yet there is a recent history of abuse, misappropriation, and a concept that has been subverted by contempt or ignorance of historical meaning. Humanism is not a freight train by any other name. It cannot mean what Humpty wants it to mean and nothing else (“With a name like yours” [he said to Alice] “you might be any shape, almost.”) Humanism is not an Alice. It is more like an egg.
Some words–noble words,–should enjoy a peaceful life. They should be left alone to mean what they mean rather than what word-starved men and women want them to mean in the service of private causes. The use of the term humanism by secular humanists is its use by scoundrels in search of a non-emotive word for unbelief. But humanism has never been about unbelief, let alone about the sort of unbelief that contemporary secular humanism espouses. It has always been about belief in a human spirit that rises above even discredited ideas of God and government.
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced) – JRR Tolkien
__________________________________
[i] THE best modern parable of progress was, aptly, ahead of its time. In 1861 Imre Madach published “The Tragedy of Man”, a “Paradise Lost” for the industrial age. The verse drama, still a cornerstone of Hungarian literature, describes how Adam is cast out of the Garden with Eve, renounces God and determines to recreate Eden through his own efforts. “My God is me,” he boasts, “whatever I regain is mine by right. This is the source of all my strength and pride.”
Adam gets the chance to see how much of Eden he will “regain”. He starts in Ancient Egypt and travels in time through 11 tableaux, ending in the icebound twilight of humanity. It is a cautionary tale. Adam glories in the Egyptian pyramids, but he discovers that they are built on the misery of slaves. So he rejects slavery and instead advances to Greek democracy. But when the Athenians condemn a hero, much as they condemned Socrates, Adam forsakes democracy and moves on to harmless, worldly pleasure. Sated and miserable in hedonistic Rome, he looks to the chivalry of the knights’ crusader. Yet each new reforming principle crumbles before him. Adam replaces 17th-century Prague’s courtly hypocrisy with the rights of man. When equality curdles into Terror under Robespierre, he embraces individual liberty—which is in turn corrupted on the money-grabbing streets of Georgian London. In the future a scientific Utopia has Michelangelo making chair-legs and Plato herding cows, because art and philosophy have no utility. At the end of time, having encountered the savage man who has no guiding principle except violence, Adam is downcast—and understandably so. Suicidal, he pleads with Lucifer: “Let me see no more of my harsh fate: this useless struggle.”
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Published: November 4, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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5 Responses to “Killing “Humanism”: Definition by a Thousand Cuts”
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Scott
November 6, 2011 at 1:36 am
Humanism is neither secular nor religious but it draws from both of the aforementioned; it’s main tool as you have stated is reason.Humanism implies, to a lesser or greater extent, the life of the mind(or spirit if one wants to call it that).
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rjosephhoffmann
July 9, 2012 at 4:41 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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davidjohnmills
July 9, 2012 at 6:17 pm
I have an idea. Why doesn’t everbody get to have their own personal definition of everything. Then they can get to whine that others are polluting it. :)
Ciao.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 9, 2012 at 6:21 pm
First of all: no one is whining. Disagreement and assessment are not whining. Second, you are echoing Humpty Dumpty–is that what you mean to do?
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Steersman
July 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Without these changes, the Enlightenment would have been a flick in the dark. But the key point is that humanism did not as such align itself with causes.
Fascinating reading – you have more of those essays on humanism waiting in the wings?
However, with all due respect, I think you’re “protesting a shade too much” in trying to distance “whole cloth” humanism from its supposedly more pedestrian if not genetically deficient cousins who have-“gotten” / got their hands dirty in the rough and tumble of the market place. For one thing, as maybe a minor point as it might be more figurative language than not, to talk of “humanism aligning itself with causes” would seem to qualify as the “sin” of reification as it hardly has any autonomy or agency to be throwing its lot in with any specific causes – more a case of, as you suggested elsewhere, of a toolkit, a “modality”, that various people use to different ends.
In addition, I would say that the “enormous changes in the university schools of the 17th and 18th century”, among a great many other similar events, bespeaks a fairly effective, powerful and pragmatic movement in itself, and a profound and committed belief in a particular feature or modality of society that was likely to advance the “greatest good for the greatest number” if not the glory of Man and God.
Much of “secular” humanism’s complaint about ninnyhammer fundamentalists is simply a remnant of the belief that not everyone enjoys the same capacity to reason ….
That might well be the case to a greater or lesser extent. However, on the nurture side of that coin, one might also argue that for many fundamentalists their brains while children were addled by the nonsense peddled by parents and church. For instance, the evangelical physicist Karl Giberson in several recent articles, one in The Guardian and one in The Huffington Post, raises some cogent questions about the gullibility of evangelicals:
But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
Not sure that it is wise or ethical to leave them to “stew in their own juices”.
But humanism has never been about unbelief, let alone about the sort of unbelief that contemporary secular humanism espouses. It has always been about belief in a human spirit that rises above even discredited ideas of God and government.
That I like. However, as I mentioned elsewhere, on the basis of its recourse to the myth of Adam and Eve I would say that your “whole cloth humanism” might more reasonably be called “mythic humanism”. Although it does seem somewhat problematic and akin to the “who watches the watchers” question in that there still is no magic touchstone available – that I know of anyway – to test that belief against, to temper if not forestall the deification of Man, the apotheosis of the collective. Hence, I think, “fear and trembling” …
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