RJH from January-June of 2010

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Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon
by rjosephhoffmann


The never-ending story in New Testament studies is first, how the gospels came to be written down (and where, and when) and how they “relate” to each other. The long-suffering faithful have for centuries–since the process of vernacular Bible translation in the sixteenth century got its legs–been encouraged to believe that the canonical order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is also a chronological order.
The belief is somewhat flimsily supported in fairly early references by writers like Papias, whose reputation as a scholar was already challenged by the man who recorded his words, the fourth century writer Eusebius, and the heresy-fighting bishop, Irenaeus–the real father of giving names and legends to the gospels.
Students studying for divinity and graduate degrees across Europe and North America have learned for more than a century that the matter of who-wrote-what-first is endlessly fascinating. The average opinion in the most prestigious and hyperactive research institutions in North America and Europe is that orthodoxy and canonicity are at best provisional ways of looking at the gospels, and, worse, misleading from the standpoint of solving the puzzle of Christian origins.
Many of these neophytes have been treated to professorial displays of source-theory so brilliant and so complicated that they could well be considered algebra. Others, so deceptively self-assured and literally faithful to ancient testimony that they cannot possibly be correct:

The standard model
Armed with only a smattering of Greek and a stash of newly- minted ingenuity, they are urged to go at the problem as though beneath it is buried a secret jewel, the pearl of great price. But it isn’t. What lay beneath the architecture and power-points, alas, are processes that the gospels themselves conceal by virtue of their simple givenness. Looking for the “origin” of a gospel is bit like looking for Jesus in the tomb on Easter morning: it was here just a minute ago.
The theory of Markan priority and the more ambitious but eventually standard “two source” hypothesis (based on the notion that Matthew and Luke embedded Mark’s gospel and must have possessed a written sayings source to account for materials not found in Mark–the variable Q will do) enjoyed sovereignty of sorts for three generations. –Mainly because it had the simplicity that mnemonics have in helping you to remember chemical formulas. {ML} = Mk+Q.
The so-called Griesbach hypothesis, in and out and up or down in favour in each generation, is just as plausible for the diagrammatics of a case: Matthew wrote first; Luke based his story on Matthew and Mark used both. It has its own bad-boy appeal, while theories of Lukan and even Marcionite priority have gotten less attention.

It is notable but unsurprising that in all of this clatter the traditional idea that consistency is not provided by literary dependence but by revelation is not discussed very much among the algebraists. Needless to say, I am not complaining about the end of supernaturalism; I welcome it, and note that in the closest book-tradition to Christianity–Islam—these priority, hierarchy and relational questions are much less important. The point is not that we should use plenary inspiration as a way of solving source- and dependence- issues, but that the complexity of some of the theories make inspiration an almost welcome relief from the haggling. –Especially (dare I say it) any discussion or theory about Q.

In a sense, Christianity brought this dilemma on itself. While divine inspiration was held up as the proof of the integrity of the gospels from very early in the tradition, it was held up in a heresiological context–that is, in the war between orthodox bishops and the religious “others,” the heretics. It involved the book itself (or books), of course, but just as much it involved the question of who can claim to be inspired and who safeguards the process through which inspiration can be validated. What (book) do you trust was inseparable from the question of who do you trust.
The suggestion that the authors were “apostles” or “apostolic men”–friends of the apostles, like Mark, allegedly, and Luke–seems gratuitous even in the context of the age. And the age, by the way, had a habit of attributing a gospel to anybody of any prominence whose legend would win hearts and minds to their cause: that is why the attribution of gnostic gospels to Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Philip, Judas and even to “Truth” sheds light on the general habit of pseudonymity and forgery.

P52
But as we know, if not through consensus, the Gnostics weren’t the first or only ones to play the name game: it was being played on the Catholic side in Paul’s name after Paul was dead, in Peter’s name, and in James’s and in Jude’s and John’s. But why stop with what we know almost certainly: it was also probably being played in the case of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, whose perilously thin legends and reputations were created after tradition (read: bishops) had named the anonymous writings ascribed to them.
Biographical authority and authenticity have to be understood against the backdrop of battles with Marcionites and harder-core separatists. It is finally solidified in Book 4 (8.2) of Irenaeus’s turgid work Against the Heresies where he claims to have compiled a book of all the “legitimate” successors of the apostles and the Lord: γενομενος δε εν ‘Ρωμη διαδοχην εποιησαμην μηχρις ‘Ανικητου…”: “And when I had come to Rome I remained there until Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherus. And Anicetus was succeeded by Soter, and he by Eleutherus. In every succession and in every city that is held which is preached by the law and the prophets and the Lord.”

Irenaeus the Fierce: Scourge of Heretics
The gospels, in this pitch and toss, are held to be locked away in safety from the corruption of heresy through the lawful succession of the western (Roman) bishops. They are “in” the church, he says as money is in a bank; the heretics are outside, “like so many weeds.” There are four of them, neither more nor fewer—just as there are four winds, four corners of the earth, four providing angels.
Irenaeus and his brother bishops were not especially concerned about the relationship between and among gospels, for the simple reason that (unlike most modern interpreters) he theorized that they constituted four independent testimonies to the truth, miraculous, therefore, precisely to the extent that there had been no consort among the authors and no copying of one to the other source. The heresy fighters were concerned with preserving traditions, the origins of which had already been lost in a century-old fog. The question of a copyist tradition only reveals itself when the belief in the miraculous four-fold testimony unravels, a chapter that began to be written at the end of the nineteenth century.

copyist
The Greek lyric poet Anacreon lived in the 6th century BCE. Through the efforts of Aristarchus (2nd century BCE) some of his work, most of its fragmentary, has been collected and survives. He was remarkable for his mastery, in some cases invention, of metrical styles and for his mastery of the Ionic dialect. (If you have not read any Anacreon lately, read, at least, “The Picture” for its lyrical elegance).
I mention Anacreon because he stands at the beginning of a long tradition of preservation through imitation. In a 1958 collection of his work by Bruno Gentili (Rome, Edizioni dell’ Ateneo) the editor for the Classical Review of that year complained that at least 37 of the poems included as genuine–based on his assessment of vocabulary, testimonia, and metrics–were not authentic and should be moved to an appendix or to the nearest dustbin.
There is even a suggestion that the editor tried to smuggle some very obviously non-anacreonic verse into the edition because he thought they were “pretty”—for shame.
What everyone knows about classical tradition, however, is that Anacreon’s name, reputation, style and prestige is preserved through the art of literary imitation. –Through copying.
New Testament scholars are very much more familiar with classical civilization than they used to be. So much so that biblical studies on the New Testament side has matured enormously in the twentieth and early twenty-first century from the parochial theological discipline it was in the nineteenth. But at a programmatic level, it needs to scrap the idea of authorial attribution completely and to acknowledge that the production of New Testament gospels, at least in the case of the synoptics, was an anacreonic process—a process of imitation, based on the desire to imitate and enhance rather than merely to produce or propagate an original. Admirers of the Jesus-story were using a prototype for copy exercises. Whose story it was is of no importance, and remains of no importance well into the second century.
There is no good reason why an anonymous copyist would have done what he did because he thought the copy he was working from was “authoritative”—and indeed it probably came to him without a titulus , that is to say, attribution. Similarly, as with the ancient tradition in letters, some copyists felt moved to add detail, story, to alter, to correct—things that biblical scholars have known to be true about the gospels for a long time–indeed have developed critical methods to cope with them–but have linked to a different set of motivations based not on what we know to be true of classical letters but what we think to be true of a sui generis form of sacred literature..

Paul: a model letter writer for later copyists
The elongation of a source by adding a birth legend or resurrection appearances is completely appropriate to the anacreonic tradition as beautification, as “outdoing” the model. The gnostic gospels which flaunt the model and seem to sing to a different harp, in this way of looking at the process, are simply failed copies. Even within the New Testament, Paul’s “authentic” if composite letters served as models for every aspiring paulinist who wanted to improve on his thought and language, the winner being the author of the letter to the Ephesians.
As with Anacreon, we know enough to know what the essential ingredients—the equivalent of the theme or metrics—would have looked like. I am not cynical about being able to construct, for example, the original narrative structure or gospel prototype. But I am completely unconvinced that any of the current gospels form that structure or that any of the received gospels is that original.
I find it more probable that we possess four of the exercises, and that these exercises have to be submitted to an analysis based not on “redaction” and tendency—fidelity to or departure from a long-gone plumb-line–as much as on the more or less purely artistic intention of the writer in terms of the story he is telling.
In fact, biblical criticism, in some of its operations, does this already but it often does it as though the question of priority is the same as the question of “source.” We do not know who wrote any gospel—not even “John’s” (and the editorial process in the Fourth Gospel is more explicit than in any synoptic). We know only one ancient collector who insisted that the source was anonymous, or more precisely “the true source”– the heretic: Marcion.

It is not surprising that to smother the effect of this radical suggestion, both copyists and fathers insisted on attribution. The gnostic penchant for attributing and the slanders of both Jewish and conservative Roman observers, with their different but equally sharp insistence on literary-historical pedigree is enough to explain the demand for named sources. But the habit, or defense, belongs to the history of apologetics and not to the earliest manuscript tradition. For all we know one such copyist may have been named Mark and another Luke. But if that is so, it is only accidentally so and they were men of no significant personal distinction. They were men who took it upon themselves to imitate, “restore” or amend the lost (or nearly lost) prototype, the master-copy of the Jesus story.
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Published: January 13, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Anacreon : Copyist tradition : Gnostics : gospels : Heresy : Heretics : historical jesus : Jesus : Marcion : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Synoptic Problem ..
7 Responses to “Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon”

.
 Bill Warrant  
 January 14, 2010 at 1:09 am 
Another excellent post! Thanks!
Reply
 
 stephanielouisefisher  
 January 14, 2010 at 4:14 am 
Poor old Farrer – he was allergic to “Q”!!
Reply

 Bill Warrant  
 January 14, 2010 at 9:35 am 
Yes, I noticed that as well Steph.
Reply

 stephanielouisefisher  
 January 14, 2010 at 11:05 pm 
It was tongue and cheek Bill, as Joseph’s connection I assume was not serious.

 
 
 
 Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says: 
 July 10, 2010 at 2:35 pm 
[...] Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon (via The New Oxonian) Posted on July 10, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann The never-ending story in New Testament studies is first, how the gospels came to be written down (and where, and when) and how they “relate” to each other. The long-suffering faithful have for centuries–since the process of vernacular Bible translation in the sixteenth century got its legs–been encouraged to believe that the canonical order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is also a chronological order. The belief is somewhat flimsily supported in … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Robert Kiremire Tumuhairwe  
 September 30, 2010 at 5:48 am 
I am wondering why the issue of ”inspiration” doe not seem to be discussed as we consider the synoptic problem. How would the inspiration of each writer be viewed in face of both oral and other possible writers on the subject matter?There are also writers motivational factors.Should we assume that the authors were equally and directionally motivated?
Reply
 
 Ed Jones  
 August 25, 2012 at 6:23 pm 
Joe, Your once intellectuual hero, Schubert Ogden: “We now knpw not only that none of the writings of the OT is profetic witness to Christ, in the sense in which the early church assumed them to be, but also that none of the writings of the NT ae apostolic witness to Jesus as the early church itself understood apostolicity.” Then Hans Dieter Betz: “The reasons for our lack of knowledge of Jesus and his teachings are of a hermeneutical sort and csnnot be overcome by an excess of good will (apologetics). The Gentile-Christian authors of the Gospels transmitted to us only that part of the teaching of Jesus which they themselves understood, they handed on only that which they were able to translate into the thouhght cateegories of Gentile-Christianity and which they judged worthy of transmission. From these texts Jesus’ original teaching can neither be reconstructed nor abstracted in their entirety. If such is the judgment from within the Guild of NT Studies, of what relevance is this detailed digging out of what the Gospels do contain? The horse is dead. .
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God Reads…
by rjosephhoffmann

And knoweth the hearts and minds of all his creatures.

God at His Computer
Well, no–not what this is about. This is about the new genre in religion (not religious) non-fiction which I have decided to name, for lack of an original thought, “God Reads”–books that are affecting to make a new case for God, or to restate old ones.
Actually the genre goes back a few years: Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism (2005) was a little premature when it was published, barely a year before the atheist best-seller The God Delusion (yes, that Dawkins) appeared (September, 2006) and seemed to suggest an atheist sunrise instead. It was dutifully followed by McGrath’s less poignant The Dawkins Delusion (2007) which (nonetheless) is a far better read than its nasty title suggests.
 
Besides, the former Master of Wycliffe College, Oxford and the sometime Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science had slugged it out before, several times in fact–McGrath having the distinction of having trained as a scientist (which shows) and Dawkins having the good fortune, or sense, never to have trained as a theologian (which also shows.)
And so the back and forth was born, God’s defenders giving in equal measure what his detractors were at pains to inflict on his holy name. What was also born was a minor canon of celebrity atheists, variously called “New,” “Fundamentalist,” “Brights,” “Militant”–or merely Annoying depending what side of the line you were standing on and whose book you had read most recently.
 
I recall visiting the home of a kindly retired atheist couple in Tallahassee in 2007 where I had gone to debate the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne on the “God Question.” On their coffee table was displayed the whole array of new atheist titles, of which they professed to have read “only a little of Dawkins.” Still, as a Victorian mother might have the Authorized Version of the Bible handy in the parlour, a new generation had arisen who had embraced new authority and were prepared to use it (or at least allude to it in the absence of actually having read it) –In other words, just like the Bible.
In reviews and popular media, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett were dubbed, and basked in the glow, the “Four Horsemen” of a new age of scientific thinking–knights on a mission to debunk the claims and pretensions of religion. A few wannabes such as Victor Stenger (God, the Failed Hypothesis) made their literary votives to the cause as well; in some cases, their books were actually slightly better than the canonical ones. But essentially the ranks were closed, like the book of the gospels at only four.
The voice of the atheist is still heard in the land. But my guess is, the shine is off the apple and we were out of Eden anyway. Ideas that were considered titillating and slightly dangerous (who says atheism isn’t slightly sexy?) became less interesting when read. I doubt there will be a rejuvenation, a rebirth, of the surprising interest (in some cases bordering on rock star fervor), that greeted the Dawkins Revolution.

The shine was off the apple.
The current spate of God Reads is a bit more interesting, to take only two recent examples. Karen Armstrong’s the Case for God, already reviewed in these pages, is not only lacking in sophisticated theistic argument but also lacks a sophisticated thesis. This hat is so old it’s made of rabbit fur and just as fuzzy. She perpetuates the idea that religion is intrinsically good and that bad people make bad religion.
 If only they would grow up, buy a shovel, and dig down to the goldmine of wisdom and niceness that lay at the heart of every faith. Armstrong seems to have bluffed her way through the history of religion for a long time, but in this book she shows a woeful lack of information about history, psychology, and anthropology and pushes a unified-theory-of-religious-thesis that was last fashionable in 1969, primarily in sanghas and disorderly convents.
Robert Wright’s seductively titled The Evolution of God (2009), a far better read than Armstrong and basically naturalistic in its view of religions, nonetheless develops a premise that is hard to swallow, or, to be fair, one that I have trouble understanding. As the New Yorker review enthused, “[Wright theorizes] that religious world views are becoming more open, compassionate, and synthesized. Occasionally, his prescriptions can seem obvious—for instance, that members of the different Abrahamic faiths should think of their religions as ‘having been involved, all along, in the same undertaking.’ But his core argument, that religion is getting ‘better’ with each passing aeon, is enthralling.”
Enthralling, sure. But if that is true, then the tendency of religion to become better must have something to do with either (a) people taking religious doctrine less seriously or (b) the secularization of society that makes religion less appealing and more vulnerable to common sense. That being so, how can anyone say that religion, as opposed to the species, is getting “better.”
Maybe no one is–exactly–and this is a quibble. As John Loftus observes, Wright’s God is illusory from an ontological standpoint: it is our attitudes about God that evolve and change, and a healthy critique of the past–including the sacred books and interpretations that form the story of the human past–are important relics of that development or amelioration. The process affects religion because it affects society in every other area. God evolves, not only man. My own guess is that Wright is being slightly mischievous. These “Abrahamic Faiths” aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, especially the most aggressive of them. Better therefore to convince the slowest to evolve that a compassionate state of acceptance is its future? I am highly skeptical.
Where are we with God Reads? Is anybody likely to have the last word in this contest of words?

Prometheus
Just now, I think, the momentum is with the Defense, the defenders of the God-hypothesis. Not in terms of argument but in terms of energy. Apologists are paying attention to names that may have been missed first time around, prior to the Dawkins Revolution. Names like Scott Atran (In Gods we Trust), Stewart Guthrie (Faces in the Clouds, a superb slightly older work that deserves reading now), Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained), Todd Tremkin (Minds and God), Barbara King (Evolving God). The pro-religion forces are reading works of cognitive science and evolutionary biology and psychology as fast as they can, and it seems to me with more at stake. You always read faster before an exam.
The God Question could not escape this lens indefinitely, and the best modern reads often begin with something like Wright’s evolutionary view rather than with the stale philosophical and theodical questions that were raised by the new atheists. Given the fact that interest in outbreaks of intellectual zeal last about as long at great awakenings in American religious history, the Dawkins phase is already looking a little quaint.
And it’s a good thing that the religious and anti-religious are reading some of the same stuff, even if they have different ends in view. When a team at the University of Montreal conducted experiments on an order of Carmelite nuns in 2005-6 (functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience), we were flabbergasted to learn that while they were subjectively in a state of union with God, “this state was associated with significant loci of activation in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem.” Can you even point to Reno on a map? I thought not.

Carmelite Ecstasy
The study (“Neural Correlates of Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns”: Mario Bauregard and Vincent Paquette) confidently concluded that “the results suggest that mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems.”
In other people, thoughts about more mundane kinds of union, puppy dogs and chocolate will illuminate the same regions. But the analogy that the physical basis of “mystical” experience explodes the reality of mystical experience (and take this from someone who likes chocolate) is a point that apologists for religion are right to challenge: It is argumentum ad superciliarum–a bit of logic based on a naturalistic smirk.
To the extent that the evolutionary and cognitive studies resemble this logic they have a long way to go. I offer the frankly disappointing view and research of Richard Hamer in The God Gene  and the (antithetical) hodgepodge of material served up by Rause, Newberg and d’Aquili (all three medical doctors) in Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief as evidence of where science can lead the opposite armies.
But the debate about how God evolves or is biologically, genetically or mimetically engendered is not finally the same question as the question of the existence of God–no matter how much we want to make it that. And even if it were, we still won’t have settled the dispute between people like Hitchens, who think God is a very bad, indeed a poisonous idea, and people like McGrath who see it as the most sublime thought of which we mortals are capable.
Maybe Feuerbach was right: it all depends on what you eat.
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Published: January 22, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Dawkins : evolutionary psychology : God : Harris : Hitchens : Karen Armstrong : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : the Great Debate ..
14 Responses to “God Reads…”

.
 Bill Warrant  
 January 23, 2010 at 11:52 am 
I actually just started reading Armstrong’s the Case for God and so far I actually kind of like it. Perhaps that’s because my knowledge of the history of religions is not that great. I’ll definately read The Evolution of God. Thanks for mentioning that one.
While reading Armstrong I find myself thinking that religion would really have something to offer as long as it sticks to what it is good at: the domains of myth, story, ritual, spirituality, inspiration, social bonding. As long as it stays away from factual claims, which is when it starts to conflict with science and reason, then I’m all for it. Alas, that’s just not going to happen.
Reply
 
 Joel  
 January 25, 2010 at 4:22 pm 
Far be it from me to agree with Bill, but gosh darn it, I do.
Reply
 
 Tyler  
 January 25, 2010 at 6:47 pm 
Great read as always.
Reply
 
 steph  
 January 28, 2010 at 7:48 pm 
Karen Armstrong became famous for not being a nun and then specialised in nothing in particular. Her scholarship is bland and tends towards generalisations and broad brush statements with pretty of frills but no real detail and plenty of flaws. But I haven’t read everything because I got bored… Actually she’d make a good writer of fantasy. Blaaa. It can’t really depend on what you eat. I like champagne, you like chocolate, and I don’t know what that means but I’m sure it’s significant.
Reply
 
 stephanielouisefisher  
 January 28, 2010 at 8:25 pm 
Karen Armstrong became famous for not being a nun and then specialised in nothing in particular. Her scholarship is bland and tends towards generalisations and broad brush statements with pretty frills but no real detail and plenty of flaws. But I haven’t read everything because I got bored… Actually she’d make a good writer of fantasy. Blaaa. It can’t really depend on what you eat. I like champagne, you like chocolate, and I don’t know what that means but I’m sure it’s significant.
Reply
 
 Joel  
 January 28, 2010 at 8:29 pm 
So…Karen makes a good religious writer? (broad brush strokes, frills, etc…. :) )
Reply
 
 stephanielouisefisher  
 January 28, 2010 at 8:39 pm 
Quoi? you’re a very naughty boy joel…
;-)
Reply
 
 steph  
 January 30, 2010 at 11:04 am 
God is an American.
:-)
Reply
 
 steph  
 January 30, 2010 at 5:07 pm 
God is an American… :-)

Reply
 
 Mimema  
 February 5, 2010 at 2:44 am 
After Wright’s /Moral Animal/, It certainly seems within his scope to engage in a little memetic engineering through propaganda. Seems like a letdown for his final thesis here, though.
The neural study you cite reminds me of a Michael Shermer book, How We Believe, that came out in 2003. There’s a section in there (can’t find my copy right now) detailing how some commonly reported feelings during religious experiences can be traced back to certain areas of the brain. The tenor of the book more generally tries to link religious impulses and even theodicies and other arguments back to determined physiological causes. Talk about people talking past each other. To enter into some kind of dialogue requires that the unbeliever acknowledge the possible reality of revelation as a result of religious experience and a mutual pursuit of truth.
I saw a very capable presentation down at UM giving an armful of very good reasons why these fMRI-centered studies, at least in relation to normative judgments, are misleading — not least of which was your snark about chocolate and puppy dogs. I’ll have to dig it up.
And I eat pizza. Perhaps the salt has preserved the amiability in my brain from a past religious life.
Reply
 
 Tomas Delgado dos Reis  
 April 19, 2010 at 7:50 pm 
Hi,
About the “God at his computer” image, you can take a look at a video on youtube called “iThinker”, username ‘Euagente’.
Tom
Reply
 
 God Reads… (via The New Oxonian): Reviews When I feel Like It, Not on Demand… « The New Oxonian says: 
 October 28, 2010 at 10:29 am 
[...] 28 Oct And knoweth the hearts and minds of all his creatures. Well, no–not what this is about. This is about the new genre in religion (not religious) non-fiction which I have decided to name, for lack of an original thought, "God Reads"–books that are affecting to make a new case for God, or to restate old ones. Actually the genre goes back a few year … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Barrett Pashak  
 October 28, 2010 at 11:10 am 
Jason Giannetti’s response to Dawkins points out the connection between pure Judaism and spiritualized atheism:

Perhaps Dawkins is correct in pointing out that there is not much difference between this conception of God (as all of Being) and atheism.–”Richard Dawkins: Vox Populi“. In Journal of Liberal Religion, v.8 no. 1.
Atheists who are not content to follow the path of materialist scientism may find that Gianetti’s approach to Biblical literature provides them with the spiritual/intellectual foundation they need.
Reply
 
 Patrick Waldi Wright  
 January 20, 2011 at 1:46 pm 
I believe in the almighty Lord of all Creation
 ruler and healer of the world i believe if you ask God anything and you ask nice enough you will get it.Praise the lord
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Eden Gardens
by rjosephhoffmann


The community was advertised as the best landscaped in south Florida.
Not only did the faux-Moroccan gate provide security from nonexistent intruders and drug-dealers, but every condo nestled in a tropical array of bougainvillea, hibiscus (coral pinks and striated reds), fiddleleaf figs, palmetto and assorted ferns.
Adam Feinstein loved the fact that the small yard was mown on a weekly basis by a Mexican boy named Donnie who spoke no English but smiled broadly and sang as he raked the shorn blades into neat piles.
Promptly at 4.45 on Thursdays, when the Feinstein lawn had been cut, Adam waited on the front patio with a large glass of iced tea for Donnie. The Association didn’t allow tipping, but a libation of iced tea or water was permitted. It made Adam feel that he had contributed something to the process.
The Association dealt with everything, trimmed everything, fixed everything (outside) and arranged to have things fixed (inside) by calling plumbers and electricians, even drywall specialists and exterminators, when any problem arose.
You didn’t even have to pay on the spot. It came as an itemized addition to Association dues.
Eve Feinstein loved the fact that no pets of any description over thirteen pounds were allowed. She had had a cat once, as a girl. She let it run away after it scratched her. And she lived in mortal terror of dogs. She could not understand the bond between human beings and their pets and would cross streets to avoid being sniffed, eyed or followed by anyone’s animal.
Eve Feinstein was not much better with human beings. She had not married Adam until she was thirty five. They had decided that they had a relationship based on disliking the same things, mainly the same people.
After thirty years their marriage was like two steel marbles rolling around in a matchbox. They traveled in the same direction whenever life tilted and ended up in the same corner. They did not look at each other anymore. They looked at the TV together. Their souls had long since retreated deep into their bodies, so deeply that nothing peered out from within.
In her first six months at Eden Gardens Eve Feinstein had only seen one violation of the Pet Rule–Mrs. Schopke’s poodle Fritz, who bolted the car when Mrs Schopke paused to retrieve a bag of cookies and a can of Old Milwaukee that had fallen from her grocery sack.
The dog had gone yipping wildly around the circular drive looking for a permanent escape route, stopping only long enough to water every bench and scrub oak on the property, including the one closest to Eve Feinstein’s driveway. He had been detained by Donnie and returned to his sobbing owner.
“My God, Fritz, I could have lost you, schnuepel,” Mrs. Schopke cried.
On that occasion, one call from Mrs Feinstein to the Association President, Daniel Weingarten, was all it took for a letter of reprimand to be sent to Sophia Schopke.
“She needs to be more careful,” said Eve to her husband at dinner.
“I don’t have to lift a finger here,” said Adam Feinstein a bit non-responsively. “My God, this is heaven.”
“Rules are rules,” said Eve, smiling at the thought of Sophia Schopke opening an official letter and taking a rolled up newspaper to Fritz for his indiscretion.
They sighed a mutual sigh, reposing in the thought that buying their condo in this paradise of flowers and rules was the best investment of their life. No snow to shovel. No curbside slush in March. No leaves to rake, drains to plunge, leaking roofs to repair.
***
It was Saturday morning. Eve and Adam Feinstein had just come from a study circle where the rabbi’s talk had been “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?”
Rabbi Jerry had been in summer stock productions of Broadway musicals and liked to give his lessons the titles of show-stoppers. Eve smiled and sang all the way home, getting the lyrics out of order. Adam corrected her. “You shouldn’t say ‘now‘,” he said, pronouncing it “neow,” which is how Eve pronounced it. “The song doesn’t say ‘neow’.”
“I’m just a victim of time, Obsolete in my prime
 Out-of-date and outclassed, by my past” Eve sang lustily.
When she did, she thought of Rabbi Jerry. Tall, elegant, bespectacled, learned, funny–gorgeous neckties–always. If she was only ten years younger, she used to think, maybe twenty, this was a man whose head she would like to turn, maybe have coffee with. But then she would feel guilty. And then she would think about his long fingers and manicured nails. Why shouldn’t she think about him?
Still, she thought, a woman her age shouldn’t have feelings like that. And there was poor Adam, poor, dull, predictable, overweight Adam with his stubby fingers and colon issues, whose life had shrunk to the act of offering a Mexican boy a glass of tea on Thursdays.
Adam punched the access code and the gate opened, barely enough to let the car through. It needed adjusting again. Pat Gibson kept nicking it with her bumper because it didn’t open fast enough, and Pat at 89 was nearly blind.
Adam plodded to the front door, swift to be clear of Eve’s dramatic finish to the song. Eve stayed behind and stretched, just like she did after any car trip.
Her attention turned to the dense foliage that surrounded the house. At times like this she made a face. It was the face of judgment and registered instant accord or disapproval. She drew her lips down in grumpy old man fashion and said “puh.”
It meant “This won’t do.”
She was thinking there were definite signs of brown on the fiddleleaf figs and even the crotons looked dispirited, and since it was Donnie’s day off, what could it hurt if she unrolled the hose and gave them a drink?
After all, there was no specific rule against watering plants, was there? Just rules about dogs, noise, keeping your car clean, not doing anything called “private landscaping,” keeping your garage door shut except on recycling day when it could be open long enough to allow bringing the bins to the curb. Those sorts of things.
There was also a rule about trespass.
The Weingartens who owned and developed the land that became Eden Gardens and now owned a double-condo had arranged the sale of the property in such a way that it enclosed a small leechee grove. It was off limits to residents.
Dan Weingarten cultivated in this small space the biggest, reddest, spiniest and sweetest leechees in the southern states–they had won international competitions in Puerto Rico–and he sold them to a New York export company specializing in exotic fruits at a handsome profit every year. But he didn’t do it for the money. He did it because he thought the nut of the leechee tree was truly the most wonderful, stickily succulent, miraculous and ancient thing in the world.
A gate behind the Weingarten’s house let on to the grove, but only Dan Weingarten himself had ever been seen going through it. Whatever mystery surrounded the Leechee Grove, in the Association Bylaws, in bold print, under the rubric “No Access to Residents,” was a clause that read,
Residents of Eden Gardens are hereby notified that the Weingarten Leechee Grove (hereafter Grove) located adjacent to 1 Eden Gardens is off limits to owners and residents at all times. It is forbidden to all residents to enter the Grove or to pick fruit from the trees for sale, profit, or personal use. Failure to abide by this notice will constitute criminal trespass. Residents of Eden Gardens acknowledge that any violation of this rule will lead to expulsion from the Homeowners Association, loss of voting rights, and disqualification for continued residency.
Signing on to such a ridiculous, possibly even illegal and unenforceable rule seemed a small, almost absurdly small price to pay for living in a floral wonderland. Everyone who signed the agreement would initial the clause with a shrug, as if to say, “I think I can just about manage to stay out of his godamned leechee grove.”
That’s just what Adam Feinstein had said.
* * *
After surveying the plants, Mrs Feinstein decided it would be nice to do something useful, like back in Brooklyn where she watered the geranium trays on the fire escape every day, July to September, with a big aluminum sprinkler-can.
She looked right and left to find the garden hose.
But then she saw it slink away–when she stooped to turn on the spigot.
It moved quickly, invisibly, its position known only from a faint rustle of the ground it disturbed, staying close against the house, and not far away.
She stood up, straight and startled. Her stomach was pounding. Jill Hong had seen a small alligator a few months ago when the drought had been officially proclaimed on Cable 7 News. It was small enough to squeeze under the security fence. But it was an alligator.
Eve quickly abandoned her plan to wet the foliage and turned to scurry to the front door.
As she turned, a very clear and polite voice said from behind,
“Eve Feinstein! It can’t be you.“
She stopped cold. The voice was familiar–it might have been anyone she’d known over the past fifty years. It sounded a little like Mel Lippman, but sexier. Mel had a lisp. She turned. She saw no one. But then, squinting to shade her eyes from the late afternoon sun, she saw him. Just in front of the crotons and hibiscus–a snake–coiled, its head raised–but not to strike. Its jaws were open. It was speaking.
His tongue quivered in a red flurry as he spoke–softly, mainly pleasantries. She couldn’t put together all the words at first because he seemed to have an accent. She put her wrist to her forehead in the way people do who have been overwhelmed by events, and she thought she might be crazy to notice that a talking snake sounded a bit like Sean Connery, her all-time favorite actor.
He was green and yellow with red diamonds that seemed to appear and disappear depending on how the sunlight played on his skin. Anyone who liked snakes would have said he was beautiful. His head was the perfect shape of a guitar pick, but a little more wide than sharp at the mouth. The yellow of his back streamed into pure gold around his black eyes and red fleck immediately above gave him the appearance of deep intelligence.
“Well, all I can say is you look fantastic. I didn’t expect to find you here.”
He was long, at least three feet, and easily able to intercept her at the sidewalk if she tried to make a run for it. Where was Adam when you needed him, she thought? Always having his midday snooze or watching basketball on TV, or sometimes disappearing for an inexplicable hour into the bathroom.
“I hear Disney is starting an extension of some kind nearby–are you some kind of robo-snake that got dropped off a truck? You are very realistic.”
She emphasized very to see if he would respond to a compliment.
The snake tossed his head back, looking a little as though he was poised to strike; Eve gasped. But the snake returned to full upright posture and said, a little disappointedly,
“My dear Eve, I am a coldblooded 100% viper of the order serpentes, an ectothermic amniote vertebrate. There are no coils, springs, memory sticks or warranties in any part of my gorgeous body. I exist to delight the eyes and to start conversations–sometimes to negotiate. It all depends.”
Eve found the July sun especially oppressive all of a sudden. Sweat was steaming down her ample back and finding its way over her broad cheeks. “On what?” she asked.
“First things first,” said the snake, loosening two coils and adjusting himself from an introductory to a more conversational posture. “Do you not find me lovely?”
“Well, said Eve, “I’ve never been this close to a snake, except maybe at Busch Gardens, but they were behind glass. I’d have to say you’re the prettiest snake I have ever seen up close.”
The snake bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, dear. I was designed to be. But it’s always nice to hear it from someone who’s a connoisseur. Your ancestor was a connoisseur. A little thinner than you perhaps, but she ate mainly fruit and veg.”
“I’ve been cutting back,” said Eve, lying. “I like nothing better than a nice salad and a glass of water for lunch. I do eat little more ample at dinner.” She thought immediately that ample was not a good choice of words when discussing weight. Maybe she should have said “amply.”
“A little more?” said the snake. “Do you call that prime rib, baked potato swimming in sour cream and fresh buttery rolls you had last night a little? And I do wish you’d learn to drink something besides iced tea–or rather iced treacle by the time you finish loading it with sugar.”
“You have a lot of attitude,” Eve said, slightly surprised at her bravery in the face of what might be her doom. “And how for godssake do you know what I had for dinner. Were you spying on me? Slithering around the garbage sacks?”
The snake waggled his head. He gave a little chuckle. It had the tone of a wise uncle who’d heard it all before. “My, no. I don’t need to spy and I would find it personally repellent to slither around anywhere, especially your rubbish. But I know you Eve Feinstein. And I know your other half too.”
Eve had never encountered such a well-spoken creature. A match even for Rabbi Jerry. His poise was like nothing she had ever witnessed. “You mean Adam, my husband?”
“Where is the old sinner–digesting lunch in a metabolic trance in front of the television, I expect, or having a long pooh while trawling through your copy of Cosmo? Gracious, if he gets any bigger you’ll be trading that car of yours for a truck.” The snake said this without flinching, as if he was asking the time of day.
It was true. Adam was addicted to anything chocolate, especially if it came wrapped in cellophane. He counted his postprandial calories not in units but in the number of “servings” he devoured. Both he and Eve loved roasts and potatoes and their avatars: fast food hamburgers and french fries. Like all true citizens of the great republic, they washed their fare down with flagons of diet drinks when being watched and beakers of sweet ones in private.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Eve, but you act like you know me. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember that. And you’re very rude.”
The snake paused and a contrite look immediately came upon his sharp countenance.
“Oh my goodness. It isn’t my intention to offend you. I came here to do you a favor. And Adam too.”
Eve thought she understood what was happening now. The day had been hot. She had either had a sun stroke or perhaps was dehydrated and was simply hallucinating. She was probably in a hospital; soon the snake’s voice would fade away and she would hear a nurse talking to her.
In any case, she felt certain that this was some kind of a dream and that she would wake up at any minute. To make it happen faster, she turned in the direction of the front door and began to walk away from her curious guest.
In a flash, he was in front of her, blocking her path.
“A favor, I said.”
Eve thought she should say something to the persistent creature.
“The biggest favor you can do me is go away.” A little startled at her bravery, she folded her arms in a defiant way and waited for the snake to react.
He glanced at her sternly.
“Are you happy Eve?”
She gave a little laugh. “Of course. We have everything we need. We have more than we need. You know, this place costs a pretty penny but it’s worth it. Must be pretty cushy for a rodent like you, too, with all these plants and shade.”
“I am a serpent, Eve, not a rodent. You were never much good in school were you? Anyway. As I see it, you don’t like your neighbors, you hate their pets, Adam–well, a clod at best, you live behind a wall that protects you from all the excitement of life outside, and you dream of sex with your rabbi. I’d call that unhappy.”
Eve waited for a moment. No one–especially Adam–would have said these things to her. Adam was the last to say anything insightful or sentimental.
“I don’t want to have sex with my rabbi,” she said at last.
“Well, whatever you people are calling coffee these days. But you have to admit, this is as dull as it gets: predictable weather, an endless blooming season, workers who do your gardening for you, and rules against everything and…”
“There have to be rules,” Eve said quickly, interrupting him. “That’s what makes it all bearable and why we love our Association and our little community. We don’t have to worry we just have to ask.”
Her conviction was thinning as she spoke.
“Just like your grandmother, eh? Quote the rules to me. And just as I told her, rules don’t make you love anybody. Do you love Adam because you took a vow to do it?”
He pushed his head forward in a way that urged her to answer.
“Well, no. I love Adam because he’s very kind. He’s a good man. He’s as honest as the day is long”
“Really?” said the snake. Did he tell you about his first wife?”
“I am his first wife,” said Eve with a trace of scorn. “He’s never been married before.”
“Yes he was,” said the snake. “He’s never told you. He used to think it would matter to you, and now when it doesn’t, he’s waited too long.”
“You are a liar Eve said abruptly.
“I am, but mainly I tell the truth. Because in my game, I’ve found the truth destroys so much more. But no, I am not lying about this–just ask him. It is his darkest secret and his worst fear that you might find out, even though he doesn’t love you any longer. And of course, you don’t love him, either. I have never understood why such secrets should amount to a cobbler’s fart when there’s nothing to make the truth matter anymore. You humans are really a desperately idiotic lot.”
Eve looked even more confused. And she knew from the sweat pouring down her back that she was not dreaming. Everything the snake said might be true. And it might not. It had been years and years since she had felt any passion for Adam. That’s the way she liked it–it kept everything in equilibrium, quiet and easy.
The idea that Adam could have kept a secret from her all these years, maybe even have wooed her thinking that a previous marriage would have scared her off–the dishonesty of it–the preternaturally dull Adam Feinstein a man with a secret? She had lived most of her adult life with a man with a past. That was exciting. He lied to her and kept things from her that she had a right to know. That was unacceptable. Maybe he was a criminal. Maybe his day job at Pawtucket Tool and Dye was a cover for government work. It didn’t seem likely, considering his spelling, but anything was possible. Adam Feinstein had a secret. Strange feelings were stirring in Eve’s ample bosom.
“That’s why I say,” said the snake, summoning her out of a reverie, “that’s why I am here to do you a favor.”
“Are you sure,” said Eve. “Are you sure he was married. So, what was her name?”
“He called her Lilly. She was beautiful–everyone thought she’d go to Hollywood. People didn’t talk about it in those days, but Lilly was something of a man-eater. She had a huge appetite. Didn’t say no to anyone, women either. She drove him crazy, and one day she just left him. He was living in Trenton at the time. That’s where you met him, isn’t it?”
Eve was suddenly sure that the snake was telling her the truth. Her heart was pounding when she said, “What kind of a favor?”
“You need to put this behind you. You need your own secret. Something that you can keep in your heart, so to speak, that Adam doesn’t know about, but something that would affect, perhaps even sting him a bit, if he did–just like the news about Lilly.”
Eve thought she knew where the snake was heading with this suggestion.
“Rabbi Jerry wouldn’t look twice at me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said with assurance. “There was a time, of course, but that was years ago.”
“No,” said the snake. You must do something dangerous, something he doesn’t know about, but you have to calculate a risk factor. There has to be risk.”
Eve Feinstein screwed her large face into a puzzle.
“You are as thick as your grandmother. No thicker. What does Adam love more than anything?”
“Chocolate,” replied Eve, “any thing fudgey.”
“No,” said the serpent. “He loves living here. He loves doing nothing. he loves watching his grass cut. He loves watching other people do his work for him.”
“True,” said Eve, “He loves this place. I think he loves it more than I do.”
“And what if you were to play a little trick on Adam. Something he would never know about. Something that no one but you will ever know about. But–just so you understand–if anyone ever did find out about it, your life here would be over?”
Eve’s face dissolved into a slightly wicked smile.
“The leechees,” she said. “You want me to pick leechees.”
“I don’t want you to do anything Eve,” said the snake in a slightly offended tone. “But this is what you want to do. It’s what you must do.”
***
Eve glanced down the street. She knew that Daniel Feinstein visited his son in Coral Gables every Saturday. He often returned on Sunday, so the time was right.
And the snake was right. The snake was brilliant. That silly Leechee Grove clause, the joke of the Association (under everyone’s breath, of course, not to offend Dan). And if Adam knew what she was going to do! If Adam had any inkling that Eve Feinstein, a woman without secrets, was about to enter Dan Weingarten’s Leechee Grove and come out with a pan full of leechees, he would hit the roof.
And then it would be done, and no one would know. Not Dan, not Adam, not anyone else in the community–just Eve, and the snake.
This time the snake did not block Eve’s path when she rushed into the house, into the kitchen, and located a Tupperware cup in the bottom cupboard for the task.
To her surprise, when she emerged again, the snake had disappeared. She half expected him to be waiting for her at the Leechee Grove gate. Eve felt even more exhilarated because it was now 3 PM, broad daylight. The residents would be incubating or napping in air conditioned comfort, away from the lawns they didn’t have to water and the hedges they didn’t have to prune. This wouldn’t be a stealth operation. Darkness would not hide her, and to her advantage the security lights wouldn’t switch on to reveal her unmistakable form.
Eve Feinstein felt almost lightheaded, almost noble. This was the right thing to do. She just knew it.
And it was all so easy. She walked toward the Weingarten double-condo as though she was heading for the mailboxes. When she got to their driveway, she headed toward the side of the house, as though on an errand, and spied the gate. There was no sign to identify its precious cargo. No signs saying “Keep Out” or “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.” No lock on the gate, which swung open easily when she undid the latch. No barking dogs. No alarms. “My God,” she thought to herself, “What has ever been easier than this?”
Eve gathered a heaping load of the reddest and fattest berries from the lowest branches of the tree.
She had never tasted a leechee and she was amazed at how easily the nut yielded at a little pressure from her fingers, virtually offering itself as a fruity sacrifice. She ate hungrily. They were sweeter than she imagined, a little acid, and she wasn’t sure she liked the texture. She ate another.
Her plan was to take the remainder, transfer them to an almost-vacant strawberry container she’d bought the week before, and leave them in the fridge for Adam to eat. Adam would ask her in all innocence, “What’s that great thing I just ate?” and she would say, “It was on special–I think it’s called mini-ruby-mango.”
She was thinking this as she shut the gate and saw Dan Weingarten standing in front of her in Bermuda shorts, caressing a nine iron.
***
The letter came to Mr and Mrs Adam Feinstein by certified mail and was signed by the Association lawyer.
Adam’s hand trembled as he read the short paragraph:
“It is my duty to inform you that you are in violation of Section III.1 of the Association Rules, subheading 4A, ‘The Leechee Grove’. The penalty for this violation is stipulated to be a fine and disqualification for residency status in Eden Gardens. The Association therefore requests per Section I.1 [Qualifications for Ownership and Residency Status in a Condominium] that you vacate the premises within 30 days of this notice. Your property will be advertised ‘For sale.’ Proceeds of the sale of the property will be distributed following the payment of all dues and penalties owed to the Association.”
Eve explained everything to Adam–the beautiful talking snake, how she had learned about his first marriage, how she had needed to do something secret, something to keep close to her heart because of what he had done and what he hadn’t told her.
She explained it calmly and as logically as possible under the circumstances, as Adam began to sob great sobs until he couldn’t catch his breath, and she thought she ought to call 911 before he had a heart attack.
“Never been married before,” he was saying between gasps. “Never.”
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Published: January 23, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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One Response to “Eden Gardens”

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 Seth Strong  
 February 23, 2010 at 7:10 pm 
Ha. That’s what happens when you decide to give up on communication with your partner. Adam could have gotten that issue resolved but he wasn’t paying attention to Eve. What does he think a partner is for?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


The Problem with Humanism
by rjosephhoffmann


The incoherence of contemporary humanism is usually ascribed to its free thought origins. Not so. Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn’t know what it believes, so much so that it doesn’t know what “it” stands for. Humanism has become the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules. It has ignored or rejected its renaissance origins (too religious?) in favor of a free-base approach to whatever grabs its attention on a given day: a Vatican blunder; an ignorant school board’s pronouncement on creation; a victimized child asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance; a pro-life television ad; an evangelical minister’s excoriation of atheists, and in the broadest sense (think Yul Brynner as the King of Siam) et cetera. It is betimes conservative, libertarian, progressive, socialist, apolitical, pro-gay, latitudinarian, anti-war and anti-Muslim,thus sometimes pro-war, 98% atheistic and 100% philosophically messy.
In part its recent history explains its lack of a following.
The American form of secular humanism evolved out of disparate sources and position-papers, now dubbed statements but in the grandiose social language of the 1930′s and 1970s once called manifestos.

They weren’t altogether bad as marching orders for a motley crew of liberal ministers and dissident academics who refused to walk in a straight line. Humanist Manifesto I (1933) was a modest document, chiefly concerned with redefining religion, rejecting the supernatural, and inviting men and women to look for fulfillment and emotional satisfaction in life rather than in some mythical hereafter.
Its “theology” was the Boston Unitarianism of 1911, already a bit yellow when it was implemented in the 1933 format, and probably unread south of the Mason Dixon line or West of the Mississippi (not counting California).
For example:

 Seventh. Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation-all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.
Eighth: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man’s life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist’s social passion.
Ninth: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a co-operative effort to promote social well-being.
Tenth: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.
Eleventh: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

For all its breadth, it was an eloquent, underwritten–or spare–and important statement of what a very few people, at the time, believed to be true, but felt they had a right to say. Its authors, Roy Wood Sellars–whose philosophical position was termed critical realism–and Raymond Bragg, a Unitarian divine, were primarily interested in containing the frontier extravagance that was suffusing most of American culture during and after the Great Depression. No matter how religiously backward religion in America looks in 2010, it was immeasurably more backward when these brave voices issued their call to a kind of commonsense idealism. One way for the necessary change to happen, Sellars believed, was to call America out of its isolationist, woodsy stupor and money-worship to an awareness of society, the world, other people’s problems (and beliefs), and the need for global cooperation. Some of the highest ideals of the gospel, the authors believed, but did not state in the document, called for the same moral compassion.
The second Humanist Manifesto (HM-II,1973), penned by philosopher Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson was designed to correct and supplement the earlier document. In several ways it was reflective of changes already percolating in American society, either as controversies or proposals: women’s rights, birth control, abortion, human rights and an international court of justice are endorsed; the primacy of secular education over religion-based dogma and ethics is asserted.
More problematically, for religious onlookers, the manifesto had a profoundly un-neutral stance toward religion. Where the first manifesto saw elements of religion as benignly relevant to social and moral improvement, the word used repeatedly in reference to religion in HM-II is “harmful.” Where the original Humanist Manifesto took an almost indifferent position toward religion, the 1973 document went after religion and religious adherents with crusading zeal–not coincidentally at a time when the first Christian tel-evangelists were showing up on television screens from Biloxi to San Francisco. The Preface laid down the challenge in an unmistakable way:
“Traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.” 
Asserting that “no deity will save us from the perils of the modern world,” the authors went on,
“We believe…that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. Any account of nature should pass the tests of scientific evidence; in our judgment, the dogmas and myths of traditional religions do not do so. Even at this late date in human history, certain elementary facts based upon the critical use of scientific reason have to be restated. We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural [order]; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity.”

HM-II focused its attention largely on two worthy objects: the pocked and deteriorating intellectual landscape of American society, which had come to believe (and propagate the absurd idea) that education and enlightenment made no claims against how you viewed the world, lived your life, or understood the universe. And the belief that this toxic state of affairs would right itself through the magic of religion and democratic process in happy concert. HM-I had been an idealistic paean to common sense and high morality; HM-II was grittier, more engaged with the enemies of reason, wordier to be sure, but a battle cry for a more progressive stance and a deeper understanding of what humanism compels the citizen-thinker to do in an Empire of Unreason.
But there was a dark side to the second Humanist Manifesto. While HM-I did not (perhaps could not) go far enough in describing religious excess, HM-II contained sections that were merely reactionary, overblown and rhetorical. The second clause under the rubric “Religion” is a case in point:
Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful. They distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization, and from rectifying social injustices. Modern science discredits such historic concepts as the ‘ghost in the machine’ and the ‘separable soul.’ Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. 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. We continue to exist in our progeny and in the way that our lives have influenced others in our culture.
In sections like this, a reductivist impulse takes hold of the document (“the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context”) and tosses out not just God and religion, but the higher self that would make any humanist program defensible and worthwhile. If HM-I was fuzzy, HM-II was didactic, at times dogmatic, and artificially pugnacious.
In its march toward the brave new world of science and reason, it clumsily trampled over the strong and sinewy root between religious developments that were socially and scientifically dictated by real changes in the global context and the beginnings of humanist thinking. It failed to see religion as a rapidly changing force whose historical record showed its ability to adapt itself to change and influence and thus change more quickly than unbelief and secularism could manage to do. Religion had changed through a mechanism of self-criticism; humanism, at least of the atheistic variety, regarded religion as a sufficient end for criticism and failed to develop its own methods for correction. Religion in the twentieth century had become introspective and discontent; humanism, extrospective and self-satisfied. HM-II confidently looked to a religionless future without glancing back at the religious past and rapidly changing present.
In short, HM-II told it like it was, or seemed to be in 1973, and in doing so put itself in a perpetually defensive position: Locked into defending claims it thought to be true, article by article, unable to acknowledge that its adversaries could sometimes be right, insightful, or forward-seeing. It did not shy away from using the word non-theists, code for those who believed in evolution and rejected supernatural as natural allies of this form of humanism. But it did not succeed (and did not perhaps envision) forms of “faith”, “belief” or religion that were equally scathing about the supernatural and equally dedicated to the ethics of commonsense and reason without God, Jesus or Muhammad at its center.

Like all critiques, HM-II had the immediate value of identifying problems and adversaries. Like all critiques, it gave those problems and adversaries a notional status which history had the power to alter or rescind. It was zealous, time-bound, and needed at the time.
But we have to ask whether we are living in a post-Manifesto world, where a truly progressive humanism will not provide–either in articles or in outline–a statement of what humanism is, or what humanists believe or should do.
Progressive humanism resides in exploration rather than definitions and statements.
I reject them in the same way Luther rejected the pope’s authority and Galileo (at least mumbled) his rejection of the Inquisition’s findings. Both humanists, according to the broadest definition, anyway–both opponents of tradition and authority.
Ultimately a progressive humanism will be the freeman’s and free woman’s dissatisfaction with the answers you are given and any suggestion that a problem (moral or mathematical) that you cannot solve can be solved by someone who knows “better,” even if they do not know more, or how, or why.
It is confidence in the self, informed by learning and imagination, that makes you a humanist. It is not an easy thing to achieve, but insofar as religion is involved in the calculation, the humanist also knows this: God will not get you there.
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Published: February 2, 2010
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Tags: atheism : humanism : Humanist Manifesto : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Unitarianism ..
5 Responses to “The Problem with Humanism”

.
 Seth Strong  
 February 23, 2010 at 7:16 pm 
Interesting. I do not have a belief or creed system. I’m not tied to the ideas of secular humanism if they end up being something beyond my conception of them.
But I disagree with religion because of it’s top down trappings. Why wouldn’t you determine your own values and then live accordingly? Why follow pre-existing creeds at all? I’m sure even if you gave every law up, you’d find and I agree that there are universal “rules”. But you find them by challenging all the rest as well and seeing what’s left.
Anyway, it’s an interesting read and if you’re missing a conversational opposite, as an atheist blogger, maybe we should converse.
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 The Problem with Humanism (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 June 7, 2010 at 12:29 am 
[...] The incoherence of contemporary humanism is usually ascribed to its free thought origins. Not so. Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn't know what it believes, so much so that it doesn't know what "it" stands for. Humanism has become the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules. It has ignored or rejected its renaissance origins (too r … Read More [...]
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 steph  
 June 19, 2010 at 11:12 am 
more relevant than ever now … and an altered riddle I think?
“Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn’t know what it believes, so much so that it doesn’t know what “it” stands for. Humanism has become the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules.” says you – so true.
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 stevie gamble  
 December 7, 2010 at 6:16 pm 
Oddly enough, this admittedly deficient humanist -see my most recent comment- agrees with you, Luther and Galileo.
And I’m reasonably sure that the oxygen so helpfully provided by the hospital is not overly affecting my judgement on this matter…
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 steph  
 December 7, 2010 at 7:22 pm 
I was thinking about labels – lots of labels – as well as the humanist label, and how they’re boxed and defined, when I was swimming this evening. I was thinking about why we should reject them. I was probably remembering this past post which impressed me greatly when I read it a while ago. And humanism isn’t static or simple enough to be shackled by any manifesto. It’s expressive, progressive and explorative – “It is confidence in the self, informed by learning and imagination, that makes you a humanist”.
x
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Teach Yourself Humanism
by rjosephhoffmann


By Mark Vernon*
Humanism is not a specific doctrine or a unified system of thought. Rather it is a tradition that starts in the Renaissance, gathers momentum during the Enlightenment, and becomes a key feature of the modern world. During this development it embraces a range of possible meanings, principles and practices. It is fundamentally an attitude or spirit that values learning, curiosity and imagination aimed at engaging with the questions of life – personal and political – that human beings face and indeed that make us human. There are therefore many flavours of humanism, many philosophers that can be used to underpin it.
The Renaissance is an inspiration, though not because it was a period in which human beings supposedly awoke from a dark age: the medieval period was one of extraordinary invention and accomplishment. Rather, it is because the Renaissance humanists were able to make something wonderful of their times – in their joy of discovery, embrace of the new, cultivation of character, political reform, critical questioning, passion and potential. This still speaks to us, half a millennium later.
Then came the Enlightenment, and it is the intellectual giants, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who impress me most. For Hume, scepticism was the natural position for the Enlightenment thinker – scepticism about religion for sure, but scepticism about the fundamentals of science too. Hume was also sceptical about what he called enthusiasm, defined as ‘presumption arising from success’. That could apply to triumphalist rationalism and scientism as much as religion.
 

Mark Vernon
Kant found Hume’s scepticism profoundly unsettling. He wanted to put things on a firmer foundation. And he did so, but only by writing Critiques. In these Critiques, the key issue was understanding the limits of human knowledge. When Kant said that Enlightenment was maturity this is what he meant, being able to live with this finitude and not reach out for false certainty. So we have Enlightenment humanism as scepticism and grappling with the reality of human knowledge and experience.
This I would actually relate to a tradition within religion, though it is one lamentably in decline today. It is called the ‘apophatic’, meaning ‘negative way’. It stands in marked contrast to the ‘cataphatic’, meaning ‘positive way’, the strident assertions of indisputable religious dogma and divine truth.
The apophatic is a way of approaching what is ultimately unknown by identifying what that unknown cannot be. In religion it says God is not mortal (immortal), not visible (invisible) – note, saying nothing positive about God. Its spirit is captured in the biblical story of Moses climbing the mountain. As he went up and symbolically got nearer to God, he did not ascend into greater light and clarity, but deeper cloud and unknowing. Thus, at its core is a sense of the sacred – that which is far greater than you and so takes you out of yourself and into the unknown.
In a way what the apophatic theologians explored was similar to what the sceptical Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Kant articulated: both identify limits and seek intuitions of what lies beyond. It was called ‘learned ignorance’ by the first Renaissance humanist philosopher, Nicolas of Cusa, and he got the idea from Socrates. Socrates annoyed his fellow citizens in ancient Athens because he showed that the key to wisdom is not how much you know but is understanding the limits of what you know. This dimension reaches back right to the antecedent origins of humanism. It runs right through any honest study of what it is to be human.
It is also this dimension that to my mind is needed to combat contemporary fundamentalisms – religious and scientific – particularly if you want to avoid becoming a humanist fundamentalist in response. It is a kind of committed agnosticism – a juxtaposition of words that only sounds strange, if it does, today.
Echoing the same spirit, the last word can come from a famous humanist and agnostic, the anti-Christian though never quite atheist, Bertrand Russell. Towards the end of his History of Western Philosophy, he reflects on how human beings across the centuries have related to their potential and powers. Sometimes, he believes, they have been too humble. In other periods, too hubristic. And today? He worries that we are at risk of thinking of ourselves as gods.
‘In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check on pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication with power… to which modern man, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.’
This ‘cosmic impiety’, the greatest danger of his time, shows no sign of passing. Humanists must ensure that they help mitigate it.
 
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Published: February 7, 2010
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7 Responses to “Teach Yourself Humanism”

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 Ophelia Benson  
 February 8, 2010 at 12:43 am 
“The apophatic is a way of approaching what is ultimately unknown by identifying what that unknown cannot be. In religion it says God is not mortal (immortal), not visible (invisible) – note, saying nothing positive about God.”
If one says nothing positive about God (or anything else) then what is one saying? If one says nothing positive about God then why (and how) talk about God at all?
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 Malachi M. Nilsai  
 February 8, 2010 at 3:26 am 
You remark that Kant opposed skepticism. Then you use him to segue into a remark on the rise of humanism as skepticism.
I’m left a bit boggled, to be perfectly honest. You rightly point out that the thrust of his critique involves establishing the limits of experience. But this bears scarcely any obvious connection to any rise in skepticism that purportedly ensued. And why should it? As you briefly allude, the transcendental logic and aesthetic are foundational in their own right.
Yes, there’s obviously the critique of speculative reason. And maybe Kant has something in common with the apophatic types in this regard.
But let’s not reduce it to slogans. The apophatic sort seem to be anti-foundational just as much as they are anti-fundamentalist. Kant, no way. He would be scandalised to be considered the godfather of an unqualified skepticism.
In other words, Armstrong might be kind of like Kant, but Kant isn’t much like Armstrong. Right?
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 Daffyd ap Morgen  
 February 8, 2010 at 4:42 am 
In your efforts to conflate humanism with religion, do not forget rational inquiry, the engine of the renaissance you invoke for your purposes.
Reply
 
 Shannon  
 February 21, 2010 at 4:54 pm 
This is one of my favorite books on humanism. I liked it so much I actually took the time to write a quick review at Amazon. I think I’ve bought about 10 copies so far. I keep loaning mine out to people and they never give them back.
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 Rich Griese  
 April 7, 2011 at 10:28 pm 
Very nice article.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
Reply
 
 Mark Fournier  
 April 8, 2011 at 4:29 pm 
Vernon seems to want it both ways here. On the one hand, he flirts with radical skepticism (which Hume considered absurd because to take it seriously removed you from the entire discussion.) But the collapse of certainty does not mean the end of knowledge, nor does it mean that there is no objective reality, and this is what Russel was warning us about. We have far too many ideologues who think that they can create their own realities, and the most frightening thing about these people is that they consider the truth to be a conspiracy–a reality created by someone else. Their solution to the truth is to find out who is responsible and silence them.
And like so many others, Vernon thinks he has discovered a cozy hiding place in apophatic theology, a place where he can believe whatever he likes because no one can question him. But in fact, the very negatives he conceives of are probably irrelevant and orthogonal to the ultimate nature of cosmology–he simply lacks the imagination to go far enough. There is no reason to think that we have evolved the faculties required to understand things at this level; the final answer may be as incomprehensible as 42 in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. How long do you have to play word games until you drop the attributes entirely and arrive at “God is not.” Why use the word God at all, but to convince others that you are still on their team? Atheism wants you to leave your church; apophatic theology wants you to burn it down.
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 scotteus  
 July 14, 2012 at 12:24 pm 
I nice iltte introductory essay, but I always recommend, although it’s a bit outdated Herbert Muller’s “The Use Of The Past”.
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Skepticism as a Human Value
by rjosephhoffmann

Snow en route
Skepticism is a funny thing, even among the Greeks – especially among the Greeks. The “original” skepticism would have been completely palatable to modern religionists, because it challenged pre-Socratic efforts to attain a true picture of the world and stoic claims to have the map to true knowledge. To the early practitioners of skepticism Thales’ notions just didn’t hold water, and if Heracleites was right today, he might well be wrong tomorrow. “‘What I may think after dinner is one thing,’ returns Mr. Jobling, ‘my dear Guppy, and what I think before dinner is quite another thing.’”
A little healthy skepticism never hurt anyone, except those with fixed and final positions, those who claim to possess the whole and unvarnished truth, or the careless throng who pride themselves on leading an unexamined life. The Greek word skepsis has about a dozen definitions in the big Oxford Greek Dictionary, the most common being “examination,” or “inquiry,” though it can also mean “doubt,” and “revision,” – as to revise an opinion – like Mr. Jobling at dinner time, but for cause, not whim or indecision. It always implies a certain restlessness or impatience with answers and “positions.” According to an unreliable tradition (and most ancient traditions are) it was Plato’s nephew and “successor” Arcesilaus who revised (Diogenes says “meddled with”) the teacher’s system by stressing the importance of arguing both sides of a case, giving weight to evidence and argument. How this was “new” is not clear from the reports; the sophists did it; Socrates did it.
Even Arcesilausian “skepticism” seems to have come from Uncle, who had said that “nothing can be known with certainty, by the sense or by the mind,” a conclusion which taken to its limit means that the conclusion cannot be known with certainty. So there we are. Skepticism always lands you in the solipsistic mud and solipsistic mud exists only outside the mind, and hence cannot get you muddy. But in paving the way for what academics like to call Academic skepticism, Arcesilaus paved the way for an important development. Take those arrogant troglodytes, the stoics. The followers of Zeno were the reductivists of the ancient world. This means they only believed in mud puddles. Sensory impressions or rather katalêpsis – a mental grasping of a sense impression) – guarantees the truth of what is grasped, or in this case, fallen into. If one assents to the proposition associated with a kataleptic impression, i.e. if one experiences katalêpsis, then the associated proposition cannot fail to be true. To put it simply: for any sense-impression S, received by some observer A, of some existing object O, and which is a precise representation of O, we can imagine circumstances in which there is another sense-impression S’, which comes either (i) from something other than O, or (ii) from something non-existent, and which is such that S’ is indistinguishable from S to A. Questions?
So the definition of truth, which Plato had made an Idea (call it I if you want), fell on the knife of the stoics’ claim that only kataleptic experiences are true and that the true stoic wise-man (who was seen to be a more perfectly developed type of humanity—a bit like Aristotle’s megalopsuchos except taller) is capable of infallibility.
For Arcesilaus, this is folly: first because we can be mistaken about sense impressions (as the Arab philosopher Al-Ghazali noted centuries later), and second because the world and life-in-it that we experience is more complex than our senses can grasp, and also because our sense experience fails to de-code the world of value that is also an essential part of human perception — lived experience. It is all, as a teacher of mine used to say, about our epistemic limits — a nice way of saying that to some people a palm tree is a cycad within the genera palma and to others a meeting place for an evening rendezvous on a deserted beach. Not either – or, of course, but when – then.

Why all this about skepticism and a nephew of Plato, barely visible in the footnotes? There is a confused idea that modern science has vindicated the stoic view of the world by refining and redefining what constitutes a kataleptic experience. True, the skeptics were correct to suggest trickery, hallucination, error, and deceit weighed heavily against the infallibility of the senses. But hasn’t modern science improved the thoroughgoing empirical model espoused by the stoics, to the extent that the skeptical caveats now count for much less? Freud deciphered the dream state; Einstein the continuum of time and space. –Jews since Moses have been busy wondering what was so promising about the Promised Land.
Even if the media insist that there are two sides to every story, isn’t it really the case that there is only one — the kataleptic one? And didn’t we all learn to be self-effacing about this when we learned the scientific method? The motto of false self-effacing irony. Science deals with facts, not truth; probability—(heaven forbid) not certainty. After all, a thousand bits of experimental corroboration can be falsified by one patchwork-colored elephant. In the treasury of scientific knowledge, the holy grail is the principle that the limit of the epistemic quest is the possibility a fact can be un-facted. (“Not bloody likely,” is not to be said out loud, especially by Nobel laureates). In this way skepticism has been deflated and subsumed into scientific method. Research professors have given it its own room at the back of the house, like a troublesome grandparent, and invite it to dinner every time a new discovery is announced. C.P. Snow and Karl Popper may quibble with these metaphors. But a true reductivist will bristle. A true reductivist will say that an essential element of the modern outlook — a condition of being modern, indeed — is to enshrine the scientific as the only appropriate way of viewing the world we see. The cultures of those who know a little and those who know better–the “two cultures” debate of the 1950′s–has reemerged as the “Brights| vs. “Dims” scientism of the twenty-first century.
Snow touched on this in his 1959 Rede lecture recalling a group of Cambridge dons (“educated men”), who were speaking contemptuously of the illiteracy of scientists. He comments, “… if I had asked [them]…What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.” The Snows of the twentieth century insisted they had not forsaken the verities; goodness, truth and beauty were alive and well, and living in the apartment next to a reprogrammed skepticism. But now the good was grounded in the goodness of a particular “way” of knowing particular kinds of things; truth, the basic axioms we need to refine that knowledge, and beauty the beauty of the cosmos – in its deciphered and intelligible form. But this is not a postmodernist screed against science. It is a question looking for an answer, and not just in the scientific arena. Has skepticism no separate voice in the understanding of the world? If it does, is it limited to stabs at religious dogma, debunking miracles and visions, looking for Chiye-Tanka’s poo in the Oregon woods or space debris in New Mexico? –The kind of skepticism that (it seems to me) gives back to credulity as much as it takes away.
The humanist intellectual tradition was shaped by a healthy respect for epistemic limits — not derived from a particular stance toward the infallibility of method and experience. The biblical God (which is not to say “God”) fell to skepticism (not science) only a few centuries after Anselm announced His discovery. Biblical infallibility did not fall to Darwin but to Erasmus and to Luther’s German successors in theology. Church authority began to tumble when Lorenzo Valla went to work on the claims of Pope Stephen II in 1440, not when Galileo was proved right. None of the perpetrators of these designs had any notion of the scientific method; what they did have was a healthy sense of the disconnect between what was claimed to be known (or true) and what a liberal application of skepticism discovered to be the case. Later on, biblical scholars would call this the hermeneutics of suspicion. It’s a phrase worth remembering.
And in the world of human values? Skepticism has done yeoman’s service in a non-scientific sort of way in freeing us from the taboos and stereotypes of tradition. If we point to the “achievements” everyone agrees are politically salutary—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, you name it, we ordinarily hear in the background the voices of skeptics who doubted the prevailing orthodoxy and the way a social world was interpreted. Is this the same as demythologizing the cosmos? Yes and no, but mainly no. It’s not just that social worlds are made by fools like us, but only Process can make a tree. It is that social worlds are provisional in a way the physical world is not, and to the extent “laws” operate in both nature and society, they are different sorts of laws. Doubtless, ideas whose time has come, come—but not without nursemaids. Skeptics have undeniably been good nursemaids for every liberation movement of the last three centuries: only a Bible rendered politically ineffective by the growth of democratic secularism could be non-instrumental in maintaining the slave trade. Only a secular government could keep in check and (mainly) out of power those who want a Christian America, or for that matter a talibanized Pakistan. with all that might imply for social justice, conscience, and the environment.
If skepticism is defined as a kind of heresy, heresy applied to repressive, cruel or dogmatic social orthodoxies, then it has done a pretty good job in those areas where it has been able to do its work. Skepticism has been less good, however, where it might do the most good. Arcesilaus taught that no intellectual position can be fixed and final. This was not a statement about truth, directly, but about the infallibility of knowing. The two-sides dialectic was not a doctrine about giving equal time to opposing viewpoints—that is an American media obsession not Greek philosophy. What skepticism entailed was the obligation to test good arguments against each other—“The fire of argument is the test of gold.”
The real crisis of skepticism is reflected in a skeptical deference to those who feel that science can provide answers to all questions of value, serve as its own guide in questions of ethics, and is ultimately compatible with a species of Truth completely different from the lowercase truth one arrives at in other enterprises. Sometimes, as Snow recognized, humanists abjure the sciences out of ignorance—a real, persistent, and inexcusable ignorance. Sometimes they abjure the sciences because they see through the false modesty to the methodological conceit that locates both the nature of the universe and the meaning of life in the house that the stoics built. Whatever the anatomy of the problem the two cultures still exist, much the same as in 1959, complicated in America, at least, by the fact that outside the circle of educated men and women who cannot define acceleration and energy, there is a subculture of yahoos who defend such ignorance on religious grounds and reductivist humanists who define the epistemic limits as what science can teach us.
A consistent skepticism, like a good sense of humour, includes the ability to turn a critical eye on your own assumptions about the sources of knowledge and truth. It is far easier– as Mr Jobling knew–to be able to define exactly what you mean and to regard everything else as nonsense. Changing your mind after dinner, as long as it doesn’t happen every day, isn’t such a bad thing.
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One Response to “Skepticism as a Human Value”

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 steph  
 August 8, 2010 at 3:31 am 
very nice clever-funny, inspiring-enlightening, from dickens to dickens but I couldn’t possibly change my mind after dinner about that. I’ve had it and it was just fruit without any gin. However I’m not very sure that the mud puddles were so simple.
Pooh rolled and rolled in a very muddy place until he was black all over, and then he floated away on a balloon… ‘How sweet to be a cloud, floating in the blue…’
x
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Unreasonable Belief by Sol Schimmel
by rjosephhoffmann

By Solomon Schimmel*

Solomon Schimmel in Action
In addition to the philosophical critique of evidentialism, there is another ground for questioning the priority of reason in deciding what we should believe and how we should live our lives. The human capacity to use reason is, after all, nothing but an evolutionary adaptation that enables our species to survive. Moreover, human reason is far from perfect. We make all kinds of logical errors in a variety of contexts.
Reasoning skills do not come naturally, but require disciplined training, often of many years’ duration, and for numerous people they never come at all. Most human beings believe things that do not meet the criteria of logical deduction or scientific induction, or even plausibility.
We frequently make inferences about events of the past, or predictions about the future, which on strictly logical or probabilistic grounds do not make much sense, and we act in accordance with these erroneous assessments or expectations.
Ancient and medieval philosophers pointed to the deficiencies of human reasoning in ascertaining “truth,” and modern experimental psychologists have demonstrated these deficiencies in numerous contexts. Simply put, human “reasoning” doesn’t live up to all that its devotees have claimed for it. It is nothing but a flawed, imperfect evolutionary tool that has been conducive to our survival as a species until now. There is no guarantee that it will continue to serve this function in the years ahead (just as our affinity for sugar helped us survive in the past but might not be conducive to our health today). Indeed, some of the most impressive products of human reason, such as nuclear physics—one of the pinnacles of reason’s achievements—may yet prove to be the instrument for the destruction, rather than the survival, of humanity.
Consequently, if at times non rational, intuitive, experiential, emotional, or even irrational beliefs and behaviors are more effective than “reason” for a particular individual or group in enabling them to survive, physically or culturally, then “reason” has no a priori claim on how they should lead their lives.
Reason is only an instrument to be used when it is the best instrument available. If falsehood, self-deception, and psychological mechanisms of denial are better for certain purposes, so be it. “Reason” is not divine; it is not more or less “human” than are emotions, or self-deception. If self-deception, or denial, or faulty reasoning, or deliberate lying can, for example, make an individual less depressed, happier, more fulfilled, and even more humane, whereas reason would lead to nihilism, despair, depression, or inhumanity, then we need not assume that one should blindly follow reason and logic and empiricism to wherever they might lead.
Why not take a Jamesian pragmatic approach to the “truth” or to religious experience and apply them to beliefs and doctrines as well? Whichever worldview bears better fruits is the one that we should, or at least can defensibly, adopt as “truer.” An argument can be made that in some circumstances and for some people, for some of the time, the “objectively false” myths and assertions of religions serve mankind better than do the fruits of “critical thinking.”
There is no reason, therefore, that the presumed “truths” discovered by “objective reasoning” should have a favored status in guiding our lives. Naturally, because reason has evolved as a survival mechanism, it probably is in our interest to use it frequently, when it is shown to be advantageous to do so.
Most religious fundamentalists are not averse to using modern technology and modern medicine, the fruits of reason and science.
However, it is not appropriate to challenge the desirability or the utility of religious beliefs simply because they may be implausible or irrational. One would have to demonstrate that such beliefs are in the long run detrimental to human welfare, relative to the human welfare that would result by following only well-established “facts” and indisputable “reasons.”
So, by acknowledging the limitations of reason, have I conceded defeat to the fundamentalists who are anti rationalists or limited rationalists? No. The issue is not whether reason, scholarship, and science are flawless tools for understanding and interpreting reality, and for living in and controlling reality for human benefit. It is rather whether, all things considered, they are preferable to a non rational or irrational fundamentalist religious approach to life and reality.
One must make a cost-benefit analysis comparing the effects on human welfare of maintaining a non-rational, or a-rational, or implausible religious worldview, with the costs and benefits of maintaining a non-fundamentalist worldview, whether religious or secular, in which reason and empirical evidence are given priority over other alleged sources of knowledge and insight.
The rationalist need not claim that reason and empiricism are the only sources of valuable human knowledge and insight. Art, music, poetry, fiction, and religious myth — much of which are not generated by, and do not appeal to, reason or to the empirical for their value to humanity — can be deeply appreciated by the rationalist for the richness they endow on human experience and the emotional and psychological insights and wisdom that they often convey. Imagination is a natural human faculty no less than is reason. Only when the humanities, including religions, make assertions about human nature, or about reality, in a propositional form, which can be subjected to rational analysis or empirical test, and those assertions fail to withstand that analysis or to meet that test, does the rationalist give reason and science epistemological priority over the humanities and religion.
We need to ask, does a particular fundamentalist religious worldview enhance the welfare of the individual believer or of the believing group? What is its impact on the welfare of people who do not subscribe to it? The same questions would have to be asked of the “rationalist,” empiricist worldview. There are no single or simple answers to these questions.
Solomon Schimmel is professor of psychology at Hebrew College and the author of The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth” (Oxford University Press, 2008 from which this excerpt is taken by the author.
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4 Responses to “Unreasonable Belief by Sol Schimmel”

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 Dwight Jones  
 March 8, 2011 at 10:41 am 
Analyses such as Sol’s beg the question of whether reason, like ethics, exists at all.
I don’t think it’s possible for humans to be much devoid of reason, except when encumbered by bad health, pain, injury etc.
As for the ‘cost-benefits’ of reason – we should be talking about personal courage and the benefits to the species as criteria for such weighing, in Life, as more likely to be relevant than some supposed degree of ‘rationality’. It’s way too smug to sit on the fence of ‘reason’ and declare others to be out of bounds – the banal tactic of the atheists.
As an example. the Hebrew people taught themselves that they were ‘chosen’, they evolved societal practices of marrying and doing business with each other preferentially, and not only in deference to outside pressure.
This carried their semitic features into Europe, where they became identified as outsiders in part for those traditions. Was that strategy ‘rational’ over the past millennia? Or did it fly in the face of biological diversity and end up revealed as completely ‘unscientific’ and badly thought out?
Be care of what lies in Pandora’s box – reason has its own agenda, and there be dragons there.
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 8, 2011 at 10:52 am 
Well, I used to like the reasons-of-the heart response to the full-reasonableness approach; but we see that those reasons are contingent on whose heart it is. The implication is that there are things we might do for the good of others, altruistically, or even for our own benefit that can’t be located in body and brain–in evolution. This is fine if you have a large and generous heart, not so good if the reasons it “proposes” are based on strongly felt passions that then drive us to do wicked or violent things. I agree with you about the dragons of full-reasonableness, but it has to balanced against Hume’s cautions in the teatise of Human nature.
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 Seth Strong  
 March 8, 2011 at 11:22 am 
I see Sol’s point. He’s referring to a sort of moral relativity and evaluating relative moral packages. I’m going to take a stab at tying the idea of reason to two things. Reason should be based on best practices and best information. And despite that, reason should incorporate empathy so that, the most reasonable stance is factually correct and comes with a plan to bring unreasonable people into the reasonable fold.
The problem with his stance is that you use reason to evaluate which tools are best… including self deception. Otherwise, you really don’t know which tools are best and there is no argument to be made against reason there.
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 8, 2011 at 11:36 am 
” Reason should incorporate empathy so that, the most reasonable stance is factually correct and comes with a plan to bring unreasonable people into the reasonable fold…” Exactly. And of course Sol and Paul (great biblical names oddly) are pushing for the same thing–that the truth claims of religious systems be subject to rational scrutiny. It seems a mild suggestion to make in the wake of recent world events. The problem is always going to be how to bring that about: since the more we understand about religions at a cognitive or scientific level, the less people who are fervently religious care about understanding and assessing their positions.
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The New Oxonian
by rjosephhoffmann

None of That
Dear Faithful or Discreet Reader:
The moniker above is chosen to reflect the fact that I am opening the site-door to short essays, reviews and opinion pieces other than my own short essays, reviews and opinion pieces. I will also consider poetry, if it is better than mine, and not-more-than 1500-word short stories, if they remind me of Guy de Maupassant.
Naturally, this is a happy day for everyone.
However, I still intend to dominate content and space, and your views must be so harmoniously akin to my own or so unalterably opposed as to merit my sharing the blanket.
Please send your work to me and, if approved, I’ll try to have it up in 72 hours, or let you know why it isn’t.
The theme of this site is “religion and culture,” which includes a lot but not everything. I am especially interested in pieces about humanism, atheism, religious trust-busting, good books, bad books (about religion) and books that need to be written. Imbecility is a frequent theme on these pages. I’m against it.
No human interest stories, paeans to favorite birds, and nothing strictly political or about Paris Hilton. In general, nothing that appears here should make people feel better about themselves. Jesus saves but the truth hurts.

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Being and Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann


God: Plato’s good, Israel’s Lord, the Christian’s redemption, Porphyry’s (and St John’s and Augustine’s) Perfect Love, Anselm’s supreme being, Aquinas’ Cause, Paley’s watch, Newton’s great mechanical, the unseen Intelligence and Designer. Etc.
I am an atheist in the sense that I do not believe a singular unseen X stands behind any of these formulations. I don’t deny their importance as intellectual events in human understanding. They are simply ideas. They are expressions of how thinkers have thought about their world. I think that their interest or importance cannot depend on their rightness, because they are, as far as I can tell, mistaken views.
I do not need an unseen lover to experience love, or a super-dad to experience security, anxiety, a need for approval, a sense of falling short.

Satan, sin and death
I do not need to boil things down to a “singularity that explains complexity” in order to comprehend the workings of my world or my feelings about it. Thales was wrong. Aristotle was wrong. The Hebrew writer of Genesis was wrong. The Rig Veda was wrong.
Human things, finite things, physical things, historical things cannot be adequately understood through lumping them together as the work of an unseen power. When I say there is no God, what I reject is the shallow and sometimes cynical attempt to simplify cause, meaning, and experience: to reduce it to an unseen indissoluble essence.
It’s true of course that not all causes are apparent to the naked eye, but it is not correct to say that these causes can serve as analogies for the existence of a supernatural cause: the wind that blows the branches off trees in a hurricane in Kingston can be clocked. DNA can be mapped. The velocity of a hydrogen atom can be tracked. Science, as a form of inquiry, suggests that as we learn more about the universe it will be on the same terms as the way in which science has progressed in the past—on the basis of falsifiability.
 
The only revelations therefore are revelations achieved through hard work and discovery using the methods appropriate to investigating the world around us, the universe beyond us. Religion and theology are not suitable to that investigation. They are not grounded in science, they do not conform to science. They are grounded in myth, namely the myths of the human past.
There is nothing wrong with myth. But it is not science, and whether we are speaking of the Bible or of the Koran, or any book thought to come to us through revelation, the accidental insights of myth do not constitute a science.
True, we tell our students that god is not falsifiable because the basic criteria for falsifiability are missing. But what we really should be telling them is that the criteria for God are missing, the need to resort to an invisible explanation of the visible world is missing. It is a fool’s dilemma to fall back on axioms of ancient logic, which in any event don’t work here.
It may be the case that the vague God of the Philosophers cannot be negated because his defining properties have receded to an Archimedean dot; but it is not true that the God of the Bible cannot be disproved. History disproves him in the same way it disproves Marduk, Isis, the Monster Humbaba, and Vishnu.

If god is a being who is only worth knowing as a postulate to explain why the universe arises to look the way it looks, then he is not a god that we need to concern ourselves with–because he wears none of the clothes history dressed him in and has none of the attributes of the god of classical theism. “God the postulate” cannot be a god of the Bible or any other scripture: he cannot love, ask to be loved, be offended, forgive us our trespasses, save from sin, or create the situation whereby people would need to be saved from it in the first place,
That ancient God, the God of the Bible, is a god from whom I ask to be saved intellectually and possibly also morally.
The Dilemma and the Definition:
“Either God caused the universe or something else did.” Apologists in freshly pressed white shirts love to begin “discussions” and debates that way. It is a variation on the Jesus was “mad, bad or God” bear-trap they sometimes set for unimaginably stupid sophomores.
They go on to say that while they know what caused things to come out the way they did, the atheist cannot know because the atheist has no more proof than they do. (My cause has no personality; theirs lives in a book.) I have tried saying “Look around you: that’s my argument.” (I haven’t had much success with that one.) So, it is easiest to say confidently, “Something else did.”
And like the mad, bad, god MCQ, this is a false dilemma, since in most formulations theologians merge God with this something else: X=X by any other name. They begin by eliminating the god of Genesis and all later attempts to domesticate the tribal and biblical gods and the gods of early Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) theology.
What you are left with is a god from whom all defining characteristics (perhaps Aristotle would have called them accidents, substrates?) have been removed. A decerebrated God whose will, moods, and mobility have been stripped away by the surgeons who were trying to save him.

I have no trouble imagining a god who is not great, or kind, or merciful or compassionate or steady of purpose, or immutable. And I won’t go into the absurdities of arguing a “philosophical god” who is changeless and a biblical god who changes his mind rather often (it is like the Eddie Izzard “Cake or Death” shtick, except it’s God holding a shamrock and saying “Redeem or damn, damn or redeem?”).
But I think most Christians—especially those in freshly pressed white shirts-would not be satisfied with a god who has been emptied of attributes, the All-Nothingness, the Eternal Absolute (I’ll take my math with tea, please, not incense) and I consider it dishonest to go on calling this being or axiom or hypothetical something god, just as I would have trouble calling a horse a horse if you forbid me to use ears, tail, hooves, mammal, four legs and oats as part of my definition.
 
In any meaningful definition that is not pure nonsense—and here the scholastics had a great deal to tell us—we need a genus, we need what they called differentiae. But what is the genus of God? God? Supreme being? All-Knowers, Creators, Flood-senders?
No good; there are no other members of this class, and as we found out from Anselm, supreme being is to god as boy is to young male. It doesn’t define it; it restates it. So I ask again, What are god’s differentiae?
The defining attributes of the God Christians are interested in knowing, loving and serving are all historical, time-bound: anger, wrath, mercy, compassion, punishment, salvation, forgiveness, knowledge, pure awesomeness. And did we mention, good at making universes? They will not worship a God who is, did or does none of these things. Why should they? They will not die for a postulate or march for the right to life in honor of a God who does not create individual souls.
In this case there is no baby to toss out with the baptismal water, no dead body that points to atheists as murderers. Theologians in ages gone by used to talk about god using certain modes: the via positiva—god the all-knowing, for example—or the via negativa—God as impassible (devoid of passion and emotion)—or the via eminentia, God as higher than our highest concept of god–whatever that means, but surely a shut down strategy for rational debate.
But as every first-year divinity student knows, the study of theology is the study of the problems theology created for itself: a god who cannot feel passion and is changeless cannot easily be the same God who so loved the world that he took pity on the world and sent his son to save it. The jealous and angry God of the Old Testament cannot be the same God who went from a solo act to playing in a threesome.
My argument is this: the God of Christian theism, Islamic theology, and Jewish scripture does not exist, and the God who is left over when that theology is scrubbed–as postulate, variable or merely “unknown”– is so useless as (in John Wisdom’s great phrase) to amount to the same thing—useless to move, love, inspire, create.
I have no reason to imagine such a being, neither as a piece of intelligent cosmic protoplasm filling the interstices of what we call space, a flying spaghetti monster, or a vastness beyond the vastness. There is no way to disconfirm any unobservable absurdity, and hence there is no reason to believe in it.
 
Notice I say no reason to believe it. Theologians have given us no reason to believe, and to be blunt, their affirmation of science and willingness to sacrifice the god of history for the god of guesses should alert everyone to the nature of their profession. There is more reality in any exhibition of Hollywood special effects than there is in theology.
To the theologians who have rejected the God of the books. To the theologians who have created the false dilemma of asking us to choose between X and X–a God who is not the God of revelation, but is a God in some irrelevant sense–who requires neither prayer nor sacrifice nor petition nor good behavior. To the theologians who in conscience must know that they are dabblers in unreality and illusion. To the theologians who have created a god less real than the God of the Bible, who for a couple of millennia had, at least, time and faith on his side. To the theologians who have lost faith like Bo Peep lost her sheep, but talk on and on.
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Published: February 8, 2010
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31 Responses to “Being and Atheism”

.
 AlvinStargut  
 February 12, 2010 at 1:23 am 
Wonderful post. Many thanks!
Reply
 
 steph  
 August 6, 2010 at 3:10 am 
I love this post, it’s just plain ordinary beautifully well written and clever. Of course. There’s a reason for a bee, and that’s to make honey, and there’s a reason for honey, and that’s for Pooh’s tummy, but there’s no reason to believe in any being described above however many theologians bleat on and on not even necessarily believing themselves anymore. As long as atheism is expressed in this way, I’m an atheist, and always have been, too. I never needed to believe, that’s all.
x
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 Being and Atheism « The New Oxonian says: 
 February 6, 2011 at 6:43 pm 
[...] Being and Atheism February 6, 2011 by rjosephhoffmann God: Plato’s good, Israel’s Lord, the Christian’s redemption, Porphyry’s (and St John’s and Augustine’s) Perfect Love, Anselm’s supreme being, Aquinas’ Cause, Paley’s watch, Newton’s great mechanical, the unseen Intelligence and Designer. Etc. I am an atheist in the sense that I do not believe a singular unseen X stands behind any of these formulations. I don't deny their importance as intellectual events in human understanding. They are simply i … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Geoff Arnold  
 February 6, 2011 at 7:57 pm 
This is beautiful. Thank you.
When I came to these conclusions, about 45 years ago, the way I responded to challenges from believers was always to say, “Tell me exactly what you mean by God, and I’ll tell you whether I believe in it.” Few who bothered to try, but those always came up with something that was was either incoherent, or trivially unworthy of respect, or empty of real meaning. And as you said…
“… I think most Christians… would not be satisfied with a god who has been emptied of attributes, … and I consider it dishonest to go on calling this being or axiom or hypothetical something god, just as I would have trouble calling a horse a horse if you forbid me to use ears, tail, hooves, mammal, four legs and oats as part of my definition.”
I know a number of soi-disant Christians (including several people that I care for deeply) who spend their lives trying to convince themselves and others that they are satisfied with such a god. They use words like “apophatic” to imbue the meaningless with significance. I don’t know what to say to them….
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 February 6, 2011 at 8:01 pm 
Thanks, Geoff: Lovely thoughts–and I think I might prefer the naivete of the people who accept the traditional view to the duplicity of theologians who know they are doing whitewash.
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 Geoff Arnold  
 February 6, 2011 at 8:08 pm 
I agree. The arguments of theologians often remind me of Wolfgang Pauli’s famous comment: “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” (Not only is it not right, it’s not even wrong!)
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 February 6, 2011 at 8:12 pm 
Genau!

 
 
 
 Jennifer Rivett  
 February 7, 2011 at 6:46 am 
I so agree with Steph – I never needed to believe, don’t understand the need, but accept that some do feel a need. But if Dawkins is correct, what we really need to believe in is the morality of humanity
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 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 4:15 pm 
I know many theists and others who identify as Christian. I interrogate them sometimes out of interest: why and what do they believe, and they generally confess varying degrees of agnosticism with a few exceptions as inbetweeners. They know they don’t know, they don’t even believe in a biblical God, just something undefinable seems to them better than nothing as they haven’t got any other explanations to depend on. I’m generally even more surprised by the self identifying Christians I know – who don’t seem to believe anything at all other than basic principles of loving enemies and giving to the poor and a faily liberal nineteenth century wishy washy view of Jesus. No heaven, no hell, no miracles, no resurrection (all purely ‘symbolic’), and a non biblical view of God as some ultimate ‘thing’, if indeed, a ‘thing’ at all. Perhaps they believe as a justification of their own being – I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. As long as we can share and agree on basic principles of ‘goodness’ then we can build relationships from there. The only biblical God ‘believers’ appear to be the likes of those who should know better (eg willie lane craig, tom wright, ben witherington the third etc) and crisp white collared with teeth to match, bike riding american accented mormons who knock on my door, as well as JWs with kiddies in tow, who come and evangelise and are politely told I’m busy today, tomorrow and forever. Of course I’ve come across street preachers too who sing about hell and damnation but I just feel sorry for them. But I do wish scholarship were flushed clear of those who insist on evangelising (to often innocent and vulnerable minds) what I’m sure they know, or at least ought to know, to be storytelling, not fact.
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 Ed Jones  
 February 7, 2011 at 1:10 pm 
Joe, Steph, might you not be making the crucial mistake of identifying “understanding” with “rational explanation”- hence limiting knowledge of Reality to rational reasoning?
” –What theses are about is a great deal of explanations”(Steph) implying that much of it has little to do with assessing the evidence, for the reason that critical scholars may have “inherited a mistaken assumption” (Steph)
 As physicists Paul Davies explains it is “the assumption of human rationality that it is legitimate to seek “explanations” for things and that we truly understad something only when it is “expained”, Yet it has to be admitted that our concept of rational explanation probably derives from our observations of the world and our evolutionary inheritance. Is it clear that this provides adequate quidance when we are tangling with ultimate questins? Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense?
 Is there a road to knowledge – even “ultimate knowledge” – that lies outside of critical scientific inquiry and logical reasonng? Many people claim there is, it is called mysticism. In fact, many of the world’s finest thinkers, including some notable scientiests have espoused mysticism.”
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 Geoff Arnold  
 February 7, 2011 at 1:53 pm 
You speak of “ultimate knowledge”. It reminded me of this passage from a blog piece by Erin MacDonalt (“”Choice in Dying”) here: http://choiceindying.com/2011/02/06/the-new-atheism/

But there is no reason for suggesting that the New Atheists — deserving of caps too! — are overreaching gnostics and claim confident knowledge of ultimate reality. No. What we think is there is no confident knowledge of ultimate reality to be had. It even wonders whether there is a decent use for that word ‘ultimate’ until someone has spotted it, and has given us some reason for thinking it ultimate (whatever Shook takes ‘ultimate’ to mean).
Indeed, this is just where I see the newness in the New Atheists. We no longer think it makes sense to speak in terms of ultimacy. What would ultimate reality look like if we found it? There’s no way of telling, because one person’s ultimate reality is another person’s mystery. And mystery, whatever else it is, does not even suggest reality. It just means that we don’t know.
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 Geoff Arnold  
 February 7, 2011 at 1:54 pm 
MacDonald, not MacDonalt – sorry.

 
 
 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 3:52 pm 
Ed. So where has anyone ‘identified’ understanding with rational explanation? But I don’t believe in mysticism although I appreciate you rather like Paul Davies. And no, I wasn’t ‘implying’ any such thing if I said what you have quoted, and I might indeed have said something similar at some time or another. I would have ‘implied’ exactly the opposite – they have everything to do with assessing evidence. And ‘inherited mistaken assumptions’ is taken out of context – it referred to Betz inheriting Bultmann’s assumptions formed in an environment in opposition to Nazi Germany.
Reply

 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 7:45 pm 
Ed: I read a couple of Fritjof Capra’s including the Tao of Physics obviously and Paul Davies including God and the New Phsyics, back in the early 90s. Various other more forgettable authors too. I was enamoured at the time but they lost their charm eventually. For me anyway.

 
 
 Ed Jones  
 February 7, 2011 at 10:09 pm 
The following quote for what it may be worth.
“Genuine mysticism, presisely to the extent that it is genuine, is perfectly capable of offering its own defence, its own evidence, and its own proofs. Indeed, that is exactly what the physicists in this volume proceed to do, without any need to compromise poor physics in the process.
 No, the audience I would like to reach is the same audience these physicists wanted to reach: the orthodox, the established, the men and women who honestly believe that natural scence can and will answer all questions worth askng. And so, in that orthdox spirit, I would simply ask, you of orthodox belief, you who pursue disinterested truth, you who – whether you know it or not – are molding the very face of the future with your scientific knowledge, you who – may I say so? – bow to physics as if it were religious truth, to you I ask: what does it mean that the founders of your modern science, the theorists and researchers who pioneered the very concepts you now worship implicitly, the very science presented in this volume, what does it mean that they were, every one of them, mystcis?
 Does that not stir something in you, curiosity at least? Cannot the spirit of these pioneers reach out across the decades and touch in you that “still small point” that moved them all to wonderment?
 The last thing these theorists would want you to surrender is your critical intellect, your hard-earned skepticism. For it was exactly through a sustained use of the critical intellect that these greatest of the physicists felt absolutely compelled to go beyond physics altogether. And as we will see, they left a trail, clear enough for all sinsitive souls to follow.” (Preface, Quantum Questions by Ken Wilber.)
Reply
 
 
 Herb Van Fleet  
 February 7, 2011 at 2:53 pm 
The problem, if there is a problem, is that here in the Western world, when we speak of God we mean, unless otherwise advised, the God of Abraham. And this Guy, as we all know, is a sumbitch.
Now, if you are brought up being brainwashed into thinking the bogeyman is lurking behind every corner, watching your every move, and waiting, just waiting for you to commit something called “sin,” thereby sealing your fate as a future and forever occupant of hell, then you are probably not going to be very receptive to a lesson in metaphysics, or cognitive science, or M-Theory, or modal logic. (Of course, those of us with the ability to think critically, and who tend to rely more on the findings of our left-brain, can dispatch this brainwashing problem much more easily than your average person in the pew.)
Believers believe they are protected in their belief by the shield made from their highly emotional investment in an unshakable faith. It is very much like the “Stockholm Syndrom.” Like that. Denying three thousand years of wishful thinking is hard work. Yes, the priests and preachers are intellectually dishonest and merely help perpetuate a lie, but, then, they are only human. Somebody has to tend to Voltaire’s invention.
Reply

 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 7:37 pm 
I don’t like to disagree with you Herb, and I may have misunderstood you, but that was my point. I don’t believe that alot of believers’ beliefs are static. Without advice even, the God of theists is often not the God of Abraham. It’s just the name they borrow to label that concept which they can’t describe. Just as I didn’t have, and didn’t need ‘advice’ in order not to believe in the biblical God or even necessarily the necessity of something other, I’ve learned that other people also have never been able to be believe in that biblical God, yet they need to express some sort of concept which they credit with the solutions to all the questions they have that science can’t explain or hasn’t yet explained. I just tend to think reality is probably alot more complicated than that and something that we inconsequential blips will never possess the power or science to fully explain despite our persistent enquiry and regardless of continuing scientific achievements and progress.
And no, not ALL priests and preachers are dishonest. Some actally do believe what they preach, and some don’t preach what they don’t believe. In fact I know personally two Presbyterian ministers in New Zealand who were kicked out of the church for preaching what they believed which was less than the rest of the church believed. That is, their sermons included stuff like Jesus didn’t literally rise from the dead, he wasn’t born of a virgin and the son of God is not meant to describe Jesus’ divinity. One of these ministers was charged in court for ‘heresy’ – famous last case against heresy in NZ 1967-9. The other has sense set up a ‘home church’ in which he gives services from his house to others who appreciate ‘religion’ without a biblical God or magical messiah figure. I have a friend in Yorkshire UK who is a Methodist minister, and hasn’t yet been kicked out by church or congregation for being more than a little unorthodox in his services. He’s honest, you see, and I suspect his congregation are intelligent people. I don’t actually know any other church preachers personally but I think to dismiss all as dishonest is completely unfair.
Reply

 Herb Van Fleet  
 February 8, 2011 at 5:15 pm 
Steph, I agree totally with what you say. And I do tend to over generalize, putting people in boxes they don’t belong in. But in my own defense, I live in the “Bible Belt” of America. In fact, I can see Oral Roberts University from my house. Just this week a bill was introduced in the Oklahoma legislature that would require creationism to be taught along side evolution in our public schools so students could be informed about “both theories.”
But, Oklahoma is not alone. A Gallup poll taken as recently as December 17th, 2010 showed that only 16% of Americans agreed that humans came about through natural evolution. 40% of those polled believe God created the earth and us about 10,000 years ago, and 30% were inclined to believe in intelligent design. (See http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_public.htm)
A much older poll conducted for Newsweek magazine in June, 1999, asked American adults whether they believed that Jesus would return during the next millennium — i.e. between years 2001 and 3000 CE. Results were: All persons: 52%, Evangelical Protestants: 71%, Non-Evangelical Protestants: 48%, Roman Catholics: 47%, and Non-Christians: 20%. (See http://www.religioustolerance.org/godpoll.htm)
This is a country where the evangelicals shoot abortion doctors and threaten employees of Planned Parenthood clinics. Many of them believe 9/11 was nothing less than God punishing us for gay rights. We have candidates running for president who don’t believe in evolution and 8 of our 9 Supreme Court Justices are strong Catholics. So, welcome to my world.
But, you’re right, I should have narrowed my criticism from the Western world to the United States and pared the believers in the Abrahamic God down to the Christian fundamentalists. When read in that context, perhaps my comments are a bit more appropriate.

 
 steph  
 February 8, 2011 at 8:11 pm 
I should add on reflection, the fact that none of the three mentioned ‘preachers of the church’ believe in or preach a biblical God. ‘God’ is used more as a term to encapsulate some sort of concept of some sort of indescribable eternal or whatever, ‘goodness’. And it’s so vague, in conversation, I don’t think even they are very sure about anything other than goodness. From a biblical perspective, they’re not only heretics, they are almost … atheists, but not really, and they certainly wouldn’t identify themselves as such. Agnostic yes, but not atheists.

 
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 February 7, 2011 at 7:45 pm 
I might add that the very distinguished John Hick was denied ordination in the Presbyterian Church USA, having been a staunch British style Church of Scotland type before he went to Claremont, because of views about religion that would strike an atheist as infantile. That is what we are up against. And I have to say, on a day to day basis, the posts I choose not to post are not coming from religious types. They are coming from the Kagin (the hairdryer guy) and PZ Myers culties. Libera nos Domine! (sorry)
Reply

 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 8:42 pm 
I remember the hair dryer cult unfundising or debaptising post. But who is PZ Myers? Someone important?
Reply
 
 steph  
 February 7, 2011 at 11:51 pm 
Infantile. What an odd thing to suggest about John Hick. Shame. He was a good friend of the late and wonderful, more recently (quiet) atheist Michael Goulder. I don’t think Michael thought his views infantile. Must read: Between Faith and Doubt, 2010. I admire the scholarship of both Hick and Goulder. I think their work reflects their impeccable honesty. I could not charge either with being ‘infantile’.
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 February 8, 2011 at 1:58 pm 
John Hick: “God purposes unconditionaly to guarantee the highest good and blessedness to each individual”. But with the following qualification: Ogden “generally accepts Hartshone’s neoclassical metaphysics in which divine power is conceived on a social rather than a monopolistic model. God acts persuasively”. “On a social model” must mean that God can only act within the mechanics of relationship. In the apparent weakness of having to wait on the human freely offered response and coorperation before He can actually do what he unconditionaly purposes. Thus we are caught in the Catch-22: God’s persuasive unconditional quarantee must wait for the feeely offered human response – at the least, for the first level of believing that He is,
 Steph, you may admire the scholarship of John Hick but unfortunatly you cannot believe in his God. How sad!

 
 steph  
 February 8, 2011 at 8:21 pm 
not at all – do I have to take on board every belief of every author I read? Michael Goulder was an atheist. Shakespeare was a critic of religion and believed far less than Hick, and even Hick isn’t consistent in his belief. I’d be pretty mixed up if I took on board all the religious and non religious beliefs of every author I admired. I’d be a little bit Muslim, a little bit witch, a complete feminist lesbian sexually obsessed nymphomanic nunnishly sexually repressed depressive introverted extrovert… How ridiculous is that Ed. Ridiculous Ed.

 
 steph  
 February 8, 2011 at 8:36 pm 
YOu know Ed – that’s actually incredibly patronising ‘how sad’ and in fact, it’s quite rude.

 
 
 
 Ed Jones  
 February 9, 2011 at 3:55 pm 
Steph,
 Apologies that my comment appeared “patronising and rude”. I made it from a state of utter dismay, having just posted a Feb. 7, 10:09 comment to your Feb 7, 9:45 pm comment. It seemed incomprehensible that this level of testimony from 8 of our greaest physicists, one being Einstein indisputably the best thinker of the 20th Centry, could be so flately dismissed. But you may not have read the 10:09 pm comment.
 In any case, I am an old man, a believer, in an alian centre, mistake prone – forgive.
Reply

 steph  
 February 9, 2011 at 4:23 pm 
Was your contribution meant to convert me to your flavour of faith or play some great and significant role in my life? Goodness me. “Incomprehensible”? How incredibly patronising. I read a great deal and appreciate many different insightful perspectives. Even I have read Einstein, Ed, so I don’t need your selected spoonfuls to digest for a first taste. I also have an independent mind and can form my own opinions.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 February 9, 2011 at 5:53 pm 
I adore both John and Michael. I’m sure Steph does too. They were miles apart “religious;y” (hard to use the term re Goulder) but there we are.

 
 steph  
 February 9, 2011 at 8:50 pm 
yes I do, and yes they are (or were, poor Michael – he suffered too, for a long time). But I ought to respectfully correct my reference to him – Michael never said he was an atheist: he very specifically identified himself as “a non-aggressive atheist” in view of the current unfortunate state of atheism (‘it’)…
Best useful quote from Michael I’ve used is “Matthew, … was a conventional Jewish male chauvinist.” (Luke: A New Paradigm, 221)
and just in case anyone thought of posting chunks from either in this comment thread, I’ve read everything both of them published except John’s latest which I’ve got on order. So no advance quotations to spoil my first reading.
BTW I no longer get pingbacks. About a month ago my twitchy finger clicked a cancel and I’ve somehow scrubbed my subscriptions to wordpress. I no longer get comment notices or updates on blogs. I’m not technical enough to work out how to resubscribe – it won’t let me when I try.

 
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 February 9, 2011 at 9:03 pm 
If I am not wrong, Michael was a favourite of Harry Stopes Roe and the BHA. I know Harry lionized him when I was there. I thought he was the best example of where studied disbelief takes a text. I do not believe in “secular” criticism, especially if it gets us to Hector (heh) Avalos–because all criticism ought to be. It’s a preposterous qualification.
Beyond this, I am not surprised that Shelley has proved too much for the old time atheists judging from hits. Pretty sure they fell asleep after three paragraphs. They will be spirited to know nudge nudge that they would never be sent down from Oxford for their atheism as they would never have arrived there with their grasp of the topic.
Reply

 steph  
 February 9, 2011 at 10:23 pm 
They were good friends I believe, and Michael was a former president of the Birmingham Humanists before Harry who I think might have actually succeeded him … ‘it’s a preposterous qualification’ I AGREE!!! We lament that often (James, Maurice and me). It’s frustrating and part of what makes this discipline so flawed. And Michael work on the synoptics is the best scholarship I’ve come across in that area. Reading his work was a major turning point for me.
I would have been surprised if they read the Shelley post at all. I wonder if they’d even heard of him before. Their hearts are set in stone I think. I don’t think they’ll ever mellow or want to share in something bigger – It would be nice if they had a great big paradisical island all of their own and they can snigger and bark and scratch together til Kingdom come and be happy little chappies together. Not that they get in the way of anything but they seem so unhappy and don’t want to be part of anything that involves people who don’t share their opinions about religions. And that does appear to be a large focus of their lives and organisations. Then those of us who want to can work together to build a better more ideal, significant humanist future for the world. With better education.
It’s appalling that the Oxford proctors ever sent someone down who had such obvious outstanding intellectual capabilities which he demonstrated in an undergraduate essay.
x
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Bertrand Russell Interviews St. Anselm of Canterbury
by rjosephhoffmann


BR: Thank you for being here, Bishop.
Anselm: Glad to be here. Glad to be anywhere after all this time.
BR: Just a few preliminaries: You are the author of this treatise, called Proslogion?
Anselm: Why yes. It’s my best work. Proslogium, please. And I never liked Professor Kant calling my argument “ontological”—it was never called that in my day.
BR: Oh, and what was in called in your day?
Anselm: Anselm’s Argument.
BR: I see. And in this treatise you propose what you call an air-tight and foolproof argument for the existence of God?

Anselm: Well, air-tight is your word. I said fool- proof. I had to deal with Guanilo you see, a real fool, albeit a Benedictine. There was not such a thing as air tight in my day. Things were draughty.
BR: My impression is that your case for God is a bit draughty as well, but for the record, could you state what your argument is, exactly?
Anselm: Yes, of course. God exists.
BR: That’s not an argument, that’s a statement.
Anselm: No it’s a proof, strictly speaking.
BR: How is it a proof?
Anselm: Well, where do you think I got the word God from?
BR: From your head.
Anselm: Exactly, and how do you think it got there?
BR: You thought it. You made it up.
Anselm: No. You see, I couldn’t: because when I say God I mean the highest possible thing, si quid digne dici potest as we used to say.

BR: But how do you know it’s the “highest possible thing.”
Anselm: The highest possible thing one can conceive.
BR: Conceive where? In one’s head? There’re other places you can conceive things.
Anselm: No, dear boy, if it’s only in my head it isn’t very high is it? I’m only about five feet tall myself. A little taller when I wear my bishop hat.
BR: So, it’s in your head because he put it there?
Anselm: Who?
BR: God.
Anselm: You see, it’s in your head too. It couldn’t very well be in both our heads unless we could think it. Could it? I mean I can think unicorn and you can think balderdash there ain’t no bleeding unicorn, and one of us would be right.
BR: Which one?
Anselm: Why the one who says there isn’t of course
BR: And why not the other? You see, I have always thought your argument favoured unicorns and lost islands.

Anselm: Because neither of us has seen such things?
BR: Because no one has seen God either—that’s just my point.
Anselm: Well of course. But God isn’t a unicorn is he?
BR: No I never said he was—I mean if he existed he wouldn’t be. In fact, I don’t know what he would be because I have an idea of what a unicorn looks like and I know what a paradise island looks like–it looks like Tahiti–but I can’t say I have any such notion of this greater-than-anything being of yours.
Anselm: Well, theoretically you could see a unicorn if they existed. But God is very much bigger. Takes up all my thinking space, really.
BR: Exactly How much bigger than a non-existent unicorn is God?
Anselm: Ah! That’s where my argument comes in. Infinitely greater, greater than anything else you can think. Greater than my bishop hat, greater than anything that is or ever can be.
BR: You said bigger a moment ago and highest before that. What is it? Trees can be big and birds can fly high. Is God bigger than the biggest tree? Does he fly higher than a soaring eagle?
Anselm: I’m quite sure I didn’t. You are mincing my words. I meant greater. God is not an infinitely big thing but a being that is greater than anything you can think of. Is the picture forming for you now?

BR: You know bishop, this is all gas formed into words but it still comes out vapour. It doesn’t really matter whether you say “bigger” or “greater” if you can’t see this God and have no idea what an infinitely great being would be. I think he has crowded logic and reason right out of your head. You have no idea of such a being.
Anselm: Of course I do; I do have an idea of it. It’s amazing.
BR: But you are using a comparative degree, bishop—“greater than” as in 5 > 4? What in the realm of being are you referring to, either in your head or out of your head—popes > donkeys, though I shouldn’t be too sure of that last analogy.
Anselm: Ah, that’s’ the beauty of my argument: I don’t need analogy or examples or instances at all. Begins here, in my noggin. That than which nothing greater can be thought can be thought. If that than which nothing greater can be thought can be thought, it exists in reality, so that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in reality.
BR: You are still talking about popes and donkeys in my view. You have to start somewhere—why not with amoebae—and go upwards with it and end up saying, Well, that’s just about it: can’t think of anything higher than the sky—whoops–just did. I thought higher than the sky. So that’s greater and it must exist too.

Anselm: No, you’re leaving out my exceedingly clever use of “greater,” because when I say “greater” I really mean perfection and for something to be great in the sense of perfection it would need to exist, wouldn’t it? I can add on other things later, like goodness and knowledge and changelessness, because perfection, I mean absolute greatness, needs those attributes too.
BR: No, not if it didn’t exist in the first place. Or exists only in the head of some episcopal gasbag who needs his hat refitted to restore circulation to his brain. What you’ve created is a divine-attribute-generating machine in the sky who exists in the same way a sausage-generating machine exists to make sausages. Except the universe isn’t a sausage. And you can’t see your machine.
Anselm: I didn’t say sky, you did. And I haven’t even got to the universe yet. Allow me now to examine God’s impassibility, timelessness, and simplicity…
BR: It’s all very…obscure, isn’t it?
Anselm: You think this is obscure? Thank God we’ll both be dead when Rowan Williams sits in my chair.

The Archbishop of Canterbury
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Published: February 12, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Anselm : Bertrand Russell. Philosophy of Religion : Ontological Argument : Rowan Williams ..
8 Responses to “Bertrand Russell Interviews St. Anselm of Canterbury”

.
 Bill Warrant  
 February 12, 2010 at 10:13 pm 
Haha, nice!
Reply
 
And now for something completely different: an ontological argument for God that invokes Rowan Williams « Anglican Samizdat says: 
 February 13, 2010 at 6:15 pm 
[...] Russell, having not made out too well in his debate with Frederick C. Copleston, interviews Anselm who drags in Rowan as an example of something more obscure and intrinsically pleonastic than both [...]
Reply
 
 steph  
 February 14, 2010 at 9:42 pm 
Love it, brilliant. Love that Gauguin too.
Funny looking growth on the rims of that yellow druid’s glasses.
Reply
 
 Christopher B.  
 March 4, 2010 at 7:48 am 
Useful insights. I love to read through your writing. Normally interesting topics, as well as great research. It is best to be putting lots of time into your blog.
Reply
 
 Ed Jones  
 March 6, 2010 at 8:51 pm 
I take this opportunity to again reference my letter to R.Joseph Hoffmann. It constitutes a reconstruction of the Jesus tradition as a whole. It is developed upon sufficient quotes from the works of Schubert Ogden, James M. Robinson and Hans Dieter Betz to make the claim that it reflects their Understanding.
 It is located on A New Oxonia – The Importance of the Historical Jesus – 10 Comments. Several of the Comments are panic responses when it seemed the letter might not be published thus, to be ignored. Edting is poor but it can be read.
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 March 30, 2011 at 12:01 pm 
Should someone by chance care to read the above referenced 13 comments containing the letter to Joe, as of today, it is found at: The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodlibet
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 March 30, 2011 at 12:12 pm 
The March 6th comment erroneously read 10 comments.
 I cain’t explain “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”

 
 
 
 Ktdxyonh  
 July 4, 2011 at 8:30 am 
rose anklet tattoo,
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Is there a God? Swinburne v. Hoffmann
by rjosephhoffmann

The following is a transcript of the first portion (prepared statements) of a debate between me and Professor Richard Swinburne, emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford University, held at Florida State University in 2006. Further portions will be posted as I decipher my own handwriting.
 _________________________________________

I thank the sponsors of this event for bringing me all the way from early winter in Buffalo to late fall in Tallahassee for this discussion. This is homecoming for me, since I graduated from a certain local illustrious university, in the last century, before moving on to Harvard Divinity School and later to Oxford.
I don’t know whether this makes me a black sheep or a favorite son, but whatever the case it is nice to be back. It is also nice to share space with Professor Swinburne. While I have FSU in common with many of you, I have the Oxford theological tradition (if there is only one) in common with him.
Let me say at the outset that you should put aside any assumptions you may have about this being a debate between an atheist and a believer. It is a debate about what we can know and meaningfully say about God.
I maintain that there is no difference between a God who does not exist and a God about whom nothing can be known. That being so, what we know and “where” we know it from becomes immeasurably important. I’ll come back to that in a couple of minutes.
The theme of this debate is posed as a question, Is there a God? rather than as a proposition such as God Exists. I am going to say that there is no God, and I am going to make this case using the following premises: As I do so, please keep in mind that argumentation is not the exclusive property of philosophers. I was trained as an historical theologian, and historical argument figures heavily in what I want to say. Moreover, the problem of God is too important to be left to philosophers.

Duns Scotus
First: All existence is historical and the existence of persons is historical. (Hic Rhodus hic salta.)
All real existence is historical and we do not know things outside history. By historical I do not mean merely temporal. Temporal means literally existing in time and refers to duration. It means a measurement, so that my temporal span upon earth might be 90 years or 60 years. Relatively speaking, I favor 90. But my temporal life is pretty boring and flat. Historical existence supplies the content; it’s literally the story of my life as a person—an individual with drives, and habits, and the ability to act more or less freely.
My personal life—my life as a person–is more than temporal. It can be told as a story with a beginning, middle and end. I can tell it, or someone else can tell it. But the requirement for telling it is my historical existence.
I can also lie about things to do with this historical existence. I can tell my biographer than I won a Pulitzer prize, when I didn’t, had seven children when I had none, loved to kayak when I have never been near the water, and enjoy opera when I only listen to country music. If I am the author of my history, I will know what is true and what is not (as Abraham did when he lied about his relationship with Sarah in Egypt). If my biographer is a good historian, there are ways in which he can find out whether I am lying.
 
In short, historical existence means the ability to test what we say about historical persons. And all real existence, even the existence of the universe, is historical in that, more or less, its story can be told.
Second: Not all stories are the stories of real persons. By design or through error, writers of history can also invent false persons, not just false bits of true histories as we find, for example, in Herodotus. When this is done innocently, for explanatory purpose—say in trying to explain floods, diseases, or the origins of the universe or the origin of different languages, things which have not always been explainable in scientific terms—we call the story myth.
Myths are not always understood by their hearers as false stories. They are often written down, regarded with reverence because time invests them with authority. They are thought to be true, in the sense they possess meaning and value.
And myths are not only very old but are set in ages before the ages began—not just once upon a time but “In the Beginning,” or “When on High.” Myths alone can tell stories about primordial time because history relies on knowledge gleaned from records, preferably records contemporary with the events described. No records of the beginning of time exist, except in mythology.
Even if myths are regarded as true, or sacred, by the believers in a religious community, they are false in the sense that they are populated by false persons and events. That is why very devout Christians will ordinarily reject the assertion that the Genesis creation story is a myth: because they accept the idea that myths are false with respect to actual persons and events.
False persons come in different shapes and sizes. Santa Claus is a false person, and not only that but one whose existence you are encouraged to reject at age six. If you still believe in him at age forty, your mother will have a talk with you. Probably the psychiatrist and the parish priest too. You may argue that you know his story by heart, the names of his reindeer, that you have always received presents at Christmas, and that you can sing seven different songs about him being jolly and fat. But the psychiatrist will say “You are wrong.” There is no such person. There is just a story.
Rumplestiltskin is a false person. The six-foot rabbit called Harvey that Elwood P. Dowd talks to is a false person. We say they are false because the prima facie evidence for their existence, their story, is false. Mind you, it has temporal existence—it has lasted—but the story itself is false. I might also mention that some false persons, like Odysseus and Abraham, are so vivid that we want them to be true, and that others like the biblical God are so entrenched in psyche and society that we wish them to be true.
The degree of enthusiasm for wanting false persons to be true persons has no bearing on their existence.

Harvey and Dowd
Once you have given up Santa Claus and six-foot rabbits, you will hardly be distressed to know that the gods are false.
Prometheus did not spoil Zeus’s plan for a tranquil world of immortal bliss. He is a false person. Leda was not really ravished by Zeus in swan form because both are false persons. With a little practice, you will have no difficulty in rejecting out of hand the creation stories of the Mixtex Indians, the story of Pangu creating the world from his body or the perfecting of the first world by Nuwo, all of Norse mythology, and the story of the flood in the Gilgamesh.
You will reject the gods and heroes as false persons who nevertheless are enshrined in stories that were believed widely and tenaciously in their time and culture. What caused their rejection is a better and more compelling story that made better sense of the information at hand. The innate skepticism that characterizes homo curiosus led to better and more adequate explanations of how things came to exist and we came to exist as a species on this planet.
Historically speaking, explanation of all events moves away from god and the gods, not towards a singular omni-purpose god as the explanation of all events.
At some point, a skeptical professor of religion will say to you (maybe even an Oxford theologian) that the Bible also “contains” myths, and that the core myth is the myth of a god named Yahweh, molded from the gods of Hebrew tribal lore, who made the world, established the stars in their orbit, destroys it out of frustration at human sin, promises to redeem it, after destroying it yet again, sometime (but not next week), and in the meantime watches unslumberingly over Israel.
He might also say, depending on how brave he is and where he teaches, that many—not all—of the biblical heroes are false persons, like the false persons of other mythologies.
He may stop at the acknowledgment of particular falsities, or he may go further.
To go further is to say that the god of the Bible is a false person, like the gods of other mythological narratives with their odd blend of real place names, plausible battles, lovely poetry, ritual and law.
Yahweh, like the procession of gods before and around him, is a false person embedded in a story about his dealing with the world, the raqia (firmament) he is said to have created. I am not sure Professor Swinburne would put it quite this way, but it is clear to many people and quietly agreeable to many more that the God of the Bible is a false person. He has never existed historically, temporally, or supertemporally. His story, of course, does exist. It is a myth made by human hands. It did not exist even four thousand years ago.
Let me put this another way. True persons are persons whose story is more than imaginary, persons whose reality, actions, attributes, and identity can be established using the normal laws of historical evidence. Put bluntly, they have an existence outside their story, just as any story about me or Charlemagne is an expression, a snapshot, not the same thing as me or Charlemagne. There are billions of real persons who have really existed outside any story about them. But there are only millions who have existed both in story and in fact. And there are many thousands of stories about persons who have never existed, whose stories are so improbable that they disprove rather than support their historical reality. If Adam and Eve really existed, their story would not be the same as their actual existence. If they did not exist, then they are false persons, the same as Zeus and Pangu. But it is, in fact, their story that establishes their falsity.

God evicting Adam and Eve
Third: If the God of Christian theism is a false person his existence is a conceptual existence, an imaginary existence. The idea, which evolves, of supreme or maximal greatness attached to this being (by theologians like Anselm, for instance) must also be false. Moreover his falseness can be demonstrated using simple if seemingly superficial tests: He is not heard of apart from his story. He shares his attributes and parts of his story with his neighbor gods whose stories are equally improbable. His story, in keeping with the pattern of false stories generally, is inconsistent and contradictory, even in terms of describing him.
But I acknowledge that even if I could get agreement that the god of the Bible is a false person, I would not have proved that there is not a god, just that there is not this god, the Lord god of armies (hosts), whose name is Mighty.
Fourth: The God of theology and the God of the philosophers is a rewritten myth, but forms part of the same account of God.
Early Christian theology borrowed certain philosophical ideas from classical thought, so that the whole project became an attempt to construct a philosophically plausible god from the frustratingly deficient god of story and Hebrew myth.
For example, using the so called Omni-properties of God that date back to the Greek idea of Zeus the all-seeing, Christian theologians preferred using the so called via eminentiae to describe their remodeled god: God is omnipotent. They do this with the aid of biblical texts. Doesn’t St. Matthew say With God all things are possible? Yes, But doesn’t the book of Judges say that “the Lord was with Judah” but was “unable to drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron”—Yahweh, not yet having developed his powers of omniscience, defeated in battle by armies with superior technology and espionage? Again, yes.
The theologians claimed that God is omniscient, though a core biblical myth records that he changed his mind about what to do with mankind and was “sorry he ever decided to create men upon the earth” (Gen. 6.7)–not only not omniscient, but not far-sighted.

Noah's ark, complete with chimney
The medieval Church insisted that, like Plato’s Good, the God of revelation is immutable, unchanging, but then drove its theologians to distraction trying to show how god could be ontologically changeless, yet go from being fatherless to a father, satisfied to angry, creator to destroyer, punishing judge to redeemer.
I am not going to go into the inconsistencies of the biblical text–the biblical contradictions–with the glee of a nineteenth century village atheist because this is precisely the kind of thing one expects in stories about false persons–that is to say, what we expect of mythology. Christianity offered to solve this problem by closing the book and breaking God into three persons and then gluing him back together in the trinity as a union in “essence”—father/creator-son/redeemer-holy spirit—well who knows really. But three has been a nice number for philosophy since antiquity.
The “classical” way of thinking about God as timeless and changeless—eternal and immutable if you like theological terms–comes from Plato in part and partly, a bit later, from Aristotle–especially those bits that imagine god as a being known from effects and identifiable with causes.
Many believers have no interest at all in this God because he is too abstract or intellectual, too “ideal,” not the robust God of hymn, war and Bible story. And yet, from an early period, Christian theology tried to fuse ideas from classical philosophy to sacred scripture—to its particular revelation, taking the untidy remnants of the religious past and repackaging them as “teaching.”

Much—most–of theology is the history of that effort. Mind you, the “person” we get at the end is still the false person we started with. But it is a story now being told by (chiefly) men with changed interests, people for whom the god of the Bible was no longer enough to explain the complexities of the theology they had invented for themselves, the theological tasks they had set for themselves—in short, inconsistent with their project.
The god of the bible, if not an inconvenience or a metaphor, was (at least) inconvenient and slightly embarrassing.
Conclusion: I extend the notion of false personhood, therefore, to any attempt, however distant to the biblical God it may stand, to identify a personal god possessed of attributes, maxi or mini, or to claim for this being individuality, agency, purpose, and action, however direct, however indirect.
Because I include theology as part of his story, I claim that the falseness of his story undermines and defeats the possibility of there being an equivalent or similar person resembling him: that is, the demonstrable false personhood of the God of Christian theism offers significant reason to think there is no other god corresponding in attributes to this God.
Not coincidentally, since we define monotheism as the reduction of the belief in many specialized gods to the belief in one supreme all-purpose god, such as the God of the Bible, establishing that this God does not exist is really the same as establishing that no God exists.
This is true whether we simply acknowledge that there is no position less than monotheism that would leave us a god to believe in (what whole number is less than 1?) or whether we say that most–virtually all—debates about the existence of God in the philosophy of religion and theology have really been debates about this god and not some other god.
But this claim is not radical. It is simply a matter of common sense suffocated by the pretext that a specious philosophical god can out- last the discussion of historicity.

Think back to Santa Claus, who is “kind of” omniscient, knowing who’s naughty and nice, but not really (maybe he has spies under your bed) or perhaps he just knows. If I say to you, as a matter of conscience: “Okay, Santa doesn’t live at the north pole, doesn’t have reindeer that fly, doesn’t squeeze down three billion chimneys between sunrise in Australia and sundown in Topeka, but that’s no reason not to believe in a thin man in a blazer in Miami who supports the Christian Children’s Fund with generous donations and it is precisely the same guy,” you will say—“No, it’s not: that’s not Santa Claus.”
Similarly, if I say the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who spoke to Moses in a fiery bush, parted the Red Sea waters, spoke through the prophets, destroyed Sodom and sent his only son into the world as the expiation for sin doesn’t exist, but can I interest you in a god who is 52% probable (Richard Swinburne’s better-than-even-chance estimate of God’s real existence) to explain the orderliness of the universe, our intelligent perception of it, human life on this planet, and some other stuff as well, you would be right to be skeptical. It’s not the same thing.
The difference between a God who has none  of the attributes of his myth and a God who does not exist is 0.
The god of Christian theism is fatally vulnerable to this assessment.
The history of God does not permit us to think of God at a discounted rate, as a person whose existence explains everything and who acts in such and such a way in relation to balance, proportion and logic, such that everything works out the way it does. This God cannot be used as the explanation of anything-–let alone everything–because he is himself completely unexplained—indeed, more unexplained than the biblical god who was assigned the personality of a temperamental king, a petty tyrant who played favorites and enjoyed arbitrary displays of power.

Yahweh on his chariot (coin)
That kind of god, even if preposterous when projected onto the global screen of philosophy and science, is at least more comprehensible than a God who is nothing more than the sum total of solutions to the problems his existence entails. Swinburne’s god, who is said to explain “everything there is and not just some narrow range of data” is that kind of god.
To summarize: God is a false person whose story runs from the purely mythological to pseudo-philosophical attempts to restate and revise the primitive data. The suggestion that God is a false person is not based on classical atheist objections to the existence of God but on historical judgment that weighs heavily against the view that God exists.
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Published: February 18, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Atheist debates : God exists : Is there a God? Religion : Philosophy of Religion : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Swinburne : the Great Debate ..
3 Responses to “Is there a God? Swinburne v. Hoffmann”

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 vajrakrishna  
 May 10, 2010 at 10:43 pm 
Premise: The universe is infinite potential energy manifesting as finite kinetic energy.
Alright. Firstly, I will validate the premise. The Universe that you see before you is finite kinetic energy – it always will be finite, there is no possibility of it ever being infinite in kinetic energy because to become kinetic in and of itself comprises of depth and space, and more specifically, distances. It comprises of an “edge” to the physical Universe, no matter how much or how fast it is growing. It may have started from nothing and exploded out, but there will always be that outer-edge to its growth. This is an aspect of empirical science. “Energy is not created or destroyed, merely transformed.”
Which leaves us with the first part of the premise – when energy lies in potential it is infinite.
Manifested energy, that is; kinetic energy, can only ever be finite, but that does not speak for unmanifest energy. You cannot use the finite nature of manifest kinetic energy as proof of finite potential energy, as it is not necessarily so.
Seeing as even empty space is seen to contain energy per cubic centimeter, and that empty space is infinite (because it is after all, pure void), that does posit the possibility of infinite potential energy.
Further to the point, the very fact that any amount of kinetic energy is allowed to create vast distances (thus giving depth and space to the void), it is plausible that kinetic energy could expand outwards continuously and never reach a “limit” as the void that it is filling up is infinite.
Infinite potential energy is no less reasonable or probable than assuming finite potential energy, however infinite potential energy holds a lot more answers for the wisdom of gnosis. You’d be closing yourself off to an entire avenue of investigation for no good reason, especially an avenue that focuses on Self-Realisation.
To add to that, also consider that attempts to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the Universe has never quite worked out, because the Universe is not behaving as a closed-space.
“It has been claimed that the second law means that the universe as a whole must tend inexorably towards a state of entropy. By an analogy with a closed system, the entire universe must eventually end up in a state of equilibrium, with the same temperature everywhere. The stars will run out of fuel. All life will cease. The universe will slowly peter out in a featureless expanse of nothingness. It will suffer a “heat-death.” This bleak view of the universe is in direct contradiction to everything we know about its past evolution, or see at present. The very notion that matter tends to some absolute state of equilibrium runs counter to nature itself. It is a lifeless, abstract view of the universe. At present, the universe is very far from being in any sort of equilibrium, and there is not the slightest indication either that such a state ever existed in the past, or will do so in the future. Moreover, if the tendency towards increasing entropy is permanent and linear, it is not clear why the universe has not long ago ended up in a tepid soup of undifferentiated particles.”
http://www.marxist.com/science-old/arrowoftime.html
“The reason why our universe remains Ordered is simply because it is part of an infinite perpetual system, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies to Closed systems (not infinite systems)”
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/cosm…aw-thermodynamics-time.htm
So now – the implications:
1. It is simultaneously infinite and finite; Well, that sure would explain the thousands of years of intuitive Eastern wisdom, which, in a nutshell, urge us to drop the finite nature of distinctions, distances and thoughts and focus on the gap between the thoughts until we experience that infinite potentiality. The claim is that there is a different kind of knowledge within that infinite potentiality, but experiencing it requires the use of introspective faculties. What makes the claim worthy of investigation is that it has been corroborated independently by several sources, making it empirically verifiable, albeit with some effort.
2. In its kinetic reality of cause/effect and distances between points in space, it is bound by time. In the reality of its infinite potentiality, it is timeless; Gather that in Eastern wisdom, which is actually not polytheist, God is another term for this unborn – unmanifest… potentiality. This potentiality is not simply an energetic state, but a state of awareness. Of being conscious and still (not riddled with a mass of jumbled cyclic thoughts). In its potentiality, it is timeless and thus ever present. It is simply that the notion of past and future are rendered redundant, because they are elements of kinetic distance, and thereby not wholistic.
3. Objective and subjective simultaneously; That is to say, kinetic reality is about points of view and perspective. Within the realms of a kinetic universe, only subjectivity is possible. Objectivity, however, is to not be saddled with a point of view. As mentioned, several methods of practice are given for a sentient to experience the dropping of “points of view.” It only takes investigation on your part to see for yourself. At this point I can understand that the dropping of points of view seem like an impossibility. But not in an infinite potentiality. It renders the possibility, but also the necessity for Self-Awareness.
Terms like “Know Thyself” aren’t a reference to knowing what ice cream you like or what your favorite color is. It is a reference to Gnosis.
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 Proving What? « The New Oxonian says: 
 May 29, 2012 at 10:18 am 
[...] at Florida State University in 2006. A relatively complete transcript of my opening remarks was posted online in 2010. In case it is not clear, I took the contra side, arguing against the [...]
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no fear? « thelocutionaryact says: 
 June 7, 2012 at 4:56 pm 
[...] From here. [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


The Jesus Prospect
by rjosephhoffmann


The indefinite suspension of the Jesus Project by its original sponsor, the Center for Inquiry, was a serious blow to an effort that had reached a critical point and was in need of an infusion of trust and money.
Funding such a project appears to have been a factor in its “relative” demise. It’s also true, however, that certain organizations suffer from a kind of chronic indecisiveness about the core premises of their existence and hence the causes they want to support. The Jesus Project in my view was simply an illustration of where a messy mission statement and messier programming gets you. The JP was naturally suspect in the press and among biblical professionals of having an axe to grind because its providing organization ground axes, usually for the purpose of cutting the heads off religious truth claims.
In the long run, no harm done. Groundbreaking (and who doesn’t hate that word) scholarship is actually more common without the razzmatazz of conferences and media hits–through the normal and often isolated networking habits we develop as scholars and critics. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Jesus Project was trending (like the Jesus Seminar before it) to produce not a conclusion but Jesus Vishnu, a god with multiple faces, disguises, incarnations and questionable plausibility.

I was once asked why the Jesus Seminar was so much more visible than the Project and my answer, which was halting, was that the Seminar, while Robert Funk lived, had a better press agent. A little like Paul was to Jesus.
As a matter of fact, online, offline, in a series of articles for the popular web-journal Bible and Interpretation, and in ordinary conversation, I spent more time defending the Project than developing it.
However Jesus would have come out of this inquisition, it would have been the equivalent of a new scourging and crowning with thorns, if not an outright crucifixion. The sensationalist clatter that greeted the announcement of the project in 2007-“What if the Most Significant Man in Human History Never Existed?“–was enough to send chills up the spines of thoughtful men and women who reasoned that scientific investigation began with an accumulation of evidence and not with conclusions in search of support. We have seen bibliosensationalism for decades now, and it seems to be getting worse each year. It’s about selling newspapers and the Christmas week edition of Time, not scholarship.
Felix culpa, then, that the suspension of the Project has worked out well for those of us who felt CFI was simply not “scholarly” enough, not academically credible enough, and not neutral enough to sponsor such an inquiry. This is not to say that what they do they do not do well. But biblical research and historical inquiry, even in their most radical, secular and revisionist forms belongs in a different circle. Ideally it begins in the seminar room, not a marketing session and is driven by the desire to know or discover something, not the opportunity to get flakes and nutters on the same platform with dues-paying scholars.
 
That is what most of those associated with the project thought before the freeze, what the freeze confirmed, and what set many of us looking for alternatives more suited to the currents and trends in New Testament studies. That is where the Jesus Prospect comes in.
The name reflects the state of the question that the Jesus Project was trying to address: it is an historical issue. It is not a question that was going to be answered by men and women whose minds were made up, some of them laying out new documentary hypotheses, some of them assuming the essential historicity of the gospel story, and some of them fundamentally committed to the doctrine of a mythical Jesus. Here there be monsters. Or more precisely, here there be three different games being played, each with its own set of rules, but using the same all-purpose ball.
I am happy to be working with New Testament scholar Stephanie Fisher in re-writing the script and continuing the work we had begun. We will be making an announcement of consultation members very soon. This space should be watched for who is in and who is not (Matthew 22.14). But unlike the Jesus Project, we want to avoid any impression that results are dictated by foregone (or are they forlorn?) conclusions or that an earth-shattering result is at hand.

D F Strauss, an original myther of sorts
At a speech in Berkeley given by Richard Dawkins last year, the papal atheist was asked why he didn’t debate creationists. He smiled like the cat who knows the canary cage is wide open and that a bird sits tremulously on its perch inside. “For the same reason a geneticist wouldn’t debate a believer in the stork theory,” he announced to the approval of the audience.
That is why the Jesus Prospect must be restated and restarted as an evaluation of evidence, not bullish hypotheses that have been held by their postulators with the same zeal Catholics propose local saints for the calendar.
In fact, there is a good prospect that Jesus of Nazareth existed. It is the most efficient explanation for the gospels, the writings of Paul and the formation of gospels and the church. There is a possibility he did not. The thin possibility cannot be supported by sweeping away the gospels like so much Palestinian debris that occludes a master-theory, anymore than the uncertainty of who the Scythians were proves that Herodotus made them up. I am of one mind with April DeConick when I assay the work of the “mythers”–the born again pre-committed–a term I don’t like very much, but in an odd way one that points to the hollowness of many of the non-historicity arguments.

Jesus Christ or a Jesus Impersonator?
And let me reiterate what I have said, and what’s been blogged about far too much. I don’t know what really happened, the Archimedean point at which Christianity “began.” I think I could construct a perfectly plausible if not indefeasible argument for the non-existence of Jesus. I can do this by ignoring the bare story of the gospels and concentrating instead on the political and literary needs and the quiver-ful of analogous myths of the early church, the door through which Christ entered as savior. But the savior the mythers begin with is not the historical Jesus, and perhaps the Jesus of the gospels has already achieved that status. Everyone (almost) agrees that most of Jesus is a myth of the church, and even the church trades on the mythical power of a name that is basically unhistorical. We don’t need to convince scholars of that. They know it already, and rather wonder why it’s such a big deal to mythers. It’s really a question of knowing where to begin.

Methodologically (if I can be brave) there are two problems. Despite considerable changes to this pattern in the last century (namely an awareness after Walter Bauer that Christianity was not one thing but many, virtually from its cultic origin) there are those scholars who focus too much on the New Testament as a self-authenticating corpus of evidence waiting to be explained through context and various forms of criticism. And there are those, although still a minority, who use context to explain almost everything, particularly the arousal of the religious interests that lead to the New Testament (and the literature of other groups, such as the gnostics). The Jesus assumed to exist as an historical figure exists in the canon of the former. The Jesus of the mythers and pangnosticists exists in penumbra of the latter.
The Jesus Prospect is essentially, in the French sense, an essay–a try–at developing a middle way where the obvious influence of Judaic and Hellenistic belief and the myths that enfold it do not totally suffocate the prospect of an historical Jesus, and the primacy of canon does not totally obliterate the prospect of a savior god who became historicized as a matter of religious evolution, from cult to church.
The headline “Jesus never existed” is not the end-game of this process. But an insistence on the importance of a hearing and verdict on the best available evidence is. And while you are keeping things in mind, keep this in mind: it is almost inevitably true that the result of such an investigation will not pay big dividends. No one will ever be able to render a “scientific” conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth was made up. It is waste of time to try. The proof of this axiom is its opposite: No one–at least no one interested in doing this kind of work or addressing this kind of question–has been convinced by the discovery of the “tombs” of the Jesus dynasty or the Nazareth domiciles. No reputable scholar feels that the Jesus of the Gospel of Judas is any more historical than the canonical Jesus (and perhaps vice versa) or the Jesus of Nag Hammadi.
Increasingly, scholars are returning to question whether the existence of “Q” is more a quest for the grail than a quest for a real document. I count among my friends many who have memorized two, four, and twelve source theories with the enthusiasm ordinarily reserved for a good bottle of wine. But in my opinion, the search for Q ended with Austin Farrer; its reconstructions have been fanciful. And they have been the greatest distraction in New Testament studies for almost a century.

Negative as these tendencies are, they are very healthy tendencies because they show that skepticism is not dead, that a will to find out more is still alive It shows that quick-fix radical, and quick-fix apologetic faith-engendering and overly speculative studies may not win the day, even in the study of the Bible. What hath Schweitzer wrought?
Information about the Prospect and its literary program can be obtained by writing to me, rjosephhoffmann@gmail.com The remains of the Jesus Project are collected in a volume to be published by Prometheus Books in August 2010, The Sources of the Jesus Tradition.
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Published: February 27, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Center for Inquiry : historical jesus : Jesus Project : myth theory : New Testament : Q : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
57 Responses to “The Jesus Prospect”

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 Antonio Jerez  
 March 2, 2010 at 11:44 am 
Joseph,
 keep up the work! And hope you haven´t missed the heated debate we have had the last month on James McGrath´s blog about the Jesus mythers.
 I´m also glad to see that you are as sceptical as me about Q – this wondrous hypothetical document that gives free reins for everybody from Earl Doherty to Burton Mack to speculate about Jesus. It is ironic that a prominent Jesus myther like Neil Godfrey thinks there is evidence for Q1, Q2 and Q3 while claiming that there is no evidence for Jesus of Nazareth.
Reply
 
 Bill Warrant  
 March 3, 2010 at 9:42 am 
Antonio,
Why are you misrepresenting Godfrey? He does not favor the Q hypothesis.
Reply
 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 3, 2010 at 11:30 am 
Joseph,
 am I really misrepresenting Neil Godfrey´s position on Q. I doubt it. And maybe this quote from Neil´s blog 19 Ferbruary this year may refresh your memory. Neil wrote:
“Antonio, there is evidence for Q and evidence for the various layers of Q1, 2 and 3.”
And as I said to Neil when I bed farewell to further participation on his blog; I don´t find it wortwhile discussing with people who think there is more evidence for Q3 than a Galilean Jew crucified under Pilate. Neil really showed his credentials as a “historian” there.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 4, 2010 at 2:29 pm 
This is having your Q and eating it. Even if there were Q, it would no more prove the historicity of Jesus than the questions of Arjuna to Krishna prove the historicity of either. Religions produce sayings, and thus sayings sources. But in fact we do not need Q. I happen to “think” (not believe) there was an historical Jesus, but I do this as a closet Ockhamite and not as someone who thinks that if we just lay another hand to the shovel we will dig something up. And I certainly do not think that the literary archaeology expended on the matter has been worth it. The whole Did he or Didn’t he (live) is the wrong way to approach the subject, and why I think the Jesus Prospect (about which more soon) is the only way forward. But as to Godfrey, hmmm–what’s on the plate after Q3.
Reply

 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 4:58 pm 
Joseph,
 if you personally think speculating about wether Jesus actually existed or didn´t exist is the wrong way to aproach the subject, then why did you include people like Carrier or Thompson in the Jesus Project? Or wasn´t the Jesus Project not meant to start from scratch? Including the possibility that Jesus never existed.

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 5, 2010 at 9:43 pm 
It’s a fair question, but I never said that such speculation should be discounted–only that people interested in the question should not be peddling master-theories in the absence of a solid knowledge pf the history of the problem. Frankly, I find that many of the modern myth theorists don’t start from scratch but from a rather narrow set of premises, most of them derived from ppp– pretty pedestrian pyrrhonism–about the gospels. It’s very hard to apply the values of a hard headed empirical historian to the gospels and come out with anything but flotsam (see Carrier’s essay in Sources of J-Trad. when it appears–a good essay, but one that bears out my assessment). Even outrageous opinions should be given the time of day, but no more standing than that. There is nothing ontological about the standing of the myth theory, and my sense is that people who hold it tend to think that all other opinions are mystical or faith-driven.

 
 neilgodfrey  
 March 6, 2010 at 10:55 pm 
I don’t understand what is meant by “myth theory” in these sorts of discussions. Is there a “historical (or other) theory” which would allow some sort of comparison and contrast? You speak of the ontology of the “standing” of “the myth theory”, but what is this “theory”? This is something I have attempted to address elsewhere recently, and it seems confusion of this is either a cause or an outcome of a lot of hostility in the discussion generated.
I don’t know what to make of the idea of ppp approaches to the gospels. I thought the arguments usually started with much earlier evidence than those. My own comments about the historical value of the gospels have nothing to do with scepticism for its own sake or the gospels themselves in particular, but are derived from attempting to apply normal standards of external controls to documents, and avoiding circularity. There does seem to be a certain degree of exceptionalism claimed for methods applied to NT historical studies. If the methods applied to the Primary History of Israel (brought over from von Ranke by such as Davies and Lemche) have justification, what is it about those methods that disqualifies them from also being applied to the NT literature, esp the Gospels?
As for sensing the thoughts of people who hold “it” (whatever “it” is), again I don’t know how to relate to such a comment. I have not seen evidence of such thoughts in the likes of Thompson, Price, Doherty or Wells, and if such thoughts were relevant to their arguments I would have expected them to reveal themselves there. (And personal communications with some of them do not bear out such thoughts from my experience.)

 
 Ed Jones  
 March 13, 2010 at 2:20 am 
I have seen no reference here to the thought of three of our indisputablly top longest standing critical historical Jesus research scholars. Does letting go of the real Jesus require letting of the likes of Ogden. Robinson and Betz?

 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 6:19 pm 
Joseph,
 and while I have caught your attention I might as well raise a question about some comments you made on this blog in may 2009. I am thinking about the passage on James in Josephus Antiquites chapter. There you seem to argue that the James Josephus is talking about was not originally Jesus (of Nazareth) brother but another James who was brother of the High Priest Jesus bar Damneus. You also argue that the phrase “who was called Christ” is a later Christian interpolation. You say that it is “clear” that the James mentioned Josephus original passage is brother of the High Priest. Personally I don´t see how that is clear at all, even if I went along with your speculation, that the passage might originally have referred to James, brother of Jesus bar Damneus. I don´t find it plausible at all that Josephus would have left us totally in the dark about the reasons for a deadly vendetta among the High Priestly familes in Jerusalem a few years before the Jewish war. Nor do I find it plausible given the scenario Josephus otherwise paints of a High Priest like Ananus be daring enough to execute a member (plus som others) of another High Priestly family without the consent of Herod Agrippa and(or) the Roman governor. If Ananus really did what you claim he did I doubt that Herod Agrippa would just have left him off the hook by simply dismissing him. A fate more like the one Ananus meted out on James would have been the more probable outcome.
 Besides, the language used in the “Jesus, who was called Christ” passage hardly betrays a “badly disguised” interpolation. The phrasing is typical of Josephus as another verse found in close proximity to the contested one shows. See chapter 8 about “Joseph, who was called Cabi, the son of Simon

 
 
 
 steph  
 March 3, 2010 at 10:38 pm 
Are there any hard nosed mythicists who don’t appeal to “Q”? Mythicists, who – apart from Price who should know better than to appeal to such a hypothetical document – generally aren’t trained biblical scholars, pounce on “Q” as a convenient way to rubbish Jesus because “Q” is such a historically implausible document. “Q” “scholars” themselves generally avoid issues of “Q” and the historical Jesus because the Jesus of “Q” is such a historically implausible (non)Jewish figure.
It’s rather odd that mythicists appeal to a mythical document as evidence.
Reply

 Steven Carr  
 June 1, 2011 at 4:08 pm 
Was Q written on wax tablets? If it had been, then Maurice Casey would be able to read it.
Mythicists like GA Wells used to claim there was no Jesus, but Wells now claims that there was a Jesus, and Q proves it so.
But this does not fit Steph’s narrative….
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 1, 2011 at 4:16 pm 
Odd, isn’t it: Morton Smith only needed an historical Jesus because there was an opening for a Jewish magician in his theory, and Wells only needed a Jesus myth because he was infatuated with German romanticism where historical figures were optional. Yes, I am positive Q existed but think it was probably written in ice in the last glacial age, about 18,000 years ago. This makes precise deciphering of the Qode difficult not to mention wet.

 
 
 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 11:47 am 
Steph,
 I don´t find it odd at all that mythicists appeal to hypothetical Q as evidence. Just as for Christian scholars like Mack and Patterson it is a useful tool when you want to dismiss the primary evidence from the sayings in the gospels (apocalyptic prophet etc etc) and make up sayings of yourself (no apocalyptic preaching etc etc) based on speculations about what might have been there once in a time in Q2 and Q3.
 I am sure Neil Godfrey is also up to something with Q1, Q2, Q3 that will turn him in to the magician who made the rabbit (Jesus) vanish altogether.
Reply

 steph  
 March 5, 2010 at 12:47 am 
Antonio, I was joking. Isn’t it ironic. Of course it’s a convenient tool.
Reply
 
 
 Bill Warrant  
 March 4, 2010 at 3:34 pm 
Antonio,
I see, so you have just misunderstood Neil instead of intentionally misrepresented him. You can find some posts on his blog where he deals with Q and then you will (hopefully) see your mistake.
Obviously Q is not a big issue for Jesus mythicists. Doherty favors the Q hypothesis, because he believes it’s a better explanation of the data than Luke’s knowledge of Matthew. Other mythicists disagree (like Neil Godfrey) on the basis of source critical analyses.
You seem to think that the mythicist rejects the historicity of Jesus, because he does not see enough evidence for it and is just being too skeptical. I suppose that is why you then cannot understand why a mythicist would accept Q. A mythicist is not just being skeptical because of a lack of evidence. A mythicist considers the non-historicity of Jesus a better explanation of the data (and this has absolutely nothing to do with skepticism).
Reply
 
 Bill Warrant  
 March 4, 2010 at 3:59 pm 
I just had a look at your little exchange with Neil Antonio
After you said this:
“Neil,
 your last answer on Q actually convinced me that I am dealing with another one of those highly intelligent crackpots that can be found in the mythicist camp. You ask others for hard evidence but think you yourself can get away with presenting wild speculations and hypothetical documents as “evidence”. I opt out from further discussions on your blog. Have fun with Joseph Wallack. I think you and him are more on the same wavelenght…”
Neil replied:
2010/02/20 at 8:29 am | Reply
 Well I am sorry you feel that way, Antonio. Have you read Kloppenborg or Mack and the evidence they present for Q? Yes, it is hypothetical, but there is evidence for the hypothesis.
I think there is also good evidence for an alternative hypothesis to Q, and have raised this here, on the old Crosstalk and on FRDB and at various times with Earl Doherty who is persuaded to accept Q. But anyone who has looked at the reasons for the Q hypothesis cannot deny that there it is based on evidence — and not speculation.”
Perhaps if you had stayed one day longer you would have understood him :) He’s not saying he favors Q, merely that the Q hypothesis is based on evidence (even though he favors the Farrer hypothesis).
Reply
 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 4:45 pm 
Bill,
 I don´t think I have to reprint my earlier answer to the aboventioned answer from Godfrey. English may not be my first language but I think I know it well enough to be able to say that THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR Q. Evidence is only here the day somebody finds some papyrus with verses from something that looks like Q or quotes from something like Q in a lost letter from an early Church father or other person from Antiquity. Until that moment Q is only based on more or less wellsupported speculations. It is pure guesswork or “ren gissningslek” like we say here in Sweden.
Reply
 
 Bill Warrant  
 March 4, 2010 at 6:05 pm 
Thanks Antonio. So we agree that Neil does not favor the Q hypothesis. Well, that’s a start.
You seem to be suggesting that source critical analyses cannot provide evidence for hypothetical documents. Would you also say that there’s no evidence for Maurice Casey’s reconstructed aramaic sources and that those are also ‘pure guesswork’?
Reply

 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 10:02 pm 
Bill,
 I think much of the confusion comes from the fact that Godfrey is talking about “evidence” when it comes to a thing like Q. Here in Sweden we would rather use the latin word indicium when talking about a hypothetical reconstruction of Q or hypothetical reconstructions of aramaic sources to GMark. You could argue that there are indicia (indications) that there may have been a Q document or aramaic sources for GMark. Which is not the same thing as saying that there is evidence for such an assertion.
Reply
 
 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 4, 2010 at 6:31 pm 
Bill,
 since I prefer to be consistent I can say without wavering that strictly speaking there is no evidence for Casey´s aramaic sources. His speculations may be more or less wellgrounded but it is still speculations. And although I found much to like in his latest book on the Son of Man problem I also found many pages were I got the impression that Casey´s guesswork were just as good or bad as the Q speculators (Now I am only waiting for Steph to flogg me. Hehe :)
Reply
 
 neilgodfrey  
 March 5, 2010 at 9:27 pm 
Antonio, way back on the old Crosswalk discussion list I found myself siding with Mark Goodacre in his case against Q; I have since written blog-posts arguing for an alternative to Q (check my Q archive); and I have raised my disagreement with Doherty on Q a number of times, the most recent on posts 6269807 and 6277129.
It appears you have not read Kloppenborg or Mack on Q. If you do, you will see that the evidence is not speculative by any means. It is strongly defensible inference drawn from comparisons of texts. There is very strong circumstantial evidence for Q. That does not mean the evidence — as is the case with any circumstantial evidence — cannot be challenged. I do question it.
I think there is more direct evidence at hand for some sort of dialogue (copying and modifying of narratives and sayings) among the surviving texts we do have in our hands. But that is also based on circumstantial evidence.
The evidence for Jesus himself, however, is built on assumptions about the sources and nature of the Gospels, and then developed from exegesis of the Gospel narratives. Assumption plus exegesis is all we have. (Plus reading Gospel narratives into Paul and other NT epistles.)
Can I also repeat here that I do not “believe” or “argue for” a mythical Jesus. That, as I have said, is a pointless exercise as far as I am concerned. History is not about whether Mr and Mrs Socrates really existed or not. It is about seeing what we can understand from the evidence about such things as how Christianity started.
But the factual (secondary) evidence historians normally work with is established as such by applying external controls to documentary sources in efforts to evaluate their trustworthiness. We have nothing like this for Jesus. Only a presumption that Gospel narratives were originally attempts to record traditions traced back to historical events. Exegesis is assumed to be able to dig down into this “tradition” behind the narrative.
An alternative is to work without that assumption and to see what happens when we restrict ourselves to the evidence we can see, and to make judgements about the literary and ideological relationships among those texts we do have evidence for.
To date, that latter approach has for me yielded a view of Christian origins that is more consistent with how we know social and cultural movements tend to start — from a multiplicity of factors and sources coming together. The romantic idea of a single founder or myth of singular origins is generally a later development, and Christianity seems to be no different in this.
Reply

 Antonio Jerez  
 March 6, 2010 at 9:14 pm 
Neil,
 at last you said the magical word. There is only “circumstantial evidence” for Q. I might go along with that. But to go from claiming that there is circumstantial evidence for Q to also claiming that there is circumstantial evidence for Q2 and Q3 is to go several steps too far in the speculative realm. The day we find a Q document maybe we can start speculating further about Q1, Q2, Q3 and all the other Q one can imagine.
 All this speculations about hypothetical strata in a hypothetical document is what has made me think that source criticism is much of a joke. You can only indulge in these kind of speculations and be taken seriously in the biblical guild (OT source criticism is often no better). Or I might add that this desease has also spread to islamic studies. Scholar like the the late John Wansbrough applied the biblical source critical tools to the Quran and managed to “prove” the muslim holy book did not go back to Muhammed but was basically a compilation of disparate sayings taken from different sources during a timespan of several hundred years. I think Wansbrough´s discoveries say more about the uselessness of much of source criticism and the scholars who apply than it has to say about the origins of the Quran.
 And I have read Kloppenborg, Tucket and other Q proponents. It is just that I don´t find their chain of cirmcumstantial evidence ultimately convincing.
Reply

 neilgodfrey  
 March 6, 2010 at 10:24 pm 
I really don’t understand your apparent disagreements with me. I have also been critical of form critical assumptions, and most of my interest has been in studying the gospels as literary wholes — in their final form.
But I can still recognize the inductive arguments for Q and yes, its 3 layers. They hardly qualify as “speculation”. As for “at last” saying “the magic word”, if you had a little more patience you would have understood what my position has been on Q — and the nature of the evidence for it — from the beginning (beginning a few years ago).
I see nothing wrong in sometimes examining an issue from a number of perspectives — form criticism or literary/rhetorical analysis, for example — to see what each can produce. I can do so with awareness of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. If I find something I personally think is interesting I sometimes like to share it.
My interest is in exploring the evidence. I’d be just as excited to find if there is real evidence for some historical Jesus as if there is for another stage in the fleshing out of a philosophical concept. The nature of the evidence simply does not allow us to be dogmatic about very much at all in the question of Christian origins, I think.

 
 
 
 neilgodfrey  
 March 5, 2010 at 9:49 pm 
Regarging my alternative explanation for some of the evidence usually taken as supporting Q, the post numbers I referenced in the previous reply are from the FRDB site. (Originally tried to include the links here but comments do not seem to be accepted here if they include links.)
Reply
 
 Antonio Jerez  
 March 6, 2010 at 10:53 pm 
Neil,
 I think our disagreement finally boils down to the fact that I think you have a strange way of weighing the strenght of different chains of circumstancial evidence. Claiming that there is “strong circumstantial evidence” for a hypothetical document nobody has ever heard of nor seen, while simultaniously claiming that the circumstancial evidence for the existence of Jesus (a figure explicitely talked about in dozens of documents) is slim, is what makes me wonder about your abilities to weigh evidence.
Reply

 neilgodfrey  
 March 6, 2010 at 11:11 pm 
Relying on any evidence for X implies we don’t see X itself. So I don’t think one can complain that the evidence is weak simply the grounds that we don’t see the real thing.
And the mere fact that “a figure is explicitly talked about in dozens of documents” of itself means absolutely zilch as evidence for the historicity of that figure. Even the mere fact that millions believe a figure is historical is not of itself evidence that the figure is historical.
Yes, the evidence for Q is more defensible than using either of the above criteria as evidence for the historicity of Jesus.
Reply

 Antonio Jerez  
 March 6, 2010 at 11:36 pm 
Neil,
 you know pretty well that it is not the fact that Jesus is talked about in dozens of documents that has convinced me that he existed. It is the WAY he is talked about and the DETAILS given in those documents that has convinced me that we are dealing with a real person. The other argument about “the mere fact that millions believe in Jesus”, you´d better throw that at the face of Christian believers. I´ve never argued along those lines since I am an atheist like you.
 And as long as I haven´t seen you deal with the kind of circumstantial evidence that scholars like Crossley, Casey and Meier present I will go on doubting your abilities to weigh historical “evidence”.

 
 neilgodfrey  
 May 12, 2010 at 5:08 am 
Antonio, if this discussion is still alive, can I say that I have understood that a main reason many say they believe in the historical Jesus is, as you say here, because of “the WAY he is talked about and the DETAILS” that convinces them. It is this “methodology” that I have taken exception to, and argued against at several levels: I think it is logically indefensible; it falls apart when compared with other narratives we know to be fictional from the same era; it is contradicted by what we can discern are the sources of many of the details; and it defies normal (nonbiblical) historical practice for assessment of the historicity of narratives.

 
 
 
 Ed Jones  
 March 7, 2010 at 3:04 am 
Once again I make referenc to a reconstruction of Origins of the Jesus Tradition as a whole, which is in the form of a letter mailed to Joseph Hoffmann, which takes the writings of the NT off of the table – the Gospels, Paul and the other NT writings are not reliable Scriptural sources for Jesus reconstrction. As the late Willi Marxsen argued: the real Scriptural norm is the witness to Jesus that makes up the earliest layer of the synoptic tradition. It is here in what the late Willi Marxsen refers to as the canon before the canon that we must now locate the witness of the apostles that abides as the real Scriptural norm. The reconstruction is meant to identify this earliest layer. It is found in the 10 Comments to the Hoffmann essay: The Importance of the Historical Jesus. Several of the comments are but crisis reactions to a percieved threat that the letter might not be published, thus to be ignored. Editing is poor but it can be read. It is developed on sufficient quotes from the works of Schubert Ogden, James M. Robinson and Hans Dieter Betz to make the claim that it reflects their understanding.
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 May 30, 2010 at 2:33 am 
An alternative way to the reconstruction: go to the blog Jesus – Making My Way, click on the third named essay: Fascinating New Research on Jesus Studies – comments 5,6 and 7 are the reconstruction, the remainder of comments are related.
Reply
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 7, 2010 at 3:37 am 
Neil: who is this addressed to? I don’t think to me, but if it is I’ll be happy to reply! Joe
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 May 12, 2010 at 2:45 am 
Joe,
As is the March 24, 2009 letter, the above comment is addressed to you. Any comment is welcome.
Reply
 
 neilgodfrey  
 May 12, 2010 at 5:10 am 
Which post? If it was the one re not understanding what is meant by “myth theory” then yes, that was in response to your post.
 Neil
Reply
 
 
 Jay  
 March 7, 2010 at 6:55 pm 
Joe,
What I don’t understand is why you started the project in the first place. You’ve been, if not working for CFI, at least been associated with them in some way for a while now. You know the nature of the organization. Plus, you selected all of the experts, did you not, or at least oversaw their selection? If Richard Carrier and others were not scholarly enough, why put them on there, and why start something that doesn’t seem to have a good prospect of succeeding?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 7, 2010 at 8:22 pm 
I would choose 98% of those involved all over again. As to the remnant, no names please, they were invited by co-captains over my not-strong-enough protests. CFI’s quite dramatic sea change from an organization that promoted and stood back and away from such undertakings dates from much more recently: they were the sponsors of Jesus in History and Myth at Ann Arbor in 1985 (yup, I chaired that one too) which was a superb gathering. They are now sponsoring unabashed explosions of illiteracy like Blasphemy Day, which make anything they do in the field of religious studies suspect. And finally, I understand what we are doing not as starting but as retooling and actually redefining the goals of such inquiry. The first step in that is to reduce expectations, the second is to be sure the apostles chosen for the effort know what they’re doing. And the third is to to ensure all along the way that whatever “support” the activity generates does not come from dubious sources. (How many nice little old Methodist ladies in Iowa supported Albright’s digs, by the way: quite a few, i can tell you.)
Reply

 Jay  
 March 7, 2010 at 11:10 pm 
I see. What I’m gathering is that within the past few years CFI has taken an overly political direction (with Blasphemy Day apparently being the breaking point for you), and that the project was derailed by people who shouldn’t have been on it. If so, I can at least understand. Well, I hope the new undertaking- Jesus Prospect- achieves what you want it to.

 
 
 steph  
 March 7, 2010 at 8:28 pm 
Jay, It’s difficult to predict whether a project will succeed or fail at the beginning. I’m sure there were high hopes of it’s success. After all, good critical scholars such as Bruce Chilton, James Crossley, Justin Meggitt, James McGrath and Gerd Luedemann were initially recruited. I don’t think that Joe himself was personally responsible for recruiting all those on the list of fellows.
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones  
 March 13, 2010 at 2:29 am 
Sorry, the last sentence of the above reply should read: Does letting go of the real Jesus require leting go of the likes of Ogden, Robinson and Betz?
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 March 13, 2010 at 2:50 am 
The March 13 reply was to correct a sentence of a reply I had just made.
 The reply read: I have seen no reference here to the thought of three of our indisputablly top longest standing critical historical Jesus research scholars.
 Does letting go of the real Jesus also require letting go of the likes of Ogden, Robinson and Betz? I had
 omitted one “go”. The reply was removed with submission of the correection.
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 May 16, 2010 at 3:00 am 
Joe,
 Why not your own reply?

 
 
 
How and Why Scholars Fail to Rebut Earl Doherty « Vridar says: 
 May 27, 2010 at 10:21 am 
[...] Fisher is a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield and on record as an associate of R. Joseph Hoffmann in what was hoped to have been The Jesus Prospect. Her particular interest is in Doherty’s [...]
Reply
 
 Sherrylns  
 July 9, 2010 at 2:15 am 
just saying ‘hi’!
Reply
 
 The Jesus Prospect (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 December 13, 2010 at 8:37 pm 
[...] The indefinite suspension of the Jesus Project by its original sponsor, the Center for Inquiry, was a serious blow to an effort that had reached a critical point and was in need of an infusion of trust and money. Funding such a project appears to have been a factor in its "relative" demise. It's also true, however, that certain organizations suffer from a kind of chronic indecisiveness about the core premises of their existence and hence the caus … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Rich Griese  
 December 18, 2010 at 5:29 am 
Hello Joseph,
Enjoyed your article on the Jesus project. I know someone, Robert M. Price, that was on both the Jesus Project, and the Jesus Seminar. I enjoyed attending a Jesus Seminar meeting once at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa years ago, and have enjoyed the study of Early Christian history for a number of years. I thought I would pop you a comment, and give my small 2 cents of advice.
First off, I have found the more history oriented scholars, what the traditionalists in the industry called the radicals or liberals to be like herding cats. Similar to the Democratic party in politics. The Republicans see very good at organizing things, and then getting their members to carry out an agenda, but Democrats seem to have a difficult time ever really working effectively as a group. So, while there are many conservative religion groups that work on projects effectively, the more liberal groups always seem to end up not getting anywhere. So, for some reason, less conservative religion industry groups seems to start with some kind of innate disadvantage when it comes to organizing things like the Jesus Project.
That aside, here is another thing I have noticed. I hesitate to make broad generalizations, but having said that, let me make some broad generalizations. Heck… ok… let me take it all back. I LOVE making broad generalizations. I think it is one of the things I do best. It’s called “seeing the big picture.”
It seems to me that, what I call “the religion industry” by which I mean academics that get degrees in such things as “NT Studies”, “Theology”, and all those non history degrees that then end up being used to write books that claim to be historical tend to really be a mechanism to promote traditional Christian dogma. Someone gets a degree say in “NT studies” or “Biblical Studies” and then often calls themselves a “historian”, and then writes books or articles about the history of Christianity. It always seems that these people all sort of herd toward very conservative conclusions and much of their work while often very detailed is really based totally on speculative assumptions that have never been demonstrated. You see the same general trends in almost all their writings. They all start with the assumption that a Jesus existed. The all use phrases like “Luke”, and “Matthew” when talking about the gospel texts as if these are actual people, rather than just anonymous texts. The all tend to work to push the estimated origins of the Pauline texts, and Gospels back as far as they can. They all in their arguments use quite remarkable personal attacks against anyone in the industry that proposes ideas that are outside the nice little superstructure that they seems to be constantly working towards. The all tend to write article after article on “paul” and the gospels, while almost ignoring characters like Irenaeus and Clement and characters outside of “The Bible”. This last bit I think is due to the fact that any book on jesus or paul, or the gospels will be bought and read and discussed by the faith community. Yet while some of the faith community claim to be “interested” in the fathers and/or patristics they may skim a book or two, but if you look at the ratio of time they spend on patristics vs the gospels you will find that their patristic knowledge is almost nil.
My point is, over the years that I have been trying to learn things, I have found that the first three years I spent, my margin return on learning was great. but then I hit a point where I would humbly say that I became aware of everything we know about the very very early church. And in the subsequent ten years I came accross almost no new information. It was the same old stuff over and over. And it seemed to me that the industry is not really interested in understanding early christianity as much as it is continually reinforcing the a sort of nicely packaged message that “academia” can assure the faith community that exists, and that there really is a great deal of knowledge about early Christianity.
I find all that pretty much crap. It’s all amazingly based on undemonstrated speculation, yet they talk about it so confidently and refuse to acknowledge the total lack of details we know about in the first 150 to 200 years.
It has made me think, that it is kind of pointless to create a new Jesus Seminar. what I would do, if I was in charge of the movement, is that I would begin to create a group of “historians”, you know… people with actual degrees in hisotry, not NT studies, not theology, not biblical studies, but plain old fashion history. And I would promote folks with history degrees to the public. I would tell lay people interested in Christian history what historians there are out there writing on the subject. I would make lists of history journals and historians that have blogs and web sites that write about early Christianity. I would try to generate interested among those “historians” to create a early Christian history group, perhaps a journal, perhaps a wiki with information peer reviewed inside the “history” community. So you would have peer review by other historians that specialize say in the french revolution, or ancient egyptian studies, ie… other “historicans” that are familiar with history tools that can peer review the methods and procedures used in the articles written by the historians writing on early Christianity.
I think this would be an effective way of beginning to give those that are interested in the actual history of Christianity, rather than simply promoting traditional church dogma ideas, the tools, support, and resources to begin to meet other people, and talk to them, and break outside what appears to me an industry that has written millions and millions of words but really has not advanced much knowledge since the time of Harnack, Strauss and Schweitzer.
At least that would be the approach I would take.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
Reply
 
 Ed Jones  
 December 21, 2010 at 11:07 pm 
A counter reply.
 Basic historical knowldege for the path to the real Jesus.
“In order to understand why there are two, Mark and Q, rather than just one oldest Gospels, we need to recall that from very early on there were two “denominations” in earliest Christianity, each with its own Gospel”.(Robinson)
“There are two spheres of tradition, distinguished both by their concepts and by their history. The centre of the one sphere is the passion kerygma, the centre of the other sphere is the intention to take up again the proclamation of Jesus’ message. The Q material belongs to the second sphere. The concepts of the passsion kerygma remained outside this sphere. Thus the Q material proved to be an independent source of Christological cognition.” (H. E.Todt) “Ever since Todt, the study of Q has a socciological concomitanmt, the Q community, a previously overlooked outcome of the impact of Jesus on his hearers and benificaries in Galilee.” (Robinson)
“If you begin with Paul, you will misunderstand Jesus. If you begin with Jesus you will understand Paul differently.” To begin reconstruction of the Jesus tradition with Paul is to begin with the writings of the NT, which are tradition not apostolic witness, to begin with Jesus is to begin with the Sermon n the Mount, our closest apostolic witness.”Even if, for want of sources, we can discover nothing more about the form of Judaism and Jewish Chistianity (Of the Sermon on the Mount), we must leave open the possibility and even the probability, of an image of Jesus which is completely different from that of the synoptic tradition and its Gentile-Christian redactors. Only the superfcial reader can find such a text as the Sermon on the Mount simple, practical and untheologiical. As one penetrates more deeply into this work – a task to which spealized knowledge in the areas of philology, form and redaction criticism, literary criticism, history of religions, and New Testament theology necssarily applies – a theological problematic becomes increasingly more evident” (Betz) Clerly this specialized knowledge is limited to the discipline of the critical historical theologian.
Given our present historical methods and knowledge, consistent with the above, a true historical path from us to the real Jesus can be reconstructed, even if it is a tight rope walk. With each step one must avoid over balance on the side either of being too credulous or too critical over against the enormous counter weight of traditional Christianity with its sources the writings of the NT: the letters of Paul, the gospels and the later witings of the NT.
Based largely on the works of Schubert Ogden, James Robinson and Hans Dieter Betz, three of our top longest standing critical historical scholars, the reconstruction of the Jesus tradition contained in my letter to Professor Hoffmann is made. The letter is contained within the first 13 comments to the post: The Importane of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project
 Quodblet.
Reply
 
 Ed Jones  
 December 23, 2010 at 12:09 pm 
Irrespective of whether anyone reads the above comment, it must be stated that this does not suggest that the writings of the NT are to be ignored, they do contain valuable data on Jesus. The point is that ones image of Jesus, properly, must be based on the Sermon on the Mount. Having this image relevant additional knowledge can be obtained from the writings of the NT.
Reply
 
 Play Mythty For Me? Dr Carrier Carries On | The New Oxonian says: 
 May 31, 2011 at 2:04 pm 
[...] of April 2011, much of the work of the Jesus Project is subsumed in a new group completely independent of CFI and its agenda. Information concerning The Jesus Prospect is [...]
Reply
 
 The Jesus Prospect | The New Oxonian says: 
 May 31, 2011 at 2:18 pm 
[...] The indefinite suspension of the Jesus Project by its original sponsor, the Center for Inquiry, was a serious blow to an effort that had reached a critical point and was in need of an infusion of trust and money. Funding such a project appears to have been a factor in its "relative" demise. It's also true, however, that certain organizations suffer from a kind of chronic indecisiveness about the core premises of their existence and hence the caus … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Rich Griese  
 May 31, 2011 at 2:37 pm 
Is there a list of folks on the project that have degrees in history, and what universities they got their degrees in? And optimally… some online contact mechanism for these folks?
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
Reply
 
Biblioblogging Carnival – Unsettled Edition | Unsettled Christianity says: 
 June 1, 2011 at 1:28 pm 
[...] Hoffman has news on The Jesus Prospect and defends his book, Sources of the Jesus Tradition and asks Is “God” Invulnerable? Tom [...]
Reply
 
 Bernard Muller  
 June 3, 2011 at 12:23 am 
test
Reply
 
 Bernard Muller  
 June 3, 2011 at 7:45 pm 
If a lot of the Q source resulted from reacting on gMark (through corrections, additions, rewriting, expansions, extrapolations), it is/was futile to attempt any reconstructions in the first place: the final editor probably mixed up all the sayings for reason of homogeneity, as can be seen in the gospel of Thomas (if it is accepted much of its gospel-like material was extracted from the gospels).
 So the failure of reconstructions of Q should not be taken as evidence Q never existed as a single document.
 Here is my reasons to keep Q as a document published around 80CE:http://historical-jesus.info/q.html
Reply
 
 Bernard Muller  
 June 3, 2011 at 8:14 pm 
I wonder if Dr. Hoffmann read my website named : Jesus, an historical reconstruction.http://historical-jesus.info/
 In it, I exposed what would be the third solution, the one between the fully mythical Jesus of Mythicists and the ones of Christians (from conservative to liberal). According to the evidence and years of research, I found an earthly Jesus existed, but only as a poor, uneducated, rustic Jew, who, in his last year, through documented circumstances, got crucified in Jerusalem (mocked) as “king of the Jew”. That Jesus was not the legitimate founder of Christianity but accidentally and unintentionally triggered its development by others, after his death. He had the same role towards starting Christianity as Rosa Parks relative to the Civil Rights Movement. He was only a link in a chain (events and people). As important were Pilate, John the Baptist, proto-Christians (the group of seven), the Church of Antioch, Paul and the author of ‘Hebrews’ (Apollos of Alexandria in my view).
 Even if I think Q existed, I would not use that as a proof for the existence of Jesus, the man credited to have began Christianity. Because most of Q was invented after gMark was known.
Reply
 
 Ed Jones  
 June 4, 2011 at 8:37 pm 
Bernard, I am much impressed with your work of reconstructing the Jesus tadition. Like you I am a non-scholar who has reconstructed a Jesus but not from the writings of the NT, rather from what can be identified as the truest NT source of apostolic witness. You might find my above September 21, 2010 comment to be of interest. The last paragraph refers to the reconstruction and how to locate it. Comment?
Reply

 Bernard Muller  
 June 5, 2011 at 1:22 pm 
Ed, I cannot consider the sermont on the mount as an apostolic rendition of Jesus’ teachings, for many reasons. If you look at my website, you will understand why. So I will not go any further on that matter …
Reply
 
 
 Bernard Muller  
 June 5, 2011 at 1:29 pm 
I forgot to mention that, because of the difference of viewpoints, styles, and even different original languages (Greek and Aramaic/Syriac), I think Q was written by a multicity of authors before it got edited in a single document around 80 CE.
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 Ben  
 April 26, 2012 at 10:35 am 
Subscribing to comments.
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Community
by rjosephhoffmann

The word “community” goes back to the Greeks, who used it to mean a circle of people who shared common interests, memories, sexual preferences, and beliefs. –Koinonia

We can’t do better than that definition.
Communities were not just groups but occasions for drinking, story-telling, arguing, remembering.
Religion fell to the use of the term by default. Stories about Jesus and even the Eucharistic banquet were memorial occasions, originally informal and probably even competitive, judging from Paul’s warnings about the gluttony, libertinism and selfishness of the Corinthians.
–Then formalized and a little dull, as the stories get written down and a lid is clamped on what the “official” stories are. How dull canon is, or as the immortal Emily might say, “How public like a frog.”
Perhaps nothing is more fatal to community (in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern style anyway) than literacy. Except for the drinking, the words of the Prophet of Islam were remembered in similar ways–by fires and moonlight, and even the teachings of the Buddha and the aphorisms of the (almost certainly) fictional Arjuna. Let literacy come along, you get books, bishops, mullahs, dogma, the trinity, jihad. Ah! For the food and the wine and the arguing.
In my imagination, Muhammad received his first revelations after a moonlit night of Arabian debauchery, and Jesus, at the last supper, told the apostles he was going out to pray for a while before his arrest, sent them away, went into a room with Mary Magdalene, and, well…you know. Prove me wrong. Because the cover-up story in Luke 22.39-46 looks pretty suspicious, I can tell you.

Communities are designed to make people feel a part of something. They are not sure-fire safeguards against conflict, dissent, and outright mutiny.
Being a part of any family includes that risk. Catholics and Jews aren’t immune to community friction. I am guessing that even Quakers feel it from time to time, as they wait in absorbed indecision to feel the spirit move among them. But feeling a part of something—a family, a church, a revolutionary movement, a political party, a linguistic or racial minority—is another way of acknowledging that it is very hard to feel part of everything.
I am skeptical that there is any such thing as a global community, no matter how many times I listen to Lionel Ritchie, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, et al. sing “We are the World.” Truth to tell they’re just a fraction of it, a peace-and-justice-loving-singing community.
I worry that people think virtual communities are the same as real communities, that chat rooms are as good as a drunken Athenian symposium. I worry that virtual classrooms are seen as being at least as good as real classrooms—maybe better–and that “real” classrooms are becoming virtual—“smart.” Don’t get me wrong: I love images. I love PowerPoint. I just don’t want to become one. I like to know that a student disagrees with me, nods because I have said something interesting, frowns when I say something idiotic or unfunny or that the price tag is still on my coat sleeve. True story. A classroom community is a real thing.

I find it sad that my daughters can spend eighteen hours a day—ok, twelve–messaging friends, checking inboxes to see who loves them, racing from the dinner table when a ding tells them a new message has arrived, pouring over images to tailor their appearance to how a thousand unknown onlookers (some of them creeps) will see them on Facebook and MySpace.
Isn’t the very phrase MySpace coded to mean the opposite of community, as in Get out of…? And doesn’t the conglomerate term Face-book tell you that what you are getting instead of a relationship is fraud and chit and poseurie rather than anything you can possibly remember the next day or take to the bank? You can’t have a baby or a hangover in a virtual community. Or maybe you can, but both will be painless, because the defining thing about a virtual community is lack of feeling.
 
But the desperadoes, both Millennials and Submillennials, worry me for another reason.
They worry me because in leaving the dinner table they are leaving behind the traditional location where community happened. Symbolically, they are anti-eucharistic, anti-narrative, anti-memory. Anti-old. There, I said it. A community of Now cannot be a community of When.
In days of yore, when community meant human voices raised in song in churches and pubs (not that different, actually), when there were bards and story-tellers and corner-table philosophers and prophets and flirtatious women (blackguards and wenches) and scuffles, the possibility of opting out of your context was slim. Community was local, not global.
There were people you could hate, even ne’er do-wells you might want to murder. Now all fights happen in the Matrix. Virtual violence is the only show in town. New York, a community of communities, is one of the safest cities in the universe. Something is wrong: does this mean that if we had had handsets and Wii (“a seventh generation console”) in 1968 nothing would have exploded, neither Bedford Stuyvesant nor Bobby Kennedy’s head?

Communities have always been composed of people, people who are just like you. They look a little like you, sing the same songs, sleep with similar people, like the same food, share the same prejudices, usually vote the same way.
But these real communiteers are not people you could just “de-friend.” The proof of the collapse of community is the fact that getting rid of someone who isn’t worth your attention is now as easy as compiling them as friends in the first place: they cease to exist when they suffer the humiliation of being made ritually inaccessible on a virtual page. In that kind of community, in MySpace I have all the power, and I can use it how I want. Imagine a Jew cutting off Israel, a Catholic Holy Mother Church. My Bad? Eat shit motherfucker and die. I don’t Need You. I kissed a girl. You burnt. Sexually I mean, Yo Mama is so fat. Ex setera.
I have a theory. It’s a sensory theory of community. It’s all about smell. The difference between real and fake community is that you can smell as well as see a real community.
Remember those high school dates? Wow. You wore English Leather, she wore Chanel 22. You knew sex was at hand when in equal measure the scents began to yield to other smells, then blend into something the manufacturers could only have guessed at. Sorry to be vulgar, but it’s true.

Your father wore real Old Spice (as opposed to “Original,” WTF!) and your mother a trace of “Midnight in Paris,” (well, mine did, but she was unusual, which is why she was always home late from choir practice). Ever notice how scents are now described by kinetic genre or velocity: “Old Spice High Endurance” or “Fusion” or “Pro-Clean,” as though what you want to avoid at any cost is the human stain?
Deodorant is a prophylactic. It neutralizes you in the same way being defriended excommunicates you. To be a part of a real community means you conform. To be a part of a virtual community puts you in charge. It is a rush, isn’t it? Let’s not even talk about Viagra.
In the twentieth century, people were still motivated by the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gendered definitions of community—by the difference between insiders and outsiders. America, with its melting- pot configurations, was divided between sectors who thought that breaking down barriers was cool and those who felt that barriers were fortifications to keep people apart—black-white, protestant-Catholic, rich-poor, gay-straight. No one stopped to think what might happen when the walls were toppled. Does anyone know yet?
America’s mixed-success melting pot was Europe’s postcolonial implosion. All of a sudden it was not unusual for a Jamaican or a Pakistani to say “I am an Englishman.” Quietly, of course, there was disagreement. Scene: Melbourne 1988. Two cops in front of me are watching a drunken Asian leaving a club with his “Australian” girlfriend. “Fuckin’ wog,” one says to the other. “Roight,” says the other. The same two, at a pub on Saturday, know Americans as “Fuckin’ septics.” That’s community my dears.
 
I wonder why (sometimes) no one noticed that for a black man to say “I am an American”—a country without a racial, linguistic, or religious pedigree—was rather different from saying “I am an Englishman.” The answer is that America had been a hodgepodge of communities for a very long time–England, a hodgepodge of dialects with social consequences and insignificant racial variation before 1950. It’s so easy to be a community when there are no…Others.
In general, I agree with Frost, the poet, not the toff journalist: walls are a tribute to our inability to understand each other. Viz., Gaza, Berlin, Jericho, the US border with Mexico.
But really, walls are built when community fails and sad alliances take their place. That’s why the Jews need to fence in Gaza, why “America” needs to fence out Mexico. In the future, there will only be smart communities and dumb communities.
History is proving that. Who hates Barack Obama the most? Whites? America? The Chinese? No: Stupid people the world over. Because he defies our “sense” of community by belonging to too many of them.

Oh, community! The part of me that prefers the days of wine, women and song (and religion and pubs) is strong. The part that despises virtual community is fiery. The part that detests walls is steadfast and sure. Where do we go from here?
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Published: March 21, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: church : community : politics : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : stereotypes ..
10 Responses to “Community”

.
 steph  
 March 21, 2010 at 2:50 am 
In an ideal world, back in time taking very little if anything at all with us. omg I don’t have a dinky phone and dunno how to use one anyway.
Luke chapter what??? That’s a wicked Dan Brownism! It’ll get the ms flicking through their bibles – if they have one.
Reply
 
 steph  
 March 21, 2010 at 5:26 am 
Cheat! – go and correct it then. Anyway how the hell would Luke know if Mark didn’t? And why would Pete and Jim and John bother making up a shitty little story about him whining about his forthcoming death, and not appearing very heroic, if he was really having it off with Mare? And who would have cared if he did so why would anyone pretend he didn’t – after all other martyrs and prophets had women. The messiah AND a very naughty boy. And the disciples weren’t sleeping… not all anyway. At least one witness to unheroism there. And if he had had his way with Mary that would have been worth reporting – it would have been more heroic. I can’t prove you wrong but you are pulling a Dan Brown.
And I thought you were complaining about 22 emails…
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 21, 2010 at 6:40 pm 
“And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (22:44)and those comforting angels–just Luke–the agon, I mean. But I’m pretty sure the details are added to make him more of a spiritual athlete playing against the odds.Don’t think Gethsemane was Mark’s idea,even if the name is, but as with your pigs I canna prove it.
ὤφθη δὲ αὐτῷ ἄγγελος ἀπ’ οὐρανοῦ ἐνισχύων αὐτὸν. καὶ γενόμενος ἐν ἀγωνίᾳ ἐκτενέστερον προσηύχετο. ἐγένετο δὲ ὁ ἱδρὼς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ θρόμβοι αἵματος καταβαίνοντες ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν.
Reply

 steph  
 March 21, 2010 at 7:04 pm 
ah – I wasn’t looking at the apparatus and forgot that lovely bit – but then if Mark (who was probably following the tradition) didn’t know, then how did Luke? Perhaps it was Luke was was Dan Brown. Romantic (or sleezy) creative genius but not omniscient.

 
 
 
Loyola solicits neighbors’ ideas (Baltimore Sun) says: 
 March 21, 2010 at 10:50 am 
[...] Community « The New Oxonian [...]
Reply
 
 stephanielouisefisher  
 March 21, 2010 at 2:46 pm 
Just in case – I can’t prove pigs can’t fly or resurrection can’t happen. It’s just blinking ‘implausible’ and I can explain it in other ways… Nice word, eh, ‘implausible’ – like ‘choc o la’.
and I prefer small independent self sufficient communities and walls to impersonal global whoppers, – it’s a horrible dilemma because ultimately human animals want to know too much and can’t stay within those walls. Perhaps if we used up the world’s oil supply and eliminated our ability to travel conveniently, and want somebody elses oil, and painted the world the same shade of green, we’d all stay home by the sea and look after our lovers and vegie gardens, ferment our own wine and teach our babies to read Winnie the Pooh.
Reply
 
 Community: A New Oxonian Repost | The New Oxonian says: 
 June 28, 2010 at 8:31 pm 
[...] Community: A New Oxonian Repost Posted on June 28, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann The word “community” goes back to the Greeks, who used it to mean a circle of people who shared common interests, memories, sexual preferences, and beliefs. –Koinonia We can’t do better than that definition. Communities were not just groups but occasions for drinking, story-telling, arguing, remembering. Religion fell to the use of the term by default. Stories about Jesus and even the Eucharistic banquet were memorial occasions, originally inform … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 29, 2010 at 1:46 am 
I’m nobody! Who are you?
 Are you nobody, too?
 Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
 They’d banish us, you know.
 How dreary to be somebody!
 How public, like a frog
 To tell your name the livelong day
 To an admiring bog!
 I still remember climbing onto the stage the wrong way – like a frog – from the front instead of using the stairs, to recite that poem, when I was five. But it’s always been significant for more than just that. I love Emily for that poem.
Reply
 
 marf  
 June 29, 2010 at 4:31 pm 
Yo’ mama were fast. My mama wore Evening in Paris, which must have been the low rent version.
 I don’t gainsay your point about smell, but I think it’s more crucial to one-on-one relationships (or what passes for that … reading Dan Savage leads one to believe that it’s common to double-team in that game). And while collecting faces in Facebook is a recognized addiction, I still think the virtual world is a good starting point for communities. Many of us are driven to reconnect with old communities or create new meatspace communities out of the pixels.
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 29, 2010 at 6:18 pm 
Very very Nice guitar, Marf but I disagree. The virtual world shatters reality and allows one the freedom to avoid any responsibility for the very human relationships formed. It’s dishonest and contrary to the very essence of humanism too. I am not into the friend collecting thing – nearly all, if not all of my f/b friends are people I have met or will meet at conferences. It is good to make contact and sometimes contact is absolutely wonderful and may never have otherwise occurred, but if these relationships aren’t actualised, the very human consequences can be akin to psychological abuse.
I don’t like virtual reality – I’m a realist and very very human. Tactile and all that. I love the acoustics. I like pizzicato interludes on my cello. Where do we go from here? BREAK DOWN THOSE DAMN WALLS. I don’t believe in walls. MEET at the beach and let thine eyes connect. And touch – and drink, make love and be merry. On my best days I smell of the sea.
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NeoHumanism: A Center for Intellectuals?
by rjosephhoffmann


I have happily signed Paul Kurtz’s statement on the principles of Neohumanism and hope to review the document on this site in a week or so.
It’s enough to say, read it and understand that it comes at a critical moment in the history of the humanist movement. It calls upon freethinkers to do something they almost never have to do–except with respect to the totally inconsequential question of the existence of God: Make up their minds.
For those of us whose humanism is not limited to the Big Question, or whether the First Amendment is inspired writ, or whether civilization commenced with Darwin, there is plenty in the statement to think about.
A warning: it is a very long piece of work so bring a sandwich and a glass of Pinot Grigio with you to the read.

Readers should also have a look at the response of the Kurtz-founded Center for Inquiry, penned by lawyer turned guru Ronald Lindsay (a status he seems to think came with the parking space) and the Huffington Post‘s comments on the statement.
Writing on the CFI website Lindsay recorded that he could not “in good conscience,” sign the statement, though he was pained by having to refuse. (Flash: Jiminy Cricket is dead.) The reason for CFI’s demurer probably has as much to do with New Directions and with the growing rift between Kurtz and the New Regime, which is really not so much a “new” crew as a raft of rudderless old sailors from Buffalo trying to reinvent themselves as first-class seamen on the backs of Celebs like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Prediction: It will never work.

Which brings me to the two things we already know about freethought–a quaint and sometime polite word that can mean everything from muscular disbelief and cantankerous opposition to God, incense and apple pie to quiet disapproval of dogma, (religious) holidays and divine inspiration.
One is that freethought thrives on contrarian impulses. The whole “Who says so?” attitude of many secular humanists leads to purist rigor, one-upsman-ship, even soteriology: The God I don’t believe in is bigger than the God you don’t believe in. The harm religion did me was more serious than the harm religion did you. The full-frontal unbelief I represent is truer and purer than the unbelief you’re espousing. Reason saves, faith enslaves. (That’s pretty good: try it on a coffee mug.) In the past, I’ve used the word “Pharisaic” humanism to describe this posture, but because the culprits don’t know who the Pharisees were the allusion has not become…code.

For all their principled reliance on evidence and fact, in ordinary discourse atheists ( at least the cranky ones) are more prone than almost any other single group to denounce the views of others as mere opinion. So, as happened in the case of the Neohumanist Statement, Write a manifesto, get a zucchini for a thank you.
When CFI ran its Blasphemy Day competition, awarding prizes for the most obtuse display of tasteless rhetoric against religion, I suggested that prizes should be given on the basis of how many things an avowed atheist doesn’t believe about God–and no fair saying “any of it, or Him.” It’s ok not to believe in talking snakes, but you still have to believe in gardens, Babylon and human predecessors. My premise was that anybody who doesn’t believe in God should at least know something about the subject. Otherwise, not believing in time or in the molar mass of an element–both bloody difficult to see–may as well be next on your list.
The second thing you can count on among freethinkers is that they can’t laugh at their own positions. My theory is that this is because there are so many of them that if they started laughing they could never stop. They take their belief with the same seriousness a Pentecostal takes the surety that Jesus loves him and his Christian comic book collection.
 
I once repeated a Woody Allen joke in front of a heavily atheist audience, having just told it the week before at a local, liberal temple. “I don’t believe in an afterlife but just in case I’m taking a change of underwear.” My Jewish audience was tickled pink. My atheist friends looked at me as though to say, “Are you saying you do believe in an afterlife”? Twice-born atheists can make an outsider feel as unwelcome in the Temple of Bright as a secular humanist would feel in a tent meeting down in Tuscaloosa. (You know, where Groucho says they take the elephants because it’s easier to remove the ivory there).
That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, any call for humanists to recognize that humility and humor are at least as important as being bright and right is a welcome change from the arrogant, carping, smirking, puerile atheism that is becoming the face of the base.
It’s hard to imagine that the attention-getting strategies of a CFI will ever add up to a coherent vision or a systematic approach to problem solving. Saying you’re for science and reason is a bit like saying you’re for peace. Who isn’t?
But how do you get there? And at the end of the trip, do you get the good life or just the T-shirt?

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Published: March 28, 2010
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Tags: atheism : CFI : freethought : Humanist Manifesto : Neohumanism : new atheism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
24 Responses to “NeoHumanism: A Center for Intellectuals?”

.
 steph  
 March 28, 2010 at 3:41 pm 
I had to, for the good of my conscience, sign it (after a pot of plunger at 2 in the morning). Where are the guru’s criticisms? I had a look but couldn’t find…
It’s certainly comprehensive but no words wasted and nothing left out. It’s idealistic without being unrealistic, it’s critical, but constructive rather than destructive, it’s about prospering together in happiness and harmony (and good humour), it’s about children, it’s about the environment… it’s about continuing in constructive dialogue emphasizing our common values. It’s about inviting people from different points of view to join ‘in bringing about a better world in the new planetary civilization that is now emerging’.
Reply
 
 steph  
 March 28, 2010 at 3:43 pm 
Who drew the little duck and Albert Schweitzer in the corner of the Pinot Grigio?
Reply
 
 steph  
 March 28, 2010 at 4:03 pm 
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/atheism_humanism_and_the_neo-humanist_statement/
Don’t agree at all. Not a smear tactic at all. Atheism was very important in Russia etc and the statement is important for objecting to the closing of faith schools. It has not to be too precise because it needs negotiation often between nation states. Disagree with absolutely everything.
Just like a lawyer.
Reply
 
 Ophelia Benson  
 March 29, 2010 at 11:41 pm 
Well I would have laughed at the Woody Allen joke!
Honestly…if only all the ‘atheists are such a pain’ moaners wrote like this I wouldn’t say a word against them. But they don’t, so I do.
Reply
 
 G Felis  
 March 30, 2010 at 5:22 am 

For all their principled reliance on evidence and fact, in ordinary discourse atheists ( at least the cranky ones) are more prone than almost any other single group to denounce the views of others as mere opinion.
A sweeping and rather insulting statement without a shred of evidence (or even a cherry-picked example) on offer would seem to put you in a rather… delicate position with respect to criticizing the purported failures of others to rely on evidence. I may not remember all that clearly what some ancient wandering preacher had to say about the Pharisees off the top of my head – the phrase “whited sepulchre” rings a bell, but the nuance escapes me at the moment – but I’m almost sure I remember the same preacher making some comment or other about motes and beams. Or was it sawdust and logs? Something like that. Surely you’ll remember the reference, you being an expert on the subject and all.

That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, any call for humanists to recognize that humility and humor are at least as important as being bright and right is a welcome change from the arrogant, carping, smirking, puerile atheism that is becoming the face of the base.
Again, you might have a little trouble claiming the high ground on this humility thing when you oh-so-humbly, with obvious good humor and no trace of venomous hostility, characterize those with whom you disagree as “arrogant, carping, smirking,” and “puerile.” Now if I were the sort of person to accuse someone with whom I disagreed of being arrogant, carping, smirking and puerile – and I assure you I am not – I would want to at least point to some specific instance of behavior consistent with the accusation. Say, hypothetically, by linking to this blog post.
Reply
 
 Hamidreza  
 March 30, 2010 at 9:40 am 
Is Kurtz trying to make a secular religion out of humanism? How uninteresting.
Reply
 
 Deen  
 March 30, 2010 at 11:01 am 

One is that freethought thrives on contrarian impulses. The whole “Who says so?” attitude of many secular humanists leads to purist rigor, one-upsman-ship, even soteriology
I trust that the irony isn’t lost on you that you have just written a whole piece yourself telling others how to properly be a freethinker?

The second thing you can count on among freethinkers is that they can’t laugh at their own positions.
Then again, the loudest atheist I know is also one of the wittiest: PZ Myers. He clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously either.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 30, 2010 at 12:39 pm 
I think I said laugh at their own positions–not those of other people. Wit is a two way street and when I meet the Atheist Seinfeld I’ll withdraw the comment.
Reply

 Deen  
 March 30, 2010 at 2:59 pm 
We are clearly not reading the same Pharyngula. PZ pokes fun at himself (and his readers) all the time.

 
 steph  
 March 30, 2010 at 4:46 pm 
I thought that might upset some of non atheists. There’s alot of poking going on there.

 
 
 
 Bruce Gorton  
 March 30, 2010 at 12:58 pm 
rjosephhoffmann
Atheist comedians are better than Seinfeld.
George Carlin: “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.”
“I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam. “
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 30, 2010 at 1:07 pm 
Don’t disagree; but the full frontal ones like Bill Maher who self-identify have a big target and the old crowd basically came out of ethnic comedy (e.g., Carlin on why Catholic cheerleaders were brighter than public school cheerleaders: because they had be be able to spell Immaculate Conception High School). But you’re still missing my point about laughing at your own positions, not the ones you’ve abandoned. Carlin (a “fatally lasped Catholic”) and Woody Allen (and Lenny Bruce) had more in common with the borscht belt than atheism.
Reply

 Bruce Gorton  
 March 30, 2010 at 2:36 pm 
I very much get your point. The thing is Woody Allen is a full-frontal atheist and so was George Carlin.
Maher’s upbringing was Catholic until he turned 13, and he found out that his mother was Jewish (Hence making him a Jew according to Judaism) when he was in his teens.
As a lot (Possibly even most) of the atheists you are likely to meet have deconverted from one religion or another, the fact that Carlin and Allen started from religious-ethnic comedy roots isn’t something that seperates them from mainstream atheism, it is something that they share in common with a huge chunk of the atheist population.
Heck deconversion stories are something of a genre nowadays. Somehow we love to hear stories about how other people came to the realisation that we, personally, are right, and everyone who disagrees is a blinking idiot.
I think it the sense of humility we get from it.
Anyway, in order to effectively mock religious side of the argument, it takes some ability to laugh at ours. It is why for example, the Family Guy’s attempt at atheist evangelism failed so thoroughly – Bryan’s non-belief wasn’t made light of, and so the overall product became anvillicious, and thus sucked.

 
 Bruce Gorton  
 March 30, 2010 at 3:13 pm 
Another example I can raise is the Chaser’s War on Everything, which explained that though the team were all atheists, they were also hypocrites – so the show wouldn’t be on for the three weeks after Easter.
There isn’t a lot of comedy tackling the centre of atheism as opposed to atheists, but that is because there really isn’t much to it.
“There probably is no God, so umm, now what?” Is pretty much all you can do with it.

 
 
 
 Ophelia Benson  
 March 30, 2010 at 4:37 pm 
Besides, Joe, you’re no slouch at alter-risibility yourself, so I think you’re setting the bar a little too high.
Reply

 steph  
 March 30, 2010 at 4:52 pm 
if ‘alter risiblity’ is supposed to mean changing what you laugh at, hopefully we can all be honest enough to admit to changing our minds … and that the bar is perceived to be set too high is too depressing a thought to let be a reality.
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 March 30, 2010 at 5:03 pm 
I love the phrase, alter-risibility. I’m certainly altar risibility esp if it refers to men in cassocks plying young men with communion wine. I admit I’m only working with impressions (speaking of which I do a great Groucho after a coupla Rob Roys) but I do think atheist humor is pretty lame because its target is too big–which is what makes the target-specific comics funnier. Also think that “humanist” and secular impulses to do much with (defending?) free expression accounts for the lameness of atheist humor, a little like going for the big belch instead of multiple tasteful burps. Less is more.
Reply

 steph  
 March 30, 2010 at 5:05 pm 
oop – i dudnu see that

 
 Ophelia Benson  
 March 30, 2010 at 6:50 pm 
Oh well god, atheist-specific humor, yes, spare me that. (Wait – I like Julia Sweeney.) But just, you know, atheists talking – not all of them are unfunny, including about selves.
Mind you, a lot of the people at – no no, I won’t say it.

 
 
 
 Lloyd Hargrove  
 May 21, 2010 at 1:52 am 
I find the attitudes of the various religious “sects” (this term being all inclusive) towards the beliefs and practices of each other to be at least as interesting as any possible attacks from the atheist point of view.
A polite approach would go like this…
Everyone is wrong except thee and me and sometimes I wonder about thee.
While it would be more correct to just say…
I am always right and everyone else is always wrong. – God
Reply
 
 NeoHumanism: A Center for Intellectuals? (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says: 
 July 11, 2010 at 12:22 am 
[...] I have happily signed Paul Kurtz's statement on the principles of Neohumanism and hope to review the document on this site in a week or so. It's enough to say, read it and understand that it comes at a critical moment in the history of the humanist movement. It calls upon freethinkers to do something they almost never have to do–except with respect to the totally inconsequential question of the existence of God: Make up their minds. For those of … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 steph  
 July 15, 2010 at 6:35 pm 
I see a new T-shirt flying through space – it’s a CSI t-shirt promoting science & reason as a candle in the dark… I hope the ISHV doesn’t devote too much energy to parallel paraphernalia.
Reply
 
 NeoHumanism: A Center for Intellectuals? (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 September 27, 2010 at 9:33 pm 
[...] I have happily signed Paul Kurtz's statement on the principles of Neohumanism and hope to review the document on this site in a week or so. It's enough to say, read it and understand that it comes at a critical moment in the history of the humanist movement. It calls upon freethinkers to do something they almost never have to do–except with respect to the totally inconsequential question of the existence of God: Make up their minds. For those of … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Brandon  
 August 24, 2011 at 12:11 am 
I thought the Neo-Humanist Statement’s focus on global democracy was admirable. Who knew that preaching on our common humanity and actually taking efforts to codify such a sentiment would be so controversial?
Reply
 

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Cartoon Cavalcade! CFI Protects Free Expression
by rjosephhoffmann


Ladies and Germs.  No, Really. Heh, heh.
It is not often that we have an opportunity to salute the defenders of free speech. Why should tonight be any different.
Badda bing.
And who says free expression can’t be funny?
The Center for Inquiry, that’s who.
“As part of its contribution to the Center for Inquiry’s Campaign for Free Expression, the Council for Secular Humanism invited professional and amateur artists to submit their sharpest, cleverest, and most ingenious creations touching on that most sensitive subject: religion.”
Can it only be yesterday that the Center was awarding prizes for slogans like “Faith is no reason.” Yes it could.
I have taken some heat on this site for claiming that atheists qua atheists are not especially funny. Now I have proof.
I’d rather have pudding. Badda bing.
When atheism goes on the attack it usually doesn’t know where to aim.
Whaddya do when you don’t know where to aim.
That’s right, Sally: Aim low.
Whaddya call an army of freethinkers? Nothing, they won’t come when you call.
So, in keeping with the noble tradition of failed stand-up comedy of a genre that would not even place in a college newspaper competition:
Number One:

Comment from prizegivers: “A stinging indictment of the Catholic Church’s pedophilic priest scandal that allows absolutely no room for the predictable apologetic defense. Left me laughing and wincing at the same time!” Not sure how an organization that prides itself on truth, justice and The American way (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Naw, it’s only Father Flaherty committing suicide.”) can get by with stinging pre-trial cartoon indictments. But boy, could I be wrong!
Number Two:

Prizegiver: “Dramatic art of the empty-eyed victim who has fallen prey to what Richard Dawkins calls religion’s ‘virus of the mind.’ Employs the over-the-top hype of a B movie advertising billboard to make its point. Good use of contrast and color. Scary!” Masterfully objective. CFI uses “science and reason,” and as we all know has discovered both the God gene and the Religion virus, so this is scary indeed. Unless…
And three:

CFI Judge: “A sweeping commentary on the negative effects of religion on society- from law, to science, to war, to culture.” This shows how little I know about cartoons. I thought this was incredibly stupid and confused, kind of the opposite of sweeping and stinging.
There was also an amateurs section for the “free expression” cartoons, the most incisive of which is this:

The prize-giver said he “laughed out loud at this one.”
I have to admit, I didn’t, mainly because John’s arm is on backwards and he’s going to throw the rock on the ground.
Hilarious, and worth every penny in prize money.

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Published: March 31, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : cartoon context : CFI : First Amendment : free expression : freethought : Paul Kurtz ..
2 Responses to “Cartoon Cavalcade! CFI Protects Free Expression”

.
 steph  
 March 31, 2010 at 2:00 am 
are these really from CFI – the ‘american way’?
Reply
 
 steph  
 March 31, 2010 at 8:25 pm 
I just had a quick look at all the ‘winners’ … ‘The zombie-eyed stare of the true believer is particularly appropriate’ sums up their attitude to religion. Ingenious creations? Just sneering anti religious, unfunny, nasty destructive and arrogant rhetoric. Pretty depressing really.
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Other Christs as Paedophiles
by rjosephhoffmann


I was an altar boy. Most of the abuse cases now being brought against the Catholic church date from the time when I served Mass, polished candlesticks, smoothed the linen on the altar, filled cruets with wine and water, helped priests on (and off) with their vestments and rang bells at the consecration.
By age ten I could rattle off both the priest’s part and my own in Latin without understanding a word. By age fifteen, a little less fervent, and with other things on my mind, the Mass was drifting irrevocably into English. By age twenty, the Latin Mass was a museum piece and I was an un-outed atheist.
So were lots of priests, or if not atheists exactly they had privately lost their faith. –Plenty of precedent for that, especially among the best-educated priests–and the Church has always had a healthy share of intellectuals and apostates-in-training. I once edited a book by Alfred Loisy, the famous French Jesuit, who claimed that, having lost faith first in the gospel and then in the Church, he was only able to mutter the prayers at the altar and chime in with good conscience at the phrase “suffered, died and was buried,” at the creed. That was in 1928, after he was excommunicated (vitandus) in 1908–as one of an international ring of intellectuals that the Church had come to believe was a conspiracy, called (appropriately enough) “Modernists.”
How many priests, before and since, shared Loisy’s doubts but didn’t possess his honesty? Hundreds? Thousands? How many more thousands after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council turned the rock-hard surety of Catholic doctrine into putty in the hands of Vatican theologians far removed from the dullness and torpor of parish life?

Loisy
Modernists were not atheists. But then, belief in God was frankly not what the Church demanded anyway. The Church of the nineteenth century insisted that you believe in the holy, Catholic and apostolic Church, its sacraments as the sole means to achieve grace, forgiveness, and salvation, and the hierarchical delivery system codified (once and for all) at the Council of Trent in 1563.
Nothing much had happened before Vatican II to challenge the ossified system and the doctrine of the priesthood that came out of Trent. When he was asked in the late 1950′s (on the edge of the Council that was called to reform the system) what he thought of the “role of the laity”–the men, women and children who put dimes and dollars in the collection basket, pay the meager salaries of priests and nuns and keep the church roof from leaking–the formidable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani answered, “The laity?–ah yes. Their role is to pray, pay and to obey.”

Cardinal Ottaviani
If grandma believed that, and your father a little less so, but still sort of believed it, what was a twelve year old to do at 6.30AM in the church sacristy when confronted by a randy priest who asked to see how much he’d “grown.” No, that little boy was not me. It was my best friend (who has never brought a charge against the Church, went to seminary and became a priest himself–a good one I think.) But I know it could have happened to me if I hadn’t been a little smarter, a little faster washing up and slamming the back door of the church.
I knew the priest. Several of my friends from our Catholic high school made a special trip to visit him in his abbey toward the end of his life, where the diocese finally sequestered him. He was a broken and depleted man–not because he’d been removed from the parish–I suspect that was huge relief–but because long before that he was condemned to live out a theological lie. The church had trained him, taken him into minor seminary (from about age thirteen), helped him to realize his vocation, and thereby made him unfit for any other profession. Unlike Loisy, he was neither educated enough, clever enough nor versatile enough to do anything else. He was taught he was a personification of Christ, but he no longer believed it and he must have hated the fact that there were still those who did. Those who did believe it may have been more dangerous. They were the ones who thought they had proprietary rights over the children of the parish and could do as they pleased.

Given the definition of the priesthood that was normal in those days, that the priest is alter Christus, another Christ, why should anyone be surprised at the moral implosion of Catholicism? Religion “experts” like me make a living by describing cults as the products of aberrant doctrine and extremes of “normative” belief. But who decides “normative”? What could possibly be more abnormal than teaching grown men and women (and children) that a man of flesh and blood “in his own person represents Jesus Christ at the altar.”
What Jesus supposedly did–turn bread and wine into “his own body, blood, soul, flesh and divinity”–this man is ordained to do at the Eucharist. That’s what the Church taught and in so many words still teaches. Do we have any evidence that members of the Lundgren Mormons or the Cult Davidian or the Ark Church believe more absurd things? If the biblical ethics of the marginal groups result in perverse outcomes, the Catholic world recoils in horror. But Catholics until very recently have not been able to draw a line between their beliefs and similar effects. Now they have to.

The “crisis” in the Catholic church is not fundamentally a legal problem. Of course the media has to paint it that way because the media is a cyclops. It encourages rubbernecking, tsk-tsking and scintillation while posing as an objective resource for moral discrimination. It is so obsessed with the that of abuse by priests that it can’t get its camera around the why.
But many Catholics and ex-Catholics like myself know that what is happening is really much more profound. It is the end of priesthood. At least it is the end of the symbolism of priesthood and the tokens of office that came with the job. Once upon a time it was, under canon law, a grave sin to accost a priest or to strike him–a crime tantamount to striking Christ himself. The Church knew that the wall between laity and clergy was belief in the sanctity and authority of the priest.

Jesus the High Priest
 
There was no parallel rule against a priest inviting a boy to take down his trousers. Part of the outrage among the most fervent Catholics is that they have watched this scandal unfold without realizing its subtler effects as a demolition of the symbolism and (thus) the system of priesthood itself. They have watched the wall come tumbling down.
They are angry and humiliated, but not just because crimes went unreported and bishops behaved like caliphs, distributing justice on whim. Priesthood was nothing without the archaic trappings of celibacy, purity, snow white vestments, and clean hands holding the host aloft at Mass–a kind of physical orison of Christ’s earthly incarnation–for the faithful to adore. The thought of the same hands, in secret, doing black and unspeakable things to the least of Christ’s brethren broke the bond of trust forever.
For the ones whose job is only to pray and obey, the priests and their bishop-protectors (who, don’t forget, are merely super-priests) are not only guilty of sin (a Catholic idea) and crime (sin translated into the penal codes of secular states). They have exposed a deeper spiritual hypocrisy that will not be covered up by incense and icons.
Surely people have a right to worship the God they believe in in their own way and to choose mechanisms for expressing their belief. The Catholic church has always been happy to provide one of the more sumptuous options for that expression–symbols of ancient pomp and power, smells and bells.
But with so much riding on a tradition that depends on authority, it’s doubtful that Catholicism can survive the smashing of its altars and thrones. The image of a God who reigns above and a vice-regent who rules below over armies of souls struggling for salvation may seem an odd metaphor in the twenty first century–not one that Joe Catholic thinks much about when he goes to communion at the 6PM Mass on Saturday evening to keep Sunday free for golf. Still, that’s the image: the “Church Militant” (on earth) joined through the saints to God and through the souls in purgatory to generations of dead Catholics that have believed throughout time what you believe now. The belief in the “communion of saints” gave Catholics a well-ordered spiritual cosmos that extended as a link between the parish–and the parish priest–right up to the top. The higher up on the spiritual ladder you were the greater the support system of like-minded men, the easier it was to believe in the historical legitimacy of the tradition that made you a bishop a cardinal, a pope. Rank has a way of assuaging even grievous fits of reason and theological doubt.

The easier it became to forget that the foot-soldiers, the priests, the men in black, leading increasingly isolated lives–intellectually and personally–were the weakest link. Not only could they not hold the line against sin and temptation while their superiors drank the good wine, they had ceased to believe it mattered. Liturgically confused, threatened by ecumenism, their catechism relegated to the attic with their birettas, uncomfortable at pancake breakfasts, rarely acknowledged by higher-ups and confronted with a growing inventory of financial woes, closing schools and consolidated parishes–last but not least, even the “good” ones–the object of suspicion, mistrust, and Mrs Murphy’s hearsay. I am not saying the actions of priests are excusable. I am saying that they were inevitable.
Like a lot of ex-Catholics, I feel in a nagging kind of way that I owe the church something, at least my education. I don’t mean to sound conceited when I say that no one who says he got a “Catholic education” since about 1975 has the foggiest idea what the phrase really means. Catholic schools, especially in America, were the first to suffer from the loss of vigor and direction which in other areas led to the emptying of seminaries, rectories and convents and to the widespread loss of faith reflected in the banality of liturgical and doctrinal reform. What I owe the church as a memento of that education is this essay.
We’re now told that this pope is pulling the Church back to basics. But it will never work. The moral center is missing and may have been a myth all along. Dostoevsky thought so. Loisy thought so. The damage cannot be calculated in the percentage of “guilty” men who are brought to justice, or measures being taken to protect children from sexual opportunists. Will the Church now make sure that a thirteen year old going to confession is accompanied by a responsible adult at all times?

The cure is unavailable to a Church that does not understand that its core doctrine, its whole symbolic garment has been unbuttoned by fake Christs who are no more the real thing than the communion wafer is his body.
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Published: April 1, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholic Church : Catholic religion : pedophile : Priest scandal : sexual abuse : Vatican ..
13 Responses to “Other Christs as Paedophiles”

.
 ken  
 April 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm 
I come from a background similar to your own, having attended parochial school for 9 years (8 in grammar, 1 in high school), back in the 1950′s to mid ’60′s, during the days of John XXIII and Treasure Chest comics.
 One person to whom I will forever owe a debt of gratitude for freeing me from the authority of this institution, is the ex-priest turned poet, James Kavanaugh, who wrote the incendiary book A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church in 1967. Here we are almost 45 years later, and his analysis is more cogent then ever.
Reply
 
 Mike  
 April 3, 2010 at 5:43 am 
Further, anyone who believes that righteous prayer will be answered has had to rethink. Did none of those children pray for the abuse to stop ? Unlikely. So where was God ?
Reply
 
 Other Christs as Paedophiles (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 January 3, 2011 at 3:33 pm 
[...] I was an altar boy. Most of the abuse cases now being brought against the Catholic church date from the time when I served Mass, polished candlesticks, smoothed the linen on the altar, filled cruets with wine and water, helped priests on (and off) with their vestments and rang bells at the consecration. By age ten I could rattle off both the priest's part and my own in Latin without understanding a word. By age fifteen, a little less fervent, and … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Dwight Jones  
 January 3, 2011 at 4:12 pm 
Superb writing as always, and having been raised in Quebec in the 50′s, it’s certainly familiar, if only from the protestant pews.
These critiques always make me ask – can Humanism ever replace our species’ desire to believe in something other than self-interest? Or would that now be laughed off as “not another religion, please!”?
Any hope for secular belief in an edifying philosophy?
Reply
 
 steph  
 January 3, 2011 at 9:49 pm 
I agree with you Dwight: always, always, always superb writing.
The point you raise is interesting too. And why do people always look for messiahs to save them, to lead them forward, bring them into a new world? Perhaps rather than humanism being passed off as another religion as you fear could happen, you said once, something about recognising our humanist self beneath our belief (or non belief) layer. If nurturing a more humanist world were to be approached this way… encouraging us simultaneously to be more individually responsible and let go those messiah desires, might we become more interested in others (and animals and the planet too)?
“Abusive priests who identify a little too closely with their Lord and Saviour”… who probably never was. At least, probably all a Jewish Jesus ever wanted, was that the people should hear him and return to God, and be his (God’s) obedient children according to the Law. Ironic really, I doubt Jesus imagined a time, two millenia in the future, when people might be waiting for him to return as their “messiah” (a title I doubt he claimed).
What on earth are the Pope’s ‘basics’? What criteria does he use? Which … myth?
Reply
 
 Dwight Jones  
 January 3, 2011 at 10:11 pm 
Steph writ
“At least, probably all a Jewish Jesus ever wanted, was that the people should hear him and return to God, and be his (God’s) obedient children according to the Law. Ironic really, I doubt Jesus imagined a time, two millenia in the future, when people might be waiting for him to return as their “messiah” (a title I doubt he claimed).”
A most astute concept, novel to me, would like to hear Joseph’s call on that.
My own position is that Christ was a Humanist updating the species on decorum appropriate to the newly urban Mediterranean. Just add Arab hyperbole, a dash of divinity and stir.
Mohammed and Buddha and most others of the same ilk deserve our regard. We need be careful not to crucify them all for the raiments and trappings of their day.
Reply
 
 steph  
 January 3, 2011 at 10:58 pm 
Dwight: I’m referring to what I currently consider to be a plausible Jewish figure, and the early first century Jewish concept of ‘messiah’. The idea that Jesus’ call was for people to ‘return’ comes from the most likely Aramaic derivative, ‘tuv’ (meaning return) of Mark’s Greek term ‘metenoia’ (meaning repent). This is discussed, for example, in James Crossley’s JSHJ 2004 article (138-57) “The Semitic Background to Repentance in the Teaching of John the Baptist and Jesus” The view that Jesus didn’t apply the term ‘messiah’ to himself is most recently and more fully discussed by Maurice Casey in Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s View of His Life and Teaching (T&T Clark, 2010).
I’d like to imagine that if Jesus was here now he might be interested in coming to a little garden wine party and discussing humanism with us… :)
Reply

 steph  
 January 4, 2011 at 3:30 pm 
oh gee – I don’t get on very well with computers, ees and oos, especially at 4am when it’s snowing, my toes are cold and any other excuses I can think of …. the Aramaic tūv is used to translated the Greek word for repent: metano(e)ō …
Reply
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 January 4, 2011 at 4:31 pm 
In what context?
Reply

 steph  
 January 4, 2011 at 9:18 pm 
first century Jewish culture, according to work by Vermes, Sanders, Crossley etc
Reply

 steph  
 January 4, 2011 at 9:36 pm 
ps. I did say what I ‘currently consider’ ie the most plausible and strongest argument given the evidence so far, but I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise … I’ve changed my mind a million times along the way as I’ve learned new things, since I was first introduced to world religions by my first undergrad teacher. He is a good friend still, senior fellow of Funk’s Jesus Seminar, former student of Lloyd Geering, and like Lloyd, a former Pressy minister rejected by his church for not believing enough. In those early days, I believed that the most convincing solution to the Synoptic problem was…
(“Q”).

 
 
 
 Depravity: Philadelphia Archdiocese Suspends 21 Priests « The Musings of Thomas Verenna says: 
 March 9, 2011 at 8:03 am 
[...] think Joe Hoffmann’s article sums up my feelings on this matter.  Here is the article from the New York Times: The Archdiocese [...]
Reply
 
 Argelia (Argie) Tejada Segor (aka Argelia Tejada Yangüela)  
 March 10, 2011 at 5:15 pm 
Great article Joe. I love your style. Never boring, always interesting, amusing….
Nuns in the USA have also left or are dying of old age. The lost of nun’s cheap labor was terrible for the church. Lucky for them, they never made a living from the altar, they had a secular job they could continue outside the church.
But I wonder about Africa, Latin America and other Asian poor countries. Haiti is a haven for missionaries. In Latin American countries, old Concordats are still in place and the states are financing the Catholic church. The more corrupt the government, the more it needs outside legitimation. I wonder how many religious orders are getting their priests from the South.
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“Who was You?” On Hiding from What You Are
by rjosephhoffmann


The Boston Lowells knew who they were. From their perch on Beacon Hill they enjoyed a perspective that encouraged them to believe in the Unitarian credo: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the neighborhood of Boston. When William Filene opened a discount store in the basement of his father’s store to sell overstock and closeout merchandise through his “automatic bargain basement” (off the rack, serve yourself), Beacon Hill was a swarm of indignation. The son of a (Jewish!) peddler would throw Boston society into disarray. Cheap clothes that looked like finery? Now even Irish women who worked as chambermaids could look respectable. That is, if you didn’t look too closely.
Never to be persuaded without a firsthand look, Anna Parker Lowell walked into Filene’s downtown store near Washington Street, coiffed and umbrellad, sought directions “to the so-called Basement” and took the steps with the polish of someone who was used to grand staircases. Once aground she saw women flipping through racks of dresses like playing cards–choosing, refusing, playing tug-a-war, even threatening bodily harm if a latecomer tried to prise her find away from someone with a prior claim. “Disgusting,” Mrs Lowell tsked to herself. “Just look at them.”

Just when she had satisfied herself that Edward Filene’s brainstorm would mean the end of high society in Boston her eyes lit on a beautiful taffeta gown that looked just the thing for the spring ball at Harvard. She moved closer for a better look. As she reached to collect her prize, a woman of questionable pedigree snapped it from the rack and headed for the till. “Not so fast my dear,” said Mrs Lowell. “I was about to have that dress.” “You was,” said the woman without slowing. “I don’t think you understand.” I had chosen that dress. I was just about to collect it.” “You was,” said the woman, unable to evade Mrs Lowell’s pursuit because of a crowded aisle. “Look here, madam. I didn’t want to tell you who I was, but I will if you persist.” The woman stopped, turned, looked Mrs Lowell in the eye, and said “Ok dearie: Who was you?”

I have always wondered what people mean when they say “That’s who I am,” but usually they mean something silly and parochial: I’m a Catholic, a democrat, a creationist, a car dealer, an ex-con, a neo-con. It’s the substitution of code for argument, a conversation stopper rather than an invitation to discuss a position or idea. Clearly identity matters, but the twentieth century was distinctive in breaking down the sorts of identities that isolated people from majority communities and power structures.
There are big identities and small identities, weak and strong. Part of this has to do with the nature of language and part with the nature of things. Being a democrat or a used car salesman are weak identities: you can change those things tomorrow if you change your mind or lose your job. Being an African-American or a male, despite the fact that we know a lot more about race and sexuality now than we did fifty years ago, still have a lot to do with properties and are much more difficult to change. To say, “I’m gay,” is not just to say “I’m not straight” but to challenge the idea of straight as normative and authoritative. That’s different from saying, “I’m Catholic,” if by that you mean you’re on your way to heaven and the guy you’re talking to is going the opposite way. Beware of anyone who says “That’s who/what I am” with a smile on his face.
Identities can be a great source of fun, as when Ambrose Bierce (the Devil’s Dictionary, 1925) defines a bride as “a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her” and “Brute” as husband, or a “minister as “An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility.” Too bad that in Bierce’s day the Vegan craze wasn’t what it is in the twenty first century, but he did have this to say about clairvoyants: “A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.”

The weakest identities of all are the ones that have to do with what we believe to be the meaning of life. I can remember in college three distinct phases of change: being a socialist at seventeen, a half-hearted anarchist at twenty, and an existentialist at twenty one. I recovered from these infatuations by not permitting myself to stop reading and never reading Camus after thirty. With confusion intact, I went to Divinity School and emerged as confused and doubtful as ever. Voltaire said it was only his skepticism that prevented him from being an atheist. That was me, too.
I can’t doubt that there are “meaning-of-life” identities that one holds passionately and therefore appear to qualify for the “That’s who I am” category of identification. I have known people whose non-belief is as fervent as the belief of a twice born Baptist or Mormon elder, people who say “I am an atheist” as proudly as an evangelical says “I’m born again.” It’s tempting to say, isn’t it, that the difference between these two statements is that the atheist is smart and the Born again needs his intelligence quotient checked. But we all know that identity statements are code for a whole range of ideas that need to be unpacked and call for explanation. An atheist who felt his non-belief in God entitled him to murder children because of the absence of divine commands to the contrary would be no better than a cult member who believed that disobedient sons can be stoned because it says they can in the Bible.
I feel my Atheist Reader squirming, because while you liked the Bright-Dim difference, you don’t like equivalences. When Katherine Hepburn turns out to be an atheist people say, “I just knew it. Such a strong woman.” When Pol-Pot says God is bunk, we think “Well that’s different, isn’t it—and so far away?”

Personally, I don’t like people who say “That’s who I am,” or “That’s what we are,” or “We need to be honest about who we are.” At a crude level I want to say WTF? It’s eerily metaphysical when atheists do it—not only because it’s the language God uses when he introduces himself to Moses on Sinai. You remember, right?: Moses hasn’t been properly introduced and God says, “That’s who I am,” and when pressed after Moses accuses God of being slippery says “I am what I am.”
I reckon what he really means is, “You know—God—the one who does firmament, landscaping, Leviathan, floods, human beings God.” In fairness, however, the Hebrew Bible insisted that God was not just a proposition but an actor on the human stage. I don’t believe that God did any of the things ascribed to him in the Bible, but to believe in a doer and deeds is a perfectly legitimate way to establish an identity—even if it’s a fictional identity. That’s why Jewish atheists begin by denying the deeds and then the doer. None of this silly ontological stuff: too Christian, too mental.
But I find it a lot harder to know who I am or what we are on the basis of not believing something.
“We need to be honest about who we are” coming from an atheist doesn’t translate easily into the propertied descriptions of being black, gay, female or physically challenged–things over which people have no choice and no control.
 
It’s tempting, I know, to think the things we believe or don’t believe have the same status as the things that constitute us as persons or collectives of persons. But you would laugh at a used car salesman saying at dinner, “Dammit, Mother, I’m tired of hiding from who I am. Tomorrow I’m going right into the boss’s office and say to him, ‘Mr Jones: I am Bill Smith and I’m an atheist.” You would not laugh at someone who said, “Mr Jones: I haven’t had a raise in two years. Is it because I’m black?”
Atheists often complain when religious groups claim special treatment on the pretext that any speech against religion is defamatory while claiming equivalent protection for their own beliefs. But atheists need to be very careful about traveling the road of victimization and minority rights or simply adopting the legal definitions supplied under non-discrimination laws. Especially when racial, sexual orientation and gender provisions do not apply to atheism and the protection accorded to religious beliefs, if embraced by atheists, creates a stew of issues–not the least of which is that there is no settled definition of atheism and if there were a true freethinker would reject it.
Difference is deceptive, especially when it comes to self-definition. Is coming out atheist like coming out gay, an act of courage? On what basis–the fact that terms like “minority,” “unpopular” and “misunderstood” can be applied to both categories? But simply to embrace a minority position toward a “divine being” based on denying a premise is not an act of bravery. It doesn’t make you who you are or what you are. It’s neither race, profession nor party platform—not even a philosophical position or scientific theory. It’s not something to be ashamed of or proud of. It’s just about an idea—even if it’s a really Big idea.
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Published: April 2, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Bible : Christianity : gay : Judaism : language : religion : theism ..
2 Responses to ““Who was You?” On Hiding from What You Are”

.
 Joram Arentved  
 April 2, 2010 at 8:48 pm 
Sorry, I meant, who is who, ‘just in case,’ ‘J.A.’
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 steph  
 April 3, 2010 at 5:11 pm 
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
 Ambrose Bierce
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Atheist Denominationalism
by rjosephhoffmann

Most atheists have never read H. Richard Niebuhr. That’s too bad. Because now that unbelievers are fighting with each other about how much of God not to believe in, they have a lot to learn from the battles fought among God’s people for primacy of position.
Niebuhr was primarily an ethicist and while influenced by philosophers and theologians as far apart as Barth, Troeltsch and Tillich, he was solidly grounded in the reality of social change. He knew that since the Protestant Reformation Christianity had become restless and incoherent. When monolithic belief in God’s holy church and her sacraments was demolished by the phenomenon of “fissiparation” (churches quarreling over picayune differences about inconspicuous doctrines and forming into ever more minor sects), the stage was set for a religion that could hardly claim to be what Christ had in mind when he expressed the wish that ‘all may be one’. Not of course that Jesus was speaking, if he was speaking, of the church when he said that.
Countries around the world experienced the Protestant Reformation in different ways: Europe at a theological level, and then in skirmishes that grew into full fledged wars. No longer able to contain the confusion by executing the odd heretic or sending the forces over the hill to rout the Huguenots, Europe settled finally into a state of religious détente that grew eventually to boredom and finally to a comparative loss of interest in religion and an acceptance of secular values. One of the reasons the “priest abuse scandal” has been so shocking to Europeans is that this generation of Irish, Italians, Germans and French have a hard enough time remembering the autocratic church of their grandparents’ day, when papal and episcopal fiat were good enough for relatively docile laity. It is the idea that society—the secular—stands against and above the church in all legal and judicial respects that makes the crisis almost unfathomable in modern terms.

A Protestant Scene
America experienced the Reformation as an export, a receiver nation. Whatever you might have learned about America being solidly “Christian” at its foundation is not only not true, but not true because the seventeenth century was the era when Christianity itself was being redefined. The puritans of New England did not share the religious interests of the commercial men of Massachusetts Bay, a “factorie,” and the relatively softer Baptists followed on their heels within a generation. Harvard had fallen from Calvinist grace by 1702 when Yale was founded to preserve its true religion (the mottoes are revealing: Harvard, Veritas, Yale Lux et Veritas). By then, Jews were aboard, or off ship, in Rhode Island and the first waves of Catholics were about to arrive in Lord Baltimore’s Maryland. Go a bit further south and boatloads of low church Anglicans had disembarked in Virginia decades before, and Presbyterians would squeeze into the gaps in the Carolinas, named for Charles II. Georgia (the name first suggested to a delighted George II in 1724) would be transformed by Wesley’s followers into a colony for Methodism. Go a little deeper and change colonial masters: waves of Catholics driven from New France by the pursuing forces of the British General Wolfe, would arrive in the bayous of the Mississippi Gulf region and learn to call it home.

A 'Cajun' (Acadian) Scene, 1898
The grab bag of religious immigrants that came together at the end of the eighteenth century was not an especially remarkable mix. It was a powder keg of competing denominations with explosive potential. In their wisdom, as Americans like to say of the founding fathers, the authors of the Constitution were savvy enough to make sure that religion and government should stay apart: that’s what the first amendment was devised to do. But they were equally savvy about the instincts of these displaced and largely yokel Europeans. Whether it was debt, famine, crime, adventurism, a loveless marriage, a lost fortune or religious persecution that had brought them to the New World, it was entirely likely that their faith came with them. So, what the founders gave with their right hand to government they took away again with their left by delivering to these competing sects the “free exercise” of their faith. Congress would never pass a law constraining the free exercise of religion. And in saying that they passed a law concerning the free exercise of religion. America became the most religious nation on earth and the most fertile field for growing new religions.

Mormon Trek
Niebuhr of course knew all of this, the son of a distinguished immigrant German theological family himself. He knew that the ragbag culture of American religion would always be a supermarket of choices–and not only that. There was something in the nature of Protestantism that was friendly to competition (as Weber had argued at the beginning of the twentieth century), from strong belief to weak belief, from Born Againism to Ask me Later. If ever Feuerbach needed confirmation of his idea that religion makes God in man’s image, the proof could be found in the American Experience.
Acadia
* * *
Modern Atheism is a continuation of the pattern of denominationalism and derives specifically from it. It is the fatal last step in the journey from strong to weak belief. Just as secularism emanates from the religious acceptance of tolerance and pluralism, necessities imposed by competing sects living in close cultural proximity over a long period of time, atheism is that point on the belief scale where God becomes not optional but impossible.
By saying that I don’t mean to suggest that atheism is religion. That is a limp, tiresome, historically uninformed debate. But atheists would be very foolish not to understand themselves connected through history and process to the developments that help us to understand the phenomenon of denominationalism. If a hard core atheist cannot believe in creation ex nihilo, it would be pretty silly for him to believe that any social or intellectual position can be equivalently wrought.
It also seems clear to me that atheists, in accepting that they have their origins not in Zeus’s bonnet but in a social process, should also accept that atheism will also experience its own denominationalism, its own sectarian divisions This process has been under way for a long time. We are seeing its latest eruption in the “debate’ between old and new atheists, as in the twentieth century in differences between religious humanists and secular humanists. Even the terminology used to express the differences (as Niebuhr pointed out) becomes crucially significant: Labeling is one of the properties of the protestant spirit. Just as it isn’t enough to say Baptist without specifying Southern, American, Freewill, Particular or Seventh Day, the day may come when one atheist will demand of the atheist sitting next to him at a bar “Old,” “New,” “Bright,” “Strict,” “Friendly” or “Prickly?”

What denominationalism teaches is that human beings despise norms. I suspect there will never be a more impressive “norm” than the rules and doctrines and liturgies of the Catholic church of the sixteenth century. If you want to know what God looked like at the peak of his game, it was then. But “then” is when the Reformation happened.
I suspect that atheism had something like that heyday in the 1940’s when it became, normatively speaking, a sexy bad boy philosophy associated with the likes of Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell, and slightly later with (certain) existentialists, especially Camus. It had a prior history of course, and a later one. But I tend to think the potential for variegation in atheism goes back far into history. Maybe it goes back to Hobbes, maybe to Lucretius or Epicurus. But wherever it goes it is always in juxtaposition with religious values, and often enough (especially with the French) with particular religious doctrines. Read the forward to Marx’s doctoral thesis to see what I mean.
Atheism follows the religious pattern of denominationalism not only because it behaves religiously but because its central question is a religious question—or more precisely a question about religion. It should surprise no one that what we are seeing now are permissive, soft, hard, pluralistic, total rejectionist, possibilist, impossibilist, and accommodationist responses to the question of God’s existence and the “meaning” of religious experience. Why would we expect anything else?
What we can hope is that the process doesn’t take atheists too far down the denominational road as they jockey for position as the True Unreligion: Once-born and twice-born atheist is a distinction we can live without.
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Published: April 8, 2010
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Tags: atheism : Christianity : denominationalism. sociology of religion : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Unbelief ..
3 Responses to “Atheist Denominationalism”

.
 rjosephhoffmann  
 August 23, 2012 at 6:41 pm 
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
In celebration of yet another atheist sect, Atheism Plus, this ….
Reply
 
Quote of the Day | eChurch Blog says: 
 August 24, 2012 at 3:00 am 
[...] SOURCE [...]
Reply
 
 stevenbollinger  
 August 25, 2012 at 12:17 pm 
Yesterday I read the forward to Marx’s dissertation and today I read it again. I think I know what you mean. And of course many centuries of years of Christianity will leave deep traces for a long, long time, more traces than even the most clever among us could ever fully recognize. Or as Nietzsche put it: “Nachdem Buddha todt war, zeigte man noch Jahrhunderte lang seinen Schatten in einer Höhle,—einen ungeheuren schauerlichen Schatten. Gott ist todt: aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch Jahrtausende lang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt.— Und wir—wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!”
Is Stoic atheism a denomination? I read a certain amount of Christian theology, not because I find it interesting. I really, really don’t. Goethe makes me smile with the third line of Faust’s first monologue, and even more with his remark to Charlotte Stein: “Die Geschichte des guten Jesus hab ich nun so satt, daß ich sie von keinem als allenfalls von ihm selbst hören mögte.” Sorry if you’ve heard that one so often already that it’s become as dreary to you as Christian theology is to me. I just really like it a lot. Da spricht mir Goethe aus der Seele, die es nicht gibt. Even Kierkegaard becomes excruciatingly dull to me as soon as he drops the ancient Greeks or the world around him to talk about God or Jeebus. And I don’t read Ambrose or Aquinas or Luther because it’s required reading, either. My major is Independent Studies — so independent, in fact, that I haven’t actually been enrolled at an institution of education in over twenty years. I read a certain amount of theology because I feel it’s important that I do.
I haven’t read anything by H. Richard Niebuhr. I haven’t even read anything by Reinhold Niebuhr, although his name has appeared often enough in what I have read that a great deal of curiosity about him has built up. Just this morning, with a heavy heart, I ordered Barth’s Einführung in die evangelische Theologie from Amazon. I hope I like it. Of course I do. Over and over I have hoped that some Christian theologian will turn out to be more than just one more appalling chore. Appalling because of the influence of his nonsense. And I love the ancient Graeco-Roman theology, which leaves me all the more appalled at the Christians who found it necessary to kill the old polytheism.
Now, am I missing something? Or are all those Christians who insist upon filtering the entire world through that one thick damned book, missing something?
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The Heat of the Moon: A Crisis for Inquiry
by rjosephhoffmann


I had dinner with Paul Kurtz recently. As many of you know, he is the founder of a number of organizations that were brought together in the early 1990’s under the somewhat mysterious moniker “Center for Inquiry.” What was a Center is now a Crisis.
The name was an attempt to stitch together his two pet projects and their respective publications, The Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine and organization devoted, basically, to investigating pseudoscience and the paranormal, and Free Inquiry, a magazine and organization devoted to the promotion of Kurtz’s ideas about secular humanism–a name not coined by him, but one intended to connote that humanism to be humanism needed to be non-theistic.
For many readers of the magazines, the difference between secular humanism and atheism was a difference without distinction. And in fact, the Council for Secular Humanism, one of the parents of the Center, was never totally interested in driving home the difference.
Between 1982 and 1992 robust atheists were drawn into the mix along with a fairly loyal cadre of skeptics, agnostics, perennial doubters, former fundamentalists, hopelessly lapsed Catholics and secularized Jews. Even though these groups had nothing conspicuously in common, they were bound together by a vague and sometimes outspoken antipathy toward religion, dogma, and the nibbling away of first amendment rights and protections by the churches and church-loving politicians.
 
The Center, when it became the Center in the early 90’s was an amalgam of two or three loosely confederated organizations and publications. On the skeptical side, readers of the Skeptical Inquirer were treated to a steady diet of articles about crop circles, weird medicine, weeping statues, spontaneous combustion (of people), Bigfoot, apparitions of the Virgin to impoverished Mexicans, the shroud of Turin, and ESP. (Remember ESP?). On the humanist side, Kurtz pursued his philosophical interest in finding moral alternatives to the dogmatic ethics of organized religion. He refused to believe that nihilism—the cliff of free choice where atheism gets you—was the only possible outcome of unbelief, and he opposed the use of ridicule as a means of argumentation. In fact, I learned from Paul that there is no need to be unkind to people who disagree with you, even if they are a bit slow.

The Center for Inquiry was always a work in progress and at the time of Kurtz’s very public ouster from the organization in 2008 was far from being a finished portrait of his thinking. Kurtz had visions of making it a “think tank” for the principles of secular humanism. The problem with such a plan was that few of his closest associates and co-workers and not all readers of the publications signed on, in a strict sense, to the vision—which (after all) was a rejection of dogma, which (after all) is what makes religions cohere at the level of belief and action. “Free-thought,” however you designate it, is not a system that leads to baptism, marriage vows, or fidelity.
CFI specialized in conferences featuring “big name” speakers. The Center developed a formula that involved, basically, appealing to the readership and a modicum of outsiders through the star-power of participants, then incorporating the “talks” from the gatherings in Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer. The conferences were themed and ranged from public discussions of biblical ethics to the war on science—a theme CFI patented long before the issue became a hot button under George W. Bush.

The advantage to the organization of these magazine-based events was a steady supply of articles by important voices, not all of whom agreed with each other and (certainly) not all of whom were atheists. The advantage to secular humanism was in being able to claim that the conference participants either endorsed the humanist stance of the Center or were apostles for for secularism. The advantage for the readers was that it validated their antipathy towards religion (“If Isaac Asimov and Steve Allen are atheists, I must be pretty smart, too”) and encouraged the belief that the Center for Inquiry was populated by free-thought heroes, public intellectuals, and top notch scientists.
To shore up this belief, Kurtz created the “Academy of Humanism” – a list of significant intellectuals and public figures who had made outstanding contributions to humanistic learning. The Academy was an important “concept”—not least because it called attention to the fact that there is a link between human progress in the sciences, arts and professions and the system of belief (or unbelief) that formed a crucial part of the biographies of illustrious, straight-thinking women and men.
But Paul Kurtz’s mission was always about education. He recognized that humanism was really the intellectual legacy of the western world and that while—in its fragmented, departmentalized and highly specialized form–this legacy is foundational in our best universities–there was no organization that saw “humanism” as a subject matter in it own right, one that both promoted the values associated with the intellectual tradition and existed to protect it through outreach and education.
 
The tricky bit in turning this vision into reality was in urging the “atheist believers” to understand that secular humanism was not an endpoint on an intellectual path to being bright and right, but a process. It included discipline, thinking, skepticism (not just about religion, but value in general). It was surprising—to me at least–how few atheists were prepared to move beyond the cul de sac of full-frontal unbelief to the questions of meaning and value. And how many found atheism a self-authenticating philosophy that evoked no further questions.
When New Atheism was loosed upon the world, birthed by writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the Center for Inquiry was plunged into a crisis. It wasn’t seen that way at first: the language of Dawkins seemed, at one level , entirely comportable with some of what CFI had been saying for decades. But Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were not especially interested in humanism (or tolerance, or kindness) and as a “new generation” of ungentlemanly soldiers they were not especially interested, either, in doing business with religion, at any level.
Programmatically, it was possible to feature them at conferences. Name-value is name-value. Educationally it was impossible to factor their proselytizing, self-promoting and sometimes academically weak approach to matters of belief into the growing academic and intellectual work of the Center. For CFI to endorse their message and mission wholesale was essentially to abandon any pretense that the Center was involved in “free inquiry” or serious intellectual pursuit in favor of playing the role of the Village Atheist loudly and proudly.
The delicate task of arguing the academic bona fides of humanism, especially its commitment to rational objectivity, was negatively offset by “a bevy of loudmouthed amateurs who simply want to see the end of religion and consider all religious persons morons.” I am quoting myself; but the quote serves to illustrate the dilemma. The gospel preached by the new atheists was not a lesson that could be taught in any secular classroom in the United States. Not because religious bigots control the classrooms, but because the classroom, in a democracy,is a value neutral place with respect to religion and irreligion. It was not religion, ironically, that brought CFI into crisis but the unkind and ungentle Unbelief of the atheist bigots.

Jesus Does His Nails: The Spirit of Sponsored Blasphemy?
My own sense two years beyond the flood is that the organization had no way out. There is a fine distinction between a message that’s muddy and a message that’s nuanced. For all the chatter about what CFI stood for and being “honest” about “who we are,” the ones most prone to invoke the challenge about identity—the Outists, if you will– were stolid atheists who had mounted an insurgency within the organization, despised nuance, found intellectuals useful only insofar as they could draw a crowd (most cannot) and were determined to drive the organization away from the academy and intellectualism.
In 2008 I resigned as a senior vice president and academic “czar” of CFI. At that point CFI had five PhDs on its payroll, not including Kurtz himself. It possessed an educational entity called the Institute, a growing summer educational program, several research projects, an articulation agreement for offering an Ed.M. degree in conjunction with the University at Buffalo, the country’s largest free-thought library, a strong evening lecture series, a summer camp program, a Sunday Platform series, a significant array of non-stipendiary fellows, and an advanced plan for a permanent MA program in humanist studies on the drafting table. It was a primary, if not the only, non-university resource for subjects it had made its own: secular ethics, religion in the public square, pseudoscience, and even controversial subjects such as the historical Jesus and the origins of the Quran. It was enthusiastically invited to hold its conferences on University campuses (an important index of the growing legitimacy with which its programs were being received): Between 1984 and 2007, it had held meetings at, among other places, the Universities of Michigan, Southern California, Richmond, Oxford, Cornell, UC Davis. As its academic visibility increased its intellectual capital grew proportionally.

Cornell
It had become, painfully slowly but surely, not just another secular or church-state separation advocacy group (plenty of those begging for time and money) but the only organization committed to the preservation of humanist values through research and education.
There were two problems with this picture, rosy as it seems. First, it was expensive, and had to compete for attention and funding with CFI’s other priority: expansion and outreach. Second, none of the long-timers associated with Kurtz from the hand-to-mouth days of CFI’s Buffalo beginnings bought into the “educational model.” From the “business model” that had evolved over time, only established projects could be defended. The charge was always that education and academic pursuits were luxuries, did not represent the core values of CFI (not true), did not bring home the bacon (partly true) and needed to be subsidized by magazine sales and conferences (entirely true) which were diminishing. Vision is far more expensive than diamonds.

I left CFI in a bad mood, with a good conscience, but also with the conviction that the organization had become unmanageable, confused, incoherent and headed for disaster. Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry and a full frontal atheist, was committed to making the Center and its magazines a beacon of atheist thought. Barry Karr, the chief operations officer, was determined to keep investigation of the paranormal at the top of the Center’s to-do list, despite the fact that magazine sales had plummeted in tandem with loss of public interest in freak psychology.
Paul Kurtz himself, at some point along the way, became diverted by expansion and left it to his lieutenants to call the shots while he focused on a mission and message that had not quite come together. He was unaware, as only a founder can be, that he had become a thorn in the side of a movement that was trying to outlast him and intent on driving programs in a different direction.
In 2008, by decree of a fumbling board of directors, a Washington, DC lawyer named Ronald A. Lindsay was named CEO of the Center for Inquiry. While Lindsay initially professed to share Kurtz’s interest in humanism, he was mainly interested in First Amendment issues and public policy.
Effectively, he took on an agenda that had suffered the predations of time and tide—the remains of a leader who was not going to be successful in achieving coherence and outreach at the same time—and scuttled it. The position toward religion became not investigative but adversarial. Educational programs were curtailed, threatened with obliteration. Research projects were put on indefinite hold. An organization that stood for the First-Amendment right for blasphemy to occur became a sponsor of “Blasphemy Day” and puerile anti-religion Cartoon Contests.
CFI moved from being a beacon of sophisticated speculation about religion and secular values to becoming a support group for angry anti-religionists and college faddists. An organization that used its stable of worthies to fund worthy projects had chosen instead to become a celebrity booking agency for sideshow atheism. If atheism once had an ugly face (think Madalyn Murray O’Hair) this was its reincarnation.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair
The old star-power had its purpose: to create something of radiance, put it at the center of the humanist universe and let it shine. The “New” Center for Inquiry will have to trade on the words and wisdom of people whose vision need not correspond to much of anything and hope to bask in its glory. It’s the difference between sunlight and moon-glow.
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Published: April 15, 2010
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Tags: atheism : Center for Inquiry : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
8 Responses to “The Heat of the Moon: A Crisis for Inquiry”

.
 Van Harvey  
 April 17, 2010 at 9:29 pm 
I agree completely with this analysis of CFI. For a time I participated in the scholarly meetings and even lectured at one or two of them, but I was always uncomfortable with the dinners or side meetings in which we were bombarded with relatively crude atheistic dogma. I can remember a slide show at one dinner concerned with “our enemies” and one of the first of these was the Dalai Lama of all people. I soon became convinced that most of the heroes of the movement–Harris, Dawkins et al–were not interested in philosophical issues at all; for example, in Harris’ curious claims about mysticism and the self or the political implications of his view that liberal religious moderation is responsible for religious conflict in our world.
Reply
 
 ken  
 April 18, 2010 at 5:16 am 
Mr. Harvey. I was fascinated with your book “The Historian and the Believer”, which I read a number of years ago. A wonderful book.
Reply
 
 Van Harvey  
 April 18, 2010 at 5:40 am 
Thank you, Ken. A second edition came out in 1996 in which I tried to take account of the new developments in historiography.
Reply

 ken  
 April 18, 2010 at 2:54 pm 
Mr. Harvey. I still have the audiotape of a lecture you gave at one of Kurtz’s get-togethers where you discussed the challenge posed to the historian who attempts to deal with historical claims of a miraculous nature. It was a great talk, apart from the annoying problem you had with the sound system not working properly.
Reply
 
 
 The Heat of the Moon: A Crisis for Inquiry (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says: 
 June 13, 2011 at 11:17 am 
[...] I had dinner with Paul Kurtz recently. As many of you know, he is the founder of a number of organizations that were brought together in the early 1990’s under the somewhat mysterious moniker “Center for Inquiry.” What was a Center is now a Crisis. The name was an attempt to stitch together his two pet projects and their respective publications, The Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine and organization devoted, basically, to investigating pseudoscience … Read More [...]
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 Justin Meggitt  
 June 13, 2011 at 1:43 pm 
Excellent post. Good to read such a clear analysis of what has happened and what an enormous loss this is. As a (non-atheist) secularist and fellow traveller, the disappearance of a movement dedicated to genuine humanism and intellectual inquiry is something I and others regret enormously. I hope in some way some version of CFI will revive. At the risk of cliche, it is needed even more now than when Paul initiated it.
Reply
 
 C.  
 July 17, 2011 at 3:05 pm 
I agree with the thrust of the article, but my perception of Paul is a bit tougher. I would welcome your corrections to these views and recollections; I know that memories and viewpoints can be biased by many personal factors.
In my opinion, Paul cornered himself by building an insular organization that haughtily judged all others as inferior or irrational. He declined to join with other Humanist groups, and instead attempted to build an organization based only on his image of “Secular” Humanism. Instead of reaching out, he ridiculed religious Humanists. For instance, he wrote:
“In my view, cowardice is an important motive for many religious humanists who are embarrassed for anyone to know that they do not believe in God or salvation; and so they fudge, hide, mask, and obfuscate their real convictions in order to be socially accepted. They fear especially to be seen criticizing religion or to become known as an atheist.”
Paul seemed to reject the idea that he should work with other groups. He ejected Secular Coalition for America’s Lori Lipman Brown from a DC meeting of Free Inquiry readers. At the same meeting, I recollect that he disparaged the idea that Humanists could or should have alliances with religious liberals. Even at local levels, it appeared difficult to for other Humanist groups to coordinate with their CFI counterparts. Local CFI chapters seemed more willing to duplicate a presentations done by other Humanist groups rather than encourage members to attend another group’s meetings.
All of these behaviors left Paul and CFI in splendid isolation: once radicals gained power in his organization, he had no outside alliances that could help him maintain his Humanist vision.
I support Humanism — in all its diversity. Our community contains a broad range of people: Deists, agnostics, atheists, and others whose religious faith commands them to aide their fellow human. I have little taste for parsing sacred texts to prove they are inane and contradictory. This has been going on for centuries with little effect since it misses the entire point why people adhere to religion. I wish Paul the best, and I also hope we all have learned a lesson in this unfortunate fiasco. I fear, however, that other Humanist groups have also moved more towards atheist advocacy and away from the promotion of Humanist philosophy. If Humanism becomes merely synonymous with Atheism, a hopeful philosophical movement will have gone extinct.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 July 17, 2011 at 3:34 pm 
Humanist groups represent a very small fraction of the US population, barely enough to sustain a single let alone a multiplicity of organizations. The reason for Paul Kurtz’s insistence on sticking to his own map was partly due to fiscal realities (donors and readers of the magazines) and partly due to the fact that he felt that the CFI mission was different from other groups. But insufficient attention was paid to the outcome you have just described (i’m a coalition builder by temperament, as long as basic principles aren’t compromised), and by the time I arrived at CFI–unbeknownst to me–a fairly well developed scenario for takeover had already been developed. I do still see this triumph for a banal and in your face atheism as a defeat for humanism. Mainly however it is a triumph for small minded and conspicuously unaccomplished men (and I do mean men) who have no hope of restoring the vision or winning people to it; in fact, I am not sure what the vision is anymore since it seems to be buffeted by financial needs and uncertainty about the future.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


The Myth of Reason
by rjosephhoffmann

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
 How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick (Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900)
“You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause.” (Chico Marx, Night at the Opera, 1935)

Once upon a time, believing in God was unfashionable. Now to come out an Unbeliever is almost as cool as–well, you know. Especially now that we know the Protestants were right in the sixteenth century about the Pope being the anti-Christ and how religion is really just the Devil’s costume party.
The problem is, now that everyone’s sticking it to religion, pop atheism is becoming as dull as people from Wyoming.
Imagine the following scene:

“Hey, Winston.”
 “Hey, Sally.”
 “What’s up?”
 “Not much, how about you?”
 “Still blogging about how fucked up religion is, though, right?”
 “Not so much. Can’t think of anything new to say.”
 “Yeh, me too. It’s like Dawkins said it all.”
 “Or Hitchens. Hitchens had a lot of good points.”
 “Good times.”
 “I got no spin.”
 “Not even. My religious friends have started talking to me again.”
 “Not good.”
 “Really, right? And when I reminded Jackie I don’t believe in God and how fucked religion is, she said good luck with that. Didn’t quote a single verse”
I’m not sure when pop atheism became unnecessary–but my notoriously eccentric opinion is that New Atheists done it in. Gave it too much oxygen, they did. “Weak opinions need but little air.”
The story hasn’t been about God–or his death or absence–for a long time now. It’s been about them, and what they think of him, or what their fan club thinks about them.
That’s important. Because in classical unbelief, whether we’re talking about Shelley or Hume, Dostoevsky or Huxley, it was mainly about him and the consequences of getting on in our moral life without the benefit of him. But that was yesterday. Yesterday’s gone.

Now it’s a repetitious lecture given mainly by pedants with a toff accent (a beard, or academic promise, will substitute for the accent if you’re American) who think that while God may be dead, he won’t lie down.
So time for someone to say, “Gracious me, you’re right. I don’t know how I missed three centuries of carping about God and religion. That’ll teach me to doze through philosophy classes. There isn’t a God. There never has been. Not  really I mean. Just stories and theological postulates and churches. All a great waste of time and real estate. We’d better shut up now and stop being so damned reasonable. [pause] So…what do we talk about now?”
Once Upon a Time in the West
Time was, atheism was quaint and curious, distaff, contrary and therefore necessary. That was when people actually believed in the things they were supposed to believe in: the trinity, the Virgin birth, creation in six days (weekends off), sin, forgiveness of sin, life everlasting, transubstantiation, infallibility (papal or biblical–you choose), the holiness of priests and the wisdom of rabbis. That’s the short list, by the way, but it’s getting shorter.
Nowadays religious people just say they believe in the paraphernalia. Because they think they need to appearto be who they always thought they were: home-schooled Baptists, “pro-life” Catholics, liberal, all-embracing protestants, culturally rejectionist evangelicals–that sort of thing. Asking a religious person of the American species if he believes in some doctrinal alphabet is a bit like asking him if he believes in dressing warm in winter.
But the polls I read tell a different story. They suggest that to self-identify only with a denomination or a univocal religious position is becoming more and more rare, even among people with very white teeth and broad smiles who say “Christian” when you ask them their sexual preference.

When the beliefs I just named ruled the hearts and minds of European peasants, as opposed to school boards in Oklahoma and Texas, they were really believed. They had to be because the most ignorant people in the world were being taught these “truths” by the glittering brights of their day, intellectual thugs who had the power to enforce their gibberish with penalties ranging from arduous fasts (not recommended if you’re undernourished already) to excommunication–a sentence of spiritual death and existential despair.
But the brightest and best of our day are not bishops and Oxford friars. That puts religion in a corner it has not been in, fully, until the twentieth century, playing defense for a “narrative” that is no longer compelling, clinging (selectively) to doctrines that seem either fanciful, impossible, injurious or wrong, and where its explanation of the world and recipe for human happiness, based on a world-denying hope for future, unmortgaged treasure, seems–doomed.
The inversion of authority and explanation from religious to secular changes everything. Religious persons, caught up in without catching onto this new reality, are seldom aware of the shift. And they are encouraged in their wistfulness by politicians and popes whose job now seems to be polishing the illusion. They live in a world where change is rapid, certain and financially profitable, even for them, but still revere “timeless truths” that are neither.
Atheists, who often complain about the second bit–the culpability of religion and politics in encouraging fantasy–need to be more attentive to the first bit–the difficulty of accepting a reality that may take another century (or longer) to be fully formed and probably will be born without an atheist midwife. After all, atheism is neither science nor authority. Rather than being an explanation of the world, it is only a stance toward implausible explanations.
Predictions about the end of religion and the dawn of a new age of scientific progress are centuries old now. They have been wrong on two counts. Religion hasn’t gone away and science has not vindicated the “reasonableness” of the species.

I don’t believe for a minute that even the prayingest, spirit-stuck pentecostal, in the privacy of her trailer, doesn’t have moments of serious doubt about her beliefs. Even Jesus-besotted Oklahomans live in a world where religious belief, every time it bumps up against scientific explanation, comes out a loser.
Believers (who come in different wattages, by the way) feel besieged by a world that leaves almost no room for traditional belief and value. Many of those beliefs are foolish and some of the values are dangerous and risible. But not all. When the congregation of the Abilene Temple Assembly of God try to be faithful to inherited religious ideas, in the same way they try to be faithful to their marriages, the results are…mixed. As a lived thing, they feel good when they are being good about religion, just as they feel good when their marriage is going well and the bills are paid–if that isn’t saying the same thing. It is not unreasonable or criminal to prefer security to anxiety.

For most of us (and not just people in Oklahoma) the “normal” state of affairs is to prefer the security of the familiar to what you don’t want to risk or lose because you don’t fully understand it, or can’t fully judge the consequences of not having it anymore. Religion is like that. It may be true that smart people find the immensity of the star-spangled cosmos more awesome than the idea of a creator and cosmic father. But smart people should also be able to apprehend the creature-feeling that has found immensities and galaxies empty of any meaning beyond their mere existence.
Yes, I know: we’re meant to take creationists and “Dims” as a “threat” to civilization and progress, and to bristle every time someone says that America is a Christian country. But, Jaysus help me, I don’t. I just think this is a position into which the course of knowledge has shoved the people who got a D- in high school biology their third time round. Atheism will never reach them. If religion has not made their life better, no religion will make it immeasurably worse.
Besides, loads of what the faithful believe and assume to be true is neither written down in Scripture nor taught by any church.
I heard from a Catholic student two weeks ago that her mother had received a “dispensation in the ‘nineties to have an abortion.” When I looked skeptical (did she mean for an annulment or permission to marry a non-Catholic?) she said, “No, really.” Remind me to review the documents of Vatican II again for this loophole.

And some years ago, a Christian student of mine regaled me with an interpretation of Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (when to have a disobedient son stoned to death by the city elders) in which he concluded that the families for whom this law was intended were “not Jewish.” “That makes all the difference,” I said. God is indeed good.
Most Catholics who are militantly anti-abortion are not so militantly protective of the pope’s superhuman authority–from which the doctrine derives. They think of course, that the Church and the Bible are always in harmony because that’s what the Church wants people to think. You cannot be a good Catholic and believe otherwise, but you cannot be a bishop and believe that. Most protestants who cling to the literal meaning and inerrancy of scripture are really addicted to the ingenuity of private interpretation, the only way to get around its embarrassments and fatal flaws. God is as absent from these theological gymnastics as he is from Lucretius’ universe.
All of which is to say that unlike the atheist caricature of religious belief, the mistaken idea that by trivializing the complex you are just simplifying an equation in order to “solve”a problem, religion isn’t simple. It is unsimple both because it emanates from the complexity of human cognition and behavior going back to the formative age of the species and because the behavioral and cultural systems it has created flow outward; their direction cannot be reversed to a single source easily–maybe not at all.
It’s a favorite ploy of the new atheists especially to say that religion is the simpleton’s method for explaining the world and nature without astronomy and physics–a “default position” for dummies who don’t understand science. Maybe so.

But even if that judgment holds water, from the standpoint of the social sciences anyway it is merely a shabby and unscholarly opposite, the default position of men and women who don’t understand religion.
Maybe this is why so few serious scholars who happen to be unbelievers (most, in my experience) have time to be public about their atheism and why the sharpest criticism of the atheist popularizers comes from within the academy, where (by the way) the serious study of religion takes place.
More critically, it needs to be pointed out that the books on the subject have been written by men with credentials no more adequate for writing about God and religion than I would have writing about the phylogeny of nematodes (about which, however, I am endlessly curious.) Which is to say: the New Atheism by its amateurism and short-cutting undermines the work of description and analysis that might make unbelief a better understood phenomenon in the contemporary world rather than, as it is in the hands of the simplifiers, an underanalyzed “position” on a subject that is greatly misunderstood.
The Myth of Reason: Of Self-Evident Truth
Is the non-existence of God a self-evident truth? It’s a fair question and I would like to see it debated by Aquinas and Ayer, preferably in Latin.

One of the reasons I have trouble with the American Declaration of Independence is that it enshrines the concept of self-evident truth, a phrase propagated in the eighteenth century by men who believed in the myth of the Reasonable Man and Common Sense. It was a significant moment in the history of the West because by propagating the myth it became possible to believe in your own reasonableness–just as centuries before, believing in the myth of salvation encouraged you to believe that you were on the fast track to heaven.
But let’s not forget, for most “men” of the Enlightenment, belief in God was both commonsensical and reasonable. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man is one of the most confident poems ever written, its central message being that the God of Reason has put us on earth to figure things out (“Say first, of God above or Man below/What can we reason but from what we know?”). And as for common sense, sometimes considered the underpinning wisdom of the American form of democracy–a structure built on the shoulders of farmers and laborers (don’t mention the slaves), not on gentility and inherited wealth (don’t mention the robber barons of industry and trade): Just look at the silly governmental structure Americans put into place in 1789, only because the revolutionary horde couldn’t wait for the British monarchy to descend into the irrelevance that was its fate. Can you imagine a reasonable organ of government anywhere in the world creating the filibuster?
I know freethinkers are an ornery bunch when it comes to packaging, but most are happy to believe in the equality, liberty and good life decreed as the gifts of an impressive creator to his remarkable creature without pausing to consider it’s a package deal. No creator, no self-evident truth, no gifts.
Would explicit atheism have helped us to bring about a better system? Would the cult of Reason have spread if, instead of doubting the Virgin birth, as Voltaire, Jefferson and Paine did openly, they would have begun by decrying the backwardness of the populace (which was pretty backward and remains stubbornly so) and sponsored blasphemy contests instead?
The proto-unbelievers of the Age of Reason could make a distinction between belief in God as a premise (or a useful metaphor for excellence), perhaps even a necessary fiction, and belief in a church that claimed proprietorship of the concept.
The great intellectual battle of the age wasn’t about whether God existed (though it was discussed) but how to wrest him from the pharisees who entombed him in church dogma. Most, in fact, tried to do the same thing (unsuccessfully) with the historical Jesus, for whom they had an intuitive respect. A bit later, the poet Matthew Arnold effused about the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and message.
Beyond the Myth of Reason: Intolerance?
One of the reasons I’m not a cheerleader for the “New Atheism” (as anybody paying attention to this blog knows) is that it exploits the myth of Reason after rejecting the myth of God. It takes the reason-myth as self-evident truth, which is a very dangerous way to handle any myth, including theistic ones.
True, these are different myths with different coefficients (reason is human, God divine). But the reification of reason is a cheat. A cheat because reasonable people find different things reasonable, and many of these things are as crazy as ever rang a belfry bell: eugenics, nuclear proliferation, cheap energy, strip mining, even the war on Terror–yes, even that, a bicameral legislature.
For every Jew killed by the Catholic Inquisition, ten people have been killed by science and reason, millions using the the best Nazi technology, thousands in Stalin’s pogroms and to bring the Cold War in with a bang at Los Alamos. Putting Science in God’s throne doesn’t make the diktats humane: it just changes tyrants. Atheism of a certain stripe descends into intolerant fanaticism. It becomes a cause, an organized frenzy for people out to document their liberation from the demons of ignorance.
Needless to say therefore that it appeals to people who need demons to feel like angels, a terribly religious emotion.
Do I exaggerate? Not when a New Atheist website screams:
“Wake up people!! We are smart enough now to kill our invisible gods and oppressive beliefs. It is the responsibility of the educated to educate the uneducated, lest we fall prey to the tyranny of ignorance.”
Holy Mary: I wish I had a plowshare to beat into a sword.
Popular Atheism has become unnecessary partly because it became dull at the same moment it became popular, loud when it might have begun to talk in reasoned measure. Like the brightest flashing of a meteor before it becomes interplanetary dust, or the point at which milky sludge becomes ice cream, just before it melts.
So now what do we talk about?
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Published: April 26, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: humanism : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
22 Responses to “The Myth of Reason”

.
 steph  
 April 27, 2010 at 2:30 am 
I wonder what the credentials of the educated are who are supposed to educate the uneducated. I think the thing to talk about now is about moving forward with neo secular humanism, and inclusiveness and social harmony, morality, tolerance, health and education, equality, fairness, the environment, personal happiness and independence, empathy, progress and reason when it’s about critical thinking and evidence. And global action and peace.
I’m fascinated by the phyogeny of lizards – I can see them often. Thank goodness I can’t see any of those horrid little worms.
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 SocraticGadfly  
 May 19, 2010 at 5:37 pm 
Excellent thoughts. Of course, the “New Atheists” could start back in the Enlightenment, with St. David of Hume’s observation, “reason must be the slave of the passions,” or look at how modern cognitive science and behavioral psychology have scientifically shown are relative lack of reason.
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 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 4:46 pm 
I see a certain parallel between yours and Kurtz’ tenure at CFI. Unwilling to stoke the atheist fires and worse, preaching Humanism per se – death by bunga!
Neo-Humanism it is, until we reform again under our own banner and covenant never to discuss religion again..
Reply

 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 5:13 pm 
I think so, a progressive humanism, beyond religious differences, inclusive, and about education, exploration and imagination (as on another post here)
Reply
 
 
 Pacotheus  
 July 7, 2010 at 9:48 pm 
Yes, there are atheists who seem to think that atheism is the end when it’s just the beginning. But when someone first breaks out of prison I think they can be forgiven for supposing that they have “arrived” when their journey has, in fact, only begun. Show them the way instead of berating them for their misunderstanding.
As for reason being the slave of the passions, all Hume meant is that reason does not tell you what to desire. It only tells you how to go about satisfying what you desire and also helping you to determine whether what you desire is good for you. Reason being slave of the passions does not mean pointing the way either to theology or something like theology that can justify whatever we wish to do whether it is reasonable or not.
Reply
 
 The Myth of Reason (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 September 25, 2010 at 1:03 pm 
[...] When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick (Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900) "You can't fool me. There ain't no sanity clause." (Chico Marx, Night at the Opera, 1935) Once upon a time, believing in God was unfashionable. Now to come out an Unbeliever is almost as cool as–well, you know. Especially now that we know the Protestants were right in t … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 steph  
 September 25, 2010 at 4:21 pm 
Brilliant. Brilliantly Bright. Superwit, so pertinently poignant, packed with important points. There’s so much in here and it’s even better somehow the second time up. We have come from the days when religion was fashionable, with the glittering Brights, all tyrannical “intellectual thugs”, to the fashionable non religion of today, with the new thugs, Four Horsemen, the real “dimwitted Dims”. The old tyrants have merely been replaced by new tyrants, all the same…
So what to talk about now?
Now let’s talk about tropical islands, licking popsicle ice, chocolate, whiskey, the good true and beautiful – music, art and poetry and probably the great big free and open ocean. Or perhaps just talk about nothing at all and enjoy the simple luxury of silence.
(sp phylogeny)
x
Reply
 
 Seth Strong  
 September 27, 2010 at 9:12 am 
The problem with atheism is going to be the same one as the problem with Christianity, you don’t have homogeneous people. You have many people trying to make sense of the social structures that were here when we got here. What appears to be an old news atheism has all the nuances to the people who care to think on such things as any idea. People are trying to get to the heart of what it is they believe and what that belief should prompt in terms of actions.
In response to the question “So what to talk about now?” on one hand, the world of topics are our oysters but yet I’m commenting here and so did Steph. We’re talking about what we are still thinking about. So for all the amusement of atheists being antiquated contrarians now that everybody is a contrarian, what’s this post but contra-contrarian? I, for one, am on a topic that I’m still putting a lot of thought into.
By all means discuss what is or isn’t working. I think these topics are interesting and relevant. But I think it’s tongue in cheek or careless to suggest that these very same people including Dawkins, or Hitchens don’t find pleasures in the smaller things as well. Just like the author of this post, I’d imagine they think on their philosophies on belief and they take their relaxation, appreciation for family, and such according to their own temperament.
The limelight atheists can sometimes cause us to forget the real people sharing the label. I’m sure there are muslims, Christians and more that feel that tongue in cheek comments often forget how human the bearers of the respective beliefs and non-beliefs are.
Reply
 
 s. wallerstein  
 April 10, 2011 at 1:22 pm 
That would be a good subjec for a blog: why are we still talking about the New Atheists?
I once had a girl friend, and our relationship was entirely based on our contempt for a certain group of persons. When we finally managed to escape from that group of persons, our relationship fell apart, because the only thing we had in common was our rejection of said persons.
Reply
 
 Herb Van Fleet  
 April 10, 2011 at 2:57 pm 
I see this is a re-post from April, 2010. I hadn’t yet signed up for your blog then, so I’ll comment now.
First and foremost, please quit picking on my home state of Oklahoma. I know we’re the poster child for Christian fundamentalism, but Mississippi is a close second. Plus they have the “Klan,” the Neo-Nazis, and many chapters of the Aryan Nation. Good pickin’s there. So, please leave the Okies to me and my merry band of heathens. We’re having way too much fun.
OK, on to Reason as Myth. The way I see it, these days, and for many centuries past, the harm done in the name of religion has been pretty much limited to the Christians and the Muslims, and here in the U.S. of A., the Protestants. As science has advanced, the beliefs of these religious groups have been, much to their dismay, falsified and shown to be mere myth and wishful thinking. Faced with this dilemma, they ask, naturally, what would Jesus do? And, even though “punt” is the correct answer, they opted to perpetuate an untruth. Call it a lie. Call it that.
Thus, reason gets checked at the door. And, damned if this hasn’t fooled the atheists. They think they are arguing with well reasoned but fatally fallacious beliefs. But, nooooo! The nonbelievers are actually dealing with a big fat lie. Of course, exposing the lie may get you stoned . . . to death. On that point, I leave you with the following (substitute “religion” for “the state:”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
 – Joseph Goebbels
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 s. wallerstein  
 April 10, 2011 at 8:26 pm 
It’s a question of variables, I think.
The New Atheists seem to want to reduce the world to a few basic variables.
Whether I like it or not, new variables constantly
 make themselves present to me. In fact, there are more variables at each moment than I feel comfortable with or can handle.
You might see it as the difference between a scientist, who strives for the simplest possible explanation and a novelist who lets the complexity of life flood his or her mind.
In my opinion, phenomena as complex as religion can better understood with the pen of a novelist or the camera of a documentary film-maker than with the equations of a scientist.
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 April 10, 2011 at 8:31 pm 
Well said, Sam: I like that analogy. A lot.
Reply
 
 
 artm  
 April 11, 2011 at 4:29 am 
Human body is another example of a complex system with many variables. It is much easier to explore human body with the pen of a novelist then with a scalpel of an anatomist. Doesn’t mean anatomists should have given up.
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 s. wallerstein  
 April 11, 2011 at 6:44 pm 
I would compare religion to the human mind rather than to the human body.
Can you explore the human mind with a scalpel? Probably not. You can explore the brain with a scalpel, but you need the novelist or the introspective (or empathetic) observer to explore the mind.
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 artm  
 April 12, 2011 at 3:18 am 
Body has many variables. One of them is mind. It is not an “independent” variable, but novelist would often rather forget about the underlying brain and concentrate on mind alone. Psychiatry, psychology, neurobiology and other disciplines on the other hand explore mind in relations to other “variables” of a human.
I’m not against novels as tools for understanding people (their minds or their religions). But I disagree with dismissing “equations” as bad tools for understanding complex phenomena.

 
 artm  
 April 12, 2011 at 5:15 am 
Or different take:
religion is a complex phenomenon with too many variables to be understood.
 a novel is a complex phenomenon with too many variables to be understood.
how is a novel a solution then? either it simplifies its subject (limits the number of variables) or it is just as complex and hence just as unintelligible.

 
 s. wallerstein  
 April 12, 2011 at 7:42 am 
Agreed that psychiatry and experimental psychology can tell me a lot about the way the mind works.
However, if I want to understand how a specific human mind works, say, to understand what my woman companion’s love for me means to her, while not discarding what I’ve learned from psychiatry and psychology, I need to open myself to listening to her, to observing her, to paying attention how other women, perhaps in novels, perhaps in poetry, describe what their love for their mates means to them.
Maybe the new atheists need to listen to religion, not only to the explicit discourse of religion, but to what lies behind that discourse.

 
 artm  
 April 13, 2011 at 3:31 am 
One would look in different novels and poetry for understanding of an abusive mother. Even if she’s one’s father’s loving companion.

 
 s. wallerstein  
 April 13, 2011 at 9:22 am 
artm:
Step-families aren’t easy nor are non-step families.
 Perhaps the myth that all families must be loving causes more damage than anything else. Love cannot be willed, while respect can. That all families, step and non-step, be respectful seems a more realistic goal.
I’ve been a not entirely voluntary step-father for the last 6 years. I’m not in love with the child, now age 10, nor is he with me. I fulfil the adult caretaker role, but I keep my distance from him and he from me. There’s no abuse, but there is no affinity. Affinity also cannot be willed.
From the way your post is worded, I gather that the woman is your step-mother, not your biological mother. If not, my apologies.
In any case, literature, especially folk tales, are full of evil and abusive step-mothers.

 
 artm  
 April 13, 2011 at 2:52 pm 
What I meant is: you suggested learning about mind by reading fiction about like minds. Remember, “mind” was a metaphor for “religion”? You are tolerant towards religion, as far as I can tell, you’d chose particular sorts of novels to understand it. New atheist are less tolerant – religion is far from “woman companion” to them, more like evil step-mother – they pick up a different novel and learn different things. Literature is full of evil priests. It’s difficult to right prejudice with fiction.

 
 s. wallerstein  
 April 13, 2011 at 4:39 pm 
artm:
I’m curious about religion. Religion is not just a set of beliefs, but a way of life for the majority of our fellow human beings; and even many of we skeptics or atheists, as Nietzsche often points out, are unconsciously motivated by ideas or ideals with their root in our religious heritage.
It seems strange to me that people as well-educated and highly intelligent as the New Atheists content themselves with a simplistic fairy tale version of religion.
If I had a wicked step mother, I would like to understand why she is wicked or if she really is wicked, especially if I had to deal with her on a daily basis, as most of us have to do with religious people.
The examined life is not worth living, they say, and if I agree with that (and I do, at least not worth living for me), then I’d best take a good look at religion, even if I have basically a negative view of it.
I was educated as a Jew, and my religious education bored me terribly. It made no sense to me, and I refused to be bar mitzvahed. At age 14 I mocked religion with all the fervor of a New Atheist.
I am still an atheist, but with the years religion has come to interest me more, as have so many things that I rejected as a teenager. As a teenager, I was trying to construct my own identity and in order to do that, I needed to mock and scorn religion and the establishment values of the day.
Now that my own identity, for what it’s worth, is fairly well defined, I can relax my defense mechanisms against religion and all the values that I rejected. I wonder why the New Atheists, most of them almost as ancient as I am, cannot relax their their anti-religious Maginot Walls either.

 
 
 
 Ed Jones  
 April 11, 2011 at 11:05 am 
This discussion of Reason as Myth, ending with the question: So now what do we think about?; forces the following: “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 both science and religion, physics and spirituality, were necessary for a full and integral approach to reality (answer the why of existence) but neither could be reduced to or derived from the other. Physics can be learned by the study of facts and mathematics, but mysticism (true religion) can only be learned by a profound change of consciousness. They uiformaly rejected the notion that physics proves or 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 (shadows and symbols not reality), and mysticism deals with the formless (Ultimate Reality). Both are important, but they cannot be equated”. (Quantum Questins by Ken Wilber, a compendium of virtually all of the significant writings on mysticism by these greatest of physicists.)
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“Drawing Muhammad”? Free Speech and Fake Goods
by rjosephhoffmann


In general, I am in favor of free speech. The sole exception being when my sixteen year old daughter talks through re-runs of Seinfeld or Frasier.
I have even gone on (nuanced) record as saying that no one should be put to death for trying to represent the Prophet of Islam. My final verdict on the Danish cartoon debacle a few years ago is that the Danes aren’t very funny. No wonder Hamlet never smiled.

Not that anyone has the foggiest idea what Muhammad looked like, making the idea of “caricature” about as useful as painting Moses with eye shadow and ringlets. Oh wait: he probably did use eye shadow and have ringlets, at least until he discovered he was a son of Israel and not a prince of Egypt. My bad.
In general however: it is a bad idea to threaten someone for disparaging your religion. Especially when the disparagement in question does not even rise to the level of sophisticated satire, let alone to a level where it should be a test case in free speech.
I personally favor a United Nations Commission for Insult and Indignation (there’s one for everything, anyway) to vet all cases where insult or defamation has been alleged. The Commission (I am glad to offer my services as its first director) would distinguish between (1) “really good satire,” (2) “disgusting and unfunny ridicule,” (3) “pathetic attempt at humor”, and (4) “potentially blasphemous and insulting, even to bystanders.” It would take a unanimous vote of the Commission for anything to achieve level (4), which would require the offenders to dress up like altar boys and spend a weekend in a rectory.

I don’t have a category for “literary” works considered to be blasphemous but apparently the Nobel Committee does, which is why Salman Rushdie will never win the prize for Literature.
All of this is to say, that the rudderless and publicity-starved “Center for Inquiry” is at it again. And (according to the legal puritans in Buffalo) it’s all about free speech.
In its latest attempt to appear useful, CFI comes to the unsolicited defense of two improbable offenders: South Park and a contest to “Draw Muhammad” that never really got off the ground.
Religions have traditionally bristled when their core doctrines have been lampooned. South Park‘s spin is usually tasteless (Who doesn’t hum “Mr Hanky the Christmas Poo” during the holy season? Who can forget the vision of the Future in the Go God Go episode, when Cartman can’t wait three weeks until the Wii console is available and is transported into an atheist future where Richard Dawkins has become a messiah?)

When South Park “does” religion, it can be sweepingly irreverent and occasionally poignant. It is sometimes offensive,as Comedy Central discovered when it received veiled threats from an Islamic organization based in New York over its 200th episode where Muhammad is “represented” as being inside a bear suit.

The episode has attracted attention in the blogosphere, with young Muslim South Park fans expressing reactions ranging from “disappointment” to anger and frustration. A viewer named Bilal el-Houri says that Muslims should take the episode and the furore as a wake-up call, and instead of grunting, boycotting and screaming should be asking themselves why these depictions are now standard.
The so-called threat comes from a certain Abu Talhah al Amrikee and is pretty dull: “It’s not a threat, but it [violence] really is a likely outcome. They’re going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It’s just the reality.” The show’s producers didn’t know that was a likely outcome? Really?
Good satire is supposed to annoy the satiree–otherwise no game. And it is merely masturbatory for a secular advocacy group to enter the picture with a typically onerous lecture on how South Park has a right to be offensive. We know that. That’s why we watch it. Not because we see every episode as a cannon shot for free expression.
Besides, some young bloggers thought the South Park episode was less funny than it was deliberately provocative, a crass bet on a sure-fire reaction to any attempt to insult the Prophet. Wrote Sher Zeinab, “2 b honest 200 episode wasnt funny at all to me!” She then added, “Bringing Mohammad back! when you know it is a sensitive issue […] seems to me southpark is running out of ideas!!! that angle just brought everything down.”
In other words, South Park got what it wanted, or maybe more than it bargained for, with Episode 200–the same way you might get a faceful if you tell fat Mrs Murphy, your annoying neighbor, a series of “Yo mama is so fat” jokes. Are you really going to the cops when she tells you to desist or she’ll sik her Rottweiler on you?
 
Taste and discretion are not essential considerations if you just want to be tasteless and indiscreet, but the question of motive does arise. Free Speech? Solidarity? Puhleez. Save it for real cases of censorship.
That brings me back to my drum. Surely if secularists and atheists have the right to satire and what they are self-describing as “blasphemy,” offended parties have the right to bristle. Listen, atheists: no such thing as a free ride. Your right to deliver insult is matched by my right to be offended and to call you a tasteless cur. No good whining about your right to be dull and overbearing when I do–not even when I say–hyperbolically of course–that you need a good thrashing for your lack of manners and civility.
If you think the pope molests little boys, as a winning cartoon in the CFI Cartoon Cavalcade suggests, then be prepared for the Catholic Church to cry foul.
When Arabs produce cartoons of Jews eating Palestinians, prepare for the Jews to disagree.

Sharon as Cronus
And if Muslims cringe and mumble threats when they see their religion pilloried on South Park or by a desperate Seattle News cartoonist looking for spin (bad idea after a bad night at the bar?), please don’t try to sell this to me as real jewels: they aren’t.
They’re publicity stunts, nothing more. Not only that, but in a world where religious emotions are running high on our crowded planet they are stunts that raise the temperature–like yelling fire in a crowded theatre, nudge nudge.
It has been a long time since an atheist was burned at the stake for his unbelief or a philosopher roasted on a spit for being an Epicurean. Not so long for Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and even Catholics. Given a complicated recent history I’m not sure that South Park‘s post-religious take on heaven or its enviable skill in stirring the pot of religious sensitivities is the place for a serious meeting of minds on the question of free expression and tolerance.
The right to criticism and insult is, surely, the low bench mark in what the doctrine of free expression is all about. The principle does not command the assent of the offended: it condones vigorous disagreement and defense. And to call every case of disagreement and even “veiled threats” and overreaction an attack on the Constitutional guarantee of free speech reaches so far beyond common sense and sound judgment that it is difficult to know whether the atheist Lilliputians are really really afraid Gulliver is trampling on their rights or are simply inventing him to scare others.
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Published: April 30, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Center for Inquiry : First Amendment : free speech : Islam : Muhammad : religion : satire : South Park ..
3 Responses to ““Drawing Muhammad”? Free Speech and Fake Goods”

.
 steph  
 May 1, 2010 at 3:24 am 
I adore Frasier (well Niles), I’ve never seen South Park and the CFI article I shoved below is really really boring. Yeah right ‘massive, public, noisy solidarity’ … is it ‘Muslim thuggery’ or really just the thugs at CFI? If you make Muhammed pretend to be a bear, what’s going to happen next? The sun goes down and gosh it comes up. Perhaps South Park should do an episode on CFI next. Or better still, Monty Python and the Life of Lindsay. Except nobody’s ever heard of him…
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/news/cfi_condemns_intimidation_of_comedy_central_urges_solidarity_in_the_face_of/
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 steph  
 May 1, 2010 at 12:59 pm 
Life of Lindsay: “I’m not the New Atheist, I’m just a noisy little bastard!”
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 May 2, 2010 at 4:29 pm 
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore–CFI has become a Pirandello tragicomedy, or more to the point has to resort to gimmickry to substitute for vision. A bit sad really.
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Renfrew: A Fable
by rjosephhoffmann


Once upon a time there was a fox named Heinrich who owned a circus. He was proud from his red and white muzzle to his absurdly long tail that his circus was the most popular one in the kingdom of Erkundigung.
There were many other circuses–some with bigger tents and more beautiful performers. But when it came to dazzling, glittering spectacle, Heinrich’s was the best: dancing bears and talking donkeys, goats who balanced themselves on ropes strung high above the center ring, a chorus of wolves who howled songs from the Rosenkavalier, penguins who wore clown hats and kicked balls at ranks of terrified hens, dogs who did triple turns off rings onto the trapeze.

Each night, alone in his wagon, Heinrich counted the day’s receipts. Each day the take was better. Heinrich slept well and snored loudly.

Heinrich took his show from Munich to Berlin, from Cologne to Dusseldorf. When the wagons rolled into the towns and villages in between, children and their parents lined the streets smiling brightly, waving kerchiefs and sometimes, as his carriage passed at the end of the parade, placing a garland around Heinrich’s neck. He had the keys to thirty three towns and cities, a tidy income, and the reputation of knowing what people liked to see. Whenever questioned about his success, he said modestly, “I am a fox, and foxes have a knack.”
It was hard work. No one knew how hard. Most of the performers, from the high-rope head Nanny goat, Gertrude, right down to Otto the emperor penguin and Ambrose, the juggling lion, had been friends of Heinrich for years.
But, as time passed it became difficult for Heinrich to ask the performers to do the old tricks, jumps and skits. “Age is the enemy of swiftness and with fame comes infirmity.”
Their timing was slower. They missed cues. One evening Gertrude tumbled from her high rope and had to be carried from the ring whinnying in pain. Otto on another evening forgot his glasses and kicked the ball toward the stand instead of the hens, knocking an ice cream cone out of a little boy’s hand. Ambrose could not be trusted to make his way through a single verse of Die Gedanken sind Frei without forgetting the lyrics.
The younger performers, not as brave or talented or famous as the old stars, began to grumble.
“Heinrich is going to spoil it all for us,” a young lion said. “We need something new.”
“Heinrich is too old. We know what people want,” squawked a hen. “But does he let us do it our way? Never.”
“For one thing,” said a lion, “We don’t need so many  acts.”
“Exactly,” said a young penguin, who had been waiting five seasons for Otto to disgrace himself. “What do you suggest?” :
“Get rid of the penguins,” said the goat.
“Get rid of the goats, said the lions–we can help.”
“Get rid of the lions,” said the wolves.
“Get rid of the donkeys,” said the donkeys.
As he watched the animals squawking and braying and whinnying their preferences fron the shadows, a sullen gray wolf named Renfrew stepped forward. Heinrich had employed him for years to balance the accounts, and in recent times to buy gallons of ice cream for little boys who had become victims of Otto’s nearsightedness.

“I have a modest proposal, said Renfrew. “Get rid of Heinrich.”
“We can’t,” said the animals in unison.
“He’s the only one who knows how it all works,” said the lions.
“He’s the only one with brains,” said the donkeys.
“He’s the only one who keeps us from tearing each other apart,” said the goats.
“He’s the only one who knows the way to Munich,” said the hens.
“He’s the only one who knows how the tent goes up,” said the dancing bears.
Renfrew smiled. “You silly beasts. You’ve been taught to believe that by the old miser. Now, if you had a clever new ringmaster–say a wolf with skills at keeping the books and staving off dissatisfied customers–we could do new and wonderful things. And don’t worry: I know the way to Munich and I can learn how the tent goes up. Who’s with me?”
A pig named Cherise stepped forward: “I am,” she said firmly pulling herself up to her most resolute height.
 
“Splendid,” said Renfrew. “You are in charge of raising money for ice cream. You do like ice cream, don’t you?”
“Ever so much” said Cherise.
“And who else?”
“I am,” said a Labrador retriever named Bartleby, whose job for many years had been bringing Heinrich his supper and washing the dishes afterward.
“Splendid,” said Renfrew. You are now the master of accounts. “And you are also to find out how the tent goes up.”
“As for myself, I will run everything. Just leave it to me. You will have your jobs–and I will finally have a position worthy of my talents. What could be happier?”
At this there was feint applause from the animals, though privately they wondered: Renfrew had worked in the shadows for years.  Cherise, it was well known, ate more ice cream than she earned, and Bartleby, though a fair enough dishwasher, was untried in other affairs.
Still, they reckoned, a job is a job, and who would hire high-flying dogs and talking donkeys in a bad economy?

***
On return to his caravan on a Saturday night, Heinrich found Renfrew sitting at his desk counting the day’s returns.
“Can I help you?” Renfrew asked with a thinly disguised and toothful smile on his muzzle. “I think you must have the wrong wagon”
“No, this is my wagon,”said Heinrich.
“No dear chap: it’s mine. So is the circus. We have arranged for you to travel with us in a somewhat more modest wagon for a time. And of course, we’ll continue to use your name, your itinerary, and the goodwill you have generated. But you must not get any ideas. I’m running this show now. Changes will be made.”
Heinrich disappeared into the evening and sat in despair in a much smaller wagon, one which had previously been used for the chickens. “I should have got rid of that wolf years ago,” he thought. “And the labrador too. And the pig.”
The following day, Renfrew, dressed in a fine new suit and vest, cravat and opal tie-pin, called the performers together.

“I have been looking at the books,” he intoned ominously. Cherise smiled and struggled to keep her eyes above the table. “We must get things under control.”
“Control?” repeated a donkey who did not know the word.
“First, we will not go to Munich. Second, we will not go to Cologne. third, we will not go to Dusseldorf. That is my plan.”
“Where will we go,” asked a rat, whose function depended on circumstance.
“We will stay right here,” said Renfrew. “Until conditions improve.”
“When will that be?” asked a young dog.
“When I decide,” said Renfrew. “And one other thing.”
“What?” said the performers in unison.
“Just staying put isn’t enough. Costs are mounting, especially the cost of feed. We must also let some of you go. Bartleby smiled broadly and Cherise grunted in approval.
“So for the time being, I am putting the lions, the goats and the penguins on furlough. And since the chickens are only needed for the penguins, the chickens must go too. I will review the situation with the donkeys in six months.”
“But people will not come out here to this muddy town in the middle of nowhere to see talking donkeys,” said a lion.
The donkeys nodded enthusiastically.
“You are suggesting I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Renfrew, “and that is insubordination. You’re fired.”
“But you’re firing us anyway,” said the lion.
“Nonsense,” said Renfrew. “I said furlough. Bartleby, put a note in this lion’s file saying that he said I said something I did not say nor mean to say. Does anyone else wish to challenge me?” said Renfrew. “Bartleby, please take down the names of all those who wish to challenge me.”
But no one did.

Six months later, the circus was still in Teufelsdrockh. It hadn’t traveled from the spot. Holes were beginning appear in the tent, but only the high-rope goats might have repaired it, and they had been fired. The crowds were down to five and six–everyone who came still remembered Heinrich’s circus. But the new show consisted of a few talking donkeys, a tap-dancing dog, and a rat who scuttled back and forth across the ring for no purpose.
“We could hire some new performers,” said Bartleby to Renfrew as the financial picture blackened.
“We would need money for that,” said Cherise,” not nearly as happy a pig as she once had been.
“We will do what I decide,” said Renfrew as he looked out of his window onto the muddy lot. “When I decide. By the way, dog: I notice the eastern half of the tent has collapsed. I don’t suppose you know how to fix that, do you?”

Moralia: Boni pastoris est tondere pecus, non deglubere.
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Published: May 14, 2010
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Tags: fables : Free Inquiry : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secular humanism ..
2 Responses to “Renfrew: A Fable”

.
 steph  
 May 15, 2010 at 3:29 am 
Is there a particular shepherd who has skinned his flock?
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 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 4:04 pm 
Would that CFI spent its last funds to sponsor a PBS special on Humanism, up to the 18th century, absent religious agitation.
That could “strike another match” and let poor Humanism start anew.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


Over at the Centre for Inquiry…
by rjosephhoffmann

Update: Since this post appeared, Paul Kurtz has resigned as chair emeritus of the Center for Inquiry, from his seat on the board, and from editorship of the flagship periodicals, Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry. This is the tragic denouement of a tragic fall, but one out of which grace may yet appear. Sad that our primary cipher for such a process is a religious one–the crucifixion–but it’s perhaps in circumstances like this that we learn to comprehend the power and subtlety of the religious symbol.

A debate is going on between the puissant professor Paul Kurtz and the unillustrious Ronald A. Lindsay, his replacement if not his successor.
Let me be the first to call for Mr Lindsay’s resignation.
In little more than two years, he has driven the organization deeply into debt, reduced both the prestige and intellectual capital of a once-serious contender to be the best humanist and secularist organization in the world, tried to use the CFI “pulpit” for his own narrow range of interests, basically First Amendment issues–and at some point in the near future will probably sell the whole kit and caboodle to a more stable organization, like Americans United. He will then wash his hands of the whole matter having mergered what he could not accomplish.
He is abetted in this by a board that wants the organization to heal itself, an interesting attitude from people who don’t believe in the paranormal, and co-workers who would have trouble finding executive positions at a sardine factory.
In the end, this debate is not about Kurtz v Lindsay (with interjections from onlookers like me and D J Grothe) but about vision.
There are a dozen organizations, more or less, that do what Mr Lindsay wants done. There are a number of adherents that want a full frontal atheist position from CFI, and an equal number that share what Mr Lindsay interprets to be the “political stance” of CFI–though that stance recedes daily into obscurity, if it was ever coherent to begin with.
CFI would be very foolish indeed to untether itself from its roots in the American secular and democratic form of humanism. But it needs to be asserted that the American form of humanism has been about tolerance, not ridicule–sophisticated critique of religion and dogma, not mockery.
 
It is fundamentally rude, wrong and treacherous to trade Paul Kurtz’s mentoring captaincy for a bunch of drunken sailors who think they know how to steer the ship. Clearly they don’t. The rocks are in view.
Let me also say, to Paul Kurtz and his defenders: Come away. The mission you are on, the game plan you are following, the chart you are looking at, is being invented day by day. Gertrude Stein could tell you: there is no there there, anymore than God is in his heaven.
It’s a plan at the mercy of every opportunistic wind, every atheist bestseller, every publicity stunt and anti-religious brainstorm that comes down the pike. There is no strategy here, just a weekly ad hocism that focuses on what lawsuit to join or what headline to chase.
True, CFI has always had an interest in being heard in the area of First Amendment matters. But that has always been a sidelight, not the headlight.
For my own part, I urge everyone who has an interest in the future of CFI to support Paul in pursuing the greater lights of his conscience and vision.
Call it what you will,humanism is too important a quest to be left to small minds who now only seem interested in perpetuating their incompetent blundering by challenging his advice, his wisdom and criticism.
Free inquiry? Give me a break.
sailors
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Published: May 18, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Center for Inquiry : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
13 Responses to “Over at the Centre for Inquiry…”

.
 steph  
 May 18, 2010 at 2:01 am 
So Lindsay is the wolf after all. How do you support Kurtz? The CFI is full of bad eggs now and has a bad name. Will Kurtz start something fresh or isn’t that realistic? Plenty of people have appreciated his vision, as demonstrated in the willingness to sign the Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values. What now?
Reply
 
 steph  
 May 18, 2010 at 3:32 am 
… I mean ‘ how do we support Kurtz’ or ‘how does one support Kurtz’…
Reply
 
 Jayson D Cooke  
 May 18, 2010 at 11:13 pm 
This is a really sad day.
Reply
 
 Creosote  
 May 19, 2010 at 3:23 am 
I ran across this blog while searching for reaction to Kurtz’s resignation. Although I attended the big CFI meeting in 2005 (if I recall), I’ve never been a member and haven’t been following the internal politics closely. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve been paying little attention to CFI lately, except for feeling that their Blasphemy Contest was unbelievably sophomoric: so many voices in skeptical/nontheist circles have moved in to fill the needed niche of sane, reasonable, welcoming community (Derek and Swoopy, the Skeptics Guide crew, DJ Grothe with his podcast and recent move to JREF, Phil Plait…).
it needs to be asserted that the American form of humanism has been about tolerance, not ridicule–sophisticated critique of religion and dogma, not mockery.  Yes indeed. Probably not coincidentally, I’ve just finished Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which sits squarely in that tradition. So I wasn’t surprised to learn today, reading Paul K’s Neo-Humanist manifesto for the first time (like I said, I’ve been out of the loop with CFI), that she was a signatory.
Reply
 
 Paul Novak  
 May 21, 2010 at 8:25 pm 
I came here as a result of finding a piece of newsprint regarding claims made here that Mr. Kurtz was “ousted”. In the newspiece, CSI states that he was not, and that “Joe was not there”.
Interesting, that the original article the link lead to here is gone.
At any rate, I’ve never much cared for the mechanisms behind any of these groups. It’s the results that matter.
Reply
 
 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 3:54 pm 
Atheism sells, Humanism has been hijacked by them for its clothes, and the money changes hands in the temple. Britain and the US are both seriously conflicted over religion, not the least of which is the puerile atheist component stirring the pot.
It is up to Humanists to boycott religious acrimony and antipathy, and instead evolve an “inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives.”
It is Kurtz’ word “secular” that created this tar pit, and ironic that this distinction became the confusing millstone that it is today.
True Humanists must move on under their own command.
Reply

 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 4:25 pm 
you’ve described that perfectly and you’re absolutely right. It’s the ‘secular’ that has become the millstone round humanism’s neck and opened the floodgates to all the bullyish atheisms that have given birth to the new ‘Humanisms’ today.
Reply
 
 
 Erich Vieth  
 October 9, 2010 at 3:21 am 
Paul Kurtz allowed me to interview him about his departure from CFI: http://dangerousintersection.org/2010/10/02/expelled-founder-paul-kurtz-explains-his-departure-from-the-center-for-inquiry/
Reply

 steph  
 October 9, 2010 at 11:05 am 
thank you, it was very nicely done and good to read.
Reply
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 October 9, 2010 at 7:09 am 
Thanks Erich; it was a very good interview.
Reply
 
 Nathan Bupp  
 October 26, 2010 at 1:13 pm 
@ Dwight Jones: I agree with everything you have stated about the new atheists having hijacked the humanist movement. It should be noted that Paul Kurtz has now abandoned the secular in humanism, as he too has come to realize that the emphasis fell on the secular and not the humanism.
Reply

 steph  
 October 26, 2010 at 2:41 pm 
I notice you too have dropped the ‘secular’ and picked up ‘naturalistic’ – is that what Paul Kurtz has done too? And what does ‘naturalistic’ suggest? I was wondering why humanism has to be qualified with any adjective, that’s all.
Reply
 
 
Paul Kurtz Resigns from Center For Inquiry says: 
 October 6, 2012 at 10:06 pm 
[...] including former leader R. Joseph Hoffman (previously mentioned here and here), who wants to see one more resignation.With or without Kurtz, CFI is an important organization and if this is what’s necessary for [...]
Reply
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No
by rjosephhoffmann


I have come to the following conclusion: Scholarship devoted to the question of the historicity of Jesus, while not a total waste of time, could be better spent gardening.
In this essay, however, I will focus on why it is not a total waste of time.
What seemed to be an endlessly fascinating question in the nineteenth century among a few Dutch and German radical theologians (given a splash of new life by re-discoverers of the radical tradition, such as G A Wells, in the twentieth) now bears the scent and traces of Victorian wallpaper.

Van Eysinga
Theologians in the “mainstream academic tradition” have always been reluctant to touch the subject because, after all, seminaries do not exist, nor for that matter departments of religious studies, to teach courses in the Christ Myth. For that reason, if the topic is given syllabus space at all it is given insufficient space and treated as the opposite of where sober, objective scholarly inquiry will take you in New Testament studies.
It sometimes, but not often or generally enough, occurs to my colleagues that much of what passes for real scholarship is equally slipshod, constructed on equivalently shaky and speculative premises and serviced by theories so artificial (Q, for example) that (to quote myself in the introduction to George Wells’s The Jesus Legend) it can make the theory that Jesus never existed a welcome relief from the noise of new ideas.
I umpired what was (as far as I know) the only direct conversation between George Wells and Morton Smith (Jesus the Magician, 1978) in 1985, in Ann Arbor Michigan. On that occasion, Smith said naughtily that “the only thing Professor Wells and I have in common is that we each hold a theory that the other regards as absurd.” So much for “real templates.” Especially ones that ask us to accept that “everything we have previously learned is wrong.” Not even the Novum Organum asks us to believe in that kind of paradigm shift. As for myself, the only thing I have in common with both those who want to argue the myth theory as a provable hypothesis and those who believe the gospels provide good evidence for the life of Jesus is that we are probably all wrong.

Arthur Drews
I accept that most of what we have learned about Jesus is “wrong” in one sense or another. Almost all of what the churches have taught about him–the christology that undergirds the doctrines of the Christian traditions, for example–is wrong at a literal level. It has to be because it is based on doctrines derived from a naive supernaturalist reading of sacred texts whose critical assessment had not even been contemplated before the eighteenth century.
But so too, the critical assessment is wrong, because it has been motivated by a belief that by removing the husks of dogmatic accretion–a process initiated by Luther’s liberal scholastic predecessors, in fact–a level of actuality would eventually be reached. There would be an assured minimum of truth (often assumed by the end of the 19th century to be primarily ethical rather than Christological, as doctrines like ascension and virgin birth were sent to the attic) which some historians on both the Catholic modernist and Protestant side thought would be unassailable.
It never happened of course, and the great conclusion to the whole enterprise after notable false stops in the twentieth century was the Jesus Seminar. It was never clear to me how a methodology with its roots tangled in a kind of cloddish German academic hubris (husk, husk, husk, sort and sift) could come to a salutary end. And it didn’t, unless we can assume that giving birth to a Jesus who said nothing for certain and might have said anything at all is a “result.”

Harnack
I admit to being a bit prickly on the subject, having finally concluded that the sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus. Some of my reasons for saying so are laid out in a series of essays included in the anthology Sources of the Jesus Tradition, coming out in August. The main argument for Jesus-agnosticism is being developed in a more ambitious study, The Jesus Prospect, for which watch this and other spaces. (The prologue on method will be ready later in 2010.)
But before all of that, let me say a few words about why I believe Christianity benefits from discussions like this, and especially from Jesus-agnosticism (as opposed to Jesus-loving and Jesus-denying scholarship)–without ever having formally to acknowledge them.
For just over four years of my academic life I have taught in predominantly Muslim universities. Both were highly selective places, the sort of institutions contrived to train “tomorrow’s leaders,” highly aware and critical of the dangers of madrasah education, more than willing to make judicious room for the comparative study of religion. But secular approaches to the Quran were not high on the agenda of either place. Even in “liberal” circles in the Islamic world there is an enclosure for religion which is to be treated respectfully, or ignored, but not questioned extensively.

American University of Beirut, Main Gate, blt 1866
The question of the historicity of Jesus does not arise naturally in Islam–or I should say among believers–any more than the “question” of Muhammad naturally arises. The status of Jesus in Islam is assured not because he is the star of the New Testament but because as Issa he is a a revered figure in Islam. He is not the unique prophet. He is not the way, truth and life. People do not “get” to Allah through him. But he is sui generis. That is, he is an indispensable rung in a ladder that leads to God through the Prophet who is unique: Muhammad.
Myth-theorists, to the extent they pay attention to other religions, tend to regard Muslim belief with the same defensive disdain one often associates with Christian fundamentalists’ view of Islam: Islam is later, derivative, probably bogus (they reason); Muslim rejection of what the prior tradition specifies about Jesus, fatally injures their own contingent tradition. –As Jesus goes, so goes Muhammad. Revelation is whole cloth, not patchwork, and it is often more annoying than interesting to Christians (and some secularists) that Islam seems to be a sequel to the Bible with a slightly revised cast of characters and substantially revised course of events.

Isa in Turkish Islamic art
Needless (I hope) to comment that western views of the sort described above are ignorant. Jesus’ “role” in Muslim teaching does not depend on any Christian beliefs about Jesus but on the Quranic incorporation of Jesus. The status of Jesus in Islam is contingent on Islam, not Christian teaching about Jesus. Muhammad ur-rasul Allah: The Prophet is the seal (guarantor) of the prophets and at the absolute center of a religious cosmos–which nevertheless includes satellites like Jesus, David, and Abraham in orbit around him.
“Say, ‘I am only a man like yourselves; (but) I have received the revelation that your God is only One God. So let him,
 who hopes to meet his Lord, do good deeds, and let him join
 no one in the worship of his Lord!’ [Surah Al-Kahf 18 :lll).
Interestingly, however, this apparent protest of humility actually enhances the prophet's stature. He's an earthen vessel, but all the more credible because he bears human testimony to the miraculous and to the reality of a personal encounter with the divine will. More than the scholars of Islam, the sufis and mystics would preserve this belief.
To the extent this encounter is reflected in prior religious traditions, Muhammad is more a prophet like Moses on Sinai than a water-walking miracle-worker like Jesus. Maybe this signals a continuity of desert tradition largely missing in the artifice of Christianity, but the Quran is far more Torah than Gospel. The directness of the dialogue between Allah and the Recorder, Muhammad himself, is the directness of the instructions of Yahweh to Moses. True, in Islamic tradition Muhammad is sometimes credited with miracles, like splitting the moon (a gloss of Surah 54.1-2). But "orthodox" Islam in its sectarian complexity does not tie itself to these supernatural occurrences: the final miracle of Islam is the Quran itself and the place of Muhammad in its promulgation. What he said, did, and taught (and there are plenty of hadith projects in departments of Islamic theology devoted to just that question) are of secondary consequence. It is vital that he existed because without that the divine will would never have been known in an authentic form and the correction of existing inauthentic forms, like the biblical tradition, would never have taken place.

The Annunciation in Islamic Context
Odd, then, that the historicity of Jesus should be of any concern at all in relation to a person whose humanity, in the letters of Paul and in the gospels (to a lesser extent, perhaps) is of no consequence to the core tradition. The battle of the post-New Testament period in the early Church, as Harnack recognized, was not to define the divinity of Jesus but to defend his humanity.
What’s usually missed in the discussion of the war between right and wrong believers before 325 is that both camps agreed on the essentials: whatever else Jesus was, “human” doesn’t do justice to it. The bitterness of battle, and the cheer-leading that has gone on for the victors ever since, leads us away from the fact that even the pro-humanity orthodox camp did not leave us with an historical figure but with a luminescent god-man whose finger perpetually points to his own breast as the source and explanation for his mission to earth.
Mission to earth? Yesterday’s gnosticism is today’s science fiction. It is all too easy to fall into gnosticism or science fiction when we examine such images in the writings, art, and liturgy of the church. Especially if we also see religion, more generally, as a species of superstition–resurrections and ascensions into heaven as undiagnosed instances of mass obsessional disorder.

Women at the Tomb
But to discover elements of the fantastic in religions like Christianity and Islam, vestiges of thought-processes that fail our requirements for modernity, is not the same as “demonstrating” that religion is fantasy.
Love, fear, joy, pleasure, mother-love, and compassion equally have their origins in emotion and human evolution and are nonetheless “real” in daily life–indeed, shape daily life–constantly expressing themselves in thought and action. Religion consolidates these aspects of existence in a way that simple curiosity and information does not. It roots them not in the self but in something external, like God, or incarnates them in messengers like Jesus and metaphors like sin, forgiveness and redemption. That is what is going on in the New Testament, not an episode of To Tell the Truth.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
For this reason–starting with a certain lack of profundity—it is difficult not to find the musings of (many) myth-theorists frankly ridiculous. The early church found the historical Jesus all but unnecessary: that is the story. They found his humanity necessary as a theological premise, because they could not quite grasp the concept of disembodied divinity. Besides, a god without humanity could scarcely be expected to comprehend human suffering, or desire to do anything about it. History did not require Jesus; emotion did. It required as well the incredible and fantastic aspects of his personality. History required Muhammad and the non-divinity of Muhammad for other reasons. That is why the two traditions are different.
I say could not “quite grasp” the idea of a disincarnated divinity because some of the Christian fathers flirted with Neoplatonism–Clement of Alexandria, for example–and they were saved by a pragmatic hair from being gnostics themselves, as I think–if we are being honest and not pedantic–the author of the Gospel of John was.
 The writer’s tortured theological prologue is our best evidence of the philosophical dilemma confronting some early christian communities.
Clement of Alexandria
But the true (non-Christian) Neoplatonists like Porphyry despised Christianity because, they said, a disembodied divinity is the only form divinity takes. To reach the far-distant god of a Plotinus you need not just a little water, a few words to a confessor and a healthy appreciation for the Eucharist but a very big invisible ladder and the annihilation of all fleshly encumbrances.
Stuck with the Bible, the gospel, a growing body of doctrine, necessitated by struggles with heretics, and the religious demands of a growing community–a lot of weight to carry–Christianity could not very easily take the turn toward disembodied and denatured divinity. If, for the pagans, the resurrection of the flesh was a nauseating idea, for the Christians it became a useful absurdity and the prelude to two millennia of “paradoxical” theology. The earliest shapers of Islamic thought were scarcely seduced by ingenious verbal strategies for mixing and mingling the human and divine: Muhammad therefore stayed vigorously human.
If, as I think, the church was largely successful in subduing the humanity of Jesus while insisting as a strictly dogmatic matter that he was both fully human and fully divine (historical and unhistorical, as in John 1.1-15?), why still bother to ask about whether he “really” existed. Shouldn’t the question really be who or what existed? It is not the same as asking whether Muhammad existed since nothing but one kind of reality has ever been claimed for him, and that is historical.
My defense of debates and discussion of the historical Jesus is not based on any confidence that something new is going to be discovered, or some persuasive “template” found that will decide for us a question that the early Christian obviously regarded as irrelevant. Still less is it based on some notion that the Church will retract the doctrine of the trinity or the hypostatic union, clearing the way for an impartial investigation into the life of Jesus. That is already possible, and as always before the journey gets us to the front door of the Church. Nothing has been more depressing than the search for the Jesus of history, and nothing more hollow than the shouts of scholars who have claimed to find him. Except the shouts of scholars who claim there is nothing to find.
Not that the shapers of the Jesus tradition, whatever their real names were, should have the final say, but they did draw the map and bury the treasure. We are the victims of their indifference to the question.
The really good news is that to the extent we don’t know who Jesus was or even whether he was, Christianity is spared the awful theological and religious certitude that drives Islam to do sometimes outrageous and violent things in defense of that certainty, the totalizing imperative that all religions in their history have struggled to keep in the cave.

The incredibility of the divine and the uncertainty of the human is a potent defense against a totalizing imperative, an inadvertent safeguard created by the extravagance of early doctrine. The vulnerability of Christianity is a vulnerability created by critical examination of its sacred writings–the legacy of its scholars, including its religious scholars, its secular scholars, and even scholars whose speculation outruns caution and evidence. It was Christian scholarship that first put Christianity at risk. Islamic scholarship has played no equivalent role in relation to Islam.
In the end, Jesus and Muhammad are more unalike than alike. If both are unique, they are unique in different ways and not because either’s claim to invulnerable authority can be treated as true or false on the basis of evidence.
Because of accidental but real historical circumstances, inquiry has invulnerated the Christian tradition in a way that has yet to happen, and may never happen, in Islam. If it does happen, it will not be because the west compels it, or because science requires it or because secularism requires it. Islam is not in retreat from the forces of reason. It will certainly not happen because some absurd theorists, mainly western, under-informed and under-equipped, and working on western assumptions, claim that (like Jesus?) Muhammad never existed.
But that is a subject for another time…
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Published: May 28, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: agnosticism : historical jesus : Islam : Jesus : Jesus Project : Jesus Prospect : myth theory : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
60 Responses to “Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No”

.
 steph  
 May 29, 2010 at 5:48 pm 
Once a fundamentalist, always a fundamentalist. Why are they always so full of vile hatred? I’m agnostic, always been agnostic, but I believe in lots of things, on and off. Some things just have more rational support. And then I realise I’m wrong about something, I change my mind, believe a little differently – but I’m still agnostic. Thank God…
Reply
 
 Anders Branderud  
 May 29, 2010 at 10:01 pm 
“Historical J…..”!?!
The persons using that contra-historical oxymoron (demonstrated by the eminent late Oxford historian, James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue) exposes dependancy upon 4th-century, gentile, Hellenist sources.
While scholars debate the provenance of the original accounts upon which the earliest extant (4th century, even fragments are post-135 C.E.), Roman gentile, Hellenist-redacted versions were based, there is not one fragment, not even one letter of the NT that derives DIRECTLY from the 1st-century Pharisee Jews who followed the Pharisee Ribi Yehoshua.
 Historians like Parkes, et al., have demonstrated incontestably that 4th-century Roman Christianity was the 180° polar antithesis of 1st-century Judaism of ALL Pharisee Ribis. The earliest (post-135 C.E.) true Christians were viciously antinomian (ANTI-Torah), claiming to supersede and displace Torah, Judaism and (“spiritual) Israel and Jews. In soberest terms, ORIGINAL Christianity was anti-Torah from the start while DSS (viz., 4Q MMT) and ALL other Judaic documentation PROVE that ALL 1st-century Pharisees were PRO-Torah.
There is a mountain of historical Judaic information Christians have refused to deal with, at: http://www.netzarim.co.il (see, especially, their History Museum pages beginning with “30-99 C.E.”).
Original Christianity = ANTI-Torah. Ribi Yehoshua and his Netzarim, like all other Pharisees, were PRO-Torah. Intractable contradiction.
Building a Roman image from Hellenist hearsay accounts, decades after the death of the 1st-century Pharisee Ribi, and after a forcible ouster, by Hellenist Roman gentiles, of his original Jewish followers (135 C.E., documented by Eusebius), based on writings of a Hellenist Jew excised as an apostate by the original Jewish followers (documented by Eusebius) is circular reasoning through gentile-Roman Hellenist lenses.
What the historical Pharisee Ribi taught is found not in the hearsay accounts of post-135 C.E. Hellenist Romans but, rather, in the Judaic descriptions of Pharisees and Pharisee Ribis of the period… in Dead Sea Scroll 4Q MMT (see Prof. Elisha Qimron), inter alia.
To all Christians: The question is, now that you’ve been informed, will you follow the authentic historical Pharisee Ribi? Or continue following the post-135 C.E. Roman-redacted antithesis—an idol?
Reply
 
 neilgodfrey  
 June 2, 2010 at 10:45 am 
If, as you say, the sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus, then why your prickliness or depression (if I understand you correctly) over attempts to explain Christian origins apart from a historical Jesus?
This strikes me as a bit like the agnostic who is as offended with atheism as he is with fundamentalist belief, blanketing atheism under the charge of being “just as fundamentalist” as the other. Just because some atheists may be dogmatic and irrational in their views doesn’t mean all are. Just because some Jesus mythicists may be more dogmatic than informed and reasonable doesn’t mean all are.
On the one hand you seem to me to be painting all positions except your own agnosticism in black.
But on the other hand you seem to be saying that those who assume the historicity of Jesus are tolerable (despite the impossibility of a verdict from the sources) while those who take the other side and assume nonhistoricity are not tolerable.
There seems some inconsistency here.
Another example of this inconsistency, as it appears to me, is in your finding the “musings” of myth-theorists “frankly ridiculous” — apparently on the grounds that they fail to acknowledge the nature of religion or what it is. Of course religion “consolidates” human emotions and needs in certain “religious-external” ways. But what has that to do with the “musings of myth-theorists”?
Or maybe I’m not seeing your point clearly.
You ask whether the question should be “who” or “what” existed. But do you really mean that? What if the “what” is something that is not a single “thing” at all? That is what some mythicist “musings” attempt to explore. But you don’t appear to acknowledge that and it is not clear why. Are you still committed to some romantic view of the “great man” or “great event” big-bang counterpart of Christian origins?
Do you really think scholarship has spared Christianity from “theological and religious certitude that drives Islam to do sometimes outrageous and violent things in defense of that certainty”? I seem to recall the same kinds of Christian hostility against blasphemous movies and plays in the 1960s and 70s that we see today among Muslims offended over cartoons. If the Muslims today are more dangerously heated than the Christians were then, one surely needs to factor in so many more variables such as the entire geo-political thing and relative status and histories of one-sided imperialism and wars etc etc etc. I don’t dispute the histories are different and Islam needs to have its Reformation or Enlightenment. But Christianity, being the religion of the masters, has the liberty to allow the State to enforce the violence that the Muslim religion lacks.
And your own article suggests an intolerance, even a certain ignorance, of anyone stepping to the left side of “agnosticism”, as indicated with a somewhat fatuous comparison of Jesus-mythicism with an imaginary Muhammad mythicism.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 2, 2010 at 11:14 am 
You use adjectivals too much, often instead of evidence and real argument. Anyway, I have no idea whether my comparison is “fatuous” but “imaginary Muhammad Mythicism” shows your own ignorance of some rather serious work being done in Germany by Gerd Puin & co on the work of Christoph Luxenberg. A conference at UC Davis a few years ago brought the leading lights of this movement together. I suggest you broaden your range to see beyond the Christ myth boundaries of your inquiry..
Reply

 neilgodfrey  
 June 2, 2010 at 11:26 am 
Evidence and real argument? I was attempting to understand and to draw you out on your Jesus “agnosticism”. I’m hardly interested in arguing a Jesus mythicist position in response to your post.
Yes, I do admit I am ignorant of Moslem scholarship. So what is your point, then? You spoke of “absurd theorists” in this connection, but here you seem to be saying that is some “serious work” being done in Muhammad mythicism? So I’m confused about the point you were and are making here.
But the Moslem religion is not my background so I don’t have the same personal interest in it as I do in the exploration of Christian origins. So I will pass up your suggestion, if you don’t mind.
I’m sorry you seem to think my query to draw you out on what you mean by Jesus agnosticism deserves such a cold response.

 
 
 
Muhammad mythicism and the fallacy of Jesus agnosticism « Vridar says: 
 June 2, 2010 at 4:12 pm 
[...] and my reply to it and Hoffmann’s rejoinder, that prompted this post, can be found at Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No on Hoffmann’s New Oxonian [...]
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 2, 2010 at 5:10 pm 
Neil, surely you are interested in the origins of any religion for which a “mythical” origin has been postulated; I am not sure I comprehend an indifference to Islam. Perhaps you’d find the following instructive:http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/19589/sec_id/19589 I would also be happy to say more on the components of Jesus-agnosticism, but would prefer to lay it out as a full deck when the book appears in August.
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 neilgodfrey  
 June 3, 2010 at 1:12 am 
I have never thought of myself as a “mythicist” of any kind. I don’t see the point. What interests me is understanding origins and nature of our culture, specifically Christianity. My interest in the Moslem religion has been in activist work working with Moslem leaders to promote cultural understanding.
The whole notion of taking a position of whether or not Jesus existed seems as pointless to me as taking one on whether Socrates existed or not. What matters is the explanation for and undestanding the bigger historical development. By taking an a priori position on that, at any level, is not the way to approach it.
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 3, 2010 at 2:23 am 
We agree, and I have certainly never taken an apriorist position.
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 neilgodfrey  
 June 3, 2010 at 7:47 am 
That’s not how I understand your position when I read: “Shouldn’t the question really be who or what existed?”
That sounds to me very a priori. The question only arises as the result of a certain (a priori) model through which you are working.
Simply removing the name or concept “Jesus” and replacing it with a “blank entity ['who' or 'what']” is still working within the same basic model.
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 Dwight Jones  
 June 6, 2010 at 7:26 pm 
As a Humanist I view Christ as one too, a philosopher who was instructing our species (a word not in sufficient use these days to describe the human ‘race”).
Christ was making plain that the incipient urbanization of the Med brought with it the need for a non-intrusive code of conduct.
His teachings were buffered by the hyperbole that characterizes people like the Egyptians to this day, that was marketing then. Much like the Dawkins/Hitchens cults today, for young acolytes first learning an entry level ‘philosophy’ like atheism.

 
 
 
 rey  
 June 3, 2010 at 3:27 am 
“It was Christian scholarship that first put Christianity at risk. Islamic scholarship has played no equivalent role in relation to Islam.”
Because Christianity began as Chrestianity, a religion of freedom (freedom from the unjust demiurge) and therefore even though it was changed into Christianity (a tyrannical imperial religion) that seed of freedom remained and fueled scholars to look for the truth (because they knew that Christianity was Imperial and thus an altered form of something earlier). Islam on the other hand, meaning “submission” began as and will ever remain a religion of tyranny. Christianity can be redeemed by getting back to its Chrestian (i.e. Marcionite) roots, but Islam simply has no better past to go back to.
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 Ed Jones  
 July 21, 2010 at 2:02 pm 
See the 12 Comments to the essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus for a take on origins based largely on quotes from the works of three of our top longest standing critical historical NT scholars.
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 Ed Jones  
 July 31, 2010 at 2:52 am 
rey, I believe you are touching on to something which with a few clarifing historical details is quite significant to Origins.
 First, nomenclature. The term Christian is anachronistic -it was first used of Paul and Barnabus’ mission in Antioch just before 70 CE, and was never applied to the Jewish Jerusalem Jesus Movemet. The significant period of origins is 30 CE – 65 CE, the apostolic period, before the Gospels and before Christianity. For this period there were two movements: The Jerusalem Jewish Jesus Movement with the Q material, soon followed by the Christ Movement with its Pauline Christ kerygma. For more enter: The Importance of the Historical Jesus. See the folowing comment.
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 Steven Carr  
 June 3, 2010 at 6:29 am 
‘I admit to being a bit prickly on the subject, having finally concluded that the sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus.’
Is it not astonishing that we can look at the earliest Christian sources and conclude that the early Christian sources do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus?
Is this because very early Christians would write entire books without any reference to what their Lord and Saviour had taught them?
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 5, 2010 at 12:58 am 
If I accepted that the texts evolved in the way you suggest it would be astonishing indeed. Nice try.
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How Jesus has been re-imaged through the ages to fit different historical needs « Vridar says: 
 June 13, 2010 at 6:49 am 
[...] Filed under: HISTORIOGRAPHY — neilgodfrey @ 2:48 pm Tags: historial Jesus There’s a comment by humanist Dwight Jones in response to Hoffmann’s post titled Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No [...]
Reply
 
 Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 December 18, 2010 at 9:25 pm 
[...] Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No (via The New Oxonian) By rjosephhoffmann I have come to the following conclusion: Scholarship devoted to the question of the historicity of Jesus, while not a total waste of time, could be better spent gardening. In this essay, however, I will focus on why it is not a total waste of time. What seemed to be an endlessly fascinating question in the nineteenth century among a few Dutch and German radical theologians (given a splash of new life by re-discoverers of the radical tradition, su … Read More [...]
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 Herb Van_Fleet  
 December 19, 2010 at 3:04 pm 
Many years ago, as a student at a Presbyterian liberal arts college, I was required to take at least one course in religion. I choose “Old Testament History.” It’s been so long now that I can only remember two things about the course. The first was that our instructor (a Presbyterian minister) required us to source our papers with a least one Jewish Scholar, one Christian Scholar, and one archeologist. Hey, fair and balanced before that was even fashionable!
But, more heavily embedded in my memory, is my recollection of sitting in that class on a Friday afternoon in late November, The girl sitting next to me put down her spiffy new Japanese transistor radio to announce that president Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was dead. Upon hearing this news, Dr. whatever-his-name-was, allowed as how we would first finish the class and then worry about the recently departed leader of the free world afterwards. There are priorities after all.
As to this Jesus guy/myth, it would be difficult these days to structure a single class or two for “New Testament History,” given the massive amount of scholarship that has emerged over the last 50 years. Indeed, there are colleges that are devoted entirely to that subject. On the other hand, a course such as “The Jesus Meme,” or “Jesus and Other Sun Gods,” might be doable.
In any case, the man and woman in the pew could probably care less. The church is like a parallel universe where belief is transformed into reality and where ghosts have a felt presence. Critical thinking and intellectual curiosity are supposed to be checked at the door.
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 dwightjones  
 December 21, 2010 at 12:00 pm 
Herb writ: “In any case, the man and woman in the pew could probably care less. The church is like a parallel universe where belief is transformed into reality and where ghosts have a felt presence. Critical thinking and intellectual curiosity are supposed to be checked at the door.”
All true, so what then is happening? Why are they doing that? Does our species have some drive to integrate itself with the Cosmos, no matter how distant that goal?
I accept that this abnegation is the attitude of atheists – fair enough – but they are representing themselves as Humanists, which is not tolerable.
A true Humanist feels that religious belief is private, like your sexual orientation or finances. A Humanist has an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives. That carries with it both opportunity and responsibility, these are steered at the personal level by his/her education, training and courage.
Classical Greek Humanism that needs no modern allele.
It serves no purpose to set any of these categories against each other, just for the sake of intellectual social climbing, esp. atheists claiming Humanism.
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 Herb Van_Fleet  
 December 22, 2010 at 3:32 pm 
dwightjones says, “A true Humanist feels that religious belief is private, like your sexual orientation or finances. A Humanist has an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives. That carries with it both opportunity and responsibility, these are steered at the personal level by his/her education, training and courage.”
This strikes me as one of those damnable Humeian is/ought problems. As I’ve said many times before, the Humanists have been taken over by the “new” atheists such that the are now little more than atheists in a cheap tuxedo wearing a pair of brown shoes. Their ill-conceived and intellectually dishonest (to me anyway) “Consider Humanism” campaign is an embarrassment to those of us who all ourselves Humanists. I could go on but the host of this blog has already done a masterful job of giving the Atheists/Humanists a well deserved lashing in his recent “Cleopas the Atheist” piece of December 21st.
The point being, I don’t know what a “true Humanist” is or ought to be. Their use of ridicule, insult, condescension, and self-righteousness as the weapons of choice in the battle for the hearts and minds of the religionists is as offensive as it is unnecessary.
That said, there are times when we need to speak out. For example, according to a new Gallop poll released Tuesday, December 21st, asking about human evolution, Gallop reports that, “Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement.” That 16% is consistent with related polls showing that 16% of American adults are not religious. But, then, there’s that pesky damn 84%!
And that makes my point. I won’t go as far as agreeing with Christopher Hitchens that religion poisons everything, but after 150 years of Darwinism, the Scoops trial, the Dover case, and the protestations of biology teachers, the fact that more than 8 out of 10 Americans still believe humans are impelled by a supernatural force is a formidable testament to the power of wishful thinking. I don’t blame the schools; blind faith that promises a happy ending trumps the impersonal outcomes of reason every time.
But such rampant ignorance and its impact on society needs to be confronted. I think it was Steven Jay Gould who said, “without evolution there is no biology.” The creationists and the intelligent designers are dangerously wrong. Therefore, as a Humanist, I am compelled to interrupt the churchgoers privacy, and announce that such dogma is damaging to their mental health and intellectual growth. When denial and uncritical belief results in a separation from reality, then, yes, there seems to be some kind of phase transition into a world not unlike the Wonderland of Alice. Call it a parallel universe. Call it that.
But, I have no ax to grind, no tolerance meter; I fancy myself a simple observer. While you seem to be comfortable in your understanding of what a “true Humanist” is, I’m still not there. And my protests, like yours, have gone nowhere.
Anyway, I may just curl up with a good read by George Orwell. I’m thinking, “Animal Farm.”

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 December 28, 2010 at 4:44 pm 
Brilliant; you should expand it into a blog and let me put it up.

 
 
 
 mikelioso  
 December 20, 2010 at 11:48 pm 
A golden oldie, Dr. Hoffmann. Over the past few months I’ve looked into the positions of various Christ Myths and I think now I can move on. I don’t think it offers a better alternative to the idea of Jesus being a guy who inspired the Christian movement
Ironically the main thing against the Jesus myth is a lack of evidence. This is ironic because the main evidence promoted for the idea is that there is no evidence for Jesus’ existence, and there are no “facts” to support the idea of a real historical Jesus. But there is even less for a mythical Jesus. In all the gospels uncovered and condemned in the works of early heresy hunters, none conforms to a Jesus Myth. Am I missing something? If it were the foundational idea of Christianity, doesn’t it seem likely that it would have survived longer? There is simply no solid evidence that anyone ever held a Jesus Myth like idea until modern times.
I don’t buy into the idea that a myth is the default position for people thought to have existed in antiquity. It isn’t like Jesus was crucified by King Midas in the fabled City of Brass. There is no reason to assume a mythic origin for this person, so I don’t find it logical at all that we should think there is an elaborate myth behind Paul’s preaching just because there is no proof of Jesus’ existence. Given the circumstance, I don’t expect proof. It would be different of the gospels claimed Jesus came leading an army of Persians to destroy Jerusalem. Should we also assume a myth to explain any one whose historical existence cannot be proven? that’s a lot of myths.
There are anomalies that are difficult for many theories of the origin of Christianity (the lack, though not a total lack, of gospel material in the epistles has been frequently mentioned by myth supporters) and could be used as evidence for a Christ myth, but that is a small bit of evidence and far to little to justify the confidence Jesus myth supporters have in their hypothesis. Are any scholars you know of really afraid the whole façade of Historical Jesus Studies going to collapse once people take a rational look at the claims of Jesus Myth supporters? I think instead, it is your position that is scarier. The we know very little about the early days of Christianity. We certainly don’t know of a Jesus myth, nor much of anything else. The creed like blurb Josephus gives could pretty much sum up our sure historical knowledge of Jesus. A man from Galilee, crucified by Pilate, believed to be resurrected by his followers.
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 dwightjones  
 December 22, 2010 at 8:53 pm 
Herb writ” I don’t blame the schools; blind faith that promises a happy ending trumps the impersonal outcomes of reason every time.”
I blame the philosophers. What have the Philosophy departments produced since the Wittgenstein farce? The British analytic tradition brought sherry and recorder parties to Universities in lieu of ideas, for the past century. Such gross effeteness has resulted in:
“…such rampant ignorance and its impact on society needs to be confronted…The creationists and the intelligent designers are dangerously wrong. Therefore, as a Humanist, I am compelled to interrupt the churchgoers privacy, and announce that such dogma is damaging to their mental health and intellectual growth.”
Must you? As a Humanist you are fully entitled to ignore the US as of no import anymore compared to Indian Humanists or emerging Chinese thought. Same for the BHA hijackers, whoa are brownshirts for the NSS.
As I maintain, there are no ideas there, their day has passed, they are dangerous to themselves only and self-punishing; and if you persist in giving them a sounding board, you become part of the problem.
Boycott atheism as beneath you…find a vision for our own kind.
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 rey  
 December 22, 2010 at 9:18 pm 
Why couldn’t a humanist believe that there is intelligent design? Obviously a humanist wouldn’t be out there fighting tooth and nail to convince people of it or trying to twist science to support it. But if it was a personal belief, would that disqualify him from being a humanist? What if one believed that God had indeed made mankind and had put within him the common sense that ought to eventually lead him to understand that he should live morally and treat his fellow man respectfully? Must a humanist of necessity be an atheist? It certainly is not the case historically. Wasn’t Erasmus of Rotterdam one of the first humanists?

 
 rey  
 December 22, 2010 at 9:19 pm 
“Boycott atheism as beneath you…find a vision for our own kind.”
I missed that comment before. Nevermind what I said above then I guess.

 
 Herb Van_Fleet  
 December 23, 2010 at 5:06 pm 
dwightjones says, “Boycott atheism as beneath you…find a vision for our own kind.”
That comment triggered a memory of something I read once in one of the Hindu Upanishads, specifically, the Chandogya Upanishad, which was supposedly written between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. There is a dialogue where the master Sanatkumara instructs a student named Narada about how to find bliss, starting with the infinite:
Sanatkumara: “The infinite is bliss. There is no bliss in anything finite. Only the Infinite is bliss. One must desire to understand the Infinite.”
Narada: “Venerable Sir, I desire to understand the Infinite.”
Sanatkumara: “Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else—that is the Infinite. Where one sees something else, hears something else, understands something else—that is the finite. The Infinite is immortal, the finite mortal.”
Narada: “Venerable Sir, in what does the Infinite find Its support?”
Sanatkumara: “In its own greatness—or not even in greatness. Here on earth people describe cows and horses, elephants and gold, slaves and wives, fields and houses, as ‘greatness.’ I do not mean this, for in such cases one thing finds its support in another. But what I say is:
That infinite, indeed, is below. It is above. It is behind. It is before. It is to the south. It is to the north. The Infinite, indeed, is all this.”
Narada: “[And] the Infinite with reference to the Self?:
Sanatkumara: “The Self indeed, is below. It is above. It is behind. It is before. It is to the south. It is to the north. The Self, indeed, is all this.
“Verily, he who sees this, reflects on this and understands this delights in the Self, sports with the Self, rejoices in the Self, revels in the Self. Even while living in the body he becomes a self-ruler. He wields unlimited freedom in all the worlds.
‘‘But those who think differently from this have others for their rulers. They live in perishable worlds. They have no freedom in all the worlds.”

 
 
 
 Dwight Jones  
 December 28, 2010 at 5:00 pm 
Here is my assessment of Humanism via my Wikipedia contribution:
Inclusive Humanism
 Humanism increasingly designates an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives. While retaining the definition of the IHEU with regard to the life stance of the individual, inclusive Humanism enlarges its constituency within homo sapiens to consider Man’s broadening powers and obligations.
 This accepting viewpoint recalls Renaissance Humanism in that it presumes an advocacy role for Humanists towards species governance, and this proactive stance is charged with a commensurate responsibility surpassing that of individual Humanism. It identifies pollution, militarism, nationalism, sexism, poverty and corruption as being persistent and addressable human character issues incompatible with the interests of our species. It asserts that human governance must be unified and is inclusionary in that it does not exclude any person by reason of their collateral beliefs or personal religion alone. As such it can be said to be a container for undeclared Humanism, instilling a species credo to complement the personal tenets of individuals.
 It contrasts with contemporary American and British Humanism, which tend to be centered on religion to the extent that “Humanism” in these societies is too often being equated with simple atheism, especially by novitiates. This over-identification with a singular non-belief is now seen to be an unwarranted truncation of one of Humanity’s most valuable and promising intellectual traditions, possibly damping out Humanism’s wider and deserving adoption.
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 Herb Van_Fleet  
 December 29, 2010 at 2:54 pm 
Responding to my comment of December 22, rjosephhoffmann says, “Brilliant; you should expand it into a blog and let me put it up.”
First, thanks so much for the compliment. Coming from you, I feel truly honored.
Second, as to your offer to set me up with a blog, I nervously accept. However, I’m clueless as to finding my way around the blogosphere, so I await further instructions.
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 demonax  
 December 31, 2010 at 7:16 am 
@mikelioso
“The creed like blurb Josephus gives could pretty much sum up our sure historical knowledge of Jesus. A man from Galilee, crucified by Pilate, believed to be resurrected by his followers.”
Have you considered the notion of interpellation?
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 Mike Wilson  
 January 2, 2011 at 2:22 pm 
@Demonax,
 Yes I have. My reason for making the statement wasn’t to say that the passage is what assures us of those facts about Jesus but that is sums up what is sure about Jesus.
My personal thought is any passage in any manuscript may be a an interpolation or scribal error. I don’t find it very fruitful to speculate on what might have been written. I can only deal with what has been. With that in mind I have to hold a modicum of doubt for any particular word or phrase in an ancient work. I don’t like to drop material though unless I have good reason.
There is good reason to believe it has been modified. that is partly due to the implausibility of Josephus believing Jesus is Christ, and evidence that at this point there are known textual variants. I don’t have an issue with there being some sort of mention of Jesus at that point, what it is though, can’t be said for sure. Either way the passage is no silver bullet ensuring Jesus existed, only that people at the time of Josephus believed this and he thought it worthwhile to pass it along, perhaps to explain the origin of an odd cult.
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 Did Jesus Exist? Yes and No (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 February 3, 2011 at 9:35 pm 
[...] I have come to the following conclusion: Scholarship devoted to the question of the historicity of Jesus, while not a total waste of time, could be better spent gardening. In this essay, however, I will focus on why it is not a total waste of time. What seemed to be an endlessly fascinating question in the nineteenth century among a few Dutch and German radical theologians (given a splash of new life by re-discoverers of the radical tradition, su … Read More [...]
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 Rich Griese  
 February 3, 2011 at 10:39 pm 
The religion industry’s purpose is to promote an interest in Christianity. Demonstrating that the myth that a Jesus existed was fiction, would pretty much close them down. So, you generally see the religion industry not only wanting to avoid discussions that the myth of Jesus is not historical, but to crush anyone from spreading that scuttle butt.
BTW… My interest is the study of early Christianity, especially the now moving into the patristics period. If that is something that anyone else is interested in, I would be happy to hear from you by email.
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 9, 2012 at 10:28 am 
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
While equally hard on mythicism and credulity in this 2010 post, I adopted a position that some readers called :Jesus agnosticism’; a more appropriate label would have been “Jesus Fatigue”. I now would argue, qua the Jesus Process, that the historical existence of Jesus is the only reasonable postulate based on the material we now possess; but for reasons I will discuss in further essays, I do not believe that this postulate has been adequately articulated by recent defenders of historicity. A recent attempt by a well-known NT scholar is exceptionally disappointing and not an adequate rejoinder to the routinely absurd ideas of the Jesus-deniers. For that reason, like it or not, I have had to abandon my indifference and get back into the fight–on the side of the son of man.
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 steph  
 June 9, 2012 at 1:16 pm 
I agree. On the side of the son of man. I think I have a little mythtic fatigue though. It’s that boredom from repetition and regurgitation that is perpetually dished up and dumped on the mythtic plate. And for goodness sake leave Schweitzer alone to rest in peace. I have no Jesus fatigue. I just want to get back into positive research and clearer articulation… a fresh start. I also need to spend a little extra time soon in my new garden beside the sea, perhaps Wairoa, not to far from the lake shores of Waikaremoana. I have fruvegies to sew.
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 reyjacobs  
 June 9, 2012 at 6:40 pm 
Perhaps this fatigue is the result of you fighting an uphill battle against the evidence.
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 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 10, 2012 at 6:49 pm 
Oh dear: @ Reycacobs: No, The fatigue comes from fighting against people (like you?) who don’t know evidence if it bit them but would prefer to believe in their private mythologies. You seem to belong to the Debunking School of Christian Origins. Nothing is easier: call all evidence tainted, late, irrelevant, interpolated or extraneous. Good grief mate: we can deny the legitimacy of Barack Obama that way: some are trying!

 
 Herb Van Fleet  
 June 11, 2012 at 2:43 pm 
I see I have make comments re this post after it was first published in 2010. Given the more recent comments, however, I feel compelled to throw in another 2 cents; one or both of which you may or may not want to throw back at me.
Now, I am not a biblical scholar, a seminary professor, a Christian preacher, a Middle Eastern archeologist, or a Jesus freak. In point of fact, I am a non-theist. In other words, I don’t have a horse in this race; e.g., a minimal bias.
As I understand it, the effort to understand Jesus as man or myth is about separating the messenger from the message. Further, it has apparently fallen to the historicists to confirm or deny the existence of the messenger. Trouble is, history may have been altered – by outright fraud, or by wishful thinking, or by mistranslations, or by other means. But human nature being what it is, no historicist worth his or her Roman calendar is going to throw his or her research under the bus very easily. Ergo, the big debate.
I also think it unlikely that any general agreement will ever be reached over this issue. Too much disputable evidence, too many egos. To me, though, it’s the message and not the messenger that’s important. We don’t really need to know if there was a real guy named Homer, or King Arthur, or Robin Hood, or even, believe it or not, Shakespeare, to appreciate their greater or lesser influence on Western Civilization.
So, whether the attributions go to Jesus of Nazareth or Apollonius of Tyana, the evidence would never be admissible in court, and no jury worth their free parking spaces could ever reach a fair verdict due to the overwhelming doubt surrounding this case. Indeed, this case is more about psychology than historicity, IMHO.

 
 Dwight Jones  
 June 11, 2012 at 6:52 pm 
I have to concur with you, Herb.
Because I view Christ as a humanist teacher instructing the species on the new urban morality – regardless of whether or not he held a heavenly bus pass – I simply ask atheist people if they agree with that.
It’s fun to watch atheists then consider, even defend him, each a Pontius Pilate within their ambivalence.

 
 steph  
 June 11, 2012 at 10:29 pm 
This is all why I believe that it is essential for the Jesus Process to examine material and methods afresh, and articulate with greater clarity arguments and evidence for historicity.

 
 reyjacobs  
 June 12, 2012 at 7:55 am 
“Because I view Christ as a humanist teacher instructing the species on the new urban morality” (Dwight Jones)
The problem is of course that although you are right, then historicists will come back with something cheesy like “well, then you’re not considering all the evidence! The gospel of John says Jesus claimed to be God! The gospel of Luke says he claimed he wants everyone who will not make him their heavenly king put to death!” These guys wouldn’t know relevant evidence versus obvious made up crap if it hit them upside the head and knocked them out. If there was a real Jesus, clearly he was as you put it “a humanist teacher instructing the species on the new urban morality” — but the church threw in all this “I am God and you will believe in me or burn crap” to make a monopolistic religion out of the guy. And the historicists because they are tied to defending his historicity they are tied ultimately to defending also every dumb little addition the church made to the gospels.
That is, I’ve yet to find a historicists who didn’t credit some oddball saying clearly made up by the church as being authentic. They always end up claiming that Jesus really called himself “Son of Man” for example. Reading through Schweitzer’s “The Quest of the Historical Jesus” and then though the modern works you find that everyone makes too big of a deal of this idea that Jesus called himself “Son of Man.” The key to understanding the historical Jesus, they will say, is his identifying himself with the Son of Man from the prophecy in Daniel.
Uh, hello! The church made up the “Son of Man” crap on the basis of a misinterpretation of Daniel that turns “I saw one LIKE A son of man” into “I saw THE Son of Man”, turning that into an ecclesiastical messianic title, and putting it in Jesus’ mouth. In every saying where the gospels have Jesus say “The Son of Man…” I GUARANTEE he just said “I” expect after “Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath was made for man” for after that when he says “Therefore even the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath” he is using the phrase as in Ezekiel to mean a human being, i.e. “therefore any and every human being is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Orthr

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 12, 2012 at 8:30 am 
@reyjacobs: For pure eloquence, finality and depth of insight, I think it would be impossible to improve on your comment:
Uh, hello! The church made up the “Son of Man” crap on the basis of a misinterpretation of Daniel that turns “I saw one LIKE A son of man” into “I saw THE Son of Man”, turning that into an ecclesiastical messianic title, and putting it in Jesus’ mouth.

 
 reyjacobs  
 June 13, 2012 at 10:05 pm 
Thank you. Coming from a scholar such as yourself its quite a complement.

 
 
 
 Ken Scaletta  
 June 10, 2012 at 12:44 pm 
If there was actually any smoking gun for historicity, there would be no fatigue.
I would characterize myself as agnostic leaning towards historicity myself, but it just isn’t possible to make a dispositive case. Even the best evidence is tenuous (Tacitus, Josephus), or uninformative (Paul), or subjective and inferential (criteria of dissimilarity, “reconstructed” Aramaic, Crossan-cultural anthropology, application of the general to the specific [i.e. inferring that an individual had specific beliefs or characteristics based on broad cultural context, for instance, assuming that if X is from New York, X must be a Yankees fan. Such assumptions are made about Jesus based on a variety of factors such as his being Jewish, being Galilean being poor, etc. The assumption is that "a typical X does Y," but no one is perfectly typical, and idiosyncrasies occur in every context]).
In all honesty, the best we can really day is that some sort of Jesus more likely existed than not, but we can’t say anything for sure about him, and we can’t really even nail down 100% that he existed at all, or that he isn’t a composite of some sort.
The fatigue, at the end of the day, is because the data does not exist to really resolve the question to a degree of reasonable satisfaction. Some of the evidence really is pretty questionable (especially Josephus), no single piece seems rock solid, yet a completely invented Jesus has its own host of problems as a hypothesis, and lacks a strong theory.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 10, 2012 at 4:56 pm 
There is a smoking gun for historicity, called the New Testament; and it is signally important until you can show good cause why these documents should be set aside as forgeries or are so hopelessly irrelevant to the case that we can ignore them. The mythtics have failed to make their case except through poor analogy, assertion, and silence. That is not the way serious critical scholarship works, but then they are not serious critical scholars so the approach, reeking of amateurism and wishful thinking on the order of other conspiracy theories, is perhaps predictable. Certainly the evidence of doctrine and the existence of the church are not probative in the same way, but it is quite ludicrous to say that ancient papyrus evidence and an unbroken literary tradiiton extending from the very century in which the events are supposed to have happened can be treated this brusquely. We would pay a king’s ransom to have anything quite as detailed about Socrates beyond a few scattered references and Plato’s dialogues lionizing his teaching. Have I missed something? When did the mythics make their case?
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 reyjacobs  
 June 10, 2012 at 5:14 pm 
“There is a smoking gun for historicity, called the New Testament;”
Biased writings written by guys who worship someone (who may or may not have existed) as a God don’t prove his existence. If it did, then Homer’s writings would prove that Zeus and Poseidon existed. There is too much myth in the gospels to believe even 75% of them. What will you believe? The healings? the casting out of demons that speak and say “I know who you are; you are the Son of God!!!”? the conversations with Satan in the wilderness? the raisings of the dead?
Even the most down-to-earth moments in the gospels, like Jesus denying the importance of the Sabbath tend to not work without the mythology. Jesus makes his statements against the Sabbath by miraculously healing on the Sabbath not by saying “I don’t believe in the Sabbath.” In the end, all we can be left with is some Jewish guy who taught something the priests didn’t like and got whacked for it. That could be historical, but it doesn’t have to be. And it could be historical with a mythical name put to it. Was his name really Jesus (i.e. savior?) or was it Simon? This Gnostic Simon character who goes around saying in one place he is the Father, in another he is the Son, and in another the Holy Ghost, whom the church fathers complain about, could he just be an older version of “Jesus” that they now reject? They are upset with Simon for teaching against the Law of Moses — but if Jesus really existed and got put to death by the priests, isn’t that precisely what he must have done? So perhaps Jesus was the first Gnostic and his name was Simon, perhaps not. We have no solid information on this guy, so the best we can say is maybe he existed maybe he didn’t, maybe his name was really Jesus and maybe not. Maybe he was crucified by Pontus Pilate as the gospels say, and maybe he was stoned to death like the Talmud says! We don’t know jack squat.

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 10, 2012 at 6:36 pm 
@rejjacobs: I am approving this, though it is hopelessly confused. Hopelessly.

 
 Ken Scaletta  
 June 10, 2012 at 6:14 pm 
Well, first, I do not think the mythers have made their case and I think there was more likely somebody rather than nobody at the genesis of the Jerusalem Jesus sect (which I would distinguish from “Christianity,” as such), but it’s somebody that’s all but impossible to say anything definitive about him, or point to any one thing (with the arguable exception of the crucifixion) which is certain to be true. Like Jack the Ripper or the inventer of the wheel, Jesus can be inferred, but not identified. That creates space for mythers to make negative arguments against specific identifications or claims. The Gospels are akin to police sketches made not even from witnesses, but from a guy who heard from another guy what the suspect looked like.
My personal opinion is that Jesus most likely matches the conventional, consensus outline of a Galilean preacher/healer, probably self-identified “prophet,” who was first associated with John the Baptist, attracted a following of his own, said at least some of the things attributed to him and was crucified for being involved in some kind of disturbance at the Temple.
I can’t really prove a single one of those things, though.

 
 
 reyjacobs  
 June 10, 2012 at 5:07 pm 
“In all honesty, the best we can really [s]ay is that some sort of Jesus more likely existed than not, but we can’t say anything for sure about him, and we can’t really even nail down 100% that he existed at all, or that he isn’t a composite of some sort.”
I’d agree with that. Pure mythicism that he didn’t exist at all seems hard to swallow. But the reality is that our sources for proof of his existence are so tainted with mythology that about all we can say is there was a Jewish guy whose name probably was Jesus (although even that might be mythological, perhaps his name was Simon?) and he apparently taught something that got him killed, but what that was isn’t even certain.
Reply

 Andrew  
 June 24, 2012 at 12:33 pm 
Reyjacobs,
There’s a difference between a source being “tainted with mythology” and a source simply being mythology. We have absolutely no reason to assume that theologians imitating Jewish prophetical books like Daniel must have started out with historical interests. Ancient people had imaginations, and one of the advantages of living in that time was that a theologian’s imagination could be imprinted upon reality with far less effort than it takes today. One generation’s myth becomes the next generation’s tradition, and by the time of the gospels, tradition is struggling hard to become a secret history decoded and deciphered.

 
 
 
 Ken Scaletta  
 June 12, 2012 at 9:29 am 
@Dwight Jones
“Because I view Christ as a humanist teacher instructing the species on the new urban morality – regardless of whether or not he held a heavenly bus pass – I simply ask atheist people if they agree with that.
It’s fun to watch atheists then consider, even defend him, each a Pontius Pilate within their ambivalence.”
I don’t agree with that, no, I don’t think he is presented as humanistic in the Gospels, he’s presented as an apocalypticist preaching only to Jews and does not envision a long germ new morality, but the advent of a new “reign of God” which would not be humanistic at all, but a massive slaughter of Gentiles entered in a rule by an absolute, theocratic monarch (which he may or may not have envisioned as himself).
Whether or not “atheists” like what he taught has no bearing on whether he existed or not, so I don’t see how that should make any difference.
Sometimes I’ve seen progressive, “liberal,” Christian pastors talking about what a great, egalitarian, pro-gay, enlightened, progressive ethicist he was in an attempt to make him more palatable to the unconverted, but this presupposes that a lack of religious belief has anything to do with finding the message personally appealing or not. It’s a kind of special pleading.
Reply

 Ken Scaletta  
 June 12, 2012 at 9:36 am 
Sorry about the terrible typing and syntax above. “…entered in a rule by an absolute, theocratic monarch,” should have been “entering into a rule,” and “long germ new morality” should have been “long term new morality.”
Reply
 
 
Morning musings | The Heretical Philosopher says: 
 June 12, 2012 at 10:34 am 
[...] Hoffman did not just come to this conclusion.  He was reblogging his own post from two years earlier. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]
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 spin  
 June 12, 2012 at 12:08 pm 
There is a smoking gun for historicity, called the New Testament; and it is signally important until you can show good cause why these documents should be set aside as forgeries or are so hopelessly irrelevant to the case that we can ignore them.
There is a smoking gun for the historicity of Ebion as well, called the church fathers, and it is signally important until you can show good cause why these documents should be set aside as forgeries or are so hopelessly irrelevant to the case that we can ignore them.
Of course these arguments are not logical. Ebion almost certainly didn’t exist but it is ridiculous to call the church fathers who thought he was real forgeries. Jesus may have been real, but you need substantive evidence to establish his historicity.
Take a tradition source such as the gospels and let’s arbitrarily discount all the outrageous material contained in them, so that we are left with plausible material, in discounting say half the text with its devils and mountains from which you can see all the world, walking on water, healing by spitting on eyes and ears, raising of the dead, and so on. There is a precedent of untrustworthy material, so let’s look at the plausible material what’s left. How can you distinguish a veracious datum from a plausible but non-veracious one when you only have the tradition from which to evaluate them? Once plausible data are absorbed into a tradition they become indistinguishable from the other plausible data in the tradition. This leaves those with ontological commitments in the quandary of having no epistemology. There is no real difference between the mythicist and the historicist other than the flavor of their ontological commitment. Both lack the ability to support themselves. We just happen to be used to the inherited ontological commitment. It’s popularity is not a sufficient criterion for its validity.
The film Hugo has a character called George Melies, who was in fact a real human being. However, in the film he is just a character. Without external evidence for Melies, that’s all he would be. The claim that the New Testament is sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus is simply bankrupt. Qualitatively there is no difference between such a claim and that of the mythicist that the bible is evidence that Jesus didn’t exist.
I can show you evidence for very many people of the era you have never heard of whose historicity can be established with little doubt at all. Consider the named monuments along the Via Appia. Each one that preserves the name of the occupant attests to the historicity of that occupant. The lists of fire fighters at Ostia Antica provide a few hundred historically attested people. All have what Jesus doesn’t have. A fairly firm historicity. And RJH offers a tradition text from which there is no epistemological support for his ontological commitment to a historical Jesus. Worrying about mythicism is ultimately a red herring. The task is to establish historicity for Jesus, not just to show that mythicists are wrong or working with insufficient means to justify their claims. I agree that they are. But it is also the case for the historicist. You have to stop wasting your time complaining about others and make a substantive case for your position. Best explanations need evidence.
Figures we inherit from very old traditions may not be able to be shown to have existed. We can happily continue living despite not being able to say if Robin Hood or King Arthur was real or not. While I can see a wave of special pleading welling up, given–contra RJH–the lack of substantive evidence for Jesus, he doesn’t warrant the adjective “historical”, even though he may have lived. (And to be clear, by “historical”, I mean “able to be supported by substantive evidence from the past”.)
(Let’s have no more mischief about me being Jacob. If you don’t have access to IP, use your stylistic skills.)
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 24, 2012 at 12:53 pm 
@spin: Surely you can do better than trying to compare Jesus to “Ebion”: Origen in de Princ.4.22 on the proliferation of “Christian” sects: “Being taught, then, by him that there is one Israel according to the flesh, and another according to the Spirit, when the Saviour says, I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, we do not understand these words as those do who savour of earthly things, i.e., the Ebionites, who derive the appellation of poor from their very name (for Ebion means poor in Hebrew ); but we understand that there exists a race of souls which is termed Israel, as is indicated by the interpretation of the name itself: for Israel is interpreted to mean a mind, or man seeing God. The apostle, again, makes a similar revelation respecting Jeru­salem, saying, The Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.” Etc.  As opposed to “Other writers, such as Tertullian (De Praescr., xxxiii; De Carne Chr., xiv, 18), Hippolytus (cfr. Pseudo-Tert., Adv. Haer., III, as reflecting Hippolytus’s lost “Syntagma”), and Epiphanius (Haeres., xxx) derive the name of the sect from a certain Ebion, its supposed founder. …But these passages are not likely to be genuine, and Ebion, otherwise unknown to history, is probably only an invention to account for the name Ebionites.” – Catholic Encyclopaedia art. “Ebionites”. The little matter of the identity of Ebion not having been settled in antiquity is not exactly apposite to the identity of Jesus having been settled before the end of the first century and the comparatively prolific sources that you continue to say are useless, though they will not disappear and your inept analogy does not explain them at all. Of course, these weak analogies used as proof are exactly what makes mythicism risible.
Reply

 reyjacobs  
 June 25, 2012 at 8:18 pm 
If Ebion isn’t good enough, how about Simon Magus? Are the book of Acts and the church father’s a “smoking gun” for his existence?

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 25, 2012 at 8:42 pm 
@Rey: sure, why not: and Santa Claus and anything else you want to allude to after you make your categorical error: one myth is as good as any other. What you do not tell me is how you are able to get around the gospels on the basis of these inept, anachronistic analogies, which like all mythtics you simply want to multiply.

 
 reyjacobs  
 June 25, 2012 at 9:18 pm 
Obviously your analogy (Santa Claus) is the anachronistic one. Those who wrote of Simon Magus are from the same period as those who wrote of Jesus, AND they are same individuals who determined what gospels would be kept and what gospels destroyed. So if there is any analogy that is good, it is this one. What you should have said, was, sure Simon Magus existed–he was Paul.

 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 25, 2012 at 9:26 pm 
Nup: a category error is a category error–you are lumping all dubious legends together as though they are the same genus and then trying to stretch your category to encompass the gospels. Simon Magus is probably from the second century if he begins with Luke, but he thrives only in the time of Irenaeus. But that is irrelevant. Let’s try a different tack: Why do you think most critical scholars who think the gospels have a historical basis are perfectly happy to acknowledge the legendary accretions in Luke, including Simon? Less to lose, or something–else?

 
 
 
 David Mills  
 July 2, 2012 at 5:57 am 
Really great article. Jesus may have existed and he may not. I lean ever so slightly towards the former, with the gap between ‘undecided’ and ‘ever so slightly favouring historicity’ being more to do with pragmatism and personal preference not to be too closely associated with mythicism, a lot of which seems to me to necessitate more going out on a limb than the alternative.
So, the question, ‘why does it matter whether he did or didn’t?’ or ‘why does it matter whether we decide?’ become far more interesting than the bare question of ‘actual historicity’, which any sensible and intelligent person will probably realize will always have to have inverted commas around it, bar some startling new evidence emerging.
Regards,
David (‘New atheist’ and proud of it) :)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


Movement Humanism
by rjosephhoffmann



What makes “organized humanism” different from the humanism that evolved philosophically out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment era is that it didn’t evolve out of the Renaissance or Enlightenment era. Not really.
Anyone who has travelled through the liberal arts curriculum of a European or American university in the last century has experienced the benefits of a benign, docile, unangry form of humanism: a curriculum free from church dogma and supervision, a reverence for scientific inquiry, systematic approaches to the study of literature, history, society and an emphasis on critical thinking.
Once upon a time, theology was called queen of the sciences. That was once upon a time. If you really want to know how the liberal arts (a slightly misleading name in our historically impoverished culture since “liberal arts”–the studies that “set your free”– include mathematics and sciences), fought and dethroned theology for the title, you really only have to look at the history of the American university—not counting, of course, those private and parochial ones that are paid for and managed by religious institutions of various stripes. In general, the modern university is built from the bricks humanism provided. It’s a product of intellectual evolution and learning and constructed to focus on the things that, as humans, we can know about rather than on the things that, as humans, we can’t possibly know.

Sometimes secular humanists want to claim that their brand of humanism shares a common pedigree with the humanism of the university. But that’s not true. Its origins, while respectable are not intellectually apostolic: French salon discussion, satire and tractarianism, German political movements, especially the Left Hegelians (like Marx in economics and Baur in philosophy and theology), anti-clericalism, frontier pragmatism in America, and above all a village atheism and hardheadedness that can be traced back to Tom Paine, Darrow, Ingersoll, and a dozen lesser lights. Many, though by no means all of these bargain basement illuminati never saw the inside of an ivory tower–though it’s a credit to Oxford that the university awarded an honorary doctorate to the cantankerous Midwestern skeptic, Samuel Clemens, in 1907.

As in Britain and Europe, freethought went hand in hand with politics: in England, spinning off the free-churches movement that was allied with Unitarianism and the “chapels,” it was tied to disestablishment— the end of the prerogatives and protections given the Church of England. In the United States, it was tied to First Amendment principles, civil liberties, a certain naive belief in “democratic values” (that did not take into account that the democratic values of the masses were dominantly intermixed with and confused with the Bible), and an occasional envy of the more robust socialism and communist tremors of an evolving secular Europe.

Clarence Darrow
I have never thought of myself as a secular humanist, or a big H  life-stance British Humanist Association sort of Humanist. The minute you start qualifying humanism you are no longer talking about humanism but the conditions under which you can think of yourself as a humanist. Humanism is humanism. Movement humanism can be a variety of things–like ice cream or Christian denominations.
The danger in my view is that movement humanism is not innocuous. George Bernard Shaw once drunkenly said that “the conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.” (Shame on him for not knowing that he was impugning the Irish as well as first century Palestinian Jews.) It is true, in the same sense, however, that the theft of the name “humanism” by atheists who think it has a nice ring is the diminution of a major chapter in the history of human learning to a press release.
I have no trouble with anyone calling himself a humanist of this or that colour. But for the word to retain its “denotative” sense, it’s important to distinguish between “movement-humanism” and humanism.
Movement or “organized” humanism, as the name suggests, is a hybrid of certain currents that came together in a strand in the mid twentieth century, especially driven by the frenzy of intellectual change after two world wars. The movement was never fully coherent and for that reason appealed to political liberals, people who sincerely believed that religion (equated with superstition, supernaturalism and dogmatism) was responsible for the world’s ills and others who had been injured by religion and needed catharsis and (perhaps) non-violent revenge. Some of these people were intellectuals. Some were nurses and folksingers and ex-seminarians. All were a little angry.
In terms of its constituency and mood, secular humanism was entirely compatible with atheism; in fact, many recognized that the phrase was simply a circumlocution for atheism or agnosticism, in the same way some Evangelicals equate their doctrinal stance with being “Christian.” The percentage of secular humanists in America or Humanists in Britain or India harboring any “religious” sentiments must be painfully, infinitesimally small.
Other additives of American-style movement humanism included a belief that ethics were man-made and not dictated by a supreme being or mediated by dogma. Secular humanism became wedded to this fairly obvious proposition just when the best theology in Europe and America was teaching much the same thing. The theologies of Hartshorne and Whitehead, and to a certain degree Gilkey and Tillich, with their panentheistic view of God and idealistic view of man, were fully humanistic in the proper sense of the word, but could not be acknowledged by movement humanism with its constricted view of human reality and facile equation of religion and supernaturalism. Indeed, the greatest error of the movement was the simple association of religion with superstition, and the the working assumption that, like superstition and magic, religion could simply be debunked as a system of ritualized hoaxes.

Whitehead
The commitment to “godless” and anti-religious ethics made good sense for an atheist program of action as a kind of self-help course for unbelievers, but could never achieve the intellectual benchmark of an ethics based on the totality of human experience and reflection.
That’s not to say that one needs to believe in God to be moral. It is to say that an ethic that is not grounded in some actually existing infinite reality, such as God is presumed to be, must first state clearly what the grounds and perimeters of values are before proposing them as normative or significant: without such a calculus, it is no more relevant to say that an action is moral because it is human than it is to say that an action is moral because it is something Jesus would have endorsed.
I drink no more than a sponge...
In the realm of ethics, especially, movement humanism became habituated to oversimplification. To make religion more depraved than it seemed to most sensible people, the movement humanists stressed that religion was the sum total of its worst parts. Christianity, a religion of Bible-believing nitwits who meddled in politics, aspired to mind-control and hated Darwin. Islam, a religion of twisted fanatics who loved violence and hated progress and the proponents, mainly western, of progress. There was no equivalent narrative for Jews or Buddhists—not really—or the irrational components of secular movements: democratic socialism, communism, and (within limits) civil libertarianism could be forgiven their excesses precisely because they had their theodicy right if sometimes they got their tactics or outcomes wrong.
While often claiming the protective cloak of science and reason as their aegis for intellectual rectitude, movement humanism was really all about creating straw-men, stereotypes and bogeymen and unfortunately came to believe in its own anti-religion discourse.
To have capitulated, at any point, to the most humane, uplifting or learned elements in religion would have been seen as surrender to the forces of ignorance and superstition. For that reason, by the early years of the twenty-first century movement humanism gave birth to a more uncompromising form of radical secularism in the form of the new atheism with its anti-God and oddly Orwellian postulate: All religion is evil. Some religions are more evil than others. Before God can be disbelieved in, as Christopher Hitchens argued in God is Not Great, he has to be roused from his slumber, bound, tried, and humiliated for his atrocities. If he is not available, his avatar, the Catholic church, will do.
God is Not Great
Movement humanism as it has evolved is not really humanism. Or rather, it is a kind of parody of humanism. A better name for it would be Not-Godism. It’s what you get when you knock at the heavenly gate and no one is home.
It’s a rant of disappointment camouflaged by a tributary note to science for having made the discovery of the great Nonbeing possible. It’s structured outrage towards the institutions that have perpetuated belief and promises that (as many atheists sincerely believe) the churches have known to be empty all along.
At its best, it is a demand for honesty which, for lack of a unified response from “religion,” seems to require commando tactics.
Unfortunately, the tactics are all wrong because they demonstrate the movement’s almost complete lack of understanding of the “total passion for the total height” that validates religion for most Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists—a huge slice of the earth’s population. To read Sam Harris’s extended fallacy, The End of Faith, or Richard Dawkins’ screed, The God Delusion, or any of the clones that have appeared since 2006 is to enter a world of misapprehension and illogic that can only be compared to a child trying to fit the contents of an overstuffed toy chest into a shoebox on the premise that both are boxes that can hold toys. But the logic did not originate with the new atheists; it originated with movement humanism.

What organized humanism lacked from the beginning of its career, as a circumlocution for robust unbelief in God, is a sense of the dignity of wo/man combined with an indulgence and appreciation of human frailty, including the limits of reason. In renaissance humanism, the thought belongs to Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a 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.
At the beginning of the renaissance, the humanist thinker Pico della Mirandola was censured by Pope Innocent VIII for “certain propositions” contained in his Oration on the Dignity of Man—the first true humanist manifesto.
In the Oration, Pico extolled human achievement, the importance of learning, the centrality of the quest for knowledge, and the primacy of man as the knower of the order of universe (which he associates with the faculty of reason and not divine revelation). He gives this speech to God as an imaginary dialogue after the creation of Adam:
“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”

Innocent VIII
Innocent VIII was no fool. This was not the Genesis story. It was a re-writing of the whole creation myth. It makes Adam’s choice of the earth over his own “divine” potential all the more tragic, a squandered opportunity. But it also makes the choice free, unfettered, fully human and the consequences–which lead after all to smart people like Pico writing smart books–all the more impressive. Divine is as human does well: that was the message
An authentic humanism to be inclusive of all people has to be inclusive of all possible human outcomes, including the possibility of failure. The story of the first human being, in the religious context, is the story of a bad choice. I suspect that that is why the story of Adam has staying power and instructional weight.
Maybe the failure of movement humanism really goes back to how we read Adam’s saga. It has always struck me that the word simpleton can be used to describe both the atheist rant against the creation account in Genesis and the fundamentalist’s preposterous attempts to defend it. Beyond the Scylla and Charybdis of that divide are millions of people who think the story is really elsewhere, that it really doesn’t begin with sticking the sun and the moon in the primordial darkness but with Adam, and more particularly with the curse of reason that Pico describes in his Oration.
Curse? Yes, I think so. The “gift” of reason (no, I do not really believe that we are endowed with reason by a divine being) is both the gift to be curious and the ability to make choices, to act. The tension we experience, like Adam, is that natural curiosity sometimes outdistances a third element—reflection.
The humanist understanding of reason doesn’t magic it into a faculty that, used correctly and with the best application of science, will protect us from error. Religion had such a faculty once: it was called faith and it got you saved from sin.
To be blunt, movement humanism with its straw men and reductive techniques, its stereotyping and bogeymen, is not just stuck in the past but stuck in a religious past of its own making. It is a past that an authentic and fully inclusive humanism would want to reject. It is a past that many religious thinkers have already rejected.
See also: http://open.salon.com/blog/r_joseph_hoffmann/2010/02/02/beyond_the_creeds
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Published: June 4, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : British Humanist Association : freethought : God : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism : secularism ..
21 Responses to “Movement Humanism”

.
 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 3:18 am 
For a summer evening with a cool golden chablis, spicey, and if not the sea, La Mer.
Reply
 
 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 3:15 pm 
A superb piece of writing, a definitive perspective on true Humanism. Classical erudition at its best.
FWIW, as a Humanist I regard “ethics” as “mob morality”, no matter their promoter. A true Humanist relies on character.
I think this distinction is important, because every wo/man has a Humanist layer beneath their “belief” layer, and when we begin to call that forth from the species, then shall the harmony we seek come into evidence.
Bravo!
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann  
 June 5, 2010 at 3:35 pm 
Thanks, Dwight. I am grateful for what you are espousing on your site as well, which everyone should visit: http://humanist.ws/ I hope we’ll be able to join forces and work together in concrete ways.
J.
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 6:53 pm 
That’s very illusive Dwight. It sounds like what the classicists taught: character is the basis of morals and the point of education is supposed to be to form your character. I like the observation that everyone is a humanist in essence.
I still think Joe’s piece the most beautiful writing I have ever read and I especially like how often the writer seems to clarify my own feelings simultaneously dropping in the most interesting and entertaining facts. Like the manifesto of a 15th century philosopher, Pico della Mirandola, who I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. And I even more especially like the careful distinction between the essential and inclusive humanism which restarted in the renaissance, from the virulent anti religious ‘movements’ not just in America, but Britain as well, which have become so bullying and prominent. My own father, when I began studying religions, was reluctant to identify as a humanist because of the atheist connotations at the time, although he was a humanist really, when he was sincerely searching for like minded thinkers.
Reply

 Ed Jones  
 November 28, 2010 at 10:26 pm 
For a treatment of “Humanism” origins see my comment to “Is Religion Good? A Repost–”.
Reply
 
 
 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 7:27 pm 
Steph writ: “My own father…was sincerely searching for like minded thinkers.” and that is indicative, as we might say that Humanism was even more obscure then than now.
Your Dad was wondering where the party was, and today we have one, albeit one crashed by loud, atheist lager louts. Now, if we could find a quiet spot in the garden…
Joe’s writing is a resource on a number of levels, very inspirational, learning is such a pleasure. Another writer I value for his knowledge of sophisticated world causes is Larry Kazdan, whom I use as my next lily pad in the pond of world governance.
Revive your blog, Steph, and give up linguistic analysis instead.. :-)
Reply

 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 8:02 pm 
I wish my dad was still here – he would have enjoyed a quiet spot in the garden… and I’m optimistically hoping we can find one soon :-)
Ha – bloggling – other people do it better! I’m supposed to be finishing a rather dull thesis on something particularly unimportant and completely wrong called ‘Q’. I’ve got another basket load of really good excuses :-)
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 5, 2010 at 8:15 pm 
I like your website Dwight. Have you got a website for Larry Kazdan please?
Reply

 Dwight Jones  
 June 5, 2010 at 8:30 pm 
Larry writes on Examiner, and various others. No fixed website I know of. Good for world issues.
Try http://tinyurl.com/33ujk3m
Dwight

 
 steph  
 June 6, 2010 at 5:35 pm 
thanks for that – I’ve been browsing around (procrasinating with more interesting things than a mythical Q). It’s a shame your novel ‘The Humanist’ isn’t available as an old fashioned book – pages to dogear and print that doesn’t move on the page – I’d read it if it was :-)

 
 
 
 Movement Humanism (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says: 
 June 5, 2010 at 11:36 pm 
[...] What makes "organized humanism" different from the humanism that evolved philosophically out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment era is that it didn't evolve out of the Renaissance or Enlightenment era. Not really. Anyone who has travelled through the liberal arts curriculum of a European or American university in the last century has experienced the benefits of a benign, docile, unangry form of humanism: a curriculum free from church dogma and … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Movement Humanism (Repost) « The New Oxonian says: 
 July 26, 2010 at 6:26 pm 
[...] 0 What makes "organized humanism" different from the humanism that evolved philosophically out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment era is that it didn't evolve out of the Renaissance or Enlightenment era. Not really. Anyone who has travelled through the liberal arts curriculum of a European or American university in the last century has experienced the benefits of a benign, docile, unangry form of humanism: a curriculum free from church dogma and … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 Movement Humanism? Enough Already (repost) | The New Oxonian says: 
 May 24, 2011 at 5:23 pm 
[...] What makes "organized humanism" different from the humanism that evolved philosophically out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment era is that it didn't evolve out of the Renaissance or Enlightenment era. Not really. Anyone who has travelled through the liberal arts curriculum of a European or American university in the last century has experienced the benefits of a benign, docile, unangry form of humanism: a curriculum free from church dogma and … Read More [...]
Reply
 
 s. wallerstein  
 May 24, 2011 at 6:55 pm 
In Chile we have a Humanist Party.
I voted for one of their candidates once, because of her stance on legalizing abortion, among other things.
They are on the left, but don’t fit in with the traditional left, the Communists and the Socialists. At times, however, they form alliances with the Communists.
They are extraordinarily earnest and politically correct, so earnest and politically correct that I feel a bit uncomfortable with them. It’s an one-dimensional earnestnesss, a salesman’s earnestness, not a visceral earnestness; an earnestness
 learned by the book.
My son thinks that politicians (and everyone except true saints) need a touch of malice. The humanists in Chile lack malice, which does not make them truly good. In fact, I would trust them more if there were a bit of malice to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_International
Reply

 Dwight Jones  
 May 24, 2011 at 8:37 pm 
Nobody listens to a milquetoast, agreed. Better we label the Spartans as the progenitors of humanism, and market from there.
Reply

 s. wallerstein  
 May 24, 2011 at 9:08 pm 
My problem with the Humanist Party (or rather their public spokespeople) isn’t that they are or are not milquetoasts (I had to look that word up).
They are Flaubert’s Monsieur Homais.
We all know people who dedicate themselves 100 % to good causes, with almost total purity and commitment: the saints.
I’m not a saint, but I respect them.
I don’t respect Monsieur Homais.

 
 
 
 Scott  
 May 25, 2011 at 10:17 am 
Ethos=character, therefore I would still choose ethics as individual assessments of value; morals as group assessments of value. Both can be problematic and difficult, but are necessary for healthy individuals and society.
Reply
 
 Movement Humanism and Deconversion from Christianity « Religion And More… says: 
 June 4, 2011 at 6:39 am 
[...] R Joseph Hoffman’s piece on “Movement Humanism“. A few choice quotations would [...]
Reply
 
Movement Humanism | eChurch Blog says: 
 June 4, 2011 at 10:05 am 
[...] written and thoroughly insightful critique of “Movement Humanism”, written by Joseph Hoffmann, himself a [...]
Reply
 
R.J.Hoffmann on “Movement humanism”, while Mary Beard writes against attempt to limit smut for kiddies at Roger Pearse says: 
 June 4, 2011 at 10:56 am 
[...] first, via eChurch blog, is by atheist R.J.Hoffmann, and entitled Movement Humanism.  What he describes is what most of us experience, when we encounter atheists or atheist [...]
Reply
 
A Few Links of Interest | Theology in the News says: 
 June 7, 2011 at 11:40 am 
[...] The New Oxonian – Movement Humanism [...]
Reply
 

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Secular Humanists Anonymous: Addiction Recovery
by rjosephhoffmann


SECULAR HUMANISTS ANONYMOUS
 An Addiction Recovery Program
Statistical Definition of the Problem
Like all addictions, secular humanism in its most general form is the overwhelming feeling that you cannot get through the day without a “fix.”

Studies have shown that as many as 65% of adult males who read the New York Times and up to 85% of those who read Rolling Stone call themselves “secular humanists” or refuse to identify themselves as members of any religious group.
97% of evangelicals surveyed called New York Times and Rolling Stone readers “really messed up.”
By contrast, 87% of women who read Prevention and 90% of men who read NASCAR Magazineidentify themselves as “very” or “damned” religious. When internet information sources are included, subscribers to Salon.com, Slate, BBC, Daily Kos and Raw Story fall squarely in the humanist camp, while subscribers to Drudge, Fox News, Wall Street Journal and WorldNet Daily show a robust religious attitude toward world political and economic events.
Similar discrepancies were observed for viewers of Seinfeld re-runs (secular humanist) and Everybody Loves Raymond (religious, pro-life). A surprising result is that 75% of respondents who self-identified as humanists did not like PBS’s Woodwright’s Workshop while a roughly equivalent number (80%) of religious persons “thought they would like it” but had never heard of PBS.
Food habits are also important indicators: secular humanists and atheists* are likelier by a 10 to 1 margin to like curries, by a 7 to 1 margin to prefer whole grain bread to Holsum Country White, and by an 8 to 1 margin to ask a bartender for a real martini instead of “that blue stuff in a crooked stem glass.”

A random survey (Glitch, 2002) of 500 mall-walkers in Sarasota determined that only 1 in 7 persons who identified themselves as secular humanists considered sangria an alcoholic beverage while 6 out of seven considered it “a crappy fruit punch with floaties drunk by Texans.”
By contrast, only 3 out of 7 males who self-identified as born again Christians could correctly spell the word “samosa” or identify its ingredients. More than 60% of humanist-trending respondents claimed to like cucumbers, while 75% of religion-trending respondents stated that “cucumbers are what celery eats.” A significant minority of Jewish secularists surveyed called cucumbers “pickle fetuses.”
 
Recovery
The growth, popularity and availability of humanist resources without government intervention amounts to a legalization of anti-religion in the United States.
The time is long overdue for an organization designed to help individuals addicted to humanism, secularism, and atheism. We believe that Secular Humanists Anonymous is that organization.
Founded in 2004 at the highpoint of the New Atheist resurgence, and now a 501c(3) not-for-profit educational entity, SHA began modestly enough in the recreation hall of New Life Temple Kingdom Church in Sandusky, Ohio, when Zelma Bickerston, got the idea of a secular humanist self-help and recovery program from her daughter Marlene, a self-identifying obese secular humanist with nowhere to turn.

We have now spread to three locations, two of them outside Sandusky in the “Research Triangle”: (Sandusky, Little Sandusky and Lower Sandusky Falls). The Research Triangle after seventy five years as a leader in paper machete innovation “is looking forward to new ways to improve the aesthetics of holiday centerpieces, birthday memorabilia and above all floats” (CofC Flier, 2001).
Our meetings are designed to minimize the pressure and stress one often feels by self-identifying as a secular humanist (atheist) or in similar drug and alcohol recovery situations.
Procedure for Induction
Normally, chairs are arranged in a semi-circle, the lights dimmed, and Jim Croce recordings are played in the background as a bonding mechanism. Random studies have found that “You Are So Beautiful” is preferred by a two-to-one margin of recoverers.
Members are asked to state their name, confess their addiction, and the duration and the severity of their affliction. A typical profession might go something like this:
“Hello, everybody. My name is Sam Siraznikov. I am a native of Sandusky, Ohio and my family lives on Oak near the old Witke house. I am a secular humanist. I have been a secular humanist for about five years. That’s when I started subscribing to Free Inquiry and National Geographic. Actually my wife let me keep my NG subscription but she says if I don’t quit reading atheist pornography I can just get out of the house.”

(Preceding used with permission of Sam Silverstein whose name has been changed here to protect his identity).
The members of the group then voice their appreciation of Sam’s courage in “coming out.” Different methods are used in the Lower Sandusky group, where they whoop, but here in the capital we say in unison, “Atta-boy Sam. Keep up the good work.” The inductee will then respond “You Betcha,” or “You got it,” or words to that effect.
Following the profession, the inductee is given a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and becomes our guest at the three-meat buffet supper. No vegetarian option.
Five Steps to Recovery
Many addiction programs have twenty or twelve point plans to guide the addict to total recovery. These programs tend to be confusing and cannot be memorized without a lot of trouble. For that reason, SHA has adopted the following five point program which we refer to as our “creed”:**
1. I really do believe in God, heaven, and hell even though I had my doubts to start with.
2. People who don’t believe in God cannot be my neighbors, but I can feel sorry for them.
3. Going to church [synagogue] is a privilege, not a right.
4. Atheism and humanism are like any other disease, but we can cure this one.
5. It is not true that “many, many great people have been atheists and humanists” because if they were they weren’t so great, were they?.

If you are suffering from the signs of addiction and want a sure-fire recovery program that is fun, easy and nutritious give to SHA and join us in Sandusky!


 *What a secular humanist really is.
 **A statement of things you believe.
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Published: June 21, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: addiction : secular humanism : secularism ..
5 Responses to “Secular Humanists Anonymous: Addiction Recovery”

.
 steph  
 June 21, 2010 at 7:08 pm 
I think I’m a humanist without any adjectives. Always been a humanist without adjectives. I have never been religious, really don’t know, but always been interested in the religious. Or maybe I’m just me, unidentified individual, learning, growing and declining, relearning, every day. I’m a fruitarian who likes to include lots of fresh greens, liquorice tea and fair trade espresso, home spressed, and likes a glass of champagne, I subscribe to nothing but use the libraries alot.
… actually humanists true to the humanism born in the Renaissance should take out the aitch so it doesn’t give expression to so much angst. The angst in aitch is hateful and horrid but an uminist ain’t angry at all. An uminist is inclusive and concerned with uman welfare and values and personal morality. An uminist is concerned with character, learning, imagination and exploration – together. An uminist has no need to be anonymous, not an umanist without any angst.
Everyone loves ‘you are so beautiful’ – religious and probably even ‘orrible atheists and positively unidentifiable umans too. It goes with the 60s genre of beautiful love songs that I’ve clung to all my life, since learning to walk, run and play in the forests and the sea, way back in those flowery 60s. It’s simple, it’s pure, it’s about love.
Religion was never polarised between fundamentalisms where I grew up – it appears to be an american phenomenon. So do ‘secular humanism’ and the CFI appear to be american phenomena, neither humanistic nor umanist true.
I’ll go to any happy garden party as long as there’s no louts or lager but lots of laughter and loving instead. Everyone is invited as long as they’re happy and willing to appreciate diversity in the happy. I’m addicted to hippidom, happiness, nature and the sea. :-p
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 21, 2010 at 10:51 pm 
by the way I forgot to say, it’s a terrible post … and didn’t ya know that 98.75% of statistics are made up!!! You are so… :-p
Reply
 
 Joel  
 June 21, 2010 at 10:55 pm 
It seems that I may be a secular humanist, at least by those stats. Honestly, why would anyone watch Raymond a second time?
Reply
 
 marf  
 June 21, 2010 at 11:24 pm 
Thanks for speaking up, steph.
 I’d like to say that, in regards to affinity to curries, I resemble that remark! I consider myself a humanist but would not, as intimated in Clyde Edgerton’s Walking Across Egypt, break into your home at night and do something “secular.” I regularly attend Sunday Humanism meetings in Second Life where I can vent a bit before returning to Real Life in the Bible Belt.
 I had not felt the need to vent before moving down here. I lived for nearly 40 years without being told I was going to hell. Being asked if I accepted Jesus as my personal savior was an event of relative infrequency that I was able to parry with a jolly “I will, if you accept Plato as yours!” Now it’s a code you must enter before doing business with some people or running for office. Shivering shibboleths, Batman! We compound the animosity each time either party reacts. What happened to peaceful co-existence? Oh, right – that never worked either.
Reply
 
 steph  
 June 22, 2010 at 1:34 am 
I wasn’t really marf. I think it’s more about the needing to include the ‘secular’ deflecting from the humanist true. Humanism has nothing to do with religion or areligion. It’s above beyond or over that because it’s inclusive, that’s all. And the post wasn’t so bad – it was about, I think, a group of angry Clowning Fancy Infidels who by their self definition of ‘secular’ negate humanist values … which include… of inclusiveness.
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Religionless Morality? On the Folly of Global Ethics
by rjosephhoffmann


“And God spake unto Moses saying: This will you say unto the children of Israel: Be Good! And Moses went down from Sinai, and the children of Israel said: What hath the Lord said unto you? What is his plan and purpose? And Moses lifted up the tablet of the law, whereon was writ: Be Good! And they laughed and said unto Moses. What is this ‘good’? We need more.” (Exodus, The New Last Chapter)
I’ve touched this topic before, but it may be time for a summertime lite version of my comments. Especially as Scipio has just read a monstrously bad piece on the subject.
In a previous post, I argued the familiar theme that not only is religion not necessary for morality but that dogmatic religions are antithetical to the development of an ethical program. They interfere with two things that make a genuine morality–a program that results in the cultivation of virtue and the avoidance of injury–possible: conscience and choice. Before ethicists became classifiers, taxonomists, and quantifiers, in fact, these two ingredients were linked to the idea of practice. Following Mill and his wretched spawn, the do-gooding ethics of utilitarians, consequentialists, pragmatists, situationalists and others tended to obscure the fact that ethics has more to do with the examined life than with mathematics.

Mill
A moral life in the modern world has to be lived without religion. It does not need to be anti-religion. It has to be lived without religion because the idea of a law-giving god has become preposterous to most people, even to people who cannot acknowledge that the world we inhabit is post-Christian (and by extension, post- every other religion). By that I simply mean that the world we live in would be incomprehensible if we adopted the cosmology of the ancient world, the world of the Bible and its literary cousins. And to the extent we don’t or cannot, it’s foolish for us to imagine that it has intellectual or moral authority over us and over the decisions we face.
It has been a long time since Bultmann, the titanic biblical scholar of his generation, reminded his profession that the biblical world is based on a myth that has ceased to have a purchase not only on the mind but on the imagination of the modern world. And while it is possible to wish otherwise and therefore to think otherwise, “wishful ethics,” in my view, does not have much of a future.
So there is no reason to consider the God of the Bible as a source of virtue or standard of right conduct in the twenty-first century, and in fact, a little study of biblical history would show that he was not so regarded by the shapers of Jewish tradition either: it’s only when Christianity (and elements of Judaism) become saturated with Greek ideas that biblical precepts and customary law acquire the force of “ethics” and get themselves philosophized into religion.
As part-time philosophers, it was part of a theologian’s job description to make room for “ethics,” but whether we are glancing back at Augustine, or (later) Aquinas or Abelard, we are looking at men who were making the recipes up as they went along: One stick Plato, melted, three parts commandments, a dash of Epicurus, and a cup of Aristotle; cover and let simmer for one thousand years; remove from heat and sprinkle with beatitudes.

Abelard teaching: The first Naturalist?
“Jesus,” as a former archbishop of Canterbury once said to me, “was a very nice man, but he wasn’t an ethicist.” We can be grateful for that. Neither was Moses, and neither was Job. So to continue to think of the suzrerainal Yahweh as anything more than a heavenly king enforcing tribal customs on a wayward people (the tougher the better, lest Israel go astray), or Jesus as much more than the condensed version of what many Jews wanted to hear in the graeco-Judaism of first century Palestine, would really be to miss the point. It is important to let the Bible be a book of its own time. That’s not how it loses but how it acquires relevance.
You can’t get to ethics, however, simply by (a) tossing religious ethics out the window and (b) keeping the good bits–using slogans like “being good without God,” perhaps the most irksome, historically challenged and simplistic phrase ever coined in the name of secular morality.
You certainly cannot get there if you assume that there are universal and trans-historical norms that were as true in ancient civilization as today. For example, there was no prohibition against lying in Hebrew law (“bearing false witness” is a juridical sanction). If there had been, the Abraham who tries to pass his wife off as his sister and the God who commands Abraham to use his son as a sacrificial goat would not have speaking parts in Genesis. But just as significant, a thousand things we regard as repugnant–blood-hunters, infanticide, the execution of disobedient sons and the selling of family members into slavery–were widely practiced in ancient society. A little history and anthropology teaches us that religion, law, and morality were not three strands but a knot, the ends of which are sometimes difficult to untangle.

Being good was not the goal for Aristotle, was it? Habituating yourself to virtue through the practice of reason was. You can habituate yourself to other things of course, but you will always fall short of the “defining virtue,” which can only be the exercise of the one essential thing that makes you human. Some of us share with garden slugs a love for lettuce. But we can’t stop there. Some of us are good with wood. So are termites and beavers. I think my point is clear: the right use of reason, which is always painfully hard work and always requires judgment about things like the relationship between action and reflection (the classical mode assigns this to the “soul”) is the only source of ethics. And to be ethical is never therefore to be good. It is to be the sort of person who does the right sort of thing.
A little meditation will convince us that this excludes the possibility of God–not as a philosophical postulate but as a practical matter. God the father wants what is best for his children; but the biblical god at least leaves them in no doubt about what that is and what the consequences are for not acquiring it. He is the worst father ever: the kind who would let his own son die for crimes he caused to happen himself.

Thy will be done.
This concept, which most people would identify as the heart of religious ethics, is personally and morally insidious. It is fine for the eternally stupid Adam, whom God endows with the reasoning powers of a three year old, and fine for other heroes who beat their chests and whack their heads trying to figure out God’s justice. Of course, the moral thing to do would be to run away from home, away from the abusive father who makes unreasonable demands for unreasoning obedience to his arbitrary dictates.

Curse God and die.
Ethical responsibility requires at least that–to be, as H. R. Niebuhr strikingly phrased it a “responsible self.”
But there comes a time when the ethical framework invites the incorporation of lessons learned through religion as the story of our moral background, our infancy.
If letting go of God is part of that story, in the same way that coming to adulthood requires us to understand the pains and tremors of infancy, we should be prepared to answer to other tribunals, identify other sources of value, specify the norms we regard as relevant for leading a good life.
Is moral life always culturally specific? If we cannot identify trans-historical and universal norms from the past, why do we suppose we will be able to construct a global ethic for the future–or is the desire to do so simply another case of the totalizing conceit that we thought we abandoned when we left religion behind us?
These are the sorts of questions we need to be asking about an ethical program for the future, and I suggest that religion has a lot to teach us about where to look for answers.
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Published: June 23, 2010
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Tags: Bible : biblical ethics : ethics : morality : religion : secularism ..
 
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Harrisy
by rjosephhoffmann

Here was the Publishers Weekly review of Sam Harris’s 2005 book, The End of Faith:

In this sometimes simplistic and misguided book, Harris calls for the end of religious faith in the modern world. Not only does such faith lack a rational base, he argues, but even the urge for religious toleration allows a too-easy acceptance of the motives of religious fundamentalists. Religious faith, according to Harris, requires its adherents to cling irrationally to mythic stories of ideal paradisiacal worlds (heaven and hell) that provide alternatives to their own everyday worlds. Moreover, innumerable acts of violence, he argues, can be attributed to a religious faith that clings uncritically to one set of dogmas or another. Very simply, religion is a form of terrorism for Harris. Predictably, he argues that a rational and scientific view—one that relies on the power of empirical evidence to support knowledge and understanding—should replace religious faith. We no longer need gods to make laws for us when we can sensibly make them for ourselves. But Harris overstates his case by misunderstanding religious faith, as when he makes the audaciously naïve statement that “mysticism is a rational enterprise; religion is not.” As William James ably demonstrated, mysticism is far from a rational enterprise, while religion might often require rationality in order to function properly. On balance, Harris’s book generalizes so much about both religion and reason that it is ineffectual.
Despite this pretty awful review, Harris went on to minor rock star status as the darling of the New Atheists, a klatch-mate of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett, the world’s most famous graduate student (he received his PhD last year), and the author of another prickly fantasy called Letter to a Christian Nation (which had to have been complied from the editorial scraps left on the floor after the first book was published.)
 
I am happy to report that the inexhaustibly repetitious Mr Harris will reveal his thoughts on “how science can determine human values” in a new book due out in October: The Moral Landscape Patience is always advised in approaching new offerings, but the following blurb says a lot about what we can expect: “Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of ‘morality’; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible.”
Cheering, yes? I do look forward to checking into my neighborhood Center for Scientific Moral Improvement to collect my monthly Betterment Plan.
The Harris Heresy is not a heresy against religion but against reason, against common sense, and against reality. First, our eyes and noses tell us that not all religions are the same. Catholics are not igniting themselves on the streets of Beirut (nor, just now, are Lebanese Muslims). Episcopalians just like to sing. Baptists prefer to pray and fry fish and call each other “Hon.” Hindus, as a fantastic new book (Nine Lives) by William Darymple suggests, are so confused by the permutations of their own religious history that it is almost farcical to call them a religion at all. And so on.
But it isn’t just that religions are “different.” Harris can slide past that little detail by arguing that the extremities of religion don’t emerge from their doctrines or rituals as much as from their common demand for faith. If, in the Bible, faith is what moves mountains, for Harris it is what causes people to bump into them: the recourse of scoundrels and imbeciles, people who are gullible enough to believe in God and murder those who don’t share their superstition. Fortunately, we now have science to explain this infantile idea to us and for a few dollars more will also arrange for things that religion used to do, inefficiently, like worry about our moral development. That’s what faith is. That’s what it does.

What? A serious Reformation was fought over the word in Europe and Christianity was split down the middle (and might have been split into nine parts) because no one could agree on what it meant.
As far as I can tell, Islam defines faith merely as “adherence,” which is the most efficient as well as the most problematical definition there is. إيمان‎ or iman implies faith in the “unseen”, but the meaning can get quite complex, since religion, over time, tends to. Still, even in the turgid formulations of later periods, iman is a distinctly non-violent idea.
As for Judaism, faith, אמונה (emunah) means something entirely different–something “supported” (not something believed). It often is associated with doing or acting in accordance with what God wants–in conservative Judaism, a huge debate between scholars who felt that this information was contained in the Law and those who felt it was “written on the heart”–people like St Paul and Jesus, to drop names. If there is a connotative meaning, it’s that emunah means “right action” and isn’t altogether different from Greek ideas of perfecting behavior–ethical craftsmanship. (The word enum, which is the noun form, actually means “craftsman.”)
When Christians sneak into the hellenistic world they use the Greek term pistis from pistuein as the preferred word for faith. It was a slippery word and altogether unlike its Hebrew ancestor. It could mean to “believe a thing to be true,” or to place trust (or confide) in someone or something, or to entrust a thing to a person. You pays your money… The ambiguity of the term throughout the New Testament shows the lexical nature of the Reformation: Who, or what do you trust? The Church, as a way of getting to God: then you’re a Catholic. –Or God, as the sole being worthy of trust and Lord over the Church? Then welcome to the First Presbyterian Church of Oklahoma City.

I won’t even mention the fact that outside these “abrahamic” traditions where no definition of faith can be decided, we have all those  other traditions in which faith plays no role at all, or at least not much. Buddhism, Jain, Sikhism, Shinto, the multiple strands of “Hindu” religion obviously have ideas about what you need to accept in order to be a card-carrying member. And, yes, historically the differences in these traditions led to violence, death and destruction. But a little social history will reveal that the reasons for conflict were the natural social, linguistic and cultural tensions that arose (especially in South Asia and China) over migratory patterns that dominated the face of the globe in the first millennium before and the first millennium after the common era. That “religion” played a role in the violence came with the disputed territory, which would still have been violently contested if, by some freak and unimaginable accident of history, all of these tribes had been atheists.
Harris will know that it was the acceptance of the principle of ahimsa (“Do no harm”) that led to the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism in the third century BCE. There are legendary elements to the story, but the bones of it are contained in a passage describing his review of the battlefield, following his triumph over the recalcitrant population of Kalinga:
What have I done? If this is a victory, what’s a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other’s kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant…. What’s this debris of the corpses? Are these marks of victory or defeat? Are these vultures, crows, eagles the messengers of death or evil?
We do have an atheist war hero to compare Ashoka to, fortunately:Josef Stalin, lamenting the fact that Ivan the Terrible had not gone far enough in purging Russia of corruption.

Portrait of the Atheist (Stalin) as a Young Man
One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive! (The same Stalin who said, as a student himself), “God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just… I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.
I know, I know: it seems a cheap trick to compare the most humane of history’s leaders to one of the real curs when so many other comparisons could be made. After all, Ashoka did destroy Kalinga when still a “Hindu” and Stalin did give orders to deliver Jews from the concentration camps as a committed atheist.
But that’s not the point. If I were trying to create a General Theory of Disastrous Consequences on the back of the belief systems of the world’s religions, I would want to know something about what individual religions held to be true. Because nothing is clearer from the standpoint of the history of civilization than that religions believe wildly different things to be true. Some believe that God is another word for self. Some believe that god exists but that nothing can be said about (it). Some that god does not exist and some that gods exist in an infinite variety that is only a symbol of the complexity of the universe (and hence can also be expressed simply, elementally, and as a unit).
At some point, it must be merely irrational to claim that this fundamental feature of the religious experience of humankind can be boiled down to a single gaping hole in human reason: faith.
By definition, atheism can get away with murder in blaming “Religion” because it approaches religion as a unitary system, a single “problem,” the single, simple solution to which is to get rid of it (or tax churches, or arrest the pope, or insult religion as often as legally possible).
Harris and his colleagues are certainly and multiply guilty of the fallacy of composition–in this case the belief that a category can be created by generalizing from what may true of a part. But simply to call his work fallacious seems weak to me. It is also superficial and in many ways historically ignorant. Its over-generalized conclusions exhibit the confidence we often find in the under-informed or immature. But I would like to think that Sam Harris is neither, so his errors must be deliberate and heretical. After all, no one was ever roasted as a heretic for being stupid. They were burned for being willfully wrong.
Why not write about “The End of Politics” since violence is often political, at some level–or “The End of Economics,” “The End of Culture,” even “The End of Humanity”? Imagine the global chaos and violence that would ensue if the forces of darkness in Washington or Beijing elected to hold lotteries to decide internet access on a month to month basis. It would be like no terror the Inquisition could manufacture–and it would be technology and politics, not a pope, that caused it.
In the long run, there is nothing specific to religion that justifies seeing it as a total explanation for human stupidity, personal or social violence, or errors of judgment.
And I doubt that an MRI of my neural state when I wrote that last sentence will do much to persuade me otherwise.
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Published: June 25, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : End of Faith : Letter to a Christian Nation : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Sam Harris ..
4 Responses to “Harrisy”

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 Leo  
 June 25, 2010 at 7:25 pm 

By definition, atheism can get away with murder in blaming “Religion” because it approaches religion as a unitary system, a single “problem,” the single, simple solution to which is to get rid of it (or tax churches, or arrest the pope, or insult religion as often as legally possible).
To my mind, this is perhaps Chris Hedges best criticism of the New Atheists; that what they are selling is an Utopian vision.
You’re correct to say that they treat “religion as a unitary system”. That’s a serious problem I think. Not all religions are created equal, nor do I think there is any such beast as “religion”. I agree with John Wilkins that the term is likely polysemic and means a sort of aggregate of characteristics of whatever religious tradition the person using the term is most familiar with.
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 Larry Tanner  
 July 1, 2010 at 2:49 pm 
It’s said that a particular believer will sometimes respond to an atheist’s criticism of religion by declaring, “But that’s not MY religion. Some religions promote weird or harmful ideas, but that’s not what I believe.”
How ironic, then, that I find myself reading this piece and protesting, “But that’s not MY atheism!”
Nevertheless, my understanding of the so-called New Atheism views as central its assertion that “Religion,” in the broad sense, is given an inordinate share of deference and social status. Examples of clergymen pronouncing on the views their flock should hold regarding this or that public policy are common enough for me not to have to go into them.
The other key assertion of the New Atheists, to me, has little to do with “a single gaping hole” of faith but rather with that other gaping hole: evidence. I don’t think it’s unseemly, fallacious, or heretical to ask members of a religion to defend the empirical and theoretical bases of their religion. We certainly can do so in the realms of politics, economics, and culture.
Reply
 
 ashok.desai  
 February 27, 2011 at 4:38 am 
india
Reply
 
 ashok.desai  
 February 27, 2011 at 4:38 am 
no
Reply
 

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