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Pulling the Plug on Grandma
by rjosephhoffmann
alzheimers
“What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go. ” This comes from Monsignor Charles Fahey, a Catholic priest who chairs the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group. Fahey was speaking about health care reform and the controversy over end-of-life care.
Unfortunately his view is not the view of his church. For all his touted gifts and charisma, John Paul II turned the Catholic Church into a single social doctrine: respect for life from conception to natural death. His legacy is an endless debate over what constitutes “natural” death in a culture that values physician assisted prolongation of suffering but finds physician assisted end-of-life care abhorrent. What we remember of that legacy is the image of Terri Schiavo, her cognitive faculties shattered, and a depleted John Paul himself, one not clinging to life but having life imposed by a machine, the other clinging to power as a symbol of the martyrdom of suffering.
No one bothered to tell them that the Christian martyrs didn’t die that way, and had no access to the extraordinary benefits of technology and life-prolonging medicines. There was nobility in neither death. Whatever lesson was being taught was being promoted by false analogy.
Entirely missing from this shouting match (which will forever undo the quaint reputation of the town hall meeting as an organ of democratic society) is intelligence. Not all of the shouters are Catholic, of course, not all are “seniors.” But many are both.
But I am puzzled at their theology. My own instincts are decidedly but unofficially Buddhist. I believe that a life worth living is a worthwhile life. That includes, as it does for Monsignor Fahey, a good conversation, a drink or two, the facility to share ideas. I know that my 10K running days are behind me at last, alas, courtesy of a bad knee. I know that as I age fewer delights will be available to me. While I have will, strength and heart, however, I intend to enjoy life, and then (again to quote Father Fahey), Let me Go. And I mean it. I have no desire to chalk up my grand-children’s birthdays, or my own, or ride around the mall in a motorized chair if I am too ill to enjoy the things that give life real meaning.
The Catholics of my youth used to believe something similar, prior to Catholic theology being occluded by a new and vicious emphasis on Life Hereunder. Is the world no longer a “vale of tears,” as it was in countless prayers to the Virgin? Do Catholics no longer believe that life on earth is “exile” from the paradise with God, as it used to be intoned in a famous prayer to St Michael (the archangel)? Or has all that been swept away with belief in saints and archangels? Is heaven no longer the destiny for which man is intended? Is it the whirr and buzz of hospital beds and equipment to which we all should look forward?
If this has changed, it’s fine with me. But please: make the announcement. Otherwise, a theological system that preaches the consolation of an afterlife but is visibly, obsessively committed to the prolongation of suffering for its own sake–not life, but biological endurance–begins to look shallow and cynical. Above all, please stop shouting at those of us who think you are being untrue to your own religious faith by the denial of life’s end and the pleasures that await the just thereafter.
Maybe, just maybe, this anger comes from not knowing what to believe, not believing it strongly enough, or the incoherence of Christian doctrine in the modern age. Maybe it comes from a native sense that a God who creates life must be all good, but a God who takes it away should be held at the door. All of these explanations are perfectly understandable–but they seriously weaken the religious objection to end of life care, hospice, and even more active methods of dealing with issues of pain, disease and aging. Maybe the anger stems from a certain envy of those who are unencumbered by a belief system that asks them to embrace the God of Life and the God of Death and Pain as the same God, though this is an envy that could never be acknowledged openly. I don’t know. It is hard to know, for all the shouting.
Thank God for priests like Monsignor Fahey.
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Published: August 14, 2009
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Tags: Catholic social teaching : euthanasia : health care reform : Obamacare : pulling the plug on grandma ..
3 Responses to “Pulling the Plug on Grandma”
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Pulling the Plug on Grandma (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
March 20, 2011 at 3:29 pm
[...] "What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go. " This comes from Monsignor Charles Fahey, a Catholic priest who chairs the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group. Fahey was speaking about health care reform and the controversy over end-of-life care. Unfortunately his view is not the view of his church. For all his tou … Read More [...]
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steph
March 20, 2011 at 4:52 pm
It’s ironical what he assumes is respect for life. Respect for life for me, respects my right to choose to die. As long as I can enjoy certain vital things that make life worth living, life is heaven. Conversation, a few sensual pleasures and demonstrating love, are vital to life. I intend to swim until the day I die and if I can’t, let me go, quietly, peacefully, to the silent land. If these beautiful things are withdrawn through disease or suffering, life is hell. And I would be hell, a burden, for the rest of the living world. I can’t bear that thought!
x
Reply
Seth Strong
March 21, 2011 at 10:02 am
I’m sure we all mean to say that disease and suffering to the point of giving up on life is subjectively determined. I think we mean that but it smacks of privilege to the less abled people who have lived with something their entire life. I know that’s implied. I just want it on record.
I basically think that the moment you don’t want to live, a person is entitled to pack it in. A life worth living is a life worth living in a place that would want to have you. At least to the extent that satisfies an individual’s temperament.
I don’t think anyone owes reality a halfhearted attempt at it. And folks who think I’m giving suicide a lot of respect can always help by giving our depressed friends more effort to find out how those people’s viewpoints might be improved.
Suffering is self determined. And there are lives I’m horrified to learn people have had to live. Being decrepit through aging is just one of several good reasons for letting go. And people deserve the right to do that.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Letting Go of Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann
ascension
“But I tell you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer also the other; and from him who takes away your cloak, don’t withhold your coat also. Give to everyone who asks you, and don’t ask him who takes away your goods to give them back again.” (Luke 6.27f)
Let’s pretend the year is 1757 and you have just come away from reading a new treatise by David Hume called an “Enquiry concerning Miracles.” Let’s assume you are a believing Christian who reads the Bible daily, as grandmother taught you; or perhaps a priest, a vicar, a Methodist minister. Part of the reason you believe in God, and all of the reason you believe that Jesus was his son, is tied to the supernatural authority of scripture. You have been taught that it is inspired—perhaps the very word of God, free from error and contradiction–passed down in purity and integrity from generation to generation. –A reliable witness to the origins of the world, humankind and other biological species.
You know many verses by heart: Honor your father and your mother. Blessed are the poor. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The love of money is the root of all evil. Lots of stuff about disobedient children and the value of being poor, confirmed in your own experience: there are many more poor than rich people, and children often don’t listen to their parents. You think the Bible is a wise and useful book. If you are a member of an emerging middle or merchant class—whether you live in Boston or London or Edinburgh—you haven’t read enough history to wonder if the historical facts of the Bible are true, and archeology and evolutionary biology haven’t arisen to prove them false.
The story of creation, mysterious as it may seem, is a pretty good story: it will do. As to the deeper truths of the faith, if you are Catholic, your church assures you that the trinity is a mystery, so you don’t need to bother with looking for the word in the Bible, where it doesn’t occur.
If you are a churchgoing enthusiast who can’t wait for Sunday mornings to wear your new frock or your new vest, it doesn’t bother you that there’s no reference to an 11 o clock sermon in the New Testament. If you are a Baptist and you like singing and praying loud, your church discipline and tradition tells you to ignore that part where Jesus told his followers to pray in silence, and not like the Pharisees who parade their piety and pile phrase upon phrase.
But what really convinces you that what you do as a Christian of any denomination is the right thing to do is what theologians in the eighteenth century, the great period after the Newtonian revolution of the 17th, called Christian Evidences.
The phrase was introduced to make the supernatural elements of the Bible, and especially for Christians the New Testament, more up to date, more in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Reasonable men and women who thought the medieval approach to religion was fiddle faddle—something only the Catholics still believed, especially the Irish and Spanish—had begun to equate reason with the progress of Protestant Christianity. Newton had given this position a heads up when he suggested that his entire project in Physics was to prove that the laws of nature were entirely conformable to belief in a clockwork God, the divine mechanic.
Taking their cue, or miscue, from Newton’s belief in an all powerful being who both established the laws of nature and could violate them at will, as “Nature’s God,” it seemed as though miracles had been given a new lease of life. No one much bothered to read the damning indictment of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, twelve years Newton’s junior, who had argued that belief in a god whose perfection was based on the laws of nature could not be proved by exceptions to his own rules. –You can play basketball on a tennis court, but it doesn’t explain the rules of tennis very well.
Anyway, you’re comfortable with Newton, the idea of Christian “evidences”, and all those lovely stories about impudent wives being turned into pillars of salt, the ark holding good old Noah and his family teetering atop mount Ararat (wherever it was) those vile Egyptians being swept up in the waters of the red sea, and the miraculous acts of kindness and healing and bread and fishes recounted in the New Testament. As a Christian, you would have seen all these stories as a kind of prelude to the really big story, the one about a Jewish peasant (except you don’t really think of him that way) getting himself crucified for no reason at all, and surprising everyone by rising from the dead.
True, your medieval Catholic ancestors with their short and brutish and plague-besotted lives needed the assurance of a literal heaven more than you do in the 18th century. But in general, you like the idea of resurrection, or at least of eternal life, and you agree with Luther—
“The sacred Book foretold it all:
How death by death should come to fall.”
In other words, you believe in the Bible because it’s one of the only books you have ever read–and perhaps not even it, cover to cover. And in a vague, unquestioning, socially proper kind of way, you believe the book carries, to use the language of Hume’s contemporary Dr Tillotson—the attestation of divine authorship, and in the circularity that defines this discussion before Hume, the divine attestation is based on the miracles.
Divinity schools in England and America which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1850’s) required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences. The fortress of belief in an age of explanation became, ironically, the unexplained.
By 1885, Amherst, Smith, Williams, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Dartmouth and Princeton mandated the study of the evidences for Christian belief, on the assumption that the study of the Bible was an important ingredient of a well-rounded moral education.
Sophia Smith, the foundress of Smith College, stated in the third article of her will that [because] “all education should be for the glory of God and the good of man, I direct that the Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and studied in said college, and that all the discipline shall be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical Christian religion.”
But all was not well, even in 1885. Hume’s “On Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
Within the treatise, Hume, like a good Scotsman, appealed to common sense: You have never seen a brick suspended in the air. Wood will burn and fire will be extinguished by water. Food does not multiply by itself with a snap of my fingers. Water does not turn into wine. And in a deceptive opening sentence, he says, “And what is more probable than that all men shall die.”
In fact, “nothing I call a miracle has ever happened in the ordinary course of events.” It’s not a miracle if a man who seems to be in good health drops dead. It is a miracle if a dead man comes back to life—because it has never been witnessed by any of us. We only have reports. And even these can be challenged by the ordinary laws of evidence. How old are these reports? What is the reliability of the reporter? Under what circumstances were they written? Within what social, cultural and intellectual conditions did these reports originate? Hume’s conclusion is so simple and so elegant that I sometimes wish it, and not the ten commandments, were what Americans in Pascagoula were asking to be posted on classroom walls: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….”
–So what is more likely, that a report about a brick being suspended in air is true, or that a report about a brick being suspended in air is based on a misapprehension? That a report about a man rising from the dead is true, or that a report about a man rising from the dead is more easily explained as a case of mistaken identity, or fantasy—or outright fiction.
The so-called “natural supernaturalism” of the Unitarians and eventually other protestant groups took its gradual toll in the colleges I have mentioned. At Smith College, beginning in the 1920’s, Henry Elmer Barnes taught his students:
“We must construct the framework of religion on a tenable superstructure. To do so is to surrender these essential characteristics of the older religion: (1) the reality and deity of the biblical God; (2) the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus and His special relevance for contemporary religion; (3) and the belief in immortality.” Sophia Smith’s college had taken a new turn.”
At Williams, John Bissett Pratt began his course in philosophy by telling his students, “Gentlemen, learn to get by without the Bible.” At Yale, the Dwight Professor of theology in 1933 repudiated all the miracles of the Bible and announced to his students that the Jesus Christ of the Christian tradition must die, so that he can live.”
Perhaps I should add that when I got to Harvard Divinity School in the 1970’s I was told by the reigning professor of theology who out of deference will remain anonymous, that my way of speaking about God was too literal—almost as though I “believed the metaphor was a real thing.”
This little reflection on Hume and how his commentary on miracles changed forever the way people looked at the gospels is really designed to indicate that in educated twentieth century America, between roughly 1905 and 1933, the battle for the miraculous, Christian evidences, and the supernatural was all but lost—or rather, it had been won by enlightened, commonsensical teachers in our best universities and colleges.
Of course it was not won in the churches and backwoods meeting houses of what we sometimes call the American heartland, let alone in preacher-colleges of the Bible belt, or the faux-gothic seminaries of the Catholic Church.
Hume’s logic and the theological consequences of his logic barely penetrated the evangelical mindset
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in twentieth century America the “social gospel.” He wasn’t new—actually he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, and forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social order based on concern for the least among us.
In Germany and England and finally in America where ideas, especially religious ideas, came home to roost more slowly, something called the “higher criticism” was catching on. Its basic premise was that the tradition about Jesus was formed slowly and in particular social conditions not equivalent to those in Victorian England or Bismarck’s Germany. Questions had to be asked about why a certain tradition about Jesus arose; what need it might have fulfilled within a community of followers; how it might have undergone change as those needs changed—for example—the belief he was the Jewish messiah, after an unexpected crucifixion, might have led to the belief that he was the son of God who had prophesied his own untimely death.
The social reality that the community was an impoverished, illiterate, persecuted religious minority might have led the community to invent sayings like “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are you who are persecuted,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” But if this is so, then the gospels really weren’t the biography of Jesus at all. They were the biography of what the community believed about him.
The Victorian church was as immune to the German school of thought as Bishop Wilberforce was to Darwin’s theories—in some ways even more so. Even knowledgeable followers of the German school of higher criticism tried to find ways around its conclusions: Matthew Arnold for example thought the gospels were based on the misunderstanding of Jesus by his own followers, which led them to misrepresent him; but then Arnold went on to say that this misunderstanding led them to preserve his teaching, although in a distorted and conflated form. They added their words and ideas to his, but in their honest ignorance was honesty. Arnold’s influence was minimal.
The deeds were gone; now people were fighting over the words.
When the twentieth century hit, few people in the mainline Protestant churches and almost no one in the Catholic Church of 1905 was prepared for the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the 18th and 19th century attempts to piece together a coherent picture of the hero of the gospels. Schweitzer pronounced the quests a failure, because none of them dealt with the data within the appropriate historical framework. No final conclusions were possible.
We can know, because of what we know about ancient literature and ancient Roman Palestine, what Jesus might have been like—we can know the contours of an existence. But not enough for a New York Times obituary.
Beyond tracing this line we get lost in contradiction. If he taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations. His teaching, if we were to hear it, Schweitzer said, would sound mad to us. He might have preached the end of the world. If he did, he would not have spent his time developing a social agenda or an ethics textbook for his soon-to-be-raptured followers. (Paul certainly knows nothing about ethics—just some interim rules to be followed before the second coming of Christ.)
Schweitzer flirts most with the possibility that Jesus was an eschatological prophet in an era of political and social gloom for the Jews. But Schweitzer’s shocking verdict is that the Jesus of the church, and the Jesus of popular piety—equally–never existed.
Whatever sketch you come up with will be a sketch based on the image you have already formed: The agnostic former Jesuit Alfred Loisy (d. 1940) after his excommunication wrote a book called The Gospel and the Church, in which he lampooned the writings of the reigning German theologian Adolph von Harnack (d. 1930) who had published a book called The Essence of Christianity.
In the book Harnack argued that the Gospel had permanent ethical value given to it by someone who possessed (what he called) God-consciousness: Jesus was the ethical teacher par excellence. Loisy responded, “Professor Harnack has looked deep into the well for the face of the historical Jesus, but what he has seen is his own liberal protestant reflection.”
In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York City around 1917 a young graduate of the Colgate Divinity School named Walter Rauschenbusch was looking at the same miserable social conditions that were being described by everyone from Jane Addams to Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in literature.
Rauschenbusch thought that the churches had aligned themselves with robber barons, supported unfair labor practices, and winked at income disparity. So, for Rauschenbusch, the gospel was all about a first century revolutionary movement opposed to privilege and injustice. In his most famous book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, he writes, “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”
Like Harnack before and dozens of social gospel writers later, the facts hardly mattered. Whether Jesus actually said the things he is supposed to have said or they were said for him hardly mattered. Whether he was understood or misrepresented hardly mattered. Liberal religion had made Jesus a cipher for whatever social agenda it wanted to pursue, just as in the slavery debates of the 19th century, biblical authority was invoked to defend buying and selling human beings. Having given up on the historical Jesus, Jesus could now be made to say whatever his managers wanted him to say.
Unfortunately, ignoring Schweitzer’s scholarly cautions, they failed to demonstrate how the words of a first century Galilean prophet, fixated on the end of a corrupt social order, could be used to reform a morally bankrupt economic system.
For many of us who follow the Jesus quest wherever it goes, it’s impressive that the less we know about Jesus–the less we know for sure–the longer and many the books that can be written. In what will surely be the greatest historical irony of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example, members of the Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to “just the real ones,” came to the conclusion that 82% of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title Messiah, that he did not share a final meal with his disciples (there goes the Mass), and that he did not invent the Lord’s prayer.
They come to these conclusions however in more than a hundred books by Seminar members, of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus. The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventor wants him to be: prophet, wise man, magician, sage, bandit, revolutionary, gay, French, Southern Baptist or Cajun. As I wrote in a contribution to George Wells’s 1996 book The Jesus Legend, the competing theories about who Jesus really was, based on a shrinking body of reliable information, makes the theory that he never existed a welcome relief. In a Free Inquiry article from 1993, I offended the seminar by saying that the Jesus of their labors was a “talking doll with a repertoire of 33 genuine sayings; pull his string and he blesses the poor.”
But all is not lost that seems lost. When we look at the history of this case, we can draw some conclusions. We don’t know much about Jesus. What we do know however, and have known since the serious investigation of the biblical text, based on sound critical principles, became possible, is that there are things we can exclude.
Jesus was not Aristotle. Despite what George Bush thinks, he wasn’t a philosopher. He did not write a book on ethics. If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.
We don’t know what he thought about the messiah or himself. The gospels are cagey on the subject and can yield almost any answer you want.
He was neither a social conservative nor a liberal democrat. The change he (or his inventors) advocated was regressive rather than progressive. But it’s also possible that we don’t even know enough to say that much.
He doesn’t seem to have had much of a work ethic; he tells his followers to beg from door to door, go barefoot (or not), and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. He might have been a magician; the law (Ex. xxii. 17 [A. V. 18]) which punishes sorcery with death speaks of the witch and not of the wizard, and exorcism was prevalent in the time of Jesus, as were magical amulets, tricks, healings, love potions and charms—like phylacteries.
But we can’t be sure. If he was a magician, he was certainly not interested in ethics. After a point, the plural Jesuses available to us in the gospels become self-negating, and even the conclusion that the gospels are biographies of communities becomes unhelpful: they are the biographies of different perspectives often arising within the same community.
Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.
What we need to be mindful of, however, is the danger of using greatly reduced, demythologized and under-impressive sources as though no matter what we do, or what we discover, the source—the Gospel–retains its authority.
It is obviously true that somehow the less certain we can be about whether x is true, the more possibilities there are for x. But when I took math, we seldom defined certainty as the increase in a variable’s domain. The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.
We need to be mindful that history is a corrective science: when we know more than we did last week, we have to correct last week’s story. The old story loses its authority. Biblical scholars and theologians often show the immaturity of their historical skills by playing with history. They have shown, throughout the twentieth century, a remarkable immunity to the results of historical criticism, as though relieving Jesus of his obligation to be a man of his time and culture–however that might have been–entitles him to be someone who is free to live in our time, and rule on our problems, and lend godly authority to our ethical dilemmas.
No other historical figure or legendary hero can be abused in quite the same way. We leave Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Cleopatra in Hellenistic Egypt, and Churchill buried at the family plot in Bladon near Oxford.
The use of Jesus as an ethical teacher has to go the way of his divinity and miracles, in the long run. And when I say this, I’m not speaking as an atheist. I am simply saying what I think is historically true, or true in terms of the way history deals with its own.
It is an act of courage, an act of moral bravery, to let go of God, and his only begotten Son, the second person of the blessed trinity whose legend locates him in Nazareth during the Roman occupation. It’s (at least) an act of honesty to say that what we would like to believe to be the case about him might not have been the case at all.
To recognize that Jesus—whoever he was–did not have answers for our time, could not have foreseen our problems and moral dilemmas, much less rule on them with godly authority, frees us from the more painful obligation to view the Bible as a moral constitution.
The history of Jesus-scholarship is a progression of narratives about what might have been the case, but probably wasn’t.
If men and women in the New Testament business wish to pursue the construction of counter-legends as though they were doing history, there is no one to stop them. If they announce to an unsuspecting and credulous public that they have found “new historical materials,” better “gospels,” the “real story,” or the bone-boxes of Jesus and his wife and family, they simply prove the axiom: Jesus may not save, but he sells.
It has been a long time since theology’s dirty little secret was first whispered: “The quest for the historical Jesus leads to the door of the church.” But that is still where it leads. We leave him there, as Schweitzer lamented, “as one unknown.”
Bultman
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Published: August 20, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: historical jesus : Jesus Project : Jesus Seminar : myth theory : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Theology ..
3 Responses to “Letting Go of Jesus”
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mikelioso
July 11, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Am excellent article. I just recently found out about your work and this site and will definitely look up your books. You address what has been a nagging fear in my time in collage, that studying to to do scholarship on Jesus is like a man from 1900 studying steam tractor repair. Beyond those who want to redirect Christian theology(of which I have no particular concern) is there a point in anyone doing study in the history of Jesus? Muhammad? I worry that these founding figures are two much obscured for anything meaningful to be said of them.
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steph
August 5, 2010 at 5:30 pm
It’s hard not to be skeptical when, although Schweitzer was commenting on scholarship before the early twentieth century, it hasn’t progressed much since then. It suffered during the Nazi period with Aryan influences and other than a few initiatives by Sanders and Vermes, New Testament scholarship is seemingly dominated by American extremes – the fundamentalists versus the fundamentalists (two polar opposites) and the American Jesus seminar in between. And the extreme caricature of scholarship could be a totally divine Godman versus a bunch 0f stories written about nobody, to a weird pacifist rebel who sounded alot like a witty cynic – a washed out hippy from the 60s like themselves… Too much religion or too much anti religion or two much wishy washy moderately learned wishful thinking in scholarship. And, “The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.” Too little consideration of how history and myth work together, and perhaps not enough use of the critical tools of Aramaic and historical plausibility. However I’m not quite as skeptical as I was, due to my current situation I suppose, and I think there is more room for less subjectivity where inquiry is for inquiry’s sake and the results might be interesting for interest’s sake but have no personal consequences for the inquirer. And I especially like this: “If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.” (Surely George Bush, silly character, isn’t really real)
xx
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John
August 20, 2010 at 2:37 am
Suppose that you — a well-educated, modern intellectual — were transported back to Jerusalem some period of days or weeks after the purported post-resurrection appearances of Christ. Suspending your disbelief further, suppose that you hear tell of a rabbi or rabble rouser who had been crucified as a criminal. Some call him a blasphemer or a trouble maker or an inconsequent so-and-so or what-have-you, but there are some who say that he matters in some way. Perhaps as a teacher or a revolutionary figure or a savior.
But, you are fairly certain, as far as things go (you know how utterly superstitious and unmodern these people are) that a man, call him Jesus, was crucified and the event (his crucifixion) created a hubbub of sorts. You are shown an empty tomb and place of crucifixion, but no body. You conduct interviews with Pharisees and Sadduccees, with the Roman Prefect, with witnesses to the crucifixion and others as you felt inclined. Of particular note, you talk to the dead man’s followers, and they tell you that he appeared to them after he died, but then he left (levitated) skyward among the clouds.
If you’re up on your Hume, you surely haven’t any reason to believe in supernatural occurrences, no matter the testimony of “witnesses”. While you might be impressed if these witnesses tell a more-or-less consistent tale and seem to genuinely believe what they say, are you not obliged to hold to some natural, though as of yet unproven, explanation for the group hallucination? Besides, others claim this group of believers is fomenting trouble, stole the body and made the whole thing up, etc.
As a matter of modern philosophical principal, are you not required to presume that there was no resurrection? Resuscitation, group hallucination, mistaken identity, hoax, wishful thinking, mendaciousness and ulterior motive — these are the pieces on the chess board, but not resurrection. It’s is outside the rules: tennis play on a basketball court ain’t playing basketball.
The point is this: unless you witnessed the resurrection with your own eyes (and, even then really), you cannot and must not believe in the testimony of human witnesses to this kind of miracle.
Hence, we let go of Jesus. What is the point in asking which of the stories is true? Why inquire as to what this particular teacher might have said? If he was not the resurrected God-man, and was not a Plato-like scholar with dutiful scribes in tow, why should we endeavor to determine (approximately 2,000 years, and many conceptual millenia, removed from the dead man’s historical context) exactly what he might have said or who he might have been? If the Nicene creed or the account that Paul allegedly received “as of first importance” is hogwash, then enough. Full stop.
But, back to you, our erudite and sober-witted time traveler, if you believed that followers of Christ testified that Jesus made certain claims to divinity and was then resurrected, does it really make sense to say that you know, with atheistic or agnostic certitude, that not only did it not happen, but it could not have happened? Turning the coin over, my point is this: if Peter himself told you he witnessed Christ’s ministry, the crucifixion and the resurrected Christ and that he supped with the Lord on the night of his betrayal by one Judas, etc. etc., would that place you in a position to believe such a tale any more than if you heard an account some millenia after the fact that was culled from other oral and written traditions as “the orthodox” account? I think the Humean answer, insofar as the God claims and resurrection are concerned, is hell no. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….”
And yet, having quoted this apparent shibboleth of reason, one wonders how we know it to be true. A miracle, something inexplicable under current theories of physics or biology or some other science, cannot be believe to have occurred unless a proposition asserting it’s falsehood would be even more unexpected or violative of our scientific framework than would the miracle? And this theorem holds for all cosmogony, for black holes, for multiverses, for Darwinism and microbiology, for you name it. And it will hold (somehow we know this) until the “falsehood” of a new datum (i.e., miraculous occurrence) is more “miraculous” than the new datum.
I assume this just means that you discount/deny events that violate your theory of natural law until such time as you feel inclined to postulate a new theory of what is or what is possible that can encompass the new data.
And…..we, scholars and humanists ain’t ever gonna find nothing to make us believe that Christ could have possibly been resurrected. I would just add……you, sons of Appollo wouldn’t have believed it if you had been there.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Letting Go of Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann
ascension
“But I tell you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer also the other; and from him who takes away your cloak, don’t withhold your coat also. Give to everyone who asks you, and don’t ask him who takes away your goods to give them back again.” (Luke 6.27f)
Let’s pretend the year is 1757 and you have just come away from reading a new treatise by David Hume called an “Enquiry concerning Miracles.” Let’s assume you are a believing Christian who reads the Bible daily, as grandmother taught you; or perhaps a priest, a vicar, a Methodist minister. Part of the reason you believe in God, and all of the reason you believe that Jesus was his son, is tied to the supernatural authority of scripture. You have been taught that it is inspired—perhaps the very word of God, free from error and contradiction–passed down in purity and integrity from generation to generation. –A reliable witness to the origins of the world, humankind and other biological species.
You know many verses by heart: Honor your father and your mother. Blessed are the poor. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The love of money is the root of all evil. Lots of stuff about disobedient children and the value of being poor, confirmed in your own experience: there are many more poor than rich people, and children often don’t listen to their parents. You think the Bible is a wise and useful book. If you are a member of an emerging middle or merchant class—whether you live in Boston or London or Edinburgh—you haven’t read enough history to wonder if the historical facts of the Bible are true, and archeology and evolutionary biology haven’t arisen to prove them false.
The story of creation, mysterious as it may seem, is a pretty good story: it will do. As to the deeper truths of the faith, if you are Catholic, your church assures you that the trinity is a mystery, so you don’t need to bother with looking for the word in the Bible, where it doesn’t occur.
If you are a churchgoing enthusiast who can’t wait for Sunday mornings to wear your new frock or your new vest, it doesn’t bother you that there’s no reference to an 11 o clock sermon in the New Testament. If you are a Baptist and you like singing and praying loud, your church discipline and tradition tells you to ignore that part where Jesus told his followers to pray in silence, and not like the Pharisees who parade their piety and pile phrase upon phrase.
But what really convinces you that what you do as a Christian of any denomination is the right thing to do is what theologians in the eighteenth century, the great period after the Newtonian revolution of the 17th, called Christian Evidences.
The phrase was introduced to make the supernatural elements of the Bible, and especially for Christians the New Testament, more up to date, more in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Reasonable men and women who thought the medieval approach to religion was fiddle faddle—something only the Catholics still believed, especially the Irish and Spanish—had begun to equate reason with the progress of Protestant Christianity. Newton had given this position a heads up when he suggested that his entire project in Physics was to prove that the laws of nature were entirely conformable to belief in a clockwork God, the divine mechanic.
Taking their cue, or miscue, from Newton’s belief in an all powerful being who both established the laws of nature and could violate them at will, as “Nature’s God,” it seemed as though miracles had been given a new lease of life. No one much bothered to read the damning indictment of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, twelve years Newton’s junior, who had argued that belief in a god whose perfection was based on the laws of nature could not be proved by exceptions to his own rules. –You can play basketball on a tennis court, but it doesn’t explain the rules of tennis very well.
Anyway, you’re comfortable with Newton, the idea of Christian “evidences”, and all those lovely stories about impudent wives being turned into pillars of salt, the ark holding good old Noah and his family teetering atop mount Ararat (wherever it was) those vile Egyptians being swept up in the waters of the red sea, and the miraculous acts of kindness and healing and bread and fishes recounted in the New Testament. As a Christian, you would have seen all these stories as a kind of prelude to the really big story, the one about a Jewish peasant (except you don’t really think of him that way) getting himself crucified for no reason at all, and surprising everyone by rising from the dead.
True, your medieval Catholic ancestors with their short and brutish and plague-besotted lives needed the assurance of a literal heaven more than you do in the 18th century. But in general, you like the idea of resurrection, or at least of eternal life, and you agree with Luther—
“The sacred Book foretold it all:
How death by death should come to fall.”
In other words, you believe in the Bible because it’s one of the only books you have ever read–and perhaps not even it, cover to cover. And in a vague, unquestioning, socially proper kind of way, you believe the book carries, to use the language of Hume’s contemporary Dr Tillotson—the attestation of divine authorship, and in the circularity that defines this discussion before Hume, the divine attestation is based on the miracles.
Divinity schools in England and America which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1850’s) required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences. The fortress of belief in an age of explanation became, ironically, the unexplained.
By 1885, Amherst, Smith, Williams, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Dartmouth and Princeton mandated the study of the evidences for Christian belief, on the assumption that the study of the Bible was an important ingredient of a well-rounded moral education.
Sophia Smith, the foundress of Smith College, stated in the third article of her will that [because] “all education should be for the glory of God and the good of man, I direct that the Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and studied in said college, and that all the discipline shall be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical Christian religion.”
But all was not well, even in 1885. Hume’s “On Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
Within the treatise, Hume, like a good Scotsman, appealed to common sense: You have never seen a brick suspended in the air. Wood will burn and fire will be extinguished by water. Food does not multiply by itself with a snap of my fingers. Water does not turn into wine. And in a deceptive opening sentence, he says, “And what is more probable than that all men shall die.”
In fact, “nothing I call a miracle has ever happened in the ordinary course of events.” It’s not a miracle if a man who seems to be in good health drops dead. It is a miracle if a dead man comes back to life—because it has never been witnessed by any of us. We only have reports. And even these can be challenged by the ordinary laws of evidence. How old are these reports? What is the reliability of the reporter? Under what circumstances were they written? Within what social, cultural and intellectual conditions did these reports originate? Hume’s conclusion is so simple and so elegant that I sometimes wish it, and not the ten commandments, were what Americans in Pascagoula were asking to be posted on classroom walls: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….”
–So what is more likely, that a report about a brick being suspended in air is true, or that a report about a brick being suspended in air is based on a misapprehension? That a report about a man rising from the dead is true, or that a report about a man rising from the dead is more easily explained as a case of mistaken identity, or fantasy—or outright fiction.
The so-called “natural supernaturalism” of the Unitarians and eventually other protestant groups took its gradual toll in the colleges I have mentioned. At Smith College, beginning in the 1920’s, Henry Elmer Barnes taught his students:
“We must construct the framework of religion on a tenable superstructure. To do so is to surrender these essential characteristics of the older religion: (1) the reality and deity of the biblical God; (2) the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus and His special relevance for contemporary religion; (3) and the belief in immortality.” Sophia Smith’s college had taken a new turn.”
At Williams, John Bissett Pratt began his course in philosophy by telling his students, “Gentlemen, learn to get by without the Bible.” At Yale, the Dwight Professor of theology in 1933 repudiated all the miracles of the Bible and announced to his students that the Jesus Christ of the Christian tradition must die, so that he can live.”
Perhaps I should add that when I got to Harvard Divinity School in the 1970’s I was told by the reigning professor of theology who out of deference will remain anonymous, that my way of speaking about God was too literal—almost as though I “believed the metaphor was a real thing.”
This little reflection on Hume and how his commentary on miracles changed forever the way people looked at the gospels is really designed to indicate that in educated twentieth century America, between roughly 1905 and 1933, the battle for the miraculous, Christian evidences, and the supernatural was all but lost—or rather, it had been won by enlightened, commonsensical teachers in our best universities and colleges.
Of course it was not won in the churches and backwoods meeting houses of what we sometimes call the American heartland, let alone in preacher-colleges of the Bible belt, or the faux-gothic seminaries of the Catholic Church.
Hume’s logic and the theological consequences of his logic barely penetrated the evangelical mindset
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in twentieth century America the “social gospel.” He wasn’t new—actually he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, and forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social order based on concern for the least among us.
In Germany and England and finally in America where ideas, especially religious ideas, came home to roost more slowly, something called the “higher criticism” was catching on. Its basic premise was that the tradition about Jesus was formed slowly and in particular social conditions not equivalent to those in Victorian England or Bismarck’s Germany. Questions had to be asked about why a certain tradition about Jesus arose; what need it might have fulfilled within a community of followers; how it might have undergone change as those needs changed—for example—the belief he was the Jewish messiah, after an unexpected crucifixion, might have led to the belief that he was the son of God who had prophesied his own untimely death.
The social reality that the community was an impoverished, illiterate, persecuted religious minority might have led the community to invent sayings like “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are you who are persecuted,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” But if this is so, then the gospels really weren’t the biography of Jesus at all. They were the biography of what the community believed about him.
The Victorian church was as immune to the German school of thought as Bishop Wilberforce was to Darwin’s theories—in some ways even more so. Even knowledgeable followers of the German school of higher criticism tried to find ways around its conclusions: Matthew Arnold for example thought the gospels were based on the misunderstanding of Jesus by his own followers, which led them to misrepresent him; but then Arnold went on to say that this misunderstanding led them to preserve his teaching, although in a distorted and conflated form. They added their words and ideas to his, but in their honest ignorance was honesty. Arnold’s influence was minimal.
The deeds were gone; now people were fighting over the words.
When the twentieth century hit, few people in the mainline Protestant churches and almost no one in the Catholic Church of 1905 was prepared for the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the 18th and 19th century attempts to piece together a coherent picture of the hero of the gospels. Schweitzer pronounced the quests a failure, because none of them dealt with the data within the appropriate historical framework. No final conclusions were possible.
We can know, because of what we know about ancient literature and ancient Roman Palestine, what Jesus might have been like—we can know the contours of an existence. But not enough for a New York Times obituary.
Beyond tracing this line we get lost in contradiction. If he taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations. His teaching, if we were to hear it, Schweitzer said, would sound mad to us. He might have preached the end of the world. If he did, he would not have spent his time developing a social agenda or an ethics textbook for his soon-to-be-raptured followers. (Paul certainly knows nothing about ethics—just some interim rules to be followed before the second coming of Christ.)
Schweitzer flirts most with the possibility that Jesus was an eschatological prophet in an era of political and social gloom for the Jews. But Schweitzer’s shocking verdict is that the Jesus of the church, and the Jesus of popular piety—equally–never existed.
Whatever sketch you come up with will be a sketch based on the image you have already formed: The agnostic former Jesuit Alfred Loisy (d. 1940) after his excommunication wrote a book called The Gospel and the Church, in which he lampooned the writings of the reigning German theologian Adolph von Harnack (d. 1930) who had published a book called The Essence of Christianity.
In the book Harnack argued that the Gospel had permanent ethical value given to it by someone who possessed (what he called) God-consciousness: Jesus was the ethical teacher par excellence. Loisy responded, “Professor Harnack has looked deep into the well for the face of the historical Jesus, but what he has seen is his own liberal protestant reflection.”
In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York City around 1917 a young graduate of the Colgate Divinity School named Walter Rauschenbusch was looking at the same miserable social conditions that were being described by everyone from Jane Addams to Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in literature.
Rauschenbusch thought that the churches had aligned themselves with robber barons, supported unfair labor practices, and winked at income disparity. So, for Rauschenbusch, the gospel was all about a first century revolutionary movement opposed to privilege and injustice. In his most famous book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, he writes, “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”
Like Harnack before and dozens of social gospel writers later, the facts hardly mattered. Whether Jesus actually said the things he is supposed to have said or they were said for him hardly mattered. Whether he was understood or misrepresented hardly mattered. Liberal religion had made Jesus a cipher for whatever social agenda it wanted to pursue, just as in the slavery debates of the 19th century, biblical authority was invoked to defend buying and selling human beings. Having given up on the historical Jesus, Jesus could now be made to say whatever his managers wanted him to say.
Unfortunately, ignoring Schweitzer’s scholarly cautions, they failed to demonstrate how the words of a first century Galilean prophet, fixated on the end of a corrupt social order, could be used to reform a morally bankrupt economic system.
For many of us who follow the Jesus quest wherever it goes, it’s impressive that the less we know about Jesus–the less we know for sure–the longer and many the books that can be written. In what will surely be the greatest historical irony of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example, members of the Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to “just the real ones,” came to the conclusion that 82% of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title Messiah, that he did not share a final meal with his disciples (there goes the Mass), and that he did not invent the Lord’s prayer.
They come to these conclusions however in more than a hundred books by Seminar members, of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus. The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventor wants him to be: prophet, wise man, magician, sage, bandit, revolutionary, gay, French, Southern Baptist or Cajun. As I wrote in a contribution to George Wells’s 1996 book The Jesus Legend, the competing theories about who Jesus really was, based on a shrinking body of reliable information, makes the theory that he never existed a welcome relief. In a Free Inquiry article from 1993, I offended the seminar by saying that the Jesus of their labors was a “talking doll with a repertoire of 33 genuine sayings; pull his string and he blesses the poor.”
But all is not lost that seems lost. When we look at the history of this case, we can draw some conclusions. We don’t know much about Jesus. What we do know however, and have known since the serious investigation of the biblical text, based on sound critical principles, became possible, is that there are things we can exclude.
Jesus was not Aristotle. Despite what George Bush thinks, he wasn’t a philosopher. He did not write a book on ethics. If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.
We don’t know what he thought about the messiah or himself. The gospels are cagey on the subject and can yield almost any answer you want.
He was neither a social conservative nor a liberal democrat. The change he (or his inventors) advocated was regressive rather than progressive. But it’s also possible that we don’t even know enough to say that much.
He doesn’t seem to have had much of a work ethic; he tells his followers to beg from door to door, go barefoot (or not), and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. He might have been a magician; the law (Ex. xxii. 17 [A. V. 18]) which punishes sorcery with death speaks of the witch and not of the wizard, and exorcism was prevalent in the time of Jesus, as were magical amulets, tricks, healings, love potions and charms—like phylacteries.
But we can’t be sure. If he was a magician, he was certainly not interested in ethics. After a point, the plural Jesuses available to us in the gospels become self-negating, and even the conclusion that the gospels are biographies of communities becomes unhelpful: they are the biographies of different perspectives often arising within the same community.
Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.
What we need to be mindful of, however, is the danger of using greatly reduced, demythologized and under-impressive sources as though no matter what we do, or what we discover, the source—the Gospel–retains its authority.
It is obviously true that somehow the less certain we can be about whether x is true, the more possibilities there are for x. But when I took math, we seldom defined certainty as the increase in a variable’s domain. The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.
We need to be mindful that history is a corrective science: when we know more than we did last week, we have to correct last week’s story. The old story loses its authority. Biblical scholars and theologians often show the immaturity of their historical skills by playing with history. They have shown, throughout the twentieth century, a remarkable immunity to the results of historical criticism, as though relieving Jesus of his obligation to be a man of his time and culture–however that might have been–entitles him to be someone who is free to live in our time, and rule on our problems, and lend godly authority to our ethical dilemmas.
No other historical figure or legendary hero can be abused in quite the same way. We leave Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Cleopatra in Hellenistic Egypt, and Churchill buried at the family plot in Bladon near Oxford.
The use of Jesus as an ethical teacher has to go the way of his divinity and miracles, in the long run. And when I say this, I’m not speaking as an atheist. I am simply saying what I think is historically true, or true in terms of the way history deals with its own.
It is an act of courage, an act of moral bravery, to let go of God, and his only begotten Son, the second person of the blessed trinity whose legend locates him in Nazareth during the Roman occupation. It’s (at least) an act of honesty to say that what we would like to believe to be the case about him might not have been the case at all.
To recognize that Jesus—whoever he was–did not have answers for our time, could not have foreseen our problems and moral dilemmas, much less rule on them with godly authority, frees us from the more painful obligation to view the Bible as a moral constitution.
The history of Jesus-scholarship is a progression of narratives about what might have been the case, but probably wasn’t.
If men and women in the New Testament business wish to pursue the construction of counter-legends as though they were doing history, there is no one to stop them. If they announce to an unsuspecting and credulous public that they have found “new historical materials,” better “gospels,” the “real story,” or the bone-boxes of Jesus and his wife and family, they simply prove the axiom: Jesus may not save, but he sells.
It has been a long time since theology’s dirty little secret was first whispered: “The quest for the historical Jesus leads to the door of the church.” But that is still where it leads. We leave him there, as Schweitzer lamented, “as one unknown.”
Bultman
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Published: August 20, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: historical jesus : Jesus Project : Jesus Seminar : myth theory : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Theology ..
3 Responses to “Letting Go of Jesus”
.
mikelioso
July 11, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Am excellent article. I just recently found out about your work and this site and will definitely look up your books. You address what has been a nagging fear in my time in collage, that studying to to do scholarship on Jesus is like a man from 1900 studying steam tractor repair. Beyond those who want to redirect Christian theology(of which I have no particular concern) is there a point in anyone doing study in the history of Jesus? Muhammad? I worry that these founding figures are two much obscured for anything meaningful to be said of them.
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steph
August 5, 2010 at 5:30 pm
It’s hard not to be skeptical when, although Schweitzer was commenting on scholarship before the early twentieth century, it hasn’t progressed much since then. It suffered during the Nazi period with Aryan influences and other than a few initiatives by Sanders and Vermes, New Testament scholarship is seemingly dominated by American extremes – the fundamentalists versus the fundamentalists (two polar opposites) and the American Jesus seminar in between. And the extreme caricature of scholarship could be a totally divine Godman versus a bunch 0f stories written about nobody, to a weird pacifist rebel who sounded alot like a witty cynic – a washed out hippy from the 60s like themselves… Too much religion or too much anti religion or two much wishy washy moderately learned wishful thinking in scholarship. And, “The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.” Too little consideration of how history and myth work together, and perhaps not enough use of the critical tools of Aramaic and historical plausibility. However I’m not quite as skeptical as I was, due to my current situation I suppose, and I think there is more room for less subjectivity where inquiry is for inquiry’s sake and the results might be interesting for interest’s sake but have no personal consequences for the inquirer. And I especially like this: “If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.” (Surely George Bush, silly character, isn’t really real)
xx
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John
August 20, 2010 at 2:37 am
Suppose that you — a well-educated, modern intellectual — were transported back to Jerusalem some period of days or weeks after the purported post-resurrection appearances of Christ. Suspending your disbelief further, suppose that you hear tell of a rabbi or rabble rouser who had been crucified as a criminal. Some call him a blasphemer or a trouble maker or an inconsequent so-and-so or what-have-you, but there are some who say that he matters in some way. Perhaps as a teacher or a revolutionary figure or a savior.
But, you are fairly certain, as far as things go (you know how utterly superstitious and unmodern these people are) that a man, call him Jesus, was crucified and the event (his crucifixion) created a hubbub of sorts. You are shown an empty tomb and place of crucifixion, but no body. You conduct interviews with Pharisees and Sadduccees, with the Roman Prefect, with witnesses to the crucifixion and others as you felt inclined. Of particular note, you talk to the dead man’s followers, and they tell you that he appeared to them after he died, but then he left (levitated) skyward among the clouds.
If you’re up on your Hume, you surely haven’t any reason to believe in supernatural occurrences, no matter the testimony of “witnesses”. While you might be impressed if these witnesses tell a more-or-less consistent tale and seem to genuinely believe what they say, are you not obliged to hold to some natural, though as of yet unproven, explanation for the group hallucination? Besides, others claim this group of believers is fomenting trouble, stole the body and made the whole thing up, etc.
As a matter of modern philosophical principal, are you not required to presume that there was no resurrection? Resuscitation, group hallucination, mistaken identity, hoax, wishful thinking, mendaciousness and ulterior motive — these are the pieces on the chess board, but not resurrection. It’s is outside the rules: tennis play on a basketball court ain’t playing basketball.
The point is this: unless you witnessed the resurrection with your own eyes (and, even then really), you cannot and must not believe in the testimony of human witnesses to this kind of miracle.
Hence, we let go of Jesus. What is the point in asking which of the stories is true? Why inquire as to what this particular teacher might have said? If he was not the resurrected God-man, and was not a Plato-like scholar with dutiful scribes in tow, why should we endeavor to determine (approximately 2,000 years, and many conceptual millenia, removed from the dead man’s historical context) exactly what he might have said or who he might have been? If the Nicene creed or the account that Paul allegedly received “as of first importance” is hogwash, then enough. Full stop.
But, back to you, our erudite and sober-witted time traveler, if you believed that followers of Christ testified that Jesus made certain claims to divinity and was then resurrected, does it really make sense to say that you know, with atheistic or agnostic certitude, that not only did it not happen, but it could not have happened? Turning the coin over, my point is this: if Peter himself told you he witnessed Christ’s ministry, the crucifixion and the resurrected Christ and that he supped with the Lord on the night of his betrayal by one Judas, etc. etc., would that place you in a position to believe such a tale any more than if you heard an account some millenia after the fact that was culled from other oral and written traditions as “the orthodox” account? I think the Humean answer, insofar as the God claims and resurrection are concerned, is hell no. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….”
And yet, having quoted this apparent shibboleth of reason, one wonders how we know it to be true. A miracle, something inexplicable under current theories of physics or biology or some other science, cannot be believe to have occurred unless a proposition asserting it’s falsehood would be even more unexpected or violative of our scientific framework than would the miracle? And this theorem holds for all cosmogony, for black holes, for multiverses, for Darwinism and microbiology, for you name it. And it will hold (somehow we know this) until the “falsehood” of a new datum (i.e., miraculous occurrence) is more “miraculous” than the new datum.
I assume this just means that you discount/deny events that violate your theory of natural law until such time as you feel inclined to postulate a new theory of what is or what is possible that can encompass the new data.
And…..we, scholars and humanists ain’t ever gonna find nothing to make us believe that Christ could have possibly been resurrected. I would just add……you, sons of Appollo wouldn’t have believed it if you had been there.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Pharisaic Humanism
by rjosephhoffmann
caiphasI’d like to coin a phrase: Pharisaic Humanism. The phrase describes what I think is the tragic flaw of so-called “secular humanism.”
Humanism has never been one thing. Renaissance humanism was a bundle of things, unified mainly by a principle we all learned (or were supposed to) for that literature exam back in college: it shifted the focus from giving God the glory to giving man his due–an adequate summary of what the never-much-read essay by Pico della Mirandola was doing in the first humanist manifesto, his Oration on the Dignity of Man.
Mind you, Renaissance humanism was not about subtracting from God’s glory. It simply saw humanity as his crowning achievement, endowed with beauty, intelligence, creative power and free will rather than some pitiful mob of sinners begging for mercy and salvation.
But it’s a short step from that to Newtonian Physics and Hume’s philosophy and a sequence of movements that put God and religion on the defensive, as if the creature had at last learned to stand on his own two feet, think for himself, and was ready to make his own way in the world without papa’s rules.
In the Enlightenment, without much flourish, it was permissible for God to die. Maybe that’s why the era produced the most poignant Requiem Mass ever written–Mozart’s–because its real sadness springs from the loss of the hero of western religion. If you have never wept at its Dies Irae, you have never wept for the right thing.
Arising out of this new self-confidence were new theories of government and social order, including America’s secular democracy. Kings were uncrowned. Revolutions were fought. Money under new theories of wealth became popular: greed was transformed into investment and venture, and the virtue of poverty was laid aside as a lingering superstition of the Middle Ages, like the Eucharist and biblical miracles.
These secular and rationalist movements were not the essence of humanist thinking—and the term was, as far as I can tell, almost never used to describe them. But without a doubt they were consequences of what had taken shape in the sixteenth century, across Europe. The eighteenth century, which both Kant and Diderot called “enlightenment,” was to ideas what the previous centuries had been to art, music and literature.
They were also self-satisfied, arrivistic, a bit too spiteful. Of course, we all applaud Hume, puzzle with Kant, laugh with Voltaire, and nod in agreement with Hegel. If God was spared the executioner’s blade, as Charles I and Louis XVI were not, he was at least put on notice and a renewable contract without tenure.
His good behaviour was demanded by a world that in its European format anyway increasingly found his word and commandments onerous rather than sources for progress and material good. His limitations were surprisingly similar to those imposed on the surviving monarchs under evolving ideas of constitutionalism: he had the right to warn and to be advised. In America he had the additional privilege of being the source of certain “rights” that people possessed apart from those defined by usurious kings.
But let me just linger over the word “self-satisfied.”
Early humanism was all about the power of the human imagination—not just as it gets expressed in Shakespeare’s plays or the Sistine chapel ceiling (although those are worthy coordinates), but also in the cartoons of Da Vinci and the scientific spirit of Francis Bacon. In the theological era, before the eighteenth century, self-satisfaction was another word for pride, and considered the greatest of sins, that “by which Satan fell.”
Making yourself like God, however, was not an especially Christian idea. It keeps Gilgamesh from his prize, gets both Achilles and Agamemnon killed, Prometheus shackled, Job broken and doomed to listen to the rants of gossips–the worst of all puinishments.
Part of the irony and beauty of the death of Jesus and the death of Socrates is that they die “in the right,” but not because they are trying to be godlike. They are innocent of vanity (Socrates a little less than Jesus perhaps), or to use the biblical trope, they humble themselves to be exalted. The sophists and aereopagites of Greece were to that process what the priests and pharisees were to Jesus.
In Dante’s Hell the proud are regarded as defective in love and generosity. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, pride is the idolatry of believing in an imperial Church or in the Stuart monarchs’ claim to divine kingship. The point is not that a succession of thinkers was correct in their condemnation of vanity, idolatry and self-satisfaction, but that with loss of a theological ideology to keep things under control—the idea that pride is a dangerous course of action, the idea that an unrelenting fate or a supreme God punishes pride—the stage was set for a new kind of idolatry.
I speak of scientism, secularism, the conviction that the idols of the tribe are superior to the God of human history. Pico’s claim was fairly modest in the fifteenth century: God must be pretty remarkable because man is truly remarkable. In the sixteenth, Shakespeare makes Hamlet exclaim, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
The verse is often quoted out of context, minus Hamlet’s conclusion–the bit that keeps it from being an instance of self-worship: “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not.” What we miss—or rather, what we don’t really have—in a world in which human intelligence, the natural order, and material progress are the measures of all things, is distance.
What we get in exchange for the idea of Adam and his heavenly maker is the idea of a being infinitely small but elementally the same as the boundless cosmos. We are what we see. Carl Sagan’s insipid chorus that “We are star stuff” makes perfect sense if you honestly believe that it is the universe defined by physics that evokes what Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. But I personally doubt many people have their peak experiences in meditating on the analogy between themselves and the dust on Mars. It is simply an attempt to endow science with the awe, mystery and wonder that people possessed when awe, mystery and wonder were religious, the sort of wonder Donne examines in “I am a little world made cunningly.”
What we get in exchange for the idea of having infinite worth derived from an infinite being who raises that smallness to dignity is the idea that we have more in common with what we eat than what we pray to—much more, since what we pray to doesn’t exist at all.
Away with the idea that we are made for higher things. In with the idea that we are about as “high” as it gets, and that what we feel and know are adequate instruments (or at least the only instruments available) for leading fully human lives.
The distance between the aspirations of man, as Aristotle realized, and the physical realities of our existence are the stuff of comedy. We have always wanted immortality and ended up dead. We have always wanted complete knowledge and ended up settling for glimpses of the truth. Science is one of those glimpses, not the True Gnosis of the Elect.
Spun differently, this distance can be the source of tragedy, compassion, challenge, heroism, and creativity. But our lives without distance, without a sense of proportion and humility, are merely farcical. The darker legacy of the Enlightenment in the form of the cult of science and the religion of naturalism gave us farce and deprived us of the tragic and the comic. There was no humanism in that, just self-glorification. Only pride.
I reject the idols of self-esteem, the whole philosophy called “secular humanism” as an oxymoron, in the same way Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ claims to piety and righteousness.
First, because there is no true humanism that is not based on a profound sense of humility. A parochial form of atheism may divide the world into Brights and Dims with the same glee the church fathers once divided the world between orthodoxy and heresy, but only the humanism of the Pharisees would be content with such a self-satisfied and facile division of the world.
“The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘My God, I thank You that I am not like these sinners’.”
Humanists cannot side with the uncompassionate because any humanism worth its salt will, secondly, begin with reverence for human life and a sense of gratitude that among all the creatures of the earth we are endowed with knowledge and understanding. When Job challenges the theology of the backbiters, those are the grounds he uses in his own defense: “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you in any way.” We do not need to deny God’s existence, or for that matter have any position on it, in order to give man the credit for the accomplishments of human civilization.
Real humanists have to believe in a common humanity based on intelligence, not on some falsely deduced “global community” held together by a tissue of inconsistent ethical norms carved out in blissful ignorance of the religious values it despises.
Finally, I charge secular humanists with hypocrisy and a failure of philanthropy. The most maligned and self indulgent religions can exhibit charity, bury their dead, visit the sick, fund hospitals and medical research, feed the hungry, create orphanages, give to the poor. Say what you will about Christianity, it is a matter of record that the church virtually invented charity—so much so that the emperor Julian scolds his pagan priests for not doing enough for the poor of the Empire.
The Pharisees were notorious for piling on empty phrases, full of critique and challenges and legal posturing, proud of their tithing, careful to do just enough. Secular humanism has never built a hospital, never paid a teacher’s salary, never endowed a college, never funded medical research, never founded a hospice, never sent workers to deal with a health crisis in Malawi or plant trees in Zambia and never dried a grieving eye. It has never expressed the humanist virtue of compassion in a material way.
If many secular humanists are wealthy, it has to be because they find the tradition of Christian charity more objectionable than the virgin birth. Intellectual critique is easy and cheap; competing with the charitable impulses of religion is expensive. If the answer is that religion can afford to do these things because the church is rich, I say Christians developed these habits when they were poor and in part because they were poor.
Does the secular humanist aversion towards charity arise out of the Pharisaic sense of knowing better and therefore “being” better? Is it because too many of the poorest and most vulnerable are also Dim, or at least religious? Or is it because the word “humanism” has been so thoroughly divorced from its cognate “humanitarianism” that the words have become antonyms. Is secular humanism merely a sense of confederation among those who think they know there is no God, without practical application, without a sense of responsibility for the human consequences of such a position?
What is humanistic about an elitist philosophy of life that has no room for the application of virtue and whose identity seems simplistically derived from its mere opposition to the philosophies and feelings it considers inauthentic or unreasonable? Secular humanism is that kind of humanism and therefore no humanism at all. It has pilfered a term it cannot define and has never actualized in good deeds.
Pharisaism was not the whole of Judaism but an ideology, a sect. The slant we get on it in the New Testament is the slant of a new “faith”—one also rooted in Jewish ideas—that saw the Pharisees as hypocrites, lawyers, and loudmouths—all words and no action, all talk and no walk. Secular humanism as an ideology has become an ossified form of atheism rooted in a blunt rejection not only of religious ethics and ideas but of other forms of humanism as well.
The Pharisees disappeared from the scene before the end of the first century, probably still praying loudly and secure in their righteousness as the tides of history swept them away.
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Published: September 3, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : ethics : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular ethics : secular humanism : secularism ..
8 Responses to “Of Pharisaic Humanism”
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Santayana
September 16, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Extraordinarily perceptive analysis of where things now sadly stand with so called “secular humanism.” Kudos from beyond….
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Of Pharisaic Humanism (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
June 22, 2010 at 1:19 am
[...] I’d like to coin a phrase: Pharisaic Humanism. The phrase describes what I think is the tragic flaw of so-called “secular humanism.” Humanism has never been one thing. Renaissance humanism was a bundle of things, unified mainly by a principle we all learned (or were supposed to) for that literature exam back in college: it shifted the focus from giving God the glory to giving man his due–an adequate summary of what the never-much-read essay by P … Read More [...]
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steph
June 22, 2010 at 5:37 pm
An excellent post on humanism. And humanism that isn’t humanism. When humanism starts gathering adjectives it is no longer humanism. Methinks.
Beautiful on Aristotle – Aristotledom Woody Allenish. Mind you Woody would’ve read Aristotle…plobibly: “We have always wanted immortality and ended up dead.” I like the emphasis on humanism’s profound sense of humility. So called ‘humanists’ of the ‘secular’ flavour appear to be clueless about that, roaring with hostility like a pride of proud lions.
Humanism is “God’s crowning achievement” without denying God his glory. It’s not about ‘reason’ as Certain self Fancying Imaginations righteously insist, nor, and especially not, is it about religion or lack thereof. Science is but a glimpse of the truth, “not the True Gnosis of the Elect” and religion – well Christians invented charity. Accretion of those elements of ‘reason’ and ‘atheism’ appear as humanist negating adjectives. The enlightened lost sight of the humanism of humanism. Look at our current Archbishop of Canterbury. Isn’t he a humanist?
And yes, philanthropy. Charity invented by the Christians, Christians who knew the value of humanity.
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steph
December 8, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Hi James, Just a thought since Joe reposted this:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/of-pharisaic-humanism/
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James Croft
December 9, 2010 at 1:08 am
There is a lot I like in this, and a lot I find objectionable – too much of both to comment on at length. But this really struck me as completely outrageous:
“Secular humanism has never built a hospital, never paid a teacher’s salary, never endowed a college, never funded medical research, never founded a hospice, never sent workers to deal with a health crisis in Malawi or plant trees in Zambia and never dried a grieving eye. It has never expressed the humanist virtue of compassion in a material way.”
The Humanist communities of which I am and have been a part have done and are working to do all of these things and more. Do you forget that the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are both explicitly secular organizations, and are nothing if not humanist in outlook? You wrote this, I think, before the excellent work of Children of the Border, a Humanist charity working in Haiti and The Dominican Republic, and The Foundation Beyond Belief were at work, but Secular Humanists have been supporting similar organizations for decades. Further, high-profile Humanists like Einstein and Russel historically have fought for humanitarian causes, and organizations like the BHA and AHA have been pioneers in supporting women’s and gay rights (just take a look at HM II for Secular Humanists’ extremely forward-thinking stance on sexuality).
Certainly, we can and must do more, but to claim we have done nothing is simply an untruth.
Further, we might appeal to a modified form of the Hippocratic Oath and assert, if it is true that Secular Humanists have done less than they should have to actualize their values, they have at least not done terrible harm to people. The record of the Catholic Church in promoting the spread of AIDS through active campaigning against the use of condoms, and its extraordinary complicity in covering up incidences of child abuse and actively shielding known offenders from justice comes to mind. But I suppose bringing these crimes against humanity up would be “Pharisaic”?
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rjosephhoffmann
December 9, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Jim, I accept that humanists have exerted humanitarian effort and that the Catholic church has an abysmal record on issues like HIV AIDS that cannot be defended, looks dishonest if not downright nasty–and I have said these things, too. In fact if we were talking only about the “humanist tradition” and not about a certain brand of humanism (which I’m calling pharisaic), you could cite even more. So let me plead hyperbole or inexactness; yet for every Bertrand Russell there’s a Schweitzer who arguably did much more, and it would be reductivist to suggest that Christian relief agencies (I am not speaking of the ones on the make or the shysters who are bankrolling their televangelism)actually stand in a long tradition of charity. So it seems reasonable for me to challenge secular humanists, particularly, to do more, but for a different reason: the religious foundations do what they do because they think they’re about God’s work–maybe this is a form of hubris–I don’t know–but humanists recognize compassion as something creatures have for each other. I’d support any form of social activism that made the simplest form of humanism more responsive to the human global community in need. I’d reject any religious adventure that did what it did simply to win souls for Christ. I suspect, however, that many of the liberal churches do what they do for humanist reasons, and then dress it up as religion. It’s all about being clear concerning motives, and I still maintain that secular humanists have miles to go. I’be been especially harsh about billboard campaigns, for example, because the people they are most likely to offend are not bishops but poor working blokes who would be impressed if the organizations did more to promote social justice issues, including poverty alleviation. I see no rhyme or reason to harp on a decent man or woman’s Merry Christmas as an affront to conscience when there is so much more that offends conscience out there.
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Stevie Gamble
December 12, 2010 at 8:47 pm
I’m going to break the habbits of a life time and take part in the Internet version of a standing ovation:
BRAVISSIMO!
statereligionvic
December 16, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Mr Hoffman:
Enjoyed this essay. I wish more people who feel they are guided by reason rather than revelation would read your thoughts and use them to inform their commitments to “mocking religion” as what seems to me to be an end in itself.
I wonder though, about the degree to which charity, which you seem to give great credit to Christianity itself for inventing, is a good measure at all of our contribution to “the good”.
Stephen Pinker, writing in the NYT asked who was more admirable, Mother Teresa or Norman Borlaug? His point being that all the soup kitchens in the world couldn’t equal the contributions of his lab. I don’t know but I suspect that Borlaug’s lab was possible because of public funding, not charity.
What if the political leanings of secular humanists were more in line with those for example Sweden? Where there is very little “charity” in the way Americans think of “charity”, but extremely high social services, and because of this, very high human welfare.
There are not areas of Stockholm where the insane sleep in the open, as you can find in the shadows of American capitols with pathetic ease.
The Salvation Army could never fill its cans with kronor in Stockholm, because the very idea of dropping coins in cans would offend the basic sensibilities of the citizens, who simply expect (and support) high levels of social order and public compassion. They simply agree that homelessness is “not acceptable” and engineer it out of the system.
Many entire categories of things which in America pass for “charitable causes” (eg. environmental conservation) don’t really exists in Sweden – they simply live with the understanding that it is necessary to have rules to conserve things.
I’m not trying to argue with you, as I agree with the sentiment of what you are saying, but is it possible that being a secular humanist might be accompanied by other dispositions which when yoked yield a much more compassionate one than the American “coin in the can” idea of dealing with social problems?
Perhaps there isn’t any political disposition associated with humanism, but perhaps the Swedes tell us something … they are personally averse to “giving” but as a people among the worlds most generous. Perhaps you are focusing on the personal rather than the public manifestations of secular humanism.
Regards,
State Relgion VIC
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Blasphemy Day 2009! Fighting Yesterday’s Battles
by rjosephhoffmann
jesus does his nails
Once upon a time people thought that if they took the name of God in “vain” they would be struck dead.
The idea of sacrilege—the misuse of sacred formulas, names, holy vessels, places, etc.—goes back to the earliest days of religion. That means to the days of our intellectual infancy. Remember how Moses had to take off his sandals on Sinai and how God won’t actually tell Moses his name, for fear he might tell someone else?
Remember the temple veil (supposedly) cracking at the death of Jesus? Ever wonder why? Because the death of the son of God was a blasphemy against God.
The idea of blasphemy against God dates from the time when only the highest paid priests were permitted to invoke the holy name, hoi polloi being reduced to saying “Adonai” (Lord) or “El” (god) as a way of not saying it. Or just being quiet and hoping for the best.
When it came to God having a sense of humour about his “real” name, he didn’t. Maybe it was Randolph. But in the same utter compassion he showed to Adam in not fencing off the tree of knowledge with an electrified barrier, so he protected the species from sudden death by just keeping them in the dark about what to call him. Now that’s compassion.
Since no one actually ever dropped dead for saying the unspeakable name, religious states (the majority in antiquity) took it upon themselves to do God’s dirty work. By the Middle Ages, sacrilege had become a concern of canon law, which prescribed punishments ranging from excommunication to death for religious crimes: desecrating the the Eucharistic host, denying the trinity, even striking a priest (when priests used to be thought of as special vicars of Jesus and not just a threat to altar boys).
In various ways, laws against insulting God, religion, sacred books, lingered into the twentieth century where they died a slow and deserved theological death–in most places.
In the Islamic world, they soldier on: in July, 2009, nearly 100 Pakistani Christians were murdered for a rumour that a Christian, somewhere, no one was quite sure where, had desecrated a Quran. Among the pious denizens of that world, Insulting Islam (the same as insulting God, his Prophet or his eternal book) is about where blasphemy and sacrilege were in 1185 in the West.
That is why the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Danish media about five years ago was a cowardly act. It could only have been relevant to the concept of blasphemy if it had taken place in Islamabad. Copenhagen? Get real. Blasphemy is not insulting other people’s religion. The word for that–with no intention of complaining about the occasional legitimacy of such acts–is ridicule. Let’s get that straight.
In another space, apropos the UNHRC’s preposterous idea that “defamation of religion is the cause of religious violence” I made the claim that religions as social entities do not have rights, and thus cannot claim the right not to be defamed, and moreover:
“Religions occupy not sacred space but real space regarded as sacred. The languages they use, whether Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit, or Urdu, are human languages that can be used for liturgy, poetry or to incite to riot and murder. The practices they encourage, ranging from Pentecostal highs to requiem lows, find their explication within the life of the religious community: no one outside the group is beholden to find it meaningful, moving, rich or true. When it is called insignificant, backward, intrusive, or harmful the redress of the religious community is not to seek legal protection for private systems of belief. The oxymoronics of victimology need to be outed: the bombing of abortion clinics by pro-life Catholics and the killing of Muslims at prayer by differently-inclined Muslims in Jamrud is not the exercise of free speech. It is not discourse. It is not the pursuit of the higher good. And it is certainly not ’caused’ by defamers.”
So why would anybody who thinks that also think that the celebration of Blasphemy Day 2009 is one of the most asinine, underthought, irrelevant and desperate attempts to create a stir ever stirred in the name of free expression?
First because there is a difference between legitimate concerns about the right to religious dissent and laws that inhibit it—a la Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—and the gratuitous desire to be offensive to religious people.
But in the American intellectual tradition, the significance of the informed conscience has been a guiding principle. The maxim “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial unto me” comes from St Paul, not Magna Charta or the United States Constitution. (It was one of Emerson’s favorite verses, a man not known for embracing supernaturalism.)
The right to cry “There is no God” in a crowded theater, just like the right of a yahoo to carry a gun to the outskirts of a presidential event in New Hampshire, may well be protected by our theoretically secular democracy. But in both cases, to quote St Paul again, the question is “What doth it avail?”
Second, because Blasphemy Day has the intellectual quantum of a pep rally. It targets (not sure) because of (what?) in order to defend (who knows?). Is the point to defend the supremacy of the atheist position through the ridicule of religious positions? That is a noble eighteenth century cause. And while the most devout Christians and Jews (and Muslims) are not known for their liberalism in matters of intellectual freedom, the majority of groups one and two would be hard pressed to organize a Pro-Blasphemy Law Day in Chicago.
I think the last of the Blue Laws in Boston fell during my student days there and were rooted in statutes that dated back to puritan Massachusetts. And, yes, they are related to blasphemy laws. And, yes, I do like to buy a bottle of wine after 5 PM on Sunday and I regard it as heinous that in some places God doesn’t want me to.
But, this preposterous exercise in how to be religiously offensive is as tactless as it is pointless. Pointless because when it’s over I still won’t be able to buy wine after twilight in New York. And selling Buddy Christ statues outside Liquormart or St Agnes’s before the ten o’clock mass won’t make it happen.
BD is also intellectually incoherent: this from a spiel accompanying the pretty crappy paintings of a painter whose image adorns this page and is titled “Jesus doing his nails,” (nails, get it?): “Artist Dana Ellyn says her ‘Blasphemy’ paintings are a tongue-in-cheek expression of her lack of belief in God and religion. The self-described ‘agnostic atheist’ [sic]—she doesn’t believe in the existence of any deity but can’t say for sure one doesn’t exist—says her introduction to religion was in college when she studied art history. Stories from the Bible, she says, are just that: stories. ‘My point is not to offend, but I realize it can offend, because religion is such a polarizing topic,’ Ellyn said of the exhibit.”
Awe-some. Like really. It can be soooo polarizing. How do we prevent that? I know, let’s make fun of the crucifixion.
The cure for the conditions under which “blasphemy” is relevant in the modern world is not simple ridicule. It is not to shy away from criticizing the extremes of religion, the horrific consequences of religious violence, the stupidities of entrenched religious opinions that violate rational discussion and common sense. But I fail to see how the moderate core beliefs of good women and men, however irrational they may seem to the atheist, invite this demonstration. It seems…unreasonable.
Do we really trust–need–organizations who give out prizes for being moronically satirical on the pretense that they are really doing “investigative” critical research, “to expose all religious beliefs to the same level of inquiry, discussion and criticism to which other areas of intellectual interest are subjected.”
Our best colleges and universities have been doing this for fifty years—without the posters in the classroom and without the giggles.
But for those who have some time on their hands and an appetite for fllaky attention-grabbing schemes, this from CFI:
– a Blasphemy-Fest! at CFI Los Angeles that will feature a talk about free speech followed by three provocative films;
– supporters worldwide have been encouraged to take up The Blasphemy Challenge (http://www.blasphemychallenge.com) by uploading their denials of faith to YouTube. A typical recording: “Hi, my name is Ray and I deny the Holy Spirit. (pause) No lightning. Maybe next time.”
myths are for kids
Or just wait for the movie.
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Published: September 25, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Blasphemy Day : CFI : secular humanism : secularism ..
2 Responses to “Blasphemy Day 2009! Fighting Yesterday’s Battles”
.
makarios
September 25, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Thank you. Pockets of sanity are always refreshing.
Reply
Jim Bennett
September 29, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I had a fascinating email exchange with the painter of those pictures, Dana Ellyn, for my blog posting on International Blasphemy Day. The outcome was hilarious. If you want to check it out, here’s the link:http://thebloviatinghammerhead.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/september-30th-is-blasphemy-day-by-jim-bennett/
My newspaper column on International Blasphemy Day is here:http://www.reviewatlas.com/opinions/x366031227/How-I-will-be-spending-International-Blasphemy-Day
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Blasphemy and Ridicule, Yet Again
by rjosephhoffmann
antisemite
As God once said, and then repented of saying it (Genesis 6.6), “I don’t do sequels.”
Follow-ups about such trivial strategies as the Center for Inquiry Blasphemy Day are a waste of everyone’s time.
But there has been a bit of action on this front, something just short of a news splash–which seems to be the only reason the press-and-media-starved organization concocted this idiotic venture in the first place.
On its own website, former Center for Inquiry chairman Paul Kurtz sensibly distanced himself from the Animal House antics, writing that Blasphemy Day is the active promotion of insult and ridicule, not a defense of free speech but a deliberate attempt to promote indignation through ridicule.
It is one thing to examine the claims of religion in a responsible way… it is quite another to violate the key humanistic principle of tolerance. One may disagree with contending religious beliefs, but to denigrate them by rude caricatures borders on hate speech. What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way? We would protest the lack of respect for alternative views in a democratic society. I apologize to my fellow citizens who have suffered these barbs of indignity.”
Smart words from the former leader and philosopher. They call attention to the fact that the promotion of tolerance includes the right to criticize, but not the need to be deliberately offensive.
It’s also troubling that CFI isn’t connecting the dots between vicious caricatures of Jews, Irish and Polish Catholics, African Americans and the social, educational and economic deprivation these groups suffered as a result of ridicule.
harpers
Is this category of insult “different” because it is said to be directed (or so we are urged) at belief rather than at the people who hold the beliefs? Or is dumbness of this magnitude excused because it is sponsored by an organization that touts “reason” and “science” as a basis for its irrational acts and incoherent approach to the values it sees as part of its mission.
In a wayward and hormonal reply to Kurtz, lawyer-turned CFI-CEO Ron Lindsay argued that “Blasphemy cannot be equated with ridicule of religion.”
Of course it can. Blasphemy is just the name given to ridicule, insult, or disparagement when it’s forbidden by religious canons or other laws protecting particular doctrines and practices. The only difference is that what the CFI crowd are doing isn’t blasphemy because there are no laws against their doing it. That’s what makes it ridicule. Moreover (obviously) why then do it?
To try to turn this circus into a temple of reason or a crusade for free speech rather than an exhibition of contempt simply cheapens an organization fast becoming known for taking the low road. Far better if the unfunny architects of Blasphemy Day would simply confess that they decided to sponsor this instead of a “Biggest Atheist Penis Day.”
The Catholic League noted that the “blasphemy contests” were being directed toward Christians rather than Muslims. Why? “Because even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians.” More likely, they will ignore it, the same way you cross the street to avoid eye contact with odd-looking people. People like P Z Myers, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated communion host. (Ah! Achilles, What Bravery is Here!) He says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” and is quoted as saying he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.
But the sharpest commentary comes from a particularly folksy, commonsense article in the Indianapolis Star by Robert King: It may be true, he writes, that this “test of wits” designed to see who can come up with the most offensive (sorry, “blasphemous”) image, poem, or tie-dyed T-shirt is protected speech. “But this blasphemy contest strikes me as beneath a crowd of folks who pride themselves on relying on reason and science to find their way through the world. They even offer silly suggested blasphemies, such as ‘God is the Santa Claus You Never Stopped Believing in’. The whole thing strikes me as a bit juvenile — like something a group of teenage boys would come up with around the lunchroom table.”
Oh, come on. Teenage boys have better things to do. Like throwing food.
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Published: September 30, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Blasphemy Day : CFI : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
4 Responses to “Blasphemy and Ridicule, Yet Again”
.
hambydammit
September 30, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Where to draw the line. It’s always a tough question. My immediate reaction to “Blasphemy Day” is very similar to yours. Why waste time with spitballs when we have the bulldozer of reason and science? It’s not designed to do anything productive. It reminds me of a child who discovers that he’s grown old enough to curse around adults without being reprimanded. Atheists can be vocal now, and a certain contingent feels like it’s important to “throw it in the theists’ faces.”
Having said that, I think ridicule is a useful tool. Some beliefs, laws, and practices are ridiculous. When other people are doing ridiculous things that hurt others, I think we have a certain obligation to at least point out that they’re ridiculous.
Is that the same as ridicule? That’s where it becomes difficult. If I make a mocking caricature of the Genesis story, comparing it to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and imply that believers are like children who believe in fairy tales, am I ridiculing them, or am I pointing out a true fact? Unfortunately, it’s often hard to tell.
I’m afraid the line between ridicule and illuminating the ridiculous will always be a bit nebulous, since we can never know the true intent behind any act. We must do our best to guess, and I think we must do our best not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even as I’m commenting on this, I wonder if I’m doing more harm than good. How much publicity are the serious, mature atheists giving to the children? Is it going to hurt us? I don’t know. Personally, I prefer to go about what I was doing rather than spend a lot of time reprimanding children for behaving like children.
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J. Quinton
October 1, 2009 at 7:54 pm
It might be overly sentimental, but I think any sort of “blasphemy day” should be a day dedicated to something more educational – like bringing to the forefront the millions of people who were murdered due to committing “blasphemy” in the past. Heretics, witches, inquisitions, etc. A lot of people have the idea that being a pagan at the beginnings of Christendom was terrible, but the worst thing to be at that point in time was a heretical Christian. Docetics, Gnostics, and the like.
How many more people are harrassed and worse in third world countries to this day for “blasphemy”? We should be shining a light on their situations, not making cartoons.
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David Wiener
October 5, 2009 at 1:54 am
The purpose of blasphemy day is to celebrate the fact that religious fanatics no longer have the right to kill those who point ti their unsupported wish for a sky fairy and say, “that is a stupid idea fit only for children”. Now, some may say that in stronger words, and that is their right.
You also incorrectly conflate racism with the ridicule of an idea. No body is saying that you should die, be sent out from the group, or denied anything of substance. We just say your religion is an unproven fairytale that is the obvious construction of primitive peoples and it is time to put it aside and get on with the business of moving forward. And if your silly god and religion are so powerful, then what do you care?
It’s not like we’re telling you that you are going to suffer in hell fire for eternity because you don’t believe in our fantasy. That would be, and is, offensive.
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steph
August 18, 2010 at 2:04 am
exactly the same silly stuff all over again 2010http://pewforum.org/Religion-News/RNS-Atheists-campaign-for-right-to-blaspheme-religion.aspx
except with all this silly justification stuff it’s actually not exactly the same – it’s worse.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
A Post-Secular Humanist Manifesto
by rjosephhoffmann
erasmus
We believe that secular humanism is dead.
We believe that secular humanism now means so many different things that it has ceased to mean anything at all.
We believe that secular humanism does not represent a coherent philosophy or life-stance but a patchwork of ideas that are no longer revolutionary and meaningful and will not coalesce in the future.
We believe that organized humanism and the humanist movement have lost their way in a labyrinth of special causes, pleadings and agendas; that secular humanism is now a clash of competing liberal doctrines, lifestyles and agendas forced into conformity without sufficient examination, and that reasonable people will look elsewhere for intellectual energy, political resolution, and ideological support.
We believe that the close identification of humanism with secularism, free-thought and atheism was a collusion of opposites, limiting the breadth of the humanist spirit, denying the contribution of religion, theology and spirituality to modern culture, minimizing the intellectual continuity between past and present, and discounting the evolutionary nature of ideas and ideologies.
We believe that secular humanism does not provide new or carefully reasoned warrants for its own commitments—to “naturalism,” “science,” the use of “reason,” and ethical values based on these commitments–and that neither as an ideology nor as a movement has it made concrete contributions to the areas it claims to promote. Neither science nor ethics, it has been committed to a program of abstraction, pseudo-scholarship and polemic, a cause without consequences.
We believe that secular humanism’s narrow focus on the evils of religion, the paranormal, and anti-supernaturalism has become quaint, backward, isolated from modern discussions of belief, entrenched in archaic debates unworthy of serious intellectual discussion.
We believe that secular humanism’s use of “skepticism” to debunk superstition, the eccentric and the irrational has trivialized philosophical skepticism and that its assault on credulity has been derisive rather than informative.
We believe that secular humanism provides no coherent system of values and ethics: that its social philosophy depends on a relativism it mocks and that its call for a global ethic is rooted in an antiquated view of the world and its cultures.
We believe that secular humanism’s hostility to all religion is indistinguishable from a religious hostility to all forms of unbelief.
We reject, as humanists, the belief that our way of knowing about the physical and moral world can be reduced to naturalism and science; as skeptics, that atheism is a priori the sensible position of the reasonable man or woman.
We reject the idea of a single operating system for the humanist tradition in the arts and sciences.
We believe that secularism is not an irresistible trend in culture but a pattern of detachment from the control of dogma that was the fruit of modernity. We see this process continuing in terms constantly being reshaped by believers and unbelievers.
We believe that intelligent men and women of religious faith have been at the forefront of efforts to limit the dominance of religion, to insist on human rights and freedom of expression, and the separation of religion and civil government.
We believe this as a matter of a history that stretches back to the Renaissance, and not as matter of corporate ideology.
We believe that an authentic humanism is neither “religious” nor “secular” but an engagement with the highest achievements of human civilization in the arts and sciences measured by their effect on the human spirit and human values.
We believe that human beings are value-making creatures and that humanism at its most generous is the discussion of the grounds for human action, the warrants for human assent, and the propagation of ideas and objects that are worthy of our best instincts and aspirations.
We believe that moral positions are justified not solely on the basis of the rational decisions of individuals but are responsible to history, culture, and society.
We believe that men and women of virtue and intelligence have been atheists. We believe that women and men of virtue and intelligence have believed in God.
We believe that the contemporary world is not defined by a confrontation between believers and unbelievers.
___________________________
Please feel free to comment on this post or suggest constructive changes. It is a work in progress, not a finished product.
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Published: October 8, 2009
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Tags: atheism : human values : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanist manifesto : secularism ..
24 Responses to “A Post-Secular Humanist Manifesto”
.
Jiri Severa
October 8, 2009 at 4:50 pm
My sentiments exactly: the difference between humanism and secular humanism is much like that of a jacket and a straitjacket.
My review of Hitchens’ silly bashing of religion, if you are interested ->
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=226010
Best,
Jiri
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rjosephhoffmann
December 10, 2010 at 10:16 am
Good stuff Jiri, I agree with what you say in the piece.
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Max
November 19, 2009 at 4:59 am
This is good, but doesn’t a manifesto need a call to action?
Reply
A Post-Secular Humanist Manifesto « The New Oxonian says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:47 pm
[...] A Post-Secular Humanist Manifesto By rjosephhoffmann We believe that secular humanism is dead. We believe that secular humanism now means so many different things that it has ceased to mean anything at all. We believe that secular humanism does not represent a coherent philosophy or life-stance but a patchwork of ideas that are no longer revolutionary and meaningful and will not coalesce in the future. We believe that organized humanism and the humanist movement have lost their way in a labyrinth o … Read More [...]
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steph
December 7, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Max, it is a call to action in a way or assertion, sort of. “Progressive humanism resides in exploration rather than definitions and statements.”
With these beliefs above and “confidence in the self, informed by learning and imagination, that makes you a humanist.” So I believe…
See further:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/the-problem-with-humanism-a-new-oxonian-repost/
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Ed Jones
December 8, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Would someone knidly explain how and when Humanism became in any way less than fully identified with its basic Christian origins? See comment to post Is Religion Good? comment November 27th on origins of Humanism: “Pico sought nothing less than the reconstruction of every human philosophy and every human religion with Christianity.” i.e. the God revealed by Jesus. However one defines a Humanism somewhere between “Secular Humanism” and aeithism with sympathetic hat tiping to “religion”.
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James Croft
December 8, 2010 at 3:39 pm
I welcome the attempt to give Humanism a rigorous intellectual investigation – as you point out in your article “The Problem with Humanism” much of the Humanist movement does seem bitty and uninformed by an overarching narrative or philosophical structure. You err, however, in asserting that this is necessarily the case, and that abandonment of the project is the only reasonable response.
I would argue this “manifesto” relies on a limiting and limited understanding of “secular humanism” and on a head-in-the-sands attitude toward the current vibrancy and growing power of the (Secular) Humanist movement.
While I agree, as I have said, that the Humanist movement lacks a certain coherence, it certainly is not “dead” and is powerfully on the rise. The number of individuals identifying as Humanists continues to increase in the USA, in Europe, in Africa and elsewhere (http://goo.gl/pEiYQ and http://goo.gl/3ZbtA and http://goo.gl/mOjDU). The organizational fortitude of the movement is increasing, as evidenced by the powerful mobilization of Humanists in online spaces and by communities like the North Texas Church of Freethought. Humanism in Sweden and other central European countries is a strong force, as is the BHA in Britain (increasingly so now a Humanist is Deputy Prime Minister).
The intellectual basis of Humanism, with its two “feet”, as I call them – rejection of the supernatural allied with a positive ethical outlook and fallibilistic naturalist epistemology – is the firmest that I have seen devised. Would you care to provide a firmer one?
The assertion that “as an ideology nor as a movement has [Secular Humanism] made concrete contributions to the areas it claims to promote” is utterly baffling to me given the above. Would you like to suggest another position that has been as fruitful?
In short you seem to equate Secular Humanism with “God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, and entirely ignore the rich history of Humanist thought and accomplishment. Further, you offer no positive program to replace what you decry.
This is odd, because in “The Problem with Humanism” you do try to tackle the history of American Humanism with some integrity. Even there, though, the strangeness of your approach is apparent: you see something “pugnacious” and “dogmatic” about, for example, saying that “As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body.” What on earth is pugnacious and dogmatic about that?
Then you say that “humanism, at least of the atheistic variety, regarded religion as a sufficient end for criticism and failed to develop its own methods for correction”, entirely forgetting (ignoring?) that fallibilism is and always has been a hallmark of Humanist thought – see the preamble to Manifestos 1 and 2, and this beautiful passage from 3:
“The lifestance of Humanism—guided by reason, inspired by compassion, and informed by experience—encourages us to live life well and fully. It evolved through the ages and continues to develop through the efforts of thoughtful people who recognize that values and ideals, however carefully wrought, are subject to change as our knowledge and understandings advance.”
Thus when you say “Progressive humanism resides in exploration rather than definitions and statements”, this seems to me entirely in keeping with the stated aims of all three Humanist Manifestos. One might ask, then, what are you arguing against? Certainly not Secular Humanism, which embraces the very values you yourself espouse.
I understand that it is not in the nature of a manifesto to give reasoned arguments, but in this case I think your assertions are clearly problematic and could do with greater thought.
Reply
Zachary Bos
December 8, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I do not believe it is warranted that “you “reject [...] as skeptics, [the belief] that atheism is a priori the sensible position of the reasonable man or woman.” Is there some reasonable position which precedes atheism as a minimally effective explanation for the matters before us?
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Ophelia Benson
December 12, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I’ll be happy to comment or suggest constructive changes, but I need a bit of orientation first. Who’s we? Is this an organizational manifesto, or a personal one? If it’s organizational, what’s the organization? (If it’s personal, why “we”?)
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steph
December 12, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Why should ‘we’ necessarily infer an organisation? I believe all of these things and don’t belong to an organisation in order to agree. I’m an atheist, I’ve never belonged to any religious faith, and I agree with some atheists about lots of things but I don’t belong to any atheist subset organisation any more than I belong to any atheist organisation. I think Jiri believes then things above, and I think even Max does too and some of my friends definitely do and probably quite alot of other humanists too.
… but we don’t belong to any organisation for believing these things, I don’t think. I’d join charities though.
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Ophelia Benson
December 13, 2010 at 12:09 pm
I didn’t say it should imply (not infer) an organization, I asked if it did. Joe said feel free to comment on this post or suggest constructive changes, and I wanted to know what kind of thing it was before commenting or suggesting.
“We” doesn’t necessarily imply an organization, but it does imply something – it does imply at a minimum that there is more than one person involved. (Unless of course it’s the royal we, but I don’t think Joe confuses himself with royalty!)
You believe all these things? Really? Every single one? That’s a lot of things!
It’s a very long manifesto, with a very large number of items to believe. I’ve never yet seen a manifesto I could agree with from beginning to end – but then I’ve never really had a desire to sign up to any manifestos. (I did sign up to one once, but mostly out of friendship, and certainly not because I agreed with every word of it. I now wish I hadn’t signed up to it.)
So I’m still curious who “we” are. It’s Joe and you, apparently, but is it anyone else? Two people seems a smallish number to need a manifesto.
But now, I suppose, I’m even more curious about how anyone could claim to agree with all the “things” in such an idiosyncratic and tendentious manifesto. That’s not to say it’s a bad manifesto, but it does strike me as much more of a personal statement than a manifesto.
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steph
December 13, 2010 at 3:06 pm
There are alot aren’t there, but I do. Nice to agree. I suggested ‘we’ included far more agreeable people than just me. But that’s why he’s open to changes I think, if you aren’t happy with being included into the ‘we’, as long as the rest of the ‘we’ agree…
Reply
Ophelia Benson
December 13, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Well I didn’t think it was about niceness or agreeableness or being happy or included. I thought it was a manifesto, not some kind of social signal. I take it you think I’m wrong about that. In fact I take it that you’re saying Joe’s blog is actually a social club and I should butt out. Ok, if you say so…but I did think this post was about ideas rather than about who gets to sit at the lunch table.
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steph
December 13, 2010 at 7:46 pm
You infer I say alot of things I never said and never would say and did not infer either. Maybe it is some sort of social invitation to question critically and recognise what we believe, rather than the hard and fast document of an ‘organisation’. But Joe’s blog is not a ‘social club’ – it’s wide open and naturally attracts all interested readers and many become regular too. Some tend to agree most of the time and others heartily disagree with reason. A manifesto need be no more than a public declaration of principles, like basic beliefs or assumptions, or of intentions. And it belongs in a way, perhaps to those who agree or would agree given a few alterations or additions. I’m not very surprised that I happen to agree with every one of the beliefs outlined above, but then I’m sure there must be some people with whom you might find it hard to disagree especially when it comes to religion.
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Ophelia Benson
December 13, 2010 at 7:54 pm
Well maybe I misunderstood you – “if you aren’t happy with being included into the ‘we’, as long as the rest of the ‘we’ agree…” looked like an attempt to say “we all agree and if you don’t like it…[you know what you can do].” But perhaps you meant something quite different.
Yes I understand that a manifesto need be anything or nothing – one can use it to mean “toothbrush”; whatever; I just thought Joe had something more public and precise in mind, since he invited criticism and suggestions, and since he said “we” throughout.
Anyway I was asking Joe what he meant, and only Joe can answer that.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 13, 2010 at 8:03 pm
I think this “manifesto” is being taken literally. My whole view is that we are living post everything, and if read in conjunction with what I have said about manifestoitis might make better sense.
I frankly do not care what anyone agrees with in this. Much of it will be objectionable to someone. I sometimes try satire, drama, even pseudo-narrative formats to make a point. OB can remember when I tried operetta on her site (“How do you solve a problem like sharia?”).
But there is no club here, and even if there were and I
had a gavel, I’d adjourn and take us to the pub!
Reply
Ophelia Benson
December 13, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Oh I’m being too literal! Wouldn’t you know. Like whoever it was who took the bus ad literally.
Neeeever mind then.
How about some more operetta for my site?!
steph
December 13, 2010 at 8:04 pm
absolutely, only Joe can answer. But I never said he wasn’t intending something public and more precise because that is why he is inviting criticism and suggestions. In fact I thought I pretty much said just that, as I tried to explain that the ‘we’ doesn’t refer to some pre organised group or ‘social club’, and I said plainly that his blog is open – that means open to the public.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 13, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Hey, I have killed Audrey. That is my concession.
steph
December 13, 2010 at 8:33 pm
That’s god sic and charitable. She’ll never get it. I’d like to push her into the well.
steph
December 13, 2010 at 8:34 pm
…her being Audrey
rjosephhoffmann
December 13, 2010 at 8:55 pm
I am remorseful that no one knows this from the Master:
Re: writing Puddin’head Wilson:
“I didn’t know what to do with her [Rowena}. I was as sorry for her as anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was sidetracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere. I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one–I must simply give
her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after
associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding things and was so nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So at the top of Chapter XVII I put a “Calendar” remark concerning July the Fourth,
and began the chapter with this statistic:
“Rowena went out in the backyard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.”
It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it/ It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else.
Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled” I suspect the gospel writers would have done it with superfluous Marys if MarK Twain had been consulted.
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steph
December 13, 2010 at 9:10 pm
:-) if.
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Ophelia Benson
December 13, 2010 at 9:14 pm
It seemed abrupt.
Classic.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
And on the Eighth Day, God Created Scholars
by rjosephhoffmann
god
And on the ninth, colleges to keep them away from others.
Update: A better Hebraist than I ever was or will ever be has called my attention to the panoply of uses by the author of Isa. 45. 12-18, where bara’is used alongside other verbs meaning collectively to refine, shape or complete: asah (made); bara’ (fashioned); nata (stretched), yasar (fashioned), kun (founded), and sawah (brought together). The difficulty is in finding a use of the verb to refer specifically to the act of separating as an aspect of fashioning. Here is the text from Isaiah:
12 I created the world
and covered it with people;
I stretched out the sky
and filled it with stars.
13I have done the right thing
by placing Cyrus in power,
and I will make the roads easy
for him to follow.
I am the LORD All-Powerful!
Cyrus will rebuild my city
and set my people free
without being paid a thing.
I, the LORD, have spoken.
The LORD Alone Can Save
14My people, I, the LORD, promise
that the riches of Egypt
and the treasures of Ethiopia will belong to you.
You will force into slavery
those tall people of Seba. They will bow down and say,
“The only true God is with you;
there are no other gods.”
15People of Israel,
your God is a mystery,
though he alone can save.
16Anyone who makes idols
will be confused
and terribly disgraced.
17But Israel, I, the LORD,
will always keep you safe
and free from shame.
18The LORD alone is God!
He created the heavens
and made a world
where people can live,
instead of creating
an empty desert.
___________________________
There is a buzz about a discovery by a certain Ellen van Wolde who is a professor of Old Testament in the Netherlands. It focuses on Genesis chapters 1-3, the most overworked piece of mythology in the world.
That is precisely why any claim to have “discovered” anything previously unknown about any verse of the book called Genesis (in Greek: the Beginning) should be treated with extreme skepticism. I humbly offer my services.
Van Wolde claims she has carried out “fresh textual analysis” that proves it was not the writer’s intention to say that God actually created the cosmos.
One review touts, “The writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.” Er, well…yes. That’s what it says alright, and unless she has just read the book for the first time, the discovery she claims to have made looks a little shy of an exegetical breakthrough.
Van Wolde claims she has “re-analyzed the original Hebrew text” and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.”
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara“, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate.”
According to her, Genesis 1.1 is not a “creation” story at all but a story about God separating the heaven and the earth–both being in the cosmic room, so to speak, when the roll was called. Think of God as a cotton gin, sort of, or a French chef who knows his way around eggs.
I don’t envy her chances when she presents her “discovery” to a room of Hebrew Bible experts in a few weeks.
In fact, if I had been privileged to sit on her thesis committee I would have said she should really go back to the drawing board because what she has uncovered is merely the peculiarity of a verb that has vexed philologists and translators for a very long time. A short list of eminent Hebraists who have played with the syntax includes Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Ewald, Dillmann, Humbert, Skinner, Speiser, Francis Andersen and Robert Alter. Probably also the translators of the King James Bible.
The choice to translate bara as “separate” misses the point about what “separation” means in the material culture of the period. The suggestion that her find makes: “the traditional view of God the Creator…untenable now” seems a little…extravagant.
Scholars of the ancient Near East have known for more than a century that other ancient creation stories assume the pre-existence of material things–water, mud, light, primal seas, monsters, fogs and abysses to name a few.
The most famous of these, the Enuma Elish, and the Atrahasic epic make similar assumptions about “pre-existing” matter. Creation is not a question of creation ex nihilo in the ancient Near East but the act of organizing what already exists.
Everybody knows that.
Christians and Jews did not begin to talk about the biblical text as an instance of “something from nothing” until speculative theology began to squeeze the poetry out of the ancient narrative.
Van Wolde’s argument is really with the church fathers and later writers rather than with the Bible. And with deference to a few others who have already commented on her claims, creation ex nihilo is not the same as what they are calling creation by divine fiat. Kings in antiquity create (cause to happen by divine command), but the wherewithal to execute their commands is already there for the taking.
God in Genesis is behaving like a king, not like a magician.
But even if she is wrong about the “newness” of her attempt to locate the biblical narrative in the context of other Near Eastern poetry where “separation” of organized mass from disorganized (usually watery) chaos is the rule (I am literally unaware of even one reputable Old Testament scholar who does not know this pattern), is she right about having cracked a linguistic enigma?
Da Vinci Code time.
Probably not. A former research associate to Umberto Eco who liked mystery and intrigue as much as the next writer, van Wolde seems simply confused about the syntax.
J. Hobbins over at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has already recounted her confusion concerning the reworking of Gen 1.1. His main point is that the act of separating and the act of making are basically the same whether the author is thinking of creation by divine fiat (“Let there be light!” when light may be there for the taking) or not.
The ancient poets were working with human models and patterns of kingship. A strong but somewhat troublous king like Gilgamesh achieved his reputation not by making bricks (they were there already) but by causing a wall to be built around his city of Uruk.
The God of Genesis works in the same way: he brings something about as a fashioner of materials that prove his organizational skills. Not something out of nothing. Something out of a mess of possibilities.
Hobbins cites the New English Bible as an example of how a good English translation can clear up some of the confusion: creation is a process (and, by the way, God is not actually called “creator” but the one who instigates a process): The temporal framework is so vague, despite the writer’s use of “days” to separate phases of the process, that even Augustine wondered what existed before there was something to exist:
In the beginning of creation,
when God made heaven and earth,
the earth was without form and void,
with darkness over the face of the abyss,
and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters.
God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.
It’s a nice touch because it separates (that word again) the process of creation from the making that brings it all together–which clearly is the writer’s intention.
But also: it is pretty clearly the writer’s intention to show God as architect-in-chief, designer, and completer. Not sure what to do about the most troubling bit of Genesis 1, the creation of man in God’s image since we can’t precisely be sure what image the writer was working with.
But in part this was solved by the (different) author of Genesis 2.6ff., where God uses water and dirt to form clay and “fashions” Adam from the mixture. In other words, like most ancient cultures, when asked how they began, the answer of the Hebrew writer was “We came from the ground.” or “we sprang from seed.”
The meaning is, We have been here a very long time. From the beginning.
It’s high time someone stopped defending this sort of crass sensationalism as “revolutionary” and called it what it is: Unoriginal.
In the long run, it may be less van Wolde’s fault for trying to sell this reading as revolutionary than the media’s for buying, or at least for not asking a half-dozen biblical professionals what they think about her claim.beresgeet
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Published: October 11, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : Creationism : Genesis : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Van Wolde ..
3 Responses to “And on the Eighth Day, God Created Scholars”
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And on the Eighth Day, God Created Scholars (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
June 22, 2010 at 1:17 am
[...] And on the ninth, colleges to keep them away from others. Update: A better Hebraist than I ever was or will ever be has called my attention to the panoply of uses by the author of Isa. 45. 12-18, where bara'is used alongside other verbs meaning collectively to refine, shape or complete: asah (made); bara' (fashioned); nata (stretched), yasar (fashioned), kun (founded), and sawah (brought together). The difficulty is in finding a use of the verb t … Read More [...]
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steph
June 22, 2010 at 7:00 pm
I remember this media expose which merely exposed the unprofundity of scholarship slavishly seeking originality when actually there’s nothing new under the sun, in order to fulfill ‘ninth day’ colleges’ beaurocratic publication requirements… if only there were not that need. It might lift the sufferance of others as they wade through pages of fantastical invented theories, published because nobody had invented such ridiculous inventions before.
It’s a shame the media never asked you and several others before they published her … and it’s a shame she had an ivory tower to come up with something everybody already knew. Except the media, that is. Poor John wrote his prologue innocently unaware of the looming speculating theologians ahead.
Even in Maori mythology from the Pacific … although possibly originating in Taiwan … ‘creation’ was already there – in the beginning was the love embrace between Ranginui (sky) and Papatuanuku (earth) when sky and earth became joined. They bore six children, Tane (forest) Tangaroa (sea) etcetera, but when the suffocating children spied sunlight in a gap between their parents’ arms, they wanted more. They declared war on their parents and cut them apart, they declared war on each other, and created us. Then they shed tears for rain … ex nihilo, squeeze the poetry out of that one and you’ll lose the story.
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Ed Jones
May 14, 2011 at 1:08 pm
The Bible is not a book of science.
For notions of the “how” of creation we look to science the souce for the “how”. There was never any pre-scientific knowledge revealed by some Diety. The Bible contaains the greatest variety of so-called knowledge of all sorts. Any “how” is necessarily pre-scientific.
The Bible also contains authentic “Why” knowledge – mysticism – true religion – Ultimate Knowledge – all “Why” knowlege which in no way depends on science. With the appearanc of species Homo “why” knwledge became available to whatever extent a human consciousness was prepared to receive it. The discussion for me seems irrelevant. The only issue is the fact of “why” knowledge. “Physics can be learned by the study of facts and mathematics, but mysticism can only be learned by a profound change in consciousness.” Ken W
ilber.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
On the Death of the Jesus Project
by rjosephhoffmann
hoffmann
Reprinted from Bible and Interpretation
With the exception of the King James Bible and Westcott and Hort, the biblical Gilbert and Sullivan of their day, New Testament scholars would be hard pressed to cite examples of “scientific” collaboration prior to the twentieth century. Most of the great works of nineteenth-century scholarship were lonely affairs, created by academic individualists with theories to sell, texts to translate, problems to solve. There were exceptions of course: 2008 marked the slightly-off centenary of the publication of Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem (1911), but like its predecessor and most academic conferences since, the original volume was less a collaboration than a collection of disparate, if highly interesting, opinions. Even works that might have benefited from collaboration in terms of textual discoveries and interpretation were not normally managed that way. We still regard the nineteenth century, culturally extending to the outbreak of the First World War, as the era of biblical soloists with theories ranging from the ridiculous to the plausible.
If we compare the nineteenth century situation to the trend that developed after World War II—the Qumran, Gnostic, Pseudepigrapha, and Apocrypha projects–at a macro-level the Anchor Bible, denominational biblical, encyclopedia and dictionary projects—the contrast is startling. Partly this has to do with the simple fact that new documentary discoveries and the need for more serviceable translations seemed to dictate division of labor as a way of doing business more efficiently. Partly, interest in collaboration was the effect of biblical studies professionalizing itself along the lines being developed by European, especially British and German, archaeology and philology. The model was so popular by the end of the seventies that it was widely assumed almost any task could be approached on a “project”-basis—even efforts that were ill-suited to such an approach.
In general, collaboration is suited to constructive and technical rather than interpretative or highly theoretical work. Because of the close traditional alliance between biblical studies and theology, as well as the nature of the biblical literature itself, it is notoriously hard to keep theology at bay in the realm of interpretation. Constructive work is different. Although far from perfect on a number of levels the Hennecke-Schneemelcher Neutestamenliche Apokryphen in Deutscher Ubersetzung was a pioneer work in the non-parochial study of extracanonical literature when it was first published in German, and in English translation in 1963, making the eccentric one-man collection of ghost-story writer M. R. James virtually useless. The same can be said of James Charlesworth’s editorial management in the translation of Old Testament apocrypha in relation to the 1913 collection edited by R. H. Charles and James Robinson’s production of a serviceable English edition of the Nag Hammadi materials. We owe to that generation of scholarship a way of moving beyond the legendary slings and arrows that were characteristic of the Dead Sea Scrolls “collaboration,” tactics that spawned a whole genre of intrigue and tarnished biblical studies as being theologically interested, religiously mysterious, and academically second class.
When I say that collaboration is suited to constructive work, I mean that it is justified when the nature of the investigation is clearly indicated by the nature of the task. Translations, questions of provenance, reconstructions of fragmentary materials and documentary questions, it seems to me, have produced the greatest examples of collaboration.
Questions about “What really happened?—are fundamentally unsuited to collaborative effort. This is true because Big Questions–Who Jesus really was, or What Jesus really said are far more susceptible of opinion-mongering , ideology and religious self-interest than the architectural ones.
John Crossan lamented at the mid-point of the Jesus Seminar that the project had become a Catherine Wheel of opinions with as many Jesuses as there were books about him, to the point where the effects were becoming “embarrassing.” For Crossan, who pressed hard for his own theory, the problems of the Seminar could be traced to a failure to get the methodology straight from the beginning. In fact, however, there was no methodology to get straight apart from sources that had been laboriously clarified by scholars working on a different set of issues. I have sometimes been asked why I have made no attempt to do my own reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel; I have two answers, but the one that matters is that I have no faith in Tertullian’s memory and regard any attempt to base a reconstruction primarily on those derivatives as unreliable. That answer will dissuade (has dissuaded) no one from trying, just as the “collaboration” made possible from the Jesus Seminar turned into a cloud of witnesses to a range of historical characters named Jesus who probably (and I do not mean this in the historical sense) never existed.
All of this brings me to a difficult subject. In June 2009 the so-called Jesus Project was temporarily “suspended” by its funding organization on the verge of a conference at Stanford. Shortly thereafter I announced my decision to leave the Project–stating that sustained scholarly inquiry cannot survive a bad case of the hiccups. On-again-off-again projects are damaged by inconsistency and irregularity.
But the hiatus has given me time to consider more carefully whether the Jesus Project was ever worth the trouble. Is it a project that could have “worked” (a la Crossan) with a better developed methodology? Was it destined to survive fissiparation by the very different interests of the scholars who associated themselves with it? Could it have overcome the charge of special pleading leveled at it by scores of onlookers who regarded its sponsor, a secular humanist advocacy organization, with suspicion –though they might never have thought the same if the funds had come from a Christian agency.
And finally, and perhaps more important, Who cares? Arthur Droge of the University of Toronto made the point directly at the last meeting of the Project in December 2008, perhaps its last meeting full stop, that one should not assume that the question of the historicity of Jesus is inherently interesting. At the time, I challenged Droge’s assessment: first, because I think some questions are inherently interesting, especially the ones that yield contradictory answers. And second, because I have often made the claim that it has been largely theological interests since Strauss’s time that ruled the historicity question out of court. It seemed to me that any question concerning the biblical text should be decided on the basis of the best evidence we possess and the best interpretations we can render without wandering off course into our own enthusiasms.
With due regard to the complexity of evidence surrounding Christian origins—a subject that has been complicated, in a good way, rather than solved by the discoveries of modern scholarship—I no longer believe it is possible to answer the “historicity question. “ No quantum of material discovered since the1940’s, in the absence of canonical material would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer.
Obviously I do not deny the existence of mythic materials entwined with a more or less historical memory of a real individual. But as I have written elsewhere, we cannot point to a stratum of ancient biography where such intertwining does not exist: it is a matter of degree, not genre, and a matter of guesswork, not reconstructive surgery. The fate of the Jesus Seminar and the potential fate of the Jesus Project had it continued—or rather, had it been advisable for it to continue—reveals more about the history of guesswork than about the “reality” of Jesus. The NT documents, especially the Gospels, are precisely the sort of literature we would expect to emerge from a time when the dividing line between the natural and “supernatural,” indeed, the divine and human, was not clearly drawn: the true miracle would have been for the NT to stand completely outside the limits of Hellenistic storytelling and the rudimentary historiographical interests of a religious community.
Finally, a word about the “orientation” of participants. While I am as hermeneutically suspicious of extravagant claims for the trustworthiness of the Gospels as many of my skeptical colleagues, I regard the suggestion that the New Testament is “deceptive” as showing a lamentable ignorance about the nature of myth and the nature of history. The myth theory in its most robust form was more possible in the nineteenth century than in the late twentieth or twenty-first because we know more today about the sociology of memory and the nature of myth.
The Jesus project was announced—in fact, but somewhat irrelevantly, against my wishes—at a conference at UC Davis in 2007. It soon became famous, like Rasputin, for all the wrong reasons. Interestingly, the title of the conference, which included among many others James Robinson, James Tabor, Bruce Chilton and Philip Esler, was “Scripture and Skepticism,” a title designed to call attention to the need to avoid all forms of sensationalism (Da Vinci code style) in marketing biblical theories—a call to seriousness and sobriety.
Alas, The Jesus Project itself became a subject for exploitation: news stories, promotional material and the reactions in the blogosphere focused on the Big Question: “Scholars to Debate whether Jesus Really existed.” Given the affections of media, the only possible newsworthy outcome was assumed to be He didn’t. Such a conclusion had it ever been reached (as it would not have been reached by the majority of participants) would only have been relevant to the people April DeConnick ( a participant) has described as “mythers,” people out to prove through consensus with each other a conclusion they cannot establish through evidence. The first sign of possible trouble came when I was asked by one such “myther” whether we might not start a “Jesus Myth” section of the project devoted exclusively to those who were committed to the thesis that Jesus never existed. I am not sure what “committed to a thesis” entails, but it does not imply the sort of skepticism that the myth theory itself invites.
Do I regard the Project as worth pursuing, reviving? I think the historicity question, as I have said many times over, is an interesting one. But it is not a question that in the absence of a “real” archeological or textual discovery of indubitable quality can be answered. It cannot be answered directly and perhaps not even through the slow accumulation of new sources. The issue is not merely that such a discovery would not persuade die-hard mythers and would not support believers in the divine Christ. It is that such evidence is really not an academic possibility. Not even the unearthing of an unknown archive of the forced and sworn confession of a skilled forger and tale-teller by the name of Rufus, appearing in front of a magistrate in the year 68 CE, would suffice. We already possess material like that, it is forged.
But the chief reason that it is time to sound the knell for all such projects is that that they cannot function collaboratively, both by virtue of what they want to achieve—that is, the over-speculative nature of the task—and because they are examples of the perils of false collaboration: an incoherent anthology of opinion derived from the private prejudices and objectives of Jesus-makers.
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Published: October 17, 2009
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One Response to “On the Death of the Jesus Project”
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steph
August 4, 2010 at 6:29 pm
“While I am as hermeneutically suspicious of extravagant claims for the trustworthiness of the Gospels as many of my skeptical colleagues, I regard the suggestion that the New Testament is “deceptive” as showing a lamentable ignorance about the nature of myth and the nature of history. The myth theory in its most robust form was more possible in the nineteenth century than in the late twentieth or twenty-first because we know more today about the sociology of memory and the nature of myth.” Well said. And interesting that April used the term ‘mythers’. I was thoroughly chastised for using a word that didn’t exist when I discussed ‘mythers’. I thought it was self explanatory. Finally, I have managed to persuade (without much difficulty) and I can promise you a free copy of a book by the Major General not later than December – because I would be very interested in your critical thoughts.
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Atheist Tantrums: The New Loud
by rjosephhoffmann
atheist-sex2
What do you get when you cross a new atheist with a Jehovah’s Witness?
Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all.
This will be brief. Blasphemy Day, God love it, has come and gone. Soon the giggling will stop. Dogs, horses and Episcopalians will be left wondering what the point was. The few Pentecostals who can read a newspaper will say, “See, told you so,” and head for the basement before the anti-Christ rides through town.
I was musing yesterday why, as a pretty fervent Roman Catholic in the 1960′s, I fell on the floor in paroxysms of laughter when a friend (also Catholic) played Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag” for me for the first time. I still laugh when I hear it, even though most twenty-first century Catholics don’t know what a kyrie eleison is or bother to stand in line for confession. In college, a little less fervent, I knew priests (many of whom aren’t any more) who knew the song from front to back. We used to break it out on cue at Charlie’s Beef and Beer (RIP) at Harvard.
So if irreverence can be funny (and I love irreverence as much as I love Mahler) why do I think Blasphemy Day was such a fuckwitted idea?
Well for one thing, as I said in my two posts on the topic, bad art, bad jokes, and behavior designed to be stupid and offensive are seldom funny except to insiders.
nails
A competition to see who can come up with the worst art, the worst joke, and the most self-referentially stupid behavior will have to be judged by how funny the insiders think it is.
I’m guessing the atheist insiders peed their pants. As for those standing outside the circle (those dogs, horses and Episcopalians), let the cattle judge.
An NPR story on the subject tried to link the Center for Inquiry-sponsored event to a growing rift between old school and new atheism.
If I bought the distinction, I would be expected to say that the “old atheism” as represented by ardent secularists like Paul Kurtz was warm and cuddly whereas the newer form, usually thought to be incarnate in Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (et al.) is tactically less subtle, more aggressive, unkinder.
But I don’t buy it. The old atheism was full of cranks and angry old men, but some of them were clever. Many of them (as my grandmother used to say) knew a thing or two. The big distinction between the old and the new is that the old atheism depended on a narrative, based in philosophy, and linked itself to a long tradition of rational decision-making. Not choosing to believe in God was an act of deliberation, not a foregone conclusion. At its best, it was studious and reflective. At its worst, it was purely negative, abrasive and sometimes nihilistic.
The best form of the old atheism had a lot in common with certain theological trends, ranging from nominalism to religious realism and minimalism–the sort of stance you get from Don Cupitt’s best writings. The worst, rejectionist stream of atheism, was marked (or marred) by intolerance and a lack of table manners. It was an atheism for the unsophisticated young and the dispirited old. Wedged between were Philistines of all ages, one big unhappy family.
What’s now being called “new atheism” or atheist fundamentalism is really nothing more than the triumph of the jerks. Unsubtle, unlearned (but pretentious), unreflective (but persistent). They have heroes in super-jerks like PZ Myers (yes, the one who drives spikes through communion “crackers” as he calls them, and Korans) because
Edgy is what young people like….They want to cut through the nonsense right away and want to get to the point. They want to hear the story fast, they want it to be exciting, and they want it to be fun. And I’m sorry, the old school of atheism is really, really boring.
Did you get that: really? Presumably Mr Myers has tenure, but I for one would love to see his teaching philosophy unpacked when it comes out in book form. Students may also like it raunchy, naked, and loud. And that’s why we used to think a university was a good place to lead people out of the tribe and toward civilization. Not PZ. Give him a hammer and he’ll follow you anywhere.
Almost as bad is the point made by CFI executive Ron Lindsay who says that his “research” organization will “take the high road, the low road, country roads, interstates, highways, byways, — whatever it takes to reach people.” Sounds strangely like Jesus, except the bit about the low road.
To the extent this highways and hedges approach works, imagine the good news: “Rejoice greatly: for unto you this day is born in the City of Right Reason…absolutely Nothing.”
Here is my prophecy. The raw atheism of the raw atheists who have given us Blasphemy Day and probably have other delights in store for us is loud because they already know no one is listening, at least no one who matters.
The shrill tones of the movement have to be amplified for the same reason cinemas now have to pump up the volume to drown out the hundred private conversations that are going on during the film, person to person, cell phone to cell phone, tweet to tweet. It is shouting, pure and simple because loud wins. Stupid and loud is even better, and outrageously stupid and loud is best.
But while all this is going on, there are many who style themselves humanists and are not believers in any conventional sense who want to say, “Shut up-I’m watching the movie.” (More precisely, “Shut up, we’re trying to think.,” or maybe read. What we need is an intellectual resource for thoughtful humanists, the thoughtful seekers who don’t think it’s cool to “repent” of your baptism by having a hairdryer pointed at your head.
What I miss about the old atheism–even though I still find its central premises wobbly and unconvincing–is that thinking was permitted. The conversation continued. There was no infallible source of confidence. Skepticism reigned.
The new atheism is a catechism of conclusions reached, positions taken, dogmas pronounced. It is more like the Catholicism I giggled to see parodied, a church too sure of itself and its exclusive ability to save souls and reveal the kingdom.
A Prayer:
Oh Thou who hast no name and many…and may not even be there:
Bring back clever.
Smite with a bolt of intelligence all enemies of parody and good satire.
Bring low the self-assurance of the Brights, and unto the Dims give light.
With a stroke of your mighty pen lay waste the stupidity of your deniers and confound the certainty of your defenders.
Render mute, O heavenly Conundrum, the loudness of the gainsayers and the loudness of the speakers in tongues. Do it soon.
And do Thou, O King, or Something, of the Unseen Regions of my Brain, grant me the endurance to suffer religious fools as gladly as I suffer the Atheist. And failing that, send a scorching fire upon the earth, if it isn’t asking too much.
Amen.
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Published: October 19, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Blasphemy Day : Catholic Church : CFI : Fundamentalism : new atheism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
54 Responses to “Atheist Tantrums: The New Loud”
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Hugh
October 19, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I may not necessarily agree with absolutely everything in it but that post was fabulously funny . Something the new anti religionists seem not to have , a sense of humour ( the bus ads in London spring to mind ).
It was a great pleasure to read .
Regards….
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Dave
May 23, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Yes,. me too. Everybody HATES jews,atheist or fucteist,they are all be DEAD within twenty years,yet they still continiue to Kill,kidnap,rape,steal,lie,..
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steph
August 5, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Can’t help but love this writing above. Blasphemy Day was a fuckwat idea designed to offend the religious fanatics perhaps but just offending human dignity (I find it offensive and I’ve never been religious) … and who actually cared or even knew about the blasphemous loud and ignorant few from an organisation we never heard of before. Just today, my cousin in Palmerston North NZ, (a university lecturer in linguistics and sociology who, like me, has never been a believer in anything much), tells me that some nitwits are sticking pointless billboards up down under in Palmy, saying ‘God probably doesn’t exist, enjoy life anyway’ or somesuch rubbish, she couldn’t exactly remember. She, being a happily isolated Antipodian (although she has lived in China, UK etc before) hadn’t heard of such dumb ideas before and really thought it quite ridiculous. ‘Blasphemy Day’ leaves us both embarrassed to be human. ‘Bring back clever’, oh how loverly, ‘Smite with a bolt of intelligence all enemies of parody and good satire. Bring low the self-assurance of the Brights, and unto the Dims give light’ – if only! I love your prayer. And someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all, God love it, I do. As for the cartoon – God forbid it!!
xx
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Atheist Tantrums: The New Loud (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
October 21, 2010 at 9:24 am
[...] Atheist Tantrums: The New Loud (via The New Oxonian) In Uncategorized on October 21, 2010 at 9:24 am What do you get when you cross a new atheist with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all. This will be brief. Blasphemy Day, God love it, has come and gone. Soon the giggling will stop. Dogs, horses and Episcopalians will be left wondering what the point was. The few Pentecostals who can read a newspaper will say, "See, told you so," and head for the basement before the anti-Christ rides through town. I was musi … Read More [...]
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steph
October 21, 2010 at 11:57 am
So sadly relevant, they are louder than ever, with pointless ranting that is destructive, pitfully artless and as you have said previously, will not help you buy wine on Sundays. “I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit. “No,” said Pooh … “there isn’t”. The shouting on the fringes shows no signs of abating but are the sensible voices in the vast middle ground, those sheep and goats conversing in the middle, able to ignore it? I think so, and with gifted souls like you (and Tom Lehrer, R.I.P.), long may constructive conversation, sensational satire, and wicked wit, make progress imaginatively.
x
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Larry Tanner
October 21, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Too whiny. They’re so LOUD and mean. They’re so dogmatic and STRIDENT.
Take off the pettiness spectacles, please.
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steph
October 21, 2010 at 7:16 pm
“The raw atheism of the raw atheists who have given us Blasphemy Day and probably have other delights in store for us is loud because they already know no one is listening, at least no one who matters … Stupid and loud”. Mean? Who cares? Just petty.
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Ed Jones
October 25, 2010 at 11:50 am
New atheism – old atheism – no God – whatever – all thoughts from within the Cave – bound by mental chains of not knowing. Let go of Religion (=Christianity). Go to the scientists – the world’s greatest physicists – who have turned to face the light which caused the shadows of sense perception. When did we stop looking to science for answers – even clues to Ultimate Reality. “Science offers a surer path to God than religion” Paul Davies. Dare to turn and “see” the Light!
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Atheist Tantrums: Remembering Blasphemy Day 2009 « The New Oxonian says:
April 19, 2011 at 4:21 pm
[...] What do you get when you cross a new atheist with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all. This will be brief. Blasphemy Day, God love it, has come and gone. Soon the giggling will stop. Dogs, horses and Episcopalians will be left wondering what the point was. The few Pentecostals who can read a newspaper will say, "See, told you so," and head for the basement before the anti-Christ rides through town. I was musi … Read More [...]
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s. wallerstein
April 19, 2011 at 4:38 pm
There are lots of very aggressive, tribal (your word), and intolerant online New Atheists, but should we judge a diffuse movement of people from the worst
characters?
I imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of people who vaguely identify with the New Atheists, but who don’t participate in the daily online lynch mob and who certainly don’t foment the daily online lynch mob.
Obviously, the voices of the least aggressive members of the New Atheist tribe are not often heard.
Unlike the New Atheists, I do not judge the Catholic Church by Opus Dei, and maybe it’s not fair to judge all those who enthusiastically read Dawkins and Hitchens (not me) by those Dawkins and Hitchens readers who want my blood.
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Ed Jones
April 19, 2011 at 10:59 pm
On the chance that it might make some difference, I repeat a comment made to Reason as Myth to shore up the above poor comment.
When so many believe that natural science can and will answer all questions worth asking, we best return to the reasoning of those who can be named as the greatest physicists the world has ever known. All of these pioneering physicists believed that science and religion, pyhsics and spirituality, were necessary for a full and integral approach to reality, but neither could be reduced to, or derived from the other. Physics can be learned by the study of facts and mathematics, but mysticism can only be learned by a profound change of consciousness. They uniformaly rejected the notion that physics proved or even supports mysticism, and yet each and every one of them was an avowed mystic. How can this be? Very simply, they all realized that, at the very least, physics deals with the world of form, and mysticism deals with the formless. Both are important, but they cannot be equated. Little as they were in the postion of thinking within the tradition of one of the old religious tradtions, equally little were they prepared to go over to naive rationalistically grounded atheism. (From Quantum Questions by Ken Wilber)
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Steve
April 20, 2011 at 11:44 am
Ed – nicely stated and poetic statement from Ken Wilber, but I ask you, can there be any answers in supernatural beliefs? Introspection labeled spirituality, maybe… but believing ones imaginary friends are real is just counter productive. Recognizing they are all just reflections of oneself, well that’s a good start. Ken’s description of atheism as “naive rationalistically grounded” is a strawman. Atheism can just be shorthand for “Show me the money”. Calling it naive is just “stupid”.
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Brownian
April 20, 2011 at 11:59 am
The last few times I opened my door to a proselytiser, he was a theist, not an atheist. (Oddly enough, he still had nothing to say. At least, nothing substantive.)
Where are you living that none but mean, unsophisticated, humourless atheists are knocking on your door, rather than members of the Religious Right? Because I’d love to move to the place where the pleasant, sensible, don’t-rock-the-boat moderates are winning.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Why would you open your door? I do agree that where you are can affect your perspective on approach. Contrary to appearances, I want the new atheists–all atheists–to be responsible, not like our worst experience of their religious opposites.
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Herpy McDerp
April 20, 2011 at 1:00 pm
I love when people use the phrase “fundamentalist atheists”.
Fundamentalist Christians shoot abortion doctors, fundamentalist Muslims fly planes into buildings, and those goddamn fundamentalist atheist write blogs. How disgusting.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Cross-ranking?
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charvakan
April 20, 2011 at 1:13 pm
the thoughtful seekers who don’t think it’s cool to repent of your baptism by having a hairdryer pointed at your head.”
- the reason why this is cool is because it highlights the stupidity of believing that dunking you in water is what is needed to save you from the wages of sin of an ancient ancestor. Any other response gives the right of baptism more respect than it deserves.
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Drew
April 20, 2011 at 1:27 pm
“What’s now being called “new atheism” or atheist fundamentalism is really nothing more than the triumph of the jerks.”
Please describe to me the “fundamentals” of atheism.
“Unsubtle, unlearned (but pretentious), unreflective (but persistent).”
I’ll give you unsubtle, but unlearned? Unlearned in what respect? Generally, atheists are, more highly educated than their theistic counterparts, and specifically on the subject of religion, at least one study showed that atheists know more about religions than the religious (see for example a recent pew study) which seems to fly in the face of your already arrived at conclusions. As to your accusation of being “unreflective”, well since the bulk of those people you’re criticizing (at least based upon years of reading so-called “deconversion” stories, which I admit potentially could still be the minority though I doubt it) come to atheism usually only after a long, arduous process of research and self discovery, again, your preconceptions don’t fit the data.
In fact this entire work is drivel.
By the way, please demonstrate some of the “catechisms” of New Atheism. The only conclusion reached by atheists is that theists have not met the burden of proof required for the extraordinary claim of the existence of god(s). As an atheist myself, I’m curious to hear some of the “dogmas” that I didn’t realize I followed.
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Backstabber
April 21, 2011 at 9:38 am
Can I second every single word Drew says?.
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Frank B
April 20, 2011 at 1:46 pm
The reason there was a blasphemy day was because too many people in the world take blasphemy seriously. Ireland recently enacted a blasphemy law which should not survive very long. In any country dedicated to the rule of law, enforcing a blasphemy law will automatically create trouble. In many places people go crazy over instances of blasphemy. The solution, blasphemy loud and long so that people will see that nothing happens and get used to it. Wringing your hands and soothing the crazies won’t work and it would be unfair to those who are threatened by the crazies. Concern for blasphemy and social justice are incompatible.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 3:30 pm
@Frank What particular crazies were being ridiculed: as far as i could tell, almost all of the insults were hurled at cartoons of Christianity. There may be some counterintuitive purpose I’m not seeing here, but linking blasphemy day to social justice? Come on.
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cameron
April 21, 2011 at 5:15 pm
You see no social justice implications in creating thought-crime laws?
K H Smith
April 20, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I’m sorry but all of this ranting against the ‘new atheists’ is tired. ‘New’ or ‘gnu’ atheists are simply old atheists with a blog or a book or a youtube channel — oh, the horror! David Hume and John Stuart Mill would have a blogs if they were alive today. While ‘Blasphemy Day’ is a way to have a little fun at religions’ expense it is hardly something that can epitomize the atheist mindset. Just as I don’t think that those that nail themselves to a cross on Easter are typical Christians. Wanting a return to some fictional, idealized world of ‘old atheists’ reminds me of the woman screaming ‘I want my country back’ at the health care rallies a few years ago — full of sound and fury – signifying nothing. Times have changed — move on…
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blu28
April 20, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Since this was reposted, I don’t feel too awkward about commenting on an old article. But in answer to “steph”, I would like to point out that Tom Lehrer is alive today, and was presumably alive in 2010 when steph wrote “Tom Lehrer, R.I.P.”. What is particularly ironic, is that the Vatican Rag was in its day, the equivalent of Blasphemy Day, and Tom Lehrer was the day’s equivalent of a “new atheist”, loud, irreverent and in your face. I am afraid that we cannot all be lyrical, musical and talented.
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Ambidexter
April 20, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Another goddist whining about the existence of people who don’t share his delusions. Of course the worst are the “New Atheists” who have the temerity of not showing the respect to goddists that goddists feel they should receive.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Absolutely. That’s exactly what this post is all about, me not getting respect for my goddist beliefs. –What were your SAT scores, btw.?
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Kieran
April 20, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Nice – a cross between an ad hominem attack and an argument from authority. Two logical fallacies in one. Then again, given the intellectual dishonesty required to justify your kooky and unsupported beliefs, should we be surprised?
rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Time to Play Learn Your Fallacies. 1. There is no ad hominem attack here. There is a reply to one, but it’s pretty tame. 2. Using scholarship to support a position is called “argument.” Ad baculum arguments are ones you win by threat. There is no argument from authority here. There are some facts: should we fear them?
charvakan
April 20, 2011 at 3:25 pm
If anyone is looking for reasons why Blasphemy Day is NOT fuckwitted idea, read and see the laws against this in the various countries. Maybe when these laws are taken off the books then having a Blasphemy Day will become fuckwitted. Till then we need to send a strong message that just because you believe and revere some book does not mean that everyone else also needs to.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Pray tell me how this particularly dumb idea had a salutary effect on any of the countries that still have blasphemy laws, especially since its focus was almost exclusively on the Western tradition.
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charvakan
April 20, 2011 at 5:57 pm
First off, you will notice that a lot of “secular” countries still have blasphemy laws on their books and have groups of citizens who like to apply a religious label to their country (eg. American is a “Christian” nation). The focus of Blasphemy Day was not just on Western tradition. It applied to all religions. The “Draw Mohamed Day” was similar in concept and that applied exclusively to Islamic societies. Yes, it is true that these have greater participation in Western societies, but the power of the internet is that eventually these will catch up in other countries where I agree this is needed more.
rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I do not notice that: Please tell me what you have in mind? Certainly not the US– here we give bathroom passes to idiot clergymen who burn Korans.
randomhuman
April 28, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Are you for some reason incapable of following the link that the good fellow posted in his comment? The Western and/or secular countries that it lists as still having blasphemy laws of some kind include: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand. Under the section “European Initiatives” you will find a further list of countries who make a crime of “religious insult”. Some of these countries have not prosecuted anybody for these “crimes” in a very long time, and Ireland has not yet made use of it’s recently enacted blasphemy law, but others have done so within the last decade. So as you can see, blaspheming against the “Western tradition” is an act of civil disobedience for many of us, since we do not all live in the US.
rjosephhoffmann
April 28, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Er, no perfectly capable: was it supposed to knock me down?
randomhuman
April 29, 2011 at 8:47 am
Only if you consider Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be part of the “Western tradition”. I’m not sure you could make a credible case otherwise, though you seem to be attempting to do so.
cd
April 20, 2011 at 5:48 pm
“A kind of book that has been endemic in England for quite sixty years is the silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before. This school of literature started, I think, with W. H. Mallock’s New Republic, which must have been written about 1880, and it has had a long line of practitioners—R. H. Benson, Chesterton, Father Knox, ‘Beachcomber’ and others, most of them Catholics, but some, like Dr Cyril Alington and (I suspect) Mr Lewis himself, Anglicans. The line of attack is always the same. Every heresy has been uttered before (with the implication that it has also been refuted before); and theology is only understood by theologians (with the implication that you should leave your thinking to the priests). Along these lines one can, of course, have a lot of clean fun by ‘correcting loose thinking’ and pointing out that so-and-so is only saying what Pelagius said in A.D. 400 (or whenever it was), and has in any case used the word transubstantiation in the wrong sense. The special targets of these people have been T. H. Huxley, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Professor Joad, and others who are associated in the popular mind with Science and Rationalism. They have never had much difficulty in demolishing them—though I notice that most of the demolished ones are still there, while some of the Christian apologists themselves begin to look rather faded.”
http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441027.html
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Interesting, if you live in 1898.
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cd
April 21, 2011 at 2:40 am
Let me translate: Blair is pointing out that the apologists’ Argument From Sneer was already a bad cliché in 1944.
Herb Van Fleet
April 20, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Please let me know if the following is blasphemous, heretical, or just cause for another crusade — this time from the Gnus to the bible thumpers who inhabit these parts (we could use a little help):
“Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I’ll go far.
“No, I don’t care if it rains or freezes
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
But I think he’ll have to go
His magnet ruins my radio
And if we have a wreck he’ll leave a scar
“Riding through the thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead, but he don’t mind
Trouble coming, he don’t see
He just keeps his eyes on me
And any other thing that lies behind
“Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Though the sun shines on his back
Makes him peel, chip, and crack
A little patching keeps him up to par
“When I’m in a traffic jam
He don’t care if I say Damn
I can let all sorts of curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn’t hear
For he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul
“Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Once his robe was snowy white
Now it isn’t quite so bright
Stained by the smoke of my cigar
“If I weave around at night
And the police think I’m tight
They’ll never find my bottle, though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For His head comes off, you see
He’s hollow, and I use Him for a flask
“Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Ride with me and have a dram
Of the blood of the Lamb
Plastic Jesus is a holy bar”
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RickK
April 20, 2011 at 6:26 pm
There’s nothing new about atheism, even strident atheism that demands attention and gives no quarter to illusions of the supernatural or divine. All that has changed is, with the explosive growth in human knowledge of the natural world, “God’s” retreat from relevance has accelerated to a breakneck pace. As we scan the skies, plumb the depths, reach into natural history and delve into the workings of the mind, all we find are nature and natural cause and effect. God has been pushed so completely into the immaterial that it is no longer possible to tell the difference between a God that cannot be understood, and a God that doesn’t exist at all. Bravo to this generation’s band of atheists who, generally more educated on matters of faith than their theist counterparts, have the courage to stand up, point, and declare at the top of their lungs “The Emperor has no clothes!”. And bravo to our Western society for, little by little, growing mature enough to allow the atheists to do so without burning them at the stake.
There is still a long way to go. It is easier for a teenager to declare “I’m gay” at the family gathering than it is for them to declare “I’m an atheist”. But if the loud voices of atheism continue to override dismissive voices like R. Joseph Hoffman, eventually the atheists can come out of the closet at the Thanksgiving table without causing family schisms. And then they can turn their attention to openly teaching the next generation about the truths and limits of “faith”.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 20, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Cute, John. What do you like?
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Frank B
April 20, 2011 at 11:15 pm
When they came for the Jews, I said nothing because I wasn’t a Jew.
I would not come for anyone. Everyone has a right to be themselves and to be different. I would be the one defending them. Mr. Hoffman seems the type to go after someone rather than defend them.
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mandas
April 20, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Wow – the hypocrisy in this post is breathtaking. Complaining about the ‘lack of table manners’ of the ‘new atheists’ while simultaneously calling them ‘jerks’, ‘shrill’, ‘stupid’ and ‘loud’.
But I guess hypocrisy is just normal par for the course for the religious, so why would anyone be surprised. What’s the matter? Don’t you like it when someone who can think for themselves calls you out on the lack of credibility of your favourite superstition?
You need to get used to it. We ‘new atheists’ are here to stay. And we are heartily sick of evangelising and proselytising from people who don’t have the courage to reject the bronze age nonsense that they foist on society – all the time demanding special privileges such as tax breaks and that their superstitious beliefs be protected agains ‘blasphemy’.
As Peter Finch so aptly put it: We are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 21, 2011 at 7:28 am
@Mandas: Why are you mad?
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mandas
April 27, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Since my last post was ‘moderated’ – or to use the more correct word, ‘deleted’ – I will try again. But the very act of deleting my comment perfectly encapsulates why I am ‘so mad’. (it also answers the question I asked in my post as well)
It’s because superstitious nonsense has held sway over our culture for far too long. Bronze age belief systems have no place in the modern world. They corrupt human progress and inflict endless suffering on people. They demand and get special privileges that they don’t deserve and which detract from more rational and deserving pursuits – the costs of which must be borne by everyone.
So you miss the ‘old atheists’ huh? Too bad. The days of compliance – of hiding our rationality for fear of persecution by a society gripped by superstition are over. We want our culture to progress, to move past the fear-mongering, the hypocrisy, and the hatred of religious superstition. And the only way we will be able to move forward is to move out of the dark ages when humans worshipped homophobic, genocidal, mysogenist, racist, and jealous beings in the sky.
Religion is the root of all evil – and we will all be better off when it is confined to the dustbin of history.
Now I ask the question again – why are you such a hypocrite?
rjosephhoffmann
April 27, 2011 at 7:32 pm
“It’s because superstitious nonsense has held sway over our culture for far too long. Bronze age belief systems have no place in the modern world.” Where do we disagree? have you ever read anything I’ve written–because if you had, you know I’ve been saying tis for two decades. As to my hypocrisy: I don’t think my opposition to the rashness of new atheism is hypocritical., it’s heartfelt.
mandas
April 27, 2011 at 11:46 pm
“…Where do we disagree?…”
Isn’t it obvious? You are superstitious, and use ‘faith’ to colour your worldview. You are irrational, and ‘believe’ in things for which there is no evidence.
You have not done the most important thing that any rational individual should do – and that is to question and think about that which underpins the ‘glasses’ through which you view the world.
Ask yourself this. Why do you believe in god? Why do you believe in that particular god? Why are you a christian, and not a muslim or a jew? Why do you think you are right and they are wrong (and yes, if you are a christian then you DO believe they are wrong)?
You may claim to have thought these issues through – but you obviously have not. For there is no RATIONAL reason for you to think the way you do – it is simply a matter of that is the culture in which you were raised. And if you were raised in a different culture, you would draw radically different conclusions on these issues. And that is pretty conclusive proof that there is no real rational thought process underpinning your beliefs.
Belief in a god – any god – is a ‘bronze age belief system’. Indeed, that is being charitable. Belief in the supernatural is even more archaic that that – and less relevant to the modern world. We now know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that the universe was not created especially for us, it was not created by a supernatural being, and that we are just another animal species, no more special or deserving than any other. These are the teachings of religion – why would you in any way defend such nonsense?
You may claim that religion has given us art and culture etc, but I am going to suggest that art and culture would have existed anyway. And while religious organisations may have done some good, they have done a lot more damage, and on the balance they have had a much more negative than positive impact on society. ‘Goodness’ is NOT the sole province of the religious. Indeed, the worst kind of hate, hypocricy and biggotry is reserved for those who are religious, and who use the teachings of their religions to justify all sorts of unacceptable behaviour.
You have written a lot lately in criticism of atheism and ‘new’ atheists in particular. And that from there that your worst hypocrisy stems. You complain about our ‘lack of table manners’, and of being ‘loud’ and ‘loud and stupid’, and that the only people who don’t matter listen to the ‘shrill’ tones of new atheists.
You might want to take a good hard look at your own table manners and attitudes. New atheism is not – as you put it in your own shrill, lacking in table manners tone – a ‘triumph of the jerks’. Atheism is a triumph of rational thought over superstition; a realisation that the fairy stories you were brought up with have no more credibility than santa claus or the easter bunny. They are great stories to tell children, but its long past the time when humanity – those who still cling to religion – needs to grow up.
rjosephhoffmann
May 1, 2011 at 10:29 am
It is impossible to overlook the tone of the tertiary Gnus. My guess is that they are all trying to sound as acerb at Hitch and fail miserably because they are not as clever as he is. Your entire representation of my worldview and thoughts is so distant from anything I believe that I thought at first it was directed at some other comment. You are superstitious, and use ‘faith’ to colour your worldview. You are irrational, and ‘believe’ in things for which there is no evidence. You have not done the most important thing that any rational individual should do – and that is to question and think about that which underpins the ‘glasses’ through which you view the world. Ask yourself this. Why do you believe in god? Why do you believe in that particular god? Why are you a christian, and not a muslim or a jew? Why do you think you are right and they are wrong (and yes, if you are a christian then you DO believe they are wrong)? Did you just dial a wrong number and continue talking when the message bleep came on, or do you really think these points are pertinent?
SAWells
April 21, 2011 at 2:18 am
I think the phrase we’re looking for is “Link or it didn’t happen”.
You’re writing a blog, making sweeping assertions, and never providing links to anything that might resemble, you know, evidence for your assertions.
Maybe this is your beef with the so-called New Atheists; you want the whole God conversation to remain rarified and abstract and all in your head, and this modern habit of actually asking for evidence doesn’t suit you. It’s so crude, doncherknow.
People are actually being murdered for blasphemy in places like Pakistan: establishing that blasphemy is not a crime actually matters. Wibbling about Respect for Deeply Held Beliefs doesn’t help. Beliefs are not respectable merely because deeply held, and people need to get used to having their beliefs mocked and challenged.
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Jemima Cole
April 21, 2011 at 8:42 am
Blasphemy Day wasn’t some unmotivated bit of spite – it was a specific response to the fact that it’s now illegal in Ireland to diss certain fictional characters. It is now literally *a criminal offence* to impune the virginity of one character from one book – God’s other bit of stuff, his second Queen of heaven, the one he raped when she was fifteen when her husband wasn’t looking. Or so the little strumpet claimed.
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Ewan
April 21, 2011 at 9:41 am
I liked those atheists much better when they weren’t so uppity.
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JoshOnPC
April 21, 2011 at 9:20 pm
I for one am amazed at the capability for people to suspend disbelief for such outragious claims as are foisted upon them by religion. I am amazed at the self defeating God people have the ability to persistently believe in. A perfectly omnicient and omnipotent man that can literally do anything, that creates an imperfect world because He couldn’t create a perfect one? Or because maybe he wanted a flawed world? An all knowing God who flooded the entire world after He got mad at his own creation for doing what He knew it would do? How is it possible to be dissapointed in your own creation knowing the outcome already? If you can believe such diametrically opposed ideas, then you have an absolutly astounding ability to dismiss your own lifes experiences for want of a bearded invisible man. It is shocking to me. Do you want to know why “New Atheists” are mad? It isn’t just because people believe in God. It isn’t just that people don’t value science (the thing that has brought you every modern convenience you enjoy, every medical treatment you use, increased food supply, etc…) over religion. But, that religion works actively against science anytime it feels threatened is the problem. Were there ever to be a final proof that God does not exist, it would not ever matter to you. Why? Because faith is the entire emphasis of religion. And what stronger faith can you have than one that exists despite clear and concise evidence to the contrary? Faith is belief without evidence, and in the world we live in, that is incomprehensably foolish.
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latsot
April 23, 2011 at 6:03 am
Blasphemy Day was doubtless intended to have a little shock value, but I think it was more about using that shock to demonstrate that it’s actually OK to be blasphemous.
Most of the people I know aren’t religious, but they’re shocked by outright blasphemy nonetheless. I think overt blasphemy helps non-believers who have never really identified as atheists to understand what we supposedly strident, shrill atheists are complaining about. For example, the horrible acts of the Catholic church in covering up the rape of minors and nuns and their insisting that AIDS proliferates due to arbitrary bans on condoms while the emancipation of women – the only known remedy for poverty and horribleness – is discouraged at best.
Blasphemy Day wasn’t about pissing off faith-heads, although I personally couldn’t care less if it did. It was mostly about reaching out to people who don’t believe in gods but were brought up to feel religions automatically deserve respect.
It’s a revelation to some people that they DON’T have to respect fairytales after all.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2012 at 8:20 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Short repast from Blasphemy days past, alas. Sometimes you just can’t help feeling nostalgic for the new atheism…. a feeling similar to the withdrawal comedians must have felt when W. left the White House.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Atheist Zombies from Hell
by rjosephhoffmann
Scary Pumpking
There is a post over at the Center for Inquiry site, or what is left of it, to the effect it has not been taken over by “atheist fundamentalists.”
Phew.
I have just seen Zombieland, so I feel pretty knowledgeable about what a takeover would mean.
Please, sit down.
Teams of craven secular atheists would come to your home demanding you turn over your Bibles, your rosaries, your virgin daughters.
I know, I know. Much easier to vouch for the Bibles.
Your only protection would be holy water, and they would break your cruets, laughing hysterically, and dribble it into your petunias
If you have stored communion crackers, whatever the reason, be ready to cough them up. These types are bloodless, hungry, merciless.
(But they have not taken over CFI. They are being held at bay south of Depew.)
Next they would march on Walmart, demanding that Halloween displays be taken down.
They will impale a store clerk on a flagpole if he resists. Force people to eat Kandykorn and Peeps. It’s hideous.
After all, Halloween is the Eve of all Saints Day on November 1st (“all hallows evening”), a religious holiday of the Catholic Church. The celebration of this holiday–trick-or-treating, gorging on sweets, lighting of jack o’ lanterns on front porches–must be discouraged: it violates the First Amendment.
But with atheists, it’s a matter of degree. It’s not whether you believe in God anymore. It’s what you’re willing to do about it.
The moderate secularists I know simply resort to pumpkin smashing. Or rounding up trick or treaters, reasoning with them, trying to make them understand that they are guilty of extortion.
“Listen, Jonquil: what you are doing is stealing in the name of religion,” I heard an atheist say to a little girl about to buy a fairy princess costume at Target last week.
“If you did the same thing on November 10th, we’d have to call the cops and throw you in jail.” The little girl, to her credit, understood perfectly and, fighting back a tear, asked her mother to buy her a 120 GB Ipod Touch instead.
The New Atheists, if they come to power, will ban the sale of straw brooms. You will not be able to buy a sack of caramels and a sack of apples in the same cart. Fairy costumes, forget it. You will only be able to dress up like Charles Darwin on his birthday and ask politely for
arthropods door to door.
CFI will not do this. They are decent types. Not into trickery, cheap shots or slurs.
They need offices and outreach to do what they do, and the suggestion that they are just a blog with an office–slanderous.
Blasphemy Day sort of symbolizes that, doesn’t it? The high ground. The intellectual cutting edge.
We can rest easy that the marauding atheist hordes will not invade our classrooms and take Johnnie’s hand off his chest just before he utters the dread words “Under God.”
Or (coming right up) storm the courthouse square to demolish a nativity scene and send the wise men packing back to Babylon.
We need to know that CFI stands up for the rights of the committed secularist, the little John Q. Public Unbeliever who thinks big thoughts, no matter what he or she believes. It’s secular America at its best.
Be on the right side of history: join CFI in its fight to send the atheist zombies back to hell.
richard-dawkins
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Published: October 23, 2009
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Tags: atheism : Center for Inquiry : new atheism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
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Booboisie Catholicism
by rjosephhoffmann
mencken-image
I don’t know about you but I am still waiting for Vatican II to kick in–you know the change-for-the-better that was supposed to be the fruit of the ecumenical council (1962-1965) called by Pope John XXIII to make everything old new again.
2005 was the fortieth anniversary of its adjournment, which means that most so-called Roman Catholics born after, say, 1968 have never heard a Latin Mass, know their catechism from stories told by their mothers, went to Catholic schools populated by divorced Catholic women, and grew up thinking that the noxious hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” is the pinnacle of liturgical expression. I haven’t even mentioned a recent survey, where it was revealed that most Catholic children between the age of nine and fifteen think the most solemn part of the mass is holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer and/or the handshaking hugathonics known as the Kiss of Peace.
our father
Rumor has it that Benedict XVI’s recent endorsement of a more liberal use of the “old” Latin mass (called without value-inflation the “extraordinary rite,” Summorum Pontificum, 2007) will awaken the deadened aesthetic sensibilities of a whole new generation of mass-goers. Now that any priests equipped to do it (not many) are permitted to celebrate in the Tridentine style, seminaries are laying on special courses (now say after me: “een no-me-nay pah-treees…”) for rosy-cheeked enthusiasts who hope to see the old mass revived in parishes around their priest-starved dioceses.
423px-John_XXIII_Sedia_Gestatoria
Not bloody likely. Vatican II was a colossal failure–at every level–and the time spent studying its documents, probing its theology, anticipating its bounty have all proved a waste of adult brainpower and seminary lecture time.
Its ecumenism was hollow, as proved by the recent decision to create a special Institute for unhappy Anglicans opposed to women and gay priests, gay marriage and sundry other “theological” gripes. Ecumenical dialogue with other denominations is in ever worse disarray, except perhaps with Pentecostals and fundamentalist Christians, Catholicism’s natural enemies at a theological level but their bedfellows on abortion, contraception, HIV-AIDS and sexual ethics (so-called). Its outreach to Jews and Muslims has been political, fumbling, self-serving and inauthentic.
Its attempts to reinvent Catholic theology have been stammeringly painful, testing the resolve of every paid theologian to develop new ways to say the same old thing in ways so obscure they may as well have stuck to Latin. True, Limbo has been questioned, but heaven and hell are still for sale, as are indulgences, the intervention of saints, the infallibility of the pope, and the doctrine of the real presence. Mind you, I do not mean to impugn any of these doctrines; but am I the only one who reads modern Catholic systematic theology with a cartoon balloon over my head filled with an enormous qmark
In terms of church attendance-the once-proud symbol of Catholic allegiance–it has been in decline since 1970–and why not, we have to ask, considering the endless loop of sermons about how loving God is all about hating abortion.
H. L. Mencken died in 1956, a decade before Vatican II had had a chance to work its special destructive magic. Years before that, in 1923 (think Scott Fitzgerald, Bentleys, raccoon coats) Mencken wrote an article in The Smart Set called “Holy Writ” that might have alerted the Church to the perils of the literal in reforming ancient tropes and gestures.
The occasion of the essay was a new translation of the Bible into French, designed to get rid of the contrived antiquity of the language then used for all Bible translations. Whoever did it, Mencken said with characteristic understatement, “is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France.”
Contrariwise, he says, “the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous, and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life….The Bible they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men could not fix their minds on the ideas in it.”
For Mencken, this inaccessibility was a good thing: it raised the text above both the theological idea-men and the critics of tradition, so that even “the assaults of Paine, Darwin and Huxley” have not been effective against it. “They still remember the twenty third psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, and they are still moved beyond compare by the sermon on the mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger.”
No friend of elitism, the chattering classes, politicians nor the nincompoops who worked at factory jobs, Mencken saw the language of the 1611 (King James) Bible as the high-browiest thing about a protestant culture that without it would be as crass as its native sons. He teasingly alludes to the state of an atheist, who by comparison with a Bibled Methodist is infinitely more crass.
When he turns to the cradle Catholicism of his native Baltimore, Mencken finds something different to praise. The good of Catholicism is not in the Bible but in its keeping the Bible away from people, and keeping people away from the technical theological disputes that occupy only a small segment of the learned clergy.
What keeps the Catholic in the pew Mencken thought was not theology or lectures on doctrine but spectacle. The Catholic church exceeds the Protestant as he saw it “because it has always kept clearly before it that religion is not a syllogism but a poem.” “A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive to a man with any genuine religious sense…as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God.”
Mencken enjoyed toying with the contrast between the major streams of American religion. Protestantism failed not only because he had a personal dislike for “American bible searchers,” largely Baptists and Methodists, whom he often called vermin, but because their religion purported to be logical.
The Protestants, he claimed “transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise” by putting their sermons front and center and eschewing liturgy. On the contrary, “Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was little employed in the early church and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today.”
But Mencken knew the end was near, even in 1923. He observed the lengthening of the sermon by Catholic bishops and priests (blather), the loss of the aesthetic, mumbled prayers, ignored rubrics, the twenty-five minute mass–as though Latin was a cage to be gotten out of.
He associated this tendency with the Irish, who wanted more gab and less godliness. He warns of the “folly” the American church is falling into by trivializing what a later generation of theorists would call “mystique”: “A bishop in his robes playing his part in a solemn ceremonial is a dignified sight, even though he may sweat freely. The same bishop bawling against Darwin half an hour later is simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon keeper in South Bend, Indiana.” Darwin’s place, no doubt, has been taken by the Abortion Provider, but the bawling hasn’t changed.
Mencken had some advice for the Church back then, especially with respect to liturgical decline: “Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will propose to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.”
What he didn’t foresee is that the work would be done by the bald headed sons of the saloon-keepers.
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Published: November 5, 2009
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Tags: New Mass : H L Mencken : Novus Ordo : Extraordinary Rite : Catholic Liturgy ..
4 Responses to “Booboisie Catholicism”
.
Tess Tosterone
November 6, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Great writing…Mencken was, however, elitist (or more accurately meritocratic), to the bone.
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Booboisie Catholicism (Repost) « The New Oxonian says:
January 5, 2011 at 11:20 am
[...] Booboisie Catholicism (Repost) I don't know about you but I am still waiting for Vatican II to kick in–you know the change-for-the-better that was supposed to be the fruit of the ecumenical council (1962-1965) called by Pope John XXIII to make everything old new again. 2005 was the fortieth anniversary of its adjournment, which means that most so-called Roman Catholics born after, say, 1968 have never heard a Latin Mass, know their catechism from stories told by their mothers … Read More [...]
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Dwight Jones
January 5, 2011 at 11:47 am
As a descendant of Martins in Ireland (mother’s name), I would be interested to know if you ever came across Malachi Martin in your studies (prominent Jesuit writer).
In my book The Humanist a high-ranking Jesuit converts to Humanism, and the promise for me in that would be Jesuitical stewardship for the DNA and future lives of Humanist Union members. I don’t judge the Jesuits, and I do admire centuries of loyalty when I see it.
Again, great writing Joseph, these retrospectives revive many old echoes and are nonpareil in their assessments.
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Booboisie Catholicism (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
July 15, 2011 at 1:34 pm
[...] This from 2010… I don't know about you but I am still waiting for Vatican II to kick in–you know the change-for-the-better that was supposed to be the fruit of the ecumenical council (1962-1965) called by Pope John XXIII to make everything old new again. 2005 was the fortieth anniversary of its adjournment, which means that most so-called Roman Catholics born after, say, 1968 have never heard a Latin Mass, know their catechism from stories told by their mothers … Read More [...]
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Atheist Schisms: Alice and Mr Dawkins
by rjosephhoffmann
alice_lg
Even though Richard Dawkins taught at Oxford for the best years of his life, he never met Alice.
Alice, you’ll recall, was happiest having tea in Christ Church meadow, getting drowsy over her books, and falling down rabbit holes where she encountered all kinds of strange creatures no one had ever seen.
The probability of having never seen Alice, whose memoirs describe smiling cats, talking caterpillars, rabbits in waistcoats and the Red Queen’s caucus race–in great detail–beggars the odds and raises serious questions about whether Mr Dawkins ever taught at Oxford at all, or if he did why he never left his room.
A natural skeptic and proud atheist would want to test the testimony, as it were. Yet there is not one recorded instance of the good professor plodding through the meadow and so much as kicking up a tuft of grass or picking up a lifeless dogeared playing card to check the sources.
This raises a question in my mind. Are the atheist fundamentalists really that skeptical, that thorough? They claim not to have seen a lot of things–miracles, resurrections, God, and the like–but given the fact that they have not even taken the time over a pretty thin volume like Alice’s biography, why should we trust them with a hefty book, full of massive improbabilities, like the Bible?
moses
They invoke something called science, or naturalism as a proof of their knowing a thing or two about not knowing a thing or two. But I ask you: the sea monster Leviathan had to be fairly impressive, or his story would not have lasted a thousand years. Wouldn’t a real atheist want to slip on a pair of flippers and a mask and head for the Mediterranean just to be sure? leviathan
According to usually impeccable American media sources like the National Geographic Channel, Noah’s ark has been spotted on a number of rocks. Even the exoskeletons of marine animals long thought extinct have been found encrusted in its petrified planks. I suppose a scientist who can’t be bothered to find a rabbit hole won’t make the journey to Sinope to check it out. But as long as those boards go unexamined, I respectfully reserve my right to believe the flood happened just the way Genesis says it did–all sloshy forty days and every drenched zebra of it. A pure skepticism requires nothing less. We’ve got the word, we’ve got the wood: what do you fellows have?
Perhaps I shouldn’t mention the New Testament, but it seems to me a little homework would turn up “thank you notes” from at least a dozen of the five thousand men, women and children who were fed bread and fishes on that hot Thursday afternoon. These would not have been sent because thank you notes never are. They are the most massively preserved species of domestic literature after unopened tax bills. Find the family bibles of their descendants, you’ve got your evidence.
After noshing all that stodge they must have been thirsty; has anybody bothered to look for the canteens? This is simple archaeology, but over the heads of our so-called atheist fundamentalists.
What I hate most of all is when atheist fundamentalists get all pious about their atheism. Take the recent bus and subway ad-campaign that tells us “1,000,000 New Yorkers are Good without God.” You’re going to trust this statistic when it comes from guys who won’t leave their lecture rooms to see if it’s raining? 1,000,000 New Yorkers are also good without a extra slice of cheese cake, while ony 75,000 look really good in spandex: so what? 3,000,000 New Yorkers don’t believe in voting. Most are atheists. Don’t believe me? Go ask. That’s what a scientist does.
fat
Besides, numbers games are tricky. Wait till the Baptists roll out a bus that screams “22,000,000 Jesus-believers who attend fish fries can’t be wrong.”
But back to the hot topic, the atheist schism. Hardcore and softcore atheists, big tent versus wigwam unbelievers?
I agree with some of my friends that there can’t be a schism in atheism because atheism is a big muddle, a jumble of ideas. Think of your mind as the accumulated junk of fifty years just waiting to go up for sale on card tables next weekend. Then it rains. Atheism is like that. Some say it’s a stream of thought. Some say it’s a rolling river. Like love.
At any rate, muddles and puddles can’t have schisms–that’s clear enough. So how do we know that atheism can make you as good as a believer? I have thought about this a good deal since the last bus rolled by and think I have an answer that any scientist worth his powder would agree on.
It’s based on my personal method of assessment that I call the Mercurial Goodness Index.
Goodness needs to be defined as the result of how much about God you don’t believe in. If you don’t even believe in the possibility of God (there’s a very fancy name for this in philosophy but I forget it), then you are totally good. A secular saint.
If there is a particular god you don’t believe in, then your goodness has to be calculated according to the number of things you don’t believe about him.
For example, 10 points for not believing he created the world, 10 points for not believing he created the human race, 20 points for not believing he wrote the most boring sections of the Bible, 5 points for not believing that, even if he created the human race, he did not create Republicans. Maximum 80. Only fair-weather and backsliding Christians, Jews and some Muslims can play this game. Secular- leaning Muslims who do not believe in God are required to surrender their weapons as a token of their skepticism.
Skeptical Hindus will be scored according to the number of gods they don’t believe in up to a maximum goodness score of 330,000,000 (way more than the number of good New Yorkers). They receive ten extra points if they also confess that Hindusim is a very silly religion.
Buddhists can play, but must be very quiet about it and not reveal the secret of their goodness.
I think even the most committed atheist will agree, this is the best way forward.
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Published: November 7, 2009
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5 Responses to “Atheist Schisms: Alice and Mr Dawkins”
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Atheist Schisms: Alice and Mr Dawkins (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
October 5, 2010 at 6:24 pm
[...] Even though Richard Dawkins taught at Oxford for the best years of his life, he never met Alice. Alice, you'll recall, was happiest having tea in Christ Church meadow, getting drowsy over her books, and falling down rabbit holes where she encountered all kinds of strange creatures no one had ever seen. The probability of having never seen Alice, whose memoirs describe smiling cats, talking caterpillars, rabbits in waistcoats and the Red Queen's c … Read More [...]
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steph
October 5, 2010 at 11:15 pm
I Adore this – it’s hilarious and so completely True. It weminds me of the three wise monkeys. The ‘Dom’ Witched Dawkins sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks …. he covers his eyes and his ears – but not his mouth for he speaketh vewy vewy much. You have solved a dilemma conclusively and so eloquently too – he hasn’t found any evidence because he hasn’t tried to find it. And I bet he’s never even tried to talk to a caterpillar or a mouse. Absolutely Fantastical post – just like a chocolate box bulging full of delicious surprises.
x
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Seth Strong
October 6, 2010 at 9:24 am
30 points are automatic: Creating the world, Noah’s flood, and that killing of all the first borns as Jesus was about to be born.
I’ll take 10 points twice for that story where Lot invites the angels in and offers his daughters to the crowd because the essence of the story happens again in Judges (or before in Judges or something). That brings me to 50.
I don’t believe in the resurrection, the fish and loaves things (which happened twice as I recall), or the healing of the soldier’s ear that Peter had sliced off in defense of Jesus. 90 points.
Daniel would have died in the lions den, 100. Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, 130.
I can go on. Honest.
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Ed Jones
October 10, 2010 at 10:12 pm
The real problem with Mr. Dawkins might just be his “beiief” that “Beiievers should be ignored”, preventing him from meeting his scientific colleagues like Einstein, Schroedinger, Heinsenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli,, de Brogue, Jeans, and Planck in the sense of ignoring their mysticalWritings. This may prove to be the problem with most atheists in spite of their claim: “Science is for Brights”.
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Weekly roundup of interesting links « The House of Vines says:
July 21, 2011 at 2:10 pm
[...] Joseph Hoffmann discredits arch-skeptic Richard Dawkins and his methodology with help from a rabbit-following girl: Even though Richard Dawkins taught at Oxford for the best [...]
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The “Case” of Karen Armstrong
by rjosephhoffmann
This is a story that will not go to sleep.
As soon as I had written about the sad and strange case of Major Hasan, now fading because it seems evident we are dealing with a culturally disconnected man, disturbed by private demons, I closed Karen Armstrong’s book A Case for God vowing never to waste another dime on her cooked to publisher’s order histories.
I do not know if this is her twelfth or thirtieth book, and it does not matter. They are the work of someone who finds it impossible to think things like religion through and as a result finds it very easy to write about religion.
It is easy to pan her prose. The conservative religion journal First Things marveled recently at her “selective compassion” but was more direct about her ignorance of history and theology:
Among people who know nothing about religion and don’t care much about factual information (an unfortunately large demographic), Karen Armstrong has become something of a sensation. But for those who think that claims about religion, ethics, or history should have some grounding in reality, Armstrong is considered an embarrassment.
And the superb Hugh Fitzgerald in The New English Review said
For Karen Armstrong history does not exist. It is putty in the hands of the person who writes about history. You use it to make a point, to do good as you see it. And whatever you need to twist or omit is justified by the purity of your intentions—and Karen Armstrong always has the purest of intentions.
This positioning is aforethought, naturally. “Religion,” bigly conceived, she seems to have learned as a nun with specific Jungian inclinations, is what God gave us in the form of religiousness with the idea of him in it.
That makes any specific denomination or faith a little too cramped to accommodate the Great Idea, the fundamentally noble truth, that all religions imperfectly embody. Welcome to the World Parliament of Religions, circa 1883. It’s all about goodness, compassion, but never about religion in a specific cultural location with specific and much smaller ideas called dogmas.
She dredges up nineteenth century ideas of the centrality of God (read: golden rule) to human experience, superimposes these features on her reading of the world religions, and then finds it remarkably easy to identify the compassion gene in each of the world’s great faiths. She is quoted approvingly by all dialogists who think that those of us who see religion as being at the heart of some of the world’s intractable problems are just plain wrong.
She is annoying and convincing, appealing to every soul that twinkles in the light of naïve ignorance.
A featured essay in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine gives us vintage Armstrong in an essay called “Think Again: God.” In it she creates a series of propositions and then “refutes” them not with argumentation but attitude and cliché.
It is a doubly disappointing performance because the propositions aren’t bad, though loosely strung beads of different colours, and deserve more thought and attention than Armstrong gives them.
The answers seem almost contrived to be dismissive rather than profound, written in the “Of course this isn’t true” mode of a neo-scholastic–and (more tragically) seem to have the work of the New Atheists in view.
The entire essay, without meaning to be sly, is in the style of a Dominican lecturing her class on missing the most obvious questions in their catechism.
A few trying examples will suffice:
God is Dead. No, she says, not even if Richard Dawkins and Nietzsche say he is.
Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.
I don’t disagree with the bit about meaning. Who could? It is seductive, and who doesn’t like a little meaning with their tea?
But the undefended suggestion that God (or belief in God) supplies ample meaning for the citizens of the modern world causes me to tremble. –Because even if this is so for religious folk, what would that “meaning” consist of if not a self-referring ego-worship as Feuerbach (whom she’s apparently never read) announced a century and a half ago? Doesn’t meaning have a little to do with reflection, wisdom, education, creating human values, including constructs like God and systems of religion?
God and politics don’t mix. Don’t believe it she says: “Theologically illiterate politicians have given God a bad name.”
It is a familiar and troubling (and increasingly popular) idea that the problem that looks like religion in the world of politics and society is not religion, but bad theology. She then quotes the electioneering slogans of presidents like John Kennedy and Barack Obama–men made nervous by faith but politically clever enough never to appear to reject it–as proof that religious faith “binds people together.”
Exactly. That binding is what got us the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, the Holocaust, 9-11 and gets hundreds of spiritually hungry and far-from-theologically-illiterate Muslims killed every year through no fault of their own by their fellow citizens in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Brushing these things aside as brief distractions, she strides to her next and related point.
God breeds violence and intolerance. If your pulse has raced with approval at the vintage 1971 American NRA (National Rifle Association) bumper sticker used by advocates of assault weapons to hold on to their weapons, “Guns don’t kill, people do,” you will have some sympathy for her answer, which is essentially the same: “No, humans do.” But one wonders about all those worthies, patriarchs, prophets and, yes, even nuns who heard the voice of God and did, or almost did, hideous things at his beck and call, beginning with Abraham. I suppose none of that had anything to do with religion.
Savvy religion scholars have been commenting for a decade (I know I have) on how the central myth of Christianity requires us to believe that God required the violent death of his own son in order to restrain himself from another act of more general violence against the whole of sinful humanity—a repetition of the first global homicide perpetrated against Noah’s generation. Do any of the religions she can name lack a concept of judgment, sin and retribution?
Perhaps Armstrong believes we should not take such stories seriously. But then we have to ask, what is to be done with the rubbished tales of Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition? And do we then end up with a mute and indistinct God who is not violent because he has never spoken, never acted, and may not exist. Clearly Armstrong doesn’t wish to go there. That’s where the atheists are having coffee. So she goes here instead:
As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you.
Without challenging whatever she may mean by “balance,” Armstrong, more fundamentally, misses the etiology of religious violence, which is the same as the etiology of religion.
The remainder of Armstrong’s propositions range over whether God is bad for science (not necessarily) or bad for women (yes, at least in those areas where she feels women must have the option of choice, as in the abortion debate).
In general, as we have come to expect, religion is a pretty good thing because Ms. Armstrong does not wish to write about unpleasant things and her readers are bored by facts.
But her responses are careless and uncongealed. She appeals to a “principle of compassion” as the underlying and ancient principle binding religions together. But as Joe Carter writes in First Things, “Where exactly is this ‘ancient principle’ to be found? Isn’t it the case that this principle is a modern invention, often used to provide a less embarrassing interpretation for religious claims that have been held for millennia?” Yes, of course.
This book and the many interviews, pitches and essays by Armstrong that follow from it are final documentation of what many of us have said for a long time: the inexhaustible Ms Armstrong, friend to all religion and true servant of what she thinks of as God, needs to write less and read more. And think about what she reads.
As Hugh Fitzgerald says in his brisk analysis of Armstrong’s twists and manipulation of history (dealing only with her first paragraph in his review), she smuggles in details as she sees fit, making Columbus a Jew (why not, no evidence to the contrary), and religion a psychic need, the real-world effects of which—especially brutality—can be justified as simply misunderstanding its essence.
She can roll history about, she can pull it apart, she can twist and turn it with the same delight exhibited by a two-year-old when a-too-solid block of Playdoh is finally softened up for use by grown-up hands. But the two-year-old is an innocent at play, and even if he leaves a momentary mess, he has done no real harm. Karen Armstrong is not innocent, and manages to do a great deal of harm, careless or premeditated harm, to history. Too many people read that she has written a few books, and assume, on the basis of nothing, that she must know what she is talking about.
I am not sure I ever thought that, but Fitzgerald’s warning is important. This is schlock: a mixture of sloppy history, poor reasoning, wishful thinking and amateur psychology.
Not a “case” for God but a case for not–ever–taking anything written by Ms Armstrong seriously.
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Published: November 16, 2009
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Tags: First Things : Karen Armstrong : new atheism : New English Review : R. Joseph Hoffmann : The Case for God ..
4 Responses to “The “Case” of Karen Armstrong”
.
Robert G. Volkmann
November 22, 2009 at 11:50 pm
First Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in 1893, not 1883.
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lucy Ortiz
July 13, 2010 at 1:23 am
You are a hateful idiot. You shouldn’t be allowed to write anything.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2010 at 1:53 am
Is that the sweet smell of Reason ….
Reply
KAfan
October 3, 2010 at 12:37 pm
lucy Ortiz (sic) lays it on a mite thick but one feels her pain, Mr. Hoffmann. THIS reader finds your argument disappointingly glib and slick, mounted on a pre-supposed logic drawn from presumed but unstated agreement to what one imagines remain always highly-arguable supporting points. In the end your discourse profoundly disappoints, lacking as it is in clearly-stated reasoning here on the page.
Or screen.
What are you really trying to say?
Here is one, but just one, example of your rhetorical sins of commission. You quote a snippet from Armstrong, including this:
“. . . humans fall very easily into despair
if we don’t find some significance in our lives.”
And you respond,
“I don’t disagree with the bit about meaning. Who could?
It is seductive, and who doesn’t like a little meaning with
their tea?”
Which to this reader’s ear is slyly sarcastic. It would stand as little else, but for how you continue:
“. . . the undefended suggestion that God (or belief in God)
supplies ample meaning for the citizens of the modern world
causes me to tremble.”
The proposition you impute to Armstrong, that she considers (belief in) God to supply “ample meaning” for citizens of the modern world is your construct, not Armstrong’s. It is not what Armstrong said, but what you are, gratuitously, piling onto her text. You’ve shot yourself in the foot here, my friend.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Winners Are…
by rjosephhoffmann
I don’t know about you, but if there’s one thing I’ve been chewing my nails over (sorry, Jesus) more than the Public Option it’s the results of Center for Inquiry’s “Blasphemy Day” Competition.
You hadn’t heard? BD was an event designed to bring out the puckishness in organized atheism.
And high time. A lot of people think that atheists aren’t funny. Except Bill Maher. He’s very funny. But a lot of people think you have to be a Jew to be funny–a Groucho or a Seinfeld.
A lot of people think Muslims aren’t very funny but my Iraqi girlfriend, Yasmine, tells me that “infidels just don’t get it” and that I won’t either if I keep watching re-runs of Curb Your Enthusiasm and You Bet Your Life.
The idea behind having a contest was to prove to religious people that their religion is ridiculous. Of course, a lot of religious people know that already, but there’s nothing they like better than a little God-bashing to remind them.
It takes an atheist to bring religion down to comic size. An atheist like P Z Myers who teaches at the University of Minnesota. Myers is famous for snatching a Catholic communion host and driving a spike (no, I don’t know how long) into it, along with a page from the Koran, and a page of Richard Dawkins’s God Delusion.
Believe or not, he was not struck dead, but he was charged by the Library with defacing university property.
According to Myers, the point of BD was to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” He says he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day. Personally, unless they include a gift-giving component I’ll stick with Christmas, but let’s wait and see how it plays out.
Meantime we have the winners. Sit down.
Ken Peters of California was first prize winner, a T-shirt and coffee cup.
His contribution, a pithy four word aphorism–”Faith is no reason.” I guess that’s Blasphemy Lite–sounds a little like Thomas Aquinas to me.
The others in no special order of offensiveness,
“There’s no religion like no religion,” submitted by Daniel Boles of Thailand, inspired by John Lennon and Ethel Merman. (Hold on to that Peace Corps job, Dan.)
“I wouldn’t even follow your god on Twitter,” submitted by Michael Hein of South Carolina, inspired by Yo’-Mama jokes.
“The reason religious beliefs need protection from ridicule is that they are ridiculous,” Michael Nugent of Ireland, inspired by a total disregard of how that slogan would look on a coffee mug.
“I survived the God virus,” submitted by Perry Bulwer of British Columbia, Canada, in a desperate attempt to prove that Canadians can be outrageous.
There were also a couple of limericks. Here’s one I didn’t understand:
“Minds harbor incongruous memes:
Religion and fairytale dreams.
Relentlessly nutty,
They turn brains to putty,
Inculcating scurrilous schemes.”
Rumour has it that some top-notch submissions arrived too late for consideration:
“Take this God and shove it” submitted by recently-deposed bishop, John McNakerney of Angel Falls, MN; “Who needs the devil when my wife still prowls the earth,” by Sol Wasserstein of Glencove, NJ, and “He only rested one day, you, you sit in that chair like it’s a throne for six,” by Ethel Wasserstein of Glencove, NJ. “Gods don’t kill people, people do because there is no God” was cited as the most confused but strangely accurate late submission.
Don’t worry if you missed the suspense and the playoffs. CFI has a new treat in store as part of its “Campaign for Free Expression.”
A cartoon contest. “We’re looking for sophisticated hard-hitting ideas and images that pose serious questions about belief and disbelief–cartoons that prod readers to think as they laugh (or maybe cry).”
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Published: November 20, 2009
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The Church’s Right to Choose
by rjosephhoffmann
Bishop Tobin
The edict of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, denying Patrick Kennedy the right to receive communion in his Church is the latest evidence of the Catholic Church’s irrelevance in contemporary ethical discussion. It is sacramental blackmail, demanding that a Catholic legislator suspend judgment and conscience in order to promote the interests of his Church above the interests of the women and men, Catholic and not, who elected him to office. Worse, it ratifies the dark suspicions of fifty years ago when non-Catholics wondered out loud whether the dogma of the church rather than the principles of secular democracy would govern the decision-making of a Catholic president. Oddly enough, it is the Church itself rather than any Catholic politician that has renewed and perhaps answered the question.
In 1960 everyone able to vote in my Catholic family voted for JFK because Catholics (like most Jews and African Americans) were Democrats. Catholics believed in the Trinity, going to confession, the rosary, and the special license of nuns to inflict pain on adolescent knuckles.
On Sundays they were treated to hideous renditions of Mozart and Palestrina by undertrained choirs with shaky voices and priests whose anguished faces at a sung Latin mass left no doubt about the existence of Purgatory.
There was a “thing” called Catholic Culture, preserved in parish schools, loosely enforced by diocesan bishops, reinforced by the anti-communist television sermons of Bishop Sheen in Life is Worth Living. Being an American Catholic was easy because your Church and your country had a common enemy, even if no one could quite decide what to do about it. Communism was “evil” to religious America because it was atheism, the finer points of dialectical materialism being lost on the good citizens of St. Paul and Kansas City.
In 1960 John Kennedy wasn’t kidding when he said that, if elected, Rome wouldn’t tell him what to do–the so-called “Protestant Scare.” For most American Catholics, the Vatican was far away (especially for Irish Americans) and the pope had the same status as meatless Fridays: he came with the territory as the price of baptism. But in general the authority of the pope was pretty obscure and the non-existence of satellite television and the internet made his authority more theoretical than real.
There was a picture of John XXIII in my eighth grade classroom, positioned close to the crucifix, close enough to encourage the belief that perhaps he had lived at the same time as Jesus.
Nobody talked about abortion, homosexuality (of the clergy or in relation to marriage rights) or (much, anyway) about divorce, though all of these things were part of a darker culture that we knew about—usually in the form of an “unmarried” aunt who came to Christmas dinner but didn’t go to mass regularly.
Politics was easy because protestants didn’t talk much about these things either. When modern conservatives talk about a “broad moral consensus” missing in American society they are talking mainly about a religious convergence of social-sexual attitudes that existed before 1968, or thereabouts.
That’s when Paul VI spoiled our theory of the non-existence of the pope by publishing Humanae Vitae forbidding Catholics to take advantage of new techniques of contraception—the pill. It was a tough year to be an undergraduate dating a liberal Episcopalian.
From that day on, Catholicism was less and less about frequent communion, the trinity, and the virgin, more and more about hating abortion and strongly disapproving of gays—despite the irony of an emerging pedophile culture in seminaries and rectories.
Sad, that when this consensus broke down, Catholics by and large were forced into an ethical corner– forced to choose between church and conscience, between a kind of laissez faire allegiance to the principles of Catholic teaching and a strangely robust “moral” voice coming from a church in liturgical disarray and sacramental crisis.
All of a sudden, your best religious friends were not the ones who shared your tradition (tradition?) but the ones who agreed with you that abortion is murder, that homosexuality is a sinful, correctable practice, and that sex between loving but unmarried individuals of different sexes is morally wrong.
All of a sudden, the weak voice of faraway Rome and meatless Fridays seemed preferable to the New Church, a church that had decided to take its stand not at the altar but in the bedroom.
But the real problem in all of this is one our culture doesn’t yet have its head around. It is the way in which the Catholic Church has forced some of its most loyal sons and daughters, especially those in political life, to leave home.
No one knows whether, given the same set of moral variables in 1960, John Kennedy would have been the first Catholic president or could have achieved the delicate balance between convincing Catholics his religion mattered and non-Catholics that it didn’t.
But the balance is gone, thanks in part to changing social realities and changed laws and attitudes, and in part to a cultural backlash that hasn’t stopped lashing.
Unlikely as it seems, confronted with a progressive Catholic candidate in 2012, as we had in 2004, the claim of the Church’s non-interference and disinterest in American politics will no longer be convincing. We see that in the brokering of “acceptable” bishop-approved health care legislation in the U.S. Congress. We saw it in the sad final days of Ted Kennedy, in his letter of “qualified” contrition to Benedict XVI. Now we see it in the virtual excommunication–literally, being cut off from the sacrament–of Patrick Kennedy.
It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Catholic lawmakers now are expected to apologize to their church for the free exercise of conscience and the right to frame their ideas within the liberal tradition of American politics.
The issue in 1960, when the phrase had everything to do with belief and almost nothing to do with personal ethics, was whether a candidate was “Too Catholic.” For Catholic voters in the future, unless dramatic change occurs in a Church not known for upheaval, the question will be “Catholic enough?”
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Published: November 22, 2009
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Tags: Catholic Church : conscience : excommunication : First Amendment : Patrick Kennedy : Thomas Tobin ..
One Response to “The Church’s Right to Choose”
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stillhere4u
November 22, 2009 at 6:56 pm
In the escalating fight between Thomas Tobin and Patrick Kennedy, it strikes me that a conflict of interest is involved in one of the parties being the umpire or mediator. It also strikes me that both parties are in a position to abuse their position to further the fight…under the rubric of a higher purpose. I recommend the following post: http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/so-the-last-will-be-first-and-the-first-will-be-last/
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Re-reading Reinhold Niebuhr: For a Friend in Maine
by rjosephhoffmann
Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.
Reinhold Niebuhr
A friend of mine in Maine writes to say, “It is almost Thanksgiving. Why don’t you write something nice about somebody?”
I have to admit, I was taken aback. I have been so busy fighting New Atheists and Old Faitheists that I have forgotten the spirit of the season.
But my friend’s request is not as simple as it sounds. During the season we will be treated to stories about heroes waging war in far-off places, sometimes against conscience, for peace and security in the homeland, heroic mothers battling to keep their health insurance, assorted others who represent our seasonal tip of the hat to the poor and the victims of wealth and opportunism.
Christians did not invent Yom Kippur; their salvation-theology would not support the idea. But the holiday season, if you just dig beneath the glam, the pre-season sales, and the consumer market report for Black Friday, somewhere down there is a manger.
Repenting of the injuries the privileged have inflicted on the unprivileged (though no collection agency will be offering amnesty to its debtors) is our yearly token of contrition for our natural greed. “It wasn’t the failure of Mary and Joseph to book ahead that caused Jesus to be born in a cattle stall,” a terribly persuasive nun once explained; “it was the greed of the innkeepers.” A nice and doubtless correct exegesis of a non-existent verse.
I’m reasonably sure the word “hero” would never be used in ordinary discussion to describe the man I am writing about. He came from respectable Midwest Protestant origins and went on to Yale and then to a lifetime of teaching at Union Theological seminary.
As a young preacher, he was a community organizer in Detroit before the term “community organizer” became a disqualification for leadership on the lips of Rudy Giuliani. At great personal risk, the Klan having its financial center of gravity in Detroit, not the South, in 1924, Reinhold Niebuhr condemned it as the greatest human evil religion had ever perpetrated.
Then with equanimity he condemned Henry Ford’s repressive labor practices. He was a pacifist, a socialist, a communist sympathizer (going so far as to support the United Front agenda of the Communist Party USA), and prior to the outbreak of World War II a strong supporter of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Through the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps Nazism’s most famous Protestant victim, Niebuhr’s thought was influential in Germany, one of the first American thinkers to make headway in the closed shop of German academic theology.
Niebuhr is best remembered for the evolution of his thought about “just war,” moving from his earlier pacifist position to a robust anti-communism in his later work—and eventually to a qualified endorsement of nuclear weapons-research. But his support of war as a “last resort” instrument of peace did not arise from the same mindset that the US military establishment used to justify both cold and hot wars across the globe.
As a Christian, and he would say as a realist, he believed in the existence of evil. It was everywhere. Its grip was as plain to him as the presence of God was sometimes obscure for its shadow.
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity….Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Niebuhr’s roots in classical Protestantism–a stream that moved from Augustine to Calvin—were not grounded in speculation but in history. His Christian “realism”—the name given to his way of envisioning the relationship between theology and the state–came from a dual conviction: first, that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had denounced all resort to violence and coercion; second, that this perfectionist ethic (which Jesus, he thought, also enjoined on his followers) is not practical in an “immoral society” where Jews can be killed by the millions and where the state assumes godlike (tyrannical) power in its own right. Alongside the pacifist ideal, he wrote, there must be a pragmatic or realistic ethic of responsibility. Humanity being humanity, that reality sometimes requires a choice of lesser or necessary evils on behalf of the community.
The Expulsion
Manifest injustice can therefore be opposed by force, and it is sometimes moral to do so. For Niebuhr, the war against National Socialism and the smoldering leftover in the form of soviet-style communism demanded opposition. By the same reasoning, Viet Nam was an immoral war, and we can guess what he would have said about Iraq and Afghanistan had he lived to see it.
For Niebuhr, perfection is never a possibility and imperfection is always a certainty: He worried about what he termed a “heretical form” of pacifism, held by his liberal Protestant contemporaries, who have “reinterpreted the Christian Gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man. Modern pacifism is merely a final fruit of this Renaissance spirit, which has pervaded the whole of modern Protestantism. We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God which waits for the final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians ‘to take Christ seriously.’”
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama cited Niebuhr as his favorite philosopher and John McCain in an interview commented that Niebuhr was right in stressing the “cost of a good war” (Paul Elly, “A Man for All Reasons.” The Atlantic, November 2007).
Niebuhr, of course, never talked about a good war. In his Gifford lectures (1940, The Nature and Destiny of Man), he reasserts that evil resides in power and the structures it inhabits. He lost neither his faith in the ability of humanity to control such structures, nor his belief that human beings would always seek to create and exploit such structures.
Millworkers
What is remarkable about his language is that so little of it is interpretation; so little of Niebuhr requires an elaborate “hermeneutic” to make his project accessible. At a time when the previously regnant models of theology were suffused with the German “paradoxical” style of Barth and Brunner, Niebuhr was able to introduce realism, commonsense, and clarity into the discussion.
His legacy? Hard to say. To read him is to be influenced by his “larger thought,” though many can now object to the christocentric nature of his ideas. An interesting twist that–for that tag to be a disqualification for taking someone’s thought seriously. It’s a bit like bringing up the obvious point that Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.
So too, his emphasis on “sin”—more precisely, the imperfection of “man” and the social structures he creates–strikes many people as unprogressive, somehow opposed to the American dream of social and economic perfectibility. Niebuhr anticipated the reaction to the incongruity of his thought in an age of science and secularism: “The final wisdom of life,” he said in his Gifford lectures, “requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”
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Published: November 24, 2009
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Tags: Christian Realism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Reinhold Niebuhr : SOCIAL JUSTICE : Thanksgiving ..
3 Responses to “Re-reading Reinhold Niebuhr: For a Friend in Maine”
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wernerschwartz
April 22, 2013 at 10:42 am
Reblogged this on wernerschwartz.
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God and We the People | The New Oxonian says:
May 19, 2013 at 5:08 am
[…] America has produced, made a pillar of his “democratic” philosophy. I’ve discussed Niebuhr’s thoughts previously in these pages, but I think it’s worth mentioning something […]
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God and We the People » R. Joseph Hoffmann says:
May 19, 2013 at 5:09 am
[…] America has produced, made a pillar of his “democratic” philosophy. I’ve discussed Niebuhr’s thoughts previously in these pages, but I think it’s worth mentioning something […]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Holy Atheism: The Puzzle of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”
by rjosephhoffmann
The origin of this little essay is a conversation I had a few nights ago when I was asked, quite unexpectedly, what books I might recommend to students seeking a deeper understanding of the world. Without much thinking, I pointed to Heidegger. Reflecting afterward, I realized that for most people Heidegger is merely “difficult” and that for many analytical philosophers (Ayer comes to mind) his writing is “rubbish.” In the right hands however, Heidegger can change minds and change lives.
Martin Heidegger is never an easy read, but he becomes more difficult with every new claim to offer a proprietary interpretation of his thought. In 1947 Heidegger published his Brief ueber den Humanismus (“Letter on Humanism”) in which he sorts through some of the tangles left behind in his 1927 opus, Being and Time and a treatise usually translated as What is Metaphysics? To come at this essay without some notion of Heidegger’s technical vocabulary, especially his complex views on metaphysics, is quickly to sink into linguistic mud. It’s equally difficult to sort through the later work without approaching it problematically. By that I mean that for all its emulsion, Heidegger was working through a very specific set of problems and a level of despair that has occasionally occupied philosophers to such an extent that paradox, aphorism and obscurity have seemed the only way to express the intractability of the problems themselves. Nietzsche comes immediately to mind, but there are tempting if imperfect analogies between Heidegger’s views and those of the negative theologians Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Sienna and Meister Eckhart.
The style he preferred in responding to his admirers—like Sartre–as well as his critics, such as Hannah Arendt—was never unconditionally generous, leaving the impression that Heidegger saw his particular mode of expression as appropriate to the subjects he tackled and most interpretation as being either reductionist, or erroneous.
He was not unaware of the power of double-speak as a tool in both political and philosophical discourse. In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview concerning his alleged Nazi sympathies (which finally cost him his teaching career and diminished his reputation in Germany), Heidegger said that in 1935 he had counted on the power of words to convey different meanings to two constituencies (his cleverest students and determined Nazi informants) when he praised the “inner truth and greatness of our movement.”
Hannah Arendt
His sense of how words shape reality and can thus misshape perception and meaning is a constant prickle for anyone who wants to “interpret” Heidegger. It makes equally difficult the task of determining his influence on other thinkers, especially the French philosophers in whose eyes he found grace after 1967.
What makes the “Letter on Humanism” worth discussing is that he pulls no punches about his agenda: to locate in history the source of modernity’s ills. In the politically charged climate of postwar Europe, the easy answers focused on economic, religious, technological and social evils. The cure, it was often proposed, was to restore meaning to the term “humanism” as a category that rises above the particular expressions of modern culture.
In an important article, Gail Soffer notes that “What is peculiar to Heidegger and really questionable in his critique is his diagnosis of the cause of modernity’s ills: not capitalism and its greed; not Protestant religious beliefs; not even runaway technology or the Gestalt of the worker; but rather the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, “humanism lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world” (“Heidegger, Humanism and the Destruction of History,” Review of Metaphysics (49) 1996).
Heidegger was not, of course, unaware of the history of the term humanism in early Renaissance thought or even earlier glimmerings in Christian thinkers such as Abelard and Pico della Mirandola. But he was not especially interested in this history of discussion, or at least such discussion could only be useful in deconstruction (Destruktion).
In a strictly connative sense, humanism is that philosophy which either assigns a defined universal essence to man as “a rational animal,” characterized primarily by voluntary action, or it is the denial of essence—a position leading ultimately to Sartre’s conclusion that existentialism is a pure form of humanism. Man is what he is through choice and action. The political appeal of the latter position is that a non-essentialist view of humanism leaves open the possibility for human beings to create worthy social institutions, human rights, Bildung in the humanities and “true” sciences (as opposed to mere technological expertise), and also to reject unworthy ones—such as Nazism.
In none of his writings, however, does Heidegger suggest that “man has no essence.” His message in the “Letter” is that this essence has been misconstrued: that to say “Man is a rational animal” is to predetermine what the nature of man is at a metaphysical level, and that to do so shuts off discussion of the relationship between Being and being human.
To be a knowing subject in relation to known objects is, for Heidegger, to determine the essence of man “downward.” Out of a range of possible definitions, we have chosen the ones that equate science and reason with the sufficient definition—the essence—of humanity. In historical context, we have taken the historical determinants of humanism, which Heidegger sees as a set of familiar phenomena, as being the same as the underlying essence of these phenomena. Heidegger rejects the idea that humanism as we understand the term can provide an understanding of what it means to be thrown into a world of possibilities and others. It does not provide an “analytic” that can help us to understand authenticity, mortality, responsibility. Humanism can provide no escape from the “vulgarity of calculation” or a sense of the temporality of existence.
This leads to the question of God and the matter of Heidegger’s atheism. To an extent, we are playing with language in a way Heidegger would, approvingly, have found amusing. The a-theism he subscribes to is a rejection of God–literally being without the God of history and tradition–and a quest for a non-metaphysical God. It is this aspect of Heidegger’s thought and the subject of die Kehre or “turning” (biographical or procedural?) in his thinking about Dasein that frustrates interrogation—in spite of a small embarrassment of new sources published since his death.
Bultmann
In the world of poetry and technology, God remains the subliminal (literally, beneath the limit) problem. Theologians since Ebeling and Bultmann have exploited this aspect of Heidegger’s almost mystical argot on the topic, and Stuart Elden has analyzed the subject in a useful article (“To Say Nothing of God”, Heythrop Journal, 45/3, 2004, 344-48.). It has been frustrating to students of Heidegger that this “refusal of a theological voice” (Laurence Paul Hemming, 2002) tweaks the nose of theology rather than encourages theological speculation. But, as with humanism, any unconcealed definition of God would be trivialization, and it has been the role of historical theology to offer familiar formulas and definitions in place of concealment.
Thus Heidegger has theology precisely where he wants it: trying to figure him out. His challenge to humanism: that we cannot employ it to address questions of meaning, value and authenticity. His challenge to theology, that the discovery of God cannot be something as simple as forming objective images from subjective data, mainly historical. The possibility of a God without being must be considered. Aquinas considered it. But the axiom “There is no God” cannot be derived from the possibility.
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Published: November 26, 2009
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Tags: atheism : Dasein : essence : Heidegger : humanism : secularism ..
One Response to “Holy Atheism: The Puzzle of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism””
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Mimema
February 4, 2010 at 9:11 pm
I’m in love. Thank you for this timely and even-handed discussion of Heidegger’s objections to the twisting definitions of humanism.
I’ll feebly mimic: openness and possibility as determinants of authenticity, of real humanism, rather than any doctrinal, assigned definition is just the thing that ought to be discussed (though perhaps in non-Heideggerian language) with devotees of both theism and atheism. The packet of science and reason brandished as a new hope for humanity is in important and relevant ways nothing new under the sun, and a sad mirror of many modern devotions. Watching atheists deify science and reason scares me, quite frankly — the movement is breeding what looks like a bunch of sociopaths, or worse. Being in relation to God needs to be part of any theistic conversation.
Mm. Sorry to gush, and likely misinterpret. This just resonated with my frustrations well. I think the discourse would benefit from a translation of key Heideggerian terms out of playful German into similarly playful English.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Interrogating Tradition: A Prospectus for Humanist Studies*
by rjosephhoffmann
*Lecture given at Goddard College, October 30, 2009 launching the Goddard Humanist Studies Initiative.
In 2004 I became chair of the department of Religion and Human Values at Wells College in upstate NY, not far from Ithaca where I now live. I was intrigued by the name of the department: most colleges and universities of any size and distinction have departments of religion, or departments of religious studies, or in some cases, Harvard to name one, programs in the “study of religion,” but a department of religion and human values–how intriguing, how mysterious. What’s going on here I wondered. I asked a colleague how the juxtaposition occurred and she told me that once upon a time the idea had been to organize teaching around the conversation between the ideas and ethical practices that we normally associate with the world’s religious traditions, and those that emanate from the secular realm.
Over time new faculty came and went, the department chair who had proposed the name became a born-again Jungian and absconded, leaving her legacy behind her along with a patchwork of courses that looked very much like any other religious studies program I had known. As I proceeded to rework the curriculum, I kept coming back to the original idea and tried to sort out in my own head what was wrong with it.
The problem was that if you call something “religion and human values” it assumes that there are two independent and perhaps antagonistic streams of thought and action that grow up quite separately from each other, one mired in an interesting but fundamentally mythic or discredited worldview, the other socially responsible, scientific, rational and relevant.
But those of us who think of ourselves as philosophers, historians, social scientists or artists know that it isn’t that simple. Religion isn’t a “knowledge pool” and secularism doesn’t spring like the ever reasonable Athena from the head of all powerful Zeus. The relationship is more complicated and is more evolutionary and erratic than symmetrical.
Having spotted the problem in a curriculum that didn’t live up to its name and probably never could, I was still intrigued by the fact that if we simply dumped the name human values we would lose something of importance. Philosophy as an academic profession cared more about technical philosophy and had spent the last fifty years trying to become a science. Religious studies had bought phenomenology hook, line and sinker and now considered itself primarily a descriptive field, wedged somewhere between literary studies and anthropology. True, our best colleges offered thematic writing seminars and various opportunities to look at topics and issues from cross-disciplinary angles. But where in the college and university curriculum would “human values” get a fair hearing? Where would students learn that at a macro level, they were the beneficiaries of a long struggle for humanistic and secular learning—something the modern university quietly embodied but failed to express.
In 2006, I became a vice president of the Center for Inquiry, tasked with building up its educational offerings. I brought the “Wells conundrum” with me to the job. In fall of the same year I flew to Miami for a meeting with a donor and a dean at the University of Miami to see whether an alliance could be forged between the Center and the University with the specific purpose of creating a program in human values or humanist studies. The dean, who remains a close friend, was direct, skeptical and helpful: He said in so many words that the modern research university is an industrial, money-making entity. It is interested in rankings, faculty development, growth, and visibility. In short, it has to be competitive with institutions that look just like it.
Moreover, he said, how is a program in humanism any different from what the college or university does every day in its scores of departments, research programs, centers and consultations? Isn’t the promotion of reason and science not only among the goals a university aims to achieve but the foundation of a good university’s existence?
I have to say, I was slightly stunned. Stunned because the answer to the question (yes) is actually strongly implied in the premise. The assumption is that the modern university is humanistic, secular, committed to science and reason, or at least to certain values that make its work possible and its product worth paying for. The further assumption is that whether you are studying Romance Linguistics or Creative Writing, biochemistry or technical theater, you are the beneficiary of this implied humanism.
So I said to the dean that nowhere in this industrial competitive model is the working assumption made clear to students. For the students, the supermarket is all about choice and the product is groceries. Increasingly it is the aggregation of disaggregation and the role of the university or college is to provide maps in the form of distribution requirements and maximum variety rather than a learning prospectus. What they are missing is any careful reflection on why education is valuable to begin with, why the products of human culture are worth studying, why we need to think of the past as more than a series of ancient embarrassments that we need to fix, or why the future is not necessarily a smooth sea called scientific progress leading to a better world.
Unfortunately, unless human values, the study of the secular, and an explicit humanism can be brought forward as integral to whatever the overworked phrase liberal education means, the most visible, well programmed, highly ranked university or college in the world will not be doing its job.
I had come a long way from puzzling over the phrase to recognizing that the poor dear Jungian who tried to slot it into the curriculum had been onto something.
But what?
The term human values has been around for awhile. The Princeton University Center for Human Values was founded in 1990,
“through the generosity of Laurance S. Rockefeller ‘32, to foster ongoing inquiry into important ethical issues in private and public life and supports teaching, research, and discussion of ethics and human values throughout the curriculum and across the disciplines at Princeton University.”
Partly this was done, if you examine the history of the Center, to provide the sort of integrating counterweight to the movement of disaggregation I was just describing. The problem, however, is that the Center was conceptualized as a research and “special events” agency, and research centers devolve quickly, even with the best of intentions into restaurant menus: lectures on fascinating topics that soon begin to mirror the private interests of big-name speakers.
Without saying that this has what has happened at Princeton, I invite you inspect the most recent lecture schedule posted on the website. What you will find are lectures on “Economic Freedom within the EU,” one on “Bioliberation,” and quite a few called “title to be announced,” strongly implying that the status of the speaker outweighs any systematic effort to link topic to vision.
I am tempted to say Let Princeton be Princeton, but rather like the situation at Wells College, there is a tendency to use the term human values so generously that its key markers—humanism and secularism are hardly mentioned at all.
What Mark Schulman, the president of Goddard, and I began discussing over two years ago now is the possibility of creating a degree program where these markers are front and center-not embedded in a general studies program, not lost among the shelves of the educational Wal-Mart, not used as a counterpoint to religion or a synonym for science or just another way of talking about ethics.
But before that discussion can take place, a little positioning “beyond Princeton” is necessary–on the premise that it’s better to avoid Alice’s situation in that famous dialogue with the Cheshire cat: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?,” Alice asks. “That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” says the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” replies Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” says the Cat. For purposes of what comes out of this dialogue, direction and definition matter because we have some idea of where we would like to end up. Otherwise, as Cicero said, “Stercus accidit.”
In the first place, human values are cultural. They may lead to the writing of books, including ones considered sacred, but they do not emanate from those books.
They are not revealed but developed. The basic principle in the human sciences is that we make culture and live in it and through it. The human values are the ones that we bring with us to this process.
Because we’re in culture “like” a fish is in water, there are key elements of our life that we don’t question, analyze, or think very much about. (The story about not telling a bee it can’t fly is a case in point). We value life, we value the continuation of life—not just our own but the lives of others and the life of the planet and the environment that supports it. And we know that most other values we can name originate in that primary valuation and that the various specialized cultures (agriculture, horticulture, techno-culture) support different parts of our existence in different ways.
But we’re not fish and we’re not bees. Human values are the values that make us human. The question of human values, as we examine the various discrete cultures that touch our lives is whether there is anything that rises above the specialized value-systems that emerge in relation to the demands of each community. If all systems of culture are need-driven, if (as we think) needs differ from culture to culture, and if we are the makers and managers of culture, isn’t the fundamental value competition and everything else piety? An impressive number of thinkers have thought so.
I am not asking that question just to say No (too pious) but to say that that’s the kind of question that would arise in this program. It is the kind of question that arises for a humanist–for someone interested in interrogating and not merely analyzing tradition.
What a humanist studies program will look like will depend on its incorporating core questions about the human past, the human condition in the present, and a vision for the future. That’s not just a cliché way of thinking about a curriculum as an obligatory three-part soul but a way of thinking about its objectives. It describes three dimensions or areas of interrogation:
1) Human achievement. Take this, broadly speaking, as the historical or social-historical dimension. Humanism is not a glorification of the human past and the accomplishments of great people. The Great Man theory of history had its heyday in the 19th century and educational programs are still recovering from the model and the assured conclusions concerning what constitutes greatness. When politicians in Washington or Moscow “invoke” national mythologies or impose patriotic categories on contemporary issues, it’s the archaic-categorical version of history they invoke. Since human values is a critical and question-provoking field, the emphasis for a student is to develop skills in analyzing and interrogating a whole range of artefacts—different expressions of material culture, ideas, ideologies, religious beliefs, political opinions and social experiments. It is multidimensional and layered rather than linear and chronological.
Historical study—which would include everything from archaeology to political studies and the history of ideas—suggests that we value memory: we write things down. We pass things on—everything ranging from nursery rhymes to myths, prejudices, superstition to battle stories and folk wisdom and techniques of war. The cultural world is composed of these memories in various forms—books, poems, art, cemeteries, ruins, myths, rituals. What do we value about the past that makes memory significant? How does the study of human achievement and memory integrate our knowledge or, in some sense, help us to understand the kind of creatures we are and the challenges we confront? Are we capable of reaching a deeper understanding of human achievement than we get in the average lecture on the Crusades, or the nineteenth century novel, or a power-point on the Battle of Marathon? The interrogation of the past, to be straightforward about this, is not the memorization of data but an experimental approach to a shared global history.
2) Human Responsibility. Just as we value the past, we have also valued certain forms of behavior. During our time on this planet, we have obeyed the customs and taboos of the tribe, the rules of priests and kings, and the commandments of various gods, and the ideologies of secular states. If one thing has characterized our behavior in general right up to the present day, it is that we have seldom thought of ourselves as the sources of these norms and regulations, and we have just as often been their victims as their beneficiaries.
It is easy to understand this procession from god-given to legislative as the swell of progress from fear to understanding. And that is certainly a theory that many secular people cherish. But just as we can point to the creation of social networks and the creation of cities as a chapter in the history of human achievement, we also have to point to war, class division, sex and gender inequality, and economic exploitation of whole human populations as failures of secular idealism.
That is to say, while we are ethics-making creatures, we are also often recidivist in the way we approach the question of responsibility. If responsibility is a human value, how can we approach it without a systematic knowledge of various political, theological and philosophical attempts to ask the question that Aristotle subsumes under a discussion of happiness and the good life for the human animal? What would that systematic approach look like? What sorts of questions would we expect a student enrolled in a humanist studies program to be asking, and how would those questions be translated into action, leadership, and the education of others?
Many humanists just now are talking about the Good-without-God craze, but I happen to think that the entire campaign is capital misspent. If there is a real correlation between human good (that is, the good for human beings) and human goodness, the God-question doesn’t arise at all. It should not dominate the interrogation of human responsibility for humanists since the question of “how ought we to behave” cannot be defined antithetically to settled dogma and metaphysics that put human beings in inferior positions. Put a bit more cynically, and epistemologically: how does the humanist know he is good without God?
3) Finally, Human Imagination. Yes, the vision thing. The utopias and dystopias, Star Wars and Heavenly Reward. I tend to think that the only difference between the vision of a science fiction writer and the vision of the author of the Book of Revelation is that the latter is conscious fraud (well-intended perhaps) whereas a lot of science fiction is studiously non-fraudulent and honest.
But human imagination encompasses a wide variety of forms, and incorporates both the proposals of science and theories about our ability to imagine the future—apocalyptically, rationally, or idealistically. It may be true that we can’t depend on the Congress of the United States to imagine a universal health care plan, but historically human beings have imagined worlds without war and wars between worlds. Imagination has been used to warn, excite, scare, destroy, and to reveal possibilities that would have seemed impossible if we were simply the pawns of history and the victims of the past.
We have not only imagined creator gods but a creatorless universe whose beginnings are subject to various imaginative solutions. And we need to recognize that the sciences and not just the arts rely on this value and that it worth exploration in its own right. That sentiment is encapsulated in Einstein’s famous comment, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” A certain psychological bias, familiar to humanists, may raise a flag on this value: after all, we have imagined all sorts of things, ranging from heavenly patriarchs to savior gods to a world without Jews to monsters in the deep.
But the fact that we have envisioned a full range of possibilities and have expressed it in art, literature, science and religion doesn’t diminish the need to interrogate the value. We need to encourage an awareness in the student of human values the central role of the imagined world because as Carl Sagan commented a generation ago, “imagination will carry us to worlds we can never see but without it we will go nowhere.”
These are the categories through which I think a coherent program in humanist studies can be developed. They are broad not because generalization is a good thing but because the purpose of such a program is to stress the unity of areas of discovery that are atomized in the departmental nature of the modern university.
You’ll notice that throughout this treatise there is a strong emphasis on the interrogation of tradition. I have refrained deliberately from using the word skepticism because “skepticism” is a habit of thought whereas interrogation is an active and constructive skill. Today especially skepticism is simply identified with what is not believed, what is capable of being disproved or debunked. Education needs to do more than train the seven year old not to believe in the preposterous or to look for card in the magician’s left hand when the right one is in motion. Interrogation is the constructive assessment of what is given to us in every area of knowledge and its motive force is curiosity and the desire for truth–which is the end of knowledge.
Painting Building at Goddard College
Ideally, all higher learning should emphasize interrogation, but it is difficult to move beyond canons, bibliographies and the accumulated structure that defines the modern university and college to that further horizon. Francis Bacon did it in the Novum Organum of 1626 when he challenged the grip of scholasticism and church authority on university training at Oxford and Cambridge, the reliance on authority and tradition and the dark suspicion of new forms of learning—especially experimentation.
Goddard’s program in humanist studies will not break the grip of specialization, but it will offer a humanistically critical approach to sources and authorities. We want to give students who are not content with compartmentalized learning and information a chance to be humanists in two senses: widely read and literate in a variety of disciplines, and highly critical of received opinion and tradition through developing the art of interrogation.
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Published: December 8, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Goddard : Good without God : human values : humanism : humanist education : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secularism : Skepticism ..
3 Responses to “Interrogating Tradition: A Prospectus for Humanist Studies*”
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Interrogating Tradition: A Prospectus for Humanist Studies* (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
July 21, 2010 at 12:06 am
[...] by rjosephhoffmann in Uncategorized *Lecture given at Goddard College, October 30, 2009 launching the Goddard Humanist Studies Initiative. In 2004 I became chair of the department of Religion and Human Values at Wells College in upstate NY, not far from Ithaca where I now live. I was intrigued by the name of the department: most colleges and universities of any size and distinction have departments of religion, or departments of religious studies, or in some cases, Harvard to name … Read More [...]
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steph
July 21, 2010 at 12:50 am
Thank you for drawing attention to this article. I like it very very very much indeed and have greatly appreciated reading it again.
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A Humanist Syllabus? | The New Oxonian says:
March 6, 2011 at 11:30 am
[...] reasons for this gap are discussed in a piece I wrote for this site in 2009, stressing the need for the organized and systematic study of [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Good without God? Not the Problem
by rjosephhoffmann
Reprinted from Spinoza’s Lens (2007/8) http://www.clipclip.org/clips/detail/159809/spinozas-lens-good-without-god-r-joseph-hoffmann
Being good is not the same as being ethical ,or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life.
Be a good boy, Beaver
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.
The God of the book religions, regardless of theological attempts to transform him into a God who loves the social agendas of the twenty-first century, is not a god who would understand the phrase “unconditional love.”
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). This 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.”
The young Marx
Religion functions through its dominant image of God and his punishments to make people “good” in the same sense servants, dogs and disobedient wives were made to be good in the ancient world. A later era would use the word control mechanism to describe this kind of incentive.
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.
crucifixion
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, the one about the missionary and the tribal chief? If the story from 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 human beings, the true makers of religion, have changed their 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.
Sarah, Abraham, and his concubine Hagar
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.
Cronus Devouring His Children (Goya)
The God of the Old Testament is a three dimensional figure—far bigger than Zeus and twice as officious. (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 explanation for what we routinely call “inhumane acts.” –Try posting these commandments above the blackboard in your neighborhood school or the court house wall above the judge’s bench.
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 “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 really 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 convenient “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. Would you want to be good without the Bible: No, because even without the dominance of a sacred text, “goodness” stems from authority rather than conscience and reflection: good dog, good wife, good Nazi, good Jew.
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, perhaps even virtuous. Pray that nothing–no power or text on heaven or earth–will arise to make us “good.”
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Published: December 9, 2009
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Tags: choice : ethics : good wihout God : humanism. Bible : morality : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular ethics ..
7 Responses to “Good without God? Not the Problem”
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Good without God? Not the Problem (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
October 27, 2010 at 7:57 am
[...] Reprinted from Spinoza's Lens (2007/8) http://www.clipclip.org/clips/detail/159809/spinozas-lens-good-without-god-r-joseph-hoffmann 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, Margu … Read More [...]
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steph
October 27, 2010 at 1:19 pm
I couldn’t possibly forget Orou. Beautifully witty, eloquent, incisive and true, prophetic wisdom far, far wiser than Pooh. May such wisdom help us with reason and choice-making, be humanly better, even virtuous too.
x
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chenier1
October 28, 2010 at 8:13 pm
And can I put in a good word for Ninon de l’Enclos? Without ‘La coquette vengée’, and her bequest, Voltaire may have carried on in his father’s footsteps.
I have nothing against accountants, unless they wear ‘Accountants Do it by Double Entry’ t-shirts, but Voltaire does not appear to have escaped unscathed; the bit about the servants stealing the silver sounds a lot more like an accountant than a great intellect contemplating the role of religion…
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steph
October 29, 2010 at 1:03 am
Ninon de l’Enclos – the most voluptuously beautiful, and inspiring heretic of seventeenth century France who defended living a good life without religion – with wisdom and wit – and she did all that rather well. Was Voltaire grateful for the fortune she left him to buy books with? She commented that feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention, she who despite her external appearance of a woman, was claims in a letter to a lover, “that in mind and heart I am a man”. And embracing Epicurean philosophy and other profane authors at an early age thanks to her father, she rejects the pious religious life her mother wished for her, shifting from the convent to the salon, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, perhaps, and made Kings wonder what she was thinking.
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A Secular Ethics? | The New Oxonian says:
March 5, 2011 at 4:11 pm
[...] have claimed frequently on this site that if skepticism at a minimum, and unbelief at the extreme, is a kind of [...]
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Good without God? Reprise « The New Oxonian says:
March 25, 2011 at 7:25 am
[...] Reprinted from Spinoza's Lens (2007/8) http://www.clipclip.org/clips/detail/159809/spinozas-lens-good-without-god-r-joseph-hoffmann 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, Margu … Read More [...]
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Argelia (Argie) Tejada Segor (aka Argelia Tejada Yangüela)
March 25, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Joe this is a great article! I wish you can read Spanish to know how Dictators in Latin America signed Concordat with the Vatican, and in an ex-change for money and power, kept the poor “good.”
Today, even leftist governments are pleasing the Church by including in our constitutions an absolute ban on abortion, marriage by man and woman only, life at conception, and death only by natural death. Because of government’s corruption, they still want the Church to legitimize their “democracies.”
After John XXIII died, they have silenced the Liberation Theologians, that used the gospel to preach a social utopia and make revolution in oppressed Latin American countries a sacred calling. That is the reason why Ratzinger is now saying that Jesus was not a revolutionary. I wish you write about it sometime.
I am posting this article on a Latin Ateorizando atheist group, and on my For a Lay Dominican Republic group and blog. Even if it is in English. It speaks to the reality of the Catholic Church in poor nations. Only 5 countries in the world have banned therapeutic abortion: Chile, Nicaragua, San Salvador, The Dominican Republic and Malta.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Love and Chairs
by rjosephhoffmann
Lazarus
A longer version of “The Importance of the Historical Jesus,” excerpted from my book The Sources of the Jesus Tradition (due out this summer) is at Bible and Interpretation: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/love3141509.shtml
In the case of the “Jesus-question,” there is no point at which the theological imagination does not shape the subject matter. Love comes before the chair, feelings and impressions before the “facts” have been put into place, and interpretation before detail. No matter what element of the Jesus tradition comes first, that element—as scholars for the most part today are willing to acknowledge—comes to us as an act in a religious drama, not as a scene in an ordinary life….
Adapted from: The Sources of the Jesus Tradition, to be published in August 2010 (New York: Prometheus Books,ISBN-10: 1616141891)
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Published: December 9, 2009
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Tags: historical jesus : Jesus : Jesus Project ..
3 Responses to “Of Love and Chairs”
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Divine
December 11, 2009 at 8:02 am
Nice Website…
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Ed Jones
December 16, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Admittedly it is the nature of the N.T. writings which give rise to the level of skepticism evident in the statements: “there is no point at which the theological imagination does not shape the subject matter – no matter what element of the Jesus tradition comes first it comes as an act of religious drama, not as a scene in an ordiary life”.
I must challenge this to be a bias – non-historical – a tendency to let the problem inherent in the writings of the N.T. shape the entire Jesus tradition.
The earlist stratum of the tradition’s claim that the key disciples, after fleeing to Gailiee, returned to Jerusalem to again take up the teaching of Jesus, can indisputably be taken “as a scene in ordinary life”. All that history reveals of what followed this act arguably remains “as a scene in ordinary life” – if one can but grant the historical reality of religious inspiration in some form. My March 24, 2009 letter constitutes an argument for such a convinction.
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Ed Jones
December 17, 2009 at 5:47 pm
The letter is contained in the 10 Comments associated with the essay: “The Importance of the Historical Jesus”, the fourth essay listed below.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
What I Think I Am
by rjosephhoffmann
I am a humanist. I do not believe in an afterlife but (to quote Woody), “Just in case, I’m bringing a change of underwear.”
Woody
I don’t deny or affirm the existence of God, any god. There have been so many, and all of them had their vague charms and serious hang-ups, ranging from the violent to the sexually perverse. Who could know which to worship? No one. That’s why we usually end up with the god our grandfathers worshiped.
Yahweh on wheels (coin)
Whether there is a God or not is simply of no consequence to me, and if the truth be told, can anyone in raw honesty claim that the God they pray to for answers, solutions, reversal of fortune, pie-in-the-sky or redress of grievances ever–ever answers their calls. Of course not. I can still see the pious face of a too-close relative asking me, as my mother lay dying in a hospital ICU, whether I believed God answered prayer. “It depends,” I said. “What are we praying for?”
I am an Unbeliever, of sorts. Joylessly so. I have no axe to swing at the necks of believers. I dislike the word “agnostic.” It sounds as precious in tone and as pretentious as the era when it was coined. It sounds as though we wait patiently for some impossible verdict to emerge from the skies confirming our hunch that we were right to disbelieve all along, Descartes and Pascal be fucked. But it’s not really about evidence, is it? It’s about hunches.
I am not an atheist. But it is a noble thing to be, done for the right reasons.
There are plenty of good reasons to be an atheist–most of them originating in our human disappointment that the world is not better than it is, and that, for there to be a God, he needs to be better than he seems. Or, at least less adept at hiding his perfection.
But you see the problem with that. Goodness and imperfection are terms we provide for a world we can see and a God we don’t. Taken as it is, the world is the world. Taken as he may be, God can be anything at all. I’m not surprised by the fact, human and resourceful as we are, that religion has stepped in as our primitive instrument, in all its imaginative and creative power, to fill in the vast blank canvas that gives us the nature (and picture) of God.
But let’s be clear that God and religion are two different things, and that atheists err when they say “Religion gave us God.” What religion gave us is an implausible image of God taken from a naive and indefensible view of nature. I find my atheist friends, even the “famous” ones, making this categorical error all the time.
There are also some very silly reasons to be an atheist. The silliest is the belief that the world wasn’t made by God because God doesn’t exist and that people who think this are stupid and ignorant of science. There are so many fallacies packed into that premise that it’s a bit hard to know where to begin picking. But perhaps this analogy will help: This clock wasn’t made by Mr Jones because I made Mr Jones up in my head. It was actually made by a clockmaker whose name is lost in the rubbish of history, so if you continue to think Mr Jones made it just because I said so, you’re ignorant.
No, that is not a broadside in favor of intelligent design (though I happen to think the atheist approach to the question is often tremulously visceral); it’s a statement about how we form premises. The existence of a created order–a universe–will ultimately and always come down to a choice between the infinity of chance and the economy of causation, but in any event, my causation is not muscled and bearded and biblical. That much we can know
I am a realist. I believe (with a fair number of thinkers, ancient and modern) that human nature is fundamentally about intelligence and that the world (by which I really mean human civilization) would be much further on if we stopped abusing it. I regret to say, religion has not been the best use of our intelligence, and it has proven remarkably puissant in retarding it. Science is always to be preferred, except in its applied, for-profit form (as in weapons research) because it expands our vision and understanding of the world while religion beckons us, however poetically, to a constricted view of cosmic and human origins.
Who will save us?
To be a realist makes me something of a pessimist (a term going out of fashion) not because I don’t believe in the capacity of human nature to become what it seems designed to be, but because–realistically–we have become as flabby in our thinking as we have become corpulent of mortal coil. Being a realist means we can’t do or know everything–with a tip of the hat to my scientifically progressive friends whose promethean visions I find engendered with a kind of cultic spirituality that makes me squirm. Science after all, like religion, was created by us. One of our tasks is to learn and teach its secrets and take it away from the priestly caste it has created.
When I hear the chorus of scientific naturalists moaning that hoi polloi are dim, that the secret to intellectual salvation comes through a door locked by secrecy and formulas the laity are unable to cipher, I’m always reminded of the ancient hierophants who guarded their own secrets closely and made sure they were passed down only through a priestly elite. And even though I know–theoretically–that science does not encourage secrecy in that sense and is–theoretically–democratic in its outreach, in practice it has been very bad in wholly communicating and exegeting its mysteries beyond the gates of MIT and Caltech. In other words, is it only religion we must blame for the scientific illiteracy of the masses?
But in the end, I am a humanist. Humanism incorporates the rest of it, the unbelieving, the realistic, the pessimistically hopeful. It also includes the aesthetic, and this can be something of a dilemma at this time of year–which, by the way, I am happy to call Christmas and not “the Holiday season” or “Winterfest” or “Solstice.” Winter is not to be feted but avoided. Saturnalia (the Roman Solstice holiday celebrated on December 17th) was just like its replacement, Christmas, a religious holiday in honor of the birth of a god, though a lot more fun.
And I have a weak spot. I love religious music, especially at this time of year. Bach and Handel spun the most amazing cantatas and oratorios out of the Christian myth. They are irreplaceably wonderful. Beyond that, the sheer melodic simplicity of “Silent Night” (perhaps the best song ever written) and the shivering loneliness of “In the Bleak Midwinter” stir the poet in any human soul. “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” Think of that the next time you’re shoveling out.
I don’t believe that Jesus, if there was one, was born in a manger, but I think the idea of pure, naked, vulnerable–even unwelcome–humanity as expressed in religious nativity art and poetry is humbling and moving. And I think the end of the same story, as an allegory of our humanity, naked and vulnerable at the end, is not a contradiction of dignity but an acknowledgment of mortality.
It is something we will all have to do eventually–face our end, I mean. For the humanist that confrontation underscores our belief that a human life is what we’ve got to work with. That we do not seek our rewards, satisfactions or compensation in some unplotted and mythical kingdom.
It is an intelligent, humanistically compelling thing (as philosophers used to remind us), to see the art of dying as the other side of the art of living well. Humanists need constantly to remind themselves that non-belief is not the same as living well or facing death courageously. I think, personally, that mangers and crosses are as relevant to my humanity as the visions of Apollo and the pleasures of Dionysus. Use the myths wisely, but use the myths.
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Published: December 10, 2009
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Tags: atheism : agnosticism : humanism : Jesus. Manger : Christmas ..
10 Responses to “What I Think I Am”
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stephanielouisefisher
December 11, 2009 at 3:55 am
I love this post. Oh yes you’re so right. I agree with absolutely everthing you say – except I think there is perfectly sound historical critical argument for the existence of Jesus, a first century Jewish apocalyptic prophet (and Maurice Casey includes a refutation now of the Jesus mythers in his forthcoming book)…
I’ve never been affiliated with any religion, never believed in God – or any god – and don’t identify as either atheist or agnostic – I’m just a rationalist but I suppose I’m a humanist … I definitely don’t have an axe to grind with any religion or any religious people and I tend not to like self identified atheists because they tend to have been conservative Christians who have lost their faith and seek revenge upon the faith they think made them suffer. I studied music and world religions and I have a very big weakness for religious music. But now I’m an independent historian of religion who listens to lots of music. :-)
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Bill Warrant
December 11, 2009 at 10:43 am
Very nice piece! My main reasons for being an atheist (simplified and summarized of course) are that (1) presupposing God really explains nothing. The data (make your pick) are not better explained by the existence of God. It only shifts the problems or (usually) further increases the number of problems to be solved. (2) It is so easy to see why humans have created God – it has created a very useful paradigm for them to understand the world and their place in it, but perhaps more importantly it gives them feelings of hope and satisfaction. We must never forget the fact that gods used to do a lot of things that we now understand better (in terms of physics). Now that we have a better understanding of the universe God has become invisible, doesn’t do as much as he used to and isn’t even in the skys where he used to be.
Education will bring the truth in the end! If only everybody was properly schooled in psychology, sociology, science, history and philosophy (asking for a lot, I know), atheism would be the norm (as it already is in most western European universities – even despite the influx of moslim students).
Bill
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stephanielouisefisher
December 11, 2009 at 5:08 pm
why should everyone be like you? Let people be. So long as they aren’t harming anything.
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Bill Warrant
December 12, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Hi Stephanie,
I don’t want eveybody to be like me. In fact, nobody should be like me! :) I’m only talking about what people think they know, not about their personalities or actions. I want people to be better educated. This, I hope, is a question of time (I’m optimistic).
Bill
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rjosephhoffmann
December 11, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Hmmmmm. I think I agree with most of this, except that education will “bring” the truth; I rather think it’s what you bring to it-at least historically speaking, would you agree?
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Bill Warrant
December 12, 2009 at 2:43 pm
“Education will bring the truth” is just a catch phrase – kind of like my version of “the truth is out there”. Nevertheless, I do feel that improved education is the key.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 11, 2009 at 10:31 pm
For Stephanie:
I listen to LOTS of music too–what do you like???
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stephanielouisefisher
December 12, 2009 at 4:44 am
Gregorian Chant, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Elgar – love cello especially (everything ever) played by du Pres, Rostropovich, Isillis (I used to play) – Sex Pistols, David Bowie (early), Rolling Stones (earlier), Carly Simon, Dory Previn, Edith Piaf, and some jazz – I had a great time in New Orleans. :-)
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john locke
December 29, 2009 at 5:01 am
Hey, I am an atheist. I consider an atheist someone who does not believe in the existence of a god or gods, so I consider you an atheist. It sounds to me like you don’t like the label, but you fit my definition(and the definition of every atheists I know) of the term. While you may not identify as such, atheism is different from religion in that you don’t need to choose to be one. Atheism isn’t a group that you can join or leave, its just an identifying feature of a person. Either you believe in a god or you don’t(and not knowing means not believing). It sounds to me like you don’t like the negative connotation surrounding atheists and don’t like how many of the behave, so want to exclude yourself from being identified as such, but this just sounds to me like your trying to attribute a feature of religion to atheism.
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kristylove
February 11, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Hmmm. I like reading all the comments! ;-)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
How Christianity is the Perfect Religion
by rjosephhoffmann
Love Incarnate?
I confess to having a seasonal defective disorder about this—Christmas I mean.
I am frankly tired of news about religious extremists plotting world takeover from septic tunnels, watching deals between “good” Taliban and “pro-western” Pakistanis brokered and shredded within months by toothy politicians, depressed from smiling over my gin when MSNBC reports that a pilotless drone (no, a different entity from the United States Senate) has killed a “top level Al-Qaida leader.” (No, not bin Laden. Certainly not—but someone who knows someone who met him once. Maybe at a barber shop.)
Bored enough even to yawn at the last report of a horrific car, market, bus, mosque or school bombing somewhere in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Weary to the point of dizziness at the latest decisions to send in another doomed-from-the get-so cadre of troops to “finish what we started” [sic] in Afghanistan. Innocence betrayed by the allure of travel to distant lands?
At a lower level of cynicism, I am lulled to despair with the conflict over whether Jews in Santa Cruz should or should not have a right to display a fifteen foot high menorah in the “downtown area.” It’s a cluster of candles for God’s sake, but more to the point: don’t you have a back yard?
I am sick of the Vatican being forced into the position, yet again, of apologizing for randy priests and abusive, sexually repressed nuns who couldn’t keep their paws off innocent children in their care. It is disgusting. It is so disgusting that we need to consider seriously if any other social community, unprotected by the fiction that religion operates for the good, is even capable of doing the things that religion does—and does by pointing to a Higher Authority whose function it is (apparently) either to forgive it or condemn it but does nothing to prevent it by putting its holy temple in moral order.
Magdalene Asylum
The commonplace concept of God in all three religions is so miserably and wretchedly puerile that it sends me searching for my dog-eared copy of The Future of an Illusion on an annual basis. May the Kingdom come (and go) soon.
So I ask myself, what went wrong, or what’s gone missing? All of these religions had mystery once upon a time. And without overstating the terrors that take shape when religion is taken literally rather than mystically religion unclothed is a dangerous thing. The poet Matthew Arnold warned a century and a half ago of the danger of taking myths, mixing briskly with the hazards of unformed religious passion and ignorance of literature, and turning them into dogma. For Arnold, the great devil of nineteenth century religion in the English tradition was making postulates out of poems.
Arnold
Who could have foretold that the literalism and plain-talk we expect in twenty-first century discourse would constrain religion to take its own propositions seriously, and worse, act to defend them in absurd and violent ways. But that, I submit is what has happened.
Maimonides. Avicenna. Meister Eckhart. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī Rumi, and more to date (d. 1937) Muhammad Iqbal and Thomas Merton, alas, are not the future of religion.
I have always found it odd in one sense that many of the great philosophical mystics were also great intellectuals, especially it seems logicians and mathematicians. Origen and Ibn Rushd, in their respective pockets, saw theology closely aligned to true wisdom, in that higher sense the neo-Platonists were so fond of talking (and talking) about.
So let me talk about it.
I have said a sufficient number of times (so that anything beyond this time will be mere repetition) that the “cure” for all the bad religion we see around us is not “good” religion or the “right sort of” religion or (above all) declamations that what we’re witnessing “isn’t really religion” but some sort of satanic parody of religion. All such talk is an invitation for conflict under the banner of dialogue.
Religion is not purified by scraping away the mould to see if any edible bread is left. A cure—and yes, that is the word I want–depends on seeing the violence inherent in religious literalism and heeding the call to myth, mystery, and poetry.
When it comes to religion, words speak louder than actions. All forms of biblical and Quranic literalism are invitations to moral terror not because the precept you happen to be reading at the moment is “wrong” but because the one you read next might violate both conscience and commonsense. Violent because you cannot know what verses stir the mind and heart of your friendly local mullah, priest or rabbi. Picking and choosing what the experts believe the laity need to hear–the way most preachers have practiced their faith in public over the millennia–may be a tribute to the power of discernment, but it teaches the congregation—the occasional Catholic, the wavering Muslim—some very bad habits.
It can lead to a constricting of moral vision, the abuse of little children, butchering or disfiguring wives and daughters, the killing of the tribe of Abraham by the children of Abraham. Words do this because they have the power to be misunderstood. And because taken as a bundle, the texts of the sacred traditions are a muddle of contradictory and sometimes terrifying ideas that commend everything from peace on earth to extermination of the unbeliever in their several parts.
It is the kind of tangle that attracts knot-tiers and exploiters and anyone who needs the money of the poor to be rich. Most of the methods developed to study and examine the narratives of the world’s religions “scientifically” in the last two centuries have helped to provide contexts for texts, have shone light on the community within which texts developed—ranging from Syria to Medina—reminding us above all that the ancient words are no different in provenance than modern words: that is, they are human words and need human interpretation. The words are not above us, they should not be considered immune from our assessment and judgment. Any doctrine of inspiration that teaches otherwise is potentially if not actually malignant and insidious.
I could quote Rumi, or Ibn Rushd, or a poem by Alama Iqbal to make my point. They were all great hearts and deeply committed to their vision of religious truth. Taken in another direction, they might have been vicious—because mysticism has often led to esotericism and fanaticism. (Religious language is funny that way.) Origen and Peter Abelard lost their testicles and hundreds of Anabaptists in Munster in 1535 their lives not because they lacked imagination but because they had special visions of how to take the kingdom by storm.
So let me take refuge instead in the myth we find embedded in the story Christians like to read at this time of year.
The Christian myth is that love was born into the world in human form, divine nonetheless and (as the story winds on, without prejudice to the order of composition of the gospel elements) capable of suffering, and destined (as in the ascension myth in Luke) to regain his heavenly estate. True love, recall, does not undergo change, does not “alter when it alteration finds.”
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and angels gave the sign. (Christina Rossetti, 1885)
People who hate the gory images of crucifixion and the metaphysically blinding element of the resurrection narrative, tend to like Christmas anyway. They like it even though they may very well reject every other part of the Jesus tradition. What they like “about” it may not be Christian at all, and may well be more ancient than the ancient ideas that quietly undergird Luke’s and Matthew’s poetic fables.
Socrates it’s easy to forget, was no fan of “poetical myths” “Those which Hesiod and Homer tell us and the other poets, for they composed false fables to mankind and told them [Republic, 377d]. These are “not to be mentioned in our city” [Republic, 378b]. It is easy to forget this because Plato himself was unable to exile Homer completely from his city. What he worries about is the propensity of “myth” (poetical or philosophical) for misunderstanding and the natural tendency among the uneducated, the young and the intellectually dull for getting the myths wrong—missing the point.
Fragment, The Republic
In the Ion [533c], Socrates explains that some people are closer to wisdom and interpretation than others. Call it knowledge—as later Platonists and their sympathizers did. There is a power, Socrates teaches, which descends from the gods to certain men and to others who, like Ion, use the works of the inspired. “It is, he says, like a series of iron rings the first of which is attached to a magnet so that the power of the magnet passes on to all in the series.” Think God, think angel choirs, think wise men, think shepherds. “Those beautiful poems are not human, nor the compositions of men; but divine, and the work of the gods: and that poets are only the interpreters of the gods, inspired and possessed, each of them by a peculiar deity who corresponds to the nature of the poet.” But it stops with the interpreters, the users. The force is not with everyone.
Christianizing Plato is a perilous business, but it did not stop the church fathers and later writers from trying and getting it poetically wrong in their determination to be theologically right. The life of Jesus for many of the interpreters was simply an allegory of divine love, the way in which love (truth) became incarnate. The way love “came down”—in the beginning, for John, “at Christmas” for Rossetti. Certain writers saw this, to be fair, more philosophically than others. The Gnostics did not need a manger or a virgin mother. The most arrogant of the mystics sided with the ancients in thinking that this love was simply a gift of inspiration given to men of learning and ability. Love, philia, is the general term that Plato uses when he wants to convey attraction. It is usually a one way street: the image of iron rings and magnets drawing the things of this world to the things of an unseen realm by a mysterious power that is divine—god-originated..
Perilous though it is, I think that Christianity was unique in democratizing love and in making love available to even the lowliest, the most ignorant, the slaves and sinners. Even the pagan haters of Christianity hated it most for its non-exclusivity, its lack of a membership code. Plato would have hated it, too, and would have insisted that, had there been any, Christians should be barred from his city. Later philosophical Platonism had next to no social dimension. Christianity did.
Christian mythology took the principle of attraction and the connection between God, conceived as love, and forgiveness, considered intrinsic to goodness, and extended it to a human race that had lost its compass and its ladder. Everyone could be perfect because everyone could be attracted.
Do I believe this is literally the state of humanity? Do I think that we should tell our children these things irrespective of SAT scores? Do I agree with Plato that amateurs need not apply and that the secrets of the myths should be “locked in concealment”—the path taken by most of the Platonically-based mysteries and even for a while among certain Christian groups.
What I believe is, there are no mysteries in mangers.
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Published: December 15, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Christianity : Christmas : God incarnate : Jesus : love : myth : Neoplatonic : Plato : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
8 Responses to “How Christianity is the Perfect Religion”
.
stephanielouisefisher
December 16, 2009 at 4:06 am
Yes indeed. I wish I wrote that. Happy Christmas. Love in a manger, a beautiful story.
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Bill Warrant
December 17, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Very nice post! I must say, as a scientist I prefer Aristotle to Plato or Socrates :)
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stephanielouisefisher
December 20, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Ha! Was my comment unmoderatably offensive?! ;-)
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John Uebersax
December 26, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Thank you for a very interesting essay. It raises an interesting point, and something I myself often think about. Is ‘philosophy’ necessary, or is it valuable at all, for Christians?
I share the belief you summarize in the statement “there are no mysteries in mangers.” It seems to me that it was partly in recognition of this that the Roman Catholic Church recognized St Thérèse de Lisieux as a Doctor of the Church.
Yet, Christianity also has a definite Wisdom tradition — as evidenced, for example, in the Wisdom Books of the Bible. It seems to me that the Platonic notion of anamnesis is applicable here. We know certain things: that God exists, that God loves us, that Jesus Christ is an active, creative, living principle of Love, abundant and always present. Yet, as important as things are,we keep forgetting them! Or, to be more precise, we live a dual epistemic existence: part of us (the heart? the conscience? the ‘nous’?) continues to know these things, and part of us (the ego?, the ‘dianoia’?) forgets.
It seems to me that a virtue of the Platonic tradition, as it has been assimilated into Christianity, is the ability to connect our deepest intuitions with our conscious reasoning, purifying the latter, as it were.
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How Christianity is the Perfect Religion: A New Oxonian Repost « The New Oxonian says:
July 2, 2010 at 1:54 am
[...] How Christianity is the Perfect Religion: A New Oxonian Repost July 2, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann I confess to having a seasonal defective disorder about this—Christmas I mean. I am frankly tired of news about religious extremists plotting world takeover from septic tunnels, watching deals between “good” Taliban and “pro-western” Pakistanis brokered and shredded within months by toothy politicians, depressed from smiling over my gin when MSNBC rep … Read More [...]
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steph
July 2, 2010 at 3:06 am
“It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and admit the purely human origins of all the precepts and regulations of civilization.” (chapter 8 of Future) – see I have him too, he lives next to Nietzche. There’s no mystery. Story about love being born with a baby in a manger. Love is real. That’s the human bit.
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chenier1
July 4, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Thank you for reposting this; I enjoyed it greatly, though it provoked a compare and contrast exercise with an essay written by Richard Dawkins a couple of years ago in the New Statesman* also on the theme of Christmas.
I don’t think you need to worry too much about the intellectual competition:
‘It is typical of the religious mind to force a gratuitous symbolic meaning where none was intended.’
I had to re-read your post again as a mental palate cleanser…
* http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2007/12/birthday-jesus-lady-god
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How Christianity is the Perfect Religion (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
December 14, 2010 at 8:35 pm
[...] I confess to having a seasonal defective disorder about this—Christmas I mean. I am frankly tired of news about religious extremists plotting world takeover from septic tunnels, watching deals between “good” Taliban and “pro-western” Pakistanis brokered and shredded within months by toothy politicians, depressed from smiling over my gin when MSNBC rep … Read More [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
New Ethics and Atheist Newbies
by rjosephhoffmann
The Necessity of Atheism?
Pardon my cough when I see titles like Good without God being hailed as “trendsetting.” Not only is the title overworked and the subject matter stale, but the author manages to get through the entire discussion without so much as tipping his hat to the theologian who pioneered the debate almost a generation ago, Cambridge University’s Don Cupitt.
To be fair, it is possible the author never read Cupitt. American learning is almost as parochial and inward-looking as it was in Emerson’s day when the sage, in his exceedingly dull 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, tried to argue that American scholarship (still the object of ridicule in Europe) would be concerned mainly with “Nature.” So, we in this nation, especially perhaps scholars, are part of a proud tradition of not paying attention to foreign scholarship and are more prone than Europeans to claim squatter’s rights to ideas developed by others, elsewhere, often long ago.
Whatever the case, to write a book about ethics without God and not to cite Don Cupitt’s The New Christian Ethics strikes me as plainly negligent, to the point of being out of touch with the topic. A bit like writing a book on the history of the Statue of Liberty without mentioning Frederic Bartholdi.
This out-of touchness is something I have been battling for years. The problem with Atheist Newbies (as good a beginning of a carping sentence as you could want) is that they are too little aware that the battle they think they are fighting was fought over a century ago, fought by theologians in liberal trenches (not atheists in foxholes) and for better or worse won by the forces of reason—if not exactly the battalions of unbelief.
I suspect that is why they spend so much time battling old believers–ranging from DMS’s (Dead Medieval Scholastics) to MILFs (Multiple Illiterate Leadheaded Fundies) because for the most part their work shows no currency with the serious strands of contemporary theology, social ethics, or even of philosophical dialogue with theology. This isolation from theology also nurtures a strong tendency among the Newbies to assume that they were at the station ahead of theologians who had actually caught the train days before them.
Of course there is no need to keep current if you have determined to win against the religious losers and claim that there are no other intellectual positions worth fighting against. It happens to be true that a great deal of modern theology is not worth bothering with. But that is doubtless true of books in general. Not to know the history of theological Destruktion since Kant, Coleridge and Schleiermacher ruled the waves is simply to claim poverty as privilege.
Which brings me to Don Cupitt. Cupitt was the unwitting source of my greatest disappointment many years ago when I was offered a place to read theology at Caius College, Cambridge, and decided to go the City of Dreaming Spires instead.
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
To be blunt, there was no one quite like Cupitt at Oxford, though a few came close. In 1988 he published a modest volume called The New Christian Ethics. The book was a follow-up to his highly controversial, absolutely marvelous little book called Taking Leave of God. (1980).
Taking Leave of God had taken what theologians sometimes call a non-realist position: God is a conglomerate of expressions about god, but not the same as any individual expression nor any total of these expressions. In this sense, God is not “real,” and so any idea that this God has given moral commandments to the human race is untrue.
Like a lot of non-realists, I prefer to say that God is not real instead of saying “I do not believe in God,” or more confidently, “There is no God.” I have no idea whether there is any god that equates to any idea or expression of god. How could I? When I say “God is not real, “ I simply mean that there is not now nor has there ever been a being equivalent to the descriptions of the divine being in sacred scripture and Christian (or any) theology. I am not saying that Christian theology is deficient and some other person’s theology is “right.” I am saying that while I cannot rule out the possibility of God, I can rule out the historical descriptions of him and the rules of conduct thought by some religious people to emanate from him. It’s odd how close this is to atheism, but the atheists I know are the last to admit it.
The idea of the unreality of God gets us beyond the existence question in a healthy linguistic way, because it means that there is no way to experience the reality of God in the way we experience the reality of the world. We know that the historical, traditional descriptions of God are man made. We know this as fact.
The commandments of the Bible and Quran are man-made as well. They are ideas that were used in antiquity to flesh in the idea of God as lawgiver and sovereign over the customs and conduct of human beings. Almost certainly, they are the work of a professional class–priests, prophets, royal sycophants and bureaucrats.
With the collapse of the biblical-realist idea of God, which happened in theology beginning in the nineteenth century, the idea of “divine command” ethics was washed away as well. For many contemporary theologians it does not matter that a great many errant and usually unrefined voices still defend the “reality” of God, the basic soundness of the biblical view of God, or the general “wisdom” (if not the details) of divine command theory. It should matter however that these voices are evidently the only ones of any interest to Atheist Newbies and matter as well that the most vocal critics of religion don’t really seem to care about making the careful distinctions that would, if ignored, sink them as experts in any other field–especially the sciences. The moral is, it is easy to be a critic in a field in which you’re an amateur.
However, the most important thing about Cupitt’s ethics is that he regards the end of realism (the end of the belief in the reality of the God of the Bible) as a turning point in human history. Rather than setting up a straw-man opposition between the “truth” of science (and any ethics emanating from “scientific reason,” whatever that is) and the falsity of religion (with its God-driven, rule based, non-negotiable edicts), Cupitt sees the end of God as a challenge that confronts everyone: the atheist may consider herself free of it, but her obsession with continuing to play with tin solders contradicts her freedom. The Christian, Jew, Muslim on the other hand must begin by acknowledging that the challenge has not been met, and that they may still be infatuated with ideas they have never taken the time to question or examine:
“The end of the old realistic conception of God as an all-powerful and objective spiritual Being independent of us and sovereign over us makes it now possible and even necessary for us to create a new Christian ethics. It is we ourselves who alone make truth, make value, and so have formed the reality that now encompasses us.”
Cupitt’s position is far more radical than it seems—radical precisely because he is not saying what I take the Atheist Newbies to be saying–that is, if they are arguing a kind of ethical détente between believers and nonbelievers consolidated in the paralytic slogan, “It is possible to be good without God.”
Cupitt is saying that it is not only (or primarily) the atheist who must learn to do without God-based ethics. Believers do not have the option to choose a reality of godly proportions and christen his commandments as the divine will as a cover and support for their morality. He is saying that everyone, including believers, must learn to be “good” without a God who is not real in the first place, who has never spoken—and not just not to atheists–and certainly not to the modern mind.
This is optionless ethics, where an atheist will find no opportunity to exchange the fixed certainties of religion for the discovered truths of science as an alternate source of ethical reassurance.
“There is no bedrock and nothing is fixed, not my identity nor my sexuality nor my categories of thought, nothing… There is no external measure or value or disvalue– and therefore our life is exactly as precious or as insignificant as we ourselves make it out to be.”
In his work, Cupitt has always been clear that there is a strong religious argument against religious ethics and against the objective existence of God. Religious argument against God? Yes, certainly. It shows through vividly in those faiths that profess an absolute loyalty to an absolute ruler who reigns from the heavens. In Christianity and Islam, the idea that God exists primarily to tell us what to do, knows what we do, and reacts by punishing and rewarding what we do, is prominent if not primary. It is not only repressive; it so limits the idea of the freedom of human beings that this sort of God cannot really desire choice as part of his plan for salvation: salvation would necessarily (and actually does) mean salvation from the structures he imposes on his own creatures.
Cupitt dismisses with a stroke of the quill the turbid debates of two millennia concerning freedom and bondage of the will and says that they are a conceptual overwrite of a scriptural tradition that precludes them—inveigled in from philosophy, planted in Eden, but with no convincing root system. “An objective God cannot save anyone. …The more God is absolutised, the more we are presented with the possibility of living under the dominion of a cosmic tyrant who will allow nothing, and least of all religion, to change and develop.”
The unreal God of the Christian tradition is nothing more than humanity setting limits on its own self-understanding by projecting such a tyrant and his rules as restrictions on human freedom. Nowadays, Cupitt argues, “the nature of language dictates what can and cannot meaningfully be said of anything, God included.”
As to the thesis that it is possible to be “good” without God: The more radical proposition is that a morality based on choice and freedom is only possible once the reality of God has been sacrificed to a deeper understanding of our own humanity.
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Published: December 20, 2009
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Tags: atheism : Christianity : Don Cupitt : Good without God : Sea of Faith ..
6 Responses to “New Ethics and Atheist Newbies”
.
Brian
December 29, 2009 at 1:41 am
It’s just a slogan, meant to make people think. It worked on you more than most.
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Christ Davis
December 29, 2009 at 2:00 am
Thank you for this essay, and for a new author to read; well, two authors, you and Donald Cupitt. I am eager to obtain Cupitt’s books. I have been a lifetime atheist and have gone through all the stages of atheism, from “who cares” to angry “New” atheist- although the angry & new was twenty years ago!
I found your blog via, I think Planet Atheism.
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Martin Brock
January 18, 2010 at 3:32 pm
There is not now nor has there ever been a literal being equivalent to the descriptions of the divine being in sacred scripture and Christian (or any) theology, but the descriptions withstand allegorical interpretation, and some of the descriptions seem plainly to be deliberate allegory.
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steph
August 7, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I really like your assessment of Cupitt’s invaluable little book. The real shame is not only that the title ‘Good without God’ is not attributed, but that it is used in a far inferior way. I appreciate God is not real rather than God does not exist although I wouldn’t be surprised if the distinction was lost on some people from the MILFs to the newbies. MILFs I rather like too – might borrow it. (Don Cupitt is the spitting image of my first world religions lecturer, Jim Veitch)
And that, said Pooh, is that.
x
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New Ethics and Atheist Newbies « The New Oxonian says:
February 10, 2011 at 10:08 am
[...] Pardon my cough when I see titles like Good without God being hailed as “trendsetting.” Not only is the title overworked and the subject matter stale, but the author manages to get through the entire discussion without so much as tipping his hat to the theologian who pioneered the debate almost a generation ago, Cambridge University’s Don Cu … Read More [...]
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Ophelia Benson
February 10, 2011 at 2:06 pm
“So, we in this nation, especially perhaps scholars, are part of a proud tradition of not paying attention to foreign scholarship”
Ah well now Mr Casaubon wasn’t an American. (He also wasn’t real [I don't mean Isaac, obviously] but never mind that.)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Religion 2010 Wish List
by rjosephhoffmann
Dionysus
This isn’t about how all religions are very nice chaps, really, or that–ideally–all religions promote peace on earth, good will toward men, and women, in their own very different ways. Not even the religion that copyrighted that slogan in the New Testament after stealing it from Virgil’s fourth eclogue (where it’s assigned to the Muses of Sicily) has been able to follow the advice of the angel choirs.
No, this isn’t about how religions are greatly misunderstood by nearly everybody who feels less than passionately about religion, how they inevitably fall short, like David the King, of what they really and truly and essentially are. I have no idea what any given religion essentially is and much less an idea what religion in general essentially is. I have theories, of course.
But I do know that religion is slippery when confronted with its sins–ranging from blowing up fellow worshipers or abusing children in rectories and laundries, to grabbing one more snip of land before “peace talks” (I love the phrase: so standard we overlook how insipid it is) can resume in Israel. Convenient too that any “religion” can say (with deference to the greatly overrated and entheogenic Huston Smith), “You must mean the other man’s [sic] faith.”
Religion alone seems able to convince ordinary people that there is no point at which abuses and sins become definitive and not exceptional: imagine judging a serial rapist by saying that he’s simply failing to live up to his ideals and that, for all appearances, he’s really a very nice chap.
Down with ideals and on to concrete proposals in this tenth year in the third millennium of the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ awaiting his long delayed coming. (What did you think AD meant?).
It is time for a list of things religions must give up, forswear, abandon and forever repudiate in order to be what they want to be–or say they do: mechanisms of peace, justice, compassion and love of humanity.
Christianity
1. Abandon the mythology of Genesis. God did not make the world in 6, 8 or 1000 days or 1000 days of years. Stop squabbling over Hebrew syntax and what you think the Biblical writers meant. They meant what they wrote and they were wrong. We know far too much about how things really came about to believe any of the nonsense written by a Hebrew-speaking priest of the sixth century BCE who thought things came about by a direct act of his hereditary deity.
2. Abandon any suggestion that you are doing science when you teach creationism. “Mysteries” are not taught in schools. Science is not about the unexplained but about the way we can best explain things. If you want students to learn about creationism, teach it in a junior year mythology class alongside Greek and Roman literature.
3. Stop trying to convert people. Do you hear me you evangelical jabberwockies? Yea, the day is coming–yea it approacheth, when the converts will stop listening because you have no idea what you’re talking about and no one in Malawi can eat the biblical bread you promise when the maize crop fails again.
4. To Our Catholic Brothers and Sisters: Abandon the liturgy you stumbled into in the 1960’s. It sounds like the 1960’s. If you must continue it, make your priests wear balloon-sleeve transparent yellow shirts with flouncy cuffs, paisley ties, and flare-bottom jeans. Maybe a striped pancho for special feasts. If you sound like an era, look like an era. And also with you.
5. To the Anglicans: Good job of putting all divisive theological issues aside, especially those based on that uncooperative tome called the Bible. Now stop counting theological success and rectitude in the number of gay and lesbian bishops you ordain, admit you’re agnostics who like to dress up and have a good time with it.
6. To all fundamentalists: Blessed art thou among Christians, for even though you will surely not see God and the Kingdom, and even though your personal morals are as shoddy as everyone else’s, you probably really believe what you say. Now, go back to school, learn a little science, and take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake. Oh, and please stop mucking up the airwaves with your prayers and singing and sales pitches. It keeps me from watching the real shopping channels–the ones where I can actually order something that comes in a box, something that I can really be disappointed with when it doesn’t fit.
Muslims
1. Give up the idea that the Quran is the most beautiful poetry ever written, the most perfect Arabic ever set to ink, the closest we can approach God in the scheme of time. Are you inhaling this stuff or just smoking? You have two hundred poets whose Arabic is better, any one of which could have won in a slam-down with Gabriel.
2. For all I know, Mecca is a lovely place. But get a second archaeological opinion on the Kaaba and especially that Neolithic outcrop, the jamarat, where people get trampled to death every year at the Haj trying to throw one last stone at the stone devils before curfew tolls and they have to board the bus. (Most recent tragedy, 2006: a stampede killed at least 346 pilgrims and injured at least 289 more.) –-Better now that the pillars have been hidden from view behind a wall, but still a pretty dubious ritual. My suggestion: learn to throw rocks at your politicians and hateful, firebrand illiterate mullahs who keep you from being nice chaps, really.
3. Let your women get an education. Admit that the most ordinary housewife who chooses to wear hijab to keep her husband and eldest son happy is smarter than the average imam. Don’t cut off people’s legs for adultery. Stop the stoning. Stop saying that cliterodectomy is un-Islamic, or rather shout it out and mean it. Don’t throw battery acid in girls’ faces for consorting with boys en route to school. Stop torching the schools.
4. If you think everyone in the religious world is evil and that you alone possess the key to truth, maybe a nice debating club would provide sufficient technology and less loss of life than your current plan. You really are making a lot of enemies this way—I have to be honest.
5. Stop promoting fallacies and false history. Medieval Arabic science was truly remarkable. Philosophy and medicine especially, and physics, not to be sneezed at. Now teach the real reasons the Islamic star ceased to shine brightly–dynastic feuding, internecine violence, a vilification of secular and scientific learning that continues today–and no fair jumping ahead to the Crusades or the colonial period for your answer. In general, the crusaders were far too stupid to pick up anything along the route to Jerusalem except diseases and by the time colonialism comes into view Islamic learning had been in eclipse for five hundred years.
6. Stop whingeing about how people who “blaspheme” or defame Islam are the “source” of violence within Islam. Here is a cart.
Notice that the horse is different because the thing on legs pulls the thing on wheels. Is this analogy unclear? See 5, above re: learning.
7. Stop blowing yourself up and calling the killing of your friends and neighbours “martyrdom.”
Nobody else is doing this. You are. In general, I don’t have an opinion on the wisdom of cultivating religious doctrine through suicide bombing, but I tend to think it’s counterproductive and immensely stupid, don’t you?
If the early Christians had tried this against their pagan persecutors in the marketplaces of the Roman world there’d be no one left to tell their story. If this had been the tactic of the medieval bishops against the heretics and Jews, guess who would have come out on top?
Judaism
1. There are no chosen people. There are just people. It is depressing, isn’t it? We all want to be special.
2. Stop trying to sell archaeological crap to the gullible west and Alabama Baptist yokels. You did not find Jesus’ family tomb. You did not find a neighbour’s house in Nazareth and probably not even Nazareth (Show me the city limits sign). I know that $1,000,000 comes rolling in every time you get a story on the cover of Newsweek, but you and I both know that this schlock is going to be available at Remainders ‘R Us a year from now when no one is looking.
3. Do your construction teams ever take a vacation? If I had been raised to think (as every Palestinian has been raised to think) that Israeli bulldozers are as aggressive and hateful as tanks I might see you as invaders and occupiers. I know you need to find room for the swimming pools (God wouldn’t want his chosen people wandering around in a desert, now, would he?), but give it a rest.
4. I know I will be slapped for saying this, but you really must get over the Holocaust. Yes, of course, I believe 6,000,000 Jews were slaughtered for no reason except their beliefs. Yes, I believe it was the greatest sacrilege against humanity of the twentieth century, not counting Hiroshima. But I think the best guess is that between 62 and 78 million people died in World War II, and in one way or another all were victims of the same racist ideology. Perspective is always nice, and at some point you will need to confront the fact that history is unkind to the monuments of persecution and tragedy. At a certain point, the cry for justice sounds a lot like the God of the Bible who screams for revenge.
5. Stop winning so many Nobel Prizes. It’s so embarrassing it’s not even funny. But your comedians are.
And to All?
1. All of you need to relinquish belief in heaven, hell, eternal reward, and eternal punishment. And of any God who participates in such abusive game-playing. These things do not exist except in your head. To the extent any of your conduct–towards virtue or towards killing infidels who don’t agree with you–is motivated by eschatology, you are living a dangerous fantasy and teaching your daughters and sons it is true.
2. All of you need to grow up a little. Some religions more than others, some people within each tradition more than the rest. It’s no wonder that some of our best minds since the nineteenth century have compared religion to infantile delusion and childlike behavior. Sorry to say, most of the people who see religion this way have been semi-believers or unbelievers.
But who’d deny that the Taliban behave like two year-olds with guns rather than like men, whether they are beating girls or blowing up Buddha statues in Bamyan. The robust beards are only masks for the deep sense of masculine insecurity they mistake for obedience to God’s will. Their wives will know better.
3. Value secular learning. I do not know whether the truth will make you, or me, free. I do know that religious truth is normally a shortcut for the intellectually lazy, crafted and sustained by preachers who like one-book solutions to the manifold problems of a complex world. There are no one book solutions, and if there were, they will not have been written in antiquity.
Both the Bible and the Quran have served that purpose in their time. ButTruth in the sense religions try to frame it–as dogma or superior knowledge–isn’t worth a confederate dollar. Knowledge of history, science, and the things of this world will get you a lot farther down the road to true salvation than religion will. Embrace it.
4. Don’t rely overmuch on “interfaith dialogue,” the corporate certainties of the religious world, the merging of fantasies in favour of a grandly mistaken worldview and the substitution of “dialogue” for serious reflection and discourse. As religions grow less confident in the twenty first century, at least in terms of their ethical and explanatory value for human life,they will turn again to the arena of martyrdom as a proving ground for faith above reason. Do not be fooled.
Postscript on the Holocaust, December 29, 2009
I knew I would be held to the fire for using a phrase like “get over” in relation to the Holocaust. I have been. What I meant of course is that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of holocaust victims and survivors will not be able to sustain the horror of the event: history erodes not only the intensity of a moment but often its significance for people born long after the moment is past. Jewish friends and relatives agonize over this very pattern; it is a loss of sensitivity familiar most of all to Jews. I am worried that creating an idol of horror-of making the holocaust a religious symbol rather than a human catastrophe (in part, of course, religiously-motivated and supported and with a long history in European civilization), will make it transcendent and incomprehensible. Hollywood and holocaust-themed memorials and museums may play a useful role in pricking memory and consciousness, but their proliferation also betokens what the historian Robert Hewison once called the “imaginative death of reality.”
Human beings did this. It has to be come to terms with at the human level and not preserved as another idol of the tribe. “Getting over” is not the best way of saying “come to terms with, comprehend, move forward,” but that is what I meant.
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Published: December 28, 2009
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: humanism : New Year's : religion : Resolutions : Violence ..
40 Responses to “Religion 2010 Wish List”
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Walter Raab
December 28, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Oh, how I wish these would come to pass!
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Lloyd
December 28, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Thank you for writing this, well said.
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CatBallou
December 28, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Love the essay, but curious about what’s missing in the third paragraph. ??
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littlejohn
December 28, 2009 at 10:51 pm
You will definitely catch some flak for the Holocaust complaint, but I absolutely agree. Almost every ethnic group can find something in its past to get its back up about. My mother’s side of the family is Irish, but we quit hating the English several generations ago. Even the Armenians have, for the most part, quit griping. It’s time to let it go. The Nazis lost, after all, and we’re still making movies (I just watched “Inglorious Basterds”) celebrating how evil they were. Apologize for Madoff or something.
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hoverfrog
December 28, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Excellent. I agree with them all.
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Josh
December 29, 2009 at 12:51 am
I think your Holocaust comment is misleading and misguided for a number of reasons.
1. Jews were not slaughtered “for their beliefs.” Europe’s Jews were killed simply due to the accident of their birth and of their Jewish race.
2. Hiroshima was worse than the Holocaust? Not to get into oppression Olympics here but that’s absurd. At least pick Nagasaki, which was much more gratuitous. In any case, even combining the deaths from both bombings you would have maximum 230,000 deaths, which while terrible isn’t even close to how many Jews died at Auschwitz alone. Also, while dying of radiation poisoning is hardly pleasant, it’s not really comparable to the systematic starvation, torture, dehumanization, degradation, rape and murder of millions of men, women and children.
3.Dying in combat in WWII or even being an unfortunate casualty of war is NOT the same as what happened to the Jews. While not every person killed in the camps or in the war was a Jew, almost every Jew was killed. Proportionally, the Jews suffered by far the highest casualties of any group.
4. No other genocide or attack on civilians in history has ever been quite like the Holocaust, where there was no political or territorial struggle at hand like with the Armenian, Rwandan or Kosovar genocides/ethnic cleansings. In fact, evidence shows that the effort to destroy the Jews became increasingly deleterious to the Nazi cause as the war marched on – the labor camps where they worked Jews to death never produced anything like what they cost and German resources at the end of the war were diverted towards moving the camps instead of retreating into strategic positions.
5. What is unique about the Holocaust is how such an integrated population as German Jews could be gradually, piece by piece, otherized, separated from their Aryan neighbors and deprived of all human rights until they were objects that could be killed, beaten or tortured at will. The point of all the torture, the humiliations, the degradation, the dehumanization was not to punish the Jews because they hated them but rather to inoculate the Aryan guards and the SS men tasked with killing them against any strains of conscience. This is why the Holocaust is still relevant and will always be relevant – because it shows you how easy it is to make a person or a whole society into what the Third Reich became.
6. Also, unlike the Armenians or Tutsi or Japanese to any large extent, the Jews are still targeted by violent extremists who want to exterminate them – not just Islamic fundamentalists who want to wipe Israel off the map but a surprising number of white supremacist and radical right-wing extremist groups in the US and Europe, many of whom believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy that is waging a secret war on the white race and that the Jews must be destroyed. These hate groups have increased 4% in the last year alone and there are more than 900 in the US. Many have turned to ‘lone wolf’ models, making them nearly impossible to catch. Examples of violence by these groups include the 1984 murder of Denver talk radio host Alan Berg by the Order, a group of white supremacists trying to overthrow the US government, the Oklahoma City bombing, and more recently the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in D.C and the attempt on the life of the president by two men who were going to behead 88 black school children (88=HH= Heil Hitler) and then shoot Obama. People who want to create another Holocaust are real and they are here today. The same can hardly be said of English who want to re-enslave the Irish.
7. Also, Jews do not, as a rule, hate German people. Just for the record.
8. @ littlejohn – that last comment was pretty anti-semitic, actually. Think about it – you want Jews as a people to apologize for the actions of an evil financier. He robbed mostly fellow Jews and Jewish CHARITIES so I think he hardly is widely supported in the Jewish community.
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John Alvord
December 29, 2009 at 2:05 am
While we’re getting over it, let’s put Pearl Harbor to rest too. The Japanese have be our good albeit very competitive allies for a long, long time now. Could we soon just let December 7th be a day in early December and not an excuse to lament what bastards those Japs were?
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stephanielouisefisher
December 29, 2009 at 2:27 am
Put me in the queue for all the above wishes please, but include for me, atheists: get over your crippling experience with religion, get over yourselves and stop playing the battered victim in your pathetic pity parties. And stop abusing all religious people and religions indiscriminately. Stop giving ‘atheism’ a bad name. Get a life and smell the roses.
Boy, does that sound angry? :-)
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Philip Tucker
December 29, 2009 at 7:07 am
Hi Stephanie Louise,
Boy, that does sound angry. At me?
I wonder although I am an atheist who has missed the parties (dragnat it!), pity and otherwise.
I passed my childhood in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. I still remember the music at my grandmother’s church. Every Sunday I got to fold the mimeographed service handout into a water bomb, and sometimes I got to fill and throw it. Or I’d climb the walls of the church, hand over hand. So I went back, and besides, my family took me.
But by the time I was twelve (1959) I was a conscious atheist. I ascribe that early awareness in large part to the cognitive dissonance imposed by my experience within the sect. Even then, I could see that it didn’t make sense.
Now I see my childhood mythos for what it was. I believe all religious peoples and religions believe and promulgate similar myths. Is this abuse?
P.S. I particularly like the magnificent Fragrant Cloud, don’t you?
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Martin Hatchuel
December 29, 2009 at 10:51 am
Oh – if only this would happen. But then what would the governments of the world have to fight over?
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Barb Fleming
December 29, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Thank you for this article. Unfortunately, it probably will not reach as many people as could benefit by contemplating it, but I am encouraged to know that someone is still open to what is actually happening and not stuck in tying to explain it or justify it. One of my favorite song lyrics points to the fact that it’s about time to recognize that someone will always be first in line and someone will always be last, but the real point is that it is you and me together, it’s all of us or none since Earth is our only home. The divisions you so clearly express haven’t done much but cause bloodshed and misunderstanding. Maybe we could try learning from one another as you suggest in the education of those who do not currently have access. Maybe we could deal with our racial debts and move into the present. Carrying the burdens unto the seventh generation may be Biblical, but it’s not psyhologically or geo-politically very helpful. Well done to you!
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Joffan
December 29, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Nice article, and a good list for the various faiths to work with. Christians must be doing relatively OK, you had to split them out into varieties to get enough things to work on.
I’ll give you a short burst of flak from an unexpected direction on your Holocaust comment: You really need to get over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It (almost certainly) saved lives, unlike Hitler’s death camps.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nuclear_01.shtml
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Yumiko
December 29, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I think you misread that entry, the article wasn’t obsessing over the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, I’m pretty sure it only mentioned it in passing. Yes, the atomic bomb brought a swift halt to war with Japan, saving the lives of many American servicemen who would have fought and died in a continued war effort. But if you’re trying to say that it wasn’t an atrocity against humanity, then you’re out of your mind. They didn’t drop those bombs on Japanese military compounds or naval bases, they dropped them on two cities where they killed 140,000 civilians (women and children) instantly and thousands more over time from radiation poisoning.
Sure, that’s not as bad as the 6,000,000 innocent people (including many christians) that died in Hitler’s death camps. And the point still stands that we should all try and dwell a little less on the sins of our fathers. But don’t try and gloss over the fact that it was an absolutely nightmarish way for all those citizens of Japan to meet their end.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 29, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Dear Yukimo,
Atrocity is atrocity when you count the dead in hundreds. Stalin is supposed to have said “one death is a tragedy, 1,00,000 deaths is a statistic.” The point is we are able to abstract the effect from the cause when the numbers are so great. Thanks for your comment!
Joffan
December 29, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Yumiko, I read the entry carefully enough I think. It strongly implied that Hiroshima was worse than the Holocaust in terms of a sacrilege against humanity. That is clear nonsense.
If you read the link I provided, you will see that ironically the atomic bomb saved many more Japanese lives than American. Maybe you should consult the history books on what happened on Okinawa – more Japanese died there than at the two A-bomb cities, and there was every reason to expect a much greater version of the same tragedy in an invasion.
War is hell. Nobody disagrees with this. The Japanese nation was guilty of quite appalling atrocities which resulted in far greater suffering than was experienced by the civilians in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, so your attempt to usurp the balance of suffering is misplaced.
Hitler’s extermination camps, incidentally, killed more like 10-11 million people, once we include the non-Jews.
G*3
December 30, 2009 at 5:29 am
> they killed 140,000 civilians (women and children)
Killing women and children is worse than killing men? As a man, I find that attitude frightening.
And while bombing military installations can be better justified as an attempt to cripple the war-making abilities of one’s adversary, soldiers also have families.
Yumiko
December 29, 2009 at 11:09 pm
You are incorrect. The article was not saying that Hiroshima was a greater atrocity, only that it was the only other single event that came close in terms of it’s heinousness.
Also, if the atomic bomb is such a humanitarian device, then why didn’t we utilize it to spare all those women and children in Viet Nam and why are we not implementing it in the Middle East? Are we so desensitized that we do not care about saving the lives of innocent people over there as well?
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G*3
December 30, 2009 at 5:33 am
It wasn’t used in Vietnam becuase Vietnam was a war-by-proxy between the US and the USSR. During WWII the US was the only country in the world with nuclear bombs, and even they only had two. Using nuclear bombs in Vietnam could easily have led to WWIII and modern civilization going up in hundreds of mushroom clouds.
We don’t use them in the Middle East because there is nothing to use them against. Blowing Iraqi or Afghanastani cties off the map would just motivate the guerilla fighters.
Joffan
December 30, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Yumiko, since the lead author said the Holocaust was “the greatest sacrilege against humanity of the twentieth century, not counting Hiroshima”, he was clearly implying that Hiroshima was worse than the Holocaust; but even allowing your interpretation of comparable sacrilege, I disagree vehemently.
Your straw-man argument of an atomic bomb as a humanitarian device is frankly pathetic. When you can present a likely scenario from the other conflicts you mention that would put the actual casualties above those of nuclear weapons use, you might have a point worth debating. Until then you are just trying to shore up your semi-religious position.
Martin
December 29, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Good article, but Judaism #4… I’m not so sure about that
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M2
December 29, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Nice article, but I wish you wouldn’t have confused “Judaism” with “the Israeli Government”. Yes, the Israeli Government is Jewish, but their policies are not inherently “Judaic” or necessarily representative or world Jewish culture.
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Scott L Holmes
December 29, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Gosh, your comment just led me to an epiphany. I’m thinking now that Religion is used by nefarious brutes that want to impose their will on everybody else by covering their disdain for their fellow many with the cloak of a holy scriptures and deities. In the past I’ve felt that religion is the root of all evil but now I see that evil permeates our species and manifests itself best through religion.
“All of you need to grow up a little.” This should be a new commandment for our time.
“immerse your soul in love”
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Martin Hatchuel
December 29, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Well said, Scott!
Martin Hatchuel
December 29, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Nah. Why should Judaism be exempt? The Israeli government is predicated on Judaism – so it’s Jewish
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Toni
December 29, 2009 at 7:44 pm
All of this (and I do mean ALL) was well written and much needed.
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rogueregime
December 29, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Hillarious! (And too true!)
Just one question, though: Who are these 200 poets with better Arabic poetry than the Quran?
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Top Posts — WordPress.com says:
December 30, 2009 at 12:08 am
[...] Religion 2010 Wish List This isn’t about how all religions are very nice chaps, really, or that –ideally–how all religions [...] [...]
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terry guesman
December 30, 2009 at 12:56 am
I agree w/ everything you had to say, and thanks for nailing it down so clearly. As far as your Holocaust statement, I do know where you were coming from, and it wasn’t an insensitive place. I’d even like to take it a step further by saying the Israelis and Palestinians both deserve to fight each other for as long as both sides are willing to kill over fairy tales. Additionally, when only 75% of Israel is represented on the country’s flag, I’d say “Israeli Government” and “Judaism” are indeed, through the eyes of millions, interchangable. When a nation’s flag touts the symbol of the religion of “The Chosen People,” that nation just negated their classification as a democracy and couldn’t, any more clearly, give the finger to a huge chunk of thier population, than Israel has. “The Chosen People” sounds an awful lot like “Master Race” to my ears. Man oh man, there needs to be an anti-religion movement, in the name of human progress…
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Derick
December 30, 2009 at 1:29 am
I can see there’s some dispute above over whether or not you have implied that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was an atrocity greater than the Holocaust. I would suggest you clarify if you did not intend to imply that, since I can think of no other reason for you to even reference Hiroshima in this context.
By any reasonable standard, Hiroshima pales in comparison to the Holocaust. If you actually think Hiroshima is comparable (or, somehow worse?) I’d be really interested to know what kind of logic you are using.
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Sara F
December 30, 2009 at 2:36 pm
How interesting…! a website dedicated to tearing down the foundations of hope and belief. It’s also interesting to me that someone would put so much energy and thought into an “anti-this” and “anti-that” campaign. You must be a joy to work with. I expect that you would like to erect a “Non-beneficial Suggestion Box” in most work place. I’m sending you here a url for “Non-inspirational Quotes” Should be right up your alley.
http://positivesharing.com/2003/10/non-inspirational-quotes/
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rjosephhoffmann
December 30, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Based on this comment I can’t imagine you’ve read this piece. Doesn’t seem to stop you from having a reaction. I am certainly against (anti-) the monstrosities that religious extremism and dogmatism create. It would be hard to justify any of the actions here as “sources of hope and belief” unless you (a) believe any action perpetrated in the name of God is justified because it’s religious or (b) believe that none of these actions has anything to do with anyone’s religion-which is an assumption I challenge as being foolish. Thanks for the link. I will look at it when I’m bored out of my mind.
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Lloyd
December 30, 2009 at 4:34 pm
A wonderful example of why education must be high on the list. Religion has brought so much death, hate and sadness to our world, not what people say they do but rather the reality of what they actually do. Ah yes, reality.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 30, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Thank you Lloyd, it’s as you say.
If only this would really happen… « Irreligious says:
December 30, 2009 at 5:27 pm
[...] by irreligious on December 30, 2009 The 2010 religion wish list. Among the highlights: [...]
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Norm E.
December 30, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Oddly, whenever the Holocaust is taught, other examples of genocide are not. There is less focus on the horror of the pracise of genocide, and more on that of a single group that has been singled out in the history of the world. Our species has made great strides in slaughtering the other. I saw little effort in the early days of the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” to stop the killing. Even less in the civil wars in Africa.
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#2010wish | Religion 2010 Wish List « New American Mercury « American Lifestyle says:
December 31, 2009 at 11:46 am
[...] promote peace on earth, good will toward men, and women, in their own very different ways. Read more Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]
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Top Posts — WordPress.com says:
January 1, 2010 at 12:08 am
[...] Religion 2010 Wish List This isn’t about how all religions are very nice chaps, really, or that–ideally–all religions promote [...] [...]
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robertbtapp
January 2, 2010 at 5:15 pm
More time would have let you move as well to those non-Abrahamic faiths that also hold all of us back. And the pseudo-religions in the political arena (Nazism, Stalinism, Teapartyism). But what you said so eloquently I agree with.
On Hiroshima, we should remember that some of the scientists tried to get Truman and our military to demonstrate the bomb on an uninhabited island. That result might well have ended the war! Having been at Bikini for the postwar test, I can readily agree.
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Joffan
January 3, 2010 at 3:35 am
Sadly, Robert, I tend to think that a “harmless” demonstration of the A-bomb would have had zero effect on the leaders of Japan, quite apart from the impossibility of arranging their full observation of such an event in the context of all-out war, and the difficulty of effectively “discarding” such a potent weapon in the same context.
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LoneWolf
July 26, 2011 at 2:54 pm
The main problem with the Holocaust example was the “Jews were killed for their beliefs” phrase that isn’t exactly true. Also, there’s the issue with Jewish secular nationalism and Jewish nationality as opposed to their religion. Many Jews support Israel – sometimes even too much, being willing to excuse the most blatant atrocities and hypocrisy on Israel’s part – on nationalistic, not religious grounds. Many former Soviet Jews especially belong to that category.
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