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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Quodlibet: Atheist Attitude
by rjosephhoffmann
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
I’ve written on this theme before, but thought I’d wait until the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism rode by to snipe at them from behind. Who, after all, wants to be in the sights of the formidable Professor Dawkins or the acid Mr Hitchens? Not me.
In their heyday, the Horsemen’s books were sitting on the coffee tables of every secular/humanist/atheist household I visited, and I visited a few. In one case last year in Los Angeles, a proud browser had Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens on view on side tables, but confessed he “hadn’t read them all the way through.” That’s no crime, I said happily. “They’re really not very good.” How could I say that, he asked, somewhat confused: “Aren’t you the head of some humanist outfit?” Atheists are mostly pretty old and they use “outfit” thinking back to their service days. I assured him (a) I was not the head of anything and (b) I did not check my critical reading skills at the door when I joined the humanist outfit.
When I wrote on this topic before (“Of Brights and Dims: Why Hard Science won’t Cure Easy Religion,” Free Inquiry, 2006) I mainly had Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion in view. I still do. Without oversimplifying an already simple thesis, Dawkins feels that religion is essentially for stupid people–people who don’t like or understand science and who think big bangs come from Pa’s shotgun. They like their religion literal, illogical, and their savior handy in case of distress. Think of the Palin clan, back in Wasilla. Nevermind that it gets them into all kinds of messes, like smiling in the face of the proven insufficiency of abstinence-only birth control: it’s easy to understand and you don’t have to wait in line. God cleans up the messes we make because he’s in the business of wanting personal relationships with people (he’s in the forgiveness business), and as a bonus he created the big mess we call the world in the first place. Religion is for Dims. Science is for Brights. Religion (saith RD) is the default position for the scientifically challenged of the world.
Now AAFCPS, this is not an argument against religion. It’s proof of stupid people. I meet such people every day. They doze through my classes, can’t make change, even with talking cash registers, burn out their credit by the age of 24 and think their preacher is the smartest man in town–after Rush Limbaugh. Dawkins, it will come as no surprise, comes from the faraway land called England, but his model of a Dim is almost exclusively American. This is where dim dives to new wattages. This is where dim is dimmest.
Richard Dawkins wants these people to know they are deluded. To help them out, he reminds them of their Thomas Aquinas and Anselm’s famous ontological argument. Nevermind that even the intellectually radiant Pastor Bob has never read these thinkers either. It is important that their dimness include ignorance of the Middle Ages, which it almost certainly does.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an argument against religion either: it’s blaming medieval scholastics for living in the Dark Ages. Everything was pretty dim. But what reason do we have to suppose that Aquinas would not have accepted the idea of a primordial implosion as a worthy substitute for “In the beginning God,” if he’d lived next door to Dawkins in twentieth century Oxford. (And as it happens, Anselm lived just down the way, in Canterbury, but alas, in the 10th century, and too dim to make the journey to the twenty first). The lesson seems to be however, that before dims can achieve a higher luminosity they must first foreswear the arguments for God’s existence that they have never heard of.
Next, they must confess, as an act of faith, that the science they were too dumb to learn proves them dim. Most of the scientists I call friends have never read the Origin of Species, but they are permitted this omission because they take evolution as scientific theory, meaning subject to falsification, meaning that if Pastor Bob can produce photographic evidence of Genesis 1-3 Darwin can suck eggs. But until he does, Darwin is right, and Pastor Bob and all his Darwin-dissing ID by-any-other-name friends are a threat to society. Moreover, creationism cannot be scientific because creation clearly exists and is thus not falsifiable and with it goes the need for a creator. Whoops, category error. Who spotted it?
Once there was a fifth horseman, a physicist by trade, a nice but plodding prose style, the author of seven books or one book in seven versions, the latest being God, the Failed Hypothesis. At a 2007 lecture anticipating his book Why is There Something rather than Nothing? Victor Stenger said, “Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.” And all the congregation, bedazzled with an hour’s worth of sparkling equations and no toilet break, said Amen.
I felt my light flickering: was I dimming out? Surely, I thought quietly, not wishing to be outed, we can only say something is more stable than nothing because we live in something-land. (To say Nothing does not exist is a tautological giggle). And what strange quantum hubris entitles us to say in the passive voice, “No laws of physics were violated in bringing the world into existence”–because the cosmos we see is the one we would expect to get from nothing. I said nothing of course. (Perhaps the something I might have said would have been the sort of thing one would expect). The audience were in full and energetic agreement. A few were even trading equations on business cards. For my part, I resolved to enroll in a low-numbered physics course at a local community college.
What physics has shown is that a table is in full conformity with a square-topped four-legged entity used for eating, writing or similar function. Just as we expected before we made it. From wood.
I have missed so much.
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Published: April 20, 2009
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Tags: brights : Dawkins : dims : Hitchens : new atheists : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular ethics ..
20 Responses to “Quodlibet: Atheist Attitude”
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TDF
June 7, 2009 at 10:50 am
I’m always bothered by the Four-Horseman epithet, which exaggerates the likenesses and homogeneity of their books, and which permits synecdochic hatchet jobs that focus only on _The God Delusion_, which has obvious deficiencies. I would be greatly interested in your thoughts on Dennett’s book, which seemed the most sophisticated of the four.
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steph
August 3, 2010 at 5:45 pm
I did enjoy the four horsemen riding by – the black cloaked highwaymen on a dreadful mission. And Dawkins, so fashionable, is so deluded about religion and his view of the religious is drawn from the Dims. Regarding Stenger: what’s so unstable about nothing? Nothing can’t fall over because it doesn’t exist but a two legged table can because it does. Why do very clever people, trying to be clever, not seem to be very clever at all? Stenger proved nothing. He assumed something and said nothing, I assume. Was he charismatic? It’s amazing how one person, saying nothing, or twisting words together in convoluted seemingly meaningless sentences, create an impression of learning. It’s amazing how this impression can spread like contagion through an audience and inspire energetic agreement and amens. I’ve seen similar things in Pentecostal Churches with exuberant dancing and hallelujahs.
x
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Quodlibet: Atheist Attitude (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
September 23, 2010 at 5:55 pm
[...] I've written on this theme before, but thought I'd wait until the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism rode by to snipe at them from behind. Who, after all, wants to be in the sights of the formidable Professor Dawkins or the acid Mr Hitchens? Not me. In their heyday, the Horsemen's books were sitting on the coffee tables of every secular/humanist/atheist … Read More [...]
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Ed Jones
October 3, 2010 at 11:07 pm
“But what reason do we have to suppose that Aquinus would not have accepted the idea of a primordial implosition as a worthy substitute for ‘in the bginning God’.”
Whatever speculative (atheist attitude) reason is being suggested; I dare to offer that the truly Bright question suggested is: By what reason do we face the indisputable fact (even for RD athestic labeling – Religion is for Dims – Science is for Brights) that the very founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics, the worlds greatest physicists, by the droves go beyond physics to embrace meta-physical mysticism
in one form or another?
The reason in brief is given in the following comments 7.8 & 9. Begin with 8 then 9, 7 is repetious.
The comments are excerpts from Quantum Questions. All on the chance that some reader (against the advise “Ignore the believers”) might yet have the interest.
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steph
September 24, 2010 at 12:08 am
Well worth reposting quite apart from it’s entertainment value, because it’s possibly even more shockingly relevant. The “four [or five] horsemen’s” shared atheistic attitude I’m sure has become louder. If anything their dimness has become dimmer – and more hostile, self righteous and vitriolic. I was interested to read a Guardian article published (16 July 2009) around the time of this post, in which Dennett attacks other atheists he labels as being from the “I’m an atheist but” crowd, who deplore the hostility and rudeness of “us atheists”, Dennett says, “while privately admitting that we’re right.” Really? Right about what? And “privately”…? Dim.
x
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Seth Strong
September 24, 2010 at 8:48 am
I like the four horsemen specifically but that isn’t an argument for checking critical thinking at the door. Getting to atheist isn’t a requirement or the end of the road for people but I’ve found having zero belief to be a challenge because it’s just assumed so often in the circles I was subject to that everyone has a little faith or a little voice telling them about the actual true god. The four horsemen confirmed that other people were running across similar experiences.
I think there is value in the growing louder atheism as part of a process that ends with variations of non belief being treated as more ordinary. I’m a software engineer working with two hundred or so other engineers. Peers of this sort tend to be mostly atheist. And in this environment, we rarely spend any time discussing it because it’s hardly interesting compared to discussing technology.
But outside of that, among my relatives or my fellow soldiers when I was serving as one, non belief is not only not expected, the Christian model of belief is sort of the template of faith (possibly just in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia). A chaplain of any faith bears a cross as a portion of their rank. There, I was louder and I observed peers who felt the same only more quietly. Although my logic is still a work in progress, I got the message that non believers exist in ordinary capacities to people who haven’t seemed to consider that possibility.
So while these criticisms of adopters of the New Atheism trend may be sound, I think I’ll pardon myself if I took a moment to enjoy best selling pro-atheist literature. It’s not the most logical or the most practical way to deal with issues such as creationism as a science and evolution as a guess but that’s the first time I saw atheism trend and it was nice to have the presence of known atheists being discussed in so many venues.
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Ed Jones
September 27, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Joe,
It is evident that a quantum comment from one physicist has had an unsettling effect – “I felt my light flickering: was I dimming out?” – the comment: “– the cosmos we see is the one we would exppect to get from nothing” – then steph’s: “He assumed something and said nothing”.- all suggesting that there is substance to “I have missed so much”.
Having just declared: “Science is for Brights”, I take it that you might just be open to further quantum comments, here by the very founders and grand theorists of modern physics.
Einstein: “The present fashion of applying the axioms of physical science to human life is not only entirely a mistake but has also something rephensible in it.”
When asked what effet the theory of relativity had on religion he said: “None. Realitivity is a purely scientific theory and has nothing to do with religion.”
Eddington: “I do not suggest that the new physics ‘proves religion’ or gives any positive grounds for religious faith. Physics takes its start from everyday experience, which it continues by more subtle means. It remains akin to it, does not transcend it.”
What in particular, did the new physics (qantum and rlativistic) tell these physicists that the old physics failed to mention?
Eddington: “Now the great difference between the old and the new physics is not that the latter is relativistic, nondeterministic, four deminsional, or any of these sorts of things. The great difference between old and new physics is both much simpler and muchmore profound. both the old and the new physics were dealing with shadows – symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and allusions, not reality – in the world of physics we watch shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances”.
Jeans: “The essential fact is simply that all of the picctures which sccience draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathmetical pictures – they are nothing more than pictures – fiction, if you like, if by fictin yo mean that science is ot yet in contact with ultimate reality.
Eddington: “Briefly the position is this. We have learnt that the explanation of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which these methods are unadapted for penetrating.
There is much more.. Should someone indicte an interest, I am plesed to offer it.
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Ed Jones
October 1, 2010 at 1:33 pm
The above quotes are from the classic treatment “Quantum Questions: Mystical writings of the World’s Greatest Physicist”, Edited by Ken Wilbur. Your advise “Ignore the believer” cautioned against using the word Mystical to better the chance that it be read. Hence the quotes are limited to these physisicist’s thoughts on modern physics. So there is inded much more. Reasonably I can assume that you have not engaged with the book – so here I take “I have mised so much” literally, encouragig the decision to offer more irrespective of whether it is read.
“It seemed a good idea to consult the founders of modern physics on what they thought about the nature of science and religion, What is the relation, if any, between modern physics and transcendential mysticim? Does physics bear at all on the issues of fee-will, creation, Spirit, the soul? What are the respective roles of science and religion? Does physics deal with Reality or is it necessarily confined to studying the shadows in the cave?
This volume is a condenced collection of virtually every major statement made on these topics by the founders and grand theoricist of modern (quandum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Brogue, Jeans, and Plank. I was quite surprised to find a very general commonality emerge in the worldview of these philosopher-scientists, certain strong common conclusions were reached by virtually every one of these theorists – - they are virtually unanimous in declaring that modern physics offers no positive support whatsoever for mysticism or transcendentalism of any variety. And yet they were all mystics of one sort or another! The reason for that will be one of the cenral questions of this volume.
The critique of these theorists cuts at right angles to any possible new discoveries. Briefly, the critque is this. The central mystical experience may briefly be described as follows: in the mystical consciousness, Reality is apprehended directly and immediatly, meaning without any mediation, any symbolic elaboration, any conceptualization, or any abstractions; subject and object become one in a timeless and spaceless act that is beyond any and all forms of mediation. Mystics universaly speak of contacting reality in its “suchness”, its “Isness”, is “thatness”, without any intermediaries, beyond words, symbols, names, thoughts, images.
Now, when the physicist “looks at” quantum reality or at realitivity, he is not looking at the “things in themselves”, at noumenon, at direct and nonmediated reality. Rather, the physicist is looking at nothing but a set of highly abstract differential equations – - not at “reality” itself, but at mathenmatical symbols of reality. As Bohr puts it, “It must be recognized that we are here dealing with a purely symbolic procedure. Hence our whole space-time view of physical phenonmena depend ultimately upon these abstractions”. Sir James Jeans: “These will nevr describe nature itself – - our studies can never put us into contact with reality”.
What an absolute radical, irredeemable difference from mysticism! And this critique applies to any type of physics – - old, new, ancient, modern, relativistic, or quantum. The very nature, aim, and results of the approaches are a profoundly different: the one dealing with abstract and mediate symbols and forms of reality, the other dealing with a direct and nonmediated approach to reality itself!
More later.
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Ed Jones
October 1, 2010 at 10:30 pm
Quotes continued.
“–if you are in the cave of shadows and don’t even know it, then of course you have no reason or desire to escape to the light beyond. The shadows appear to be the whole world, and no other reality is acknowleged or even suspected — this tended to be the philosophic effect of the old physics. But with the new physics, the shadowy character of the whole enterprise became much more obvious, and sensitive physicists by the droves — including all of those in this volume — began to look beyond the cave and beyond physics altogether.
But why then, did all of these great physicists embrace mysticisim of one form or another? Obviously, there is some type of profound connection here.
“The symbolic nature of physics,” Eddington explains, “is generally recognized in such a way as to make it almost self-evident that it is a part something wider.” However, according to these physicists, about this “something wider” physics tells us — and can tell us– nothing whatsoever. It was exactly this radical failure of physics, and not its supposed similarities to mysticism, that paradoxically led so many physicisis to a mystical view of the world. As Eddington carefully explains: “Briefly the psition is this. We have learnt that the physical scinces leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – this one centre where more might become known. There [in immediate inwrd consciousness] we find other stirrings, other revelations than those coditioned by the world of symbols. Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies that which science is admittedly unable to give”.
To put it in a nut shell: according to this view, physics deals with shadows; to go beyond shadows is to go beyond physics, to go beond physics is to head toward the meta-physical or mystical — and that is why so many of our pioneering physicists were mystics. This new physics contributed nothing positive to this mystical venture, except a spectacular failure, from whose smoking ruins the spirit of mysticism gently arises.”
Ed Jones
October 1, 2010 at 10:38 pm
The repetitions are justified by the crucial nature of these thoughts.
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Seth Strong
October 4, 2010 at 9:56 am
Is there any chance you can reduce whatever it is you are trying to say into some essay format that clearly says it?
You seem to be discussing non overlapping magesterium which is the proposition that science has nothing to say about religion and vice versa. But you’re talking a really long winded and unclear approach to doing even that.
Ed Jones
October 4, 2010 at 11:03 am
It is the, perhaps hopeless, attempt in this centre to get around the Dim athiest attitude “Ignore the believers” – “religion for Dims”; indeed to make the indisputable point that the World’s greates
physicists in droves go from physics to embrace religion – mysticism – they are indeed believers!
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Seth Strong
October 4, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I have my doubts that anyone has suggested ignoring the believers. Personally, I hardly ever get that chance.
Your appeal to authority is interesting in it’s basic structure, but that’s not a great tactic if you are inclined to think for yourself. Respecting the professional authorities should be limited to the fields of the professionals. Therefore, I’ll defer to Einstein on physics but not on belief no matter how many physicists share a common belief.
“Religion is for Dims” has several problems. The first is the terminology makes me think you are arguing with Brights. I’m not a Bright and an atheist isn’t necessarily a Bright. So you may have misinterpreted your audience here. Secondly, I’m an atheist. The blog author isn’t necessarily and also there are other commentators who won’t identify as atheist. So there’s even more diversity than your comment appears to address (from my vantage point). Third, as an atheist, I haven’t adopted any stance along the lines of “believers must be stupid”. I don’t think that for a second. I think there absolutely has to be sensible reasons for so many people to have a belief. I do not share their belief and that is all that being an atheist necessarily implies. It’s not a matter of ranking their intelligence.
If you want a conversation with atheists and humanists and such, by all means continue. Or get your own blog and post what matters to you. I’ve got one. And you know of the one you are on. That’s a great way to make sure a believer like yourself is hard to ignore.
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Dwight Jones
January 2, 2011 at 11:54 am
A beautifully written and commented critique of the four schoolboys, RJoe, but there is no appearance of any markers forming your side of the wager. Very little of ‘something’ to disprove ‘nothing’. (I’m assuming you’re not ‘all in’.
As always I point out that these guys aren’t Humanists either, despite the coat of many colours that they stole from a tradition far nobler than their own.
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Tristan D. Vick
January 2, 2011 at 12:44 pm
“Surely, I thought quietly, not wishing to be outed, we can only say something is more stable than nothing because we live in something-land.”
Actually this is a common misconception people have. Mostly the “something” of something-land is mainly comprised of empty-space, that is, there is more nothing between our cloistered together particles than actual something.
As for the universe, I think Victor Stenger, and others such as Lawrence Krauss are simply referring to the quantum fluctuations in a vacuum, that is, as Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically 30 years ago how the universe could have arisen from a quantum field of virtual particles (the closest thing to “nothing” that there is).
But physical laws would need to be violated if God snapped his fingers and made a cream danish from nothing for me to eat. No laws need be violated, however, for a universe to pop into existence from mere nothing full of cream danishes for me to eat.
It’s magic!
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rjosephhoffmann
January 2, 2011 at 1:01 pm
In won’t believe it until I meet Puff.
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rjosephhoffmann
January 2, 2011 at 7:24 pm
“But physical laws would need to be violated if God snapped his fingers and made a cream danish from nothing for me to eat. No laws need be violated, however, for a universe to pop into existence from mere nothing full of cream danishes for me to eat.”
Like all tautologies, this is true. But it doesn’t actually prove anything–including the laws that are not violated but extrapolated from what is. No laws are violated in a universe described by YHWH’s Ten, either until a system appears in which, e.g., ridiculing the gods is regarded as virtue and keeping laws as sin. I have nothing against the “laws” of physics obviously but nothing that satisfies the maxim Ex nihilo nihil fit, whether it’s cream danishes or fluctuations in a vacuum or worlds. The postulate’s closest cousin is Anselm’s ontology, where the physical has to be explained in terms of the non-physical, and that leads to simple mischief.
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Tristan D. Vick
January 2, 2011 at 11:30 pm
@Joe
Since your on about the new atheists, and it seems that my cream danish analogy was a bit fuzzy, here’s a good video explaining far better than I could about the universe coming from nothing. (Maybe you’ve seen it?)
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rjosephhoffmann
January 3, 2011 at 8:32 am
Thanks Tristan. This is interesting, Dawkins more than Kraus.
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Datman, Numavox and The New Oxonian? | Blue Django says:
June 19, 2012 at 12:37 pm
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Quodlibet: Religious Minimalism
by rjosephhoffmann
rdfflyerimagine4page
I recently became associated, if that is not saying too much, with a band of reprobates called the Biblical Minimalists. Some have called it a “school.” In fact, it is at least one classroom and a belfry short of being any such thing. Its premises are wobbly, its methods diffuse, and its conclusions so weak that members will drink to almost anything that seems controversial.
Tell a minimalist the ostracon of Joseph of Arimathea has been found with a note saying “Gone Fishing” and he will titter. Tell them that someone misplaced Nazareth on the map of the Roman empire and they will say, ‘”So that’s where it’s gone to.” Tell them that Joshua not only did not fit the battle of Jericho but probably would have found it in ruins, if he lived to find it in any condition, which is highly doubtful, and they will swoon. And toast you.
Biblical minimalists, you see, are skeptics first and unorthodox second. They feel that insufficient, faith-based archaeology and a commitment to an older, theologically-charged school of biblical studies has multiplied the number of “safe conclusions” you can achieve in the history of the biblical record beyond a tolerable level. No self-respecting minimalist will tell you what the right level would be, but most would agree it has been exceeded.
Thus, avoiding creed and allegiance, they (we?) are bound to the principle of non-multiplication of unsupported details. In a word minimalism. Show us your Solomon, divulge your David, pony up your prophets. Can’t do it? You burned.
No, this is not a group of flakes who think the Bible was written during a Jewish layover in Babylon by a group of unemployed scribes. (On the other hand, don’t rule it out). It is a group that asks for consistency in method as between the study of biblical documents and other areas of ancient and classical study where conclusions are not anchored in a two thousand year history of assuming the documents inscrutable except through the eyes of faith. On the other hand, there is no bugle call to fight the forces of faith. Its proponents, strangely enough headquartered at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Sheffield take themselves far too unseriously to be militant. Battles are fought on Facebook, where recipes are also exchanged. Meetings are not held, per se, or if they are no one has invited me.
This brings me to Religious Minimalism. I suspect there is a “movement” out there by that name. I refused to Google it because I want to think of this as my idea and to discover it is really someone else’s would have a depressing effect–thus no blog. So let us assume this is my idea, even if there is a posted reference to a substantial movement by the same name that started in 2001.
The problem with religion, it seems to me, is that by its nature it becomes more and more specific. The accumulation of doctrines in Christianity between the first and fourth century is inversely proportional to the relatively small number of books selected for the New Testament canon. Twenty seven, at last call. Rabbinical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible was no less cumbrous. And forget what you heard about the simplicity of Muslim belief. It’s about as true as the aphorism that Christianity boiled down to loving God and loving neighbor, and then being told–Oh, one other thing: the hypostatic Union. For every Islamic pillar there is a body of doctrine (i.e. opinion) about it big enough to fill a barn. I will not speak of Buddhism and Hinduism because it is already past five p.m.
But you see the point: whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing, it is too much of a thing. It is corpulent and unwieldy, full of distractions and formulas, defiantly undeconstructible–a superhero made of putty and able to absorb most threats to its person by adding a few extra pounds. It is full of highsounding unarguable slogans about the oneness of god, the inspiration of scripture, the salvation of souls, everlasting reward (and its opposite, marriage), what not to eat, and moral activities that are unIslamic or Unchristian, or otherwise damaging to your soul, recreationally known as sin.
I take it for granted that adherents of religious tradition take their faith traditions seriously. And most religious leaders cannot be aware that most of what they say is swill. But what about those of us who are unchurched not because we think religion is a bad thing but because we simply think there is too much of it, and that excess is giving religion a bad name. It isn’t religion I don’t like, it’s the grotesque behemoth human ingenuity has made of it.
A minimalist principle is that the larger the accumulation of any body of beliefs the more likely the majority of those beliefs are to be wrong. If we were minimalists, for example, we would see the trinity as an example of christian exaggeration, letting Jesus be Jesus whoever he was. We would regard as absurd the Islamist position that the Koran is a blueprint for governing complex modern societies or contains all the science anyone needs to lead a productive life. We would challenge the relgiocentrism that permits Jews to invoke an imaginary past populated by imaginary heroes–most–as though it were their historical past. I will not speak of Hinduism or Buddhism because it is now past 6 PM.
I am not advocating Quaker simplicity, Amish withdrawal, or killing the Buddha. Religious minimalism needs to be more aggressive than pacifist, more intellectually demanding than sapppily “humanistic.”
It needs to lay claim to the religious life and spirituality, the sense if not the definition of God, and to ask the otiose religions (that’s about all of them) of the world the following question:
“Why do you think you know better?”
And make it short.imaginenoreligionmedium
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Published: April 21, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Bible : humanism : minimalism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
2 Responses to “Quodlibet: Religious Minimalism”
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Fred Werter
September 15, 2009 at 11:34 am
Hi, thanks for your text.
I made a short quote and gave a link to your text on Religious Minimalism and posted it on the FRDB forum.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?p=6099844#post6099844
Religious Minimalism? I want to support it!
My handle there is Wordy because I am bad at being short and concise and I am a poor thinker too.
I kind of like your text.
Have you read Paul Bloom and Pascal Boyer?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html
NATURAL-BORN DUALISTS [5.13.04]
A Talk with Paul Bloom
or his text herehttp://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/publications.html
Bloom, P. (2007). Religion is natural. Developmental Science, 10, 147-151.
and many other texts
Pascal Boyer too has interesting texts on what makes some religion more effective in getting members than others.
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/
I seems to be the only person who comment so far?
Which don’t look promising for RM at all.
May I ask. Do you still have any reference to the group active around 2001? I fail to google them?
I wrote a short post 2006 about Religious Minimalism but none of the other atheists got interested in it. I am a poor writer.
Okay.
Best wishes to you
Fred Werter
Native of Sweden living in Stockholm Europe.
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steph
August 12, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Faskinating post. Let William of Occam shave his beard and call on his razor. Perhaps a religious minimalism is one that sheds all doctrine (or rather opinion) and looks at central ideas – like the God idea perhaps – and then starts from there. In a spiritually human way. Perhaps. It’s the peripheral puff that clutters it up. Of course it’s your idea. I didn’t google it but who else could express thus like this? But ‘everlasting reward (and its opposite, marriage)’? Well that sort of uneverlasting is the reward for grotesque mistake. That’s'll.
x
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Quodlibet: The Jesus Project
by rjosephhoffmann
jesusWhat can you say about a thirty-three year old Jew who died. History suggests, a lot. The Jesus Project, previewed here, isn’t so sure.
Even before the Jesus Project had resolved itself into a critical mass of scholars with ideas, goals, and vision, bloggers of various persuasions pronounced its fate. It was quickly bloggled into one of three things: More of the Same Old Thing, A Radically New Thing, or a Thing that Wouldn’t Make a Difference whether old or new. To chop these positions finely: the first group consisted of apologists—those who believed that the questions proposed by TJP, or their formulation was impertinent, so were happy to declare the question dead at asking; but also of skeptics who had seen the grunts and groans and fissiparation of previous quests and seminars and were skeptical that anything really new would come from another set of scholarly calisthenics. The second group, which might have included me but didn’t, was giddy at the prospect that stalwart scholars were going to blast the timidity of the Jesus Seminar when it came to the edge of the Big Question, and march on to Baghdad, if the analogy between Gulf I and Iraq isn’t an inappropriate one.
I was not the inventor of the preposterous slogan “What if the Most Influential Man in Human History Never Lived?” but I should have been its destroyer. I was however the “creator” of the suggestion that the non-historicity of Jesus is a testable hypothesis and can no longer be ignored and I still believe it. The second group also included, along with people who wanted to ventilate their “myth theories” in a serious forum, many who were interested in the formative power of myth in the creation of social groups and religious movements. The third group, mainly post-Christian and post religious skeptics wondered why in the twenty-first century anyone would worry about such an issue: whatever motives underlay the founding of TJP they were not (surely) as important as such pressing matters as getting God out of the Pledge and getting evolution back into the schools. For two years seriously concerned people wrote, emailed and phoned asking whether I had nothing better to do with my time.
In this space, I want briefly to address each of these positions directly—not to put straight a record that has not yet been written, but to alert both scholars and onlookers that we have everything to gain from confronting our critics as well as our theories. TJP was never construed as a sequel to the Jesus Seminar. (I have now written that sentence eight times in different places.) That has not prevented linkages in the press of the “Mars-is-to-Earth …”variety. It did not begin as a corrective or a replacement to the Jesus Seminar. I recently wrote that the Seminar asked some of the wrong questions in the wrong order, skated past others, and that to accept any critique of TJP methodology, as it evolves, from a seminar whose own methods were often seen as risible would be–risible. Hence without being dismissive of the Seminar Jeremiahs who’ve been there, done that, TJP cannot proceed without an evaluation of what the Seminar accomplished, failed to accomplish, and the reasons for its performance. While I take the term “scientific” as it is used in the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion both cum grano salis and in its most German sense as “scholarly,” it’s my impression that all of those so far associated with the project take “scholarship” very seriously indeed and want this to be, at the very least, a faith-free process. My colleague April Deconick has recently offered her own superb assessment of the Seminar in a blog-series called “The Jesus Seminar Jesus is Bankrupt” (http://forbiddengospels.blogspot.com/).
Critique is always a postmortem enterprise, and I believe the post-mortem has begun. From what has been said above, it follows that the other part of the category who see the JP as a rehash of the Seminar, the apologists, need to look again. There are certainly associates who hold to a “myth theory,” and there are others who hold to a non-super-naturalist or radical historicist position. There are textualists who believe that a careful and positivistic reading of canonical sources will provide more information than a “fuller” view of Christian origins, and others who believe that there is only a notional difference between what canonical and non-canonical sources have to offer. There are advocates of Matthew Black’s famous view that we need to get behind the text to an Aramaic context to understand what it going on in the translations (if that’s what they are) we possess, and others who think a Galilean folk hero has been inserted into a Greek myth. Obviously that degree of non-unanimity is discomfiting to those who think the New Testament is self-authenticating text without context, but it can hardly be seen as business as usual to invite a free and open discussion of these positions knowing that they cannot all be right.
As to the idea that TJP is “radically new,” let me be the first to say calm down. There has been nothing “radically”—that is, theological-foundation-shatteringly—new in this area since Strauss, and almost no one reads Strauss anymore. Even if they did he’s virtually impenetrable without reading the heroic Hegel first. There has been, to be sure, a great deal of jockeying to say something radically new, as though Jesus-research is no different from looking for a new isotope. At a certain point in contemporary New Testament scholarship the quest to be the puzzle-solver largely replaced the quest for the historical Jesus—another caution we can take from the Seminar. In a culture of celebrity, the slow pace of scholarship is painful; in a dozen interviews about TJP, the first question, almost without fail, is “What are you people trying to prove?” or “What’s the conclusion?” Presumably, if I had said that we had stumbled on impressive information that, prior to his ascension Jesus gave to James the instructions for making a camera, and that we now had photographic proof of the event, they would have hung up. But if I say that new papyrus discoveries, combined with some pretty impressive canonical clues, substantiate the claim that the followers of Jesus were a first century gay alliance, they become more interested. Reporters will call you back.
As a matter of fact, TJP needs to be new, but new also in eschewing sensationalism and exhibiting a certain lack of intellectual concupiscence as we trudge on. It is not enough to be “non-theological” since what is not theological is not eo ipso “right”; the Project also needs to be bold enough to say that some conclusions will be out of its reach, either for lack of evidence or lack of measurement. Again, the analogy is the sciences. There is nothing about the world of the twentieth century (save global warming) that is physically different from the world of Thomas Aquinas’s day. Our mode of describing the same things about that world has changed dramatically, however, and with it our understanding of how life evolved and human beings assumed their place on the planet. There is nothing in the nature of old evidence that cannot provide better understanding if the right methods of description are developed. TJP, if it is new, will be new to that extent.
And finally to the indifferent, the skeptics-with-portfolio (as distinct from the “detractors” in group one). The question “What does it matter?” is a fair question. It’s a sort of distaff to the view that Jesus matters as a self-evident proposition—matters to the life of faith, to the heart, or, as a moral teacher, to our conduct—not just the necessary presupposition of the movement that bears his title, but as the centerpiece to the religious life. The slogan “What if [he] had never lived” was somewhat bluffly and mistakenly directed at them, as though the sole legitimating reason for the Project is to disabuse religious men and women of their beliefs. Yet why would a Jesus who “did not exist” be of more value to unbelievers than a Jesus who existed in the “ordinary” way and died in an ordinary way? And why would religious folk be troubled by any conclusion reached by any group with such a siloistic objective? That Jesus matters in one sense is a statement of faith, therefore he cannot matter historically anymore than any other event can matter. It is not legitimate to read back into his original story, whatever that may have been and however it may have evolved, a significance that was three hundred years in the canonical and doctrinal making and millennia in the revising. It seems to me that women and men who have decided that most historical questions have no bearing on the meaning and purpose of life are dead right. That disjunct will have to be acknowledged and almost all scholars do acknowledge it today. But to say that “Jesus does not matter” is a different sort of statement and strikes me as immensely uncurious if not downright tiresome. Does it mean that the question itself is uninteresting because the asker has decided that religion, being bogus anyway, causes us to indulge in inherently silly pastimes? Or does it mean that the question lacks what Aristotle called “Magnitude”—greatness—as might be claimed, for example, for the question of the origins of the universe, or human life, or language? I have to say that people who have asked me the question seem shocked when I ask them why they are asking it. As if to say, “You seem like an intelligent man; why don’t you know the answer yourself?” But it seems to me that intellectual curiosity cuts in two ways, and that people need to be able to say why they are bored by something as much as why they are intrigued by it. As you may gather, from this little discursus, my sense is that the people in group three are displaying hostility rather than boredom. I remember telling my mother once that I was working on a research paper on the history of Christian marriage and had become fascinated with how relatively late the Church decided to ecclesize nuptial arrangements. Her immediate “Catholic” response was that such inquiries are better left to bachelors and maidens and she hoped that I wouldn’t publish the paper. That kind of hostility.
As to magnitude, I think it has to be said that the “big questions” are always etiological and hence always to a certain extent historical; where things come from matters, and without subscribing to historicist or originalist positions, I would find it odd to maintain that the origins of a religion—any religion—are not at least as deserving of investigation as the origins of the English language or the trans-Asian migrations of the early Americans. Some things are worth knowing not because they are matters of fact or de coeur, but because they have achieved magnitude by assent or influence. I would regard it as more informative to know why the “question” of Jesus is not interesting than to explain its interest. And so to “knowledge.”
TJP might begin where Descartes did in 1637 with the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason. Those who have kept their sophomore philosophy anthology on the shelf will remember that Descartes had professed “perfect confidence” in the ability of reason to achieve knowledge. His own “project” involved a preparation which he compared to the architectural destruction of a whole town. Towns, he recalled, had not developed “rationally” but in fits and starts creating a chaos of a landscape. This he compared to the state of knowledge in the seventeenth century, heavily dependent on everything that had come before, when nothing that had come before achieved the systematic standard he set for himself. “We must begin,” he wrote, by “deliberately renouncing all of the firmly held but questionable beliefs we have acquired through experience and education.” And as we know, while Descartes was not occupied with the question of scripture, having learned a thing or two from Galileo’s fate, he was immensely interested in the question of God.
No one who lives in a post-Enlightenment and postmodern world can believe that Descartes fulfilled even his own hubristic agenda, but he did provide a “method” that TJP might consider (and is considering) as it moves along. In his seminal Book III, the philosopher proposes that a proper investigation should always include four parts:
1. “To accept as true what is indubitable.” That is to say, ascertain to the extent possible what is factual, and what is based only on the prestige of authority. This requires a method within the method. No other field of investigation is so authority-laden as Jesus-research. Thus the question has to be, ‘what sort of authority is it and does it have bearing on the kind of investigation TJP wants to be?’ Do scholars in Christian origins regard anything beyond the mere fact of early Christian literature and aspects of its context as “indubitable”?
2. “Divide every question into manageable parts.” This seems self-evident, but it has not been the pattern of previous investigations. Neither the question “Did Jesus exist?” nor “What did he ‘really’ say?” was manageable. Formulating the sub-questions and prior questions is likely to be a painstaking business. If it is not done systematically and in a free and open debate, the Project may as well disband now.
3. “Begin with the simplest issues and ascend to the more complex.” It seems to me that this is the one step we have a grip on—the early reports came from communities. Their historicity cannot be doubted. That is a simple fact. These communities were called into existence by an event or sequence of events, the precise nature of which scholarship has spent over two centuries trying to reconstruct. I do not think those reconstructions, from the most radical to the most “traditional,” can escape our scrutiny. The road from simplicity to complexity cannot be shortcut by an appeal to the sanctity of consensus. The scientific nature of TJP is on trial precisely at this point; can we be as iconoclastic and skeptical as the Cartesian method requires us to be or do we look for safe havens in the competing correctnesses of our educational or political investments?
4. “Review the process consistently, so that the objectives of the process (the “argument”) is always in view.” The “argument,” it follows, should not be a conclusion, a favorite hypothesis, an agenda. What Virgil says of “Rumour” (Aeneid, IV, 173) can be applied here to “Reputation.” It flies aloft, moves with a strength of its own—threatens every collaboration, and it threatens this one. The ability to keep an objective in view derives from the successful execution of steps one through three. The Seminar evoked attrition because it lost sight of an objective and became a cloud of unknowing rather than a cloud of witnesses. It is important that TJP does not become a sounding board for private or exotic fantasies about Who Jesus Really Was
In short, TJP must not become an opportunity for its members to proselytize others to their point of view. Above all, Descartes understood the importance of deconstruction, landscape, and using precise measures for “what is known.” His naïve faith in certainty comes to us from a different world, with a different sense of “measurability” and expectation of success. But I submit the process still has on its side simplicity and intellectual candor, and that is what I personally would like TJP to display.
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Published: April 25, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: agnosticism : Christianity : historical jesus : Jesus Project : myth theory : New Testament : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
9 Responses to “Quodlibet: The Jesus Project”
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spin
April 26, 2009 at 5:01 am
RJH wrote:
“I was .. the “creator” of the suggestion that the non-historicity of Jesus is a testable hypothesis”.
I have no necessary problem with the notion of the “non-historicity of Jesus”, but isn’t it just as untestable as the historicity of Jesus — given the dearth of sources regarding Jesus certainly from the period?
spin
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Jay Raskin
April 26, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Good points. I think Rene would be proud.
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Diogenes the Cynic
April 27, 2009 at 2:13 pm
In addition to Spin’s question, I’d like to ask what constitutes a definition for “Jesus.”
I am agnostic on the historicity question, but I think we have to establish a set of criteria for what kind of historical figure could or could not be definitively called “Jesus.”
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steph
August 3, 2010 at 7:56 pm
I am sorry this promising project was halted. I agree absolutely with your claim that the non-historicity of Jesus is a testable hypothesis and can no longer be ignored and it took me a while to persuade someone else of this. The problem I think is that contemporary ‘serious’ scholarship does not take the myth theory seriously and relies on outdated scholarship which is perceived to have made the idea redundant. However, the non-historicity of Jesus hypothesis has equal rights with the historicity of Jesus hypothesis to be examined and tested. Another problem of course is that myth theories have more recently been supported by those outside scholarship who might be accused of not having clear enough grounding in basic learning of languages and culture of first century Judaism, and also a further a problem arises when religious presuppositions and anti religious antagonism get in the way…
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Seth Strong
October 14, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Connecting this post with the Atheist Attitudes post, I am beginning to suspect that your argument against atheism would be wielded much the same way against any label that claimed a gnostic position on the realm of beliefs and what that means for the rest of us. I think I’m reading a skepticism for any conclusion that ends up right where the hypothesis started because it isn’t truly an investigation. I might be inclined to view your opinion of a Christian or an atheist as two kinds of people who fail to view ethics and the purpose of religion in a scholarly fashion. Hence, the circular bit about the table being made of wood at the end of your Atheist Attitude post.
This comment is not designed to put words in your mouth. It should be noted that I do my best thinking when write down my opinions as I go.
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steph
October 14, 2010 at 6:13 pm
I don’t think you’re being very clear here Seth. Joe is critiquing methods and attitudes, but he is not rejecting hypotheses because they are not scholarly.
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Seth Strong
October 15, 2010 at 9:46 am
One thing I think I’m saying is that Joe is critiquing common examples of atheists. His arguments go “denial isn’t the end of the road nor does negating whatever advancements Christianity offered sound like a good strategy.” Because that leaves the sample believer feeling like they are going backwards. In his atheist attitudes, he targets New Atheists and their incomplete arguments. On the Christian side of the continuum of belief I have yet to see Joe accept that they have strong arguments either.
Then I come across this post because I figured I should back up and get a better background on Joe because as you probably know I jumped in on a kind of random article and I didn’t really know who he was in any sense.
On this post, he mentions Descartes’ rules for investigations and I got the sense that one way to generalize what Joe says is to observe that both sides of the Christian/atheist divide (in America we definitely see that division more often than other belief/atheist divides) is to say these folks (including me) start with a position and neatly end at the same position which means they didn’t use their own critical thinking skills.
I may be reading into this, but it’s not a bad point to suggest that if someone were to investigate the purpose of faith, the functions it serves, and how best to take faith to the twenty first century, you would expect the investigators to be surprised by something along the way. I would guess that from an atheist standpoint we could be expected to stumble across reasons why religion provides an advantage even now (which means there’s a reasonable decision being made by believers) and from a believer standpoint I expect they might be surprised to find out what the god of their testaments actually meant to the people at the time of the early Hebrews or the almost Christians or something.
The rule of thumb is that if you come out knowing what you knew going into the investigation, it wasn’t an investigation.
That’s what I think I was thinking yesterday.
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steph
October 15, 2010 at 10:55 am
I think it’s always a mistake to generalise and to ‘sum up’ one person’s point of view and it is definitely impossible to generalise Joe. Often groups are identified but this does not deny individuality. In fact his own thinking is a reflection of individuality. This blog I think reflects an evolving thinking process, and investigations are conducted continually outside it, as a scholar with a wealth of knowledge, learning and experience, in the real world. Do you really know what his ideas prior to investigations are identical to those at the end of investigations? I don’t think so. Joe’s arguments are complex and he defines them with clarity. It is unhelpful to attempt to boil them down and condense them into a box if this is what you’re doing. I’m still not sure what your point is.
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Seth Strong
October 15, 2010 at 11:30 am
Maybe they slipped me decaf today, I will accept the possibility that I’m not thinking clearly or not writing clearly or both.
I think Joe’s prescribing against those sorts of investigations. I do not intend to suggest he is a part of investigations.
Here, Joe makes a case for why historical Jesus matters despite all of the conventional wisdom that we might think has been covered millions of times. Joe acknowledges that an expression of disinterest is fine but that many of the complaints of secular and nonsecular folk of “not interested”. are actually a form of hostility. There, he closes with “What physics has shown is that a table is in full conformity with a square-topped four-legged entity used for eating, writing or similar function. Just as we expected before we made it. From wood.” which I interpret to be a denouncement of circular logic.
In both posts, Dawkins and friends in the other post and the detractors of TJP here offer a position that might be “Why would you bother with an issue that is already decided?” For Dawkins, the answer is that people might be Dim to fail to understand the obvious conclusion. And his argument might go “I suspect there is a God Delusion, therefor we have found a delusion about God”. The secular folks in this post would say “why bother learning about Jesus” which is them saying “I suspect there is nothing important about Jesus, therefor I’ve noticed nothing important about Jesus.” The Christians do the same thing with a probelief variation. “Why bother learning about Jesus” which is them saying “I suspect Jesus has already been thoroughly revealed and there he is right where I expected to find him in the New Testament and Josephus’s works.”
My hypothesis is that Joe suggests fairly frequently that there is a scientific method to be used on questions of belief as well as the historicity of beliefs and that method is not being employed in these cases. And when I google him, it becomes more likely to me that this is the underlying theme of the New Oxonian.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Looking for Islam in a Funny World
by rjosephhoffmann
A couple of years ago I made the offhanded remark in an article that the real problem with religious extremists is that they hate sport and jokes. Nothing has more agitated good-natured Muslims recently than the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore in March 2009, and the subsequent ostracism of Pakistani cricket at an international level.
If you want to fuel the fires of terrorism, take away footballs and cricket bats and ask sixteen year olds to find something else to do with their spare time.
The last sentence was an example of irony, the kind that is wasted on religious zealots, because they hate humour more than they hate sports. Both (they think) are Unislamic. They seem to rely on an unfamiliar hadith that proves the Prophet never played football and never smiled. Historically, those who have thought religion was a serious business have not thought that life was a funny business. Frowns and smiles, after all, are symbols of two approaches to the human predicament. Am I right in thinking that the standard image of the Muslim, at least the gun-toting sort, is symbolized increasingly by the disapproving frown.
Humour as a means of stress-relief is a structured activity.The joke is its highest form, and the self-deprecating joke, whose payoff depends on a religious or ethnic punchline (Yiddish, “zinger”) made at the teller’s expense, is the most sophisticated level of the highest form. Generally speaking, in the hierarchy of humour, protestants of the Calvinist persuasion aren’t good at it. Catholics are, Jews are better, and Muslims–well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
The first recorded instance of the religious joke (if Genesis 2-3 isn’t a long one) is the tall tale of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt–a story so good it’s told three times, the last with Isaac and Rachel in the starring roles. It’s a cruelty joke, but the punchline is uproarious: You can almost hear the set-up from three thousand years ago:
Did you hear the one about Abraham and Sarah in Egypt? No? Abraham and Sarah are going to Egypt. Abraham says to Sarah, let’s tell Pharaoh you’re my sister, not my wife. He’ll say, “What do you want for her,” I’ll say, ” What do think is a fair price?” When I’ve got the goods, I’ll tell him the truth, he’ll have to let you go, and we’ll be rich.” Sarah says, “But won’t he be angry?” “That’s the best part,” Abraham says. “He’ll be so busy dealing with the plagues God’s going to send that it won’t matter.” (Genesis 12.10-20, 20.1-18; 26.6-9).
It’s all there: the wandering Jew, the deceit and cunning, the greed, and the punchline. Never mind that Pharaoh doesn’t do anything wrong. These are chosen-people-times. Pharaoh is a Putz who can ess drek und shtarbn. In fact the whole story is funnier in Yiddish.
Three thousand years later, the evolved form is this: A rabbi is driving down the street when he crashes into a car driven by a priest. Both cars are wrecked but amazingly neither driver is hurt. After they crawl out of their cars, the rabbi sees the priest’s collar and says, “So you’re a priest. I’m a rabbi. Just look at our cars. There’s nothing left, but we are unhurt. This must be a sign from God. God must have meant that we should meet and be friends and live together in peace the rest of our days.” The priest says, “I agree with you completely. This must be a sign from God.” The rabbi continues, “And look at this. Here’s another miracle. My car is completely demolished but this bottle of wine didn’t break. Surely God wants us to drink this wine and celebrate our shared good fortune.” So he opens the bottle and hands it to the priest. The priest thanks him, takes a drink, and tries to give the bottle back. But the rabbi politely urges him to have another drink, so the priest takes another. Then he tries to give the bottle back again, but the rabbi shakes his head. The priest asks, “Aren’t you having any?” The rabbi says, “No, I’ll just wait for the police.”
The two-thousand -year history of mordant humour even reaches into the death camps–on both the Jewish and the Catholic side: A Catholic priest, a homosexual and a Jew are scheduled to be executed at Auschwitz–a privilege only given to distinguished “guests.” They are asked what they want to have for their last meal. The priest asks for filet mignon, eats it, and is taken away. The homosexual asks for a ham sandwich, eats it, and is taken away for execution. The Jew asks for a plate of strawberries. The guards tell him strawberries are out of season. “So, I’ll wait.”
In July 1944 Father Josef Möller was sentenced to hang by a Nazi court for “one of the most vile and dangerous attacks directed at our confidence in our Führer.” The priest had told two parishioners this joke. “A fatally wounded German soldier asked his chaplain to grant a final wish: ‘Place a picture of Hitler on one side of me, and a picture of Goering on the other side–that way I can die like Jesus–between two thieves.’” If Jews can laugh at what is arguably the bitterest moment of their religious history, why are Muslims not producing any good Taliban jokes, because only if people who take themselves murderously seriously can be shown to be as ridiculous as the rest of humanity is there any hope of accepting them into the human race. No, I don’t expect the Taliban to write jokes in the privacy of their caves. But I don’t see other Muslims answering the call to satire either.
If there were an official litany of comedians who are good at self-mockery and religious satire dozens of names would leap to mind. On the Jewish side, Groucho, Milton Berle, Alan King, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, John Stewart, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Steve Martin, Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld. An embarrassment of comic riches. With a little more struggle we can add the names of Catholic wits–Steve Allen, George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Kathleen Madigan, Dennis Miller, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Maher. But the subject was Muslim humor. Start with a joke which makes the rounds in Middle Eastern comedy clubs:
A man is taking a walk in Central park in New York. Suddenly he sees a little girl being attacked by a pit bull dog . He runs over and starts fighting with the dog. He succeeds in killing the dog and saving the girl’s life. A policeman who was watching the scene walks over and says: “You are a hero, tomorrow you can read it in all the newspapers: “Brave New Yorker saves the life of little girl” The man says: – “But I am not a New Yorker!” “Oh, then it will say in newspapers in the morning: ‘Brave American saves life of little girl’” – the policeman answers. “But I am not an American!” – says the man. “Oh, what are you then? ” The man says: – “I am Pakistani.” The next day the newspaper says: “Islamic extremist kills innocent American dog.”
First of all, this is not funny. It rates the same on the comedy scale as Borat’s attempt to learn how to be a stand-up comedian. Not. Second, the humour is not self-deprecating. It’s derisive, a sort of failed lampoon of western views of Muslims. Third, it’s violent. Never kill dogs in jokes if you can just throw a rock. The conclusion is: there is not much humor in the Muslim world, not much that would cause fits of hysterical laughter, and what there is is either clearly derivative or not very funny. Why is this so?
Start with the point that the Quran does not contain many stories. This is not a criticism but a fact: it arises out of an oral tradition in which hundreds of stories circulating widely and familiarly among Jews and Christians of the Middle East were also familiar to Muhammad and the brethren. There was no need to repeat them unless corrections to certain bits were being made, as sometimes happened. But the general habit in the Quran is that a simple mention or allusion is worth a thousand words. For example, the story of Noah (Nuh) in the Koran (surah 71) contains almost none of the details of the Genesis 6-8 account, but simply assumes that the story is known and accepted–torrents of rain and drowning unbelievers are mentioned–the serious stuff. But no mountains, boats, animal-pairs, doves, no postdiluvian drink-fest. The fun stuff. Not that the Arabs weren’t good story-tellers (you don’t survive the ways of the desert without entertainment), but it is not a significant feature of the Quranic tradition. Second, as I already said, religion is a serious business. Maybe if the Jews had spent less time laughing they would have listened to God more carefully. No wonder they drowned.
But anti-comedy goes deeper than that in Muslim culture. The eighth century caliph ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azeez warned, “Fear joking, for it is folly and generates grudges.” The basic criticism of jokes and joking is that it is foolish, leads to hurt feelings within the ummah, wastes time that could be devoted to serious study, and “hardens the heart against Allah.” Joking is not quite sin, but it is a misuse of leisure and makes the joker appear frivolous and (frankly) not too smart. Islam developed as a religion that depended on chains of authority. So it no surprise that there is a chain of authorities (beginning with Abd al-Azeez) regarding jokes. In a famous hadith, preserved by Fath al-Baari the Prophet is said to have said: “If you knew what I know, you would laugh little and weep much.” al-Barri explains:“What is meant by ‘knowing’ here has to do with the might of Allah and His vengeance upon those who disobey Him, and the terrors that occur at death, in the grave and on the Day of Resurrection.”
Don’t even smile. Judgment is no laughing matter, which is why in the Middle Ages, when Catholics still believed in it, there were very few jokes, and why in the twentieth century when many fundamentalist Christians still believe in it, there are very few jokes. The louder you laugh, the less likely you are to hear the summoning trumpet. The big joke is on the people who miss the wake up call. Plenty of time to laugh then.
The Quran was especially fond of “warners”–which is why the stories of Noah and Jonah (Surah 21 and 37) are both preserved. There is also, with due seriousness, a strong emphasis on destruction or judgment stories like Sodom and Gomorrah (Quran, surahs 57-77) and the killing of Korah (Numbers 16-21; Quran 76-82). Another hadith records the Prophet saying, “Do not laugh too much, for laughing too much deadens the heart.” (Saheeh al-Jaami’, 7312). In other words, laughter develops a certain callousness–and leads one to disrespect himself and to lose face due to the perception that a man is puerile and jejune (Umar ibn al-Khattaabith).
There have been loads of psychological studies showing that the morphology of humor is related to the morphology of cruelty, so there is wisdom in some of this. But there is little recognition that laughter also serves as a coping mechanism, locates the source of otherwise incomprehensible injustice not just in what “other people” think about Catholics, Jews and Muslims, but in the images they have projected of themselves, their customs, and their beliefs. The Muslim tradition of “satire” lampoons (as far as I can tell) other people’s images of Muslims. Creating images from within the tradition that can then be satirized–images that can be the targets of wordplay, self-ridicule and irony–that has not happened on a large scale.
Maybe some of the problem has to do with proportion. Islam is a very big religion (1627.61 million), getting bigger, and wants to be taken seriously. The momentum of history seems to be on the side of its rather grim view of human destiny and purpose. The religions that have developed a strong tradition of self-mockery are not flourishing. Judaism is a very small religion (ca. 14,000,000), growing smaller through attrition and assimilation, historically and culturally important far beyond the numbers of Jews alive today, or in any era. True, religious Jews take a very serious view of history as well (and something tells me do not joke very much), but in general Jews have told jokes because they have a different view of success and of destiny.
A perfectly respectable Islamic website states this: “Nowadays, although the ummah needs to increase the love between its individual members and to relieve itself of boredom, it has gone too far with regard to relaxation, laughter and jokes. This has become a habit which fills their gatherings and wastes their time, so their lives are wasted and their newspapers are filled with jokes and trivia.”
There may be a reason why Islam, along with some small sectors of Christianity and Judaism, still regard salvation as a humorless business. It’s a matter of how seriously you take God. The Seinfelds, Woody Allens and Bill Mahers of this world don’t. And in a presumptively secular world where even “religious” people don’t take heaven, hell and judgement as dinner table topics, they are fit matter for jokes. No amount of persuasion is going to convince a religious citizen of the post-religious world otherwise. Even comedians who consider themselves religious can’t let religion or their religious eccentricities off the hook.
In his gentler days, George Carlin used to ponder out loud that Catholic cheerleaders had to be smarter than other cheerleaders, “because they have to be able to spell Immaculate Conception High School.” Jackie Mason asks if people realize it was Jews who invented sushi. “Who else,” he asks, “would buy a restaurant with no kitchen?”
The failure of Islam to produce a comic tradition–there is pantomime and unbearably dumb slapstick in the Muslim world, most of it so broad it can’t have amused its creators–may seem a small thing. But I think that the anti-laughter culture of Islam is a significant thing. It bespeaks a mindset that leads to beheadings, public floggings, the stoning of “miscreants,” It comes from the same place that the torching of girls’ schools and video stores comes from. The high seriousness of Islamic doctrine is the public declaration of religious exceptionalism. Only rarely–among the medieval flagellates and the New England puritans– has laughter been outlawed and the sources of laughter been regarded as satanic. In both cases, history and contact with corrective forms of the Christian religion had a leavening effect on the morbid fear of fun. I do not hear that conversation happening in Islam, not yet. For it to happen, however, Muslims who want to see a healthy, this-worldly, socially engaged Islam need to do something, as Eric Idle intones in The Life of Brian as he’s being crucified: “Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
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Published: April 29, 2009
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Quodlibet: Good without God?
by rjosephhoffmann
adam1
Being good is not the same as being ethical, or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life.
Let me begin with two stories. The first comes from Voltaire, who is reported to have said to his mistress, Marguerite, “Whatever you do, don’t tell the servants there is no God or they’ll steal the silver.”
Another, told by the writer Diderot in the 18th century, is about the journey of Catholic missionaries to Tahiti–a dialogue between a chief named Orou and a priest, who tries to explain the concept of sin.
Orou says that many of the things Europeans find sinful are sources of pride in his island.
He doesn’t understand the idea of adultery, since in his culture generosity and sharing are virtues. Marriage to a single man or woman is unnatural and selfish. And surely there can be nothing wrong with being naked and enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake—otherwise, why do our bodies exist. The horrified priest delivers a long sermon on Christian beliefs, and ends by saying,
“And now that I have explained the laws of our religion, you must do everything to please God and to avoid the pains of hell.”
Orou says, “You mean, when I was ignorant of these commandments, I was innocent, but now that I know them, I am a guilty sinner who might go to hell.”
“Exactly,” the priest says.
“Then why did you tell me?” says Orou.
***
These stories indicate a couple of things about the relationship between religion and morality—or more precisely, the belief that God is the source of morality. The first story suggests that belief in God is “dissuasive.” By that I mean, religion is seen as a way of preventing certain kinds of actions that we would do if we believed there was no God. The kind of God religious people normally think of in this case is the Old Testament God, or the God who gives rules and expects them to be obeyed.
Not all religious people believe these rules were given by God to Moses or Muhammad directly, but most would agree that it’s a good idea, in general, not to steal, commit adultery, hate your neighbor (or envy his possessions obsessively), or kill other people. For at least a thousand years busy theologians have tried to put these essentially negative rules into more positive form: for example, by saying that people should act out of love for each other, or love of God, and not out of fear. Most Christians would say this is the essential difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus in the New. But they are only partly right. Both books of the Bible and all of the Qur’an emphasize fear of God, judgment, and the rewards and punishments of the hereafter as goads to repentance, leading a better life, giving up your rotten ways. Even the books of the Bible that are tainted with Greek thought—like the Book of Proverbs–emphasize that “the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So it’s mischievous to say that fear and trembling aren’t used for moral leverage throughout the Bible.
Modern Christians, Jews, and the Muslims who focus on God’s compassion and mercy, are required to ignore a whole cartload of passages where God reminds people, like any ancient father (and not a few modern mothers), that his patience is wearing thin. Jeremiah 5:22 (NIV) “’Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” The answer is a deafening: “Yes.” Remember the flood? Remember the first born sons of the Egyptians? Remember the plagues and famines? Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? You love this God because you ignore his commandments at your peril. He has chosen you; you have not chosen him, and he can withdraw his favor whenever he wants. (As Jackie Mason used to say, you look at Israel and you have to wonder if “maybe the Samoans aren’t the chosen people”).
The theme of the oldest books of the Bible is very plain: God “loves” (more precisely, he watches out for) the ones who keep his commandments and punishes those who don’t. — A simple message that theology has had two thousand years to massage. In fact, the New Testament belongs to the history of that massaging process. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the first spin doctors–re-writing the script, transforming Yahweh into a compassionate conservative. But let’s be clear that the hero of the story is a typical Near Eastern tyrant: powerful, vengeful, jealous by his own admission, proprietary (“His is the world and all that dwells within”), and though slow to anger, fearsome when his wrath is provoked, watchful to point of being sleep- deprived (Ps 121.4). There is no unconditional love here. God is not a model for progressive parenting; he’s not interested in the self-esteem of his people, has not read Dr Wayne Dyer, and will not break down weeping on Oprah! for being compulsive. The message of God the Father is, “Do this or else.”
A larger question posed by Voltaire’s little story is whether the motivation of fear is ever ethical. If you do something because there is a threat of pain and suffering if you don’t, or if you hold off doing something you would really like to do—for the same reason—are you being moral?
What Voltaire is really saying—as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud would later say—is that religion is useful for keeping certain kinds of people in line. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- century European society could be neatly divided into those who knew better and those who served the ones who did. Marx went so far as to suggest that the social deference the moneyed classes paid to religion was simply intended to convince the lower classes that religion is true—in fact, that’s exactly what Voltaire is saying: Religion is a mechanism used by the knowledgeable to keep the unknowledgeable in their place. It has social advantages—Marx’s Jewish father conveniently “converted” from Judaism to the Prussian State Church in order to go on working as a lawyer. And we all know the younger Marx’s most famous verdict on the topic: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”
What’s missing from this critique, of course, is the question of whether a “religious act” can ever be a “moral act.” Clearly, belief in God (or a specific kind of God) provides behavioral incentives. As a system of control based on fear, religion keeps people from “being bad,” or at least doing things considered bad by the controller. But it does this inefficiently. Clearly it offers people an explanation for why they behave in certain ways, ranging from the “Bible tells me so” to “Papa dixit”—the pope says so. As a means of consolation, it teaches people to deal with the fear and insecurity created by oppression. But it does this at the expense of self-fulfillment, wholeness. It is the security of an abusive relationship, where comfort consists in being able to predict and manipulate eruptions of violence. In fact, to look back to the sacrificial origins of religion, this was precisely its social role. Even the story of the crucifixion, which many people believe is all about love and forgiveness, is the story of a God so angry at the sinful imperfections of humanity that he transfers his violence to his only son, who becomes the redemptive victim—the buy-back price—for sins he didn’t commit.
Let’s call this religious approach to behavior “Being Good.” Being good is not the same as being ethical or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life. It’s a mother wagging an imperative finger at a three year old and saying “You’d better be good.” It always involves threat and reward. Two generations ago, the image would have included threats of belts or woodsheds spankings, going to bed without dinner. I guess, unfortunately, in some places it still does. But you don’t get ethics out of this. You get obedience and submission.
***
What about Diderot’s story about the missionary and the tribal chief? If the story about Voltaire suggests that religion is dissuasive and coercive, Diderot’s suggests another reason why religion doesn’t sit well with ethics: Religion is prescriptive, and like politics, it’s local. In 2000 years of massaging the message, it has changed because we have changed our minds. Most of the biblical rules about property, goods and chattels, adultery and incest were typical throughout the Middle East; in fact, as Freud recognized, the taboos against murder and incest are the earliest form of laws in some tribal societies. But the books we call the basis of the “Judaeo-Christian -ethic” weren’t written by tribes—tribes don’t write. And the body of laws we call the Ten Commandments contain lots of rules that have been quietly put in trunks and sent to the attic.
For example, we all applaud the wisdom of the commandment that says, “Honor your father and your mother.” It has a nice ring, especially during school vacations. But Deuteronomy 21.20 says that disobedient sons should be stoned in front of the elders at the gates of the city. And Exodus 21.17 says that anyone who insults his mother and father shall be put to death. As for adultery, which belongs to ancient property law in the Jewish system, the punishment is stoning—normally only for the woman (Deut. 22.21). In Deut. 22.28, the penalty for raping an unbetrothed virgin is a fine of 50 shekels–plus taking her on as a wife. There are laws protecting the rights of the firstborn sons of unloved wives when a man has several wives (Deut. 21.15) and even laws about how long a Jewish warrior must wait (one month) before he can have intercourse with a woman he has captured in battle (21.10). According to Leviticus 19.23, raping another man’s female slave is punishable by making an offering to the priest, who is required to forgive him. There are laws covering how long you can keep a Hebrew male-slave—6 years—but if you sell your daughter as a slave to another man she cannot be freed, unless after the master has had sex with her he finds her “unpleasing”—in which case she can be put up for sale (ransom) (Exodus 21. 7ff.). On it goes—throughout the books of the Torah—the Law.
The sheer ferocity of the God who gives, or rather shouts these commandments to his chosen people is distant from our time. The voice is unfamiliar: Failure to do what he says results in terror: In fact, that’s the very word he uses: “I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease, recurring fever, plagues that will blind you….those that hate you will hound you until there is no place to run; I will multiply your calamities seven times more than your sins deserve. … I will send wild beasts among you and they will tear your children from you. … If you defy me , I will scourge you seven times over. …I will send pestilence …cut short your daily bread, until ten women can bake your bread in a single oven. … I will punish you seven times over. … Instead of meat, you shall eat your sons and your daughters.” Don’t take my word for it: read Leviticus 26. It has literary flair. The God of the Old Testament is a three dimensional figure—far bigger than Zeus and twice as malignant. (Perhaps Zeus was able to give freer rein to his sexual appetites, whereas Yahweh limits himself to one Galilean virgin?) And look though you may, you will not find these laws “repealed” in later books, at least not in the way modern laws can be amended and repealed. But it’s absolutely certain that anyone who tried to obey these laws in twentieth century Europe or America would be slapped into jail, and the defense “The Bible told me so” would not be an adequate defense. –Try posting these commandments above the blackboard in your neighborhood school.
One way of charting the so-called progress of western civilization is to trace how human values eventually triumph over the ferocity of religious law. The kind of morality that Diderot’s priest represents, like the morality of the Bible, and even the reductionist versions of biblical and Quranic teaching that modern religious denominations espouse, is not ethics. It is not ethics because ethics can’t be grounded in what I’m going to call “irrelative prescriptive dissuasion.” If you say to me, “Well: no one believes these things any more,” then I say “Good for us for not believing. Then time to stop letting the Bible be the source of moral authority when the conduct of its hero is not up to our standards of civil behavior.” If you say, “There is great wisdom and poetry in scripture,” then I say “Please then, let’s treat it like other great books that express ideas, customs, and values that have no authority over how we lead our lives.” I have no quarrel with those who want to appreciate the Bible as a product of its own time and culture—with all the conditions that attach to appreciation of that kind. My quarrel is with people who want to make it a document for our time and culture.
And I suppose my quarrel extends to people who consider themselves experts, when what they are expert in is reading around, into, or past the text. Liberal theologians are immensely gifted at reinventing the God of the Bible in the light of modern social concerns. But the project is a literary–not an ethical one. At another extreme, which is really a false opposite, are the fundamentalists who claim to defend the literal truth of the Bible while ignoring two-thirds of the text and focusing on the “literal” truth of bits and pieces.
Can the Bible make you good? If you accept the framework, beginning with Adam and Eve, and the creation of a race doomed to be perpetually three years-old and scolded into obedience, I suppose it can.
Reduced to basic form, the temptation in the Garden of Eden is a story about a cookie jar and a sly, accusing mother. But it takes more than avoiding mousetraps for a choice to be moral or an action to be ethical. A moral act is one in which you can entertain doubt freely, where a person confronts human choices and human consequences, personal and social.
To be fair: the Bible and its cousins are important records of those human choices and their social consequences, coming from an age which is no longer relevant to us. To make it a book for our time is an abuse of the book and a misunderstanding of its importance. More depressingly for some, perhaps, there will probably be no book to replace it. Not even one by a secular humanist. But there will be wisdom, and reason and choice-making, and that will make us humanly better, if not exactly good.
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Published: April 30, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Bible : ethics : morality : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secular ethics ..
2 Responses to “Quodlibet: Good without God?”
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steph
August 3, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Like alot!!
x
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Seth Strong
October 13, 2010 at 3:41 pm
I’m commenting here in part as an effort to mark my efforts to review these posts. Also, I agree with this position.
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The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodlibet
by rjosephhoffmann
And he asjesus_photoked them, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8.28)
For the last three years I have been associated—perhaps identified is a better word—with something called the Jesus Project. Enough has already been said and written about that for me (mercifully) to be able to avoid another “introduction” to its aims and objectives.
This essay therefore is about something else. It is about why we should care about the historical Jesus
My guess is that there are just as many people who sort of believe in God as there are people who sort of believe in Jesus. But the two beliefs are different. The existence of God can be argued theologically or philosophically. If theologically (using archaic language) the proofs are usually called “demonstrations” and include some of the classical arguments of the theistic tradition—such as Anselm’s and Thomas Aquinas’s five ways. It is quite convenient for philosophers to have these arguments because they don’t have to go about inventing their own. They can simply take aim at these rather good ones and fire away, and top it all off with a heavy syrup of philosophical naturalism. If that last sentence sounds mildly sardonic it is because I think we are living in a post-naturalistic world and that philosophers had better find another island to swim to. Theologians at least believe they have someone to save them.
“Believing” in Jesus can be argued historically or theologically, but not philosophically. Historically, the existence of Jesus to be indubitable would need to be demonstrated in the same way the existence of any other human being can be shown. The standard of proof is fairly high, making allowance for the age in which the person lived or is thought to have lived. Normally we would expect records, reports, artifacts (bones are best), or the writings of people who mention Jesus in their reports of other events. For example, a chronicle of the Roman administration of Pontius Pilate in Palestine with a mention of the crucifixion of an outlaw named Jesus of Nazareth would be very helpful. But we do not possess such a record. Instead, we possess reports written by members of a religious group that had very specific and interested reasons for retelling his story. And the way in which it is told differs so markedly from the sorts of histories the Romans were writing in the second and third century that scholars have acknowledged for a long time the “problem” of deriving the historical Jesus from the gospels—and even more the problem of deriving his existence from the letters of Paul or any other New Testament writings.
Having said this, I don’t mean to suggest that the gospels are made up, that they are like Greek myths, though bits are, or that they possess no historical value. The Iliad is Greek myth, mainly made up, perhaps seven hundred years older than the earliest gospel, and yet seems to point (however obscurely) to actual events that transpired six centuries before Homer (?) immortalized them. Herodotus, who lived more than five centuries before the gospels, is known to us primarily as a purveyor of history, but freely uses mythology and the supernatural without totally discrediting the stories he has to tell.
Why then, it can plausibly be asked, can we not assume the gospels point to events that transpired within (say) a generation of their tellers’ lifetimes? It would be more unusual not to find the mythical and supernatural as part of their fabric than to find precisely the kind of documents we possess—especially coming from a class of writers who were not historians or literary craftsmen.
Belief in the existence of Jesus can also be argued theologically, but I am not good at it. Paul does it this way by quoting (we assume) a hymn in Philippians 2.5-11. It locates Jesus in a cosmic time-frame that might be Gnostic except for the emphasis on his death and exaltation. The Eucharistic narratives do it this way as well, by making Jesus the centerpiece in an unfolding drama of betrayal and martyrdom. The crucifixion story is as much a theological memoir as a historical one—or rather a peculiar blending of two interests, a kind of intersection between historical expectation and super-historical completion. The earliest church fathers, especially Ignatius of Antioch, saw Jesus not just as the fulfillment of prophecy but as the way in which prophecy acquires its meaning through the Church. The Quran also depends on the existence of Jesus, but rejects certain elements of the Christian story in favor of Islamic interpretation. Still, without the gospel its own claims are fatally jeopardised. The increasingly elaborate theological framing of Jesus may distract from the fading image on the canvas, but it is the enthusiasm for ever-more ingenious frames that kept the historical figure from disappearing entirely.
These theological arguments are better described as constructions of the “reality” or necessity of the human Jesus, and lead to various controversies that historians have left it to the theologians to sort through. In effect this has created a kind of scholarly apartheid in which secular historians have treated the theological debates of the fourth and fifth century as the weird preoccupations of a bygone era, while (except among scholars who represent Anglican and Roman Catholic orthodoxy) many contemporary theologians regard the debates in just the same way.
Yet these debates irreversibly coloured the picture of the historical Jesus and created in his place the Byzantine cosmocrator who ruled the aeons. The one-personed, two-natured Christ, the hypostatic union (the doctrine that Jesus is both God and Man without confusion or separation of natures) would probably count as myth if it had more of a story line. But at all events the fully divine and human Jesus had become a theological necessity before the end of the second century. The historical presupposition was buried in this controversy, if it had ever existed independently.
Given the “two ways” of approaching the question of the historical Jesus, it may seem a bit strange that the theological comes first. But there is simply no evidence that the early Christians were concerned about “whether” Jesus had really lived and died. They became Christians because of the gospel, and the gospels were preached, not read—except by very few. If there is one cold, hard, unavoidable historical datum that virtually everyone who studies the New Testament can agree on, it is that the early Christian community existed and came into existence because of the gospels.
It may well be true that the beliefs of these communities were as varied as coloured buttons for more than a century. But the Jesus they “proclaimed” (a good first century verb) was part of a story, not a doctrine—a story they believed to be true. You can’t go very far into the second century without seeing the story becoming clouded with doctrine and definition, however.
The church fathers and the Gnostics were really two sides of the same obscurantist process: the Gnostics needed a Jesus whose humanity was transparent or unreal, the church fathers needed a Jesus whose humanity was real but disposable. It is not surprising that the disposable won out over the unreal.
The resurrection stories, as they lengthened, seemed to suggest that a kind of transformation took place in the hiatus between death and being raised from the dead. In other words, the historical (human) Jesus who rose from the dead won out over the Gnostic Jesus who does not, not because the gnostic story is fabulous but because the familiar story was human—grounded in history. Paul seems to have caught on to the market value of this fact very early (I Corinthians 15.4-8)
The historical Jesus is not important in the same way that a Roman emperor’s existence is important –that is, as a simple causa prius to his being declared divine, or (for example) as a way of averaging human and divine qualities, as the ancient world was fond of doing with demigods and heroes. We tend to forget that men of the fourth century, confronted with defining the humanity of Jesus, still had the images and stories of Achilles, Dionysus and Heracles in view. It was not a thoroughly Christian world, but a world still infused with the seductive images of demigods and their courtesans—the same world whose attractions Clement had anguished over a hundred years before Nicaea. Saving the saviour from that kind of emulsion prompted some of the more intricate doctrines of the early period.
The preservation of the humanity of Jesus came at the expense of his historicity. In making sure he would not be confused with Caesar, Apollo or Mithras, they focused on the way in which he was God and how God became man. At the end of the makeover, however, no first century Jew remained to be seen. Even a spirit-struck Pentecostal preacher who has only the dimmest idea of what Chalcedon was all about calls on a “Jesus” who was born there—a man-god who can walk on water, heal the blind and save from sin.
The historical Jesus is important because he is a presupposition for the faith that millions of people have placed in non-historical consequences, and not only Christians. His status if primarily significant to Christians is also important, in different ways, to Jews, Muslims, and even unbelievers.
I do not know whether the recovery of a Jesus after two thousand years of theological repair is possible. John Henry Newman died in 1890. He was buried in a wooden coffin in a damp site just outside Birmingham. To the disappointment of many, when he was exhumed as part of the normal process for canonization in October 2008, no human remains were to be found—only artifacts of wood, brass and cloth. We are considerably better off of course, in the case of Newman. The grave site was known, we have letters, diaries, treatises, biographies, the memories of friends and relatives—even his own instructions for burial. But that is because he was a man living in an age of documentation, and moreover a man of some prominence and means. We have photographs, and well into the twentieth century the recollections of people who had known him or heard him preach.
Everything we think we know historically about Jesus points in a more depressing direction: a man of no prominence, living in a widely illiterate age in a backward province, even by Roman standards, with few friends who could have told his story. Yet the story is oddly similar—a remembrance of a life, wisdom, preaching, struggle, and death. One of the fathers of the Birmingham oratory on being told that Newman was not to be found in his grave replied calmly, “It’s enough that he was here.” In the long run, that may be all that can be said about the historical Jesus.
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Published: May 1, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Christian Origins : gospels : historical jesus : Jesus : Jesus Project : myth theory : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
16 Responses to “The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodlibet”
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Ed Jones
May 9, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Having just received notice from Dr. Hoffmann that he has yet not received my letter.in which he graciously included the link to this fine essay, without further word, I repeat the lettr for what it may be worth.
Dr. R. Joseph Hoffmann, March 24, 2009
Re: The Jesus Project
James M. Robinson, named senior consultant for TJP, wrote in a recent article in CSER Review: “The Jesus Project is not to launch into endless, but ultimately unconvincing arguments that Jesus never lived, but to better understand that oldest layer of tradition and how it can be made a more influential force in our siociety”. Given the level of participation in TJP, one must conclude that this implies responsible recogition of his special status as a fellow crtical scholar and to thus accept his conviction as “a value in non-parochial religion scholarship”.
The conviction that Jesuss in fact lived forces a historical paraphrse of a sentenc from the last paragraph of your first article: “Itroducing the Jesus Project”. The sentence reds: “- – this project is aiming at a probable reconstruction of the events that explain the beginning of Christianity – a man named Jesus from the province of Galilee whose life served as the basis for the beginning of a movement of events that led to the Jesus story being propagated throughout the Mediterranean”.
The paraphrase: “- the project is aiminmg at a historical reconstruction of the events that explain the beginning of two movements both purporting to ecxplain the significance of a man named Jesus. Chronologically the first, a man named Jessus from the province of Galilee whose lif, defined by his words, served as the basis for the beginning of the Jesus Movement, the other movement which soon followed, a sequence of events that led to the man Jesus becoming transformed into “agod become man” the Christ Movement story being propagated throughout the Mediterranean”.
Then meaningful period of origins for these two movements is 30-65 C.E., before the Gospels and before Christianity. The term “Christian” was first applied to the Pauline Christ Movement just before 70 CE when it became the “winner” in the struggle for dominance. As winner it could label the Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Robinson wrote: “Fortunately, the Jesus Movement Sayings Gospel Q did not fade from history along with the community whose Gospel it was. Rather, it survived in the gentile church’s Gospel of Matthew and Luke”. The term”Christian” was never applied to the Jesus Movement. Thus “Christian” Origins is a misnomer, properly origins is about the Origins of the Significance of the man Jesus. The Jesus Movement remained a sect of Judaism while the domain of the Christ Movement was Gentile. The Christ Movement became orthodox Christianity. Both movements are documented in Scriptural sources, the source for the Jesus Movement is lcated in “the oldest layer of the tradition”, the source of the Christ Movement is the writings of the N.T.. Of the two, only the Jesus Movement has claim to apostolic witness to the historical Jesus.
I take Schubert M. Ogden to be the real prophet of the Quest for the HJ. He wrote using the term “christian” in its common convenient use: “We now know that none of the O.T. writings is prophetic witness to Christ in the sense in which the early church claimed them to be, but also none of the writings of the N.T. is apostolic witness to Jesus as the early church itself understood apostolicity. The sufficient evidence of this point in the case of the N.T. writings (without the tortuous details of what the N.T. does contain) is that all of them have been shown to depend on sources, written or oral, earlier than themselves, and hence not to be the original and originating witness that the early church mistook them to be in judging them to be apostolic. – - all appropriate ‘Christian’ faith and witness are and must be apostolic, one believes and bears witness with the apostoles, solely on the basis of their prior faith and witness – - the witness of the apostoles is still rightly taken to be the real ‘Christian’ norm, even if we today have to locate this norm not in the writings of the N.T. but in the earliest stratum of the ‘Christian’ witness (“the oldest layer of tradition”) accessible to us, – - the first step one must take in using (Scripture) as a theological authority is historical, rather than hermeneutical. Specifically,that is the step of reconstructing the history of tradition, of which the first three Gospels are the dcumentation, so as thereby to identify the oldest stratum of tradition, which is the real ‘Christian’ canon. The procedures required to execute it are identical with those long since worked out in the quest of the historical Jesus – - with the single,if crucial, difference that in this case (given our present historical methods and knowledge) there is no neeed to make any dubious inferences about Jesus himself, once the earliest stratum of ‘Chrstian’ witness has been reconstructed. Consequently, one may be quite confident of finding what we today can rightly take to be the apostolic witess and hence the proper canon for judging the appropriateness of all ‘Christian’ witness and theology.
Hans Dietr Betz, the expert on this “oldest layer of tradition”, identifies it to be the Sermon on the Mpunt (Matt.5:3-7:27, the SM). Robinson wrote:”The first and most important collection of Jesus’ sayings in Q grew to become the Sermon on the Mount”. Betz writes on the required level of involement before a scholar may come to recognize the special significance of the SM: “- – a task to which specialized knowledge in the areas of philology, form and redaction criticism, literary crticism, history of religions, and New Testament theology necessarily applies”. These are areas of knowledge necessarily restricted to the discipline of the critical hstorical theologian, as well as areas essential for establishing the SM as “a value in non-parochial religion scholarship”.
I make note of a statement from your “Memorandum to Myself” which reads in part: “- – what was happening at Claremont – - seemed robust and real -”, during your PhD, 1976-1980. I believe that for much of this time Robinson and Betz were “what was happening at Claremont” which must say that as a fellow scholar you are knowledgable of Betz’s essays and commentary of the SM and his important hypothesis that the Sm was a pre-Matthean source composed by a redactor, freeing the SM from the limitations and distortions of its Matthean context. Betz writes: “This source presents us with an early form (deriving from the Jesus Movement) of the ‘;Christian’ faith as a whole, which had direct links to the teaching of the historical Jesus and thus constitutes an alternative to Gentile Christiaity as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels, as well as later writings of the New Tstament. – -If the SM represents a response to the teaching of Jesus critical of that of Gentile Christianity, then it serves unmistakably to underline the well known fact, frequently forgotten today, of how little we know of Jesus and his teaching. The reseon for our lack of knowledge are of a hermeneutical sort and cannot be overcome by anexcess of good will (apologetics). The Genile-Christian authors of the Gosels tranmitted to us only that part of the teaching of Jesus that they themselves understod, they handed on only that which they were able to translate into the thought categories of Gentile Christianity, and which they judged worthy of transmission. By contrast, the SM stands nearer to the Jewish thought of Jesus, and manifests its characteristic affinty and distance over against later Christianity”.
A brief reconstruction of the history of the two movements:
The Jesus Movement: After the crucifixion the disciples fled to their native Galilee. Emboldened by Perer’s and others aberration experiences the key disciples Peter, James and John, soon there after, returned to Jerusalem to again take up the message of Jesus. Betz writes: “A truly disturbing problem arises for the community only when they discover that there are other ‘Christians’ who have drawn very different conclusions from the teachings of Jesus (the Gentile Pauline Christ Communities). It is not only their task to maintain and defend the teachings of Jesus, but to establish, first of all, what Jesus taught and desired of others and what he did not teach and desire. The strange fact that such conflicting interpretations of the teaching of Jesus could arise so soon constituted the profound dilemma of the SM in relation to the historical Jesus”. Robinson writes: “Perhaps it was the Roman war in the 60′s, which devastated Galilee before reaching Jerusalem that finally forced the remnants of the Q community to join the refuges fleeing norh to Antioch. Here facing the relentless pressue of the more successful Gentile church, the Jesus Movement gave way to the Gentile church with its Gospel of Mark. – - It is Betz who desreves credit for calling our attention o the unavoidable fact that the SM is something special, not only as the classic statement of Jesus’s teaching, but also the way it came to be – - when one turns to Matthew, the contacts with the Sayings Gospel Q are so striking that one has to realize that the Gospel of Matthew was written in a congregtion that itself had been part of the Sayings Gospel’s movement”.
The Christ Movment: Talk pof Jesus rising frmthe dead resonaed with a group of hellenisr Jews with their traition of rising and dying heore or gods, together with the Jewish animal sacrificial system,to suggest that Jesus’ death and resurrectionwas a proper sacrifice fro mankind’s sins which abrogated the Torah. For Temple autjhorities this constituted an act of treason. The Acts story of the stning of Sthephen, a Hellenist Jew, seems to document a put-down by Temple authorities, driving the group out of Palestine, they ended up i Damacus. Paul is named as a paricipant, holding the garments of those csting the stones. It was this Hellenist group that Paul was pursuing as persecutor when he had his “vision experience on the rad to Damascus. It was from this roup that Paul received his gospel. Only later is there evidenc that Paulwas aware of or concerned with the Jerusalem Jesus Movement. Paul was never a member of the Jesus Movement nor did he proclaim or know Jesus’ message. Only after develoments resulting from challenges by missionariesfrom the Jesusalem Jesus Movement, which threatened the very existence of his Gentile mission ddoes Paul turn to the Jesusalem disciples seeking their acknowledgment of his Christ myth gospel, for only the Jesus Movement had claim to apostolic witness.During the apostolic period the Jesus Movement was dminant. By 70 CE the Gentile chjurches became doinant, now identified asd Gentile Christianity which became orthodox Christianity.Throughout al of its twists and turns Christianity’s basic tenet remained Christ’s salvific death and resurrection (the passion kerygma).
More later. Ed Jones
Reply
Ed Jones
May 9, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Ed Jones said,
The above Comment was a lettr mailed to Joe Hoffmann. Whoever or whatever produced the statement: “Your Comment awaits moderation “, I ask that you await my reply from Joe Hoffmann. I am emailing him now seeking his help.
I have no clue as to what is meant.
Reply
cEd Jones
May 20, 2009 at 11:55 am
I will much appreciate removal the two five line comments, 9 May 2009 at 9pm
Many Thanks,
Ed Jones
Ed Jones
September 26, 2009 at 9:22 pm
The Quotes are from:
Essays on the Sermon on the Mount and the on-line articles”
Faith aand Freedom by Schubert M. Ogden and
The Real Jesus of the “Q” Sayings Gospel.
Reply
Ed Jones
October 6, 2009 at 5:32 pm
The Real Jesus of the “Q” Sayings Gospel by James M. Robinson
Ed Jones
July 25, 2010 at 7:27 pm
This is not to suggest that the Gospels may be disregaded. They do contain important data about the HJ. The issue is with which Scriptural source one one begins his/her understanding. Dom Crossan uses an idiom, but in another context, which seems to well serve this question of where to begin one’s search: “If you begin with Paul you will understand Jesus incorectly;. If you begin with Jesus you will understand Paul differently.
The real Jesus requires that one begins with the Jesus kerygma the earliest stratum of the jesus tradition, specifically The Sermon on the Mount. The Gospels are interpreted from this earliest source.
Reply
Ed Jones
May 9, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Ed Jones said:
Please whoever or whatever produced the statement: “Your Comment is awaiting moderation” Give me time to email Joe Hoffmann to seek is help. This was a letter to him. At age 90 and not computer savy I have no clue what brought this on. I think the letter is important for TJP. It took 4 hours of hard work. I ask that it be maintained until I can get word from Joe. Thanks
Reply
cEd Jones
May 13, 2009 at 4:09 pm
This is to complete my Comment which “is now uo”:
My comcern for TJP might be expressed in Lao-tzu’s famous definition of the baffling paradox surrounding the term Ultimate Concern: “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know”. It is apparent that a number of the real authoritative critical historical scholars who “know” will not become members of TJP nor will they speak out. Perhaps from some position like that expressed by Betz in a note to me stating his reasons for not joining the Jesus Seminar, saying in effect: “My position has been made clear in my works which are public to anyone concerned to know”. Might not Jesus, with his idiom the Kingdom of God, have been about Ultimate Concern – the ultimate solution to the human condition, hence our problem with Ultmate Concern (God-man relationship – mysticism) may yet be the basic cause of our difficulty with knowing who Jesus was or even if he was.
An after word: As teacher, Jesus was faced with an enormous problem. He wanted to proclaim the ever-present reality of something not readily recognized (“few are they who find it”) and for which there was no familiar language with which it could directly be described. Thus he employed a different kind of language, parable, to speak of the Kingdom of God indirectly. Only words, not deeds, could describe this way of being in the world. Hence Jesus may have been identified with no objective thing (deed) to which secular history might have recognized as beeing worthy of rememberance.
Sincerely,
Reply
cEd Jones
May 16, 2009 at 2:04 am
Ed Jones said,
A related Comment to the letter to Joe Hoffmann.
A quote from the article “Beginning from Jerusalem – -”, Re-examining Canon and Consensus by Merrill P. Miller. (Article dated 1995 before Betz’s Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, 1997).
“In this paper I have argued that modern scholarship has followed the canonical lead on unitary origins but ignored any actual political implications of the canonical account of the execution of Jesus and the caonical account of the origins and identity of the Jerusalem church. Surprisingly, this holds true especially for those who wish to take the political context of Christian origins most seriously into consideration. In the remainder of this paper, I want to raise as matters for an agenda, several other reasons why the scholarly consensus on the unitary origins of Christianity needs to be re-examined.
First, it leaves out of consideration studies that are important because they do not support and may prove to be incompatable with the predominant paradigm of Christian origins, Resent studies on the genre and literary history of Q, on approcryphal Gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas, and the pre-Markan gospel traditions, have shown that there were early Jesus traditions that cannot be accomodated within the Easter kerygma and which do not evidence an apocalyptic context or persuasion. However, this is only a minimal statement of the significance of this recent work. An alternative picture of Christian origins has already been argued on the basis of it, namely,that Christian communitiees were at first formed in the name of Jesus as the founder-teacher. The teacher-sage was invested with the authority of Wisdom’s envoy to enhance the significance of the teaching as various Jesus communities confronted challenges and sought a place in the social landscape of Galilee and southern Syria. Along these lines, a continuing wisdom trajetory can be traced into second century Christian gnosticism. On this view, the resurrection of Jesus is not the common center of all expressions of early Christianity. Moreover, the communities whose foundation myth was the kerygma of Jesus saving death and resurrection do not represent the dominant basis of association from the beginning and arose in circumstances different from those of the Jesus mvement. These are the pre-Pauline and Pauline congregations of the Christ located at first in northern Syria and Asia Minor. As a consequence of this recent work, it is possible to pursue the question of community formation in Jerusalem by folowers of Jesus without assuming the model of the kerygma-oriented Christ congregations as the only possible model.
Reply
Ed Jones
November 25, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Note to the above sentence: “Recent studies on the genre and literary history of Q, – -”:
“These studies are to a large degree the work of scholars who have been influenced and set in new directions by the work of James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, see “Trajectories through Early Christianity – -”
Reply
Ed Jones
November 18, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Musings on the Deepak Chopra phenomena.
First off, my critical stance in no way is a critique of Chopra’s interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Clearly his primary source is the Sermon on the Mount, thus I am in full agreement with his picture of “Jesus the teacher of what the spiritual life (God – man relationship) looks like”.
My concern is Chopra’s evident complete disregard of the cumulative results of over 200 years of the critical historical quest for the historical Jesus, beginning with Reimarus’ challenge that our scriptural sources present two radically different images of the man Jesus – the historical person and the mythical Christ of faith. The task of research has been to reconstruct the Jesus tradition to recover the true scriptural apostolic witness to Jesus. Who Jesus is, must have the norm of a credible eyewitness scriptural authouity if it is to sustain the test of history (secular criticism).
To name one crucial historical mistake, the statement: “The historical Jesus – - whose teachings are the foundation of Christian theology and thought”, thus forcing the notion of “The Third Jesus”. Historically, the foundation of Chriatian theology and thought is Pauline kerygma, the salvific death and resurrection – the very opponent kerygma to the language of the Sermon on the Mount.
I believe the Hoffmann letter does connect the crucial dots of the Jesus tradition to serve as a frame of reference for its reconstruction.
Comment?
Reply
Ed Jones
March 17, 2010 at 2:51 am
Betz writes: “In reality, the Sermon on the Mount is the New Testament text most remote from modern men and women.” ((Including scholars)
“As one penetrates more deeply into this work – - a task to which specialized knowledge in the areas of philology. form and redaction criticism, literary criticism, history of relligions, and New Testament theology necessaily applies — a theological problematic becomes increasingly more evident –” I.e. The NT writings are not reliable sources for the real Jesus
research. It is the Sermon in the Mount which “presents us with an early form — deriving from Jewish Christianity (more properly the Jerusalem Jesus Movement) — of the Christian Faith as a whole, which had direct links to the teaching of the historical Jesus and thus constituted an alternative to Gentile Christianity as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels, as well as later writings of the New Testament.”
All of which says, until one comes to terms with Betz’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, one will not recognize the true Scriptural witness to the Real Jesus. (The Apostolic Witness).
I make the claim that the above reconstruction of the Jesus tradition is consistent with Betz’s position as well as that of Robinson and Ogden.
Reply
Edward Jones
March 16, 2013 at 8:22 pm
We now know that the writings of the NT are not reliable sources for knowledge of Jesus. They were written by followers of Paul to propagate the Christ myth, not by followers of the Jesus tradition, thus not written to convey history so they are not historical science. The foundational historical post-Easter event is the NT documentation of the return of the key disciples to Jerusalem (within weeks), purposing to again take up the teachings of their revered Master. This marked the beginning of the Jesus Movement from which we obtain the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles. They made collections of sayings which grew to become the Sermon on the Mount; its final redaction was around 50 CE. We have this only because the author of the Gospel of Matthew chose to include it. However it radically counters Matthew’s Christ myth story and theology. Under the force of present historical methods and knowledge certain of our top NT scholars find sufficient historical NT data to reconstruct a viable historical account of origins of post-Easter Jesus traditions which took place during the apostolic period 30 CE – 65 CE to sufficiently authentic them as credible historical science. All legitimate NT Studies must be consistent with the origins of the Jesus tradition which has the sole claim to sources containing apostolic witness.
The term “Christian origins” is a misnomer, an anachronistic term suggesting serious historical distortions and misconceptions. Jesus traditions did not begin with Christianity, the word Christian was first used of Barnabus and Paul’s mission in Antioch after 65 CE; it was never used of the Jesus tradition. Christianity developed from a Jerusalem Jewish Hellenist group which began soon after the beginning of the Jesus movement, hearing talk of visions of the resurrected Jesus with their traditions of dying/rising gods, took up a totally different interpretation of the Jesus event, to begin the Christ myth tradition. By a series of documented circumstances, Paul first as persecutor, then converting to this group in Damascus; taking over their Christ myth gospel, proclaiming it to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, becoming winners in the struggle for dominance it could soon label the Jesus tradition heresy, to effectively remove from the pages of history.
This is but the briefest sketch, for a more detailed reconstruction see my reconstruction in the form of a letter to Hoffmann, 1. Comment above.
Reply
The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodlibet (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
July 20, 2010 at 5:22 pm
[...] by rjosephhoffmann in Uncategorized And he asked them, "Who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8.28) For the last three years I have been associated—perhaps identified is a better word—with something called the Jesus Project. Enough has already been said and written about that for me (mercifully) to be able to avoid another “introduction” to its aims and objectives. This essay therefore is about something else. It is about why we should care about the historical Jesus My guess is tha … Read More [...]
Reply
steph
July 21, 2010 at 6:36 pm
I like this post alotalot – tres elegante, tres belle! I like your accurate image of a ‘makeover’ and the church’s embracing of a Jesus whose humanity was ‘real but disposable’. It’s so ironic that the humanity of Jesus came at the expense of his historicity. And absolutely, two thousand years is a very long time for a human’s remains to be found especially with all that theological repair. (Perhaps Newman rose from the dead). The standard of proof is high and so much is at stake. As Schweitzer says at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb. ” (478, 2nd edition, 2nd translation)
However, with much trepidation and hesitation, I wonder if it is possible that the gospels came into existence because of those early ‘communities’.
xx
Reply
Ed Jones
August 2, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Steph,
Having posted the 14th comment following my 13, either you found them not worth the read or simply not meaningful, which must say that you have let go of the three named schoars. Kindly offer a word of reply.
y
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Marriage of Likeness: A Mild Dissent
by rjosephhoffmann
marriage
I have always been sympathetic to the right of people of any sexual orientation to cohabit without interference from any outside agency, religious or secular. I regard the sexual practices of partners, so long as they do not cause unacceptable pain to each other or scare the horses, to be the business of the partners.
I not only think but know from experience that a child raised by a loving gay or lesbian couple is as well off as a child raised in a loving heterosexual household, and better off than a child raised in an unloving household. I find it amazing that same sex couples should not have full access to the health benefits and inheritance and taxation privileges that heterosexual couples enjoy. I do not believe that the gay life style is any more “predatory” or “proselytizing” than the lifestyles of straight men and women.
But I am opposed to gay marriage.
I can’t blame my gay and lesbian friends for the way the debate has gone, the way the battle has had to be waged. You can’t always choose your enemies and the enemies of gay marriage have been fighting with Bibles and neolithic ideas of social organization.
I also see that with New England and much of the rest of the country moving in the direction of legalizing same-sex marriage, this little contribution will flicker and die a quiet death and seldom be referred to in a year’s time. Time and tide are irreversibly on the side of legalization, and when legal, gay marriage will be seen as one of those things that had to happen. Perhaps it is right that it should happen. Its supporters certainly and honestly believe it is a moral victory—a “win” for social justice and equality. In a few years, when the Defense of Marriage Act lay in tatters, we will look back on the days when gays couldn’t get married with the same disdain as we have for whites-only waiting rooms and men-only elections.
Or will we? Two “auxiliary” movements in the past thirty years have invoked the catechism of the civil rights movement. One of them is feminism. As a philosophy it has moved from marginal to mainstream—like all movements that destroy the premises of their foundation as a condition of their success. The other is gay rights. These movements have operated chiefly by analogy to movements that opposed the denial of basic civil rights and have resulted in changes that even confirmed political troglodytes would have to agree are for the better. No woman should be denied any right available to a man. No black should be denied a right available to a white.
It isn’t worth overwriting this: we take these things for granted, like hot days in the tropics. As the founding fathers put it with their penchant for economy: “self evident.”
Is the right to vote and the right to earn a living, or to live in peace without threat and violence the same as the right to live together as a married couple?
In the first two cases, the denial of a right creates a hardship. I may choose not to vote or not to work, but that does not constitute a case for abridging this right. (“If you don’t use it, lose it.”) I also have the right to live free of fear, violence, overt expressions of intolerance—but this right to peace and security is merely the extension of a right that exists uniformly within a democratic system.
As an extension of the right to happiness, which the founders listed among the “unalienables” it seems to me that the state should also extend to homosexuals the right to live together, free of fear and harassment, and may extend to such couples other rights, regarding property, taxation and inheritance and the adoption and raising of children. There is stronger ideological support for the right to happiness and (perhaps) personal liberty than there is for a right to privacy.
I am not convinced however that in addition to extending a right of union to gay couples as a “civil” liberty the state has any obligation to extend the benefit of marriage: first, because there is no evidence that the denial of this benefit constitutes a hardship and second because granting the benefit actually negates the purpose for which the benefit was created.
If the example of marriage is too emotionally charged to serve as an example, imagine a movement of older citizens who demand the right to serve as infantrymen in a popular war and argue that theiy are being marginalized in favour of the youth and stamina of new recruits. The army suggests that the war effort needs them in other capacities, will permit them to serve as auxiliaries, but not in the infantry because special conditions apply to enlisted men at the front. A benefit has been denied. Discrimination has taken place. But the state has defended in its own interest an “institution” regarded as important for its efficient operation.
The principle here—analogy–is a weak one however: “the state cannot deny to a black what it offers to a white” is not equivalent to the statement “the state cannot deny to a gay couple what it offers to a straight couple.” This is not because being black is a matter of skin colour and being gay is a matter of choice. Most lesbian and gays, though not all, would reject the latter statement. It is because rights are individual rather than dual or multiple. Furthermore, the state can only be in the business of securing conditions–such as personal freedom–under which happiness can be “pursued.” It can’t define or guarantee a state of personal happiness. The state is under no compulsion to secure the rights of a pornographer, for example, just because his work gives pleasure to millions.
For centuries dating back to the start of the common era, marriage was the church-approved form of sexual happiness. The state embraced it, through a series of historical compromises coordinated its regulation with the Church, and saw it as an important responsibility of civil government: Marriage, family, and society formed a closed set of values. Divorce was barely tolerated. Church and state intersected in the bridal chamber. The act of marriage presupposed a choice whose literal embodiment was the marriage contract. It dis not matter whether the contract was florid or plain, spoken by a magistrate or sealed with a bishop’s ring, It was understood that the state did not confer rights on “marriage,” did not broker the contract. In medieval theology from about the ninth century this was reflected in the already ancient idea that the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony were the man and the woman, and that the priest was merely the witness to an event performed by them. Neither church nor state legitimated the choice, sanctioned the decision, decreed how many offspring the couple should have. While the opponents of gay marriage as well as advocates of the practice spend a lot of time talking about the Bible, they will find no formula for marriage anywhere in the Bible.
The analogy with civil rights also fails on categorical grounds. Black/white, man/woman and gay/straight have been forced on the political consciousness as terms specific to a category of marginalized groups who have suffered discrimination and intolerance. The modern field of gender studies has succeeded in calling into question the “normative” distinction between male and female, which in turn has been used by some proponents of gay marriage to support their case. (What does it mean to say the marriage is the union of “a man and a woman” if both are shades of biological gray?) But normative or not, the distinction remains central to discussion and definition. To say that gender and sexuality are different things and that gender in particular is “socially constructed” is not prima facie a defense of gay marriage.
I’d be the first to say that history should not bind us to the past. And perhaps I am guilty of the same thing that advocates of gay marriage are doing when they reject civil unions as second-class marriages. We are both making marriage a prize, something greater than the sum of its partners.
It is part of the flow of postmodernity that why not questions are asked before why questions. But the question Why not a gay soldier or Why not a woman admiral or a Black president are categorically different from the question Why not gay marriage. This is so because marriage is not a splicing of DNA but a fundamentally symbolic arrangement characterized by the potential for new life. That is not a normative statement but a description of its symbolic weight. There are good reasons for lifelong unions between two people of the same sex, but the symbolism of marriage is not the best way to express those reasons.
Finally, consider this: there is no “right” for heterosexual persons to marry. The state assumes but does not confer such a right, and even the word “right” in this case would have to be translated by the old Latin phrase “jus naturale”—something rooted in a natural condition, rather than in “jus” or a law of marriage that can be extended as the state chooses. –Not to be facetious, but if it is within the state’s power to extend marriage to same-sex couples, then there should be no reason for the state not to extend it to children, to polygamists, and sisters and brothers. Surely the happiness and fairness arguments would not prevail in such cases; but without a definition that materially restricts such argument, what reasons can the state employ to deny marriage to such persons? I would not be persuaded by an argument that began, “Well, gays and lesbians would also oppose the marriage of minors, siblings, polygamists, sexual adventurers.” It would have no more weight than polygamists who oppose the right of gay couples to wed.
Heterosexual marriage was rooted in the natural law arguments of Stoics like Musonius and Epictetus long before Christianity came on the scene. In fact, it took a long time for the Christian church to rediscover them. But it is incorrect to think that the Christian or Jewish or Islamic traditions have been the primary brake on the train that is now taking us in a new and experimental direction. The union of opposites was a matter for philosophical discussion in antiquity, and frankly was a more edifying discussion than we are getting today.
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Published: May 2, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: christian marriage : defense of marriage : gay marriage : homosexuality : matrimony : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
4 Responses to “The Marriage of Likeness: A Mild Dissent”
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steph
August 18, 2010 at 5:51 pm
You have convinced me that nobody has the “right” to get married, but I do wish to express mild dissent with the view that homosexuals shouldn’t get married if they really really want to.
I also know homosexual couples bringing up children, and the children are every bit as happy and well off, if not more happy and better off, than children of heterosexual marriage, because they have two happy parents together instead of one. I don’t think the children of homosexual couples should be denied their happinesses just as I don’t think homosexual couples should be denied their children.
I know no homosexuals who think their sexuality is a matter of “choice” although I’ve read of those who have been persuaded their “lifestyle” is “sinful” by religious friends, and they have been persuaded that they have a “choice” to repent and reject it.
The thing about marriage is that what are real human “rights” naturally follow. These are living together, having children and bureaucratic rights automatically which are automatically allowed to married couples. I think marriage today, is about love, life long commitment to one person and children if possible, and they are the things homosexual couples want recognised too. The fact that homosexual couples feel rejected by society and unequal because marriage is not allowed, means that they do ‘suffer’ and should be enough reason not to deny them the privilege granted to heterosexual friends. So let them marry if they really really want to.
Marriage in a church is different… but mainly because I can’t see why homosexual couples would want to as I can’t be persuaded that Christian teaching doesn’t reject homosexual relationships. But again, if a Christian couple really really want to marry in a church, and the church is willing, let it happen. And let the priests marry too.
x
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The Marriage of Likeness: A Mild Dissent (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
June 27, 2011 at 7:47 pm
[...] I have always been sympathetic to the right of people of any sexual orientation to cohabit without interference from any outside agency, religious or secular. I regard the sexual practices of partners, so long as they do not cause unacceptable pain to each other or scare the horses, to be the business of the partners. I not only think but know from experience that a child raised by a loving gay or lesbian couple is as well off as a child raised … Read More [...]
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s. wallerstein
June 27, 2011 at 8:03 pm
You are a born contrarian!!!! You would have gotten rich if you had studied law or maybe not, because you probably would have defended lost causes.
They want to get married: let them get married.
Who cares? People have a right to make stupid decisions.
They’ll learn: marry in haste, repent at leisure.
Groucho Marx: I was married by a judge; I should have demanded a jury.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 28, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Ah, marriage. A relic of the ancient past still hanging on, still creating lots of mischief. Dr. H, I respectfully disagree with your analysis of marriage here, but not by too much.
It seems to me that the real impetus for matrimony in the beginning was the lack of contraception. Along the way to what we might laughingly call civilization, it became a man’s world and women were little more than property. So, the idea of betrothal was so that if someone asked, “Who’s your daddy?” you could name your daddy with a certain degree of confidence; that is, until god created mailmen and meter readers. Ergo, the invention of the surname. The wife took the husband’s name in the way the husband took title to his house, with the emphasis on “his.” Daughters take on the surname of their fathers, and when they marry, of their husbands. Of course, some women get married and hyphenate the surname of their fathers with the surname of their spouses. This, I suppose, to announce to the world that patriarchy is alive and well and, well, even moral. Hey, it’s in the bible. Look it up.
Of course, you already know about the commandments outlawing adultery and coveting your neighbor’s wife. Chastity belts came along, bastards were a disgrace. The harlots and the whores were hard pressed (pun intended) to say who the sperm donors were for their children. And that put paternalism in crisis. Even female circumcision (mutilation) became and still is common practice in too many parts of the world. Women were not supposed to enjoy sex, and, as I understand it, didn’t until the 1960′s.
Now, along come the homosexuals. And they want to get married! Are you fucking kidding me? There is no paternity to protect, no bastards to run out of town. It throws the whole “adultery” and “coveting” thing into a tizzy. Then we’ve got all these damn laws in place that might have to be changed. Not to mention that most of the jokes about marriage become ambiguous; not to mention that. And “rights” you say? We don’t know nothing about no stinking rights! Just ask our Supreme Court.
Sadly, the days of our paleolithic ancestors are long gone. Back then marriage was superfluous. Everybody knew who was shacking up with whom. Care of the children was a communal effort. If their were any homosexuals around in those times, and no doubt there were, I suppose they were expected to carry out their responsibilities to the group like everyone else. And surnames were unnecessary. Light-in-the-loafers could “marry” Kicking-and-Screaming and their child might be named something like Little-Broken-Condom-Made-in-China, who, in turn, could be adopted by a gay couple. No mess, no bother, no problem.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Measuring the Truth of the Book
by rjosephhoffmann
koran_new
All religions make truth claims. These may be specific, as in the form of particular doctrines—heaven, hell, the trinity, the virginity of Mary—or more general: the finality of the Prophet, the exclusive role of the Church as a means of grace and salvation, the belief in the divine election of the Jews.
What is not so widely acknowledged is that these claims of truth are supported by a set of rationales, or to use Van Harvey’s famous term, “warrants” that provide security and confidence to adherents of the religious tradition.
The warrants are seldom available in the sacred writings and doctrines explicitly, but they are often observable in teaching, interpretation and conduct. The three book religions, which often have been referred to as “Abrahamic” actually have quite different warrants for their truth claims.
Warrants in religion are a kind of pseudo-empiricism—a quantification of truth value. Like empirical tests, warrants are susceptive of disconfirmation—being proved false—at least in theory. A warrant is not a doctrine, but a justification for religions to “do as they do”; they empower belief and practice by creating benchmarks for the success, prestige or dominance of a religious tradition—often through comparison to rival traditions.
For example, in some forms of millennarian religion predictions of the end-time have been recorded with remarkable precision. The habit goes back at least to the time of Rabbi Joseph the Galilean, a contemporary of Hyrcanus and Azariah, who thought the Messiah would come in three generations (60 years), after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The messiah failed to arrive, however, and the nominee for the position, Shimeon bar Kochba died a humiliating death at Roman hands in 135. End-time prophecies continued with the Christian Hippolytus’ calculation that 5,500 years separated Adam and Christ and that the life of the world was “6,000, six full ‘days’ of years until the seventh, the day of rest.” His calculations in 234 indicated there were still two centuries left. Two millennia of apocalyptic forecasting lay in store. The “prophet” Moses David of The Children of God faith group predicted that the Battle of Armageddon would take place in 1986 whenRussia would defeat Israel and the United States. A worldwide Communist dictatorship would be established, and in 1993, Christ would return to earth.
Apocalypticism is conspicuously subject to disconfirmation and its calculations have—quite obviously–never been accurate, as Simon Pearson has documented in his popular survey, A Brief History of the End of the World (2006). Just as surprising though is the amazing ability of apocalyptic movements to regenerate themselves: this or that cult or movement may die away through embarrassment and loss of faith and members, but the phenomenon itself is tied to a (more or less) naturalistic belief in the beginning and end of things, and theological constructions of that belief to include ideas of judgment, reward and punishment.
All three of the book religions, at bottom, believe in the last three of these ideas—the end of the world and the judgment of humankind. The mechanism and details differ slightly, with Christianity and Islam being historically more tied to eschatology (the belief in the final destiny and dispensation of the human race by god). In fact, it would be more accurate to call the three “Abrahamic” faiths the eschatological traditions because of their common belief that the relationship between God and the human race is personal and moral rather than abstract. The belief in judgment is most vivid in Islam, less so in Christianity, and highly controversial in Judaism—where, nevertheless, since Hellenistic times, it has featured significantly.
If eschatology is a core belief in the three book religions, it is fair to ask what mechanisms (warrants) have been used to procure the success of these traditions in the face of disconfirmation?
Just as any case of eschatological “disconfirmation” (a failed apocalyptic event) weakens the overall strength of a warrant, so too the collapse of a warrant will lead to general doubts about the truth claims of the religion. This religious domino effect is most clear when the eschatology is strong.
For example, messianic Judaism of the period after the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE) is relatively well attested. Most Jewish apocalyptic literature is not written until after the death of Alexander in 323 BCE (most even later) and the disintegration of the Hellenistic world he created. Between the time of the Persian hegemony over Palestine, right through to the period of Roman domination, the apocalyptic spirit—an acute sense that the times are out of joint, that God is at the end of his wits waiting for things to right themselves, and that divine intervention is imminent—is at a high pitch. But while the spirit may have been feverish, solutions did not arrive on schedule, and when they did they were not the solutions the Jews had been expecting.
Apocalypticism ends with a massive crash: the Roman assault of 66-70 CE–the burning and looting of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, a century of uneasy détente followed by a second blow with an edict that Jerusalem was henceforth off limits to Jews and that a pagan shrine would be built on the temple site. This is not coincidentally the period when messianism, originally a political movement, later a more spiritual one, was most in evidence. But the hope for a messiah was repeatedly disconfirmed by circumstance, loss, and disappointment. The “truth” of Judaism and beliefs subordinate to its eschatology, had to be sacrificed at an empirical level for more secular goals and a this-worldly focus on ethics. In strictly historical terms, the truth claims of Judaism were untruthed. All else is adaptation and interpretation.
The Jewish situation cannot be understood properly without looking at its foster child, Christianity. Whatever else may be claimed about this religion, it is undeniably Jewish, eschatological, and messianic in its origins. It belongs specifically to the time when Judaism was the most fraught with expectation, and some of its apocalyptic books, and passages from the gospels (such as Mark 13) are literally taken wholesale from Jewish writings such as IV Esdras and I Enoch.
Christianity survived for just under a century under what scholars used to call the cloud of
“imminent eschatology,” and what one scholar has called “prolonged disappointment”. By looking backward and forward, it appropriated and reinterpreted passages from the Hebrew prophets to apply to their messianic hero. This point of conjunction is often overlooked in exchange for the belief that Christianity somehow forged quickly ahead of Judaism and looked back only occasionally and when necessary. In fact, as the second century Marcionite crisis showed, Christianity could not go it alone. It needed the “witness” of scripture—the Hebrew Bible–and the promises of the prophets to make sense of its emerging belief system. It required Jewish atonement theology to explain the significance of the crucifixion. It did not claim a new finality but completion of a process. It did not (except very rarely) challenge the wording of the Hebrew Bible or rewrite the prophecies or produce targums of Jesus setting it all straight. It became skilled at allegorical interpretation, in its own theological service, but also made reference to the rabbis. Christianity was not the shock of the new but the old repackaged for sale to gentiles,
Above all, beginning with Paul, it was messianic. And its first crisis, as we gather from passages such as 1 Thessalonians 5.2 and 2 Peter 3.4-6 concerned the delay in the return of the messiah. When that event—the second coming that would vindicate the unexpected failure of the first—did not happen, Christians were confronted with a crisis that could only be rationalized organically.
Two things distinguish the Christian reaction to eschatological failure from the Jewish response, however. First, Christianity was much more concerned with the belief in resurrection than with belief in messiahship. Its happenstansical withdrawal from the Jewish world at the end of the first century immunized it to a certain extent from the effects of disconfirmation—or at least, bought it some time. Truth was focused on the larger event which (though tied to eschatology) was not seen to be identical to it in the gentile world, where Christianity gained the most ground. And in the gentile world at least, even the emphasis of the “judgment aspects” of resurrection were deemphasized in favour of its promise of immortality—a theme long revered by the Greeks and Romans. Later on, in the onslaught of death, plague and war, the emphasis on judgment and the cruder aspects of the afterlife would reemerge in the middle ages. But during the period when Christianity was most at risk of being another disconfirmed Jewish messianic movement, it survived by changing the subject. Indeed, it may have been Paul who changed it –as early at the 50’s of the 1st century.
As the resurrection faith, a religion of expectation, Christianity survived through a proclamation of a risen lord “who will come again.” Its truth claims were protected through procrastination—not that any individual Christian or church or hierarchy was aware of the strategy. No “groupthink” was involved and no council could have been called to resolve the issue. The response seems to have been organic and somewhat reflexive—but crucially it meant that Christianity could not be untruthed until such time as Jesus did or did not come, and no one knew precisely when that time was: the psychology of prolonged expectation prevailed over the psychology of prolonged disappointment. In a word, “faith.”
Islam is related to its cousin traditions in a contorted way. Like Christianity, it claimed to be a common heir of the Abrahamic traditions. Unlike Judaism, it taught that much of that tradition had been corrupted by false prophets and evildoers. Like Christianity, it claimed a continuum with the prophets of old; unlike Christianity it made little use of any specific passages of the Hebrew bible, did not incorporate it into its own sacred library, and did not regard the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood to be based on any adumbration in the books of the Jews or Christians.
This was important, because the legitimacy of Christianity was theoretically dependent on the sheer fact of the Old Testament (rightly interpreted) and its soteriological system being applied to the death of Jesus—the atoning sacrifice for sins. Islam like Christianity understood itself as somehow connected to the past, but disconnected from most of its theology and in large part from its literary tradition. In particular it was disconnected from Jewish and Christian soteriology: the God of the Prophet does not suffer the sin of the people but rather judges them according to his fiat, the Qur’an. The connecting fiber that joined Christianity to Judaism was decisively cut by Islamic rejection of the ancient idea of atonement.
The extent to which the earliest teachers of Islam felt able to appropriate the Judeo-Christian sources ex post facto is a subject of some discussion, but whatever the reasons for the disuse of the prior claimants to the Abrahamic faith, Islam alone found error not merely in interpretation but in the sources themselves. The idea of error was both tied to and a consequence of the doctrine of finality: Muhammad is the prophet of God in a conclusive and indubitable sense. What is contained in the book revealed to him is true beyond question.
The messianism of the two older traditions depended in different ways on verification. Even the New Testament, whose messianic claims are undone by historical outcomes, asks believers to look to the skies, but the portents and signs can only be understood by looking backward (Mark 13.14-16).
Judaism and Christianity saw the events of the end-time as suprahistorical happenings whose occurrence could only be understood prophetically. By sacrificing the “backward look” to the idea of finality Islam created a new understanding of prophecy, whereby ‘non-prophets’ could be adopted simply because they were believed to have lived in an age of witnesses—as “Muslims before their time.” This theme was not unknown in Christianity; it is voiced by church fathers like Justin and Clement in relation to Old Testament heroes and a few classical worthies who “taught truth” before its time had fully arrived in the person of Jesus Christ.
The last day or yawm al-din underscores the idea of finality which also shapes the view of prophecy and scripture: God’s judgment demands the observance of Islam to such an extent that in Islam, eschatology replaces theology. This also accounts for the largely allusory style of the Qur’an in relation to the other book traditions; individual stories do not matter as much as establishing the historical pattern of “warning” and the Prophet’s pedigree: Adam, Abraham, Jonah, Noah, Moses, form a kind of chorus of worthies, an honor guard, whose role it is to provide a line of succession to the prophet of God. They are not so much “adopted” or interpreted as in Christianity but expropriated.
So too the Islamic use of the messianic idea. It is not clear that the first Muslims grasped the idea of the messiah or “mahdi” except in relation to the belief in judgment. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century historian famous for his pioneering work in philosophy of history, writes in his Muqaddima:
“It has been (accepted) by all the Muslims in every epoch, that at the end of time a man from the family (of the Prophet) will, without fail, make his appearance, one who will strengthen Islam and make justice triumph. Muslims will follow him, and he will gain domination over the Muslim realm. He will be called the Mahdi.”
The Mahdi’s bona fides are well-established from early on: He will be an Arab, from the tribe of Banû Hãshim and through his line by Fatima (ie a member of the Prophet’s family). Critically, he will not be a Jew or a Christian—Islam’s declaration that the final judgment of God will be according to the rules of Islam. The Mahdi will be “assisted” by Jesus, who is relegated to role of helper on the day of judgment; he “will fulfill a role behind the Mahdi.” The true Christians “will follow Jesus in accepting Imam al-Mahdi as the leader at the time and become Muslims.” In short, the messianic expectation is that all those who will be saved will follow Jesus in subordinating himself to the true messiah.
The measurement of any truth claim in Islam, therefore, is subject to the prior assumption—or “strong belief” in the finality of the Islamic position towards its predecessors. This claim, despite certain superficial or family resemblances—is a belief in unqualified rejection. The claims of Christianity and Judaism are selectively falsified in the doctrine of the corruptibility of sources, the partiality of God’s revelation to previous warners, the rejection of the idea of atonement, and the replacement of it with a strong and exclusivist eschatological scenario in which followers of Jesus will be judged on the basis of their acceptance of Islam.
More directly relevant to measuring truth claims however is their effect. Never a large religion and today consisting of only about 14,000,000 adherents worldwide, Judaism has historically been an exclusivist religion. Its salvation theology emerges from its historical situation–one surprisingly similar to its current political situation–as a fairly cohesive religio-cultural community surrounded by adversaries. The viability of faith depends first of all on the existence of the faith community, and throughout its later history this has been Judaism’s primary concern. In such constricted circumstances its theology was necessarily more about salvation, messiahship, and rescue than conversion and growth. Its truth claims were tied to that survival more directly than to other possible warrants, such as military achievement or imperial expansion.
Christianity traded exclusivism for expansion after the second century of its existence. It did so by lowering the religious bar on radical monotheism, relaxing some of the more stringent safeguards of Judaism in terms of diet and religious observance, the use of images and rituals, and substituting for this a church-based system of authority and a sacramental system that created a sharp class distinction between laity and hierarchy. “Faith” (de fide) in this sense was not an act of the will but a body of doctrine passed down as a sacred deposit of truth interpreted and taught by the Church: the laity had no active role other than to accept the church’s teaching and conduct their lives accordingly.
To the extent this system was successful, as it was until the sixteenth century and in modified form even until he twentieth, Roman Christianity and its protestant spawn successfully substituted the idea of reliance on belief for the more ancient belief in the coming of Christ (even though the latter has been given honorary status among the discarded beliefs of the ancient period). The warrant of the truth claims of modern Christianity for all the available versions and possibility of continued fissiparation, is simply the quantum of what the church or churches teach and what Christians find agreeable to faith. Protestantism shifted the focus from the nominative sense of faith as a body of orthodox teaching to the verbal understanding –faith as assent in conscience to biblical revelation. But in either case, the lex fidei, the law of faith, was the exclusive warrant for Christians of the Middle Age and Renaissance periods.
Islam offered no such options. The doctrine of finality had not budged much since the early middle ages among serious adherents of the faith. When Islam is seen as regressive or repressive in terms of social doctrine or custom, it is usually because its core structure has remained remarkably intact, like a well built house that defies the weather.
The doctrine of the Mahdi, for instance, has never had to be rationalized, defended or abandoned, because it did not suffer the historical disconfirmation that both Judaism and Christianity experienced. Islam’s eschatology is alive, robust and looks to the future. It is fundamentally different from an eschatology undone by history (Judaism), or dislodged by qualifying doctrines (Christianity). While the authority of approved teachers, imams and ayatollahs is a significant feature of the religion, there is no central authority and no mechanism for consensus of all individual authorities. In fact, the debate in much of contemporary Islam is not whether the fundamentals of faith are sound but whose Islam is the most Islamic—the “truest” example of the faith.
Superficially this would seem to suggest chaos, but instead it points to the fact that there is enormous room for disagreement among Muslims, within limits. The limits concern subordinate or derivative doctrines: when is violence justified; should women wear hijab, to what extent is it permissible to sort out true and false traditions relating to the early community or the hadith, and the applicability of sharia to the regulation of the conduct of believers.
***
In addition to the apparent impermeability of its core doctrine to disconfirmation, Islam has developed a sixth pillar which it seems to me is beginning to serve as a warrant for its truth claims. Unlike Judaism and increasingly unlike the phenomenon of a deflating world Christianity, Islam is growing. Its success is in numbers–conversions, expansion, the building of mosques and madrasas. From Malawi to Toronto and London, the signs of Islam’s health and success at a demographic level are visible, impressive, and unmistakable.
In 2008 the estimated world Muslim population was close to 2 billion, and rapidly increasing. Estimated increase and actual numbers vary widely among researchers, but the U.S. Center for World Mission estimated in 1997 that Christianity’s total number of adherents is growing at about 2.3% annually. (This is approximately equal to the growth rate of the world’s population.) Islam is growing faster: about 2.9%, and Islam will surpass Christianity as the world’s most populous religion religion by 2023.
Samuel Huntington famously saw these numbers as portending a clash of civilizations. Whatever the merits of his argument, the more significant issue is how numbers are interpreted by the adherents of a belief system and just as vital, how adherents “behave” toward numbers. If numbers serve as a warrant of truth, adherents will have an enormous interest in sustaining and expanding the numbers, through whatever means possible. As a matter of history, unlike the messianism of the Jews and the parousia-theology of early Christians, Islam–uniquely–has not been eschatologically disconfirmed. In fact, its warrant provides a kind of empirical test that Judaism and Christianity have already failed. Given the warrant that Islam uses for the truth value of its beliefs, it passes the test.
Early Judaism dreamed of a day when Abraham’s descendants would be a numberless as the stars in the heavens. If that remained an ideal, the day never came. As a warrant of truth claims, Judaism would have very little to gain from playing a numbers game. The more modest and warranted Jewish position is that Judaism is true as long as it survives.
But the same is true of Christianity, largely because it is no longer one thing but many things—not Christianity but Christianities, as the Oxford scholar Peggy Morgan likes to point out. In significant ways, Christianity has been unharmonious and inhomogeneous since the Middle Ages. It has had to measure its truth with different spoons, using different systems for the better part of five centuries, and still is large enough that certain segments of the Christian religion hardly know that other sectors exist or what doctrines they profess. Evangelical Christians may dream of bringing a singular gospel to the far flung regions of the world, but a healthy majority of other Christians oppose the entire missionary philosophy as form of religious colonialism. In addition to this, an unknown but sizable percentage of the world’s Christians are largely secular, agnostic, or “lapsed” members of the tradition; they identify with it in name only. Rarely in the twenty-first century will someone be denied the status of “believer” in any denomination through violence or persecution simply because his beliefs are askew. And even in those traditions with ancient legal traditions, such as Roman catholicism, rules are unenforceable at a penal level.
Thus the Christian warrant for its truth claims, “faith” (whose faith?), is a wobbly instrument of measurement in the modern situation, and a number of factors weigh against the ability of Christians to use geographical reach and population as indicators of truth. Christianity possesses no single vision, doctrine, or praxis. With the death of “Christendom” in the sixteenth century, Christians also sacrificed geography and population as a warrant for the claims advanced by the faith. The export by missionaries during the colonial period of a variegated Christianity preached in different ways to different colonial populations only accelerated the process of international fissiparation–which we still see in the massive success of “conversions” in Central and South America from Roman Catholic to Evangelical protestantism, and the supermarket Christianity of the developed world. With the acceptance of modernity, Christianity was obliged to accept the relativity of its belief systems to other ways to the truth, including in principle the idea that its faith was unwarranted. Christianity’s survival seems latched to the acceptance of the final triumph of secularism and its correlate: believing less and less.
For Islam however, from an early date, the increase of the faith is a living proof of its finality. Numbers are paid attention to. Territory once submitted to God must always be submitted to God—one of the reasons the question of Jerusalem remains one of the irreconcilables of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Dominant stories, dates, and myths are significant: The triumph over the Meccans, the submission of Constantinople, the conversion of the Mongols, the winning back of Jerusalem by Saladin, the capture of al-Andalus. “Jihad” has been the key word to describe this warrant, but rather than thinking of it as war or violence, it must be seen as the execution of a principle, without which Islam might go the way of the other book traditions.
Sheer increase has become the defining warrant for the truth of Islam. Consequently those who pursue the interests of the dar-al-Islam (the territory submitted to God) most vigorously—the Taliban, for example, or others that western observers are likely to label “religious extremists”–are acting on a proven principle. If we end where we began : “A warrant is not a doctrine, but a justification for religions to “do as they do”; they empower belief and practice by creating benchmarks for the success, prestige or dominance of a religious tradition—often through comparison to rival traditions.” By that definition, Islam’s success seems assured whether by comparison to its rivals in the Abrahamic tradition or by dint of the prestige it enjoys as the world’s fastest growing religion.
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Published: May 8, 2009
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Tags: Bible : Christianity : Islam : jihad : Judaism : truth ..
10 Responses to “Measuring the Truth of the Book”
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Of Truth Claims: Measuring the Truth of the Book (A New Oxonian Repost) | The New Oxonian says:
July 13, 2010 at 12:59 pm
[...] All religions make truth claims. These may be specific, as in the form of particular doctrines—heaven, hell, the trinity, the virginity of Mary—or more general: the finality of the Prophet, the exclusive role of the Church as a means of grace and salvation, the belief in the divine election of the Jews. What is not so widely acknowledged is that these claims of truth are supported by a set of rationales, or to use Van Harvey’s famous term, “warra … Read More [...]
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steph
July 13, 2010 at 6:34 pm
‘Prolonged disappointment’ sounds like Schweitzer. I love Schweitzer – not just for his eyes – big solemn pools of wisdom that they were. I love him for his ‘reverence for life’, his brilliance as an organist, his excellence in learning and his sophisticated intellect, and the fact he took his medical expertise to Africa and helped the orphans. Religious ‘truth claims’ seem to involve hope as a fantasy based on ‘faith’, just what Pope perhaps slid away from or avoided… Gee wizz I really want/need to know more about your earliest gospel and Marcion’s role…
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Ed Jones
May 4, 2011 at 10:50 pm
An expression making anything like the declaration: “I really want/need to know more about your earliest gospel – -expressed for whatever expectation or from whatever context, sets off an irresistable complusion to attempt a response taking the liberty to substitute “the” for “your”.
We have the “earliest gospel” identified by a non-traditional NT canon – defining the real apostolic witness. A source which presents us with an early form – deriving from the Jerusalm Jesus Movement – which had direct links to the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and thus constitutes an alternative to Gentile Christianity (which became traditional Christianity) as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels as well as later writings of the NT. Recgnition of this earliest gospel requires a radical reconstruction of “Christian” origins. Here we have a nomenclature probem: the term Christian was first applied to Paul and Barnabus’ Antioach church after 60 CE. It was never applied to the Jesus Movement nor was Paul ever a member. The period of significant origins is 30 CE to 65 CE, before Christianity, before the Gospels, indeed the apostolic period. Two Movements in the strictest adversarial relationship, revealing two strikingly different images of Jesus.
Enough to say, if one has the interest I will be pleased to say more.
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Measuring the Truth of the Book (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
May 1, 2011 at 12:06 pm
[...] All religions make truth claims. These may be specific, as in the form of particular doctrines—heaven, hell, the trinity, the virginity of Mary—or more general: the finality of the Prophet, the exclusive role of the Church as a means of grace and salvation, the belief in the divine election of the Jews. What is not so widely acknowledged is that these claims of truth are supported by a set of rationales, or to use Van Harvey’s famous term, “warra … Read More [...]
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s. wallerstein
May 1, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Very interesting.
The proof of numbers: it functions in Islam and in sales.
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John E. D. P. Malin
May 3, 2011 at 1:31 pm
I concur with the author’s arguments completely. They are well expressed. This article further confirms my personal reflection that religion promotes ignorant tribalism. The sooner it is eliminated in the affairs of man, the better for common humanity! Religion, simply, no longer serves the well-being of man! Its costs outweigh its benefits! [The recent show of European & American peasants in Rome for the Beatification of the venerable John Paul II struck horror in my historical sensibility!]
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Antonio Jerez
May 4, 2011 at 2:55 pm
Another excellent essay. But I have a small quibble with your conclusions. I may be true that regarding the future it may be more difficult to falsify islam than either Judaism or Christianity. But if we go backwards in time Islam is a lot more easy to falsify than either Judaism or Christianity. Due to the nature of the claims made by Mohammed (God is talking directly through me…) if no Adam or no Moses then Islam basically goes out trough the window. There is not much leeway for allegorical interpretations of the stories in the Quaran. Which is why muslim world is a wast sea 99,99 % inhabited by creationists. Paleontologists don´t stand much of a chance there.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 4, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Antonio: I completely agree with falsifiability in that sense; many of the great allegorists, like Ibn Rushd, are now largely considered heretics. Islam’s intellectuals are not Islam’s theologians–such that “religious authorities” and even those who are considered scholars are really mono-educated frauds. By that very token, it is Islam’s position vis a vis faiths that have been falsified eschatologically that puts it in this aggressive, advantaged position. My point is not that any of it is beyond rational critique (!) but that the criterion of expansion and demographic increase serves as a kind of faux-empiricism for the faithful: the more the truer. It’s not a statement about theology but about the sociology of success. –Which makes me wonder what they will do will a minor falsification like the killing of bin laden.
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Antonio Jerez
May 4, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Joseph,
the jihadists will just say that bin Laden died like a true martyr. His death is just Allah´s way of testing the faith and the fortitude of his fighters. No matter what Allah will grant victory in due time…
rjosephhoffmann
May 4, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Yes, of course. Setbacks, no real victories unless the victories are on the right side. A very old story. It’s the religious zeal that finally led the exasperated Romans to invade Jerusalem and burn the temple to the ground. And there weren’t nearly as many of them. You have to expect that jihadism will temporarily flourish because of this.
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The Theology of Regret: Making the Pope Say ‘Sorry’
by rjosephhoffmann
-pope_benedictXVI_12.25.08_color_lrg
When will the Pope apologize to the Muslims for those perfectly awful things he apologized for in September, 2006? The case where he quoted (and took exception to) the words of a 14th century Christian emperor who said some rather nasty things about Islam being violent. Where would anyone get such a crazy idea?
During his trip to Jordan, the pope was given low marks by CNN and the BBC for his failure to “apologize” to the Muslim world (or was it Muslim leaders, and who are they?) for his address in September 2006 to the Faculty at Regensburg where he was once Professor of Theology.
To demystify this event (most Muslims know only that the pope is thought to have said something horrible and have no idea of what went on), here is what he said:
“The emperor [Manuel II Pailailogos in 1391] must have known that [Qur’an] sura 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body.”
The pope had said that the emperor’s comments were delivered with “a brusqueness that we would find startling,” but he also points to a little-heeded fact that Manuel seems to have been alert to, and the savvy Rat zinger will not have missed: that Muslim Christian dialogue depends on how the concept of God works itself out in a particular theology. Ever the teacher, and now the only one that matters in the Catholic church, Benedict was not going to let this point get away from his audience.
Despite what you may have read about Crusaders and forced conversions to Christianity, the unanimous position of the western church since the time of Gregory I (7th century) has been that a forced conversion is no conversion at all because it deprives the potential beneficiary of free choice. As the act is irrational (good to be able to bring Aquinas in at this point) it cannot be beneficial. It’s needful to say, the Church did not always stick to its principles and forced conversions of Jews and heretics were an occasional part of the religious landscape of medieval Europe.
But the general point is important: to act contrary to reason is to act contrary to the nature of God as he is understood in Latin theology. Violence is unreasonable as a means of promoting religion.
The pope went on:
“To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. [the Pope then goes on to quote the word of the Byzantine scholar, Theodore Khoury, “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Muslim R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.”
I think the pope is onto something, but it’s nothing he can apologize for. He is saying that the concept of God as it has evolved in the Church since the Middle Ages has increasingly merged with the concept of reason. Aquinas’ job at Paris was to theologize about the relationship between reason and faith, and he gets at least an A- for the effort. Using Aristotle to maximum advantage, Thomas reserved faith as mode of “knowing” for those cases where natural reason failed to provide the answer—for example: God can be known through reason because he is rationality itself. The trinity is a mystery accessible only through faith. Yet the mysteries of faith (he thought) were never incompatible with reason.
Some Muslim scholars were on the same path prior to the desolation of Baghdad in 1258 (Aquinas died in 1274), but the fourteenth century brought the beginning of intellectual torpor to the Muslim world. Interesting speculation ends up as an unfinished paragraph
Crouching behind a couple of authorities he obviously admires, the Pope suggested that the Islamic doctrine of God as having a transcendent will makes irrational action possible. It wasn’t an especially modern recognition, just one that needed reiteration, he felt. Nor was this interpretation of Aristotle unique to Muslim scholars. Aquinas sorted through the thorniest of Aristotle’s dilemmas and quieted the radical Franciscan school at Paris—the friars that broke their heads against problems like whether God being God could send righteous souls to hell to exhibit his omnipotence. Thomas hushes them by saying that God can do nothing contrary to his nature, and his nature is infinite reason. Things like power and goodness and knowledge will work in conformity with the divine nature, not contrary to it.
Islam opted for the idea that God’s freedom is absolute, and consequently for the belief that his will is unconstrained by a paltry thing like “reason.” It is what makes irrational behavior like violence possible in a situation—say—where God’s will is known and the means to achieve is force. If God’s revealed will is the domination of Islam over other religions and people, there is little reason to convene a council to ask whether violent action is “reasonable.”
If Christians could say, “Thy will be done–under certain conditions that have to meet the criteria for moral action and reasonable consequences” (which is a good Aristotelian response) the typical Muslim response of “Inshallah”—according to God’s will, is a much more incisive statement. It will happen according to God’s will, only if God wills it.
It is a shame that Professor Ratzinger’s words were attacked because they were considered insulting to Muslims. They were much more dangerous than that
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Published: May 10, 2009
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Tags: apology : Islam : Pope : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Ratzinger : Thomas Aquinas ..
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The Jesus Tomb Debacle: RIP
by rjosephhoffmann
The following is a repost from Butterflies and Wheels 2008JesusTomb1R_468x327
By R. Joseph Hoffmann
So much will have been written about the Discovery Channel presentation of the James Cameron extravaganza, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” that a further dissenting voice will neither be needed nor missed. In my initial preview of the program, published within hours of the CNN “announcement” and public unveiling of the alleged Jesus and Mary Magdalene matrimonial ossuaries, I wrote that the entire project was based on bad assumptions, and that since “following the science,” as the logorrhoeic Simcha Jacobovici says he was doing, can only take one where assumptions lead, let me spell out why the assumptions underlying this project are not only flawed but positively malicious to good scholarship and science. It seems to me uncontroversial and indisputable that the entire exercise hangs on an assumption that modern scholarship knows and accepts the names of Jesus’ family recorded in the gospels and passed down in Christian tradition; that the gospels coincide with other ancient testimony, for example, that provided by Paul in his letters or Luke in his two-part history. There is an assumption which more and more asserts itself in semi-scholarly work that while we can rely on the gospels for the names of the family of Jesus, we cannot rely on them for information about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene; that in the latter case we have a cover-up abetted by early theological interests and a desire (by whom?) to suppress the “secret” life of jesus, this despite the fact that it is public celibate life, and not a married life, that would have been scandalous in first century Judaism. The same brand of scholarship is also characterized by a willingness to credit ancient sources that are contemptuous of history – the gnostic gospels especially – as the primary sources for information about the secret life of Jesus and his family. New Testament scholarship has struggled for two centuries to explain the complex literary relationshiop between the synoptic gospels, between the synoptics and John, and between the canonical four gospels and extra-biblical sources such as the gnostic gospels. A part of that struggle has been the recognition that each gospel has its own perspective and expresses a tradition unique to the community from which it emerged. If scholars cringe at the style, and the substance, of this most recent assault on good sense and critical method, it is because they will detect in the methods underlying the docu-drama a violent conflation of sources, not different in style from the sort of thing we normally associate with fundamentalist Christianity with its credulous approach to the Bible as an undifferentiated collection of religious truth.
As this controversy unfolds, there will perhaps be time to challenge and expose the sheer ignorance of these assumptiuons, but for the present, and because so much hinges on the names scrawled on the Talpiyot ossuaries, I propose only to deal with the “name game” being played by James Cameron, Simcha Jacobovici, and their historical “advisors.” History that is disrespectful of logic and facts, and the accumulated wisdom of two centuries of the historical critical method in biblical studies, deserves to be known by a new name. Assuming that at least some of what is being presented by the film-makers on the project corresponds to some of what has emerged from the Talpiyot tomb site, it is best to talk about the “faccidents” of the case – facts that do not fall into place without the benefit of a prior commitment to an established conclusion.
1. Faccident One: The Name Game
(a) The earliest Christian literature, that written by Paul, knows the names of none of Jesus’ family members. It is sometimes pointed out that Paul makes reference (Galatians 4.4) to Jesus having “been born of a woman, under the law,” but it is widely believed that these words are an insertion into the text of Galatians: Marcion, our earliest witness, does not know them, and as Hilgenfeld once noted, if his opponent, Tertullian, could have quoted them against Marcion, a docetist thinker, to prove the essential humanity of Jesus, he would have. We are left with the bare fact that Paul knows nothing of the human family of Jesus. He does know the names of some of Jesus’ followers, and in the same epistle uses the phrase “James the brother of Lord,” which makes it the more remarkable that he would not know of an extended family with a strong female influence operating in Jerusalem. As suggested below, Paul’s use of the term “brother” is not dispositive since he is not using it in reference to a biological relationship.
(b) Complications: The apostle named “James” in the earliest written gospel, Mark, is specifically catalogued as the son of Zebedee and brother of John (Mk 1.19) and thus not a member of the family of Jesus; a second James is named as a son of Alphaeus, along with Levi (Mk 2.1) and thus specified as being of a different family. This leaves James, the “brother” of the Lord mentioned in Mark 6.3, outside the community, and it is only by force of speculation (and conflation with Paul) that we can bring him into the fold. A skeptical eye might note, however, that Mark attributes the name “James” to three individuals in his narrative, a fact that suggests a compositor’s lack of historical information, an absence of historical memory, or both. There is good reason to think, considering the apparent overlap in names between the family of Jesus and the followers of Jesus given by Mark, that he was merely using garden variety names associated with the Jesus-tradition as he knew it. As noted below, textual force majeure will not solve this riddle.
(c) The author of the fourth gospel shows a thoroughly characteristic reserve. He, and his editors, provide no catalogue of followers of Jesus, although they give the names of most of the apostles, and once only, in the appendix, and then quite incidentally, speak of “the sons of Zebedee” (21. 2). There is nothing whatever to be said for the suggestion that the dialogue with Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross is a dialogue with Mary Magdalene, or that the agapetos or “beloved disciple” was a son of Jesus, a piece of speculation so wild in view of John’s theology that it scarcely deserves mention.
(d) Mark’s theological point of view centers on Jesus’ rejection of his family, in favor of a narrowing inner circle that includes a new kind of “brotherhood” with Peter, James and John (the sons of Zebedee), at its core. In Mark 6.3, James, Judas, Simon and Joseph (Joses) are listed as family members (cf. Matthew 13.54), while Luke omits any reference to this catalogue preferring to have the congregation cry, “Is not this Joseph’s son.” (Luke 4.22b). These differences might be explained redactionally, but this would not explain why Luke, or his editor, with his considerable admiration for the mother of Jesus, would omit her from the family list, as also seems to have been the case in an earlier version of Luke’s gospel used by Marcion. The tradition of names is so fluid that in Luke’s redaction of Mark’s resurrection account, he gives Mark’s list of “Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, Mary Magdalene, and Salome” as “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the daughter of James” as companions at the end (Lk 24.10), and in John’s gospel, the list expands to three (!) Marys: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary, her sister, also named Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene (John 19.25-26). The proliferation of Marys can also be explained as parablesis – a scribe inserting names from names previously encountered in the text in order to flesh out detail – and a paucity of verifiable historical information.
(e) The confusion over the names provided in the gospels and letters of Paul relating to Jesus, his “family,” and his circle, is a persistent one in New Testament studies. “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” not only fails to acknowledge this controversy and the literary complexities of sorting through data that is at least as charged with theological interests as with a concern for factuality, it exploits it. As a matter of simple integrity, if the gospels are being used to provide the sole literary artifact evidence for the names we can associate with Jesus and his “family” – and this is the only possible standard of evidence – then in view of the above textual aporiai, it is significant that the only family grouping of factorial significance would be Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and Joseph only in two gospels, or three if we accept Mark’s listing of Joseph as a brother of Jesus.
The conflation of names – three (+) Jameses, three Marys – suggests redactional confusion between and among evangelists as well. This does not account for nominal confusion over “James the Just”, “James the Righteous”, “James of Jerusalem”, “James Protepiscopus” (first bishop of Jerusalem) and “James the Less,” all of whom turn up in diverse Christian testimonies.
2. Faccident Two. The Historicity of James. At odd junctures in the “Lost Tomb of Jesus,” we revert to a dramatized scene of the stoning of James, partly in keeping with the director’s intention to “drive home” the James-Jesus connection forcibly through images, partly as a way of redeeming the James ossuary which has fallen into disrepute since news of its “discovery” surfaced in January 2003.
(a) The death of James is not recorded in the New Testament. For that we rely on a late 1st century work by the historian Josephus in his Antiquities (20.9). It is known by scholars, however, that Christian references in Josephus’s work are pious additions. In the case of the Jamesian reference, the hand of the Christian editor is especially badly disguised by the addition of “who is called Christ” following the use of the name “Jesus” in discussing the trial of a certain James. It is an echo of the same device used in the Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities 18.3), sometimes cited as a proof of the existence of Jesus but today normally regarded as a Christian forgery. If we purge the Christian interpolation, it is clear that the James mentioned by Josephus, who is delivered to stoning, is the brother of a significant Jewish leader and contender for the priesthood, Jesus bar Damneus, whose name appears in the same passage. In Antiquities 20.9.4, a Jesus bar Gamaliel succeeds Jesus the son of Damneus in the high priesthood. Josephus does not mention – at all – the James known from New Testament sources. The James sentenced to stoning is a completely different man. In his Jewish Wars, Josephus sees the death of Ananus – not James – as a precipitating event leading to the destruction of Jerusalem. The Christian interpolator has (bunglingly) inserted the relationship into a passage where he located the name of the wrong Jesus. It is therefore also impossible, outside Christian legend, to say anything of historical consequence about the later history of the James known to us from Paul’s letters.
(b) Complication: Paul’s language. The basis for the suggestion that James is the brother of Jesus depends on early references in Paul, especially Galatians 1.19. There is no doubt that James was regarded by Paul as a significant player in the Jerusalem community, together with Peter and John (Galatians 2.9, repeated in the legendary primacy-catalogue of Mark 9.2ff.). But his use of the word adelphos, as many scholars recognize, refers to James as a member of the brotherhood, as in Galatians 2.4; 3.15; 4.12, or as when he speaks of “false brothers” in Gal 2.4,5. James, according to Luke, uses the same language in calling Paul “brother,” (Acts 21.20) and the community the “brotherhood” (20.17).
The early Christians were renowned for their use of familial terms to describe their fellowship, a fact which led to their rituals being castigated as incestuous by pagan onlookers. In short, the use of the term “brother” to refer to James is honorific (religious) rather than genetic. Paul nowhere refers to other “Jameses” – no biological brother, no “James the Just” or “the righteous” or “the younger.” Those characters are created by necessity and fleshed out in the future, by gospel writers, and perhaps echo late first and early second century confusion over misremembered details of the historical period that Paul represents, more or less contemporaneously. In the light of Paul’s complete disregard for the “historical” Jesus, moreover, it is unimaginable that he would assert a biological relationship between James and “the Lord.”
(c) Finally, the James, Joseph, and Judas of the gospels, if not merely stock figures invented by Mark and dis-invented by Luke, play no role in the ministry of Jesus, while the unrelated son of Zebedee does. To turn Mark’s James into the head of the Jerusalem community after the death of Jesus, one would have to imagine that the James of the family who rejects Jesus (Mark 3.31) and is rejected in turn, repents of his action and joins the apostles, in Jerusalem, at some point following the death of Jesus, and rises to a position of prominence. While this scenario is not impossible, parsimony dictates that it is not likely. Mark’s theology implies that the scenario in chapter six is a fictional one designed to subordinate ephemeral family relations to the needs the wider community – the “true brotherhood” of believers.
The James who is head of the church in Jerusalem is not a biological brother of Jesus. Later but inconsistent gospel references to James are muddled reminiscences based on the more prominent James of the Pauline tradition.
(3) Faccident 3: The Identity of Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is one of multiple Marys in the gospels, and never listed as a member of a family group.
It is unnecessary to go into detail about her role in the “family” of Jesus. That association is rooted in commercial interests, based on modern fiction and poorly understood ancient sources.
(a) The obvious points are that Mary is not listed as a relative of Jesus in the sole passage in Mark that gives the names of Jesus’ hypothetical family (Mark 6.1.). Mitochondrial DNA tests on ossuaries belonging to Jews of the Herodian period seem a far-fetched way to prove a fact attested in the gospels, that Jesus and Mary were not related. The suggestion that she is the “wife” of Jesus goes beyond anything given even in apocryphal and gnostic sources, where she enjoyed an expanded reputation for reasons grounded not in history but in gnostic theosophy.
(b) This in itself is not insignificant however, because Mary Magdalene is a vivid character in Christian imagination, lore, and in heresy. Her “extrapolated” importance points to the priority of the community over the family in the telling of the gospel story. In other words, “Mary Magdalene’s” significance emerges out of the gospels’ focus on the followers of Jesus and the unimportance attached to real-life family relationships, the very opposite of the significance asserted for her in the present controversy.
(c) She is especially important in two contexts: As a feminine prototype of discipleship, and as a “witness” of the resurrection of Jesus. It is wrongly supposed that she is named as the woman accused of adultery in the floating tradition associated with John 7.53-8.11, or following Luke 21.28, but is missing completely from some manuscripts. The woman is anonymous.
It is also wrongly assumed that she is the “immoral” woman who washes Jesus’ feet in Luke 7.37ff. That woman also is unnamed. In the prototype of this story in Mark 14.3-6, the woman who anoints Jesus’ head with oil is also unnamed by the synoptic writers, and is a resident of Bethany. It is unlikely that someone remembered as “Mary Magdalene” would be the same as Mary of Bethany, known from John’s gospel as the sister of Lazarus (Jn 12.1-8).
(d) This means that the sole reference to Mary Magdalene outside the resurrection tradition is a passage in Luke 8.1-3 where she is listed as “Mary called Magdalene,” a woman exorcised by Jesus, who is traveling with other women – including Joanna and Susanna. Luke finds a role for Joanna in his resurrection narrative as well (24.10), possibly to appeal to the wives of wealthy patrons who have commissioned his gospel.
(e) In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene has become the primary female witness to the resurrection (John 20-1-8), and the intimate dialogue between the weeping Mary and the risen Christ at the site of the tomb in unique to the fourth gospel. Jesus’ resurrection appearance to her before the male apostles, while a piece of Christian fiction, was a powerful incentive to her further career in Christian literature. She appears therefore as a leading character in a variety of gnostic texts: In The Dialogue of the Savior (2nd century?), she assists Jesus in explaining the hidden meaning of the parable of the mustard seed in characteristically gnostic terms; in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (late 2nd century), she is called by Peter the one with the key of the Savior’s knowledge (gnosis) and the one loved by the savior more than males (a fundamental text in the eroticization of the relationship between Mary and Jesus); in the Gospel of Thomas (2nd century), which may be related to the traditions embedded in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Jesus offers to “make her male” since the female spirit cannot resemble that of the father.
(f) In the texts touted by the filmmakers responsible for the “Lost Tomb of Jesus,” the Gospel of Philip, dating from the 4 th or 5th century and trading on the confusion of Mary’s in the gospels, she is numbered among a “trinity” of Marys including the mother of Jesus and the sister of his mother, also known as Mary. In the text, she represents Sophia or wisdom, and Jesus, in symbolic but erotic language, is accused of “kissing her on the mouth” by disgruntled apostles, who equally symbolically represent their inadequate search for divine gnosis. In the Pistis Sophia (late 3rd, 4th century), in language skimmed from Luke 1.36-49, she is called “blessed beyond all women of the earth.because she shall be the pleroma of pleromas.” In this scene, she plays the part of a gnostic Virgin Mary of the Magnificat, prostrating herself submissively at Jesus’ feet. While this skims the surface, the following curriculum vitae is clear enough:
(e) From inconspicuous beginnings in Mark’s gospel (15.40, 16.1; 16.9), Mary Magdalene’s legend grows sufficiently by the 90′s of the first century that she becomes the beneficiary of a private dialogue with the risen Jesus in the Gospel of John. Based on the high gnostic evaluation of the risen Christ, the dialogue is formative for her exaggerated importance in gnostic circles from the late second century onward. In this role, she is of symbolic importance only.
(f) There is nothing of historical value in these sources, just as there may be little of historical value in the canonical sources upon which they are based. But in the (seemingly) most explicit of the gnostic sources, the Gospel of Philip, reputable scholars have fallen into the trap of searching for historical references to a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. What makes such a connection preposterous is Gnosticism itself: Gnostic dualism, with its emphasis on a world-denying asceticism and chastity, makes any suggestion that a “physical” relationship is being posited for Jesus and Mary Magdalene theologically absurd within the system from which the texts emerge. It is only by literalizing late sources, such as the Gospel of Philip, at the expense of the propagandistic Gnosticism they represent, that one can begin to suggest a physical relationship between the two protagonists.
(g) An intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is based on the legendizing and the Gnosticizing of a single passage in the canonical gospel least sympathetic to this-worldly relationships, one which actually trivializes her human significance as a witness to the resurrection and emphasizes the non-physicality of the risen Christ (John 20.17) and the unimportance of human relationships. With Thomas, also a favorite of gnostic speculation, she becomes a witness to the divine gnosis, enfigured in Jesus as the logos of God – not a potential bride.
Conclusions:
The jigsaw of names and their conflicting theological contexts is fatal to the filmmakers’ approach to the Talpiyot tomb inscriptions. Far from representing a univocal tradition concerning Jesus’ “family” the evidence suggests a positive disregard for family relationships, ignorance and confusion over names, and theological situations which make the family configuration suggested for these ossuaries impossible to accept:
1. In the earliest literature, that produced by Paul, the family of Jesus is unknown. References to James as the “brother” of Jesus in Paul’s writings must be explained in terms of the familial usage adopted by the early Christians themselves.
2. Outside the New Testament, there are no early references to the family of Jesus, the sole candidate for such references, the work of Josephus, being forged.
3. The gospel writers beginning with Mark convey confusion or ignorance about family names. In the sole passage where names are given in sequence (Mark 6.3) three are lifted from the catalogue of apostles and one is the name later assigned to the father of Jesus, about whom Mark is otherwise silent. In a passage not repeated by Matthew and Luke, Mark records another “family” tradition in which the brothers (and mother) are unnamed. (5.31-32). John knows nothing of an extended family of Jesus, replacing the mother of Jesus mentioned (nameless) in John (2.5) with a post-familial and quasi-gnostic tradition of Mary Magdalene at the tomb (John 20.1ff.). John is ultimately confused about the proliferation of “Mary-names” (19.25-6), making both the name of the mother of Jesus and her sister “Mary.”
4. The later tradition concerning Mary Magdalene is historically vacuous and the possibility that she was invented to counter Jewish aspersions against the chastity of Mary the mother of Jesus cannot be dismissed out of hand. In Jewish tradition, the mother of Jesus is known as a harlot, a “dresser of women’s hair,” and is thus indistinguishable from Mary Magdalene: “Did not Ben Stada (Yeshu = Jesus) bring spells from Egypt in a cut on his flesh?” They replied, ‘He was a fool and one does not prove anything from a fool.’ Ben Stada is Ben Pandira. Rabbi Hisda [a Babylonian teacher of the third century] said, “The husband was Stada, the paramour was Pandira.” The husband was Pappos ben Jehudah; the mother was Stada. The mother was Miriam [Mary], the dresser of women’s hair – as we say in Pumbeditha [a Babylonian town where there was a famous rabbinical college], “Such a one has been false to her husband” [Shaddath 104b]. The phrase “Miriam m’gadella nashaia” (an aspsersive for the mother of Jesus) may indicate the origins of a bitter debate between Jews and Christians over the chastity of Jesus’ mother and the apologetic origins of the “second Mary.” The spelling of the name “Miriamne” or Miriamne (‘e) Mara is a red herring in the recent documentary. Mary Magdalene is never referred to in any source as the latter, and the former is widely attested as a name in Hellenistic Judaism, especially in the writings of Josephus.
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Published: May 15, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: James Ossuary : Jesus Project : Lost Tomb of Jesus : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Talpiyot ..
2 Responses to “The Jesus Tomb Debacle: RIP”
.
ROO BOOKAROO
August 26, 2012 at 7:01 am
Excellent and authoritative article. Most erudite.
The link for ” In my initial preview of the program,” does not work any more. Can this “initial preview” be accessed somewhere else online?
Thanks for the info.
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Robert Smythe
May 12, 2013 at 10:27 am
The mythological death of the imaginary James (Jacob) appeared in a lot of old documents showing how the gullible ancients persistently transmitted this story, either erroneously believing it to be “fact”, while others were participating in a conspiracy that deliberately spread forgeries.
Josephus Antiquities
Eusebius’ Church History quoting Clement and Hegissipus
Epiphanius Against Heresies
Nag Hamadi collection of Books: Apocalypse of James 1 and 2, Apocryphon of James
Clementine Recognitions 1.7.
The Protevangelium of James (the death of Zacharia looks like a paraphrase of the death of James found in other accounts)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Thirty Theses: Plausible Propositions for the Existence of a Historical Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann
Schweitzer
Thirty Theses: Plausible Propositions for the Existence of a Historical Jesus*
1. The primary data for the beginning of Christianity are the documents of the New Testament.
2. Secondary data including apocryphal and Gnostic sources and testimonia are primarily valuable for the reconstruction of the growth of the Christian movement
3. The gospels are about the life of a man called Jesus of Nazareth
4. Their probable genesis before the end of the first century is strong support for the basic historicity of the events they portray.
5. Jewish polemical sources do not challenge the historicity of the life of Jesus, rather his messiahship and resurrection.
6. The silence of classical writers concerning Christianity is explained by the inconspicuous nature of Christianity in the first two centuries of its existence.
7. The existence of interpolations in the work of non-Christian writers such as Josephus expresses an interest in enhancing the historicity of characters portrayed in the gospels and cannot be used to “prove” the deceit of gospel writers of an earlier generation.
8. The silence of classical writers with respect to Jesus cannot be used as an argument against the historicity of the gospels.
9. The ridicule of later pagan critics of Christianity does not include the premise that Jesus did not exist. Conversely, all pagan critics assumed the historical existence of Jesus.
10. The fact that early Christians worshiped Jesus [ap. Pliny jr.] does not suggest they denied his historicity.
11. There is little of purely belletristic interest or value in the gospels.
12. Compared to known examples of Roman fiction and legend the gospels lack the artifice and design of purely literary work.
13. Compared to known examples of “philosophical biography” such as that of Philostratus, the gospels show marked resemblance of style and purpose to philosophical biography
14. Pagan critics of the gospels recognized the genre of the gospels as being comparable to philosophical biography, viz., Apollonius of Tyana.
15. The existence of a “spiritualized” gospel attributed to John does not diminish the value of the synoptics, especially as the fourth gospel is clear about its apologetic motive.
16. The existence of myth and miracle in the gospels does not diminish the historical framework of the gospel story.
17. The presence of healing stories and magic does not lessen the historicity of the subject of the gospels.
18. The gospels conform to beliefs, expectations and practices typical of the community from which they arose and beliefs known to exist within Hellenistic Judaism and the larger Roman world
19. The gospels are the kind of literature we would expect of a time and culture that valued myth, miracle and the improbable.
20. It would be more extraordinary for the gospels not to reflect the religious-supernaturalist worldview of its writers and auditors than to reflect the worldview they do.
21. The gospels’ position towards the miraculous, the divine, and the supernatural reflects views common in the ancient historians whose essential historical value we acknowledge (e.g., Herodotus on the Battle of Salamis). Conformability is a crucial argument in favour of the historicity of the gospels.
22. The stories of cult gods, ranging from Dionysus to Mithras to Asclepius, bear only a superficial resemblance to the story of Jesus
23. The selection of the canonical gospels was based on criteria that included the element of plausibility and historicity. This can be judged on the basis of patristic testimony and more directly from the nature of the excluded material.
24. Central to the historicity was the information that Jesus had been crucified in the time of Pontius Pilate. The narrative of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus represents the earliest stratum of historical interest and probably the oldest stratum of gospel development.
25. The redaction of the gospel traditions from older sources represent only the tendencies of individual writers and do not constitute a coherent argument against the essential historicity of the Jesus tradition.
26. The teaching of Jesus in the synoptic sources is not extraordinary. The tendency over time to make it extraordinary, as in the discourses of the fourth gospel, is evidence in favor of the historicity of the earlier tradition.
27. The teaching of Jesus without theological gloss is conformable to the teaching of preachers known to exist in the first and second century AD.
28. The character of Jesus of Nazareth is not extraordinary but typical of his time and context.
29. The ordinariness of Jesus is presented plausibly and directly in the synoptic traditions about him. The Christological context of this portrayal does not weaken the historical description.
30. As a statement of belief, the resurrection is not a statement of something that happened to the historical Jesus but a statement of what was believed to happen to him. The existence of the resurrection tradition, which can be traced by literary evolution from Mark to John, is not a proof of the non-historicity of the pre-resurrection tradition.
————————
*Update on comments so far: If you respond to these theses, do a bit of work and find out what a thesis is and how propositions can be argued. A few have written with the misconception that these bald controversial statements are “amputated arguments” rather than debating points. No time for that kind of thing. Also, I suggest you read the statements carefully, since as far as I can tell none is eo ipso false: e.g., the existence of a written description of an event whose social effects are known is support for historicity, if not accuracy. It is not analogous to say that stories about Herakles (eg) also produce social effects since it is not asserted that Herakles (or Dionysus) founded movements. It is also inaccurate that “the pagan critics of Christianity assumed the historicity of Dionysus…et al.” (re thesis 9): they did not, and one at least, Julian, regards the Greek stories as literally implausible. No points for misinformation, therefore.
I provide the following for entertainment, serious but not mordant discussion, debate, and argumentation (above all, argumentation). Please keep your argument to the proposition, rather than, “Haven’t you read,| or “Surely you haven’t considered…” Discussion. Also, please post your comments to this page and not to “About.” As the above relate to work being done by The Jesus Project, I would welcome especially additional premises or propositions (or variants) not listed above.jc
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Published: May 20, 2009
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Tags: historical jesus : Jesus Project : Jesus Seminar : myth theory : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Radical Theology ..
5 Responses to “Thirty Theses: Plausible Propositions for the Existence of a Historical Jesus”
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Steven Carr
May 21, 2009 at 10:53 am
Another thesis….
The abscence in any church records in the first century , outside the Gospels or Acts 1, of any mention of anybody seeing or hearing of Lazarus, Bartimaeus, Joseph of Arimathea, Judas,Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, Nicodemus, Jairus, Martha, the other Mary, the Virgin Mary, the other brothers of Jesus, Simon of Cyrene, etc can be explained by all of those people having no further involvement with any Christians.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2009 at 4:56 am
Maybe, or given their social status what reason would there be to commemorate them and for whose benefit? Another point, I do not say that the argument for historicity is a claim about accuracy of detail; there would be a stronger reason to remember the carriers of tradition than the people who form part of the earliest mission, but surely what you say is important for suggesting that a tacit division is made between these “apostolic carriers”–Paul and Acts being the primary evidence–and the dramatis personae of the gospels who seem to have immediate historical relevance for the mission of Jesus. Nicely played!
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nmonteiro
May 29, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Another thesis:
“The Gospels were problably written between the First and Second Jewish War. In the first and early second century AD, there were many revolts caused by self proclaimed “Kings of the Jews”. In that same time period, christians were persecuted and christianity was an illegal cult. In fact, Aristides, Quadratus, Justin, Melito, Appolinaris, and others, wrote to emperor of the day in order to prove that christians were loyal, peaceful and productive citizens of the empire. Why, under such circumstances, would christians invent a crucified messiah, put to death as a political criminal, by roman authorities, under charge of high treason? The most problable view seems to be that Jesus really existed, was really put to death by crucifixion, was found guilty (rightly or wrongly) of high treason for claiming to be the King of the Jews, and such things were well known (and embarassing) facts that christians had to explain.”
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rjosephhoffmann
May 29, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I like it.
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steph
August 11, 2010 at 3:11 am
I like every single thesis. It’s a superb post (and unlike the gospels, it’s belletristic).
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
One God, No Pepper, Hold the Mayo…
by rjosephhoffmann
The major development in polling about religion since mid-decade when Baylor 2006 appeared was the 2010 Pew Forum Poll on Religious Knowledge and the same organization’s survey of religious change in America.
Pew 2010 (The Religious Landscape Survey) had a few surprises: (1) that 1/4 of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised; (2) that the number of people who claim to be unaffiliated with any particular faith now stands at 16%, 1.6% of whom are atheists; 2.4 agnostic; and 12.1 uninterested in the question but “Nothing in particular”; (4) that for the first time in history America is on the verge of becoming a Protestant-minority country, with barely 51% of Americans being members of protestant denominations.
While Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses (about a 7% drop), immigration from predominantly Catholic countries has kept Catholicism at about 24% of the religious population.
Other survey highlights: Men are more likely than women to declare no religious affiliation (24% against 13%); Muslims and Mormons have the largest families; and 50% of Hindus, 34% of Jews and 25% of Buddhists have received postgraduate education. The religion with the lowest retention rate, at 37%, is the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
When it comes to religious literacy, Americans are “challenged” in a number of ways:
Fewer than half (47%) knew that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, only 27% knew that Islam is the dominant faith in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. Less than 25% knew that it is permissible to use the Bible as literature in a classroom, and (the shocker) 45% of Catholics surveyed could not answer a question correctly about their Church’s belief about the Eucharist (i.e., the doctrine of the “real presence“).
In the rankings, atheists took away the trophy with 20.9 of 32 questions answered correctly, followed by Jews and Mormons. Catholics and Mainline Protestants were tied with a whopping 50% (do I see a big red F?) of correct responses.
Balanced against the fact that America remains the largest and busiest religious restaurant in the world, you’d expect more people would want to know a little more about the menu. As always, however, America is full of surprises!
Following is a review of Baylor 2006, which originally appeared in Free Inquiry magazine,
I am an enortinmous fan of religion polls. I used to imagine pollsters as sleuths in trench coats, pulling palm-sized ring notebooks from their pockets and asking distracted bystanders whether God gives meaning and purpose to their lives-or something else, like maybe a good Caesar salad. We all know that in the Land of the Free, God gives meaning and purpose to around 90 percent of American lives, or at least that is the percentage advanced by the Baylor Religion Survey (September 2006) as the number who say they believe in God.
Recent polls conducted (infrequently) in the United Kingdom suggest that only 23 percent of Britain’s brood believe in God, and only 7 percent believe that the Bible is the word of God. That makes the American religious scene endlessly fascinating and completely confusing. So put away your ideas about pollsters in trench coats (I know I have) and ask yourself, “Who is asking the questions?” and “What do the answers really tell us about God in America?”
Flash back to the unanointed first pollster of American religion, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose long essay, Democracy in America, is increasingly cited by religious conservatives as proof that religion, of a certain sort, has always been good for America. Tocqueville argued in his 1835 work that the first political institution of American democracy is religion. His thesis, to paraphrase liberally, went something like this: the premises of secular materialism do not sustain democracy but undermine it, while the premises of Judaism and Christianity lead to democracy, uplift it, carry it over its inherent weaknesses, and sustain it.
Impressive as this might sound, it is difficult to find another political thesis with so much wrong about it. To be blunt, de Tocqueville could not anticipate the rise of religious movements so wedded to ignorance and out of step with the fundamental principles of both aristocracy and enlightened (Jeffersonian) democracy that they would undercut government in a way that even the rawest and most unrefined democratic passions never could. Nonetheless, the French observer joins two ideas that have remained central to all political estimates of American religion: in the absence of high culture, which, according to him and other nineteenth-century European travelers, America lacked and would always lack, religion performs a “civilizing function.” It reduces passion. It imposes by doctrine or moral fiat what might be achieved by reason in more enlightened parts of the world.
Tocqueville,first critical observer of American religion
And how are we doing religiously almost two centuries after de Tocqueville put down his pen?
The Baylor Survey provides some interesting and perplexing answers. First, it comes from Baylor, the flagship of Southern Baptist theological conservatism, and was funded by the Templeton Foundation, whose stated purpose is “to encourage a fresh appreciation of the critical importance-for all peoples and cultures-of the moral and spiritual dimensions of life.” Embracing that pious assumption greedily, the research group consisted of seven team members, including Rodney Stark, a Baylor faculty member, whose studies of American religion in the 1960s provided a model for what the team claims “is the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted”–by which they mean 1,721 respondents, mixed-mode sampling (telephone and self-administered mail surveys), and plans for “additional waves . . . with rotating topical modules every other year.”
Indeed, the study is so “extensive” that cherry-picking topics is the only way to do it the injustice it deserves–so let me focus on the most specious parts of the effort, leaving aside those that are merely uninformative.
According to Baylor, 86.5 percent of evangelical Protestants have “no doubt that God exists” (compare: 74.8 percent of Catholics and 42.9 percent of Jews). The real interest here is the sizeable number (13.5 percent) of evangelicals who appear to entertain doubts about God’s existence–not normally a trait one associates with Bible believers and a discovery that poses serious questions about the doubt-index for related doctrines. For example, 94.4 percent of evangelicals believe that Jesus is the son of God, 11 percent higher than those who have no doubts about God’s existence (compare that with 84.9 percent of Catholics and a mysterious–or deaf–9.6 percent of Jews).
The prospect that Jesus was a fictional character, by the way, is appealing to 13.7 percent of those described as “unaffiliated” but to almost no one else.
Almost 50 percent (47.8) of evangelicals believe the Bible is literally true. Presumably, no one defined the term literally or the number might be different. Literally outside the evangelical tradition has been defined as “theologically,” “spiritually,” “verbally,” “historically,” and “indubitably,” and, without narrowing those choices, it is difficult to know how to gauge the relevance of this response. But there is one interesting aside: despite the emphasis on Bible study invoked in the afterglow of Vatican II, only 11.8 percent of Catholics see the Bible as “literally” true. Catholics, apparently, see only bingo and what the pope says as literally true. Some 82.3 percent of those classified as “unaffiliated” see it as a collection of ancient history and legend.
Confused by the surprisingly large number of evangelicals who do not seem to accept the doctrine of plenary literal inspiration (50 percent), or have no idea what the question meant, I turned to the issue of religious labels–which, in fact, should be placed before the beliefs-survey, as it defines the terms used in the assessment. But confusion is again at hand. First, we are told, in a footnote, that respondents were only required to answer “Yes” or “No” to each label, that categories were not mutually exclusive, and that therefore the reported percentages do not add up to 100 percent.
Fair enough, say I, we live in a world where many things are less than 100%. But statistical confusion still reigns: 47.2 percent of respondents described themselves as “Bible-believing” when (a) only 17.6 percent described themselves as theologically conservative and (b) only 14.9 percent described themselves as evangelical. In the first place, Bible believing is a term with currency unique to religious conservatives (not many of those 11 percent of Catholic biblical literalists would choose it, for example) and the menu of choices beyond it-”born-again,” “moral majority,” “seeker,” “religious right,” “Fundamentalist,” “Charismatic,” “Pentecostal”–seems pulled from the same Baptist hat. If the point of the menu was to express the deep structure of Protestant religious conservatism, its effect is to sideline other forms of Christian and religious commitment that do not fit the assumptions of the surveyors: “Would you describe yourself as Born-again, Bible-believing, or a little of both?”
What Flavor God: Distant or Critical?
Baylor assures us that “religious affiliation does not exist in isolation from belief and behavior.” It is not clear whether this should be translated as cause and effect or as bacon and eggs. In a way, that is the least problematical aspect of this section of the survey. The more troublesome issue is the vivisection of God into four “types”: authoritarian (angers easily, punishes harshly); benevolent (angers slowly, forgives easily); critical (God kind of is and kind of isn’t interested in the world); or distant (like the deus otiosus of philosophy, God is either asleep at the wheel or on permanent sabbatical and basically happy with the way things turned out). This quadruplex deity (trinity plus one?) is expressed in various social and political behaviors: conservatives like an authoritarian God; Catholics and mainline Protestants tend toward the “distant” view. People along the eastern coast of the United States tend to believe in a critical God, and southerners in an authoritarian God. Among those who choose none of the above, atheists are said to account for 5.2 percent of the sample. (Of the 10.8 percent of respondents who claimed no religious affiliation, 40 percent are atheists).
Baylor’s September 2006 survey actually dampens the percentage of unaffiliated from a previous benchmark of 14 percent to just under 11 percent, offering this caveat: “Researchers have previously over-counted the religiously unaffiliated by 10 million Americans and may have overlooked as many Americans who are actually affiliated with Evangelical congregations and denominations.” One refrains from attributing this undercount, if real, to the slipshod way of identifying evangelicals, already discussed. But wait: why the correlation between “affiliation” and “Evangelical affiliation”? To put it more directly, why not ask the whole sample about the authority of the pope or the assumption of the Virgin? Answer: because Bible belief is considered “normative,” while these other beliefs are thought of as “particular.” Effect: Christianity is defined in terms of the beliefs of the Protestant majority, with the Bible at the center, a recipe for disaster in achieving a deep profile of religious belief in a complex religious (and irreligious) society.
The tacit assumption throughout is that American religion is primarily about deviations from the norm of white, conservative-evangelical Protestantism. The upshot of this, reinforced methodologically, is that unbelief can be treated as an aberration of the norm, rather like the under-analyzed 4 percent “Other” category that includes a dog’s breakfast consisting of Mormons, Hindus, Muslims, Greek Orthodox, and Unitarians.
The Parson Thwackum Factor
We were taught in high school that every good book review should include not a rehashing of the plot but an assessment of the work as a whole. Here is my assessment of Baylor 2006.
The study is deficient in uncountable ways but chiefly at a level that affects its claim to be “the most extensive survey of religion ever conducted.” Its evangelical bias is not just implied in the mechanics of the survey–the choice of topics to be surveyed and the framing of questions–but in the often-preposterous techniques surveyors employed to relate God to social and religious behaviors.
Is it surprising, for example, that 90 percent of those who believe in a fascist God want prayer in schools, while only 47 percent of those who believe in a “distant” god want the same thing? Indeed, anomalies in Table 10 alone (“The Four Gods and the Role of Government“) raise significant issues about whether the respondents understood which God on the ballot to vote for. If the study is all but useless, it is still useful in one way: it calls attention to the recurrent inability of all such surveys to do justice to unbelieving and pluralist-religious minorities. There is something mildly cloying and a little revealing about the following setup on page 8 of the survey. To quote:
“Barely one in ten Americans is NOT [sic] affiliated with a congregation, denomination or other religious group. . . . Fewer than five percent of the US population claims a faith outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream. . . . [But] fully a third of Americans, roughly 100 million people, are Evangelical Protestants by affiliation.”
As Case Western professor Brent Plate mused after looking at Baylor 2006, “If I were a Jain and received this survey to complete, I might not be very interested in filling in the boxes and returning it.” How much less an atheist or secular humanist!
Baylor’s researchers share the view of Fielding’s Parson Thwackum, who responds to a question about his definition of religion as follows: “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.” Just substitute “Baptist Church” at the close of the last sentence: You get the idea.
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Published: May 27, 2009
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Tags: agnostics : atheists : Baylor religion poll : Baylor Religion Poll 2006 : Catholic Church : God : Judaism : Pew Religious Landscape Survey 2010 : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion polls : religion survey : religious beliefs : religious literacy ..
One Response to “One God, No Pepper, Hold the Mayo…”
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steph
May 11, 2011 at 10:51 am
Nice and refreshing to read this again and be reminded of the origins too. Polls are interesting, confusing and not very accurate. They’re always fun to analyse but it’s probably not advisable to take them very seriously. We can’t be sure if one person’s response would be the same tomorrow, or even if they know exactly how to respond, or exactly what they think. We can’t even be sure if they’re being entirely honest. And personally I leave the question blank for a number of reasons.
With a caveat to concede that it may not be the same in America, I was interested in an analysis done in New Zealand a few years ago. The conclusion was that most of the people who put ‘Christian’ didn’t believe anything at all. The reasons for identifying as ‘Christian’ varied. Some genuinely considered themselves Christian merely because they were christened in a church, while they’d never really believed in anything throughout their lives or belonged to any church. Some considered themselves Christians because ‘Christians’ around them seemed pretty safe people. Some people preferred Christian because they didn’t want to be associated with ‘atheism’ as popularly understood.
Of course I’ll never forget the blushing face of a particular Tyndale House friend. Over drinks at a conference I quizzed him on the virgin birth. “Do you really believe it?” He visibly squirmed and said ‘aahhhh’ but couldn’t say “no” because he was committed to a statement of faith, but he couldn’t say “yes” because I’m pretty jolly well convinced he knew it wasn’t true.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Purity and Danger: The View from Pakistan*
by rjosephhoffmann
Tpakistan_longhe somewhat mysterious title of this offering can be traced to a book written by the anthropologist Mary Douglas in 1966. The equally mysterious subtitle of the book was “an exploration of the concepts of pollution and taboo”– which in anthrospeak means the customs adopted by groups and societies that create a sense of wellbeing and general healthfulness, as opposed to practices that lead to a feeling of general despair and corruption—“sin” in religious terms. Douglas’s own situation as a Catholic in 1940’s Oxford, a woman academic in the Congo, an independent voice in an age of anthropological orthodoxy (centering on the work of Robertson Smith and Sir James Frazer)—created her interest in looking at the structure of societies, what rituals reinforced their identity, and what practices created anxiety, marginalization and a sense of threat. Tempted to believe, as she began to ponder these things, that “pollution” is a problem for primitive societies and not for ours, she came gradually to realize several things about modernity:
1. In the study of religion, evolutionary approaches to behavior (a la Frazer) are mistaken; we do not progress by stages from magic (primitive) to religion (less primitive) and to science (fully modern) as degrees of knowledge and sophistication.
2. Ritual is not an exclusive trademark of “primitive” societies; social rituals create a reality which may or may not be religious but which cannot be sustained without it: “Money is only an extreme and specialized form of ritual.”
3. Early and modern cultures, religious and otherwise, create ways to protect their system of ritual from skepticism (or contradiction), for example, by asking the community to believe in a “Them” who are planning to destroy the community, or telling the community that its lack of success is a trial, the passing of which will restore the community to health or grace.
Douglas found examples of these ritual attributes in societies stretching as far back as ancient Israel (her chapter on the origins of the “abominations” –ritual taboos– listed in the book of Leviticus stands is a classic in its own right) to the wealth/poverty divide of modern society. After reading her, you will never think of the words “us” and “them” in quite the same way, and you will never feel comfortable talking about ”inferior” cultures and primitive religion.
Which brings me, quite literally, to Pakistan. In December 2008 I was appointed Visiting Professor of History at LUMS, the Lahore University of Management Sciences, sometimes seen as a kind of hybrid Harvard and MIT of South Asia. The rankings bear out the legend. LUMS faculty are trained at the leading research universities in the world, the tone is studiously Ivy-Oxbridge, and in recent years the privately endowed institution, despite all odds and economic downturns, has managed to attract prominent Pakistanis away from senior positions in the UK and US as well as a respectable number of international faculty. LUMS symbolizes for its over-achieving students what a certain segment of Pakistanis want to be: modern, slightly if not wholly secular (on the Turkish model), well-spoken, business savvy, scientifically and socially current, and at least competitive with the traditional “enemy” to the south, India, whose ancient heritage overlaps with Pakistan’s own story.
The word heard most often in progressive circles like this is “Identity” and the sentiment I hear voiced most often by ordinary Pakistanis is that the promise of Pakistan at the time of independence (partition from India in 1947), whosever it was to keep, has not been kept. The local English medium TV station, suggestively named Dawn TV, uses the motto “Restore the Identity.” The sense that something has been lost, or squandered is a part of every conversation. Only the religious zealots feel that there is nothing to be recaptured since for them a static, timeless ideology rather than space, history and culture define what identity means. It is sufficient for them to label any activity of which they do not approve, including cricket and the education of women, as Unislamic. Whatever other motives fuel the seemingly unstoppable Taliban in their quest for power and dominion, the quest for purity and the fear of contamination from Unislamic enemies is prevalent.
The American view of Pakistan, to the extent Americans pay attention to anything beyond their continental borders, has been self-referring. Estimates range from the country being a failing (even a failed) state, a haven for terrorists, or a potentially indispensable ally in the war on “terror.” Except for military personnel perched on the border with Afghanistan in the Northwest tribal Frontier, a few stray diplomats and the odd (mainly European or Canadian) academic visitor or thrill-seeker, Pakistan is not bustling with tourists. The recent hotel blasts in Islamabad and Peshawar were designed to underscore the contempt for strangers that that religious zealots instinctively feel.
To the chagrin of its intellectuals and mainstream policy-makers, Pakistan has been made a “them” in global political terms. Since September 11, 2001 it has been a reluctant but not a natural ally of the United States, reluctant in the same way any state with a rich cultural legacy and independent streak would be hesitant to find its validity in its value as a buffer zone between religious lunacy and secular democracy.
Not that Pakistan’s troubled history hasn’t contributed to its in-between-ness. Its story is now a sixty year history of not coming together, a period equivalent in historical terms to the end of the American War of Independence in 1783 and the presidency of James Knox Polk. The analogy while completely inappropriate is made even more inexact because the contradictions, paradoxes and contrarieties of Pakistan society have now become ritualized, defining features of a country waiting to be born but still somehow only able to evince the pangs of labor. But the analogy is still a nagging one because post-Revolutionary America while still dominated by English values and Christian virtues like hard work and frugality was already becoming pluralized while Pakistan began its life as a nation that placed a premium on its Islamic identity, on depluralization, a place where Muslims could be safe from the predations of religious majorities to the east. Pakistan in one sense is a postcolonial concoction: the name is an acronym of its original areas, Punjab, Afghania (Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan) but the acronym had its own appeal: in Urdu the name means “land of the pure.”
In a country that within a period of twelve weeks since my arrival saw an independent judiciary restored by impressive civil action on the streets of Lahore, Sri Lankan cricketers assaulted by gunmen for reasons mired in uncertainty and confusion, and the Government’s surrender, then subsequent recapture of the Swat Valley, once Pakistan’s premier tourist destination (“the Switzerland of Pakistan with its high mountains, green meadows, and clear lakes,” the old brochures read) to the forces of the radical operator Maulana Fazlullah—anything is possible.
As I write that last sentence, I can’t help thinking how differently it would scan if we applied it to the generally optimistic view that North Americans and Europeans have of the future: “Anything is possible” is usually taken to mean that even things that aren’t quite right will improve with a little time, a bit of imagination, luck, and effort.
In the case of Pakistan, the phrase means “Who knows?” The reality of a troubled history, the growth of religious fanaticism in society and education, fundamental disagreements over whether concession and containment will appease or only tantalize the Pure into broader escapades and adventures. No one knows, least of all the experts. Beyond all this, it is relatively easy for all Pakistanis to point a finger of blame outward toward former colonial masters, toward its manipulation by outsiders during the cold war, at India, at the Soviet Union, at the United States, at homegrown but ideologically foreign fanatics like the Taliban. The tendency until very recently has been for the West, in particular, to say roll up your sleeves and save yourselves.
But now even the West is beginning to realize how disproportionate a burden Pakistan has had to share in the power mongering of the last sixty years, and how the slogans of the war on terror breathe a sordid promise of more of the same.
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Published: June 10, 2009
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One Response to “Purity and Danger: The View from Pakistan*”
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steph
August 26, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Excellent post, Mary Douglas and Pakistan. Very sad indeed -”more of the same” – que faire?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
On the “Affirmations of the New Skepticism”
by rjosephhoffmann
crucifixion2Without skepticism we might never have invented the umbrella, or the compass. After all, commonsense observations about storm-clouds and your best friend’s sense of direction make the tools of precaution and measurement possible.
The spirit of curiosity and doubt probably explains many inventions that have made human life more bearable, the world more manageable—at least more intelligible—ranging from telescopes that tell us about the far flung corners of the uncornered universe and microscopes that tell us there are biological realities we can’t see at all without assistance.
There is a common misunderstanding that “skepticism” is something new, a turn of mind that took shape during the Enlightenment after the long dark sleep of religion and superstition. Even well-educated women and men sometimes think this way, usually pointing to the religious texts and creation stories of our literary infancy as proof that doubt is a skill that evolved over time. These same people know that while human discovery is a recent story, human intelligence has been around for a long time and that we would not have got very far in the world without doubt. Just as something in the primal slime saw its future on dry land, someone in a cave must have imagined a happy life in a semi-detached in Wantage or a split-level in Teaneck.
But to be fair to our predecessors. Ancient creation stories weren’t based on stupidity but on early attempts to reconcile the existence of the seen world with known patterns of causation: if shoes are made and human beings are, in some sense, made, then the world must have come to be in a similar fashion. It doesn’t really matter whether you call it creation or “generation.” The important thing is that human beings asked the question “What caused this?” and then invented the stories that answered it. We still do, only our stories are better because our observations are different and the causes are better understood. Frightful thought: doubt leads both to Genesis and to Steven Hawking.
The Big Questions are often Why questions: Why something rather than nothing? Why this universe and not some differently arranged one? Why intelligent life as opposed to mere bacterial or not-quite-so intelligent animal life? Some early skeptics doubted the existence of the natural world, a question still considered au courant in Descartes day. Even the ancients who did not doubt everything, most particularly the reliability of knowledge, could doubt that the world of the senses provided insight into the real world–recall those Eleatic philosophers like Thales and Heraclitus, for example, who seemed to believe that what we get is not what we see. I am still enthralled by Democritus’ ideas about the nature of the unseen atom, of stoic ideas about creation and conflagration, and Lucretius’ willingness to turn some of it into—of all things—a poem.
Some questions are Why not questions. Why not a thousand inhabited planets in this galaxy? Why, since we can imagine a better universe, a more efficient planet, even a better designed species, are we not living in it, on it, not, in fact, It? But both why and why not questions have something in common: they want to know why things are the way they are and not some other way. The ability to figure out the way things are gives us science. The ability to create models of existence that differ from the way things are experienced gives us art and technology. The two capacities are not so much two sides of a coin as two strands in a rather tightly woven rope of human reason and imagination. Remember Donne’s poem, “I am a little world made cunningly.” Well, take out the bit about sin and salvation and you’ll see that he just about has it right.
The idea that a household warmed by skepticism and science are the best models for leading a good and fulfilling life is not just untrue for people who see life as more than the “exercise” of reason. It should also be true for people who value skepticism.
That is why I am troubled by the recently issued Affirmations of the New Skepticism authored by the founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Paul Kurtz.
I suppose the place to start with these “affirmations” is that they read like the creeds they are intended to supplant. The Apostle’s and the Nicene Creed begin with the phrase “Credo,” “I believe,” and then go on to posit such events as the creation of the world by God, the eternal generation of Jesus as the only son of the God, the salvation of the world through a crucifixion, and the eternal “progression” of the Holy Spirit through some undefined process, stuck on to the end. I am pretty sure most Christians who say these words don’t begin to understand them, because if they did they would not say them.
But the Affirmations of the New Skepticism are gobbledygook of an equally pedantic nature, worse perhaps because while the Nicene Creed says preposterous things eloquently, the Affirmations say nothing in particular rather badly.
In the first place, they are statements of a position toward reality, hence “postulates.” What does it mean to say (Article 1) “We believe in the possibility of discovering reliable human knowledge.” Except that it doesn’t work as a postulate either: “Human knowledge is possible” is as insightful as saying “Water is wet,” and to say “We believe water is wet….” is—well you get the idea. Beyond this, one has to question whether the sentence means anything at all: would the headline “Reliable Human Knowledge Discovered” be more significant than the headline “Human Knowledge Discovered.” The point of course is that knowledge, unless we are speaking of metaphysics, which is not, I think, the agenda here, is of particular things and processes. Unless this sentence is directed against Sextus Empiricus, it doesn’t mean much to claim to be able to discover “knowledge.”
The Affirmations are a quilt of equally badly thought out triticisms. With apologies to the Tampa Tribune columnist who once japed a political writer with the following parody (badly paraphrased), on Gilbert and Sullivan,
“It’s obvious, it’s obvious, he’s positing the obvious: He tells us what we always knew in terms so flat, it’s all review–in glaring generalities and uninspired banalities.”
So banal that it is hard to imagine the audience for this creed.
The worst bit of the Affirmations is not the sense but the syntax: they ask for skepticism to be “extended to all areas of human endeavor—science, everyday life, law, religion, and the paranormal.” Mercifully, lawn-mowing has not been included.
Syntactical short-cutting asks us to imagine these “areas of endeavor” as of one sort, when (a) they are a laundry list of uncategorized nouns, into which science has crept as an area recommended for scientific inquiry; (b) might not be susceptible to “scientific inquiry” to the same degree, in the same way, or at all, and (c) are not really what the author wants to say. What he wants to say is that smart people need to make smart choices about certain activities and that skepticism is a useful tool to achieve smartness. Despite the cloudy phrasing, the Affirmations “believe in clarity rather than obfuscation, lucidity in the place of confusion and linguistic definitions to overcome vagueness or ambiguity.” Personally, I prefer Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia to mud, but call me picky.
The remainder of the Affirmations is an effusion of treacle, if treacle can be inconsistent. “We do not reject any claim to knowledge prior to inquiry.” It has, as a professor of mine once said, “an air of philosophy about it,” textbook possibilism. But surely a coherent skepticism rejects all sorts of things out of hand, including claims about patchwork elephants and Guanilo’s perfect island.
Unsurprising, then, that only a few affirmations down the list, the author rejects out of hand “mythologies of salvation whether based on ancient fears or current messianic illusions unsubstantiated by corroborative empirical grounds.” Not sure how one can reject a messianic illusion on the basis of investigation before the empirical, corroborative ground one is standing on is trembling at the Rapture, but I look forward to the experience. Again syntax is the enemy, as salvation becomes not a matter –a doctrine–to which doubt can be applied but a system springing from “ancient fears” and “messianic illusions.” That is a tough characterization to overcome through dispassionate investigation.
My last criticism actually extends to the whole thought-process behind the Affirmations. The solipsisms and phrasal potholes reveal a mind already narrowed to believe that instead of the two woven strands of why and why not science is really a whip to be used to beat the past: “We believe in inquiry rather than authority, reason in the place of tradition.” The euphony of chiasmus has always been the enemy of sound reason: How for instance would we create a legal or constitutional system on inquiry rather than tradition? If the methods of science do not possess authority beyond the heuristic value of inquiry, on what grounds do we defend the method? Or do the Affirmations mean to say authority and tradition only when speaking of religion, which is an important source of legal tradition and even legal reasoning? Is the author distinguishing between the authority of dogma, as distinct from the soundness of a proposition and a conclusion based on experiment?
“Clarity rather than obfuscation?” Before trusting too much in these proposals, readers should at least insist that the Affirmations reflect the clarity of thought they extol.
This narrow vision at its narrowest sees human happiness, essentially, as a celebration of the world technology can erect “to alleviate suffering, reduce pain, and ameliorate and enhance human happiness.” Skepticism, in other words, does not extend to the evil that science can perpetrate, the questionable benefits technology has achieved by injuring the planet for short term gain, the ethical irresolution science and skepticism wreak when the humane is equated with the merely human. Even following the logic of the sixth affirmation (”We ask for facts, not supposition, experimental evidence, not anecdotal hearsay or conjecture, logical inference and deduction, not faith or intuition”) there would be plenty of reason to reject the idea that science is the source “of all worthwhile inquiry about the world and that it can be enlisted to solve problems, neutralize animosities, compromise [sic] hatred and negotiate differences” (article 3). Frankly, faith, intuition and good intentions have done at least as much to ameliorate hatred as science. Technology has killed more of the naked than it has ever clothed.
There is no profound sense in this bombastic paean to the skeptical muse, in other words, that the mere affirmation of science and skepticism falls dismally short of a coherent humanist vision of the past and its connectedness to the future. The author seems to have some sense of the limits of these proposals in the last affirmation, where he writes, “We are not negative skeptics, naysayers, debunkers, cynics, or nihilists.”
There is nothing “new” about this New Skepticism. It is more of the same old debunking and ghost-busting that sees Jesus, Bigfoot, Muhammad and the Amityville Haunt as stars of the same carnival sideshow. And that is the affirmation that deserves the most skeptical review possible.
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Published: June 17, 2009
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Tags: Affirmations of the New Skepticism : Paul Kurtz : Skepticism ..
2 Responses to “On the “Affirmations of the New Skepticism””
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On the “Affirmations of the New Skepticism” (A New Oxonian Repost) | The New Oxonian says:
July 12, 2010 at 2:07 pm
[...] On the “Affirmations of the New Skepticism” (A New Oxonian Repost) Posted on July 12, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann Without skepticism we might never have invented the umbrella, or the compass. After all, commonsense observations about storm-clouds and your best friend’s sense of direction make the tools of precaution and measurement possible. The spirit of curiosity and doubt probably explains many inventions that have made human life more bearable, the world more manageable—at least more intelligible—ranging from telescopes that tell us about the far flung … Read More [...]
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steph
July 12, 2010 at 5:54 pm
I like the explanation for the existence of the umbrella. Perhaps that’s why my umbrella smiles – it opens with a big yellow grin up at the clouds, and enjoys the shower it endures. It doubted the sun would last forever but it wasn’t paranoid. I’m skeptical about affirmations which have no verifiable proof from religious affirmations to affirmations about doubt. Affirming that they doubt authority so authoritatively suggests they clearly don’t doubt their own. Defining what they doubt in such a pedantic and dogmatic way seems a little paranoid. And while I admire drama, it seems a little over dramatic.
Affirmations of skepticism appears to be oxymoronic or maybe moronically oxycal. Affirmation the first -’We believe in the possibility of discovering reliable human knowledge.’ Where will we find it – in a cave at Tokomaru Bay? What does it look like? Is it orange or purple? We know we know things when we have verifiable evidence and as skeptics we doubt all things for which we have no verifiable proof – isn’t that all that needs to be said? I hope the ISHV pursues positive things, inclusively, with healthy doubt in the background.
I do appreciate the call for clarity rather than obfuscation, lucidity in the place of confusion (although given the context, it in itself seems a little confusing), and identifying preferred ice cream flavours can prove to be very useful when doing the shopping (I had to google Ben and Jerry – and Amityville – all this american culture!). Also clarity between partners in conversation is helpful when they’re clear about what they mean to say.
It seems to me that ordinary old fashioned skepticism is still good ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.’ saith Polonius (Ht. 2.2) Hamlet. Act II. Sc. 2
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Number Three: Political Dimensions of the Godhead
by rjosephhoffmann
trinity icon
Long before God became a Trinity by vote of bishops in the fourth century, the number three had a magical history. Philosophers before Aristotle divided events into beginning, middle and end, the way Aristotle divides a play; early Neo-Platonists saw the world as a combination of harmony, necessity and order; they talked about bodies consisting of length, breadth, and thickness; intelligence as consisting of memory, mind, and will.
To read some of the early writers, you begin to get the sense that everything comes in packs of three—that three is a natural cipher, so that by the time we get to Plato, even the soul is divided up this way—into a vegetative, an animal and intellectual part. Three fortunes amongst the planets. In the underworld, three judges, three furies, the three-headed dog Cerberus–a thrice-double Hecate. Three months of the Virgin Diana. Three eons–of nature, law, and grace. Three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. Jonah was three days in the whale’s belly; Jesus three days in the tomb.
And not to be stingy, three branches of government in Locke’s philosophy—a sovereign power whose sovereignty is checked by a legislative and judicial arm.
If you take yourself back to that class in Greek mythology you may have slept through, as I did (until later I learned you could crack myths like walnuts), you’ll remember that there really wasn’t a supreme god in Greek mythology. There were three feuding brothers, each with his own territory. Zeus had the best seat in the cosmos perched atop Olympus with the world and all those virgins and new brides at his feet, but there was also Poseidon, who plays a major role in the Iliad, you’ll remember, and there was Hades, the black sheep of the family who spent most of his day figuring out how to lure people to his subterranean apartment for the weekend. A dysfunctional family of three gods.
Now in the good old days, the real old time religion, the way to get new gods was to kill off the old ones. The three male Olympians are the sons of the Titan, Cronos, who killed his father Uranus, just as Cronos would be overthrown by his sons. The battles of the gods were a simple reflection of real dynastic feuds being fought throughout the Peloponnese in the 8th century BCE when some of this was written down. It was all about power, authority, and gaining ground, winning and losing. It was also embarrassing to the Athenian philosophers like Socrates who tried to tame the myths (he wasn’t the first of course—the philosopher Xenophanes said that if horses could make gods, gods would look like horses) and with the help of Plato, maybe with a lot of help from Plato, turned the feckless threesome into a trio of eternal ideas—Goodness, Truth and Beauty. (You know them when you know them not when you see them). Victorian translators used to call these the eternal ideas or the verities—but in fact Plato saw them in a weird kind of way as one big thing—Good or Goodness and two things that were really emanations or aspects of the Big thing: that’s why when you went on to study Keats in college you remember reading that beauty is truth and truth beauty and it’s all really, really Good. Unfortunately, Plato’s demythologized trinity didn’t last because even his pupil Aristotle scoffed at it; the gods survived the philosophers for a long time after the school of Athens had been reduced to a colonial backwater.
When Christianity came along at the start of the 2nd century it found itself in a theological mess. The Greek gods—their Roman counterparts—weren’t dead but they were aging badly. The Christians were stuck in a world where to get rid of an inconvenient god by assassination, assimilation or conquest was the best way – the usual way to do things. But it didn’t make much sense to set the Hebrew father figure against Jupiter. For one thing, Old Warriors though they both were, the Hebrew god would lose to Jupiter because the Jews always lost to the Romans.
So, the Christians decided instead to create their own God. The problem they immediately confronted is that the God of the Jews was older than the Hellenistic gods and was aging even worse; by the time the Romans took over Palestine from the Syrians in 63 BCE, he hadn’t had a winning season in 500 years. A bit like the Chicago Cubs. Presumably, that was one reason most Christians were committed to the divinity—the Godiness—of Jesus Christ, and were happy to send the father into semiretirement in their Old Testament with honorary mention in the Creed. If they had been 8th century Greeks, they could have staged a battle where Jesus simply unseats the old man and occupies the throne for himself; but because they were third century gentiles with honorary Jewish passports, they decided to go with the number three. Jesus does not fight a war against his father, he simply ascends to his right hand as a “never to be king in his own right” but one who isn’t exactly a prince either.
To keep the power in check, or arbitrated at least, they are joined by an emanation called the holy spirit, which one of my teachers—a theologian nonetheless, called a gratuitous rounding off to an odd number in the spirit of Greek philosophy. So lacking a role was this holy spirit in earlier Christian thought that the first version of the Nicene Creed in 325 barely alludes to him and gives him no job description at all. His importance comes later, as a mechanism for inspiring popes and Pentecostals.
What does this theological muddle about threes have to do with the Middle East? Well consider the following:
◾Three prophets, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad
◾Three sacred books, the Old Testament the New Testament, the Quran
◾Three claimants to holy ground, the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims
◾And let’s not forget the world—a beginning, a middle and a very loud end, after which
◾Judgment, heaven, and hell
The interfaith movement, of which I used to be a strong supporter, used to talk about the book religions, the big three—three religions worshipping the same God. Three paths to the same truth. In fact, we have heard a great deal recently about the ahl al -kitab or book religions—an Arabic phrase which actually also includes the Zoroastrians and in some areas the Druze.
In the most recent period of Islamic extremism, the fact that these brother religions would resort to bloodshed to settle their disputes has seemed incomprehensible to commentators, especially interfaith commentators. Religion (they say) is all about peace, not war; especially Islam. (Or, especially Judaism, or especially Christianity). The media bought into it; faith communities bought into it; liberal Muslims embraced it as a political stance. The orthodox interfaith version was that the people of the book all worship the same god, tell virtually the same story, have the same theological doctrines, and the same sense of world history, progress and the future.
The sanitized version of the ahl al-kitab fallacy, if you’ll forgive my calling it that, is that religion behaves like the contestants in the Miss America pageant each falling all over itself to promote world peace and brotherhood. And in times of crisis, the talking religious heads appear in “dialogue” to promote just that view: Judaism was the first religion to teach peace, every man under his own fig tree or in his vineyard happily wined and dined where the lion lay down with the lamb. Christians saying that Jesus is the prince of peace and Christianity the religion of good will and forgiveness; Muslims saying that Muhammad is the prophet of peace and that Islam itself derives from the Arabic root for peace.
And this is when the number three becomes dangerous. It becomes dangerous when we believe that a lack of historical knowledge is as good as the truth just because history can’t be tested in the same way we test truck tires. Or it becomes dangerous when what we would like to believe about our faith replaces the historical record. Just to take from the three examples above: Judaism cannot have been the first religion to teach peace because religions weren’t in the peace-teaching business. In fact, you need to get rather deeply into the late modern period before religions take up the banner of social justice. Are there elements of an evolving human “conscience” and sense of justice in the Bible? Sure there are, but the dominant theme has to be the supremacy of the one God and how that supremacy has to be defended against his enemies. Or take the second, that Jesus is the prince of peace, a title lifted from chapter 9 of the Book of Isaiah. When Christians proclaimed this about Jesus they were actually doing something quite mischievous; they were challenging Augustus’ famous title as the emperor who brought peace to Rome and tranquility to the provinces; that famous song the angels sing above Bethlehem, peace on earth to men of goodwill, is actually lifted from an ode written to celebrate the birth of Augustus. Or take the term ahl al kitab: it doesn’t denote the Muslim view that Christians and Jews are as “good” as Muslims, or all equally right in what they believe or how they behave; it means that because they were tolerated during the prophet’s lifetime they should not be slaughtered gratuitously, only when they resist or try to convert Muslims to their own faith. Indeed, it isn’t exactly true that the word Allah is the ordinary word for god that Christians and Jews also use. It is, true enough, the generic word for any god, but one who is given a distinct personality in the Quran, very different from the God of the Jews, who properly speaking has a different name, or the Christian God who doesn’t exist as a single face but as a god with three personalities, only one of which takes us back to the God of the Jews. It’s an act of theological imagination not a fact of history that the three religions talk about one God rather than three gods. It is difficult to know when a matter of theological difference begins to make a political difference; but it is not difficult to know when a theological neo-doctrine becomes absurd, as the idea would be that a God of peace who fostered three clans who worshiped him in different ways, with different books, styles, laws, and different prophets really all believed the same things. Historically speaking, it seems undeniable that Jews and Christians and Muslims do not get along very well because while using suspiciously similar stories, their interpretations of those stories differ dramatically.
The second way in which the number three becomes dangerous is in terms of a doctrine all three share. This is the doctrine of chosen-peopledom. The idea of an “elect” is actually older than the Hebrews; it’s intrinsic to the beginnings of civilization—that means city culture. It probably has a lot to do with the survival of city culture, and tribes before that. Every ancient god is the protector of a city. To think that the neighboring god is stronger or wiser or a better fighter is simply a recipe for defeat. Every ancient city from Babylon to Rome is a chosen people that worships what it thinks is the right god in the right place in the right way. There’s no multiculturalism in the ancient Near East. There’s swapping and mixing and conquest and rape and intermarriage—and gods do change through the normal historical mechanisms those events entail. But the God of the Hebrew tribes who becomes the god of the Jews over a period of about a thousand years virtually shouts his exclusivism. “You shall have no other gods ahead of me” because I am a jealous God who vents his wrath down the generations. He’s a trickster God who likes to test people’s devotion by working against their own interests—like offering them deliverance from Pharaoh and then hardening pharaoh’s heart to keep them slaves. I’m not sure what equivalences we can see between that kind of behavior and the conduct of a sadistic parent, but it’s hard not to notice the cruelty of the image.
The Christian God was a problem from the get-go. Just as the Christians couldn’t invent a myth of Jesus at war with Jupiter for control of heaven, so too they couldn’t accept, without substantial revision, a Jewish God who had been the commander of armies against the Romans–especially when the Jewish people were almost unrepresented in the new gentile faith. The uneasy solution is that the Christians, through the hook and crook of St. Paul’s theology become honorary Jews, able to live without Jewish law as the adopted sons and daughters of Abraham. Why? How? Because God (saith Paul) intends to provoke his original chosen people to jealousy, so that by seeing other people saved first, they’ll want to be next in line. What could be more natural if we think in terms of family dynamics—Show favor to the younger child and your no-good, defiant 18 year-old will finally come around and love you back. But how offensive to decency. An interesting theological strategy, but not the kind designed to promote good feeling between the new chosen race and the race God had rejected because of their hardness of heart and dogged sinfulness.
And so to the third. In the 7th century Muhammad offered a new option. The option is really much simpler than most textbooks make it. The non-Arab religions had falsified the revelation of God, each making itself the centerpiece of God’s care and concern. The true chosen were the people God had chosen through the true prophet to receive the uniquely true word of God—the Muslim faithful. To read the “operant” portions of the Koran is to read a book obsessed with its own primacy, petulant and carping in its view of the other religions as fakes. The basic tension in the book religions is that each has a messianic case to argue, and each case nullifies or tries to nullify the preceding one. If this were only a theological issue, if this were only a problem in metaphysics with no human casualties, this little discussion would be unnecessary. But the idea of chosenness, the idea of the salvation of a few and the rejection of the many is more complicated.
And it’s more complicated because there’s a third problem with the number three. Three land claims.
Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a father who had three sons. The father vowed to give all he had to the son who could prove he loved him the most. The reward was a beautiful ring that symbolized the father’s whole estate, the palace, the land, the animals, and the wealth—all of it. The sons began to quarrel over the ring; instead of showing their love they were only able to show their hatred for each other, their greed. What is the father to do? What happens to the inheritance?
The original story is used by the poet-philosopher Lessing in his drama, Nathan the Wise. In that version the ring is an heirloom that has the power to make its owner beloved by God and has been passed from father to the son he loves the most. When it came to a father of three sons whom he loved equally, he promises it (in “pious weakness”) to each of them. Looking for a way to keep his promise, he makes two replicas, indistinguishable from the original, and on his deathbed gives a ring to each of them. The brothers quarrel over who owned the real ring. A wise judge admonished them that it was up to them to live such that their ring’s powers proved true.
Now transparently this is a story about the book religions, and more particularly about the relationship between the religious claimants to the holy land. But it is a very irritating story. It is annoying because it ignores more than it reveals. It assumes that the father is loving, that the sons are hateful, and that all the three have to do is learn simple division to work out their differences—that all the father wants is for each son to have a piece of the estate (or a share in God’s love) but that they have to figure this out for themselves, and in figuring it out they will show the father the love he wants. It is a Mr. Rogers episode on sharing applied to the Realpolitik of a fused dynamite keg. At least that’s how I read the parable. It is odious moreover in its theology, making God a power-broker and his simple subjects pawns on his board. Chess was, by the way, Lessing’s and Moses Mendelssohn’s favourite parlor game.
But those of us who are impatient with the sort of trickster god who would make an Adam and Eve, give them Paradise, and then concoct a test he knew they were going to fail in order to punish them and their descendants for all time—those of us who know stories like that are on to this god’s tricks. So here, instead of my solution to the ring-story, is a better story:
Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons and an unpromising piece of ground that he tried to make fertile and productive. Like all sons, they had their virtues and their shortcomings. The eldest son was small of stature; he spent so much time trying to acquire better land that his crops failed repeatedly. And so his father gave his property to the strong middle son. But the middle son showed no interest in staying put; he married a girl from another city, moved away and left the old man wondering what to do with the land. When the youngest son had come of age, the father said “Your brothers have disappointed me: your oldest brother is too weak and undependable, your older bother is too ambitious to be a farmer, so I am counting on you.” The youngest son took the farm and made it prosper. But when the old man died, the oldest son said—‘It’s mine by birthright. I was here first.’ The middle son, hearing of the dispute, and not much liking the youngest brother anyway, came to the oldest brother’s defense, raised an army, and drove the youngest into exile for a while, and killed many of his followers.
But only for a while. The younger brother raised a bigger army and drove the others out and killed many of the older brother’s followers. And so it has been from that day to this.The land became a bloodsoaked sponge while the descendants of the brothers searched high and low for the old man’s last will and testament.
The secret of whose land it really was died on the smiling lips of the old man.
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Published: June 19, 2009
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One Response to “The Number Three: Political Dimensions of the Godhead”
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steph
August 12, 2010 at 4:01 am
Simply divine post! Beautiful and so True, and all really, really Good. And very, very funny too.
And then there is seven – my last name was Seven once, ironically for only seven years, chosen obviously because of its magical symbolism in religious traditions, although I think what appealed to me most was Salome’s legendary dance of the seven veils…
x
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Letter from Camp Question
by rjosephhoffmann
camp
Dear Mom and Dad
First I am sorry that Jason and me burned down the house. It’s just that every summer you say it will be the last one grammie stays but then when June comes she is still alive. You and dad had been talking for a long time about getting a bigger place and we figured that either the insurance on the house or that death benefit of grammie’s you and dad are always talking about would make life easier. We were only trying to help.
By the way, did anyone ever find Pete the Python?
I am having a pretty good time here at Camp Question. I know it’s a good idea for me to ask questions and think critically and not to be fooled or duped, but I do miss marshmallows and swimming like we had last year at Camp Chippewa.
Today Tommy Braddock was caught telling a ghost story and was sent home with a letter to his stepfather. It was his third year at camp and the head counselor said he should have known better.
We saw a film last night on crop circles. The night before they showed a film on the Roswell aliens. We learned that crop circles and the aliens are a load of crap. I think crop circles are amazing but the aliens are a load of crap.
The night before that some guy did a powerpoint on the Loch Ness monster and said he could prove it was an otter. Sarah Shilepki shouted “That’s one big fucking otter” and everyone laughed so hard that Sammy, the program director, told Sarah that if she ever said anything against critical thinking again she would be sent home with a letter to her stepmother. It didn’t look like an otter. I almost peed I laughed so hard.
After lunch and on Sunday we have Anti-Prayer-in-School rallies. We learned that “Under God” was not a part of the original pledge of allegiance and that America was a better country before it was introduced by a president named Eisenhaus (?). David Eisenhaus said no Jew would do that and that all the really big wars and slavery and shit had come before God got into the pledge. The ethics counselor said “So I guess Jews shouldn’t care if Christians stick a nativity scene in front of a court house” and Davey says, “Frankly I don’t give a shit where they stick it,” and everyone laughed realllly hard, so the counselor said “And I guess you want to see the ten commandments in a classroom,” and Davey says “I go to the Hillel School, theyre already there but they’re in Hebrew so we can’t read them.” Anyway the ethics counselor quit and said that all of us were fucking freaks.
We get lessons on science every day. What we learn is that God didn’t make the world and that if there was a God the world would be better designed and not to believe anybody who sasy the world is designed. Especially religious people who we call “Duhs.” I don’t really get that part–about how it’s not designed but is just awesome if it’s not designed because such an unawesome place can’t have been designed by a really awesome creator but I hope we’ll cover that tomorrow.
Science is kind of crap though because when Tom Slater asked the science counselor why a boat floats on the water he couldn’t tell us and Tommy said maybe it’s because at Camp Question we don’t have any boats or water.
We also have anti-magic shows here. They bring in a magician who pulls quarters out of your ear and makes match boxes disappear. Then he kind of smiles and says, “You can’t always believe your eyes, can you?”
Rachel Goldman said “Can you make yourself disappear,” and he says “No.” Then she says, “Can you make a hundred dollar bill appear in my left shoe right now because I’m trying to buy a Vespa?” and he said “No” and she said “Can you make Camp Question disappear because I think it Q R A P.” I didn’t see Rachel at lunch. We had a lecture on freedom of speech.
Anyway I really think I get the whole thing about evidence and not believing anything until you have reason to believe it. The Leader of Camp Quest says it’s the basis of our whole democracy and the only way we can really lead a happy and fulfilling life.
At yesterday’s Fundamentals of Thinking Right he said “Question everything–accept nothing–demand proof, even if someone tells you the sun will rise tomorrow. Ask him ‘How do you know that?’” I think they should have sent Sol Jameson home when he grabbed Margie Talbert’s boobs and says let’s see ‘em maybe you’re a dude but no one expected Margie to do it and Jesus she is no dude. No way.
Anyway I have to go look at the stars and there’s a guy coming in to talk about how small the earth is. I asked our dorm assistant if it was about taking care of the planet and he said “Nah, just about how small the earth is.”
Anyway, I can’t wait to see you guys next week and I hope grammie gets out of the ICU really soon. Let me know if anyone finds Pete.
Love
Charlie
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Published: July 4, 2009
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Tags: atheist : camp : humanism : Richard Dawkins : summer camp ..
7 Responses to “Letter from Camp Question”
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Fran Welte
July 12, 2009 at 5:07 am
It is obvious that you disapprove of Camp Quest; it is also obvious that you know very little about Camp Quest, the counselors or the campers. The characters in your “straw man” mock letter are violent and do not consider others; not so Camp Quest campers. They are amazing, intelligent, caring and loving young people who look for ways to help themselves and others. And yes, they eat s’mores. However you will find that many will get in line for the vegan marshmallows because they have strong moral objections to hurting their fellow creatures. They know that the world is big enough for all of the life it contains! I believe that many educators would love to know our secrets. I find it refreshing when we have to “drag” our campers away from learning because they are immersed and don’t want to stop. How many summer camps offer plane rides with a zero gravity experience? Here is a heartfelt invitation – join us in Fort Lauderdale, FL the week of 12/25/09 through 1/1/10! It is our first Camp Quest in Florida and will be a family camp. Get to know our campers and their families. I promise you will find it impossible to knock us on any reasonable grounds. It is easy to set up the straw man and knock him over again. Let’s see if you have the courage to really get to know us before you knock us! By the way non-believers really have only one choice. They can openly acknowledge that they do not believe or they can stay “in the closet”. They have no choice about the fact of believing, if one doesn’t believe, then one doesn’t believe. Would you have us lie about it?
Best Regards,
Fran
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rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2009 at 11:06 am
It’s a satire. Lighten up. I’m sure Camp Quest isn’t as bad as Camp Question. You should teach them how to read irony.
JH
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John
July 13, 2009 at 4:07 am
Please, Dr. Hoffmann, forgive me for my childish sense of humor, which obviously has not developed beyond the level of an 8 year old.
Which, by the way, is the age of the youngest members of our camping community.
Of course, even at the tender age of 8, these campers are very skilled in the use of information technology. They will probably be LOL in no time. I think they will find my naive and unsophisticated response especially funny.
Just in case there is an 8 year old out there who doesn’t understand satire, I am taking the liberty of posting the definition, lifted from the Meriam Webster online dictionary.
“sat·ire
Pronunciation:\ˈsa-ˌtī(-ə)r\
Function:noun
Etymology:Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin satura, satira, perhaps from (lanx) satura dish of mixed ingredients, from feminine of satur well-fed; akin to Latin satis enough — more at sad
Date:1501
1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
synonyms see wit”
Happy reading, kids! Remember, it isn’t personal.
Best Regards,
Fran
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rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2009 at 11:40 pm
I’m sorry that Camp “Question” was associated with Camp Quest, actually: it is rather a satire on another freethought camp that I know a LOT more about
Len
July 12, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Dr. Hoffmann-
Fran does not speak for Camp Quest, and her opinions are hers alone and do not represent the views of Camp Quest organizers.
On the other hand as Camp Director I do speak for Camp Quest of Michigan, and would like to invite you to visit our camp, which takes place this August 17 – 23. This is of course extremely short notice, but I think our campers would benefit greatly by your expert insights into the origins of the Jesus tradition. (I eagerly await publication of same.)
Thanks,
Len Zanger
director, CQMI
c. 248-330-5061
h. 248=334-7094
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steph
August 4, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Hilariously side splittingly funny. AAs are a bit like innocent kiddies celebrating misbehaving. They know nuffink about religion because it’s in Hebrew, but in the safety of the group, they pride themselves on epitomising critical enquiry and free thinking without recognising the freedom they possessed before they became so angry. Hell hath no fury like an atheist scorned, evil as Eden’s snake. Watch out, it comes back to bite! Congregating round the Fire with Insolence.
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steph
August 4, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Actually, Dr Hoffmann, if you are still considering the above invitations, you might also like to consider a third. However on this camp there are no other campers and it’s more of a tramp. No marshmellows, no plane rides, but there are flocks of colourful tuneful birds, and while it’s advisable to prepare for your own chocolate fix by filling compartments in your backpack, there are plenty of trout to be hooked if you’re not vegan. You won’t see another soul for a week, and it’s all about peace and clean air. It’s free, Lake Waikaremoana, but the secret is how to get there.
x
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What’s to Believe?
by rjosephhoffmann
fool
In response to an almost microscopic reference on this site to the fact that I am ploddering away on a book on the failure of secular humanism, together with a mystifying blognote to the effect that I have left the Legoland of organized unbelief for Dystopia, I have received some very interesting email. Some of it has been well-intentioned and all of it has been grammatical. Thank you.
Since I have always maintained that what anybody believes is relatively unimportant unless, to quote Jefferson, it picks my pocket or breaks my legs, I have been somewhat dumbfounded that anyone should care what I believe. I have spent most of my life telling undergraduates that what they believe isn’t important until they have published their third book or made their second million. –And warning graduate students that if they begin one more sentence with the phrase “It seems to me, ” even if speaking about Foucault, they will banished from the classroom. Quaint, therefore, that I am being called upon to explain myself.
It also marks me out as an Older Man. Students of my generation fought for free expression and later, as an afterthought, invented the world wide web. (In fact I marvel to this day that Timothy Berners-Lee isn’t a houehold name in the way, say, Bill gates is.) My spoiled rotten generation virtually created the wherewithal through which the cult of personal expression has come into being. But now we are old and stodgy (we prefer hearing mature) and upset that the ones who are using it use sentences like “rofl thats so funny :) lmao! yo dwag u gotta see that desinger! hes like 1337 dood but that other dood is a noob nywy i g2g mate….”
What people (doods) seem to want to know is why I have “left” unbelief behind and embraced the alternative. Only one correspondent asked me to seriously consider the possibility of early onset Alzheimers. The majority use the following logic: (1) Unbelief is the Emerald City. (2) Belief is Kansas. (3) Why would anybody who’d arrived at 1 return to 2?
But to respect my inquisitors, here are a traditional ten points I happen to believe:
First I do not believe that Unbelief is a logical stopping point in thinking about the world. I do not remember a time when I considered myself a lukewarm atheist that I did not feel like a tourist.
Second, I believe that I am no smarter than the many religious persons I know. I do not look for excuses to rub the noses of friends and relatives in my worldview (or lifestance) just to see if they bristle or lose their point. I do not believe that being an unbeliever is like “coming out” if you’re gay or lesbian. And I find the whole phenomenon of coming out the nether side of extreme honesty anyway. If I were forced to come out, however, I would come out uncertain.
Speaking of uncertainty, I share, thirdly, the view of many confused people that cowboy skepticism and pistol-packing atheism is a waste of time. I have (as Bertrand Russell said somewhere, once) no ideology that I would fight and die for–certainly no position I have ever embraced, religious or secular. So if you regard me as a lukewarm, backsliding atheist you’ll have to take us both out.
Fourth, I believe that there is real excitement in uncertainty. I don’t give a damn if the only people still interested in Pascal are underpaid junior lecturers or if he erred on the side of belief thereby privileging an absurd intellectual position. Ok, I do care a little. But I’m not certain.
Fifth: There is a difference between uncertainty, not being able to make up your mind, and not caring. In a recent New Humanist article, Laurie Taylor opined that (contra Francis Thompson and pro Thomas Aquinas) it isn’t God who won’t let you fall but “the concept of God that won’t let you go.” It is endlessly fascinating in all its images, aberrations, and iterations, artistic, linguistic, dramatic, philosophical, theist and atheist. I do not believe that this fascination serves either as a proof of God or as a warrant for belief or even as justification for religious feeling as “pointing” James-style to the possibility of a source for the feeling.
I believe, sixth, that the God of the Hebrew, Christian, Islamic and monotheistic traditions generally has no more actual existence than the gods that came before or exist in non-book traditions or may come after. I do not think that the denial of the gods of human history closes the door on the question of a god. The procession–the life and death–of gods is part of a creative process that also gives us culture, art, the novel, political constitutions and psychiatry. It also gives us literary criticism which is much harder to take seriously than God.
Seventh, I believe that the sacred texts of all religious traditions are the competing stories of people, nations, movements. None is “true” in a historical or scientific sense. All look foolish when they are used for law, science, history, and ethics.
Eighth, I believe the philosophy of religion is bunk: on the theological side, nothing more than apologetics choreographed by questions framed a thousand years ago, and on the philosophical side by a number of maneuvres, points and counterturns equally archaic, to point up the absurdity of the religious position. This ballet is now so stale that it is amazing anyone can watch it any longer without laughing, or write books on the subject that still sell. But they do.
Ninth, I believe that organized humanism has lost its way in a labyrinth of special causes, interests and agendas; that it is now a clash of competing secular doctrines and lifestyles and that reasonable people will look elsewhere for intellectual energy and support. In the end, smart women and men save themselves from dogma and superstition, even the dogmas of the age. Especially the dogmas of the age.
Tenth, I believe in two commandments, not ten.
Thou shalt be curious.
Thou shalt form thy conscience with learning and reflection.
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Published: July 24, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : belief : Bertrand Russell. New Humanist : humanism : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secularism ..
2 Responses to “What’s to Believe?”
.
Hugh
August 2, 2009 at 1:32 am
Great post . A pleasure to read .
You gave that flowing but witty style that I much admired in Bertrand Russells writings . In consequence , like the great philosopher , even where I may diagree with you in the details , I’m with you in the more important wider context . Looking forward to you’re future posts .
Regards …
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steph
August 10, 2010 at 8:36 pm
By the time they have published their third book or made their second million, their opinions should have evolved and they should have changed their minds several million times … allowing for a little exaggeration of course. “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.” wrote Sir Bertrand in the Introduction to his Skeptical Essays. In certain contexts, yes (consider fundamental human rights). The same principle applies to particular flavours of unbelief where certainty of the correctness of one’s opinions is just as passionate as the most fiercely opinionated in religion and politics. In fact there is nothing smellier than a stagnant pond or a stagnant, unimaginative opinionated mind.
I find it surprising that you should be dumbfounded that what you believe might not be inherently fascinating to others. ESPECIALLY what you believe.
Not sure about the fifth because I’ve never ‘believed’ but I wouldn’t reject it, it’s inherently interesting as an idea.
I very much appreciate the fundamental commandments of which there are but two. Pooh of course would approve – no bear was more curious than he. Eeyore was the plodderer, not you, and he was curiousless – or at least the least curious of all. Curiosity, imagination, creativity, all inspired by the spiritual self which groweth. Which is human, not bear. And curiosity never killed even a cat.
x
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Humanist Spirituality
by rjosephhoffmann
AlbertEinstein
A Jewish historian and a Chinese historian are arguing over whose culture is the oldest. The Chinese historian says, “Our great culture goes back 4000 years.” The Jewish historian smiles and says, “That’s nothing, our civilization is 5000 years old.” The Chinese historian pauses for a minute. Then he says, “Amazing. What did you people eat for 1000 years?”
That’s my joke, now for something that sounds like a joke:
A guy walks into a bar. He sees an attractive young woman sitting there and offers to buy her a drink. They begin to talk. The conversation turns to religion. Finally he says to her, “So, are you religious?” She says without a moment of hesitation, “I’m not religious but I am kind of, you know– spiritual.” And he says, “Yeah, me too.” Fade.
My guess is that this is a very common conversation for Gen X and Gen Y spiritual-seekers and the multifaithed and unfaithed and partly secularized masses of North America and Europe. The question we’re left with is what does it mean to be spiritual—how is it that these two people seem to know what they’re talking about, and do they mean the same thing when they use the word?
For example does spiritual mean
1.Not religious
2.Not dogmatic
3.Not too fussy about details
4.Not a member of a church
5.Not judgmental
6.Not a believer
7.Not interested in abiding by the moral rules of a denomination. (I guess if we locate this conversation in a bar, the answer is 7—they’re saying they are open to whatever happens as the conversation unfolds; if the conversation is between two people feeding pigeons in the park, it may mean simply, “I believe there’s something beyond this life, but I can’t be bothered worrying about it.”)
One of the things secularists and humanists tend to care about is language. Words need to mean what they say, they need to refer to something. Humanists love dictionaries. I’m convinced that the compiler of the first dictionary was a humanist.
Many humanists have trouble with the word “God” because–even though a lot has been written about him (including a whole book called the Bible, and a supplement called the Quran, which claims to contain his words) only very religious people actually believe that a being named God or Yahweh or Allah actually said any of it or did any of the things attributed to him.
God means something in the same way that Santa or Reynard the talking fox or “dragon” or “unicorn” mean something: an idea based on stories made up of images, some of which come from our experience of similar things: Giants are overgrown men; so were gods; unicorns are malformed horses; some of the gods were composites of men/women and birds or crocodiles. We should celebrate the imagination that gives us stories—humanists will say—but we should not lead our lives as believers in stories.
When we come to a word like “religion,” we’re on safer ground—because we know what religion is, even if no one is quite sure about what God is. You can define religion as believing in and conducting your life in accordance with some form of faith. It doesn’t matter whether the objects of faith are real or imaginary, unprovable or unproven. The specifics are going to be different between faiths, between denominations, and between people. It might mean reading the Bible, going to mass or temple or Friday prayers, it might mean venerating saints or ancestors or speaking in tongues, or lobbying to get scripture reading back into the schools. It might even mean murdering the infidel as a fanatical advocate of your cause. I don’t want to equate all of these activities and behaviors—but I do want to say such behavior is characteristic of religions in historical terms.
We also have a social context for religion. We can look at religion anthropologically, as a feature of human cultures; we can explore it historically in terms of where it developed, how beliefs arose, changed, or died. Most of the gods who ever lived as objects of belief are dead gods. And dead gods are a consistent feature of vanquished nations and extinct cultures. Anyone who doubts this fact of religious history doesn’t really know very much about religion.
Religion can be explored geographically and comparatively, culture to culture–linguistically, and more recently, in terms of brain science and studies of cognition. In other words, while it’s very tough to do much more than argue about God, religion can be studied. Words like liturgy, prayer, sacrament, vision, inspiration, ecstasy, martyr, sin, etc.–the ingredients and gradients of religion–can be defined.
The problem with a word like “spirituality” whether you use it in a bar or on a park bench is that it is very hard to pin down. Before his alleged conversion to deism, the philosopher Antony Flew in a famous essay called “What is Spirituality” called it hogwash. A less famous atheist Chris Dykema was more direct “The most charitable interpretation of being spiritual but not religious” he said, “is that it means the speaker feels a disposition towards masochistic submission of the sort that used to find expression in systematic religious faith, but that he or she doesn’t really believe in what you have to accept to be religious.”
So the problem is this: if you can’t define something, how can you practice it, and why bother using the word? People who have stopped believing in god and heaven and the afterlife have obviously stopped believing in an immortal soul—so why should we bother about spirituality? Especially when, at the other end of a very wide spectrum of uses, we find this kind of language. This comes from something called a spiritual sharing group in Colorado:
The MISSION of our Spiritual Sharing group will include learning about the spiritual part of our lives, seeking peace within, centering ourselves, gaining clarity in the vision of spirituality, and learning about ourselves as we listen to others, gaining philosophic knowledge, and changing attitudes.
I don’t know about you, but this kind of language makes me nervous. I imagine a room full of people with perpetual smiles on their faces doing centering activities and offering me green tea as we join hands in the quest for “philosophic knowledge” and exercises in attitude modification. Frankly I’m perfectly fine with where my attitudes are centered, I don’t like green tea, and I got my philosophic knowledge in the classroom, not in a circle of friends.
But to be fair, the term is everywhere. And because humanists do care about meaning with a small m—how words mean and what words refer to, and also meaning with a capital M, sort of, the meaning of life as its lived and affirmed, and not supplied by books and dogmas–we probably should try to figure out what someone means when she says, I’m spiritual but not religious. So, let me make the following points:
First: What it doesn’t mean. I think we have to accept that the normal laws of semantic change are at work in the case of a word like spirituality. The word knave used to mean boy, not a villain; the word nice used to mean foolish; the word fast still exists in two contradictory forms in English—it means standing totally still, as standing fast, and it means moving quickly. In jive, hot used to be cool and cool became hot—an attractive person no longer looks good, she’s bad. So let’s move slightly beyond the arrogance of linguistics and philosophy, where words are supposed to behave themselves like good children, and accept the fact that language transforms itself in unpredictable ways.
The word spiritual used to mean mystical—holy–men and women from various religious traditions who developed a more intense or extreme pattern in their religious life than others following the same religious regimen. When we think of certain religious orders like the Carthusians in the Catholic tradition, or the Hesychasts in the east, or the Tarika or Sufi sect in Islam, we’re speaking about people who in very particular ways also felt that the normal forms of religion tied you down. The formality of text and doctrine for such individuals was suffocating rather than liberating. True, in some of these traditions there was a kind of communal mysticism, or spirituality. But basically the spirituality of the mystics was an individual thing. A good modern example is the Catholic monk Thomas Merton who by the end of his life had departed so measurably from his Catholic roots that in all but name he was a Buddhist, living in the corner of his monastery away from his fellow monks.
But can “secularly inclined” people hope to learn from people who seem to have been even more religious than the very religious people around them. No, not if we fail to recognize the process at work in the rejection of literalism. The “spiritual” impulse among the mystics and quietists often connoted people who weren’t very fond of dogma, or authority, or following the pack, or even of the conventions of their religion. That’s why mysticism and spirituality have always been a problem for religious bureaucracies. After all, if you have monks and nuns and farmgirls speaking directly to God while the bishops and pope can only talk to each other, you have a problem.
The second thing I’d ask us to consider is a piece of history. When I tell my students that the idea of the soul isn’t a Jewish idea, even my Jewish students get agitated. But it isn’t: “dualism”—the fancy term for what we normally call the body-soul arrangement is a Greek derivative, and was an old idea when the Greeks received it. In Hebrew, Adam’s name meant mud—or earth. He’s a purely physical entity. The nephesh, the word that’s used for what Adam becomes when God breathes life into him, just means animal or living being– not a soul—it was the breath of life, because the only distinction in Hebrew is between a living thing and a dead one—based on whether it’s breathing or not. But it’s not a soul. And when you die, you die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, to quote the book of Job.
It took until the 4th century bce before certain Jewish writers began to speculate about souls, and by the time the Christians came along souls were all the rage: everybody had to have one. Even the unborn.
Both religions had been transfused with—dare I say it—the spirit of Greek speculation, especially Platonism. But don’t blame the idea of the soul or even of an afterlife on religion. Even in Greek religion, the gods are immortal, people aren’t. And even after souls were all the rage, we find certain writers, like the author of the Hebrew book called Q’holeth by Jews and Ecclesiastes by Christians wondering out loud, “Who knows whether the spirit of man rises up or like the beasts goes down to the earth”. (He guesses, it goes down.)
In fact, the single biggest boost to the idea of souls in Christianity wasn’t even the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. That was meant to be a bodily resurrection (and why the very thought was so repugnant to certain classical observers of the new religion). It was a later theological doctrine that exalted the idea of the soul: the belief that Jesus had two natures—human and divine, and that baptism as it were “activated” the divine nature in humans, made it like Christ, and thus made resurrection possible. You can thank an over imaginative theologian named Paul for the early phases of such thinking and church doctrine for the rest of it. I might just add that in the classical period, Islam too suffered from overindulgence in Greek philosophy, so that the doctrine of the nafs or soul became prominent in the work of the great Islamic thinkers of the 11th and 12th century.
So does this little piece of history shed any light on the word “spiritual” as it’s being used today by all of these people who are saying they’re not religious.
Maybe to this extent:
First of all, the word has its roots in an antiestablishment and nonconformist tendency to resist being governed and controlled by the regimen of religion, church and mosque. The spirituals ranging from the mystics of the middle ages to the 18th century Quakers were religious dissenters. In fact, the church even learned to control the mystics, or in the case of Islam, to expel them as heretics. In any case, take one dimension of the meaning as dissenting from the norm.
Second, spirituality can be perfectly naturalistic. You don’t need a theory of a soul or an afterlife or heaven or a theology that divides the person into more parts than a butcher’s beef cut chart. You don’t even need to solve the body mind or mind brain problem before you can start using the term. The 1st century poet-philosopher Lucretius ridiculed certain ideas in his own day—which happens to be the same century Christianity was born—by poking fun at a banquet of unattached souls in heaven that had sloughed off their bodies, fighting over which one got to dive into a marriage bed and leap into a fetus about to be born.
“For surely it is utter madness to combine
A mortal thing with an eternal, and opine
That both can feel and act as one, what more detached
Can we imagine, more repugnant, more ill-matched,
Than an immortal and a mortal thing together
Trying to stay united through the fiercest weather?
Like Lucretius, most humanists have a low tolerance for dualism. I tend to agree with Lucretius and the author of Ecclesiastes that this life is the life we have and we are what we make of it.
But in another poem, Lucretius talks about the meaning of our lives:
“Our lives we borrow from each other; and like runners, we pass along the torch of life.”
We are what we are because we inherit culture, shape it, inevitably change it through the product of any particular time, and pass it on. Unlike Al Gore, I didn’t invent the internet, but I can remember life before it, just as educated men and women in 1440 could remember never seeing a printed page. At a basic level, these adaptations and adjustments are evolutionary and at one level might be reducible to genes and memes. But the torch of cultural life is unique to humans. There are no equivalent non-biological adaptations among other species, none at least that the species brings about through will, knowledge, learning, reflection and experiment. So if we resort to a phrase like the human spirit to represent those evolved capacities and achievements that mark us off from the other animals–all the humanly created aspects of life that we pass along to the next generation, we can be forgiven for wanting a word to express it.
Among these achievements the evolution of language and the evolution of the way in which we communicate ideas symbolically has to be primary. Knowledge depends on it. No outside force or entity placed it there. God neither wrote the Bible nor inspired Einstein. When we speak of spirituality in terms of the human spirit—the passing of the torch– we are—as the Canadian sociologist Pat Duffy Hutcheon has said, “referring to all the wonders that followed from the emergence of a distinctively human consciousness: that awareness of the boundaries and singularity of oneself–that extends beyond mere animal sentience –a consciousness gradually brought into being by one particular species of upright primates, as they learned to manipulate symbols.” Symbolic language made possible, for the first time in evolution, the sharing of experience: experience removed in space and time from the current moment.
If we see it in this way, spirituality includes certain activities that come to us through language and thinking—the way we value knowledge over ignorance, the use of language and technology to create beauty, the understanding of responsibility for our actions, ethical principles and ideals, virtues, even the obligation to test, experiment and revise our conclusions against our experience.
Spirituality so defined is not grounded in the idea that we need to find the source of what is distinctive about humanity in some unseen power, some super-natural order. But it does offer us a way of speaking about those aspects of the human condition that take us beyond creaturely feeling, everydayness, and the ordinary to that other, largely symbolic level of existence that is not satisfied by being thin, rich and successful. The level that still holds out for good, true, and beautiful.
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Published: July 27, 2009
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Tags: atheist : beauty : humanism : humanist spirituality : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : spirituality ..
One Response to “Of Humanist Spirituality”
.
steph
August 9, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Lovely piece: Spirituality – one for the little lexicon where definition is not just about usage but usage sort of depends on definition. And happily put back in my vocabulary of vital self defining words. To be without Plato would be bad, wrong and ugly and to be without poetry also. To be without imagination would be flat and unimaginative and frankly inhuman and without spirit: unspiritual. So embrace our ‘spirituality’ – and whoever said they’ve ‘never had a spiritual bone’ in their body? They were kerfuddled obviously, without adequate definition, and put off by Gen X and Y conversations. I think she really meant her bones never needed no religion to be enspirited.
The first dictionary, apparently, according to the unreliable Wikithicky, which in this case might be wrong, was by a Buddhist philosopher and poet, in Sanskrit, in the 4th century. Most plausibly a humanist Buddhist poet, and philosophising logosophist. Although somebody else comes to mind who compiled a Sumerian to Akkadian wordlist around 2300 bce … But as he was quite possibly was a lion fighting Marduk worshipper who wouldn’t have been a humanist, it probably doesn’t count as a proper dictionary anyway…
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate
by rjosephhoffmann
franklin2
I was having dinner with friends before leaving the sweltering Lahore summer to return to Maine in June. Discussion turned to politics, as it often does in foreign parts. Having spent most of my professional life, by choice, outside the United States, I have learned to fine –tune my discourse, even to absorb comments that betray a woeful lack of information or historical perspective on America.
The one that requires the deftest response is what I have come to call the “German question.” Every expat has heard it in one form or another: “How is it that America continues to be strong?” A rough translation is, “Given your Coca-Cola view of the world, your cave-dwelling masses who can’t find Europe on the map, a national legislature whose debates we run on our comedy channels, why hasn’t your country blown itself up?”
America, as we all know, is unavoidable. I have spent my whole life running from it. Probably because the various movements ranging from tepid socialism to anarchism to secular humanism that try to make a dent in its demeanor and overt sense of Exceptionalism are full of Americans, they quickly become homespun, dull and remind you of church. To avoid this curse of serial movementeering I joined the motley band of those who take exception to exceptionalism in the far corners of the world. Here we try to avoid each other by pretending we’re a lot more interesting than we really are. The common denominator among expatriates is that each of us privately thinks the reasons he is living abroad are terribly important and special whereas your countryman’s presence abroad marks him as a misfit or a political refugee. In the case of missionaries, this is usually true.
But the word “misfit” will do, especially for Americans. I have been a misfit in Australia, where my older daughter was born, in England, where my younger daughter was born, and with wife and them in tow developed graduate skills as a misfit in three African nations, in Beirut, in Wider Europe, in Pakistan.
I knew I was at an irredeemable point in my exile when, on her return to Oxford, a teacher asked my nine-year-old daughter if she had ever lived out of the country–in this case outside the UK—and when she began to rattle off for the benefit of a dazzled group of classmates the places she had lived the teacher said, “No dear, I didn’t ask where you have gone for holiday.”
Unfortunately, the condition of being a real misfit is probably an irreversible condition. You know this when you realize that the only place you feel really Not at Home is back in the USA. Odd, because I always considered myself a non-extremist politically. I do not seek the overthrow of the United States government nor predict with French hauteur that America’s ascendancy in the twentieth century was a drole act of Fate, serving as further disproof of the existence of a just God.
I do not believe America is evil. I do not think other countries, with the exception of Iceland, are “better,” or at least not much better. And I regard the idea that America is the “greatest nation on earth” as the kind of Barnumesqe mildew that grows on the brains of gun lobbyists, NASCAR addicts and people from Alabama generally. Like a pretty good novel, America has a pretty good story to tell. But as the hearings for judge Sonja Sotomayor just demonstrated, it can sound ugly in the mouths of dumb southern lawyers who get elected to the United States Senate.
My misfitedness has now reached a critical level. This visit home coincided with two epic events, or rather the aftermath of them: the election of Barack Obama and the (consequent) possibility that other countries would begin to see an aspect of “America” that corresponds to what Americans think about themselves—the “liberty and justice for all” bit.
As a believer in omens and appreciator of the British knack for getting ceremony right—especially occasions of state—I was a bit thrown off by the Inauguration—a Chief Justice who botched the only solemn component of the day, the Oath of Office, ah! and that dreadful flatulent praying and that worse poem (etc.). But I could defend these things by saying, “Hey: we’re a seriously democratic place that takes mediocrity seriously. Why shouldn’t awful liturgy be the appropriate paradigm for what we’re all about?”
But six months on, my return passage is booked. “Yes we can” has become, “Maybe not.”
Simple principles of justice, embedded in the reform of health care for this allegedly rich and powerful and compassionate nation, are turning into another fight about bogeymen—euthanizers, atheists with syringes visiting hospitals and hospices.
Arguments that would be risible in almost any other country on earth—the “birther” discussion, for example–are dealt with by “serious” newscasters as coming from a nutty fringe that they fertilize with every news story devoted to the nuts.
Billions of dollars are going to be spent not on giving people a break with their insurance plans but in advertising campaigns designed to convince old people that liberals are trying to send them to their grave. (“And crowned thy good with brotherhood.” ) Forgive my saying that a big, wide more interesting world that doesn’t give a camel’s fart about this idiocy beckons.
As the country eats more and learns less, its historical revolutionary spirit in politics has descended to the level of a football game where policy and real issues matter far less than popularity and the opportunity to change the team at half time. America’s brain seems to have gone to its trans-fatty butt.
Flash: The President is in Trouble. Poll numbers down.
Flash: Republicans are gaining ground, poised to take back the House in 2010.
Never mind that literally nothing has happened to cause these numbers to change. The point is, a game is being played. Half time is coming up. The paradigm for politics has been set by Wal-Mart, where store wide Thanksgiving comes in August and Christmas on Labor Day.
Is the point to get to the Apocalypse sooner? Just to vindicate the expectations of those southern Republicans?
Misfits of the expatriate variety have an acute awareness of what the citizens of other places hear when they listen to CNN International or the edgier-bordering-on cynical reports about America on the BBC and other international channels.
The average American sitting in his living room in Ropeadope, Iowa (if he listens to news at all) doesn’t give a flying fig about the giftie gie us. I’m sure there was a time when I didn’t care either, because like all Americans I thought the world was in orbit around American power and interests. It came as quite a shock when I discovered my cosmology was way off, that American mass and strength didn’t make America great except in the derogatory sense Freud meant when he said, “America–great, yes: a great mistake.”
I am old enough alas to remember Viet Nam era bumper stickers that read, “America: Love it or Leave It.” I was living in the American south in those days, and I tended to agree. Why would you stay if you could leave. It’s a free country. The doors are open. That’s how people including my ancestors got in.
But now I am a stranger in a strange land, where not the election but the assassination of JFK has become the seminal and defining element in a country that seems to have taken another giant step forward in advance of many bigger steps back.
I suppose America has always been an idea, more than a country. That is why it is hated around the world. It’s a theological dilemma isn’t it? Just like the God who is meant to be sublimely good and compassionate and merciful and fair can be the opposite, America turns out to be nothing but a disappointment, the negation of the ideal. You learn to doubt a God like that. You learn to be a political atheist about a country like that.
With its gaming politics, its weird sense of what racism is or isn’t, its refusal to rise above sensationalism to its better instincts, and its stubborn refusal to put its best face forward in times of international stress, it has become (to borrow a phrase) Hollywood’s suburb, and easy to hate.
But I do not hate it. I am merely a misfit, a prophet not at home in his own country.
So, I said to my friend in Lahore: “You’re going back to Paris, but will you come back—from Paris?” And she said, “Yes, I can only be French when I am out of France.”
And I said, “I know what you mean.”
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Published: July 30, 2009
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Tags: America : expatriate : patriot : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
7 Responses to “Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate”
.
steph
August 4, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Welcome to misfittidom. How can you possibly feel out of place as a misfit in the Antipodies? We all pride ourselves on being misfits among ourselves. The misfittier the better. At least that’s what I thought – it’s all about individualism and independence among ourselves. Not sameness and conforming to yer snooty little social sub groups.
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>However ungraceful, it was a fitting response. « Girl in Guadeloupe says:
May 25, 2011 at 8:47 am
[...] found a nice summary on expatriatism here:I especially like this excerpt:“I do not believe America is evil. I do not think other [...]
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Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
August 2, 2011 at 1:39 pm
[...] I was having dinner with friends before leaving the sweltering Lahore summer to return to Maine in June. Discussion turned to politics, as it often does in foreign parts. Having spent most of my professional life, by choice, outside the United States, I have learned to fine –tune my discourse, even to absorb comments that betray a woeful lack of information or historical perspective on America. The one that requires the deftest response is what … Read More [...]
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Mike Wilson
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Cool kids always think dad’s a square. When England was tops there were people who wanted to escape into Indian mysticism. America is willing to bear the cost of Europe’s compassion and enlightenment in exchange for keeping a vital market free from world war. the price is the compassion and enlightenment of all of America that isn’t New England and the West Coast. It is a win win, because anyone from middle America will tell you football and X-Box are way better than compassion and enlightenment, just don’t get sick until you’ve been with the company for at least five years.
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Scott
August 3, 2011 at 11:39 am
Welcome to the card-carrying club of terrible Americans, Dr H. I’ve been “terrible” for at least the last 20 years (and loving it).
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steph
August 3, 2011 at 3:59 pm
I like you just the way you are. But then I’m not anybody in particular, or anything at all. I don’t belong anywhere really. I just like what I like and I am who I am…. In fact as Emily wrote, and I recited on a stage when I was five: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you Nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise you know! How dreary to be somebody! How public like a Frog to tell one’s name, the livelong June, to an admiring Bog!
Not that you’re nobody of course, and I hope you become refreshed, energised, lifted, and at peace, abroad.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 29, 2012 at 6:32 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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