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Is “God” Invulnerable?
by rjosephhoffmann
Paul Tillich died while I was still in high school. But the embers of his theological revolution–equivalent in theology to Bultmann’s in biblical studies–were still warm by the time I got to Harvard Divinity School, where he taught from 1955 to 1962. I read him assiduously, ran yellow highlighters dry illuminating “key” passages, and wrote the word “Yes!” in the margins more often than Molly Bloom gasps it in the last chapter of Ulysses.
It isn’t that I now regard Tillich as less profound than I did three decades ago. It’s that I now realize he was methadone for religion- recoverers. His key works–The Religious Situation, The Shaking of the Foundations, the multipart, unbearably dense Systematic Theology (especially disliked in Britain when it appeared), and Dynamics of Faith–reveal a soul committed to taking the sting out of what many theologians before Tillich called “the modern situation.”
The modern situation was basically scientific knowledge–the growing conviction that what we see is all we get, and that if we can’t see it we just need better techniques for seeing it. The glaring exception to this optimism, this faith in scientific know-how–a 1950′s word–was God, about whom it was widely supposed that no lens powerful enough, no jet-propulsion engine fast enough and no controlled experiment sophisticated enough was ever going to discover him. God was safe, in a weird kind of way, because he was, to use the catchphrase of the time, “Wholly Other.”
There were two ways of dealing with the vulnerability of God to the modern situation. One was to say that God is immune from scientific discovery because he is known only through faith. Bring on your historical criticism, your naturalistic assaults, your so-called “facts,” your rock and roll. The bigness of God just shows the puniness of your methods. To try this course, however, entailed a repudiation of the idea that God can be known rationally and that faith and reason were compatible rather than hostile modes of determining truth–a rejection, in other words, of the whole previous history of theology, especially Catholic theology.
The other way was to exploit post-positivism, or a theological construction of “Popperism.” This tactic relied on the philosophical premise that while God can be postulated on reasonable grounds (analogically, for example: shoes have makers so universes have creators) “he” cannot actually be falsified (we know where the shoemaker’s house is; we see him going to it at five o’clock; but we don’t know where God lives as he is thought to be invisible). We can’t quite be certain that he doesn’t exist, on the same grounds we can’t falsify the existence of anything we haven’t seen, and some propositions (or assertions) about God are tenable, even if implausible, when alternative explanations are considered.
Part of this “propositional” strategy hearkened back to ontology, the idea that God is not directly experienced or instantiated in creation and so in some sense must be greater than it, prior to it, or transcendent, in a way that beggars ordinary description. Theology had never succeeded in reconciling the claim of biblical revelation with the “classical” attributes of god’s aseity and impassibility (i.e., a supreme being cannot change or suffer–”he” is what he is, as Yahweh sniffs in Exodus 3.14), so uncertainty was a kind of safe epistemological cloud to wrap discussion in–in addition to which it had a certain (unrelated) currency in atomic physics which leant it a kind of dubious respectability. This approach preserved the bare notion of the rationality of religious belief, leaving theology room to exploit the doctrine that Christianity is all about faith and hope, the “certainty of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1).
Faith seeking understanding?
Both positions were so intellectually flimsy (and apologetic) that theologians had to go a long way to create a vocabulary that made them independently and mutually impressive. That goal, I write to say, was never achieved. Claims were made and games were played, but theology did not succeed in preserving the life of its divine protagonist–not even in the totally cynical and ephemeral God is dead theology of the ‘sixties.
ii
Beginning before the publication of Karl Barth’s “neo-orthodox” tome, The Epistle to the Romans (1922), where the Swiss theologian reaffirms for protestants everywhere the primacy of faith, “serious” theology became enamoured of the idea that God as God is invulnerable to scientific thought, as the term was understood in the mid-twentieth century.
There were plenty of medieval (and later) parallels to this way of thinking, ranging from mysticism to the “apophatic” theology of some of the scholastics, which even included the acknowledgement that the statement “God exists,” if it means existence of a temporal, durable, knowable kind, is false.
"God does not exist but nothing else matters."
In most areas of life, to say something doesn’t exist means you don’t need to be concerned about it: it can’t bite you or lend you money. In theology, however, this sublime non-existence evoked awe, mystery, dread, and reverence–the very things you don’t get in the morning with coffee and toast. It can even give your own pathetic existence meaning if you just embrace its awesomeness. Authentically.
Modern discussions of existence as a mere temporal condition of being, especially Heidegger’s, emboldened theologians to think outside the box, with Heidegger being to the thought of the day what Aristotle was to the thirteenth century Church. Thus Rudolph Bultmann could write this confrontational paragraph in his essay “The New Testament and Mythology” (1941):
The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings — the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his demons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thought and guide his purposes. He may grant him heavenly visions. He may allow him to hear his word of succor or demand. He may give him the supernatural power of his Spirit. History does not follow a smooth unbroken course; it is set in motion and controlled by these supernatural powers. This æon is held in bondage by Satan, sin, and death (for “powers” is precisely what they are), and hastens towards its end. That end will come very soon, and will take the form of a cosmic catastrophe. It will be inaugurated by the “woes” of the last time. Then the Judge will come from heaven, the dead will rise, the last judgment will take place, and men will enter into eternal salvation or damnation…”
None of this is literally true–indeed, has already proved not to be true, Bultmann said; none of these things will happen in the way they are described. Called “demythologization,” Bultmann’s program did not call for a simple recognition that (most) modern people find the biblical landscape fantastic and absurd, but an aggressive embrace of methods that would strip mythology away and leave in its place the bare “kerygma”–the message.
Bultmann
While Bultmann could be cagey about the implications of this message, especially in correspondence with critics like Barth (who refused to accept Bultmann’s defintion of myth) he essentially embraced the axiom of Rudolph Otto (overlaid with Heidegger’s phenomenology) that “God is wholly Other” than the categories we associate with existence. It was the theological equivalent of hitting the target in front of you and hearing your opponent say, “That isn’t the target you needed to hit.”
Theologians spent the next forty years coming to terms with the contours (and dead-ends) of Bultmann’s thought. His contribution to biblical studies was to persuade timid seminarians, accustomed to treating the biblical text with reverence rather than historical skepticism, that in taking a knife to scripture they were not making it bleed away its life. They were saving it from the cancer of obsolete thoughts and ideas–freeing the message of authentic existence to be itself, making faith a “choice” rather than blind obedience to discredited ideas and dogmas. Like all closed systems, it made sense from the inside.
While there was much to admire here there was almost no one to admire it: a program for liberal biblical scholars to consider, conservatives to eschew, and almost everyone else to ignore. Looking back on his legacy from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it looks strangely like a plant bred only for the hothouse of academic theology and not suited for life in real weather.
The term “demythologization” acquired a voltage among under-read–especially Catholic and evangelical scholars–that was only rivaled by the word “atheism.” Not an elegant prose stylist (most German academic theology of the period was pure fustian) Bultmann was at least considered dangerous in the establishment he was trying to save from intellectual disgrace.
iii
In systematic theology the task was roughly the same, though the tracks did not always run parallel and (perhaps surprisingly) the historical track was often more radical than the theological one as “demythologization” merged with the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a boutique of approaches that put the biblical text at the mercy of historical criticism.
Tillich in 1957, while still at Harvard, addressed the question of God and the modern situation directly in a Garvin Lecture called “The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge.” His key theological slogans are all present in this lecture: God is not a “being,” but the ground of all being–being itself. All language about God is symbolic rather than realistic, including the meaning of the concept of God–which is not the same as the symbol. It is impossible to describe God or to say anything “non-symbolic” about him.
Like other existentialists Tillich was confronted not just by the problems entailed for theology by God’s non-existence but by the implications of that recognition for human existence itself. Sartre, among others, had described the sense of emptiness brought on by the end of God’s moral reign as despair, nausea, freedom without purpose. Tillich thought that Christianity’s emphasis on faith was both an acknowledgement that the concept of a literal God was done for (that is, something implicit in faith itself) but also an opening to being. In a vocabulary that sometimes rivals Heidegger’s for pure self-indulgence, this is variously described as the “God above god,” “Being itself,” and “ultimate concern.” It is whatever humans regard as sacred, numinous, holy (in traditional language), but so overwhelming that it requires total surrender. The God of theological theism is no longer the cure but the source of doubt and despair. He
…deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with recent tyrants with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implication. (The Courage to Be, 135)
Tillich’s theism was pure humanism in a different and slightly dishonest wrapper. He confesses as much in his Garvin Lecture when he says that far from science creating the modern situation of universal doubt, it is “the wisdom of twentieth century art, literature, drama and poetry…which reveals man’s predicament: his having to die, his being estranged, his being threatened with the loss of meaning, his becoming an object among other objects” (Idea of God, 108). God for Tillich is non-objectifiable, thus crumbles when he is made into what the French theologian Gabriel Vahanian called a “cultural artifact,” an idol. Tillich’s theology was at bottom a religious answer to the question Sartre said it was cowardly to answer religiously.
We are already writing the history of post-modernism, and the histories of existentialism are legion. It’s a history of malaise and post-War exhaustion conceived as a general theory of the “human predicament,” the “modern situation.” Tillich believed that by admitting to the collapse of the literal god-concept, the God of religious authority (an admission that by no means all Christians would have joined him in making!) an epistemological substitute could arise to save us from the mess we have made of our world, our society, our disoriented and alienated selves. But the distance between a God who could disappear into the vortex (a favourite image of the period) of despair and anxiety and be purified and strengthened by it (Tillich) and God as “absence, the solitude of man” (Sartre) defined the distance between a reupholstered illusion and the reality that had made atheism an option forced by twentieth century realities. Both thinkers agreed on the non-existence of God. Yet for Tillich, that was no reason to sacrifice a symbol.
Tillich
The invulnerators were obviously infected with the spirit of their own formative fantasy, the resurrection, which saw the death of the human Jesus as the prelude to his immortal reign. Christians as Christians clung to a highly material view of that belief, and the associated belief that as it was for Jesus, so it would be for them–a little less royal but every bit as everlasting.
Tillich’s attempt to recast Christianity in the vulgate of the 1950′s is stale, but not merely stale because it is dated: stale because it is pedantic and wrong–atheism dressed as a bishop, when it was perfectly possible to dress in shirt and trousers and say what you really think and mean: The God of Christian theism is a story. He does not exist. All theological projects to prove his existence have failed. The historical and critical work of the last two centuries have made his existence absurd to increasing numbers of people, making religious beliefs harder to maintain and defend. This has turned millions of people into seekers, and created a situation which humankind has not encountered before. Its outcome is still unknown.
That is what Tillich should have confessed because it is what he thought. Yet his solution was to offer sedatives and linguistic figments to people whose imagination, courage and intellect he didn’t trust. Methadone, as I said, for religion-recovery.
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Published: May 18, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: apophatic theology : atheism : Christianity : Does God Exist? : existentialism : German theology : God : Paul Tillich : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Rudolph Bultmann : Sartre : systematic theology ..
11 Responses to “Is “God” Invulnerable?”
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Jesse Christopherson
May 18, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Would you please elaborate on the idea “Like all closed systems, it made sense from the inside,” using the example in your post?
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MKR
May 18, 2011 at 7:12 pm
“I now realize he was methadone for religion- recoverers.”
Ha ha. This makes me feel as if I understand Tillich, though I have not read any of his work. At least now I know not to expect much if I do read it.
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John Anngeister
May 18, 2011 at 8:56 pm
I love your writing, Joseph, even when I am frustrated by your general perspective. I do think the period of your concentration (Barth, Otto, Bultmann, Heidegger, Tillich) does not represent the key salient of battle, but lies after the collapse of the center, when the curtain had already come down on the old Christian dispensation. Actually I see maybe that’s your point.
I concede the fall of the old Christianity – the faction that still refuses to surrender the old flags (sovereign Church or sovereign Scripture) has certainly been over-run by ten divisions of ‘advanced culture.’ For all their bad choices each of the ecclesiastical ‘regiments’ add up to something less than the threshold of critical mass now. They are simply rolling along under the force of momentum, like a long line of boxcars on a subtle decline (aided by some big old monetary foundations – which aren’t going away soon).
I doubt this poor excuse for Christianity would even be coming up on the humanist radar if it were not for that dreadful sub-group who are so passionately engaged in sponsoring the heresy of ancient theocratic pretensions. It’s just that I think the argument against them can be offered in full on political and even religious grounds without necessitating a rejection of God’s transcendence or existence.
In fact, none of the awful defeat of rows of poorly-armed and badly marshaled churchmen that I described affects any of the very reasonable arguments for divine immanence and transcendence. So I guess my vote reads ‘invulnerable.’ The citadel cannot be taken, even if all the city is freed. Maybe that’s the way God planned it.
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Rich Griese
May 19, 2011 at 3:38 am
This sounds like a pretty incredible load of BS. No wonder religion and theology schools are closing. It’s one thing for supernaturalistic kooks to spend time arguing about gods. I am getting the impression that there is a secondary market. A sort of market of philosophy and humanities folks that use the gods product to sort of riff the intellectual BS on top of. I would not call them as bad as the supernaturalists. But, they are seeming to me to be something on the order of ambulance chasers. They prey on the whole supernaturalistic nonsense, and give folks that have actually overcome supernaturalism so product to read that keeps the from finally putting away the supernaturalistic childishness. It seems to me that they enable folks that have escaped wasting time with supernaturalistic nonsense, and sort of throw a tweaked product down near the entrance of the library so that folks that are leaving the library, having finally over come supernaturalism, will get sucked back in.
People should just overcome the interested in supernaturalism. And stop picking the scab. Just do this. Subscribe to the nature or one of the major science journal RSS feeds. Then if gods are discovered you will be alerted. Now, that you have set up your alert mechanism, you can go about your life, and stop wasting it.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
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s. wallerstein
May 19, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Rich:
There’s something about your tone that makes me want to read Tillich, although I never have.
If you represent being right, I’d rather be wrong.
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steph
May 27, 2011 at 11:40 am
he’s well worth reading Sam, for his historical value reflecting a human struggle with the nature of existence.
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s. wallerstein
May 27, 2011 at 12:18 pm
There’s a saying that Hannah Arendt quotes somewhere from, I believe; Cicero: I’d rather be wrong with Plato than right with Pythagoras.
Sometimes, the quality of a writer’s thought, although mistaken, stimulates one’s own mind more than the ABC’s of truth.
For example, I learn more about politics from reading Marx, in spite of all his errors, than from reading a New York Times op ed column, although the point of view of the New York Times is more accurate than that of Marx.
I learn a lot struggling with the mistakes of Marx or of Sartre or
Spinoza or Aristotle.
I suppose if we were only interested in reading a good version of what is considered to be true today (and I think that contemporary thought is the closest that we can come to the truth) , we could ditch the classics and read Wikipedia.
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2011 at 1:58 pm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908007-1,00.html From Time to Time is a very lyrical book by his wife. I re-read it recently. which is what prompted this piece. He seemed to need porn for different reasons, but tried to believe, or make himself believe, he was simply cut in the Greek panerotic style, better than other men and thus entitled. His intellectual dishonesty is screaming.
steph
May 27, 2011 at 4:34 pm
That’s so disappointing. What a revoulting rogue, and a hypocrite – today anyway – they both were. Appalling. I still don’t think that infringes on his writing and theological struggle though. Perhaps if he had paid more attention to Paine he might have declared himself agnostic… why am I defending him? He didn’t advocate Christian God of theism which is as good as denial. I still feel his writing portrays genuine agnostism – and crisis. What a messy life he had.
Ed Jones
May 23, 2011 at 10:48 am
Comment test.
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steph
May 27, 2011 at 11:35 am
I still enjoy reading Tillich, he is profound as you say in this very good post. To me he represents the profound sea change in theological thinking, the evolution of belief in the god idea, and provides an insight into the deep struggle to express something beyond the bounds of biblical belief. Never a believer and never having cared, I’m interested in him for his historical value and human demonstration. I don’t think I’d call him dishonest, and I wouldn’t label him an atheist. I don’t think he was. I think he was a deeply troubled agnostic who was exploring the possibilities and limitations of what we know. So many Christians today are by definition Christian but their ‘faith’ is agnostic, and I know many, including ministers of the church, who confess this is so. They have discarded human constructed Gods and brought the idea further so that it is almost synonymous with our evolving science. What you wrote at the end of the post brought Thomas Paine to mind:
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. (The Age of Reason)
However I am not so sure Tillich is guilty of such heinous dishonesty. He did inspire later theologians such as Lloyd Geering, who had the courage to call a Christianity without God. Yet even Geering, although he has been accused of being an atheist also, is too open minded for that. His atheism is limited to the biblical, existing god idea. An Anglican minister suggests that the question of existence and non existence is irrelevant. To be an atheist is to maintain the existence of God as Ursula Le Guin writes in Left Hand of Darkness, and I don’t think Tillich does that precisely enough.
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The Empty Cup Theory of Everything
by rjosephhoffmann
The Empty Cup Theory of Everything.
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Praying for Osama
by rjosephhoffmann
Osama bin Laden is dead, and since he is with the fish rather than God, why am I bothering to blog on what some religious nutter in Florida thinks about his Christian duty?
Borga
The bare bones of the story are this: A West Palm Beach man named Henry Borga has slipped his parish priest ten bucks to include the name of Osama bin Laden in the Mass-intentions for Sunday, May 22nd. Borga says he doesn’t “admire, sympathize or respect Osama bin Laden” but being a devout Catholic he feels it’s the Christian thing to do and that people need to pray for ‘lost sheep that stray from the flock.’
“I’m asking for forgiveness, mercy and compassion for that miserable criminal,” says Borga.
The parish priest, candidly named Gavin Badway (who has become fond of the microphones waiting for him when he pretends to scurry away from a small gaggle of reporters), says that it’s Church policy to accept prayer requests for anyone, though he understands that “it’s an emotional issue.” Thank you father. Tea?
Badway: will pray for anyone.
OK, those are the facts. And Sunday, during the so-called “Prayers of the Faithful,” some doody will say (maybe with her eyebrows slightly raised just to let her family know it wasn’t her idea to do this loser of a thing) “We pray for those who have died: Mary Reilly, Joe Vermicelli, Charlie Murphy, and Osama bin Laden. Eternal rest Grant unto them O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon them.” (Clears throat).
There will be a mumble, with some people saying “Hear us O Lord,” or “Have mercy on us O lord,” and a hissing few saying ”May the sharks fuck him sideways O Lord.” At the pancake breakfast after Mass, no one will talk to Mr Borga except Mrs Vermicelli who will say, “Thanks a fuckload Chuck for having the world’s worst person mentioned in the same prayer with my Joe.”
Mr Borga will just say that he’s just doing what any good Christian would do. Lost sheep. Flock. Etc. It’s his WWJD moment.
There are a couple of things wrong with this picture, besides its utter stupidity. First, Mr Borga has every right to pray for his enemies, in the privacy of his bedroom. But to insert the name of the world’s nastiest pillock into a liturgical celebration where others can’t opt out, “Christian thing” or not, is really a bad idea. Osama bin Laden is not a lost sheep. He is a wolf, and the sheep have no obligation to pray for the wolf.
Second, the priest didn’t have to do it. Although Catholicism is notoriously lax in terms of the theology of this part of the Mass (the “Intentions”) its orginal purpose is pretty limited: the prayers of the Catholic faithful are for the Catholic ”faithful” and the “faithful departed”–a spiritual square dance with no strangers buttin’ in trying to steal a little grace. The standard boring version includes prayers for the pope, the bishops, priests and priestly vocations, the sick, the dying and the dead plus (sometimes) a shout-out of things that don’t make it onto the list. (“Mel’s grandson in Michigan isn’t doing well. Acute Intermittent Porphyria–I thought you’d want to know”). It’s a prayer uttered by the community for the community. And while I haven’t checked, I don’t remember OBL being a regular communicant at the Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church. Rule of thumb, however: If you don’t pray for your arthritic Baptist uncle George to lay off the gin, it seems a bit of a stretch to pray for a dead Muslim who killed thousands of Christians, Muslims (more Muslims than Christians) and a few Jews before he packed it–I mean had it packed–in. Aren’t there enough lost sheep in West Palm Beach to make a credible flock? What about Barnes and Noble after midnight?
...Need somebody to love....
Like the Ground Zero Mosque, this is a non-controversy fueled by Catholic illiteracy of the Mass, the Church and its traditions. Not to pray for Osama bin Laden isn’t a lapse in Christian charity or a sin against the Holy Ghost or a repudiation of Jesus saying love your enemies. Which I suspect he said under enhanced interrogation techniques.
Jesus never met an enemy like this, or he might have made an exception. And as for Christian charity, there are good reasons why you don’t show it to the devil. If there’s any larger Catholic purpose here, I can’t see it. OBL was not going to Catholic heaven, so the intercession of the Church on his behalf is supererogatory and baseless. If he had dreams of paradise and thought his jihad was the way to get there, he doesn’t need the help of Floridians to locate his virgins among the sharmutahs.
My advice? Take up a collection and take Mr Borga and his family out for a nice post 11-o’clock mass brunch at the inevitable Olive Garden close to the Church. Leave a chair empty in honor of our fallen hero. Talk to the chair. Tell it how sorry you are and how Jesus forgives him and that we need to learn to talk together like God’s children. Offer him him some salad and bread. The wine is all yours.
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Published: May 19, 2011
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Tags: Catholic Church to Pray for bin Laden : Holy Name of Jesus Church : OBL : Olive Garden : Pray for bin Laden : Prayer of the Faithful ..
5 Responses to “Praying for Osama”
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Ophelia Benson
May 19, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Ah,, the Olive Garden…so heimlich yet so multicultural.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 19, 2011 at 7:43 pm
yet strangely conducive to terrorists under the age of eight
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John Coffin
May 20, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Have the mormons baptised him yet?
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rjosephhoffmann
May 20, 2011 at 12:55 pm
They’re out of underwear.
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rey
May 29, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Why are they worried about him? He’ll probably be able to scrounge up about 70 suicide bomber virgins in hell.
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Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable
by rjosephhoffmann
During the lazy month of June New.Ox. offers a random but largely relevant selection of things I like to read and think about. rjh
John Dewey
[Previously] we noted incidentally the distinction made in the classic tradition between knowledge and belief, or, as Locke put it, between knowledge and judgment. According to this distinction the certain and knowledge are co-extensive. Disputes exist, but they are whether sensation or reason affords the basis of certainty; or whether existence or essence is its object. In contrast with this identification, the very word “belief” is eloquent on the topic of certainty. We believe in the absence of knowledge or complete assurance. Hence the quest for certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now since, as we have already noted, all matters of practical action involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and making.
In this chapter we are especially concerned with the effect of the ideal of certainty as something superior to belief upon the conception of the nature and function of philosophy. Greek thinkers saw dearly-and logically-that experience cannot furnish us, as respects cognition of existence, with anything more than contingent probability. Experience cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal. Not being “exact” they come short of “science.” Thus there arose the distinction between rational truths or, in modern terminology, truths relating to the relation of ideas, and “truths” about matters of existence, empirically ascertained. Thus not merely the arts of practice, industrial and social, were stamped matters of belief rather than of knowledge, but also all those sciences which are matters of inductive inference from observation.
One might indulge in the reflection that they are none the worse for all that, especially since the natural sciences have developed a technique for achieving a high degree of probability and for measuring, within assignable limits, the amount of probability which attaches in particular cases to conclusions. But historically the matter is not so simple as to permit of this retort. For empirical or observational sciences were placed in invidious contrast to rational sciences which dealt with eternal and universal objects and which therefore were possessed of necessary truth. Consequently all observational sciences as far as their material could not be subsumed under forms and principles supplied by rational science shared in the depreciatory view held about practical affairs. They are relatively low, secular and profane compared with the perfect realities of rational science.
And here is a justification for going back to something as remote in time as Greek philosophy. The whole classic tradition down to our day has continued to hold a slighting view of experience as such, and to hold up as the proper goal and ideal of true knowledge realities which even if they are located in empirical things cannot be known by experimental methods. The logical consequence for philosophy itself is evident. Upon the side of method, it has been compelled to claim for itself the possession of a method issuing from reason itself, and having the warrant of reason, independently of experience. As long as the view obtained that nature itself is truly known by the same rational method, the consequences at least those which were evident-were not serious. There was no break between philosophy and genuine science-or what was conceived to be such. In fact, there was not even a distinction there were simply various branches of philosophy, metaphysical, logical, natural, moral, etc., in a descending scale of demonstrative certainty. Since, according to the theory, the subject-matter of the lower sciences was inherently of a different character from that of true knowledge, there was no ground for rational dissatisfaction with the lower degree of knowledge called belief. Inferior knowledge or belief corresponded to the inferior state of subject-matter.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century effected a great modification. Science itself through the aid of mathematics carried the scheme of demonstrative knowledge over to natural objects. The “laws” of the natural world had that fixed character which in the older scheme had belonged only to rational and ideal forms. A mathematical science of nature couched in mechanistic terms claimed to be the only sound natural philosophy. Hence the older philosophies lost alliance with natural knowledge and the support that had been given to philosophy by them. Philosophy in maintaining its claim to be a superior form of knowledge was compelled to take an invidious and so to say malicious attitude toward the conclusions of natural science. The framework of the old tradition had in the meantime become embedded in Christian theology, and through religious teaching was made a part of the inherited culture of those innocent of any technical philosophy. Consequently, the rivalry between philosophy and the new science, with respect to the claim to know reality, was converted in effect into a rivalry between the spiritual values guaranteed by the older philosophic tradition and the conclusions of natural knowledge. The more science advanced the more it seemed to encroach upon the special province of the territory over which philosophy had claimed jurisdiction. Thus philosophy in its classic form became a species of apologetic justification for belief in an ultimate reality in which the values which should regulate life and control conduct are securely enstated.
There are undoubted disadvantages in the historic manner of approach to the problem which has been followed. It may readily be thought either that the Greek formulation which has been emphasised has no especial pertinency with respect to modern thought and especially to contemporary philosophy; or that no philosophical statement is of any great importance for the mass of non-philosophic persons. Those interested in philosophy may object that the criticisms passed are directed if not at a man of straw at least to positions that have long since lost their actuality. Those not friendly to any form of philosophy may inquire what import they have for any except professed philosophers.
The first type of objection will be dealt with somewhat in extenso in the succeeding chapter, in which I shall try to show how modern philosophies, in spite of their great diversity, have been concerned with problems of adjustment of the conclusions of modern science to the chief religious and moral tradition of the western world; together with the way in which these problems are connected with retention of the conception of the relation of knowledge to reality formulated in Greek thought. At the point in the discussion now reached, it suffices to point out that, in spite of great changes in detail, the notion of a separation between knowledge and action, theory and practice, has been perpetuated, and that the beliefs connected with action are taken to be uncertain and inferior to value compared with those inherently connected with objects of knowledge, so that the former are securely established only as they derived from the latter. Not the specific content of Greek thought is pertinent to present problems, but its insistence that security is measured by certainty of knowledge, while the latter is measured by adhesion to fixed and immutable objects, which therefore are independent of what men do in practical activity.
The other objection is of a different sort. It comes from those who feel that not merely Greek philosophy but philosophy in any form is remote from all significant human concern. It is willing to admit or rather assert that it is presumptuous for philosophy to lay claim to knowledge of a higher order than that given by natural science, but it also holds that this is no great matter in any case except for professional philosophers.
There would be force in this latter objection were it not. that those who make it hold for the most part the same philosophy of certainty and its proper object that is held by philosophers, save in an inchoate form. They are not interested in the notion that philosophic thought is a special means of attaining this object and the certainty it affords, but they are far from holding, either explicitly or implicitly, that the arts of intelligently directed action are the means by which security of values are to be attained. With respect to certain ends and goods they accept this idea. But in thinking of these ends and values as material, as related to health, wealth, control of conditions for the sake of an inferior order of consequences, they retain the same division between a higher reality and a lower that is formulated in classic philosophy. They may be innocent of the vocabulary that speaks of reason, necessary truth, the universal, things in themselves and appearances. But they incline to believe that there is some other road than that of action, directed by knowledge, to achieve ultimate security of higher ideals and purposes. They think of practical action as necessary for practical utilities, but they mark off practical utilities from spiritual and ideal values. Philosophy did not originate the underlying division. It only gave intellectual formulation and justification to ideas that were operative in men’s minds generally. And the elements of these ideas are as active in present culture as they ever were in the past. Indeed, through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea that ultimate values are a matter of special revelation and are to be embodied in life by special means radically different from the arts of action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been accentuated in the popular mind.
Here is the point which is of general human import instead of concern merely to professional philosophers. What about the security of values, of the things which are admirable, honourable, to be approved of and striven for? It is probably in consequence of the derogatory view held of practice that the ion of the secure place of values in human experience is seldom raised in connection with the problem of the relation of knowledge and practice. But upon any view concerning the status of action, the scope of the latter cannot be restricted to self-seeking acts, nor to those of a prudential aspect, nor in general to things of expediency and what are often termed “utilitarian” affairs. The maintenance and diffusion of intellectual values, of moral excellencies, the aesthetically admirable, as well as the maintenance of order and decorum in human relations are dependent upon what men do.
Whether because of the emphasis of traditional religion salvation of the personal soul or for some other reason, there is a tendency to restrict the ultimate scope of morals to the reflex effect of conduct on one’s self. Even utilitarianism, with all its seeming independence of traditional theology and its emphasis upon the general good as the criterion for judging conduct, insisted in its hedonistic psychology upon private Pleasure as the motive for action. The idea that the stable and expanding institution of all things that make life worth while throughout all human relationships is the real object of all intelligent conduct is depressed from view by the current conception of morals as a special kind of action chiefly concerned with either the virtues or the enjoyments of individuals in their personal capacities. In changed form, we still retain the notion of a division of activity into two kinds having very different worths. The result is the depreciated meaning that has come to be attached to the very meaning of the “practical” and the useful. Instead of being extended to cover all forms of action by means of which all the values of life are extended and rendered more secure, including the diffusion of the fine arts and the cultivation of taste, the processes of education and all activities which are concerned with rendering human relationships more significant and worthy, the meaning of “practical” is limited to matters of ease, comfort, riches, bodily security and police order, possibly health, etc., things which in their isolation from other goods can only lay claim to restricted and narrow value. In consequence, these subjects are handed over to technical sciences and arts; they are no concern of “higher” interests which feel that no matter what happens to inferior goods in the vicissitudes of natural existence, the highest values are immutable characters of the ultimately real.
Our depreciatory attitude toward “practice” would be modified if we habitually thought of it in its most liberal sense, and if we surrendered our customary dualism between two separate kinds of value, one intrinsically higher and one inherently lower. We should regard practice as the only means (other than accident) by which whatever is judged to be honourable, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable existence. In this connection the entire import of “morals” would be transformed. How much of the tendency to ignore permanent objective consequences in differences made in natural and social relations; and how much of the emphasis upon personal and internal motives and dispositions irrespective of what they objectively produce and sustain, are products of the habitual depreciation of the worth of action in comparison with forms of mental processes, of thought and sentiment, which make no objective difference in things themselves?
It would be possible to argue (and, I think, with much justice) that failure to make action central in the search for such security as is humanly possible as a survival of the impotency of men in those stages of civilisation when he had few means of regulating and utilising the conditions upon which the occurrence of consequences depend. As long as man was unable by means of the arts of practice to direct the course of events, it was natural for him to seek an emotional substitute; in the absence of actual certainty in the midst of a precarious and hazardous world, men cultivated all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of certainty. And it is possible that, when not carried to an illusory point, the cultivation of the feeling gave man courage and confidence and enabled him to carry the burdens of life more successfully. But one could hardly seriously contend that this fact, if it be such, is one upon which to found a reasoned philosophy.
It is to the conception of philosophy that we come back. No mode of action can, as we have insisted, give anything approaching absolute certitude it provides insurance but no assurance. Doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of frustration. When men began to reflect philosophically it seemed to them altogether too risky to leave the place of values at the mercy of acts the results of which are never sure. This precariousness might hold as far as empirical existence, existence in the sensible and phenomenal world, is concerned; but this very uncertainty seemed to render it the more needful that ideal goods should be shown to have, by means of knowledge of the most assured type, an indefeasible and inexpugnable position in the realm of the ultimately real. So at least we may imagine men to have reasoned. And to-day many persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable and dubious presence of values in actual experience by projecting a perfect form of good into a realm of essence, if not into a heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if not their existence, is wholly unshakeable.
Instead of asking how far this process is of that compensatory kind with which recent psychology has made us familiar, we are inquiring into the effect upon philosophy. It will not be denied, I suppose, that the chief aim of those philosophies which I have called classical, has been to show that the realities which are the objects of the highest and most necessary knowledge are also endowed with the values which correspond to our best aspirations, admirations and approvals. That, one may say, is the very heart of all traditional philosophic idealisms. There is a pathos, having its own nobility, in philosophies which think it their proper office to give an intellectual or cognitive I certification to the ontological reality of the highest values. It is difficult for men to see desire and choice set earnestly upon the good and yet being frustrated, without their imagining a realm in which the good has come completely to its own, and is identified with a Reality in which resides all ultimate power. The failure and frustration of actual life is then attributed to the fact that this world is finite and phenomenal, sensible rather than real, or to the weakness of our finite apprehension, which cannot see that the discrepancy between existence and value is merely seeming, and that a fuller vision would behold partial evil an element in complete good. Thus the office of philosophy is to project by dialectic, resting supposedly upon self-evident premises, a realm in which the object of completest cognitive certitude is also one with the object of the heart’s best aspiration. The fusion of the good and the true with unity and plenitude of Being thus becomes the goal of classic philosophy.
The situation would strike us as a curious one were it not so familiar. Practical activity is dismissed to a world of low grade reality. Desire is found only where something is lacking and hence its existence is a sign of imperfection of Being. Hence one must go to passionless reason to find perfect reality and complete certitude. But nevertheless the chief philosophic interest is to prove that the essential properties of the reality that is the object of pure knowledge are precisely those characteristics which have meaning in connection with affection, desire and choice. After degrading practical affairs in order to exalt knowledge, the chief task of knowledge turns out to be to demonstrate the absolutely assured and permanent reality of the values with which practical activity is concerned! Can we fall to see the irony in a situation wherein desire and emotion are relegated to a position inferior in every way to that of knowledge, while at the same time the chief problem of that which is termed the highest and most perfect knowledge is taken to be the existence of evil-that is, of desires errant and frustrated?
The contradiction involved, however, is much more than a purely intellectual one-which if purely theoretical would be innocuously lacking in practical consequences. The thing which concerns all of us as human beings is precisely the greatest attainable security of values in concrete existence. The thought that the values which are unstable and wavering in the world in which we live are eternally secure in a higher realm (which reason demonstrates but which we cannot experience), that all the goods which are defeated here are triumphant there, may give consolation to the depressed. But it does not change the existential situation in the least. The separation that has been instituted between theory and practice, with its consequent substitution of cognitive quest for absolute assurance for practical endeavour to make the existence of good more secure in experience, has had the effect of distracting attention and diverting energy from a task whose performance would yield definite results.
The chief consideration in achieving concrete security of values lies in the perfecting of methods of action. More activity, blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of conditions upon which results depend is possible only by doing, yet only by doing which has intelligent direction, which take cognisance of conditions, observes relations of sequence, and which plans and executes in the light of this knowledge. The notion that thought, apart from action, can warrant complete certitude as to the status of supreme good, makes no contribution to the central problem of development of intelligent methods of regulation. It rather depresses and deadens effort in that direction. That is the chief indictment to be brought against the classic philosophic tradition. Its import raises the question of the relation which action sustains to knowledge in fact, and whether the quest for certainty by other means than those of intelligent action does not mark a baneful diversion of thought from its proper office. It raises the question whether mankind has not now achieved a sufficient degree of control of methods of knowing and of the arts of practical action so that a radical change in our conceptions of knowledge and practice is rendered both possible and necessary.
That knowing, as judged from the actual procedures of scientific inquiry, has completely abandoned in fact the traditional separation of knowing and doing, that the experimental procedure is one that installs doing as the heart of knowing, is a theme that will occupy our attention in later chapters. What would happen to philosophy if it whole-heartedly made a similar surrender? What would be its office if it ceased to deal with the problem of reality and knowledge at large? In effect, its function would be to facilitate the fruitful interaction of our cognitive beliefs, our beliefs resting upon the most dependable methods of inquiry, with our practical beliefs about the values, the ends and purposes, that should control human action in the things of large and liberal human import.
Such a view renounces the traditional notion that action is inherently inferior to knowledge and preference for the fixed over the changing; it involves the conviction that security attained by active control is to be more prized than certainty in theory. But it does not imply that action is higher and better than knowledge, and practice inherently superior to thought. Constant and effective interaction of knowledge and practice is something quite different from an exaltation of activity for its own sake. Action, when directed by knowledge, is method and means, not an end. The aim and end is the securer, freer and more widely shared embodiment of values in experience by means of that active control of objects which knowledge alone makes possible. [In reaction against the age-long depreciation of practice in behalf of contemplative knowledge, there is a temptation simply to turn things upside down. But the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making good excellencies of all kinds - secure in experienced existence.]
From this point of view, the problem of philosophy concerns the interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought with knowledge of the means for achieving them. just as in science the question of the advance of knowledge is the question of what to do, what experiments to perform, what apparatus to invent and use, what calculations to engage in, what branches of mathematics to employ or to perfect, so theproblem of practice is what do we need to know, how shall we obtain that knowledge and how shall we apply it?
It is an easy and altogether too common a habit to confuse a personal division of labor with an isolation of function and meaning. Human beings as individuals tend to devote themselves either to the practice of knowing or to the practice of a professional, business, social or aesthetic art. Each takes the other half of the circle for granted. Theorists and practitioners, however, often indulge in unseemly wrangles as to the importance of their respective tasks. Then the personal difference of callings is hypostatised and made into an intrinsic difference between knowledge and practice.
If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in order to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by their structure to other animals, man had to find out what he was about, and he could find out only by studying the environment which constituted the means, obstacles and result of his behaviour. The desire for intellectual or cognitive understanding had no meaning except as a means of obtaining greater security as to the issues of action. Moreover, even when after the coming of leisure some men were enabled to adopt knowing as their special calling or profession, merely theoretical uncertainty continues to have no meaning.
This statement will arouse protest. But the reaction against the statement will turn out when examined to be due to the fact that it is so difficult to find a case of purely intellectual uncertainty, that is one upon which nothing hangs. Perhaps as near to it as we can come is in the familiar story of the Oriental potentate who declined to attend a horse race on the ground that it was already well known to him that one horse could run faster than another. His uncertainty as to which of several horses could out-speed the others may be said to have been purely intellectual. But also in the story nothing depended from it; no curiosity was aroused; no effort was put forth to satisfy the uncertainty. In other words, he did not care; it made no difference. And it is a strict truism that no one would care about any exclusively theoretical uncertainty or certainty. For by definition in being exclusively theoretical it is one which makes no difference anywhere.
Revulsion against this proposition is a tribute to the fact that actually the intellectual and the practical are so closely bound together. Hence when we imagine we are thinking of an exclusively theoretical doubt, we smuggle in unconsciously some consequence which hangs upon it. We think of uncertainty arising in the course of an inquiry; in this case, uncertainty until it is resolved blocks the progress of the inquiry – a distinctly practical affair, since it involves conclusions and the of producing them. If we had no desires and no purposes, then, as sheer truism, one state of things would be as good as any other. Those who have set such store by the demonstration that Absolute Being already contains in eternal safety within itself all values, have had as their interest the fact that while the demonstration would make no difference in the concrete existence of these values – unless perhaps to weaken effort to generate and sustain them – it would make no difference in their own personal attitudes – in a feeling of comfort or of release from responsibility, the consciousness of a “moral holiday” in which some philosophers have found the distinction between morals and religion.
Such considerations point to the conclusion that the ultimate ground of the quest for cognitive certainty is the need for security in the results of action. Men readily persuade themselves that they are devoted to intellectual certainty for its own sake. Actually they want it because of its bearing on safeguarding what they desire and esteem. The need for protection and prosperity in action created the need for warranting the validity of intellectual beliefs.
After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class having leisure and in a large degree protected against the more serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members proceeded to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains and care in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in knowledge was worshipped as a substitute. In minor matters, those that are relatively technical, professional, “utilitarian,” men continued to resort to improving their methods of operation in order to be surer of results. But in affairs of momentous value the requisite knowledge is hard to come by and the bettering of methods is a slow process to be realised only by the cooperative endeavour of many persons. The arts to be formed and developed are social arts; an individual by himself can do little to regulate the conditions which will render important values more secure, though with shrewdness and special knowledge he can do much to further his own peculiar aims – given a fair share of luck. So because of impatience and because, as Aristotle was given to pointing out, an individual is self-sufficient in that kind of thinking which involves no action, the ideal of a cognitive certainty and truth having no connection with practice, and prized because of its lack of connection, developed. The doctrine worked out practically so as to strengthen dependence upon authority and dogma in the things of highest value, while increase of specialised knowledge was relied upon in everyday, especially economic, affairs. Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate natural causes and their workings, so acceptance of dogmatic rules as bases of conduct in education, morals and social matters, lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions which are involved in forming intelligent plans.
It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis which has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences in the last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about the world in which we live and the realm of higher values, of ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from natural science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the world of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to men; has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends, all preference for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to us as a scene of indifferent physical particles acting according to mathematical and mechanical laws.
This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the main problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved? This question forms the philosophic version of the popular conflict of science and religion. Instead of being troubled about the inconsistency of astronomy with the older religious beliefs about heaven and the ascension of Christ, or the differences between the geological record and the account of creation in Genesis, philosophers have been troubled by the gap in kind which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural world and the reality of the values according to which mankind is to regulate its life.
Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find some harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows that the trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at theories regarding the nature of the universe by means of theories regarding the nature of knowledge-a procedure which reverses the apparently more judicious method of the ancients in basing their conclusions about knowledge on the nature of the universe in which knowledge occurs. The “crisis” of which we have just been speaking accounts for the reversal.
Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to -be found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily borne. The physical world can be surrendered to matter and mechanism, since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their foundation in immaterial mind. Such has been the characteristic course of modern spiritualistic philosophies since the time of Kant; indeed, since that of Descartes, who first felt the poignancy of the problem involved in reconciling the conclusions of science with traditional religious and moral beliefs.
It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naïveté if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all this ardour to reconcile the findings of natural science with the validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why should we not proceed to employ our gains in science to improve our judgments about values, and to regulate our actions so as to make values more secure and more widely shared in existence?
I am willing to run the risk of charge of naïveté for the sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of science. They would have welcomed the latter. For anything ascertained about the structure of actually existing conditions would be a definite aid in making judgments about things to be prized and striven for more adequate, and would instruct us as to the means to be employed in realising them. But according to the religious and philosophic tradition of Europe, the valid status of all the highest values, the good, true and beautiful, was bound up with their being properties of ultimate and supreme Being, namely, God. All went well as long as what passed for natural science gave no offence to this conception. Trouble began when science ceased to disclose in the objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties. Then some roundabout method had to be devised for substantiating them.
The point of the seemingly crass question which was asked is thus to elicit the radical difference made when the problem of values is seen to be connected with the problem of intelligent action. If the validity of beliefs and judgments about values is dependent upon the consequences of action undertaken in their behalf, if the assumed association of values with knowledge capable of being demonstrated apart from activity, is abandoned, then the problem of the intrinsic relation of science to value is wholly artificial. It is replaced by a group of practical problems: How shall we employ what we know to direct the formation of our beliefs about value and how shall we direct our practical behaviour so as to test these beliefs and make possible better ones? The question is seen to be just what it has always been empirically: What shall we do to make objects having value more secure in existence? And we approach the answer to the problem with all the advantages given us by increase of knowledge of the conditions and relations under which this doing must proceed.
But for over two thousand years the weight of the most influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought has been thrown into the opposite scale. It has been devoted to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty and goodness. As against such a doctrine, the conclusions of natural science constitute the materials of a serious problem. The appeal has been made to the Court of Knowledge and the verdict has been adverse. There are two rival systems that must have their respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell us something quite different. The problem of reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find standards in the course of experience they will seek them somewhere else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a reason that is above experience.
This then is the fundamental issue for present philosophy. Is the doctrine justified that knowledge is valid in the degree in which it is a revelation of antecedent existences or Being? Is the doctrine justified that regulative ends and purposes have validity only when they can be shown to be properties belonging to things, whether as existences or as essences, apart from human action? It is proposed to make another start. Desires, affections, preferences, needs and interests at least exist in human experience; they are characteristics of it. Knowledge about nature also exists. What does this knowledge imply and entail with respect to the guidance of our emotional and volitional life? How shall the latter lay hold of what is known in order to make it of service?
These latter questions do not seem to many thinkers to have the dignity that is attached to the traditional problems of philosophy. They are proximate questions, not ultimate. They do not concern Being and Knowledge “in themselves’ and at large, but the state of existence at specified times and places and the state of affection, plans and purposes under concrete circumstances. They are not concerned with framing a general theory of reality, knowledge and value once for all, but with finding how authentic beliefs about existence as they currently exist can operate fruitfully and efficaciously in connection with the practical problems that are urgent in actual life.
In restricted and technical fields, men now proceed unhesitatingly along these lines. In technology and the arts of engineering and medicine, men do not think of operating in any other way. Increased knowledge of nature and its conditions does not raise the problem of validity of the value of health or of communication in general, although it may well make dubious the validity of certain conceptions men in the past have entertained about the nature of health and communication and the best ways of attaining these goods in fact.
In such matters, science has placed in our hands the means by which we can better judge our wants, and has aided in forming the instruments and operations by which to satisfy them. That the same sort of thing has not happened in the moral and distinctly humane arts is evident. Here is a problem which might well trouble philosophers.
Why have not the arts which deal with the wider, more generous, more distinctly humane values enjoyed the release and expansion which have accrued to the technical arts? Can it be seriously urged that it is because natural science has disclosed to us the kind of world which it has disclosed? It is easy to see that these disclosures are hostile to some beliefs about values which have been widely accepted, which have prestige, which have become deeply impregnated with sentiment, and which authoritative institutions as well as the emotion and inertia of men are slow to surrender. But this admission, which practically enforces itself, is far from excluding the formation of new beliefs about things to be honoured and prized by men in their supreme loyalties of action. The difficulty in the road is a practical one, a social one, connected with institutions and the methods and aims of education, not with science nor with value. Under such circumstances the first problem for philosophy would seem to be to clear itself of further responsibility for the doctrine that the supreme issue is whether values have antecedent Being, while its further office is to make clear the revisions and reconstructions that have to be made in traditional judgments about values. Having done this, it would be in a position to undertake the more positive task of projecting ideas about values which might be the basis of a new integration of human conduct.
We come back to the fact that the genuine issue is not whether certain values, associated with traditions and institutions, have Being already (whether that of existence or of essence), but what concrete judgments we are to form about ends and means in the regulation of practical behaviour. The emphasis which has been put upon the former question, the creation of dogmas about the way in which values are already real independently of what we do, dogmas which have appealed not in vain to philosophy for support, have naturally bred, in the face of the changed character of science, confusion, irresolution and numbness of will. If the men had been educated to think about broader humane values as they have now learned to think about matters which fall within the scope of technical arts, our whole present situation would be very different. The attention which has gone to achieving a purely theoretical certainty with respect to them would have been devoted to perfecting the arts by which they are to be judged and striven for.
Indulge for a moment in an imaginative flight. Suppose that men had been systematically educated in the belief that the existence of values can cease to be accidental, narrow and precarious only by human activity directed by the best available knowledge. Suppose also men had been systematically educated to believe that the important thing is not to get themselves personally “right” in relation to the antecedent author and guarantor of these values, but to form their judgments and carry on their activity on the basis of public, objective and shared consequences. Imagine these things and then imagine what the present situation might be.
The suppositions are speculative- But they serve to indicate the significance of the one point to which this chapter is devoted. The method and conclusions of science have without doubt invaded many cherished beliefs about the things held most dear. The resulting clash constitutes a genuine cultural crisis. But it is a crisis in culture, a social crisis, historical and temporal in character. It is not a problem in the adjustment of properties of reality to one another. And yet modern philosophy has chosen for the most part to treat it as a question of how the realities assumed to be the object of science can have the mathematical and mechanistic properties assigned to them in natural science, while nevertheless the realm of ultimate reality can be characterised by qualities termed ideal and spiritual. The cultural problem is one of definite criticisms to be made and of readjustments to be accomplished. Philosophy which is willing to abandon its supposed task of knowing ultimate reality and to devote itself to a proximate human office might be of great help in such a task. It may be doubted whether it can indefinitely pursue the task of trying to show that the results of science, when they are properly interpreted, do not mean what they seem to say, or of proving, by means of an examination of possibilities and limits of knowledge, that after all they rest upon a foundation congruous with traditional beliefs about values.
Since the root of the traditional conception of philosophy is the separation that has been made between knowledge and action, between theory and practice, it is to the problem of this separation that we are to give attention. Our main attempt will be to show how the actual procedures of knowledge interpreted after the pattern formed by experimental inquiry, cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action. Before engaging in this attempt, we shall in the next chapter show the extent to which modern philosophy has been dominated by effort to adjust to each other two systems of belief, one relating to the objects of knowledge and the other to objects ideal value.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Quest for Certainty (1933), publ. Capricorn Books, 1960.and at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/dewey.htm
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Published: May 26, 2011
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One Response to “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable”
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Ed Jones
June 12, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Last two paragraphs of The Mind og God by Paul Davies.
“– through science, we human beings are able to grasp at least some of nature’s secrets. We have cracked part of the cosmic code. Why this should be, just why Homo sapiens should carry the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma. We, who are children of the universe==animated stardust—can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules 9n which it runs. How we have become linked into this cosmic dimension is a mystery. Yet the linkage cannot be denied.
What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such privilege? I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for ithing, but the existence of a mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental sigificance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated sself-consciousness. This can be no trival detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.”
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Play Mythty For Me? Dr Carrier Carries On
by rjosephhoffmann
It’s considered bad form for an author or editor to reply to critical reviews of their own work. But as Richard Carrier’s recent attempt to trash the Sources of The Jesus Tradition looks more like a fit of distemper than a serious attempt to assess a collection of essays (and hardly represents “my own work”) I think his “review” is fair game.
Sources, like a lot of anthologies, is an untidy book. That’s not my phrase; it’s one I learned from looking at reviews of two significant twentieth- century collections–a famous one by Hans Bartsch called Kerygma and Myth, consisting of scattered and not very well focused responses to Rudolph Bultmann’s classic essay The New Testament and Mythology, and a real second-rater, undeservedly famous, called The Myth of God Incarnate. In fact, it was the editor of the latter, John Hick, who called it untidy.
I’d probably describe each anthology as one or two good essays surrounded by clutter and private opinion. Most scholars of any experience know that “collections” and anthologies have a very low batting average in terms of popular success and none at all in terms of financial success. The corollary is that no editor ever became famous on the basis of editing other people’s work, nor probably totally reprobate either. Richard Carrier wants it to be otherwise.
Anthologies are untidy because unless the contributors agree on every point or disagree on a defined set of them, the essays tend to wander over the predilections of the essayists. Meeting and conference papers are especially notorious in this respect, editor-driven themed collections much less so.
Sources emanated from a couple of conferences associated with an initiative called the Jesus Project, about which I‘ve written far too much. Carrier was invited to become a part of this initiative a few years ago after its “founding” at UC Davis in 2007 and just prior to its suspension by the host organization, the Center for Inquiry, for which he now works, apparently as an advocate, in 2009.*
Carrier was originally enthusiastic about the aims, even about my leadership. He now says that on the basis of post-publication (!) conversations he had with me, “Hoffmann was a complete dick to me, and wouldn’t own up even to the mistakes I had actual proof he had made. Rumor has it he’s like this. But this was my first experience of it. His behavior toward me leaves me with no further sympathy for him, so here it goes….” What “goes” is a cyclone of aspersion that even in the sections where his sentences parse looks like the verbiage of an under-trained enthusiast. (As an aside, New Testament scholarship is getting a lot of amateurs lately, most of them under-trained).
I am still not sure what “mistakes” he’s referring to other than his own, which were as substantial as his contribution was irrelevant, a long discursus on Bayes’ theorem that never once budges above pedantic lecturing to engage the literary material – the New Testament – to which its application is implied to be relevant. A cautious, or less sympathetic editor would have cut it eo ipso as being totally to the left of the topic, though Carrier shows a fleeting acquaintance with some of the methods (and limits) of conventional New Testament criticism. It does not rise to the level of convincing expertise.
The other essays Carrier finds worthwhile, indeed redemptive, are the contributions of Frank Zindler, head of the American Atheist Press, and Ron Lindsay, head of the organization that employs him (and one suspects, the organization at whose bidding he’s doing this hatchet job). Needless to say, he feels his own essay belongs to this lot.
What these three contributions have in common is that their authors share the conviction that Jesus did not exist. That’s a fair conclusion, as I have said on several occasions, and one of the areas the Jesus Project was meant to address. Of the three, Zindler comes closest, tonally, to “fitting” in with the essays Carrier would like to rip away, especially my own. Lindsay on the other hand writes a fairly anachronistic piece using the formulations of modern American jurisprudence as basis for deciding questions of “evidence” in the gospels. But while naive, it at least (to quote the author) discharges its duty to the subject matter, unlike Carrier’s piece where the subject matter never comes into view. To be generous, it may be largely the writer’s own sense of the deficiency of his performance that leads him to accuse me of sloppy editing. There is a lot an editor can do to ensure that an article or chapter is an accurate representation of what its author intended it to say. There is virtually nothing an editor can do to make an article rewrite itself once it’s been written.
Thomas Bayes. Maybe.
Carrier also claims that my own public presentation at the conference does not correspond to what I have included in the book. As a matter of fact, “On Not Finding the Historical Jesus” and “The Canonical Historical Jesus” represent the entirety of the handwritten scripts of my presentations at the Amherst conference, edited for publication but not at all substantially different from what was said in 2008.
Whether the essays, meager and merely suggestive as they are, have any merit beyond what Carrier assigns to them, I cannot say. I can say the “naivety” he curiously assigns to me concerning the origins of the sayings of Jesus, the identity of Paul and (especially) the status of Ephesians reveals a woeful ignorance of my own scholarship in this area, especially in terms of the history of the canon. Beyond this, what he says is pure tantrum and loaded with the language of a man who strives to be outrageous and appears to be perennially upset.
Do we agree about anything? Yes, the chapters by Luedemann and Meggitt are very good. So, however, are the chapters by Trobisch and MacDonald and Chilton. As for Arthur Droge, whose comments at the meeting were also very good, Arthur was not able to get them to me in publishable form before deadline, though a version of his remarks appeared in the journal Caesar, cut by CFI at the same time at the Jesus Project was defunded. As for James Tabor and others, their lectures were not available because they formed part of work already committed to publishers. They were gracious enough to share their ideas with the group–as were many others at UC Davis in 2007. I do not think this is unusual, but I recognize that as a full-time self-promotionalist Carrier does not travel an orthodox conference circuit where this protocol would be familiar to him. He writes primarily for his fans, atheists pre-committed to his view of a mythical Jesus who then pretend to be passionate about evidence and method. Obviously people like me deserve the ire of people like that.
Yet even by my low standards, a 50% rate of good and excellent essays is a “win,” especially since the majority of the losers–my own (3 of 15)–get the axe as “fails.”
Dr. Carrier has spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy trying to separate me out from the group in order to perform a kind of literary assassination, but in a way so crude and bilik that the whole interminable exercise sounds like a whine.
But to recap: The book remains untidy, like a lot of anthologies that begin as conferences and papers. I wish it could have been tidier. I am guessing, however, that the sore thumb sticking out of the collection in such a way that its author must now wonder what he was doing is an essay entitled “Bayes Theorem for Beginners.” I certainly wonder what it’s doing there.
__________________________________
*As 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 available from its managing director, S.L. Fisher: stephanielouisefisher@btinternet.com
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Published: May 31, 2011
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Tags: Bayes theorem : biblical scholarship : Carrier : New Testament : R. Joseph Hoffmann : sources of the Jesuse Tradition ..
48 Responses to “Play Mythty For Me? Dr Carrier Carries On”
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Rich Griese
May 31, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Seems to me that this idea of applying Baysian methods to Christian history is one of the actually new ideas in Christian history. So, in my opinion, that type of articles would be of more interest than other more speculative ideas in the industry. This idea that actual scientific tool might be able to be applied to Christian history is intriguing. As I see it, the religion industry has a problem. You almost ever see people with actual degrees in history writing on the subject. Instead you get various collections of people with degrees from theology, and philosophy, religion schools. Now granted, I understand how all these various schools evolved to exist, and understand the history of the evolution of the university.
For me, I look to find two types of folks for my data on my interest in Christian history. 1) people with degrees in history 2) people in the scientific industry that can provide data on various technical questions.
For me, I have found that the folks from the religion industry, then to generate a great deal of paper, but don’t actually get much done. I mean, sometimes it seems that very little has been done in the field since David Friedrich Strauss’s _The Life of Jesus Critically Examined_. And when I talk to my friends that are in the religion industry what were the 5 greatest things learned about Christian history in the last year, 5 or 10? … they may say something like “we have really improved the tools of the critical method…” etc. But then I ask, so what have you found with those tools, that would actually fit my question, they tend to kind of lose interest or start getting angry.
You have various folks in the education and religion industry with somewhat steady jobs due to it. But very little if anything has been learned of major importance regarding the history of early Christianity from this group.
And now with the advent of blogging, and more folks getting interested in it. It looks like we are going to have even more material about the topic. That means that as a percentage, the amount of new discoveries or knowledge RE the history of Christianity per the amount of info generated by the industry is going to go down even further. That is not a encouraging sign to me.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
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steph
June 1, 2011 at 7:11 pm
clown
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steph
June 1, 2011 at 8:09 pm
I get so bored seeing the same Rich Griese mantra everywhere he goes, reflecting his own narrow American view of scholarship. I’m not alone in the field of New Testament now, in having never stuck my nose into a “theological seminary”. I’m not alone either, in having never studied “theology” formally although I’ve read into it alot over the years inspired by research into the history and evolution of religions and ideas. I’m not alone in the type of degrees I’ve taken – first in education and music and then in the history of world religions, majoring first in history and classics, as well as taking psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, world music, philosophy and English literature. I studied these subjects in the departments/schools of education, music, history, world religions, classics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy and English literature…. in state universities. I’ve had Professors (in the correct sense of the term) in religions departments, with a PhD in nuclear physics, History, and even Botany, as well as Philosophy and Religion – not that they would be dimwitted enough to apply the tools of, for example, nuclear physics to religious source material…. and applying Baysian methods to Christian history is about as speculative as you can get.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 8:25 pm
I do not think it is fair to characterize Rich as “an American view” of scholarship, do you?
steph
June 1, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Swop it round – narrow view of American scholarship. And perhaps interpolate a mythtic between the narrow and the view – or a gnu. Synonymous almost.
steph
May 31, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Once upon a time, there were three American atheists: a lawyer, a mathematician and a geologist. And they all found their way into an anthology of essays examining the existence of a first century Jewish teacher. I wonder how that happened. Perhaps you might say, ‘”By some might be said of me that here I have but gathered but a nosegay of strange flowers, and have put nothing of mine unto it but the thread to bind them”. (Michel de Montaigne) Fitting response to an incompetent diatribe.
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s. wallerstein
May 31, 2011 at 5:59 pm
What does “bilik” mean?
Thanks.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 31, 2011 at 7:20 pm
cheap
Reply
Scholars addressing Jesus Myth studies: Richard Carrier’s reviews « Vridar says:
May 31, 2011 at 7:57 pm
[...] of Carrier’s assessments of its quality. R. Joseph Hoffmann, editor of the book, has written a response, and Carrier has in return replied to this. Ah, the refined art of academic knife [...]
Reply
Tristan Vick
June 1, 2011 at 7:53 am
Joe-
Strangely enough, I agree with you that anthologies need not necessarily be systematically organized by topic. As I read through Sources of the Jesus Tradition, I really didn’t pay attention to whether or not the essays were related. There’s no rule that states all collections must be linear.
Although, I did find some essays better researched than others.
However, I think you might be being a little unfair to Carrier when you say you wonder what his article is doing there. After all, the cover of the book says you were the Editor–so that was ultimately your call–you have to own up to that. Complaining after the fact just seems to be unnecessary and unprofessional, even if you are only attempting to defend your work.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 8:34 am
Thanks for the comment; it is actually the tone and extent of Carrier’s original post and follow-up that elicited my response. There are too few essays (15 in all, three mine) that deal with the topic. Carrier’s could have been promising if he had spent less time expounding Bayes and more dealing with how it could be applied. But I agree with you in general about taking it on the chin within reason–& if it had been a book consisting entirely of my own work I’d be inclined to follow Sam Harris’s pattern of posting the review and then responding to it. Depending on what “kind” of collection a collection is, editors have varying degrees of authority and responsibility. The other matter is that the book appeared during a fairly awkward period between CFI, the project sponsors, and Prometheus Books, whose Chairman Paul Kurtz (who had left CFI, which he founded, in a battle mode, as many know) was not inclined to permit references to CFI sponsorship of the Project which had recently been defunded. There were very serious questions about whether it would be published at all. Without going into the details of that period, the back and forth certainly affected all aspects of the book’s production–something I felt and still feel the contributors’s did not need to know. Probably more was happening “behind the scenes” with respect to the release of this collection than any I have dealt with in the past. Anyway, Tristan: thanks for the comment!
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Rich Griese
June 1, 2011 at 8:37 am
I posted a comment yesterday, but don’t see it showing up. And I noticed this morning some other comments on this thread. Did my comment get lost? I can repost again if it did, but don’t want to if the post was just hung up in the pipes.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
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Landon Hedrick
June 1, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Dr. Hoffmann,
So, I’m guessing that Carrier won’t be invited to take part in the “Jesus Prospect” then?
By the way, you may have seen it already, but he commented on this blog post in the comments section of his review.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 3:46 pm
I actually like Richard’s work and as a starting point for some real criticism of NT methods, his Bayes’s approach could be interesting–though it’s also interesting that the theologian Richard Swinburne uses Bayesian logic in his arguments for the existence of God.
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Landon Hedrick
June 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Yeah, I find that interesting as well. Tim and Lydia McGrew, in an article you may have read (or heard about), use Bayes’ Theorem in their assessment of the evidence for the resurrection.
What work of Richard’s do you like?
Victor Reppert
June 1, 2011 at 5:26 pm
In the comments to this post on my blog, probability theorist Timothy McGrew of Western Michigan University blew several gaping holes in Carrier’s treatment of Bayesianism.
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2011/01/richard-carrier-on-bayes-theorem.html
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rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 6:36 pm
A surprisingly large number of people have written in with information about Carrier’s rudeness and incompetence in Bayseian theory. I have to say that Tim and Lydia McGrew seem legit to me after reading this from J R Frazer:
J. R. Fraser says:
We all knew Carrier was cocky and overly sure of himself. However, publicly denigrating the paper of professional scholars in an area in which you yourself are a rank amateur with demonstrated incompetence disqualifies you from consideration as a serious intellectual. That’s just what Carrier has done in reference to Tim and Lydia McGrew’s article on the Resurrection which was published in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. The Blackwell Companion series, for those who are unaware, is a highly respected academic press. Carrier, on the other hand, can’t get academic presses to publish his books, but he says that’s just because his latest manuscript on Bayes’s Theorem is too mathematical – or at least he suspects that’s the case. Nobody has actually said that to him.
But there’s another problem with Carrier, and that is that he’s just plain wrong, and is an amateur hack who doesn’t know what he’s doing but pretends he does. Tim McGrew demonstrates Carrier’s incompetence in probability theory on a thread here: http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2011/01/richard-carrier-on-bayes-theorem.html.
Lydia McGrew exposes Carrier’s basic error with regard to his bizarre critique of their paper here: http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2011/01/odds-form-of-bayess-theorem.html (and yes, those are my comments on the thread).
These all stem from an interview Carrier did with Luke Muehlhauser at Common Sense Atheism. To his credit, Luke posted an apology on Lydia’s blog for appearing to go along with Carrier’s vague and off-base criticism of their paper. Notably he said, “When asked to guess at the competence in probability theory between two people who have been publishing peer-reviewed philosophy literature on probability theory for at least a decade [that would be the McGrews] vs. someone who discovered Bayes’ Theorem in the last few years [that would be Carrier], I’m going to bet on the former in a heartbeat.” That’s at least a reasonable starting position. The position that Carrier might actually have a legitimate critique to offer the McGrews on Bayesian probability is just embarrassing. Although I also have to say that I knew as soon as I heard that Carrier had decided to try to write something on Bayesian probability with respect to the Resurrection that he was going to make a fool of himself.
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Ben
June 1, 2011 at 7:46 pm
It should be noted that Carrier has responded to those “several gaping holes” here: http://war-on-error.xanga.com/738651384/is-richard-carrier-wrong-about-bayes-theorem/ which came to a grand total of three and only one of them seemed like anything beyond nit-picking on the part of an angry husband.
Muehlhauser’s sentiments aren’t quite a “reasonable starting position” since he presents a false dichotomy. Carrier has had his manuscript vetted by other qualified math people and they found it satisfactory with minimal changes (http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/01/csa-interview.html?showComment=1294246207742#c6875328303254714735). McGrew’s contribution to that end only presented perhaps one more minimal change.
Further, the “position that Carrier might actually have a legitimate critique” isn’t so “embarrassing” after all as what Carrier offered ended up being an accurate assessment of it since it was aimed at what other people were claiming about McGrew’s paper as Carrier pointed out on her blog (http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2011/01/odds-form-of-bayess-theorem.html?showComment=1294516826483#c8684968774214098658).
So there is a lot of convenient mountain out of mole-hilling going on here.
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 8:22 pm
Actually this is not quite true; when I asked him about the status of his essay/calculations (heh!) and why he did not publish with academic presses where his work could be properly vetted he said he was not understood. I did not buy it then and I especially do not buy it now. I will write a more substantial piece on this scam next week.
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 10:14 pm
It is pretty clear that Carrier has decided to be the Sarah Palin of atheist biblical scholarship, the outlier, the one who’s got the key to the kingdom, except his credentials are totally unproved and even in the areas he has chosen to take a stand he shows nothing but a commitment to being extravagant. Is it really likely that no one can assess his work, or that everytime he goes wrong it is someone else’s fault? To be blunt, Bayes doesn’t work with the NT because it can’t be applied to the assumptions of source criticism. I say this not just in relation to Carrier but also in relation to others who try to use it on the contrivances of “events” like the resurrections (sorry McGrews) and principles (Carrier’s fetish) like dissimilarity (which he calls as a few others do embarrassment). It’s fit for debating fodder on abstruse issues like the existence of God, viz. Swinburne, but ultimately fails there too. Like a bad suit, it can be made to fit but Carrier does not show any mastery of the literary and hermeneutical background of the texts he is considering, let alone of the methods that have been developed to assess them. One suspects he thought he could bypass this and go straight for the razzle dazzle, except in deciding his MO was simply to call all senior scholars who have no patience with his witchcraft insane or unable to grasp his calculus, he’s probably destroyed any chance at credibility he might have had. This is certainly not about a book–it’s about whether Carrier knows anything about the subject he professes to be expert in. What he does in in the Kingdom of Blog will not decide his future.
Ben
June 1, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Perhaps we are referring to different things. Carrier is talking about his forthcoming book in that link which was the ultimate issue from that McGrew situation (even though that technically focused on an online PDF) and you seem to be talking about his chapter in Sources of the Jesus Tradition.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Who publishes that book? Not a trick question.
Reply
Ben
June 1, 2011 at 8:38 pm
If you are trying to say that the people who reviewed the manuscript of his forthcoming book just so happened to be (as you put it) “atheists pre-committed to his view of a mythical Jesus who then pretend to be passionate about evidence and method,” (or in this case math, I suppose) I think you are far from demonstrating that.
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 9:50 pm
I asked who is publishing the book; everyone knows who the constituency
is.
Landon Hedrick
June 1, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Dr. Hoffmann,
I asked a while back which of Richard’s work you like, since you said you like his work. Have you read anything of his other than that Bayes paper? If so, I’d be interested in hearing what stuff you liked.
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Landon: I am liking less and less; frankly while I have been pretty gentle with mythtics, I am becoming less patient now that I see that Carrier has slutted his paper around to multiple would be publishers with very little revision. He was recommended to me by another mythtic, Robert Price, who I like personally but cannot say much for his choice of disciples. Let me be really blunt: Carrier has been under my radar until now, but he is ALL wrong and his methods are risible.
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2011 at 12:00 am
His contribution to the Price anthology on the resurrection [The Empty Tomb], which I reviewed and you may have seen, was credible enough. No one said he was all wrong, did they? I think the jury on Richard Carrier will be out until his work can be subject to peer review, which will mean publication by a serious press, and he learns how to write critical reviews of other scholars’ work without the fatal tendency to vilify people personally as insane or “paranoid.” So far he has shown himself completely unsuited to the scholarly arena–and I think that is the view shared by a great many people who might otherwise be useful to him. What do you like?
Ben
June 1, 2011 at 10:49 pm
If you have a problem with the peer review process that Carrier’s book has and will go through, then be specific and constructive with your “scam” theory. It makes little sense to me to praise a publisher who puts out there something like the Blackwell Companion to Theology as though the entire field of theology isn’t dubious to begin with (unless you’d like to disagree with that) and then put down another publisher like Prometheus if it actually manages to generate credible material that has been properly peer reviewed.
Ben
Reply
Landon Hedrick
June 2, 2011 at 12:57 am
I think you responded to my comment without publishing it. Was that an accident? Or maybe this is just your response to my earlier comment, and my most recent is being held for moderation?
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Landon Hedrick
June 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Dr. Hoffmann,
Evidently you won’t be approving my other comment for moderation. (Either that or it somehow got marked as “spam” or something.) That’s interesting.
To reply to your most recent, it should just be pointed out how bizarre it is that you say at 10:20pm that Carrier “is ALL wrong and his methods are risible.” Then, in your very next comment, less than two hours later, you say about Carrier: “No one said he was all wrong, did they? I think the jury on Richard Carrier will be out until his work can be subject to peer review…”
Do you realize how bizarre this sounds? It’s as if two different people are posting contradictory messages from your account, one right after the other.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2011 at 3:06 pm
@Landon: I think the thread rather than my comment is a bit bizarre, but in the interest of fair play maybe you could re-send the comment in question? The all wrong/no one said comment relates to what literary folk sometimes call “irony” and I thought you might have picked up on it that way since you caught its “bizarrenes” and since both comments I believe were directed to you? But you still have not told me what you admire in Carrier’s work, or why this discussion matters?
Reply
Landon Hedrick
June 2, 2011 at 4:27 pm
I’ll reply to this comment, and then I’ll re-post the one from last night. I agree with you that the thread is bizarre, and I apologize for anything I did to help bring that about.
I certainly didn’t pick up on the “irony” of your contradictory comments. It strikes me from reading your comments that you just don’t have your mind made up about Carrier. You say one thing, and then something completely different, and then the opposite, etc. If you were intending to do all of that for the purpose of irony, all I can say is that it struck me as more confusing than anything else. But that may be a mark against my ability to pick up on these things, rather than a mark against your ability to express your ideas.
I never said I “admire” his work, either. I was just curious about what work of his you had read and liked, since I don’t know what actual scholars think about him and I’m not qualified to judge his work in this area myself. (I do know what Christian apologists think of him, however.) I will say that I read his book Not The Impossible Faith and thought it was pretty good, but I don’t know what actual scholars think about it. When you said you liked his work I was interested to find out if you had read it and would endorse it as a scholar in that field.
Alright. Below I’ll post my comment from last night. It might make less sense now, and seem like it’s beating a dead horse at this point.
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2011 at 9:50 pm
All good, all posted. I also saw your comment on Carrier’s blogspot. Thank you for your kind comments on the “cover.” Always judge a book by that. I also happened to notice a resounding and deafening lack of response to his screed. Did you?
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Not the Impossible Faith? Did I “like” it? What difference would that make? Where was it reviewed? Carrier is a debater and atheist apologist–not a serious scholar.
Landon Hedrick
June 2, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Wait a minute. This afternoon you said: “I actually like Richard’s work…” (3:46pm)
I asked which work you liked, to which you didn’t respond. You then posted that diatribe from Christian apologist J.R. Fraser, and apparently learned about the old controversy between the McGrews and Carrier. I asked you again which work of his you liked, and now you’re saying “I’m liking less and less.”
Did your opinion change in the course of a few hours? How did that happen? This seems strange to me.
Perhaps you liked the Bayes stuff, and then you found out that Tim McGrew claimed to find some errors in Carrier’s online pdf, and now you don’t like it anymore. Is that it? (Was there anything McGrew pointed out which disproved any part of what you specifically liked about Carrier’s case? Perhaps you liked this one particular calculation, and McGrew pointed out that the calculation was botched, and now you find yourself liking his work less and less?)
Or did you in the past read some of Carrier’s other work, and then go back today and re-read it and find that you don’t like it much anymore?
What paper are you talking about which you say Carrier “slutted around… with very little revision”?
I’m just finding it bizarre, frankly, that this afternoon you said you liked Carrier’s work, and now you’re saying: “he is ALL wrong and his methods are risible.” Perhaps you could clarify.
Landon Hedrick
June 2, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Dr. Hoffmann,
Thanks. Yes, the cover is good. I saw it at Barnes and Noble a couple of months ago and was tempted by how nice it would look on my bookshelf.
As for the lack of response to Carrier’s screed, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what would be a normal response in that case. I couldn’t correct him on anything myself, since I don’t know you, haven’t read the book, etc. I will say that it would be better of him to actually explain in detail why he thinks all of those papers are crap. (That’s something I feel like you should have said in response to him.)
Alright, I understand now that you don’t think he’s a serious scholar. The question about Not The Impossible Faith was just whether you thought it reflected good and accurate scholarship. Apparently you haven’t read it, and I don’t know if any scholars in your field have (it’s self-published, after all–and I know, you don’t have to say it, this just goes to confirm your conclusion about him not being a serious scholar…).
Thanks for your replies. I look forward to checking out your blog more.
steph
June 3, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Landon : the definition of irony – the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning. Compare perfect irony above.
Serious scholarship does not refer to receptive readers as “my fans”. I thought it was odd enough just once, but scrolling through his ‘stuff’ I see he refers to “my fans” alot. Even William Lane Craig, who also tries to present himself as a “serious scholar” does not, as far as I know, refer to his readers as “fans”…
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Landon Hedrick
June 3, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Steph,
Thanks for the comment. I wonder if I was the only one who was confused by the bizarrely contradictory things Dr. Hoffmann has been saying about Carrier.
Well, if nothing else, the “fans” comment certainly rules out Carrier as a serious scholar! That’s the nail in the coffin. As you pointed out, not even William Lane Craig says that about his fans. (By the way, did you take this criticism of Carrier straight from Craig himself?)
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steph
June 4, 2011 at 10:44 am
I doubt that many people were confused by the use of blatantly obvious perfect irony in the context of this post. Only people who don’t understand irony, or steadfast “fans” of Dick Carrier who probably don’t own a sense of humour anyway.
Many, many things rule Dick Carrier out as a ‘serious scholar’. Never judge a book by its pretty cover. Not that he’s pretty, but he’s currently asking for pretty photos of himself from “fans” I notice. And what on earth possessed you to think I took this criticism from Billy Craig? I scrolled Dick’s ‘stuff’ and it wasn’t hard to pick. I haven’t a clue what Billy Craig thinks of Dick Carrier and I wouldn’t believe anything he said anyway. I just picked Billy out because he represents the other end of the apologist pole from Dick Carrier, neither of whom are serious critical scholars, and both of whom have seriously uncritical readers.
TruthOverfaith
June 4, 2011 at 4:21 am
Hey steph, maybe you need to lighten up!
Many authors/writers have “fans” of their work. Why should it matter if they’re fiction or non-fiction?
If you ever manage to have anything published, perhaps you’ll have fans yourself.
Reply
Landon Hedrick
June 4, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Steph,
Your comment made it obvious to me that it’s not worth pursuing this conversation any further with you. Thanks for your input though.
Reply
Rich Griese
June 6, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Steph got banned from Neil Godfrey’s site for making an ass of herself. Your not the first.
Cheers!
Aeyaz
June 4, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Hello Professor Hofffman. I was one of your students at LUMS.
Anyhow, my comment on this issue is this:
Is this insistence on trying to invoke Bayes’ theorem in such contexts a manifestation of some sort of Math or Physics envy? Or is it due to the fact that forcing mathematics into one’s writings apparently confers on them some form of ‘scientific’ legitimacy?
The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parmeters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?
Secondly, is it compulsory to try to impose some sort of mathematically based methodological uniformity on all fields of rational inquiry? Do there exist good reasons to suppose the the methods commonly used in different areas that have grown over time are somehow fatally flawed if they are not currently open to some form of mathematization?
If this kind of paradigm does somehow manage to gain ascendency, I assume history books will end up being much more full of equations and mathematical assumptions etc. While that will certainly make it harder to read for most (even for someone like me, who is more trained in Mathematics than the average person) I doubt that it would have any real consequence beyond that.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 6, 2011 at 2:35 pm
See http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/%CF%80-ness-envy-the-irrelevance-of-bayess-theorem/
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Nick
June 5, 2011 at 5:59 am
Let us prostrate ourselves at the feet of the mighty Steph: the world-renowned expert and arbiter on who does and doesn’t count as a serious scholar. I’m being ironic of course…
Reply
steph
June 6, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Just as well, because I’m just reflecting the view of critical scholarship, which does not consider that apologists like these, represent serious critical scholarship.
- steph
Reply
Ed Jones
June 5, 2011 at 11:58 am
Top NT critical historical scholar Schubert M. Ogden makes the claim that none of the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels as well as the later writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus. The sufficint reason for this point is that they all have been shown to depend on sources earlier than themselve and thus not to be the originating and original eye witness sources the early church mistook them to be. Thus not reliable sources for reconstruction of the Jesus tradtiion. The apostolic witness is located in a non-traditional canon, the earliest stratum of the Gospel sources. His position is shared by James M. Robinson, Hans Sieter Betz and Patrick Hartin to name a few. It is a matter of where to start in NT critical studies. “If you begin with Paul you will misunderstand Jesus, if you begin with Jesus you will understand Paul differently”. To begin with Paul is to begin with the writings of the NT, to begin with Jesus is to begin with the Jesus sayings tradition – before Paul, before the
Gospels, before Christianitn, the apostolic period, 30 Ce – 60 CE.
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π -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem? | The New Oxonian says:
June 6, 2011 at 2:23 pm
[...] a recent post responding to a blog review of Sources of the Jesus Tradition by atheist blogger Richard Carrier, I [...]
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American Heroes
by rjosephhoffmann
Trawling through old Newsweeks, I came across the May 2nd story (“Shattered Faith”) about the “fall” of Greg Mortenson.
Mortenson is the author of the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea (2006). It’s a story about how he returned hospitality (when the villagers of Korphe, Pakistan, nursed him back to health following an abduction by the Taliban) with generosity (how he built a school and raised money for other schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan.) Hampton Sides, the essayist, writes,
Anybody with a heart had to be inspired by the beautiful idea that one man could make such a profound difference in such a hard and desperate part of the world. I remember thinking that this was not only a book talk and charity fundraiser, it was something akin to a religious experience—a modern-day tent revival. People had not merely come to listen, they’d come to believe. Mortenson, a son of missionaries and a nurse by training who by then had been thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (and whose books were required reading by the Pentagon), was a secular saint who’d seized upon a revolutionary notion that soared across conflicts and continents—the power of educating children, especially girls, in tribal societies racked by poverty and war.
It now turns out that Mortsenson made most of it up, including the bit about recuperating in Korphe. He was never abducted by the Taliban, and the charity he founded never amounted to a hill of beans. Most of the “schools” are being used to store hay.
Pat Tillman
The thing that caught my eye however was not the meltdown of yet another American hero. We’ve come to expect that, even to overlook it: Pat Tillman, football hero, silver star recipient, last full measure of his devotion and all that, killed by friendly fire and the object of a military cover-up of operational intelligence. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Civil rights messiah, National Holiday. Don’t ask about why Boston University didn’t rescind his PhD when it was discovered he’d plagiarized chunks of his thesis. The list of disappointments goes on and covers the full range of political, military and philanthropic opportunities for heroism and tragic falls from grace. Did I mention John Edwards’s fight for the North Carolina little guy? Or Eliot Spitzer’s renown as as a prosecutor of corporate crime, vice and corruption?
When you get down to it, heroism corresponds to America’s love for tall tales and fake history: like the idea we won our own Revolution, or how the west was won by prairie knights like Kit Carson.
I have to admit, I don’t understand heroism. I think the deficiency comes from my mother who was invited once to give a talk to a Catholic sodality and, at the end of her discussion was asked what saints she admired the most. As Mother Theresa was not yet available, she said she was “sure they all had good points–except St Rose of Lima” (famous for being beautiful and disfiguring her face with lye to get over herself) “who was mad as a March hare.” She wasn’t invited back.
The irritaing thing about Sides’ little essay is the presumption that Americans, as Americans, need heroes.
We need our explorers, our sports icons, our Medal of Freedom winners, our Nobel laureates. We need our Greatest Generation warriors, our ‘Sully’ Sullenbergers, our Neil Armstrongs. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat. We yearn to believe not only in his good deeds but in his inherent goodness as a person. Perhaps it’s something rooted in our Puritan past, but we seem to have a monochromatic view of heroism.
But I see this need as basically religious. Is it any accident that the most religious industrialized country on earth (89% compared to Nigeria’s 92%) also throws the word hero around more casually than any other democracy? John McCain, real American hero. First-responders, real American heroes. Our men in uniform, real American heroes. Tea Party Patriots, real American heroes. The only thing close to military and athletic heroes are Hollywood actors and country singers who do good imitations of real American heroes.
Ted Nugent: Guns and Gi-tars
Despite what Sides says in his article, I seldom hear Nobel laureates described that way–or longsuffering classroom teachers holding the fort in failing inner city schools. Mainly, it is people who follow orders, kill other people for God and country, score touchdowns, or–like Seal Team 6–perform ritual assassinations in the name of Justice.
Sides theorizes that “[America's] deep need for heroes is tied to the sheer size of our country and the myth of the frontier.” Maybe so, but if that is the case then we have done a pretty bad job of filling the landscape with worthy prototypes. I don’t think legendary seven-foot-tall trekkers like Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Casey Jones fire the imagination of young Americans (even those who know their stories) any more than “real” ones like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Compared to the rounder and more glorious heroes of islands like Britain and Greece, for example, our iconic plonkers just seem to typify the American obsession with guns and engines. Brains, justice, “real” courage, and virtue–even chivalry and healthy sex lives, are not things American heroes have time for. –All those trees to clear and indigenous inhabitants to shoot. Our heroes, and usually our presidents and legislators, have to reflect our infatuation with stubborn determination and short sentences. The hero as a complicated, multidimensional, thoughtful and strategic player isn’t even especially good box office. Just ask Disney. Or Marvel Comics.
Paul Bunyan
What Americans have the need for is the need to worship something uncomplicated, and their choice of heroes largely reflects the militaristic and violent disposition to which the American myth of “greatness” is attached. It’s biblical. It’s about conquering and subduing the land with big men and oil rigs, violence against nature when we can’t execute it through our unheroic foreign policy by making other nations tremble before The World’s Only Superpower. U.S. is the perfect abbreviation for what we think we are in the world of thems. In America Nietzsche’s Übermensch isn’t an atheist intellectual, he’s an ass-kicking man of steel. Who flies.
Sides ends his article with a throwaway line, a kind of epitaph for his disappointment over the fate of Greg Mortenson, non-hero: “I for one still want to believe,” he says. “Americans have a yearning to believe not only in a hero’s deeds but in his goodness as a person.”
Well, I don’t. Belief in heroes and belief in the gods have been connected since the dawn of civilization. America’s obsession with heroes is just another part of its social pathology, the other side of which is religious lunacy. I have no need to believe in heroes. I can’t handle the disappointment.
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Published: June 1, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : cowboys : football : heroes : heroism : John Wayne : mythology : Pat Tillman : politics : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : superman : war ..
6 Responses to “American Heroes”
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steph
June 1, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Always be suspicious. Especially of so called ‘heros’ and people who have them. They’re the sort of people who hold passionate convictions (and assume everyone else does too). Beyond the American world, there is, believe it or not, a rest of the world. Within that rest, exists a concept called egalitarianism. When poppies get too tall they get the chop. It’s call a syndrome – tall poppies. But in America, heros spring up like weeds and are nutured (especially military, muscular and atheist ones) – but like weeds, they make you suffer, and suffocate your individual freedom. Hero worship predominates in places where there tends to be a lack of freedom and independence of thought, and as long as the worshipping endures, it ensures there never will be freedom or independence. “The Greatest American Hero” was a joke on the whole American ideology – but I don’t know if most Americans realised that. They just thought it was ‘funny’ and still held their convictions. In heaven an angel is nobody in particular said George Bernard Shaw, while his distant cousin Oscar Wilde, said that Americans will always have heros (although they be generally from the criminal classes). Therefore, methinks, I’m in heaven…
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steph
June 1, 2011 at 3:39 pm
nurture not nuture – like mythtics nurture gnus.
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Scott
June 1, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Superlatives apply here, Dr Hoffman. No public Ubermench could survive long on our soil; only the dumbed down rock-star hollywood types can.
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Karla McLaren
June 1, 2011 at 5:48 pm
I like your points, and as a person who knows people within Greg Mortenson’s organization, I’ve been thinking a lot about heroes and their trajectories. My suspicion is that, once a person has reached the age of consent, the knowledge that heroes always fall isn’t completely inaccessible. Many people who project all their hero fantasies onto some charismatic figure have indeed seen previous heroes crumble. But see, this time, with this guy, it’s going to work. See?
It seems to me that hero worship is not just a fixation on the imagined godlike or king-like qualities in another — but it is also an unconscious fascination with the hero’s eventual downfall. And it’s such a universally human behavior that it’s an easy thing to find hero worship (and the same downward trajectories) throughout secular communities.
Making heroes and creating movements around personalities — it’s an addictive human behavior, I think. I also wonder how much of hero worship is developmental, in that gods, heroes, and mentors often seem to take the place of the imagined or idealized parent for many people?
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ken
June 2, 2011 at 11:00 pm
It’s about time somebody had the courage to say this.
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ken
June 2, 2011 at 11:03 pm
“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
Emerson
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π -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem
by rjosephhoffmann
In a recent post responding to a blog review of Sources of the Jesus Tradition by atheist blogger Richard Carrier, I made the point that his own contribution to the book does not rise above the level of pedantic lecturing on a theorem of dubious value to engage the literary matter.
Carrier has claimed on a number of occasions that his approach is revolutionary, a tour de force and essentially over the heads of New Testament scholars. Apart from the naivety of saying anything like this in a field littered with the corpses of dead theories and “discoveries,” this is scarcely where you’d want a revolution to be fought.
Strauss
There are numerous critical issues attached to using a theorem that is primarily about probability to assess material that isn’t. It is, however, a common feature of forensic (i.e. controversialist) approaches to the Bible on both the fundamentalist side and the atheist side to engage the material on a literal level. This is so because both sides have to meet on the field at that point where literal claims about the text are being made, if not with the claim that the texts themselves are designed to propose facts–though most biblical literalists would say that they are, and most of their opponents would say that they are defeasible at this level.
Accordingly, a particular way of reading the text has been the main source of “rationalistic” critiques of the Bible since the Enlightenment though many of those critiques were superficial and almost all have been improved by serious academic study in the last two and half centuries.
Reasonably speaking, it is analytically impossible to assess claims of “factuality” without assessing the texts on which such claims are based, even if we begin with relative certainty or skepticism (for example) about the occurrence of miracles or the reliability of a written tradition. Despite the fact that the multiplication of “conditions” and ”assumptions” violates the sensibility of most post-modernists who deplore looking at things like authorial intention, criticality, or audience (community) in discussing narrative, the character of the text is the conditio sine qua non–the starting point–for all discussion. It is a condition a literalist believer, on the basis of his epistemological suppositions, tries to avoid since his prior assumption is that the text has a particular integrity, and the skeptic, guided by opposite beliefs, no less literal, is often able to ignore.
Modern New Testament scholarship emerged precisely in response to the impasse between credulity and skepticism, neither of which seemed a sufficient answer to the “problem of the text.” Forensically speaking, text is text. Critically speaking, it isn’t.
Generally speaking, the biblical literalist feels he is under no compulsion to defend his confidence in the text; he assumes he has warrants for his confidence. He can invoke a number of interdependent subordinate claims to support his position–arguments from antiquity (the age of the text or its distance from the reported events), reliability (a kind of mock-psychological assessment of the trustworthiness of “reporters”), self-consistency (whether the text is basically coherent within itself and among variants, where they exist), inspiration and inerrancy (the belief that the text is autonomous as a product of revelation and thus superior to any methods used in its evaluation). Most subordinate claims have been savaged by modern critical approaches that have grown organically out of the study of the gospels and cognate literature, though some are still of interest to historians.
A forensic approach to the Bible means that key debating points like the six-day creation story, the resurrection of Jesus and (perhaps) the existence of Jesus have to be treated as historical assertions to the same extent they are asumed to be true by the most literal readers. This is a severe limitation to forensic approaches since they initiate discussion with the question of whether a text is vulnerable as a truth-claim, using a formula more suitable for modal logic than for history: Is something possible or probable? Are events described in a text more likely to have happened or not to have happened?
Hume
Even the study of the text for both literalists and skeptics will be subordinated to the modality of claims. Texts that assume propositional value for the literalist (even if that value has to be manufactured) are the very texts the skeptic needs to find defeasible. Scholars have understandably winced at this level of discussion because it’s easily seen as a branch of apologetics rather than as a field of serious literary and cultural study. Its preoccupation is not with what the text has to tell us, but with whether you or your opponent is right or wrong about a relatively small number of events.
Gunkel
Debaters like Carrier have suggested that the critical methods developed for dealing with the Bible in the nineteenth and twentieth century are insufficiently rigorous. But that is simply not the case. In fact, the methods grew in tandem with evolving perceptions of what the character of the text actually was, how it was formed, and what its creators thought about the world. In the language of an older school of criticism, what its “life situation” was. They continue to evolve and to adapt in an organic way. Only if the sole question to be answered is whether the description of an event corresponds directly and generically to “what really happened” (if it were possible to answer that question, as it isn’t in many cases) would the modality of a forensic approach be useful, and its usefulness would still depend on prior questions.
“Conventional” and revisionist approaches remain central to academic study, however, if we assume that the New Testament is not making its case propositionally, event by event, but narratively. If Genesis was not intended to teach astronomy, the New Testament was not intended to teach medicine. Neither of those statements tells us what the Bible was intended to do, yet such a determination would be essential for answering questions about how it fulfills its purposes.
Beyond the forensic approach, the question about the kind of literature the New Testament literature represents remains absolutely prior and absolutely crucial. As an example, the amount of material that can be removed into the category of “myth” (a great deal, from most of Genesis to all of Revelation) can never be determined by modal assessment of the truth properties of a text, since analytically myth is not amenable to modal analysis and only a wrong definition of myth as a kind of rhetorical lie or pre-scientific error–a definition that flies in the face of modern anthropology–would make such analysis possible. The forensic approach does itself a huge disservice by paying insufficient attention to the history of criticism, where the general mythological character of much of the material is almost taken for granted, and focusing instead on a discounted view of myth as non-factuality.
What is true of myth, moreover, is true of the other “forms” (literary and historical genres) that exist within the Bible and the New Testament especially. So much of the Jesus story is myth, in the sense of μυθογραφία (writing of a fabulous story), that I have no objection to the phrase “the Jesus Myth.” –But a great deal to object to in the sentence “Jesus ‘was’ a myth,” implying absolute non-historicity and a method designed simply to document his irreality. In Sources, this is the subject of two essays, one of which (“On Not Finding the Historical Jesus”) suggests that the gospel writers bore no interest in the “question” of the historical Jesus but had a profound interest in his reality.
For the forensicists, “Was the cosmos created or was it not created in six days”; “Did Jesus or did he not rise from the dead?”; ”What did he really say?” and “Did he exist?” are primary questions that should not be swept under the rug of literary analysis: they are questions of right and wrong. The text exists primarily to settle these questions.
In my view, this is an impoverished way to approach the Bible since the book (taken as a kind of religious artifact rather than an accident of editorial history) was not construed to answer such questions and the methods that have been devised to explore it have been driven by different phenomena and concerns: what communities believed; how they understood society; how they manipulated history and politics religiously to provide social coherence; why ideas like salvation and redemption gained ascendancy in the first century and how they evolved to become something quite different in the second. Put flatly: the questions asked by the forensic approach are not primary questions at all because they do not arise from the text.
Not unless you accept the prior assumption that the literature of the Bible puts itself forward as hard fact (and most scholars in the present century would say, it doesn’t) all operations on the material should derive naturally from what it is. Certain techniques like hermeneutical suspicion, mutiple attestation, “dissimilarity,” and redaction, source (and various other) criticisms and linguistic distribution are simply code for ways of testing how the tradition developed and how the sources evolved over time. If anything, the “factuality” or modal probability of events in using any of these methods is held in suspense in the same way Coleridge describes the willing suspension of disbelief (and for not altogether different reasons) in the Biographia Literaria.
Back to Bayesics?
I was reminded of the danger and potential irrelevance of imposing non-literary templates on the biblical material by a former student, whose comments on the use of Bayes’s theorem are significant because (a) he is not critiquing the use of this device as a New Testament scholar: he is a PhD candidate in mathematics and is properly reckoned a prodigy in pure mathematics; and (b) he is not a Christian.
I personally find his comments devastating to the use of the theorem as an assist to the modal approach to the Bible. But I’ll leave it to others to decide:
“Is this insistence [Carrier] of trying to invoke Bayes’ theorem in such contexts a manifestation of some sort of Math or Physics envy? Or is it due to the fact that forcing mathematics into one’s writings apparently confers on them some form of ‘scientific’ legitimacy?
The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parmeters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?
Secondly, is it compulsory to try to impose some sort of mathematically based methodological uniformity on all fields of rational inquiry? Do there exist good reasons to suppose the the methods commonly used in different areas that have grown over time are somehow fatally flawed if they are not currently open to some form of mathematization?
If this kind of paradigm does somehow manage to gain ascendency, I assume history books will end up being much more full of equations and mathematical assumptions etc. While that will certainly make it harder to read for most (even for someone like me, who is more trained in Mathematics than the average person) I doubt that it would have any real consequence beyond that.
The fatal flaw in Carrier’s misuse of the theorem therefore is that the “real world conditions” he finds described in the gospels are not real world conditions. Thus its application does not flow from axioms designed for its use. The gospels are the complex record of the reactions of communities to conditions that are extremely difficult to assess. Even though Carrier may know and accept this premise, he finds it unimportant to address its consequences.
It may be that in further work Carrier will lay the theoretical groundwork, justifying his use of Bayes as a cipher for understanding the gospels. But even if his mission is not that–even if it’s just a game-playing exercise for debunking their historicity in front of believers–it seems to me that Ayez has raised a fatal objection: Bayes is for apples and the gospels are oranges. And Carrier’s persistent defense that no one is really on the same page–or able to “get” the page he’s writing–is becoming increasingly difficult to swallow.
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Published: June 6, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: analysis of the gospels : Bayes's theorem : Criticism : gospels : penis envy : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Carrier : Sources of the Jesus Tradition ..
74 Responses to “π -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem”
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 3:28 pm
I agree absolutely with every word from beginning to end including the astute observation of your former student. Apples and oranges – the major flaw of applying non historical methods to historical research. However I would suggest there may be in the Bayesic advocate’s methodological misapplication, a case of penis envy, which like his Bayes theorem is to historical research, also completely irrelevant.
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Rich Griese
June 6, 2011 at 3:52 pm
I applaud Carrier’s attempt to bring more precision to the study of early Christianity. We have know since Strauss that a great deal of the Christian scriptures are mythical. If we can now apply the tools of the natural sciences to obtain more precision… great. So little has been learned by the learned by the religion industry. The history industry tends to just avoid the whole issue. Perhaps the social science folks can have a crack at it. It will of course anger the folks that are trained more in the humanities, and the philosophical types. But philosophy is really just a vestal discipline today. the average man on the street is simply amazed that after 2000 years of searching, we have to date found zero historical data on the jesus character. Anything can do a better job would be welcomed.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Spock: “Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.”
McCoy: “You admit that?”
Spock: “To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor”
As Mark Twain wrote: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
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Dwight Jones
March 25, 2012 at 11:24 am
Carrier’s work is akin to an assessment of Shakespeare by Dick Tracy. As RJH maintains, if you don’t consider the motives and purposes behind the history of the bible, you had may as well discard Aesop’s fables for being non-factual at the same time. Bring in Disney for questioning.
The Bible is/was an envelope for teaching the new ethics of agriculture/trade/urbanization to our species, as it underwent rapid cultural flux (note powerful scientific word), by whatever hyperbole/fact mix was available to the authors of the day.
We carried around the idea of Ark of the Covenant as a representation of powers we did not yet have, but aspired to. So too was ritual the mortar of communal trust. You cannot evaluate the history of the Bible without considering its purpose.
Any butterfly can be broken on a wheel, but you do need a tiny mind to do it right.
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 4:21 pm
baah – Bayes’s, belonging to Bayes.
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Scott
June 6, 2011 at 4:44 pm
Carrier’s use of Bayes Theorem just seems like an example of domain confusion more than anything else.
Following H’s student, do we apply mathematical principles to Longinus’s ” On the Sublime; or Drydens “Essay Concerning Dramatic Poesy” or to “explicacion du text”? I can’t think of too many serious scholars I have been fortunate to sit with who would think the latter would be a fruit giving endeavor.
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Mark David Dietz
June 6, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Joseph,
Thanks. I picked up a lot from this essay. This is really where the hard thought of our age is coming down. Not in the hard sciences as simple solution engineering, but in science that demands modal logic and a depth of understanding of the nature of humans from the inside out, not just the outside in.
I am reading a book on the presocratics just now in which, to too great a degree, the author pictures mythology as the precursor to science/philosophy. He focuses on the new thoughts that Thales introduced (or borrowed from the Babylonians) but fails to account for what he held on to or brought with him from an older tradition, perhaps too easily called mythology. The presocratics are thus seen as the beginning of a broach between two irreconcilable positions — although, surely we are pushing a little too much to say that two clearly distinct positions existed for Thales or Anaximander, et al.
The questions I have focused on are: to what degree did the presocratics tend not to see the disctinctions we now make or, for that matter, that Aristotle made a hundred years later? Did they continue to value that which we call mythological even as they began, in a near forensic way, to exercise reason and challenges to older traditions? Is challenging an older tradition really a sign of rational thought, or more a matter of a kind of mythopoeic thought that seeks more complex and articulated conceptions that resonate with both the ideal and the real?
More and more I grow concerned that we have so favored one tradition that the other (call it mythological, rhetorical, whatever) all but disappears — and the modal question of possibility, or the imaginative question of where do the axioms (archai) come from, become deep, black magic to be run out of town on a rail if they ever make themselves too obvious or too noticable.
Best, Mark
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The Last, Best Hope for Mythicism? | Exploring Our Matrix says:
June 6, 2011 at 11:39 pm
[...] Click through to read the rest. [...]
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beallen0417
June 9, 2011 at 1:10 pm
One is immediately reminded of Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria. Is that a conscious decision? Also, is missue a typo for misuse?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 9, 2011 at 1:46 pm
-I do like missue as a sentiment but misuse is what is meant–thanks. I have some doubts about Gould’s thesis, which amounts to ideological dualism and it is hard to say that methodologies are the same as worldviews. “Religion”/theology isn’t immune from scientific critique, but the extent to which methods appropriate for real world situations can be applied to problematical descriptions of irreal situations would steer me away from probabalism, unless I were really just looking to make a literalist look stupid. My own view is that most good biblical scholars are not stupid and would find would want to know the heuristic value of advocating this technique. Why not , e.g., use relative frequency as the heuristic instead. The answer is, it gets you no further than what we already know on the basis of techniques better suited for the literature.
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Soloview
June 15, 2011 at 10:22 am
Excellent analysis, Joseph ! The Bayes’ folly of Carrier is shocking because he is smart guy. One wonders how he can sustain the illusion of obtaining a valid set of input data that would make his scheme work. How would he prevent Garbage-In ? Evidently, Carrier does not understand that even in the study of historical materials there is a difference between managing data and obsessing about data. The difference is that one approach does not admit options.
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 1:24 am
Carrier’s method is fatally flawed.
For example, what is the probability that ‘Mark’ used Aramaic sources? No number can be assigned to this probability, making it impossible to apply Baye’s Theorem.
Real scholars of the New Testament would never dream of using phrases like ‘We must make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested.’ or attempt to put numbers on probabilities by saying things like ‘…I cannot assume more than 51 percent probability for my best guess.’
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rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2011 at 8:10 am
I agree, but all BayesBoyz do it. Swinburne does it in his philosophical theology as well. Seems to be especially important to debaters (and to almost no one else in this area) to be able to quantify things, just to score points, but the quantification is completely spurious since the assessment of the data doesn’t affect its initial reliability, relevance, usefulness or truth value. Reminds me of slapping a coat of paint on boards that are already full of dry rot.
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Robert
July 4, 2011 at 11:52 am
Nicely done, Steven!
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 12:42 pm
I was quoting Maurice Casey, in his book ‘Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel’.
I’m not certain if these quantifications that Maurice made in his book are ‘completely spurious’. Can you explain further please?
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Steven Carr
July 3, 2011 at 5:39 am
I’m curious to know why you haven’t approved my post informing your readers of the person I quoted. I now am in the invidious position of quoting people anonymously, which is not a good thing to do…
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Demystifying R. Joseph Hoffmann, and the war over Bayes’ theorem « Vridar says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:29 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann has let a crotchety side to his nature show as he publicly attempts to humiliate a younger scholar who, in exchanges with the aging don, has exposed a dint of mediocrity in his [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 11:30 am
I love the reference to “ageing don”. It must rhyme with something. Alas, however, while not Mozart I am more than ten years short of my biblical mandate and still able to navigate my way without a walker across a sitting room. As to the use of “scholar” in relation to Carrier, let’s reserve that term for someone who practices the trade and has a life beyond self published books and blogs.
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steph
July 11, 2011 at 11:32 am
(I still can’t get “Major Tom” out of my head – bit of a cult song really – lingering – and always had a bit of a thing for Bowie and his different coloured eyes. Star Man: ageing dom Major Tom…) :-)
steph
July 4, 2011 at 3:45 pm
As usual, no reference is given by Carr. The author he is trying to implicate does not recognise the quotation, so at best been taken out of context, and at worst, made up. It is not to be found by searching the ms submitted to Routledge, a book written to argue that John’s gospel is not remotely true.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 4:14 pm
And that scholar implicated would never use statistics to make mathematical judgements of precision. He is not a Bayesboyes – Carrier and Swinburne: they’re Bayesboyes.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 7:08 pm
It’s ironic that Carr’s friend Neil attempts to deride a highly qualified critical scholar and Highly Distinguished Professor, by referring to him as “an aging don” when Neil himself, at 62 years old, is actually much older than the Highly Distinguished Professor, and holds only elementary qualifications as a librarian. An ageing librarian.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 8:06 pm
It’s ironic too that Carr’s friend Neil provides no references either to these alleged quotes which are not recognised by the alleged author and which have not been found now after searches in manuscripts of three different books. But Neil cannot even describe Carr’s “quote” accurately. Instead he writes that the author “was interested in assessing probabilities of something being a fact, and even quantifying a probability at not more than 51%” whereas Carr claims the author wrote about probability and guessing, not “fact’. So while it looks suspiciously like Carr made it up, it looks suspiciously like Neil has neither quoted the alleged “quote”, nor asked Carr for a reference, in order to conveniently exaggerate.
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steph
July 5, 2011 at 7:26 pm
It is ludicrous for Neil to suggest that Professor Hoffmann has “rejected a valuable tool” that was really waiting to be used “for his advantage” because of a “personal dispute” with Carrier. Professor Hoffmann is absolutely and blatantly clear that Carrier is wrong in his application of Bayes Theorem to history. It is malicious to suggest otherwise.
It is ludicrous for Neil to imply that Professor Hoffmann is inconsistent with his criticism of mythicists as Professor Hoffmann is well aware of the differences between critical historical method and the mistakes the mythicists make, just as he is well aware that ‘Is John’s Gsopel True?’ was written to argue that it isn’t true at all.
It is ludicrous for Neil to speculate and create fiction about the content of a book he knows nothing about, and say “Presumably the book will be (like Bart Erhman’s) an argument for why we can believe the Gospels as testimony for certain historical facts about Jesus.” It has absolutely nothing to do with Ehrman’s book and is not remotely like it or Neil’s fiction. It is taking time to write because the gross mistakes of mythicists take a long time to work out with accuracy rather than with creative fiction in which they are expert. It focuses on decent historical method. It points out the gross misuse of texts, in total contempt for historical method, by Doherty, Murdock, and their followers.
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Steven Carr
July 7, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Alleged quotes?
Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel – page 110 and page 165.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How on earth does Carr expect Professor Hoffmann to assume Carr’s ‘quote’ was anything other than a hypothetical statement of someone applying mathematical precision to historical argument, when he didn’t give a reference? Extracted from a real passage has distorted the meaning making it appear to represent something else, and is nothing other than false attribution to create a straw man.
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steph
July 7, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hōste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hōste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hōste + ind. does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hōste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’rū. expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hōste,rikaans + ind. shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and kl qbk dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:25 am
I corrected my transliteration and took out the ‘rikaans’ which wouldn’t come out before – I can’t italicise the aramaic, it won’t transfer. But I added a bit about Meyer’s earlier attempt discussed by Casey. All in corrected comment below… :-)
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 10:55 am
I am not an expert in Aramaic sources, unlike Maurice, but Matthew Black and James VanderKam and I had occasion to work together on extracanonical materials more than fifteen years ago. I think I know what a plausible and what a hyperbolic case looks like. The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous. As to Carrier, I’ve said all I need to say. Partly he is a victim of a trend in proper NT studies that seeks always to revolutionize the ordinary and the well known. I have not suggested that his work is totally useless but that instead of providing greater certainty about the sources it is nothing more than quantified interpretation superimposed on “data” for which the theorem is not suited. I am not used to substituting press releases for critical reviews and no one can say whether or not Carrier’s effort has any value until he reaches the point of being noticed by journals. As far as I am concerned, he is learning biblical methodology on the run and has a primarily polemical agenda in view — which is frankly not radical but antithetical so sound scholarship–not unlike the approach of a committed evangelical at the other extreme. Call me cantankerous, but better still prove me wrong.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:04 am
Do you think that the LXX contained aramaicisms?
Do you think that it is reasonable to contend that the LXX was likely a major source for the gospel writers?
If so, is it a wonder that aramaicisms appear in the gospels, or are these particular aramaicisms too far removed as to have been, in any way, influenced by similar passages in the LXX?
rjosephhoffmann
July 11, 2011 at 10:37 am
Mishnah, Talmud, targums, in the Palestinian air: aramaicisms everywhere. גמרא gamara–considering the context and despite freebasing use of the LXX by the writers, it is not a sufficient explanation. Recommend you have a look at Vermes and Chilton, though I have pts of disagreement with both.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:47 am
What, specifically, do you believe would fall out of the uncountable aramaicisms, possibly derived as the result of inbreeding with a Greek translation?
Any particular passage(s) that gives you pause?
Anon
July 11, 2011 at 1:46 pm
There seem to be some misconceptions here as to the applicability of Bayes’ theorem. The truth is, there is no department of thought where it can’t profitably and validly be used, for as Physicist Richard T. Cox showed, probability (and BT in particular) is the natural extension of Aristotelian logic (in which every statement is either true or false) into the realm of reasoning in the presence of uncertainty (where the premises of the argument are represented by numbers between 0 and 1, with traditional logic being invoked to nail the limiting cases). As Carrier demonstrates in his tutorial, BT isn’t confined to ‘statistics’ or even math – it’s about inductive reasoning.
The so-called ‘subjectivity’ of the theorem is no more an impediment that it is to the ordinary syllogism; garbage-in, garbage-out is as relevant here as it is to probabilistic conclusions. If two people have exactly the same prior knowledge and beliefs, then they will, if we assume they are both rational, assign the same number to the probability of an event. If they assign different numbers because they have different prior knowledge, then surely they OUGHT to assign different numbers?
In any case, the subjectivity objection is irrelevant; People differ over whether propositions are true or false, but that doesn’t invalidate logic, which isn’t actually concerned with whether a given proposition is true or false, just with what follows if it is. The actual truth value is a separate matter determined by other quite different procedures and quite frequently disputed, hence, presumably, subjective.
Nevertheless, it IS possible to assign probabilities to premises such that the conclusions are highly probable. The way to do this (again, see Carrier’s tutorial for examples) is to choose values for the terms in BT which are the limit of what you can reasonable expect them to be. Using a wide margin of error gives confidence in the results, regardless of the inexactness of your estimates.
rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:54 am
What permits you to reduce narrative to propositions? That was the whole point of the blog. You have to begin by adducing propositions from texts that make no claims about themselves, perhaps the one exception being the final ch and appendix to John which on this premise should enjoy a high degree of probability.
Robert
July 13, 2011 at 6:58 am
Propositions like the one where the authors intended to write history?
I agree.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:54 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey has agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:55 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:19 pm
I know Maurice spent a year in St Andrews with Matthew Black in 1978-9 (I think), and learnt alot from him. He has a great deal of respect for him and liked him alot. He told me that he was incredibly easy to talk to and liked being contradicted – with reason.
steph
July 7, 2011 at 8:12 pm
And by the way, I don’t use google books and don’t know scholars who do. As I understand it, the whole text is generally not available and I wouldn’t rely on it for my sources. While the deceptive tactics of Carr to pull the quote out of context, make the words look ludicrous not only to Professor Hoffmann and myself (which is why I suspected it was made up as no reference was offered in that initial comment) but also to Professor Casey because he had no context, the three of us are now clear of the argument (which has nothing to do with mathemantical precision or Bayes Theorem) which we can assess and be free to debate and disagree.
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steph
July 7, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Carr’s deception of quoting out of context in order to distort the intended meaning of the whole passage, is nothing other than a logical fallacy, a type of contextomy, false attribution of quoting out of context in order to misrepresent an author and make them appear to support another position, is creating a straw man. It’s ludicrous and typical.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:21 am
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hōste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hōste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hōste + indicative does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hōste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’rū. We might expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hōste plus indicative shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and klqbl dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet.
Casey did of course also discuss the earlier attempt at a reconstruction of Mark 2.27-28 by Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache (1896), p.12, when much less work had been done and much less Aramaic was available. He pointed out that while the reconstruction of two whole verses was for the most part a great step forward, “The use of the late expression bgll kn behind the difficult hōste is also problematical: it would surely have been more likely to have given rise to dia touto” (Casey, Aramaic Sources, p.12, part of a sympathetic critical assessment of Meyer’s work, in the light of what could and could not be done later).
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Carr doesn’t realise that taken things out of context is misrepresentation. I’ve just seen that he has blogged on Maurice Casey’s “Is John’s Gospel True?” but misrepresented the argument as usual. He claims to quote Casey, but he gives only a partial quotation. Carr has completely misrepresented Casey’s argument by ignoring it and selecting for mention only the part of his argument that mentions the absence of Lazarus from later sources, and then comparing this with the absence of other figures from Paul’s epistles. Casey in fact put forward a complete argument for the secondary nature of Lazarus. Of course fundamentalists do not take that seriously, but it remains quite ludicrous that mythicists ignore most serious critical scholarship and misrepresent arguments which dispute the ‘truth’ of scripture, which was really the subject of Casey’s whole book. Godfrey’s description of Casey’s work in a comment on the post, as ‘fraud’ is typical of his inaccurate rudeness, and his description of him as ‘part of the reasonably known set of Sheffield scholars who boast…’ is rude and inaccurate too. Casey is Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham, not Sheffield. Of course he has long-standing connections with the University of Sheffield, as also with many other universities, as should be especially obvious from his Festschrift. Godfrey’s personal attack of me in the same comment is silly and malicious.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:42 pm
On pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument),
“The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death.
After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important. If this were true, we would not be able to explain the omission of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again. It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon, yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts. Nor does he appear again in the fourth Gospel, surviving an unsuccessful plot. Finally, in the Judaism of Jesus’ time, having faith in Jesus did not mean `leaving’ in any reasonable sense. The fourth evangelist has imposed on the Judaism of Jesus’ time the situation of his own, when Jews converted to Jesus did indeed leave the Jewish community.
But the narrator has not yet finished. Verse 12.12 slides into the old tradition of 12.13-15. More trouble begins at verse 16, where the disciples are to `remember’ what they had not previously known. It becomes serious in verses 17-19, where the crowd bear witness that Jesus had raised Lazarus, so the Pharisees declare, `the world has gone after him.’ Lazarus, however, is heard of no more. The Johannine narrative is thus internally incoherent, as well as inconsistent with synoptics. The decisive incoherence is that the story of Lazarus just stops. With so many Jews `leaving’ because of the raising of Lazarus, with the crowd who saw this miracle bearing witness to it, with a crowd meeting because they have heard of this sign, with a plot against Lazarus’ life, Lazarus was such an important figure that his further presence, and his fate, were bound to have been recorded. But they are not recorded. Why not? The only possible explanation emerges from the absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. His fate is not recorded because he never was an important figure. He does not turn up in Acts, and he neither wrote nor figures in any epistle, for the same reason. This also tells us something about the way in which this Gospel has been written. The profound and real feeling that Jesus brought life and `the Jews’ brought death (cf. 16.2) to the Johannine community is presented in story mode. Hence the stress on the love of Jesus for Lazarus, as even `the Jews’ notice (11.36), and for Martha and Mary (11.5), for Jesus loves his disciples. Hence also the narrative precedents for Jesus’ own resurrection, especially the difference in the graveclothes, for Lazarus came forth bound (11.44), whereas Jesus left the graveclothes behind and vanished, a difference great enough for a disciple whom Jesus loved to come to faith (20.7-8) Such factors have quite overridden the historical inconcinnities which we can see.”
Reply
steph
July 8, 2011 at 8:30 pm
The point is that Carr treats Casey’s argument as if it is an argument from silence, which it is not. He spends his whole post condemning arguments from silence. It is for the most part an argument from what is said about Lazarus in the Gospel attributed to John and is an argument from cumulative weight scattered over many pages. Obviously the quotation I reproduced above only represents one part. It does matter, however, that Lazarus as a supposed historical character is absent from the synoptic Gospels. This is quite different from the absence of a variety of people who were not important in the early church from most of Acts, and all this is quite different from the absence of all sorts of people and things from the occasional epistles of Paul.
What both Godfrey and Carr fail to distinguish is the difference between apologetic and critical scholarship, part of which they could use to their advantage if they had the critical skills. But they don’t. All they have is bias. So while scholarship is eternally grateful to librarians, Casey himself keeps thanking libraries in prefaces to most of his published books e.g. Aramaic Sources p. ix. But scholarship is not dependent on an individual librarian.
Reply
steph
July 9, 2011 at 7:09 pm
In a comment on his post (4th July) ironically with a title beginning “Demystifying…” Godfrey commented “Steph sadly cannot even demonstrate that she understands the discussion. She fails to see she supports my point when she declares Casey wrote “Is John’s Gospel True?” to argue it is not factually true. That is the very debate Hoffmann says we should bypass, but I am not surprised Steph herself fails to understand Hoffmann’s post that she says she fully agrees with.”
Professor Hoffmann has not said historical debates should be bypassed and I never said anything about ‘factually true’. Godfrey has no references. His abilities as a librarian are not the same as abilities to assess critical scholarship honestly and he has not demonstrated any awareness of what ‘Is John’s Gospel True?’ is about – in fact Carr’s and Godfrey’s blog comments on it have demonstrated they don’t understand it at all. Casey’s book Is John’s Gospel True? was originally drafted in 1987 because the reasons for believing that this Gospel does not contain significant historically correct information not available in the synoptic Gospels were well known to professional scholars, but not available to students or to interested people in the churches, many of whom believed it was literally true. As he continued work, Casey became more and more concerned at the use of the Gospel of John in persecutions of Jews. Thus his 1996 book argued firstly that, where John differs from the synoptics, it could usually be shown to be wrong. He examines in detail the use made of it by Martin Luther. He provides many details and reasons to argue that the document is dangerous, when held to be scripture, as that term was understood at the time. I do not however wish to land Professor Hoffmann, me or anyone else with all of Casey’s opinions. In particular, I often disagree with him as to how certain his conclusions are. This is part of ongoing fruitful debate, which Godfrey shows no signs of understanding.
Reply
edj19
July 11, 2011 at 3:22 pm
My identity is in eror. It should be:
Name Ed Jones
Email: edhj1@msn.com
Please correct this.
Reply
steph
July 12, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Dizzy misrepresentations and laughable things continue over on Vridar including a comment at the bottom of one funny post: “Evidently, Stephanie Fisher, who is credited with having worked meticulously through “every word” of more than one draft of Casey’s Jesus of Nazareth also feels that this story of a resurrection is literally true.” Of Jairus’s daughter? Really? I do not, and anyway Casey follows Mark’s report that Jesus said she was not dead, rather than the fundamentalist tradition that she was.
Godfrey again refers to Casey as my mentor, which he is not, as I have pointed out before but Godfrey can’t actually comprehend that I disagree with Casey on minor as well as quite major points all the time. What I do though, is represent Casey’s work accurately (which does not mean I endorse it) and correct those who misrepresent it, like Godfrey and Carr, which they do all the time possibly because they don’t understand it. Godfrey says he can hear me “screaming” – funny that because I don’t scream … but I do sing. I hope he wasn’t insulting my singing… He suggests I am “emotionally unstable” which I’m not so perhaps he’s got a bit of psychological projection going on, because he does make so many many more personal attacks.
Godfrey and Carr misrepresent so many things that it would be dull to enumerate them all. For example, Casey’s comments on the healing of the blind man in Bethsaida are dependent on the work of Keir Howard, whom Carr just manages to mention. He does not however note that when Keir Howard wrote this book, he was a fully qualified medic, experienced in the healing of psychosomatic illnesses and competent in the anthropology of medicine, and that his comments were partly based on the work of professional ophthalmologists, a quite different world from that of the miracles which Godfrey and apparently Carr used to believe in, and on account of which they will no longer believe stories which are perfectly plausible as natural events in the real world.
Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual. The New Testament professors are Roland Deines and Richard Bell. Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey retired several years ago. That is why he is ‘Emeritus’. It’s a shame that Godfrey, who is a librarian, and Carr have such little respect for integrity and truth.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:17 pm
@ Steph It is all too ludicrous for words and has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously. Perhaps he hopes that James Randi will set it all straight.
Reply
Steven Carr
July 13, 2011 at 2:01 am
‘Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual.’
I must apologise most sincerely for my insinuation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to regard Professsor Casey as a Professor of their University and for my unfounded malicious allegation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to read Professor Casey’s work.
I am genuinely sorry for this mistake of mine.
Reply
steph
July 13, 2011 at 10:38 am
Joe :-) that would be truly amazing. Funny Carr equates “unfounded malicious allegation” with “incompetent and misleading as usual” … which that equation effectively is – incompetent and misleading.
However he would be quite accurate if he applied “unfounded malicious allegation” to his continual ridiculous parodies of the Emeritus Professor, such as “No wonder Casey is misrepresented so often. Nobody can follow his train of thoughts or work out which ad hoc hypothesis is supposed to be active at any one time… He is the only person in the world who can read Aramaic documents behind Mark that nobody else can see and that no Christian in the first century ever mentioned existing… With the superhuman ability to read Aramaic documents that nobody has seen or heard of, and to read them better than Mark himself, who allegedly had them in front of him, it is little wonder that Casey managed to get such a prestigious appointment…Mythers cannot compete with people who can read invisible documents… The only surprise is that with such powers, Casey has not been invited to be our next Prime Minister.
But perhaps the ability to read invisible Aramaic documents is not needed in Number 10 Downing Street, although it is invaluable in becoming an Independent Biblical Scholar…That is Independent as in not being Dependent upon texts actually existing before you translate them into Greek…”
Clownish? And this ain’t no “teary defence”(!!) although tears do swell well when we laugh. :-)
Reply
steph
July 13, 2011 at 11:52 am
Carr continues to choose to ignore that fact that most of Casey’s argument is based on what is said in the Gospel attributed to John, so it is basically not an argument from silence. One of the main points about scholarship about the Jesus of history is that the major historical sources are the synoptic Gospels, so that an argument showing that what is said in the Gospel of John has no support in the synoptic Gospels is not an argument from silence as that term is normally understood, when it has begun by showing that the account in the Gospel attributed to John is not remotely plausible.
For example, on pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument), “The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. …Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death… After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important.”
None of this is an argument from silence as that is normally understood. It is an argument that the narrative of the Gospel attributed to John is hopelessly implausible. Of course, anyone who believes that the narrative of the synoptic gospels is important for understanding the historicity of such stories will add the complete absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. But this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the Gospel attributed to John is not silent at all, it is historically useless. Godfrey cannot take this seriously because he has an intellectually arbitrary commitment (apparently unconscious) to the notion that Jesus did not exist, so nothing in the synoptic gospels could have any historical value: to any absence from them is an argument from ‘silence’. What Casey has quoted from the Gospel attributed to John is obviously not silence at all, but something which fits conveniently into the narrative and theology of the Gospel attributed to John.
Carr quotes Casey, “Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again” and Carr comments “Yep, another argument from silence”.
Again, this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the first part of the argument is not silence at all. The rest simply complements the total implausibility of John’s account.
The rest of Carr’s allegations that Casey’s arguments are from silence are of the same kind. For example, he quotes Casey: “It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon , yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts.” And Carr comments: “Another argument from silence”.
This too is nor an argument from silence as that is normally understood. If John’s story were true, we need to know what happened to the plot against Lazarus. Casey fitted the story into Johannine theology, and that is not ‘silence’. That Lazarus is absent from the main primary sources underlines the fact that the account of him in a late secondary sources are entirely secondary. That is what Casey argues and I am representing his argument. Can Carr not recover from the fundamentalist concept which believes that all ‘scripture’ is inerrant? For that is needed Randi’s amazing wand perhaps? That’s it, no more clowns. Entertainment with more serious things are generally more inspiring and fruitful. :-)
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Jerusalem Talmud Ketubot 11:1 and the Mishna, Avot 1:1; Talmud Yevamot 21a, per Leviticus 18:3 and the whole ethos of dissuasion concerning departing from the ways of the community would indicate that a plot against Jesus for violating a tomb is not implausible in the Lazarus situation. It is perfectly plausible; indeed, in sources like the Toldoth Yeshu, the accusation against Jesus for such feats is given explicitly as the reason he is executed as a mamzer (bastard) and magician. The Yorah Deah requires that the body be buried “in the earth” and must not be disturbed. This is at least implicitly a scandal in the resurrection stories as well, where pains are taken despite inconsistencies to suggest that no one disturbed the grave (e.g., “moved the stone.”) And these are the people assigning Bayes values to their assumptions?
Reply
steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I know curiosity killed the cat but I have an insatiable instinct and the latest comment is too funny to pass. Neil once likened me to a ‘vampire’ so I’d better not mention appetites. But I must stop the irresistible urge to peek at what nonsense continues to be repeated. Maybe I keep looking to check it’s actually true – true that they lack all sense of comprehension not only of Casey’s work, but my representation of it, and pour personal attacks against our characters as a substitute for honest analysis.
Today, I’m apparently ‘fretting’ Neil claims, at what is being written on Vridar. I can only imagine this is another example of psychological projection of someone projecting their unwanted emotions onto others. But it’s ironic because it’s more my numb astonishment at what he and his friends continue to say. He even quotes my comment but doesn’t even represent what I wrote and misses completely the fact that I am representing Casey’s arguments and not endorsing his views or even putting forward my own hypothesis, yet he attributes all Casey’s arguments (which he doesn’t understand) to me. He cannot understand the fact that not only do we critical scholars disagree on many points which we can debate and discuss, but that the ability to disagree is what critical scholarship is about and how we make progress in forming and improving hypotheses. And the rhetorical accusation of ‘circular reasoning, begging the question, special pleading’ is nothing more meaningful than a demonstration that he doesn’t know what they mean, or I mean, or Casey means, or even Professor Hoffmann, who Neil accuses of “vacuous approval”.
He still insists I contradict Professor Hoffmann but cannot produce the evidence to demonstrate how or where the contradiction lies in Casey’s argument (which Neil continually attributes to me) and refuses to entertain the fact that when Professor Hoffmann has points of disagreement we can debate those respectfully and fruitfully without resorting to personal attacks. The yet again Neil invents one of his ridiculous little analogies and says “trying to reason with steph is like Alice trying to get sense out of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
It amuses me that that they constantly refer to a PhD student at Nottingham University, sometimes identifying that person with me, yet they seem to have no understanding of what is involved in independent research or why I travelled 12000 miles to work with a critical scholar who has an internationally acknowledged particular expertise in Aramaic. They have no idea it seems that I spend far more time with colleagues who are working in my field, and they are from other British, European and Antipodean universities including scholars sometimes in America. And Carr announces also today, that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ by Maurice Casey is not on the reading list for undergraduates. I don’t know what courses they offer in the Nottingham department for undergraduates and whether such a book would be useful, but it’s ridiculous to expect a book published in 2010 to be on everybody’s reading list. When I was an undergraduate I investigated and read new research myself in addition to what was on generally limited reading lists. Carr’s silly little comment is as ignorant as it is misleading and malicious.
They certainly have no respect or comprehension for the use made of interdisciplinary expertise by the best critical scholarship today. Casey has benefited from the recent expertise of scholars such as Justin Meggitt and Howard Keir. Keir is a qualified medic including cure of psychosomatic illnesses and has read himself into the anthropology of medicine which means he understands how traditional healers could heal some of the things he could heal. Carr just rubbishes him and thereby rejects any possible value that his contribution to critical inquiry might have, which is slightly ironic.
God only knows what methods they apply – they’re a mess to untangle. I suggest we have a bonfire and attract all the ‘tics’ to a bright flaming fire. Falstaff had a remedy to bring to the celebration which will inevitably increase the numbness but reduce the astonishment and replace it with glee and plain ordinary happy…
Reply
steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Even the British Library which is bound by law to have a free copy of every book published in England, has not yet received a copy of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ published late 2010 … and Carr expects it to be on everyone’s reading list?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 14, 2011 at 6:19 pm
Well, this is a situation where we invoke teachers. The role of the pupil is to surpass the teacher, as Porphyry did Plotinus when the word “education” meant what it said (educare). I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier (how’s his Aramaic?) and Godfrey et al. can’t have opinions, and not that they do not have the right to sniff out the amateurism and parochial interests of scholars who cannot distinguish between apologetic and inquiry. Yet pure skepticism is not a method, and now the amateurism of the critics is becoming embarrassing–I hope for them as well. I will not names names, but I am speaking of people who haven’t even mastered English grammar and are holding forth as skeptical NT blogmeisters. I have nothing against autodidacts except that it’s the academic equivalent of autoeroticism. Good scholarship like good sex needs additional, expert validation.
Reply
The Unhelpful Way In Which The . . . Debate Has Moved (Or, attempting to understand why the misrepresentations from Hoffmann, McGrath, et al?) « Vridar says:
July 15, 2011 at 4:19 am
[...] (my time) Dr R. Joseph Hoffmann wrote: I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier [...]
Reply
steph
July 15, 2011 at 11:23 am
Godfrey can’t even understand the procedure between book publication and the realities of university syllabuses, reading lists and the existence of publications in libraries, yet he is a librarian. He misrepresents everything, including independent scholarship, and the whole idea that he can classify a rather diverse group of differently qualified people, independent of each other, into something called ‘mainstream scholarship’ is ludicrous.
Godfrey has distorted Professor Hoffmann’s comment. Professor Hoffmann is accused of chiming in, emphasising that his distaste is more for the grammar than the arguments. This is not a representation of what he wrote. Professor Hoffmann wrote “people who haven’t even mastered English grammar…” which is not the same as saying that grammar is more important than the arguments. He offered no approval let alone a ‘vacuous’ one. He merely noted his mutual despair at the ludicrous affair which has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously and implied Casey was more of an expert in Aramaic. What is important is the fact that expert validation is missing in the blogging world.
I never suggested in a blog comment that a medical explanation increases the likelihood of the scene being historical. I didn’t even endorse Casey’s particular argument, which involves a complex web of arguments including Aramaisms and so forth, and not merely the idea that psychosomatic cures are plausible. What I did was criticise Carr for rejecting outright the usefulness of Keir Howard’s expertise and rejecting the usefulness of his expert interdisciplinary research for historical inquiry. And so it goes on and on and on, and it will continue to go on and on, and it is very dull.
I don’t endorse the group of bloggers who blog against mythicists and I don’t endorse those who represent mythicist views. In fact I don’t pay much serious attention at all because it’s all such a mixture of the incestuous, mutually self supporting bloggers, feeding off each other’s absolute skepticism, with bloggers who lack the ability to differentiate between apologetic and critical scholarship. With the non existence of expert peer review or validation, all extremes are embarrassing to critical enquiry and quite honestly I can’t afford this time. I have better things to do, such as genuine constructive inquiry with positive and fruitful debate, and more inspiring conversation.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 15, 2011 at 11:58 am
My reference to those who have not mastered English grammar pronouncing on arguments and conclusions that require a high degree of philological competence in ancient languages (as well) is what it is. Like a rose. But surely, since grammar and syntax are also the building blocks for argument, what can possibly be the sense of making such an absurd separation? Personally, I care about grammar because it is intricately associated with thought and the assessment of grammatical expressions and orderly representation of ideas. The internet by its very nature undermines this and specializes in blurts, intellectual spasms and half-thought out ideas. It’s also a great “leveler” of opinion, where pundits have to deal with enthusiasts.
Reply
steph
July 15, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Precisely – you can’t have one without the other. A double-edged sword but better a rose, because it’s beautiful duality, not ferocious. It has reminded me of this (but not this particular recording which isn’t the one I’m listening to). The perfection of its passionate completeness.
Reply
kiloxray
July 17, 2011 at 5:14 am
Steph,
I have never come across someone who actually seems to specialize in pathetic, unadulterated, insolent whining.
Will that be the dissertation for your Ph.D?
Reply
steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:50 am
Infuriating woo woo. I wonder how he managed to earn a phd in maths. He doesn’t demonstrate clear headed logical thinking at all. Analagomaniac woo. And he’s conceited beyond belief. Poppy.
Reply
steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:51 am
not for moderation. just browsing.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 25, 2012 at 5:06 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Several colleagues will be responding on this site in a week to claims made by atheist blogger and amateur “logician” Richard Carrier concerning the historical Jesus (contra Bart Ehrman) and his abuse of Bayes’s theorem. In the meantime, this from 2011.
Reply
steph
March 25, 2012 at 7:54 am
Applying Bayes theorem to texts is like applying a banana to an air valve to pump up a tyre. Imposing post enlightenment views of history and myth onto ancient storytelling cultures is anachronistic nonsense.
Reply
Robert
March 26, 2012 at 5:28 am
One wouldn’t apply Bayes theorem to texts. One would apply Bayes theorem to assumptions made about the texts.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:34 pm
How does that work l exactly @ Robert as the assumptions have to be based on content?
Leo
March 25, 2012 at 8:09 pm
I think maybe Godel applies to the way Carrier is attempting to use Bayes. Just because we can ask the question, doesn’t mean there’s an answer.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
March 25, 2012 at 11:02 pm
Hoffmann seems to create somewhat of a straw man between literalists and skeptics with himself presented as the “white knight” who knows the sweet spot. Had he confined his comments to Carrier and Bayes, with perhaps a sidebar into Carrier’s Gnu Atheist connections via CFI, he might well have had something stronger. But, he doesn’t.
Reply
Jim Lippard
March 29, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Leo: I strongly suspect not. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are often misused by trying to apply them where they do not have any relevance, to make erroneous claims of impossibility. Check out Torkel Franzen’s book, Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, for a guide to many of the things that are popularly, but incorrectly, said to be entailed by the theorems.
Reply
Bernard Muller
March 29, 2012 at 8:42 pm
I have been banging my head on how Carrier used the Bayes theorem for “the brother of the Lord”. That looks irregular to me mathematically, but more important is the data (generated by his biased opinion) he used and how he manipulated it before being fed into his equation. And the Bayes theorem can only be used with a set of data with a certain relationship between the factors, which seems to be absent in this case.
Carrier always appeals to logic & math, but the Bayes theorem is only a front for his bullying statement “all Christians were “brothers of the Lord”” , based on Carrier own theological extrapolation.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 12:38 am
Bernard is right. “Bullying assumptions” made by force majeure are then used to establish values that tilt the outcome in the directions of the presumption. The evidence for “all Christians being brothers in the Lord” is based on sources that are fraught with controversy and further subdivide into three different problems from different periods: The gospels do not use or envisage the convention; the use of the phrase in Paul is subordinate to his preoccupation with apostleship, which in turn presupposes a hierarchical rather than “adelphic” model; and the Acts though not pivoting from Paul’s personal crisis imagines this hierarchical model already to be in place and defends it. We have no idea how pervasive was the idea of brethren and brotherhood was as a term of personal usage, just extrapolations based on inferences, e.g., the fact that Tertullian in the third century defends Christians from the charge of incest & cannibalism may arise from pagan misunderstanding of the term, but we have no idea that this is what pagans thought. Moreover, in some house churches, the biological relationship clearly would have preceded any metaphorical usage and might have arisen by extension, and if so it is disjunctive from any special usage that would have arisen in the Jerusalem church or in relation to e.g. James. Paul refers to tines apo Iakabou interfering with his message, not brothers, so it cannot be true that “brothers” was standard usage that would nullify any form of literal biological relationship–indeed, the assumption itself makes no sense at all. Assumptions in, assumptions out, and Bayes can’t make them good ones, let alone “facts.” Carrier wants to dispense with the James tradition because it is inconvenient, for reasons not unlike its inconvenience to the Catholic doctrine of Mary. Maybe he should try to sell Bayes to the Vatican. Or apply Bayes to the assumptions made by used car salesmen, which are far fewer than the ones we have to deal with in the study of the gospels.
Reply
steph
March 30, 2012 at 9:14 am
Apart from mathematical formulae devised to ascertain mathematical probability, being inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical probably and therefore irrelevant to historical texts, he doesn’t have a structured method of application, but worse, he is dealing with mixed material, some of which is primary, much of which is secondary, legendary, myth mixed accretion. He has no method of distinguishing the difference and this renders his Bayes a complete muddle. But as you say, it’s convenient to dispose of inconvenient tradition and he is under the illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific language to conclusions he is determined to ‘prove’. And he claims to have ‘proved’… such an anomaly to reliable and credible critical scholarship of history.
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Exactly, he takes the text as given rather than composite and chronologically and ideologically composite. Partly because he dismisses tradition criticism, partly because he is just a lousy historian.
http://tinyurl.com/imeaward17609
January 23, 2013 at 11:02 pm
Just what exactly truly stimulated you to post “π -ness
Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes�s Theorem � The New Oxonian”?
I reallydefinitely enjoyed reading it! Thanks a lot ,Trista
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Jihad and Genocide
by rjosephhoffmann
Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz was the seminal work of theological reflection on the Holocaust in the 1960′s. Imbued with the spirit of Rubenstein’s teacher Paul Tillich, it was also the book that turned my attention from philosophy and literary studies to religion after Rubenstein arrived at Florida State University from Harvard.
After a half century of reflection on the situation of Israel, he paints a bleak picture for the prospects of a pan-Middle Eastern peace, associated with the persistent demand for jihad against the Jews among the youngest and strongest voices in the Islamic world.
...Shortly after 9/11, the late Daniel Barnard, Ambassador of France to the United Kingdom, declared at a private London gathering, that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel.”
What is seldom discussed publicly by the Western elites who see Israel’s demise as the solution to the problems of the Middle East is the likely fate of Israel’s Jews were the Muslim ever to achieve that objective. One reason for the reticence may be a pervasive amnesia concerning why so many Jews came to Israel in the first place. Starting in the eighteen-eighties, there was a direct correlation between the rise of European anti-Semitism and the decision of so many Jews to uproot themselves and migrate to Palestine. Read on…
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Richard L. Rubenstein is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Bridgeport and Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Jewish theology, the Holocaust and other issues including After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, The Cunning of History, My Brother Paul and Dissolving Alliance: The United States and the Future of Europe and Jihad and Genocide (2010).
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Published: June 8, 2011
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Tags: After Auschwitz : Arab Israeli conflict : Death of God : genocide : Holocaust : Richard L. Rubenstein : Six Day War : Tillich ..
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Parable of the Dumb Lawyer
by rjosephhoffmann
A few years ago I participated in a colloquium at UCLA that included, besides myself, two other academics who studied various aspects of the origins of Christianity, and a lawyer, somewhat unjustifiably famous for battling “religious theists” [sic]. The latter category he habitually referred to as “religion” or “supernaturalism,” which in his head amounted to the same thing.
Lawyer
With a kind of cocksureness that always comes naturally to the malinformed, he told me minutes before delivering his spiel that he welcomed the opportunity to “set these religion scholars straight.” I muttered something agreeable about the nature of scholarship–always being a willingness to accept correction, though privately I have always thought that Jesus’ words about lawyers are among the wisest things he is ever reckoned to have said.
At the end of his discussion, the three of us sat quietly. Carol Backhos, a UCLA professor of Judaic Studies, who had kept track of the number of times the speaker had equated religion and supernaturalism in his talk, asked him fairly pointedly what he thought the three of us did to earn a living. Her implication was that if our work corresponded to what he thought we did, we should not be permitted near the gates of a university.
Reuven Firestone, a leading expert on medieval Judaism and Islam, pressed him a bit further, asking whether he could make the distinction between “supernaturalism” as a view of the world that could only have become intelligible in modernity, especially through science, and a view of the world that would not have included it–indeed would have been unintelligible–even to educated people–prior to the “dawn” of science. He asked especially about Spinoza’s view on the self-contradictoriness of miracles as proof of God, as an illustration.
Baruch
As the hapless panel moderator, my final word was that he (the lawyer) should understand that “providentialim” and “supernaturalism” are useful to historians only in charting superficial descriptions in history, and that all serious historians share a methodological disbelief in ghosts, spirits, fate, kairos, gods and divinities causing anything to happen. Consider, I tamely said, that in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of the name Julius Caesar dies in Act III but is still considered causative as a literary device until the end: “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!/ Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords/ In our own proper entrails (5.3.94-96).” (Most students of historiography know the problem as Caesar’s ghost–explaining something that really happens in terms of forces you know aren’t really there but may be in the minds of people with a different disposition towards cause and effect.) Supernaturalism, I said, is not a word that scholars often use as equivalent to religion in modern study and not even a likely descriptor that a religious person would use about himself.
For different reasons, mainly related to discussions of scientific naturalism as a term in need of an opposite, philosophers sometimes revert to it and an older generation of anthropologists used it “descriptively.” Historians, on the other hand, have been ferociously critical of its use.
E B Tylor: The Bogeyman theory of religion
The lawyer mumbled something unhelpful and sat down, plausibly thinking that the scholars had not learned much about religion from him.
Those of us who teach the study of religion at college level battle two assumptions: first, the assumption of many students that courses in religion are religious–hearkening back to an era of undertrained divinity school-trained lecturers who were very often protestant ministers themselves; and second, the often grotesque ignorance of our colleagues in the academy, and not just in the sciences, about what is actually studied in a religious studies curriculum. Academic apartheid is another name for what universities call “disciplines.”
I have no statistic to prove the following point, but I would guess that courses bearing the “Religious Studies” label are probably among the least understood in the average college catalogue. And it isn’t the fault of students or colleagues in other disciplines that this is the case. Religious studies “professionals” are sometimes the worst spokesmen when it comes to explaining what they are doing in the classroom, inviting the suspicion that they are doing priestcraft and witchery and alchemy instead of more useful subjects. Or perhaps, though I hope not, this reluctance to explain, defend and inform comes from the esoteric nature of religion itself.
Beyond this, some of the best programs in the field, such as the longstanding one at the University of Chicago, share a common designation with the worst, such as the ones at self-described ‘Christian” universities like Liberty in Virginia or Oral Roberts in Oklahoma–and these, alas, are not the worst examples of Christian apologetics masquerading as serious academic study. Einstein once said of the physics of his generation that “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.” In religious studies both the means and the aims are often not made clear.
So who can blame our lawyer friend for being confused? I sometimes like to say to advanced students taking methodology or historiography courses that religions are morphologically similar and anatomically different. They exhibit common structural features in widely divergent ways. Some have priesthoods, some have brotherhoods, others only monks or congregants, others only inquirers. They meet in churches, mosques, tents, open fields, temples and not at all. They resound in highly structured public celebrations, ecstatic and emotional outbursts, and total silence. They base their practices on sacred books, private revelations, only conscience, believe in one God, thousands, and none, and produce codes ranging from axioms and laws to questions and puzzles. Some see a complete rift between the world of experience and the world in which a divine spirit suffuses reality. Some believe these worlds are continuous or periodical. Some see the natural world as the only world there is.
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinte space, – all mean egoism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal Being circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God (R. W. Emerson, Nature)
There have been famous attempts to solidify structural points of similarity in religion, notably by scholars like Ninian Smart and anthropologist Clifford Geertz–both of whose contributions are indispensable reading for anyone who really wants to know about the nature of religion at a methodological level. But the “essence” of religion is notoriously difficult to capture and even harder to describe. A lot of what we do in a first year religious studies course is giggle at definitions proposed by well-intentioned scholars a hundred years ago. Here, to save space, they will be nameless.
Smart thought that religions (“religion” is a less adequate collective noun) express themselves in seven more or less discrete ways which he labeled “dimensions”: experiential, emotional, pratical, ritual, legal, and mythic (or narrative) forms. By this he simply meant that religions tell stories (myths) that either stem from or result in practices that satisfy an emotional need or moral situation. In some cases, they claim that this story is rooted in history: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam do this. In other cases, especially in the Asian traditions, the seminal stories may just be stories–myths whose meaning lay in their ability to form a cohesive community–a church, or some other institutional structure dedicated to propagating the values and teachings of a particular faith. A religion’s success or failure is the aggregate of the way in which the dimensions contribute to its survival.
Ninian Smart
Smart also believed that there were competing worldviews that were not strictly speaking religious but which satisfied the same objectives and exhibited many of the same dimensions. These secular worldviews included nationalism with its myth of the history of a nation (often highly mythologized for politial purposes over centuries–Roma Aeterna, Mother Russia, Pioneer America, Albion.) Political and economic philosophies, like Marxism and capitalism, also exhibited many of the same characteristics, especially with respect to the essentially conservative (i.e. tradition-preserving) nature of the institutions and legal systems such philosophies create.
Certain parts of Smart’s “seven-dimensions” seem a bit strained in the contemporary context, but they still represent a useful conceptual entry-level model for coping with the complex characteristics that “religion” exhibits.
Descriptively, the better models were proposed by Clifford Geertz (who died in 2006 at the age of eighty) and whose work on the etiology of culture has been priceless for all areas of the field of religious studies. Focusing more on family resemblances and what he termed “thick descriptions” (comprehensive analysis of why people do what they do, rather than, as Smart, the fact that they do it), Geertz saw religion and ritual essentially as ”The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, [something] evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs…”
Geertz
Any attempt to make sense of the term “religion” after Geertz that does not take the functionalist approach into account, even if it does not depend on it, is simply deficient. The same would be true of the essential work of Michael Gilsenan (NYU) on Islam, and a former “superior” of mine at Heidelberg, Gerd Theissen on the sociology of early Christian communities. Theissen is especially interesting as an example of a scholar who sees his primary work as that of a theologian trying to grapple with the approaches sociology has imposed upon various inquiries into the beginnings of the Christian church.
I have often complained on this blog about the way in which otherwise well-spoken people such as my lawyer-friend use terms like “religion,” “superstition,” and ”supernaturalism” as though the analysis of these terms reached a dead-end in the ninetenth century, when science dethroned theology and the Church seemed not to notice. In fact religion only began to be understood in the nineteenth century, and science–or rather methods of investigation common to a scientific and skeptical outlook–helped us to do it.
What is less commonly understood is that much of what made the reign of science possible in the first place are theological programs of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (and habits of inquiry that go back much further in time) that cleaned the house of “supernaturalist” thinking in the interest of saving a ship that was sinking in the sea of modernity. The names, ideas and work of the men and women who participated in that project are almost (but not quite) as deserving of mention as names like Darwin and Faraday.
F D Maurice
I can tell you that it is increasingly embarrassing to see that the ineffectiveness of people in my own field in explaining what they do for a living to people unacquainted with the basic Wissenschaft in religious studies has now resulted in a debate that would be far more interesting if people would update it from 1765 to 2011. There is simply no excuse for dumb lawyers anymore.
Daumier: Two Lawyers
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Published: June 10, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: anthropology EB Tylor : anthropology of religion : atheism : Christianity : Comparative religion : Geertz : historiography : history of religion : Judaism : lawyers : Ninian Smart : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Religion: study of : Shakespeare : sociology of religion : UCLA ..
72 Responses to “The Parable of the Dumb Lawyer”
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Herb Van Fleet
June 10, 2011 at 4:14 pm
“The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”
— Clarence Darrow
Reply
s. wallerstein
June 10, 2011 at 5:22 pm
Lawyers are trained to win their cases, while philosophers supposedly seek the truth.
Your lawyer friend was arguing a case; he probably expected you to be arguing one too. He may not even grasp that not everyone has a case to argue.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 10, 2011 at 5:28 pm
That is certainly true. Wouldn’t you want it therefore to be persuasive?
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s. wallerstein
June 10, 2011 at 5:29 pm
Maybe he was punching above his weight, as they say.
Leo Cooper
June 11, 2011 at 11:44 pm
i aspire to not argue with any one, take the best and leave the rest. Persuit of truth, yes, indeed, even for a genuine enquirer it can be convenient or otherwise depending on ones agenda. Waste of space.
It would be in the interests of stability for one to be held accountable for what they espouse.
Talk is cheep and only too often amounts to little aside from feeding ego centric enterprise
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steph
June 10, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Excellent post! I get pretty frustrated when people who should know better consistently refer to the beliefs of religious people as ‘supernatural’. If anyone refers to them in such a way again, I might do something which will result in me needing a lawyer… and a lawyer may end up causing me to re-offend. Dick the Butcher said ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’…
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Herb Van Fleet
June 11, 2011 at 11:53 am
Spoken like a true academic. As far as I know “Supernatural” is not a term of art. Therefore, when used by “people who should know better” to mean religion, one supposes they are not in an academic setting and that their interest is more about communication than etymology. Just saying . . .
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steph
June 11, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Herb :) No not really. Supernatural is just not the word to describe the beliefs of religious people at all – it never has been in my environments. It would have been insulting to people of different religious faiths. It’s generally used by people being derogatory about religious beliefs – but it doesn’t actually reflect what those religious beliefs are. It’s insulting to religious people and it seems to be implying that natural is to supernatural as science is to magic. It’s miscommunication and it would be helpful if people criticising religion stopped using it. On the other hand, I think the dreamy surrealist art of those such as Salvidore Dali conveys alot of fantastical and supernatural images. :)
ken
June 11, 2011 at 1:50 pm
It all goes to confirm one of the great psychological insights in the history of the species….Maslow’s Golden Hammer, namely…if the only tool you have to work with is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.
Herb Van Fleet
June 11, 2011 at 1:40 pm
“Supernatural” from http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=supernatural:
▸ noun: supernatural forces and events and beings collectively (“She doesn’t believe in the supernatural”)
▸ adjective: not existing in nature or subject to explanation according to natural laws; not physical or material (“Supernatural forces and occurrences and beings”)
The term may be taken as derogatory by some religionists, however, based on the definition above, which is more or less the same in the dictionaries I checked, there are circumstances in which its use is entirely appropriate and accurate. Now, I suppose you could use the definition itself without the word, but that would be kinda silly don’t ya think?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 12, 2011 at 8:23 am
@ Herb, with all due respect, no one is arguing the word doesn’t have a dictionary definition or a history. The point is about its usefulness as a synonym for religion. Just sayin’…
Steersman
July 10, 2012 at 7:47 pm
@ Joseph,
The point is about [supernatural’s] usefulness as a synonym for religion. Just sayin’…
Its usefulness to who? Academics and theologians? Or the hoi polloi? If the latter had the same “methodological disbelief in ghosts, spirits, fate, kairos, gods and divinities causing anything to happen” as the former do then fundamentalism wouldn’t be the problem that it is in America and the rest of the world.
Proof? The last survey from the fairly credible, I think, Pew Forum indicates that some 60% of Americans think that their “holy” books are the “Word of God, literally true word for word” (33%) or “Word of God, but not literally true word for word”. In addition their assertion ( Q.39b) that “Angels and demons are active in the world” is completely agreed with by some 40% of the subjects and “mostly agreed” with by a further 28%. No wonder the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described the situation as an “intellectual disaster” – a train wreck waiting to happen.
Maybe it’s time that “serious historians” and company realize that what is carrying the rather problematic freight on some seriously rickety tracks is a freight train and not a goods one.
steph
June 11, 2011 at 1:59 pm
PS Herb :) I should clarify why ‘supernatural’ as a description of belief is insulting to religious people. It is insulting because it is untrue. Alot of religion is even described as ‘secular’ with religious people writing and talking about ‘Secular Christianity’: Christianity without miracles and with a purely human ‘Jesus’. Popular Christian theology includes titles such as ‘Christianity without ‘God”. This exists quietly even in America but only fundamentalisms speak loudly. I wrote a short piece a couple of weeks ago, with examples of religious ideas from written work and conversation with Christians, in order to demonstrate the diversity of religious belief. The term ‘God’ covers all sorts of ideas which have nothing to do with an anthropomorphic existing being, let alone one which interrupts history. For example, Lloyd Geering writes:
“For me “God” is a useful symbol, inherited from the past, to refer to that meaning, to those values I find to be supreme and to those goals I feel myself called to aspire. So when I say “I believe in God, I mean something like this “God” is the symbol which holds together in a unity all my bits of knowledge about the world and all the virtues I have come to value such as love, justice, compassion.”
Supernaturalism is inappropriate for a lot of literate religious people because a god who influences the natural order of things is not their view.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 12, 2011 at 2:38 pm
OK, let me take one more shot at this. I understand, though, that the best way of derailing an otherwise interesting discussion is to devolve into a debate over semantics.
That said, I live in the bible belt where God and the Supernatural are inseparable. So, when prayers are offered, even by non-fundamentalists, the idea is to ask a supernatural being for a supernatural act to, say, heal the sick, or to keep from dying, or to help win the big game on Saturday night. And, in the absence of any other obvious cause, a “miracle” is seen almost universally as proof of a supernatural act.
Whether used openly or not, the term is implicit in and understood as part of a belief system shared by literally billions of people around th world. Even we non-believers use it as a qualifier to say what we don’t believe!
None of us can presuppose what’s in the minds of the religious. But common sense says that the idea of “supernatural” is as ubiquitous and as it is unambiguous. But, those religious folks (both of them) whose beliefs exclude the notion of the supernatural have only to say so and we can go on from there; no parsing, no hair-splitting, we get it.
So, again, the term may be a subject for inquiry in a scholastic or academic setting, but the average man and woman on the street don’t really give a flip. Religion and the supernatural are inexorably intertwined in their minds. Even the mystics and the spiritualists seek answers that are transcendent and outside the material world. Sure, a few, a very few, might be offended. But, as Clark Gable famously said to Vivien Leigh, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Reply
steph
June 13, 2011 at 10:13 am
My sympathies with you as always Herb for living in that strange Bible Belty world. But the point is their views don’t reflect the views of religious believers throughout the rest of the world. It’s not a debate about semantics. It just doesn’t describe the religious beliefs of people not in your street. And I do ‘give a damn’ and a ‘flip’ and it’s not about ‘hair-splitting’ to describe things accurately and not impose views on other people that they don’t have. Literate religious people all over the world do not believe in things or gods which influence the natural order of things. That isn’t in their view. The Bible Belt and other places of fundamentalisms aren’t the whole world. It’s not academic – it’s just about living and talking and listening to religious people. I like Ken’s reference to the consequence of only having a hammer as your tool and beginning to think everything looks like nail. It isn’t.
Herb Van Fleet
June 13, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Steph, I really don’t understand why you are such an apologist for whatever these religious groups are that don’t believe or have faith in something that a reasonable and literate person would consider supernatural. The only one I can think of is the religion of science. So, please specify the religions you are talking about so that when use religion in the context of the supernatural or any of its synonyms, I can then qualify my remarks by excluding those religions that don’t believe that way and thereby avoid hurting their feelings.
Anyway, I’ll make you a deal. Most reasonably intelligent, and even minimally educated people, use the terms “sunrise” and ‘sunset,” all the time knowing full well that the sun does neither. The better terms are “dawn” and “dusk.” Come to think of it, sunrise and sunset kind of imply supernatural events, don’t they? So, that would fit in here perfectly, wouldn’t it? Anyway, I think this would be a good project for your Universal Church of Hermeneutics. Hopefully, you won’t offend anybody in the doing.
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steph
June 13, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Christianity outside the Bible Belt. All the religious people around me. Religious people in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark… I could go on. Secular Christianity too, which exists all over the world. I’m an apologist for nobody. I’m interested in accuracy. I don’t think ‘science’ is infallible either. I don’t understand why you seem to require ‘specifics’ and literal dogmatic definitions. I don’t understand either why you insist on a term that is about the most unhelpful and inaccurate term I can think of to describe the wide and diverse religious ideas. Non fundamentalist religious people don’t generally define things that way. That’s just it you see – most religious people are either fairly agnostic, or open minded with evolving views. As my views evolve too. We learn and we grow and we change opinions and we tend to avoid dogmatism. I don’t make deals of that sort either and don’t quite see any proposal of a fruitful project. I say ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ and religious people talk about ‘God’ and none of us necessarily have ‘supernatural’ beliefs. And the UCHS is not that sort of church. It’s just a free thinking open worldview, eternally suspicious of all forms of dogmatism. :D
Ed Jones
June 11, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Natural v/s Supnaturalism a perspective from science.
“As long as we insist on identifying “understanding” with “rational explanation” of the sort familiar in science, we will inevitably end up with (the unexplained). There will always be mystery at the end of the universe. Can we make sense of the universe without (the unexplained)? Is there a route to knowledge – even “ultimate knowledge” – that lies outside the road of rational scientific inquiry and logical reasoning? Many people claim there is. It is called mysticism. Most scientists (as well as Christian theologians) have a deep mistrust of mysticism. This is not surprising, as mystical thought lies at the opposite extreme to rational though. In fact, many of the world’s finest thinkers, including some notable scientists such as Einstein, Pauli, Schrodnger, Haiesnberg, Eddington, and Jeans have all espoused mystecism. We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation, by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek such an explanation in the first place. If we are to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of “understanding” from that of rational explanation. Possibility the mystical path is a way to such understanding. Maybe such expeiences provide the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosophyncan take us, the only route possile path to the Ultimate.
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Ed Jones
June 13, 2011 at 10:12 am
The last two paragraphs of The Mind of God by Paul Davies.
“- – through science, we human beings are able to grasp at least some of nature’s secrets. We have cracked part of the cosmic code. Why this should be, just why Homo sapiens should cary the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma. We, who are children of the universe – animated stardust – can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules on which it runs. How we have become linked into this cosmic dimension is a mystery. Yet the linkage cannot be denied
What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such privilege? I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidential blip in the great drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of a mind on some planet in the unoiverse is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated consciousness. This can be no trivial detail. no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.”
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Leo Cooper
June 11, 2011 at 11:30 pm
Supernaturalism is alive and well for me as per usual, there being more in heaven and on earth that a mortal mind can digest and hold in a singular moment. Directing attention to the phenomena to Edgar Cayce who’m I understand to have emited (via collective conciousness relatively untainted proof devoid of the influences of egocentric aspirations. How grand might one facilitate them selves to be by their own effort ? Academia and what ever other instrument comes to little with regard to aspirations in the grand scheme of things
Reply
Ed Jones
June 12, 2011 at 10:11 am
The above quote is from Paul Davies “The
Mind of God” should anyone care to know.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 12, 2011 at 10:41 am
Thank you Ed. I know the book; very nice quotation.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 12, 2011 at 10:53 am
Can I recommend three books, one a classic, one ok, the other risible. In philosophical terms, Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World * Process and Reality is still worth a read. I have never bought into process philosophy per se, but D R Griffin’s Re-enchantment without Supernaturalism at least drags the term under the magnifying glass, and showing its age badly in the light of modern anthropology and enlarged studie sof reality is Kurt Segilmann’s 1969 Magic, Superaturalism and Religion. I think it is is hard to contradict the notion that supernaturalism as a term is a reductio ad absurdum for many people who dislike religion. In polemic, I don’t think I have any firm objection to its use. In analysis, I do. I haven’t yet read a book I ordered about a month ago, the author Upton Sinclair’s The Profits of Religion: A Study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege (1947). It sounds sexy and seems to reflect the Tendenz I’m describing.
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Ed Jones
June 12, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Ooops! A comment intended as a follow-up to my June 11 commen was mistakenly posted on Philosophys Search for the Immutable.
I have no explanation for this – an old age quirk.
Thanks Joe,your comment is of specal interest.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 13, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Steph, Steph, Steph, what are we going to do with you? I asked you to list those religions that have beliefs which do not include anything that remotely smacks of the supernatural, and you give me a list of countries where religion is less dominate than here in the U.S. You want accuracy, but then you don’t deliver.
And that takes us back to the semantic wrestling mat, trying to come up with acceptable meanings for “God,” “Supreme Being,” “Afterlife,” “Spirituality,” and even “Religion” itself, and whether any of those terms can be reasonably construed to include the concept of something like “Supernatural.” But, I think, or at least I hope, that ship has already sailed.
Also, I never insisted on using “literal dogmatic definitions.” That is your characterization. On the contrary, one of your earlier comments was, “Supernatural is just not the word to describe the beliefs of religious people at all – it never has been in my environments. It would have been insulting to people of different religious faiths.” Well, that is your opinion and I respect that, but please don’t tell me what words I should or should not use in the context of religion. I hope you would respect me in that regard. Disagreement I can handle. Disapproval I won’t stand for.
You say, “most religious people are either fairly agnostic, or open minded with evolving views.” My response here is that, if true, then they are no longer “religious” people and they shouldn’t be using that label because it’s misleading and, in your world, inaccurate. Speaking of which, the terms “sunset” and “sunrise” are also inaccurate, antiquated, dogmatic even.
Anyway, we can just agree to disagree and move on. If we keep this up Dr. H will probably start hitting us with a surcharge for taking up so much of his cyberspace.
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s. wallerstein
June 13, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Herb and Steph:
You are talking past each other.
Herb is talking about the literal content of religious beliefs: for example, the belief that there is a Being called God and that God is loving.
Steph is talking about the way most religious people, outside the Bible belt where Herb resides (and outside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, too, I imagine) hold those beliefs: not literally, agnostically, with a certain skepticism, as metaphors, etc.
Reply
steph
June 13, 2011 at 9:19 pm
I don’t know who the ‘we’ is that doesn’t know what ‘to do’ with me. But I agree with Joe that it’s about it’s usefulness as a synonym for religion and I know that Herb is talking about religion in his American environment, particularly the Bible Belt, and I have been trying to make it clear that religion in the rest of the world is not like it is there. There is no list of religions because all these religious ideas fall quite comfortably under the general category of Christianity and even Judaism. And yes Sam, you’re absolutely right :-)
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steph
June 14, 2011 at 9:40 am
I should add that while I’m not in favour of ridicule, the term specifically used in relationship to Bible Belty fundamentalisms is no more objectionable than those fundamentalisms. Used polemically there, is not my concern. However the term applied to religious believers in the rest of the western world is the same sort of thing as calling apples, oranges. When we refer to sunrise and sunset, everybody understands what we mean so it’s not a useful analogy, to illustrate the use of a term which leads to the opposite: complete misunderstanding of religious views throughout the rest of the western world.
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s. wallerstein
June 14, 2011 at 10:56 am
Actually, most of the religious people whom I know in Chile and in the U.S., generally Jews and Catholics, are similar to those Steph mentions: if you question them about the content of their beliefs, they are almost agnostics.
I even taught English once to a group of Chilean, Dutch, and Spanish monks here in Chile, and when I asked them if they “really believed” in some key tenets of Catholicism, Virgin Birth, transubstantiation, they got vague and began to talk about metaphors.
However, I would say that all of my contacts are with educated people, and I’m not at all sure how literally the mass of less educated Catholics see the religious doctrines of the church.
The Jews I know are Reform or Conservative Jews or completely non-affiliated; and the Catholics are social Catholics: that is, they get baptised and married in Church, as well as holding funerals there. They may even send their children to Catholic schools, but when pressed as to what they believe, they often turn out to be deists or pantheists or agnostics. They certainly do not accept Church doctrine about birth control, homosexuality and abortion.
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steph
June 14, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Thank you Sam. People don’t fit into boxes – boxes are for chocolates. :)
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Herb Van Fleet
June 14, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Well, as much as I would like to see this little debate die a merciful death, there are some comments that I must respond to. First and foremost, to say that my understanding of religion is limited to my Christian fundamentalist neighbors is as absurd as it is insulting. As a Humanist, I have spent more time than I would have liked learning about cultures around the world and the religious beliefs within those cultures. But whether your experience is with those who say they are religious, yet have no belief in something supernatural, or whether my experience is with the God-fearing fundies, those positions are irrelevant. We’re talking big picture here, not the stuff out there in the margins.
So, if the core belief of any religion is conditioned upon some aspect of supernaturalism, then that religion, by definition, can be accurately referred to as one which believes in the supernatural. They would include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and any other religion where the belief system involves some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature This is not about believers, this is about beliefs. It makes no difference if certain individuals within those religions have doubts about that belief. The religion itself is not changed by those views. Thereby, “secular religion” is an oxymoron.
And to say that the use of the term supernatural, “leads to the opposite: complete misunderstanding of religious views throughout the rest of the western world” is nonsensical on its face and comes off as little more than insolent hubris. If you want to change the meaning of words to fit your opinion, then your complaint is not with me; it should be aimed at the nice folks at the OED or some similar authority.
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Ed Jones
June 14, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Joe and Steph, however aware you may be of Paul Davies’ The Mind of God, I challenge you both to read again as if for the first time its last two paragraphs, posted above as comment June 13, 10:12 pm (the missplaced comment) as a followup to my June 11th comment. For me it is an irresistibly compelling argument. “- – as long as we insist on identifying “understanding” with “rational explanation” of the sort familiar in science, we will inevitably (yet) end up with the unexplained. We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation, by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek such knowledge in the first place. If we wish to rogreess beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of “undedrstanding” from that of rational explanation. Possibly the mystical path is a way to such understanding. Maybe mystical experience provides the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosohy can take us, the only possible path to the Ultimate.
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steph
June 14, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Thank you Ed. It’s always nice to read Paul Davies again. I still remember reading him for the very first time. I ‘scored’ that title in an auctioned box of books when I was setting up a second hand book shop and it was almost brand new. I read it pretty much from cover to cover without putting it down as far as I remember.
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Ed Jones
June 15, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Steph, but I am forced to raise the concern that your response: “Its always nice to read Paul Davies again” fails to indicate the stark either /or implications of his conclusion: “the universe is no minor byproduct of mindless. purposless forces. We are truly meant to be here” must constitute an unaviodable, irrefutable fact for any free thinker, however fixed one may be to his secular bias, to force the admission as fact that the source and organization of the cosmos is controled by a superintelligence who guides its evolution through quantum prosessses – a diesists understanding of existence. A necessary a proiri belief before one might begin the practice of mystisism which can be learned only by a profound change in consciousness – from a consciousness already conditioned by the habits of sense perceived reality – to proceed from believing to “knowing” – Ultimate knowledge.
Herb Van Fleet
June 15, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Ed, in re your comments on Paul Davies, I’m always leery when I see words like “mindless” and “purposeless.” These are human attributes often projected on the universe or any object of scientific study. It is the “Strong Anthropic “Principle,” which says the universe must have properties that allow humans (sometimes called “intelligent life”) to observe it. But, this argument is fallacious in a number of ways. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Criticisms, “Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Shermer and others claim that the stronger versions of the Anthropic Principle seem to reverse known causes and effects. Gould compared the claim that the universe is fine-tuned for the benefit of our kind of life to saying that sausages were made long and narrow so that they could fit into modern hotdog buns, or saying that ships had been invented to house barnacles. These critics cite the vast physical, fossil, genetic, and other biological evidence consistent with life having been fine-tuned through natural selection to adapt to the physical and geophysical environment in which life exists. Life appears to have adapted to physics, and not vice versa.” In short, the universe doesn’t need laws, people do.
steph
June 15, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I don’t see the evidence for this as an irrefutable fact. I just appreciate his ideas Ed. I think I’m free to do that and free to appreciate other ideas :)
Mark Fournier
June 14, 2011 at 11:51 pm
I have to side with Herb here. I come from a Catholic family, all of whom subscribe to supernatural beliefs–ghosts, spirits, the afterlife, etc–not all of the above, but some combination thereof. I have a friend who seemed to subscribe to the naturalistic type of religion you describe, but I sent him a link that set him off (I’m still not sure why), and he sent me a five page screed, with lots of caps, that was a litany of supernatural beliefs.
I suspect that when you approach believers with the advisory that you are a student of religion, they shut up and go with the flow. They say what they think you want to hear, because their supernatural beliefs are indefensible by all rational and empirical means, and it requires a certain aggression and arrogance to push the point to someone who disagrees. These are not things they share with non-believers. And I say this as someone who was a believer less that ten years ago. Supernatural beliefs are guilty secrets, to be shared with the guilty. For an atheist to hear about these, you have to catch them angry, drunk, or off-guard. And beware of confirmation bias–what you hear may not be what they are saying, much less what they mean. In many cases I find that you have to discern what they actually think by implication, not by direct proposition, and narrowing it down requires indirect questions. A strong attachment to mind-body dualism, for example, almost always signals an attachment to spiritualism or idealism, both of which are forms of supernaturalism (usually because most people have no conception of information theory–or even know that it exists!)
In general. supernaturalism persists because most people rely on folk science and have a drastically reductionistic view of naturalism. I think that supernaturalism is the default position and naturalism the rare exception, and most people paper this up with various religions, new age beliefs, or ideologies. I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect that the 12 to 15% for atheists in America represents the real number of people who are naturalists.
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steph
June 15, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Recent research, surveys and writing, suggests that people who believed and leave their ‘faith’ often assume other believers believe what they did. I tend to follow argument and evidence and let my own ideas and conclusions evolve as I continue inquiry with real people and groups. I dare say what you ‘suspect’ or suppose is right for some of America, but not everyone fits into boxes, although all chocolates do and if they don’t special boxes can be made for them to fit into. With people we have individual consciences which when educated, grow and lead to evolving ideas, skepticism and agnosticism. Science doesn’t answer all questions but religious people do not always reject what science continually helps us to understand. Research reveals throughout the world that religious believers do not all believe in ‘supernaturalism’. Ministers of churches do not all preach as if the Bible is literally true, and promote no more than good living and good values some of these are attributed to a man called Jesus. It’s fine to assume but I suggest its unwise, and unhelpful to impose what you believed on the rest of the world because that would be incorrect. My experience of American Christianity is so limited I haven’t included it but my experience and research in other western countries doesn’t reflect the popular concept of American Christianity at all. While I have never been religious or ‘believed’ in anything (except that nature is more honest than humanity, and that I’ve learned rather than just assumed without experience or evidence), involvement with religious communities and research analysis reveals that relgious belief evolves and literacy and reason lead to most religious believers having diverse ideas, none of which interferes with the natural order of the universe. All religious people I know believe in evolution. And luckily so many people all over the world, understand the concept of evolution in lateral ways. I like the thought of chocolates but I don’t eat them – they’re all the same. Too sweet.
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steph
June 15, 2011 at 12:56 pm
religious religious religious, two ‘i’s in religious or three if you spell it phonetically.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 15, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Well, I guess I can scratch “Send chocolates to Steph” off my list. Anyway, like you, I don’t like boxes either, especially the metaphorical kind. And, neither do I like being boxed in; a.k.a., locked in. But, metaphorical boxes are useful as a starting point; a collection of ideas that seem to fit better in one box than another. So, when the ideas change so much that they no longer fit the box, then another box is needed.
For example, in the beginning there were all these Christians trying to squeeze into one big box. But soon they were split into two boxes, one for the Roman Catholics and one for the Eastern Orthodox. Then along come Martin Luther and John Calvin who created a couple of boxes for those who protested against the Catholics. And, let’s not forget King Henry the 8th who said FU to the Catholic pope for interfering with his marriage plans, then immediately began building a box for the Church of England, while burning down the Catholic boxes that were in England at the time. And on and on it goes, with a more or less similar moving and making of boxes in the Eastern religions, and perhaps the African religions as well.
Point being that when ideas change so much that the old box no longer fits, then another, better fitting box is built. But there is a difference between a box of beliefs and the individual beliefs of those in the box. So, if I see a box named St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I can reasonably assume that this is where the Catholics hang out. Further, I can also safely assume that the parishioners follow, you know, the Catholic beliefs. If they didn’t, then it is also reasonable to ponder why they are members of that church in the first place. Like, if I go to a Ford car dealer anywhere in the world, I would expect to see Fords all over the lot. Now, if I go to a Ford dealership that has nothing but Toyotas, then I get a bad case of cognitive dissonance and my head explodes. Same thing with religions.
Now, I don’t like polls, I think they come after statistics in their lack of veracity, but one of interest here is at http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=5217. The headline reads, “Belief in Supreme Being(s) and Afterlife Accepted By Half (51%) of Citizens in 23 Country Survey, But Only 28% Are ‘Creationists.’” If valid, this suggests that, at least for the 23 countries involved, I am more than half right (by one percentage point) and justified when I apply the term supernatural (the afterlife being an unnatural state) to both religions and the religious. There is much more in the article of course. I recommend you read it.
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steph
June 15, 2011 at 4:07 pm
I don’t like waffles either.
steph
June 15, 2011 at 6:55 pm
The messenger is Joe. I would never shoot Joe. The message was clear. ‘Supernaturalism’ isn’t a useful synonym for religion. I read your ‘article’. It wasn’t useful or helpful and didn’t contradict the message. Apart from severe limitations in your ‘article’ it was very simplistic. I recommend you read this parable above on dumb lawyers. Perhaps read a former post too, on “Anachronism”. I suggest you read some of the comments above. Read the comment, for example, by S.W. (Sam or Amos or someone else) above: “…question them about the content of their beliefs, they are almost agnostics.” That is the point. Ask religious people if they believe in God, they’ll probably say yes. But when you prod them about what ‘God’ means to them, that is when you begin to learn what people believe. Or don’t believe. Read his comment further: He taught English once to a group of Chilean, Dutch, and Spanish monks in Chile, and when he asked them if they “really believed” in some key tenets of Catholicism, Virgin Birth, transubstantiation, “they got vague and began to talk about metaphors.” And all cowboys with beef drink Scotch so that’s not surprising.
steph
June 15, 2011 at 2:44 pm
wikiphilia … where’s the prosac, the gun and the gin.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 2:48 pm
I love that song.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 15, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Don’t shoot the messenger.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 15, 2011 at 3:06 pm
. . . and I prefer Scotch.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 16, 2011 at 12:37 pm
OK, class, let’s review:
1. The comment that, “‘Supernaturalism’ isn’t a useful synonym for religion,” is, as I have stated many times here, just your opinion. I have never equated religion with supernaturalism
You don’t agree, fine. You agreement is not required.
2. I also tried to point out several times that most of the disagreement here is about a simple definition of terms. I provided some, you provided none. Since you have provided none, I can only assume you agree with mine. In that case my arguments withstand the scrutiny of logic, making yours fatally flawed.
3. I did reread the article in this post. It derives, as I’ve also already said, in the context of scholarship and academia. I can’t name names, but I think it is a safe bet to say that some other scholars and academics in this field would disagree. And Dr, Hoffmann’s articles, all of them, are also mere opinion; informed opinion, wonderfully written opinions, but opinion nonetheless. Disagreements happen.
4. I’m not surprised that you said the article I referred you to, “wasn’t useful or helpful and didn’t contradict the message.” After all, talking to some people in a classroom in Chile, along with like-minded friends and colleagues has got to be more reliable than a scientifically valid poll conducted by an internationally respected public research firm, right? And you know what’s in the minds of the respondents, right? Wow! You also apparently failed to notice that the poll covered believers and nonbelievers alike. Had it been directed only at the religionists, there would have been a much higher percentage of respondents who would agree to the supernaturalism of their beliefs. In fact, such polls exist, but there is obviously no point in dredging them up here since your mind is aleardy made up on the issue. (Seems like such extreme bias would be a severe handicap in the world of research. But I’m just an Oklahoma hick, so what do I know.)
In any case, I’m done here. I’ve got other projects that need my energy. But, if you ever decide to leave the planet you’re living on and come back down to earth, let me know.
p.s., You even got the “all cowboys with beef drink Scotch” wrong. They drink good ‘ol American corn mash liquor – Bourbon!
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steph
June 16, 2011 at 3:48 pm
fungus mushrooms parsley sage and thyme.
steph
June 16, 2011 at 4:01 pm
…rosemary and thyme.
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steph
June 16, 2011 at 7:30 pm
I said ‘ask religious believers if they believe in God’, and you deduce from that that I think that the poll didn’t include non believers as well? What an extraordinary leap. But in any case you miss the point – simple questions receive simple answers. The answers and these have not been analysed. Analysis involves further questioning about what is meant by the simple answers, ie what “God” means to each person who said yes they believed in God. And there is not just one single simple definition for “God”. But it has all been exceptionally … but then I’ve never quite understood American new atheist language. Enjoy your poison whatever it is, and I’ll stick to mine which is usually gin on my planet.
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Herb Van Fleet
June 17, 2011 at 11:34 am
. . . . word.
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steph
June 17, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Word?! An American expression meaning what? It isn’t really American new atheist language I don’t understand, although I find its rudeness astonishing, but you seem to have absorbed an American new atheist concept of language and logic which is equivalent to the simplistic fundamentalist view of language and logic which ignores the usage of people outside their own social group, and interprets social surveys as if everyone surveyed with simple questions must have understood all the terms in the survey in the same way. Have you not noticed that American new atheists are almost all former fundamentalists, or that the American view of language is more literalistic than that in the rest of the world?
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Herb Van Fleet
June 17, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Balderdash.
Ed Jones
June 17, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Reply to Steph’s June 15, 2:52 pm comment.
Apologies, I get carried away as a long time believer. Facts relate to “rational expalnation” by which God notions can be no more than opinion, beliefs. Certainly you are free to only appreciate Davies as you appreciate other ideas, keeping an open mind. Surely the validity and authority of ideas are judged by the intelectual level and integrity of the thinker. Davies ideas for me in this sence are particularily compelling and convincing, characteristic of those who can be identified as the world’s greatest physicists, all of whom believed that both science and religion, physics and spirituality, were necessary for a complete and integral approach to reality..
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s. wallerstein
June 17, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Ed:
Never apologize. That shows weakness and is a sign that you acknowledge that others may be right and you may be wrong or that others may be partially right and you may be partially wrong and that those who disagree with you are not despicable insects who should be laughed at, scorned and then crushed with all the weight of scientific certainty.
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steph
June 18, 2011 at 9:59 am
Amos :-) I never contradicted Ed, and he had no need to apologise to me. Thank you Ed, for that clear expression of your faith whichI do appreciate. It’s more a reflection on my own intellectual limitations that I absorb so many alternative insights without reaching any absolutes myself. And living in this reality of beauty and despair, I would like to share faith in an ultimate reality but I don’t. Often I wish I could remove myself further from current realities and ‘go bush by the sea’ where nature is the only pure reality that exists to my physical senses.
steph
June 18, 2011 at 10:01 am
…which I do appreciate. It’s more a reflection of…
Ed Jones
June 19, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Steph, thanks – insughtful and interesting.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 10, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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scotteus
July 10, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Hmmmm….betting the lawyer was E. Tabash. You can get a ways with argument by abduction ( C.S Peirce by way of Billy of Ockham), but only so far as it is applied best in a courtroom, but falls flat when the simplest argument just won’t cut the cake (or pour the wine).
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davidjohnmills
July 11, 2012 at 2:51 am
As I see it, one should, to be entirely accurate, not equate ‘religion’ with ‘supernaturalism’. Having said that, in the context of when it is used, it is, IMO, a valid approximation, in the sense that what it is being used to describe is ‘supernaturalist religion’, which is probably a fuller and more accurate term.
Will I now start to use ‘supernaturalist religion’ instead of ‘religion’. Hm. I might, but typing with one finger as I do, I might approximate, and reserve longer terminology for the exceptions, as in when I specifically mean ‘non-supernaturalist religion’, or should hat be ‘naturalist religion’? :)
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Steersman
July 11, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Having said that, in the context of when it is used, it is, IMO, a valid approximation, in the sense that what it is being used to describe is ‘supernaturalist religion’, which is probably a fuller and more accurate term.
Yes – quite agree. And that is more or less along the line of my last post in this thread where I pointed out that, at least in America, over 60% of the religious have a decidedly ‘supernaturalist’ bent to their religion. And on that basis I expect that of the 2 billion world-wide adherents of Christianity and Islam that figure of 60% is likely to be on the low side. And, in addition, all of the folk and animist religions of India and China have some decidedly supernatural aspects to them. Apropos of which, Ibn Warraq in his Why I Am Not a Muslim [which Joseph wrote the Foreword to] quotes Salman Rushdie, as does Dawkins in The God Delusion, on the occasion of, I think, one particularly egregious massacre or another as follows:
Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood
And all of that would seem to entirely justify your argument that the “longer terminology” should be reserved for the exceptions: ‘religion’ is largely supernatural clap-trap. Seems to me that, with all due respect, far too many, although not all, of the religious academics have been cooped-up in the ivory tower (“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair”) for far too long and need to get out into the “real world” and see the problematic and nitty-gritty interpretations and consequences of ‘religion’ that are held and produced by the majority of their fellow citizens.
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steph
July 11, 2012 at 7:09 pm
To provide an umbrella of “supernaturalism” ignores the history and complexity of religious tradition. It doesn’t take into account the evolution of religious thought and belief and understanding of the historical cultural context of identity, storytelling and teaching, and it ignores the fact that many modern religious people in some parts of the world have evolved and do not hold beliefs, like “ghosts, spirits, fate, kairos, gods and divinities causing anything to happen”, which contradict the evidence of science.
rjosephhoffmann
July 11, 2012 at 7:37 pm
Steph’s point is significant: Realizing that our western paradigm is crucial does not mean it is sufficient. I am not defending witch doctors and shamans, but only saying that science concerns itself (and this is perfectly natural) with a certain kind of truth. It may be the case that knowing how the world works is the only truth there is; but I have read the Meno too many times to buy that. I celebrate our ability to figure things out. Socrates marveled at the ability of a slave, with no degree in Physics, to figure things out. Not trying to be obscure, but I think you get the point that the ability to generate information, data and solutions does not constitute the whole of knowledge–and I know that neither of you gents would argue such a conclusion. Carry on. I am enjoying listening.
Steersman
July 12, 2012 at 2:41 am
Steph,
To provide an umbrella of “supernaturalism” ignores the history and complexity of religious tradition.
One might suggest, to coin a phrase, that you are “going to extremes to misrepresent me” – I said “religion is largely supernatural clap-trap” and I’ve said in, probably, a dozen or more posts here that “religion” has made significant contributions in our cultural evolution and, in its more non-literal manifestations, continues to provide significant value – at least advantages that might outweigh the disadvantages.
… it ignores the fact that many modern religious people in some parts of the world have evolved and do not hold beliefs, like “ghosts, spirits, fate, kairos, gods ….
Yes, and I’ve quoted chapter and verse in the various surveys that strongly suggests or proves that most do, yet you seem to completely ignore them which suggests some bias. If you have 100 people who are religious and 70 of them are “supernaturalists” and 30 of them are “metaphorists” or “mythists” or “non-literalists” – as seems essentially the case – then it is quite true that, as you say, many of them are of each type. But the most important point is, I think, that most are the supernaturalists who cause the most problems – it is then somewhat disingenuous, at best, to talk of the “many” who might be lukewarm when the “most” are threatening to burn down your house. And if the latter 3 classes wind up enabling or condoning the actions of the first one then one might reasonably argue that they are more a part of the problem than of the solution.
I sort of get the impression that you, and maybe Joseph to a lesser extent taking into account his Foreword to Why I Am Not a Muslim, wish to paint all of religion in the rosy hues of “identity and storytelling and teaching” which is simply not at all accurate – not to mention that there is a dark side to each of those. But at some point it frequently becomes necessary from a pragmatic utilitarian point of view – the “grim meat-hook realities” of John D. MacDonald – to separate the wheat from the chaff particularly in light of the preponderance of the latter and its rather poisonous nature; to realize that regardless of whether Hitler loved his mother or not he was still a monster who had to be destroyed one way or another. It might be nice if we can retain the better features of religion – Dawkins notes that we learn, and learn from, the legends of the Greek and Roman gods without being asked to believe them – but that seems to be a hard lesson for us to learn.
Steersman
July 12, 2012 at 3:07 am
Joseph,
Realizing that our western paradigm is crucial does not mean it is sufficient.
That might well be the case although that does tend to beget the questions of precisely what is understood by “paradigm” and what is meant by “sufficient” – and to what ends? Although I’ll readily concede – genuflecting to Gödel’s Proof (the limits of formal systems of logic) – that it is quite likely that no paradigm is sufficient – rules of thumb at best.
I am not defending witch doctors and shamans, but only saying that science concerns itself (and this is perfectly natural) with a certain kind of truth.
You have, no doubt, run across some detailed if acrimonious discussions recently on various websites, blogs and on-line newspapers on the question of The Humanities, the Sciences and Ways of Knowing (the title of a Choice in Dying post on the topic) related to Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” [NOMA]. But I feel, and have argued on that site and others, that that is somewhat of a false dichotomy, that it ignores the basic fact that we all – scientists and historians and plumbers and philosophers and architects and librarians: virtually every classification in society – use, apparently, the same basic “toolkits” composed, largely, of both inductive and deductive reasoning or, somewhat equivalently, hypothesis generation and testing – to a greater or lesser extent depending on training and discipline. It is just that “science” per se has formalized and defined those tools fairly precisely and accurately through mathematics which has allowed it, somewhat unreasonably and inaccurately, to assert that “other ways of knowing” are largely without value – simply because it, largely or in many cases, is unable to see the common threads and processes.
For instance, I’ve briefly read your recent post on Galatians 4 and I would say that it quite reasonably qualifies as an exercise in science – at least to the extent science is defined as a “systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe”. As the British biologist and Nobel Laureate P.B. Medawar put it in his Two Conceptions of Science essay in his book titled The Art of the Soluble:
… we may collect and classify facts, we may marvel at curiosities and idly wonder what accounts for them, but the activity that is characteristically scientific begins with an explanatory conjecture which at once becomes the subject of an energetic critical analysis. It is an instance of a far more general stratagem that underlies every enlargement of a general understanding and every new solution of the problem of finding our way about the world. [pg 153]
By which token one could say that Galatians 4 consists of a hypothesis or “explanatory conjecture” – and a counter one from the mythtics – followed up by some detailed deductions based on various facts of varying degrees of credibility and on certain assumptions and rules of inference about human nature. It might be nice if each “theory” built on their respective hypotheses could make some predictions about something that isn’t currently known and that might follow – the gold standard of a credible or useful “scientific” theory – if the hypothesis were true that could be tested – sort of an “X marks the spot” and on digging at which yields the expected treasure.
But that false dichotomy is, I think, quite problematic as it tends to give a free ride to various hypotheses – from both science per se (evolutionary psychology) and the humanities (theology) – that are really little more than “just-so stories”: heavy on the hypothesizing, but very light on the deductive and empirical testing. Society is, I think, not well served by that.
It may be the case that knowing how the world works is the only truth there is; but I have read the Meno too many times to buy that.
Not having read it at all I am obliged to rely on Wikipedia for the “Coles Notes” version. But, while my understanding of epistemology is rudimentary at best – or certainly not formalized, it seems to me that the paradox – “a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know” – has been more or less superseded or invalidated by the evolution of our understanding of science. For example, one might see some indistinct object on the horizon – it could be a car or a man moving or a mirage – such that one does not know precisely what it is. But by using some binoculars one has searched for and found what one did not know. Although I’ll concede that there still might be some things for which no sensory apparatus can be designed which will reveal its existence or attributes. But if they have no influence on our senses then they, in effect to all or virtually all intents and purposes, simply don’t exist.
Not trying to be obscure, but I think you get the point that the ability to generate information, data and solutions does not constitute the whole of knowledge ….
Does your Galatians 4 not constitute a “generation of information, data and solutions”? By itself it, of course, is only a single case and hardly constitutes the whole of knowledge. But, one might argue, as Medawar in effect argues, that the “same imaginative and critical acts” that you used there which “unite to form the hypothetico-deductive method” are the same ones used by every other “scientist” – to a greater or lesser degree and effect – to generate information, data and solutions.
While I might be guilty of trying to shoehorn all ways of acquiring knowledge into that “hypothetico-deductive” method – and there might well be ways other than that one, it certainly seems to me to cover a lot of ground – not to mention providing a bit of a bridge between C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures.
steph
July 12, 2012 at 10:17 am
No Steersman. It’s taking into account years of reading across disciplines, research, and experience with many different cultures, communities and individual belief and practice.
Steersman
July 12, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Steph,
So. You completely reject the statistical conclusions of the Pew Forum that I quoted earlier? That close to 90% of all Muslims in America see their “holy” book as, more or less, the “Word of God, literally true word for word” which is quite likely to hold throughout the world? Parenthetically, ever read Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim?
That looks rather akin to “don’t confuse me with facts; my mind is made up” and seriously anti-intellectual and seriously obstinate – to say the least.
steph
July 12, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Yes of course I’ve read Why I am not a Muslim, including alot more scholarship from around the world. I know the American Pew Forum statistics and fundamentalism in America and the environment Muslims live in in America. I am also well aware of Islam in Islamic states and Islam in secular society, assimilation, history and evolution and interfaith discussions and I also know about the simplicity of polls and their questions, and how they’re interpreted literally. I know anthropological and sociological field research and analysis of belief and practise around the globe. You’ve ignored the fact that I take into account other religions and other parts of the world. This is all taken into account to explain the uselessness of the term ‘supernatural’ as a synonym for religion. Steersman, I’m not interested in discussion with you. That’s the realm for you and John Mills.
Steersman
July 12, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Steph,
You still haven’t answered my question: do you or do you not reject the Pew Forum statistics that I quoted? Yes or no?
Getting you to answer a simple question is like the proverbially pulling teeth.
Can’t say that we’re having much of discussion considering the above.
But “supernaturalism” seems to be a perfectly reasonable description of “religion” as it is practiced by the majority of the people in the world. Notwithstanding all of your “sociological field research”.
steph
July 12, 2012 at 6:45 pm
My goodness you’re quick. You must be always close to your keyboard. Of course I don’t ‘reject’ the poll of which I was already aware of or other polls. I always take these things into account. And no, it is not an appropriate synonym for religion for the many reasons I have outlined.
Steersman
July 12, 2012 at 6:59 pm
Steph,
Little difficult to see how you can not reject that poll, how you can accept that poll – which concludes, more or less, that religion in America is largely supernaturalism – and still continue to insist otherwise, that “supernaturalism” is not an accurate label or descriptive term.
But I guess you’re better than I in believing in impossible things (A and not A) – either before or after breakfast.
.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist
by rjosephhoffmann
I’ve been puzzling for a few months now why the discourse between hardshell and softshell atheists has taken such a nasty turn. Can’t crabs just learn to live together–scuttling from side to side without disturbing each other’s tranquility?
True, when I first detected the trend among the leading atheist commandos (variously Gnus, News, EZs and Full-frontals) I said they were behaving like jerks, which of course got me called worse names by their fans. All of a sudden I felt as unwelcome among the Baptism-revokers as Garp did when he stumbled into a meeting of the Ellen Jamesians.
Think of me as the little engine that couldn’t, the Doubting Thomas who tanked. I guess if I had been among the apostles on the day after the resurrection and had been invited to place my fingers in Jesus’ wounds, I would just have said, “Naw, I’ll take your word for it.”
I am a soft-shell atheist, someone who periodically lapses into doubt about the premises and sincerity of his unbelief. I am an unbeliever with a soft spot for religion–that’s the truth of it. In darker moments, I sometimes entertain the suspicion that there may be some kind of god. Then I look at my online bank balance, or a Republican presidential debate, and realize how foolish I’ve been.
But I’m also one who feels that atheism has a job to do: protecting believers from themselves and the rest of humanity from absurd and extreme ideas. Atheism has to be outwardly directed at religion, its historical opposite, and isn’t at its best when it begins to obsess about degrees, vintages, and levels of unbelief. Even though these exist.
At first the debate within was between so-called “accommodationists” and “confrontationists.” I think the terms are imbecilic, but apparently the former are those who think conversation between believers and non believers can be civil. The latter follow a somewhat different model of discourse, as between an annoyed pet owner shouting at a dog who’s just peed on the chair leg again.
Some accommodationists think that atheists should engage in interfaith dialogue with believers of various brightnesses, as long as both parties to the discussion are unarmed and everyone agrees that Ben and Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” is the best ice cream ever made and that Kristin Chenoweth’s version of “Taylor the Latte Boy” is awesome. I’m not that extreme, of course–just a backslider who needs a little stained glass and Bach in his life now and again.
But confrontationists are tough. They are the real deal. You can keep your ice cream and your god–and don’t even think about using the courtier’s reply when they call you out as a dick because they have that page in their Atheist Pride Handbook bookmarked, you conceited, theistic, knee-bending pillock.
All kinds of silly images come to mind when I read what the angriest of the atheist brood say, but the dominant one lately is a continually pissed off and ineffectual Yosemite Sam waving his pistols in the air and shouting “It’s time to stop pussyfootin’ around. You Bible-totin’ swamp cabbages and your lily-livered compadres better run for cover. Our day has come and it isn’t the rapture, varmint.”
Hard-shell Atheist in Uniform
The level of pure nastiness has now reached such comic proportions that the real danger faced by the hardshell atheists is the risk of appearing clownish and absurd without being especially funny.
That is a sad state to be in when you are supposed to be advocating for science and reason. So we have to ask why the “confrontationists” are in such a bad mood. All we know is that ice cream won’t fix it.
I have a theory about this. As often happens in the history of movements beginning with a- they seem to be have learned how to behave from the movement they’re rebelling against. Hardshell atheists are behaving like craven theists.
One of the things that irritated ancient nations about the Jews was the CPT, the Chosen People Thing. Judaism at its peak was a tiny and exclusivist sect among the religions of the Middle East. Its purity codes and laws were famous for being as prickly and picky as their God was about who got to call him Father. Having conversations or social relations with non-Jews was not only not recommended, it was not tolerated. (It’s one of the charges against Jesus: a publican is a non Jew). Accommodation was not an option. The Egyptians hated it, then the Persians (a little less), the Babylonians and finally the Romans. Later the medieval Europeans codified the hatred, and of course, the Germans decided to take matters into their own hands. The Final Solution is what happened when talking, compression, and eviction notices didn’t work.
The Christians got a version of the CPT by default when they canonized the Old Testament and proclaimed themselves the New Israel. The Muslims had no choice but to follow suit: their religion is the end of prophecy and their way is the only straight way to God.
One of the things, I suspect, that most irritates atheists about the book religions is this sometimes implicit (and sometimes grating) ideology that you are either inside or outside the faith, and if you’re outside, forget you. But salvation was never about saving everybody. In most denominations, God doesn’t want that. He wants the ones who shine the brightest.
Odd, isn’t it, that the evangelical atheists have adopted a fairly toxic version of the same narrative toward members of their own tribe. Yet who can deny that their total commitment to the Non-existence of God is another outbreak of CPT. They are behaving religiously, aping the worst features of the religious attitudes and behaviors they profess to condemn.
They–the hardshells–will call me wrong, of course, as well as seriously confused and (heh) accommodating. They will say that I’m just being an idiot (again) for equating supernaturalism and superstition (= religion) with logic and science. Don’t I get why this analogy is so bad? It is so bad because this time the chosen have been self-selected by their ingenuity and intellectual excellence, not by some imaginary celestial power.
To which I have to say, in my defense, Don’t you get that the God who doesn’t exist now—the one you don’t believe in—didn’t exist then either? The god of religious exclusivism is the god fabricated by people who already believed in the superiority of their ways, their laws, their customs, and their intrinsic value. It’s the feeling right and thinking that because you are, you are also special and need not discuss your ideas with people who dramatically oppose you that leads to the mistrust, the suspicion, the animosity. Atheists who wonder why they are mistrusted can begin with the anguish the Jews felt when the Romans began a centuries-long tradition of vituperation against the CPT.
But lackaday dee misery me. This post will be greeted with the same disdain I have come to expect from atheists. They will find a straw man in here somewhere and put a hat on him. This will be called a screed or a diatribe. I will be asked where my evidence is for saying these things. (Hint: everywhere) I will be told that I don’t want dialogue, or that I’m coddling religionists, that this post is a troll in some endless private conversation among certified members about the evils of (all) religion or that I am arrogant (though arrogant prick is my favorite obloquy) or that I am an undercover agent for the Church of God. Actually, the last has not yet been suggested so feel free to use it. And don’t let the fact that there are literally dozens of fairly intelligent people chiming in on this message to the atheist hordes; write it off to my envy at not being Richard Dawkins. Damn.
Now for the best part. It may surprise you to learn that, for everything said here, I am not really a fan of dialogue with faith communities. As far as I am concerned ecumenism and interfaith dialogue are simply activities of groups that interact at a social level, without really getting into the nitty gritty of how they are different, or why they might be wrong. There are two kinds: the merely boring and the pissing contest, but both are ultimately ineffectual.
Atheism–just an opinion, mind you–has no clear place in such a discussion; to mean anything at all, it must be premised on some form of the proposal (a) that God does not exist (b) that this belief has social and moral consequences, especially in terms of human decision-making and (c) that the world we create through these decisions is accountable only to us—that we are the source and the end of our actions. I personally agree with one of the most outspoken hard-shell atheist writers when she sees atheism as something that happens person to person and individual to individual. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to people who are religious. But do you really need a committee (or a community) to do it in?
But I am in favor of atheists, hard- and soft-shell, being concerned about language, self-image, the quality of their critique of religion, and their capacity to describe their life-stance in a positive form. I am interested in narrative control and a literary style that corresponds in form to methods and aims that have often (think Sartre) been elegant. That makes me an elitist, not a cowboy, I know. But the funny thing about Yosemite Sam is that he’ll always shoot first and ask questions later. And people begin to wonder about people like that.
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Published: June 14, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : gnus : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Dawkins ..
45 Responses to “Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist”
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Jeremy Stangroom
June 14, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Ha! You’re so going to get into trouble for this (unless you’re ignored, of course)!
Reply
s. wallerstein
June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I’m Jewish and not looking for a fight, but a Jew who was looking for one could look askance at your suggestion that ancient anti-semitism and even, indirectly, the Holocaust were somehow brought on by the Jews’ sense of superiority.
Do you really want to start a war on two fronts, against the GNU atheists and the Jews too?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2011 at 5:36 pm
The problem of religious exclusivity is a well known pattern; Try reading my Just War and Jihad. You seem to think that the CPT was not a factor in European attitudes–in fact from the time of Tacitus it was amain factor.
Reply
s. wallerstein
June 14, 2011 at 5:38 pm
I don’t doubt your historical knowledge.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 11:06 am
However, I might have said something about how the CPT becomes viral among adoptees–e.g., pretty obvious that the Germans had adopted a racial and social version of the same philosophy which the religious claims of Judaism rendered problematical. Probably worth a blog in its own right. I mainly interested in how the idea gets translated into various forms of religious and social puritanism.
Reply
s. wallerstein
June 15, 2011 at 11:47 am
Your account of the effect on the CPT on others seems implicitly to steer very close to what is called
“blaming the victim”, in this case, the Jews.
Your sources are Babylonians, Persians and Romans, all of which were imperialist powers at the time, and imperialistic powers do tend to rationalize their conquests and domination by self-serving accounts, in this case, that irritating Jewish sense of superiority (the CPT). Tacitus, whom you cite, was a Roman historian: I imagine that a Jewish historian would have seen things from another point of view.
In reality, Babylonian, Persian and Roman aggression against Jewish Palestine probably had economic and geopolitical motives.
I’m not claiming that the CPT does not irritate non-members of the CP or that Jews are always good and that those who attack them are always bad. Life is not that simple.
However, blaming the victim is not only politically incorrect, but also it at times leads us to forget that
someone attacked someone else and that even if the person attacked “asked for it” or was hopeless obnoxious, that is no justification to attack others.
rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 11:55 am
Not discounting the importance of trading routes in terms of aggressive action; but you seem to think I am only implicating the Jews when in fact the tendency seems innate in most religions. And politics. And I can’t simply ignore the perceptions of the actors–they are a matter of historical record. Just an example: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/tacitus.html
Ophelia Benson
June 14, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Ah, Joe, you don’t have to try so hard – I’m always ready to learn from you!
There’s one exception though – this business of the “capacity to describe their life-stance in a positive form.” No, I’m sorry, that’s asking too much. My life-stance forsooth! And in a positive form. No no no; there’s a limit to everything.
I must say I never took you for a life-stance describer in a positive form. I’m a little disappointed.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2011 at 8:18 pm
Yes, I have to say: I think my therapy is full of worms and that someone snuck that in–possibly a nurse. Also the word snuck. I may strike the phrase overnight and then deny I’ve ever used it.
Reply
Ophelia Benson
June 15, 2011 at 10:59 am
Ha!
steph
June 14, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Great art! Reminds me of ‘how thou’ and ‘speeches to the (un)cultured despisers’: those ‘enlightened’ despisers whom Friedrich’s friend Friedrich (Schlegel) referred to as ‘harmonious dullards’. They comprise so many social sub groups, gangs, tribes, movements and fraternities or sisterhoods (maternities?) all with apologists agonisingly defending and clinging fans. Some are compromising and others are not. There are those who cuddle and those who coddle and those who converse or just concentrate on being angry instead and hate huggles wholeheartedly. Much better to be free on the outside and be considered an honorary apatheistic citizen of the planet and go wherever people don’t get quite so uptight about people with other ideas and you can hear liberating Bach cantatas bounce of stained glass and find less to distrust and more to celebrate. (I’m not sure how ‘atheism’ .. “happens” – but I don’t really care – too fluffy)
Reply
Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist (via The New Oxonian) | First Praxis says:
June 14, 2011 at 9:08 pm
[...] I’ve been puzzling for a few months now why the discourse between hardshell and softshell atheists has taken such a nasty turn. Can’t crabs just learn to live together–scuttling from side to side without disturbing each other's tranquility? True, when I first detected the trend among the leading atheist commandos (variously Gnus, News, EZs and Full-frontals) I said they were behaving like jerks, which of course got me called worse … Read More [...]
Reply
s. wallerstein
June 15, 2011 at 12:11 pm
The tendencies may well be innate in most religions, as you say, but you do specifically refer to the Jews, and Jews tend to be sensitive about being the objects of persecution, for reasons that we both know all too well.
Here’s a Jewish story: a well-intentioned lady asks the violinist Isaac Stern why so many Jews play the violin.
Answer: it’s easier to flee the country with a violin than with a grand piano.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 2:18 pm
Well Sam, of course I refer to the Jews because the texts make specific and clear reference to the ideology of chosen people. You seem to imply that I am suggesting this ideology deserves the treatment it got, to oversimplify your point, whereas the point is that outside perceptions created conditions of intolerance that led to systematic persecution. The leitmotif in Judaism is better developed than in other religions, even religions like Xty and Islam that exploit it. But (since I am theoretically a scholar in these matters) have a look at Deut. 14.2; Exodus 19.5; Gen. 17.7; Exodus 19.6; Deut 7.7-8; and Amos 3.2 — just the tip of the iceberg. Any judgements people make about such texts in the wake of the holocaust are naturally going to be seen in the light of that catastrophe, but we need to begin not with Isaac Stern but with the phenomenon of exclusivity, which is what this post was about–and the tendency of atheists of a certain kind to accept. the same posture. Try also to understand that any suggestion that the Jews “got what they deserved” is a complete misinterpretation of isolating this theme in Judaism.
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steph
June 15, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I had a cello and a piano and I had to leave both behind.
Reply
Someone Else
June 15, 2011 at 2:56 pm
It’s Amos, not Sam. –Someone Else
Reply
steph
June 15, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Is S. not the samos Sam, Amos? Or is Sam Amos the samos Amos?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Samos Amos samos Famous Amos?
steph
June 15, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Did he rise?
s. wallerstein
June 15, 2011 at 4:49 pm
I’m Amos. I never claimed to be Sam. Dr. Hoffmann began to call me “Sam”, since I had only left my initial “s” and I liked the name.
When I began to use my last name and first initial online, that is, “s. wallerstein” instead of my middle name “Amos”, I explained my motives at length in the TPM blog, in the Feminists Philosophers blog and in Jean Kazez’s blog, so it is far from a secret.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 15, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Sorry–Don’t know where I got the Sam from, Amos. Amos is very fine prophet. Perhaps the best exponent of the CPT. Samuel, not so much.
Reply
s. wallerstein (aka amos, aka samos)
June 15, 2011 at 9:53 pm
You do have an excellent sense of humor, Dr. Hoffmann.
rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2011 at 9:34 am
My one saving grace–though I do keep my sword sharp.
steph
June 16, 2011 at 9:32 am
Sorry Amos – I like ‘Sam’ too. Fond of a nephew, Sam. Like me, he loves the sea but surprised us all by becoming a chef. He cleaned up proper, married a nice Scottish lass and is living somewhere up in the highlands with a brand new baby. Recently he cooked for the Queen and the Pope who dined together, but like me, a hopeless Antipodean pacifist, he missed the perfect opportunity to get rid of them both. An Amos like the prophet might have done better. (apologies to loyal royalists)
Reply
BOB
June 15, 2011 at 7:26 pm
I personally think that biology makes it thus. Humans are band primates; we separate into groups and struggle against each other. Morality is whatever benefits the bands; evil is what the other band does. Like all traits, the urge to belong and struggle is biochemically distributed, stronger in some, weaker in others (the latter including Dr Hoffman, it seems).
As a universalist Christian, I think-or to be more accurate, I hope-that this is what we are most saved from, that in the end God has no band, but all.
Reply
s. wallerstein (aka amos)
June 16, 2011 at 10:45 am
Dr. Hoffmann:
I’ve noticed your elegant verbal sword play. I’ll try to keep a few meters between us.
Steph:
With the years, my bomb-throwing, Stern Gang, tendencies are ever weaker . So I probably would have asked the Pope to autograph a copy of his latest encyclical.
Reply
steph
June 16, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Then sell it! I do have a very keen dagger. Especially for midgets. Like that two volume life of pope’s Jesus.
Reply
Jean K
June 16, 2011 at 1:07 pm
I don’t really get this analysis. You’ve got the chosen people thing, but then there’s also the evangelical thing. Chosen people feel superior, but just want self-determination. They want to be left alone. Evangelists feel superior and want to spread the word. They think there’s evil out there and they win points by hunting it down and eliminating it. If you’re going to explain the problems of Jews, it would be grossly unfair to point a finger at the idea of chosenness and not at the very different, and Christian, tendency to evangelism. Where do new/gnu/whatever atheists fit in here? No, they’re not Jewish in attitude, they’re Christian. They think they’ve seen the light, and they want everyone else to see it too. Not even all fellow atheists are enlightened enough–they must first convert all atheists to the right kind of atheism, and then they can march onward and save everyone else from the sin of religion. They have missionary zeal, and Jews don’t.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Where do you get the idea that the CPT was about isolationism? It was expansionist and aggressive–as in Land of Canaan and making Abraham’s descendants as numberless as the stars in the sky. It didn’t work. Later, (think Ezra and Nehemiah) the refrain is the Jews built a hedge around the law–after sound drubbing by the nations mentioned in the piece. But they certainly didn’t develop the original triumphalism a la David and his cohorts because they “wanted to be left alone.” You seem to be impacted by the post-1st century condition of the Jews as a denationalized people who were forbidden to proselytize.
Reply
Jean K
June 16, 2011 at 1:52 pm
But you’re using choseness to explain things done to Jews in the 20th century and to describe today’s new atheists. Surely that makes it sensible to think about what choseness has amounted to over time, and not just pre-1st century. In any event, even pre-1st century, where’s the evangelism? Triumphalism isn’t the same thing. Growing by leaving descendants is completely different from converting surrounding peoples. Killing the Canaanites is also not the same as converting them. I don’t see any evangelizing here–Jews have never wanted to turn non-Jews into Jews, but new atheists definitely wanted to turn non-new-atheists into new atheists. It seems to me the more apt comparison is between new atheists and Christians, not new atheists and Jews.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2011 at 2:15 pm
No: Just a religious “motif” that begins a long time ago and affects groups throughout time. The chosenness for all I care could be Mormon misssionaries in Bangladesh. It isn’t the case that the Hebrew tribes didn’t try to “grow” their religion–but the word you use–evangelization–as in preaching and persuasion–doesn’t apply; conquest does, and it is more accurate to use the term Hebrews anyway, at least up to the fatal fall with the Babylonian captivity. That is when expansion was well and truly over, when Judaism becomes a “religion” rather than an autonomous, national, post-tribal thing. When you say “the Jews never wanted to convert anybody” (make Jews of non Jews) you have a whole lot of Hebrew history to overlook: but it IS true that Judaism becomes non proselytic over time, for the same reason Xy in Islamic countries does: as a stateless minority within a huge religious world they were constrained from doing so, and made a religious virtue of political necessity. But I detect a certain parochial belief behind your comment about this–as in “I asked a rabbi how I could become a Je and he told me to go away.” A lot of Jews as a purely religious matter are very proud of the the “fact” that they belong to a faith that doesn’t want to propagate itself through conversion, but this is an historical outcome, not the explanation for what the the original sense of “righteousness” and election came from. I do agree, however, that if it takes this much background to explain an analogy the analogy must be horrible.
Reply
Jean K
June 16, 2011 at 3:04 pm
OK, in some periods Jews have tried to expand, but by reproducing more, driving other people off of land, killing people, etc. They haven’t tried to expand by changing people’s minds, making Jews out of non-Jews. Have they? What’s the “proselytic” period of Hebrew history that you think I’m overlooking? On the other hand, converting people has always been a strategy for Christian expansion. Christians want to save others, not just expand themselves. Ditto, new atheists. They are worried about how religion is poisoning everything–harming everyone else–and want to save people from all these horrors. So it’s not a matter of a tribe wanting to expand itself (the Jewish goal), but there’s something essentially other-regarding about new atheists. No?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Jean: I can’t disagree with this because you say “Jews” and that frames it a little differently. Plus you have converted me to the obscurity of this analogy. Plus, I like the way you improve certain points of my argument–and yes I think New atheists are far more evangelical in their sense of rightness. In exchange for these concessions I expect you to friend me on Fb.
Reply
steph
June 16, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Fungusgelicals? It’s in the dikshunree.
Dwight Jones
July 5, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Jean:
Methinks that the salient feature of Judaic “reproduction” was their policy to marry only within their own kind. This overt genetic strategy retained Semitic features that allowed outsiders to isolate them physically in Europe, when the Middle East was rarely viewed positively. Any bird that is different is pecked to pieces, and that has to be part of it, if we truly try to understand their debacles now and then.
Still, what a gruesome subject within Joe’s wonderful screed. I just try to browse here and get drawn in to his superb grasp of the language with all of its vernaculars and paeans to lost piety – keep it up, for dog’s sake, all of you!
Reply
Jean K
June 16, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Ha! By all means–that’s a more than fair exchange!
Reply
A few good links | eChurch Blog says:
June 20, 2011 at 4:11 am
[...] The New Oxonian – Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist [...]
Reply
religionandmore
June 21, 2011 at 10:39 am
I enjoyed this post a lot… and can empathise with two points espectially:
1) I am an atheist-agnostic, yet I have little-to-no interest in science. That is not the same as saying that I do not find the most interesting bits of it fascinating, or that I doubt its validity or usefulness… I am simply saying that dialogues about science and scepticism do not particularly interest me. I would rather talk about theatre, literature, current affairs or, dare I say, religion. I always feel that when I am within ‘non-’ or ‘anti-religious’ circles that I am being implicitly looked-down upon for not being interested in evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics etc etc.
2) I have never really understood the point of inter-faith dialogue… I don’t know what it achieves. But I guess it is better for people to be talking than not talking…
Reply
s. wallerstein (aka amos)
June 21, 2011 at 6:59 pm
R & M:
You’re not the only atheist who has not glanced at a science text since secondary school physics. I assimilated my atheism from Camus’s The Stranger and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
Why atheist debate has been hegemonized by the science-people is a question I cannot answer. Behind the scientific-atheists, often seems to lurk a certain hostility to or sense of superiority over us poet atheists. Maybe they are settling old scores, dating back to the long-gone days when poetry was cool. As Auden’s poem says, “those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”.
Dr. Hoffmann has a good eye for how social phenomena arise and he may be able to illuminate this question.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 21, 2011 at 7:56 pm
Dear Sam: I won’t call you Amos unless you insist!
rjosephhoffmann
June 21, 2011 at 8:04 pm
I do completely agree with Jean that America has lots of songs. Maybe that is the issue: so many songs that we can’t even talk about patrimony, and that means when people have to sing their history they can only sing in sections. No “I Vow to Thee My Country” or “Jerusalem” is even remotely possible. Best Loved Songs of the American People–forget it. God Bless America–forget it. It’s got to be George Gershwin or Cole Porter or Richard Rogers or…..(carry on) until you arrive at your comfort zone. If I were vain (patriotic) I’d say: This is America, eat our dust. But what i say instead is, Can you sing our common inheritance? Sho’ ain’t jes English Mr Interlocutor. Try Swanee. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngIiaV3BFo
religionandmore
June 22, 2011 at 9:18 am
“Why atheist debate has been hegemonized by the science-people is a question I cannot answer. Behind the scientific-atheists, often seems to lurk a certain hostility to or sense of superiority over us poet atheists. Maybe they are settling old scores, dating back to the long-gone days when poetry was cool. As Auden’s poem says, “those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”. ”
I heartily concur!
Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist (via The New Oxonian) « Religion And More… says:
June 21, 2011 at 10:41 am
[...] Anyway… enjoy! I’ve been puzzling for a few months now why the discourse between hardshell and softshell atheists has taken such a nasty turn. Can’t crabs just learn to live together–scuttling from side to side without disturbing each other’s tranquility? True, when I first detected the trend among the leading atheist commandos (variously Gnus, News, EZs and Full-frontals) I said they were behaving like jerks, which of course got me called worse names by their … Read More [...]
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s. wallerstein
June 21, 2011 at 9:20 pm
Call me Sam or Amos, whichever you prefer.
As to music, I’m completely tone deaf, but from time to time, I find myself singing Bob Dylan songs to myself:
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Chimes of Freedom, Like a Rolling Stone, Desolation Row, Visions of Johanna……
Otherwise, the only song I know is je ne regrette rien.
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James Croft
June 29, 2011 at 1:18 pm
I’m intrigued by your view of interfaith dialogue. I was not myself a fan until I tried it – I found it valuable simply because it helped me put a face to certain religious opinions and therefore made it more difficult for me to dismiss them in quite the same way. It seems to me that humanizing the other is a goal to be sought for its own sake, and that interfaith dialogue will help us achieve that.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
‘Murikans ain’t got no songs…Sort of
by rjosephhoffmann
I giggled a little at Steve Martin’s parody, “Atheists Ain’t Got No Songs,” the premise being that while church folks have a lot to sing about–the Rock of Ages, Amazing Grace, and Jesus, lover of their soul–atheists don’t. That’s bullshit of course, though I would be in favour of expanding the repertoire slightly to include at least three songs other than Imagine and Both Sides Now. My opinion, however, is that all music that isn’t about God is secular and that’s good enough.
But this isn’t really about atheists. It’s about my annual bout of depression over the fact that Americans ain’t got no songs. They sort of make their way through the Star Sprangled or Strangled Banner at ball games, a more bellicose than which national hymn has never been created.
–Though not the ugliest or most trivial. The night we “got” bin Laden, crowds of drunken college students from the DC area congregated outside the White House and repeatedly sang “God Bless America,” the unofficial anthem of the Republican party. –Who knew that Irving Berlin stole it from a Yiddish review where the song was known as “When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band.”
That’s about it for American songs. I’m not crazy about the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I like America the Beautiful, but apparently it’s too green for the NASCAR and Second Amendment crowds, plus atheists choke on the “God shed his grace on thee”-part,” So it’s a non-starter–useful for high school graduations and various over-dramatized patriotic displays on the Washington Mall on 4th of July but not so good for community singalongs. Besides, you can’t imagine singing either of those songs at a football game or frolicky evening.
A few years back I was sitting half-drunk and exquisitely satisfied at Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Around 9.30, as the cycle of drinking and relieving onesself of the consequences was in full swing, the singing started spontaneously. It encompasssed everything from Schubert (lots of Schubert) to Haydn lieder to folk songs I’d never heard–to the Beatles. It went on for hours. Everyone went home hoarse and happy. I have repeated this dissolute and completely human event many times in British and Irish pubs and French cafes. And listen dear American patriots to Heinrich Hoffmann’s words to the second stanza of Germany’s anthem, Deutschland Ueber Alles, the first few strains of which over a radio were considered terrifying enough to send Illinois farmers running for their shotguns:
German women, German brotherhood,
German wine and German song
Shall retain in the world
Their old beautiful chime
And inspire us to noble deeds
During all of our life.
Terrifying, yes? Wine, women, song? I know, we fought against fascism, but we could have used a little more of the Gemütlichkeit.
What, I wondered, has happened to our nation? Is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where Europeans came to lose their music? Or is music as a social bond something like a tax we have to pay to the tuneless, hymn-singing puritan drones who founded the nation by keeping it all specific, generational, ethnic, uncollimated?
I recall as a kid that in my Grandmother’s piano bench there was a raggedy book called Best Loved Songs of the American People. An updated version of it–for reasons I cannot fathom–still exists for a modest $29.99. On the cover Uncle Sam sits playing (what else?) a guitar.
The selections ranged from Civil War songs like “When Johnny Come Marching Home” to Irish heartthrobbers like “Danny Boy” (in its Ulster version, of course: “Would God I Were a Tender Apple Blossom,” to “Hail Columbia, Happy Land,” and a weird assortment of college novelty songs, rounds, and (just to show we’re not opposed to foreigners) “songs from other lands” and “Negro Spirituals.” Such diversity!
The contents seem to suggest that “the American people” liked songs from America and the British isles and simplistic ditties like “Bicycle Built for Two,” “Man on the Flying Trapeze,” “Buffalo Gals,” “Bird in a Guilded Cage,” “Shenandoah,” “On the Sidewalks of New York,” “In the Gloaming.” Not immortal, and today even a relatively smart fifteen year old probably can’t make her way through any of them. Nor could her parents. Best-loved is soon forgotten.
In fairness, we hadn’t yet produced our Schubert and when we did his music wasn’t for everybody–especially for God-fearers with hymnals. (Sexy music was for Jews and Catholic bootleggers, after all, and mainly played and sung by them.)
George Gershwin
After a few rounds, “John Henry” or “Buffalo Gals” might not sound so awful. Except of course, in the America they came from, muscular, protestant and tea-total, most people weren’t doing rounds. They were meant to be sung on Saturday night around a piano with apple-bread and cider while your aunt Grace struggled with the chords. No wonder that music didn’t endear itself to multicultural America when it arrived, or more precisely when it was acknowledged to exist.
It's ok to sing--in church--but no organ, and don't smile...
Speaking of your grandfather, if he was anything like mine, and not a Presbyterian, he knew a thousand songs, just like the guys at Hofbrauhaus. My father knew even more than his father. But (sad to say) put us all, along with my teenage daughter in a garden at a Miami beerfest (really?) and you’ll be lucky to get “Guantanamera” and “God Bless America” before it breaks down into intergenerational confusion.
It’s not exactly that we ain’t got no songs–America has been making music for two hundred years–it’s that we got no songs that reflect a common cultural patrimony, a single national memory. We got our soul, our rock, our country, our blues, our fusion, our sixties, our (yuck) seventies, our hip-hop, our jazz–oh, and your whatchacallit NPR stuff. But nothing that would keep us drinking with each other as we traversed our common life in song. And no, I do not regard Karaoke as the contradiction of what I am saying; I think it’s more like electronically assisted memory for the culturally impaired. A little like American Idol.
Why O Why America have you no voice to raise on high? Is it that you are too big, complicated, and diverse? Or is it that you’re too fat, dumb, and indifferent?
Ask yourself that question the next time a thousand nineteen years olds sitting on each other’s shoulders, waving American flags, break out into a rousing chorus of “God Bless America.”
Update 22 June: Some comments are too good to be comments and Jean Kazez’s is that kind of comment: “Jeez, I don’t feel that way [i.e. my way] at all. At all my drunken songfests, I have no trouble coming up with stuff to sing–This Land is Your Land; Bruce Springsteen songs like Born in the USA; Neil Young songs like Ohio; the wonderful Buffy St. Marie song Universal Soldier; Joni Mitchell songs like Blue; piles and piles of Bob Dylan. This is all music that takes you back, creates a feeling of solidarity, evokes stuff you love or hate about your country. On wait, you said “common cultural patrimony, a single national memory”… but do I really want to feel in synch with every American idiot? I think not (but please, don’t quote me on that).” Amos aka Sam Wallerstein adds, ”As to music, I’m completely tone deaf, but from time to time, I find myself singing Bob Dylan songs to myself:The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Chimes of Freedom, Like a Rolling Stone, Desolation Row, Visions of Johanna……”
So maybe the problem is that America’s got too many songs, and songs, like our politics “is” local. And that explains why in periods of great national elation we find our music chest empty of anything that reflects our sameness–except, of course, The Star Strangled Banner and God Bless America. But don’t take my word for it: Listen to Christina Aguilera’s stunning attempt at getting it right.
The prize for cultural adaptation goes to the Brits however: what other country could take a schmaltzy American Rodgers and Hammerstein tune and turn into a football pep song?
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Published: June 21, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: America : Europe : folk songs : German : hymns : music : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : singing : social memory : song ..
13 Responses to “‘Murikans ain’t got no songs…Sort of”
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steph
June 21, 2011 at 3:37 pm
“Murikans” took me a while – I suppose we say “Meerukuns” where I come from, wherever that is. It’s pretty hilarious though – and sad. I don’t know what they sing in pubs wherever I came from – mainly rugby songs I think. But I grew up with a wealth of songs, especially in Maori, telling our own history, of legends, describing the landscape and people, to music. We also have a national anthem which is perfectly all right sung unaccompanied in Maori (which it more often is), as long as you don’t know what the words mean (but unfortunately we bilingual NZers do). The best music is probably found in the bush and mountains though – from the birds – heard more often than seen. They have the most beautiful songs of all. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for wherever it is I came from, where I no longer have a home.
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Jean K
June 21, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Jeez, I don’t feel that way at all. At all my drunken songfests, I have no trouble coming up with stuff to sing–This Land is Your Land; Bruce Springsteen songs like Born in the USA; Neil Young songs like Ohio; the wonderful Buffy St. Marie song Universal Soldier; Joni Mitchell songs like Blue; piles and piles of Bob Dylan. This is all music that takes you back, creates a feeling of solidarity, evokes stuff you love or hate about your country. On wait, you said “common cultural patrimony, a single national memory”… but do I really want to feel in synch with every American idiot? I think not (but please, don’t quote me on that).
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rjosephhoffmann
June 21, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Yeah, we’d be singing from the same songbook. I agree. And no, I don’t want to feel in synch with every American (idiot) which is why I go mute every-time I hear God Bless America.
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steph
June 21, 2011 at 7:20 pm
That’s a great list, I love them all, despite them being truly American. They’ve all been exported and welcomed as imports by the rest of us in the world – or perhaps just stolen by us because we liked them so much. The sort of American exports we’re eternally grateful for. Is the Universal Soldier the one Donovan sang? That whole Woodstock thing going… and what country can possibly have any national anthem to unite people in solidarity without contradicting the freedom of its independent minded individual citizens? I hate our national anthem, partly because it represents nationalism which I oppose, and partly because it reflects our supposed and outdated allegiance to the ‘motherland’. I only sing it disguised in Maori, but its not a song that tells our stories.
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Jean K
June 21, 2011 at 9:14 pm
Yes, Donovan does a lovely version of the Universal Soldier–it’s particularly exportable!
ken
June 22, 2011 at 11:13 am
If things don’t get better soon, we’ll all be singing “Sixteen Tons” (kudos to Ernie Ford and Merle Travis)
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rjosephhoffmann
June 22, 2011 at 11:32 am
@Ken: and if gas prices don’t fall, Ellington’s Don’t Get Around Much Anymore!
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Scott
June 22, 2011 at 11:57 am
At least it’s not God D… America. I turn down the volume or walk away everytime God Bless America starts.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 22, 2011 at 1:06 pm
Wouldn’t “God Help” or “God Save” or some secular equivalent like “What’s New? America” work.
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Scott
June 22, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Good Suggestions(:I think we are going to need to change it to “God Help” America if we continue down the same road.
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steph
June 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Before it was disguised in translation, the Irish (Catholic) Australian who wrote NZ’s national anthem, called it “God Defend New Zealand [from Meeruku]“. But ironically it was one of our atheist (or better described ‘apatheist’) Prime Ministers (representing the whole country’s opinion) who saved us joining in with America’s (or Mr Bush’s) war. But God never saved us from McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken or nice little children morphing into greedy little monsters at Halloween – or the internet.
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Another round of interesting links « The House of Vines says:
July 12, 2011 at 12:02 pm
[...] Joseph Hoffmann ponders why Americans don’t sing: It’s not exactly that we ain’t got no songs–America has been making music for two hundred [...]
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Don
September 22, 2011 at 10:21 pm
I have been trying and trying to find information on the artwork/watercolor of the pilgrims… “12_003″… and assistance would be hugely appreciated.
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Devils
by rjosephhoffmann
Call me a Manichaen, after you look it up, but whatever I may think about God, my faith in the devil remains unshaken. He’s my guy. He rocks and rules.
The Manichaens thrived in all parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and as far away as China and Europe, from the third century onward. So popular were they that the church fathers tried to make people believe they were a Christian heresy. But their real roots are in the dualistic thinking of ancient Persia, stretching back to the prophet Zoroaster.
Their appeal was huge, however, and Mani’s culturally omnivorous followers availed themselves of all sorts of religious ideas (and possibly even Christian writings) in formulating their philosophy. In turn, the Christian gnostic sects used it freely and imitatively, so much so that it’s sometimes difficult to sort out Manichaen and “purer” gnostic forms of teaching.
Not to mention that even the most “orthodox” Christian teaching got a heavy dose of Manichean ideas. The most famous of the early church writers, Saint Augustine, was a Manichean throughgout most of his formative period. And some cynics have noted that he only converted to Christianity in 387–after the emperor Theodosius, worried about the influence of Manichaen thought on Christianity throughout the empire, issued an edict (382) ordering the death of Manichaens. A coincidence, to be sure.
What I like about the Manichaens is that they based their teachings on the simple observation that there is more evil than good in the world, and that two eternally opposed powers of good and evil preside over everything from the cosmos to the individual soul or will. Giving to charity and lying about your tax liability to the IRS are perfectly natural expressions of your humanity. So is patience with children and wanting to beat the crap out of the guy who just cut into your lane, missing your car by inches. It keeps us in a constant state of stress and imbalance, and if this weren’t so the stars would fall out of the sky.
Good and evil are simply modes of the universal struggle and the impulses that govern the individual life. Since we live in a world governed by material things, the downward trend of our desire for pleasure, sex and riches is more or less guaranteed. Let’s not call it sin. Let’s call it human nature. Because when writers like Augustine get hold of the idea, they’ll equate the two and we’ll just feel sorry for ourselves. Christianity is the great confusion of a much simpler, earlier dualism.
True, their myths are far more complicated than I’m letting on, and the light and dark imagery and personages who populate their stories (like the quasi-gnostic Mandaens of Iraq) can be a bit obscure and exhausting–a bit like Hinduism. There is also the problem of knowing which of the sources we possess, interspersed as they are with all kinds of religious teaching ranging from apocalyptic Judaism to Buddhism, are really representative of Manichean religious thought. But that just makes them more interesting–in my humble opinion.
Manichaeism remained highly vaporous, dangerous, and a little sexy. Orthodox Christianity pinned everything down to definitions and ended up sounding like Daffy Duck.
The big advantage over orthodox Christianity is that for Manicheans there is no real problem of evil. Evil (as Nietzsche and Richard Strauss saw, philosophically and musically) is just a mode of reality. Good and evil are correlative forces creating the basic tension in the universe. In the basic myth of the Manichees (there are many), God is not all powerful, so he couldn’t subdue evil if he wanted to, and humanity itself is a byproduct of the struggle–a mythological way of saying that our personalities are symptoms of eternal, unresolved swirl and restlessness. Like Jessica Rabbit, we’re not bad; we’re just drawn that way.
The Christians meantime taught that Satan was relatively puny, a tempter, slanderer (diabolos, devil), adversary (Satan), or lesser angel of light (Lucifer) who infiltrated creation, spoiled its primordial goodness, and then had to pay the price of his mischief through the coming of a “redeemer” who could satisfy the devil’s demand for the payment of a debt God had incurred in a game. God the almighty had lost the world in a wager when Adam “fell” from grace. History becomes the staging ground for getting it back.
No, I am not making this up: almost all the church fathers taught that Satan had won the world to his side in the Garden. Even the concept of original sin is developed in the light of this belief. God is seen as a gambler who invents the stratagem of salvation: producing a god-man who belongs to the devil by right (all humans do, according to Christian theology) but not by nature, since he is “truly God,” and hence more powerful than a speeding devil.
Jesus harrows hell where the saints have been waiting patiently
The belief that between the crucifixion and resurrection Jesus paid a visit to hell and “caught” Satan by surprise (“with the bait of his humanity on the hook of his divinity,” Irenaeus and Basil liked to say) is actually preserved in early christian creeds, like the one curiously called the Apostle’s Creed written late in the fourth century by Ambrose of Milan.
Slightly embarrassed by this highly mythological way of looking at why Jesus came into the world (bait? hook?), the church finally turned to philosophy, where it tried to make roads and ended up creating the system of potholes we call Christian theology.
In this system, the devil still exists but plays no real role in the drama, leaving God vulnerable to the all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing trilemma. –The one the Manichaens never had to confront, as their divine powers were fairly equally matched, at least in this cycle of creation.
The theologians’ God (as distinct from the God of the Bible, lore, and early legend) had to account for the fact that the deity, being omniscient, must have known creation would turn out wrong (evil) and being all good must not have wanted it to turn out that way and being all powerful could have prevented it, yet didn’t. No matter how you de-horn this preposterous beast it’s still mighty ugly. Every theologian from Augustine to Plantinga and Hick have had a try at solving the problem that James L. Mackie saw as Christianity’s fatal intellectual flaw. I recommend reading them only if you have ten years in solitary confinement to kill, and even then get plenty of exercise. –No wonder that this branch of Christian theology, “theodicy,” is often misspelled “theidiocy.”
My real proof that the Manichaens are right however is not that orthodox Christianity looks wrong, it’s that the pure force of evil within the Church is plain as the nose on your face.
My guess is that for two thousand years the Church has been a kind of hothouse for evil. The process reached a pre-climax in the Crusades and later in the Inquisition. But only in our own time has the complete success of the evil forces been clear.
Still not convinced? I offer the following exhibits:
1. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A woman so in love with poverty that she did everything in her earthly power to propagate it on a global level. Especially successful was her campaign against family planning and HIV-AIDS education, calling abortion, in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize address,”the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.”
2. Pope John Paul II (Blessed John Paul II): The charismatic bishop of Rome and soon to be canonized supreme pontiff and successor of Peter (1978-2005) whose “Gospel of Life” and blind eye towards the moral decrepitude of thousands of priests was the Catholic church’s belated contribution to the sexual revolution.
3. Pope Benedict XVI, right-hand man to John Paul, whose skill at delaying judicial proceedings against the criminal acts of priests and bishops revealed a level of technical proficiency seldom witnessed, even in ecclesiastical bureaucrats.
4. Bernard Cardinal Law, archbishop of Boston, the first bishop shown to be actively involved in a cover up of the criminal acts of priests accused of child abuse, and duly rewarded for his service to his Church by John Paul II by being appointed to a lifetime sinecure in Rome and archpriest of Saint Mary Major basilica, one of Rome’s cushiest benefices.
6. Father Paul Shanley, who managed to combine his pastoral work with street people in the 1980′s with plenty of downtime with adolescent boys (at least nine), and after being transferred to faraway San Bernadino, California, where the living and bishops were easy, co-owned a B&B for gay tourists with another priest in Palm Springs. A self-starter, Shanley used his rectorial experience to found the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Hymnal appropriately includes “I get high with a little love from my friends.”
6. Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix, who rightfully stripped St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center of its Catholic status after insolent nun, Sister Margaret McBride, assented to a surgical procedure to save the life of a woman in her eleventh week of pregnancy, on doctors’ advice. In the spirit of the Church’s robust defense of unborn life and its commitment to the spread of poverty, disease and infant mortality in the developing world (cf. the “Gospel of Life,” above), Bishop Olmsted also noted that Sister Margaret had incurred automatic excommunication for her intervention.
7. Honorable mention. With its aggressive media, it was almost tempting to think that only the American church had been overcome by devils. Now we know that the spirit of evil is alive and flourishing in Canada, Belgium, and best of all, around Galway Bay, where Paddy can now be a nickname for Patrick–or something else.
Basically, wherever God thought he had won, there is plenty of proof that he lost–just like in Eden all those millennia ago. As far as I’m concerned, the Manicheans had it right all along. What a craven poltroon, what a yellow-bellied dastard, what a sissy, a milquetoast, a Scaramouche. He couldn’t even manage to wipe out the whole human race with the flood, and hasn’t had the cojones to follow through with his promise to do it again only this time for real.
Put your money on the devils.
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Published: June 24, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Benedict XVI : Bernard Cardinal Law : Bishop Olmsted : Boston : Catholic Church : devil : dualism : evil and good : God : John Paul II : Mani : Manichaeism : Mother Teresa : Persia : Satan : sexual abuse scandal : Sister Margaret McBride ..
17 Responses to “Devils”
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s. wallerstein
June 24, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Evil, as you say, is a just a mode of reality, and I suppose that wisdom calls for accepting it, trying to not contribute to it and to undermine it in one’s own little way, without losing one’s sense of proportion.
First, I guess, one must determine what is evil, but there’s no easy formula and most likely there’s no formula at all.
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Rob Fisher
June 24, 2011 at 5:38 pm
I’m sorry Joe. This has to be said. How dare you draw the lovely Jessica Rabbit into this torrid tissue of allegations?! As we all know, she’s not bad: she was just drawn that way!
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rjosephhoffmann
June 24, 2011 at 5:46 pm
The only animated character I have ever realllllly loved.
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Scott
June 24, 2011 at 5:48 pm
The Catholic Church: making the world safe for sexual predators everywhere (unfortunately).
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steph
June 24, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Sorry tale, and all true. You had an easy job. I can hear Calvin sighing: despite his own evils he recognised the evils in the church around him. Funny that Dotty M made so much stuff up, when all she had to do was stick to the truth and tell a few facts to justify her condemnation of the Christian church. Not only did she have Augustine convert just after Nicaea (which was before he was born), but she pretended he converted from a Mandean instead of from a Manichean. And his motivation, according to her, was the promise of a prominent place in the church. The real story is so much more gruesome but the mythtics don’t seem to be able to tell the truth straight.
I think I agree – I believe in a devil. Many devils and demons exist I think. However I don’t believe in any gods who might want us to live with them. Angels though, fight those devilish demons and generally win, at least on a good day when life is treating us well. But the church is like most movements and organisations: they all run rife with hypocrisy and demons.
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Jeremy Stangroom
June 24, 2011 at 6:41 pm
” And some cynics have noted that he only converted to Christianity in 387″
Other cynics have noted the possibility that his Manichaeism was partly motivated by the fact the Manichaeans didn’t require the non-Elect to live up to the religion’s austere moral code!
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rjosephhoffmann
June 24, 2011 at 7:38 pm
I like it.
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steph
June 24, 2011 at 9:16 pm
“Grant me chastity … but not yet”. But who was he praying to and did whoever he was praying to, if he existed, ever grant it? He was obsessed, he liked his concubines.
rjosephhoffmann
June 24, 2011 at 9:19 pm
You know, it is impossible for us to put ourselves into the age of optionalism in which there was a real alternative to Christianity. We will never be able to feel it or to imagine it. The stark choice to day between belief and unbelief cannot capture it, any more than Augustine could fathom our choice.
s. wallerstein
June 24, 2011 at 9:24 pm
Christianity is like capitalism in that sense.
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Jean K
June 25, 2011 at 8:40 am
Joe, We have a running argument in my house–I’m hoping you can settle this. One side says the devil runs hell. The other side says no way–if so, he’d be working under God, because hell is where God metes out just punishments to bad people. Hell’s employees have to be good, not evil. So what’s the answer, in Christian theology? Does the devil run hell? Is he even on the staff?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2011 at 9:28 am
Easy peazy: The devil cannot run hell because my seventeen year old does and she’s never heard of God ;)
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steph
June 25, 2011 at 10:31 am
I thought EZ PZ ran hell.
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Jean K
June 25, 2011 at 11:43 am
Come on, I need to know. My 14 year old says the devil runs hell, and I want to prove to him that he’s wrong. I think it’s ridiculous, like putting Charles Manson in charge of the California prison system. p.s. Are you sure your daughter isn’t the devil?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 25, 2011 at 12:27 pm
Tell him that if he asks impertinent questions he’ll find out first hand. I think the devil could learn tricks from my daughter that he didn’t learn in hell. Btw, Chris Matthews said a few nights ago that Newt Gingrich couldn’t be the devil because he looks like the devil. Apparently that’s an old Irish proverb but based on the idea that the devil is a master of disguises. I do love the devil–atheists need to talk more about him because the more you say the more absurd God becomes. I would only debate William Lane Craig if he’d agree to debate me on the devil.
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sailor1031
June 26, 2011 at 12:05 pm
I couldn’t agree more. Regarding modern crimes you could also have mentioned the catholic church’s dealings with murderers, fraudsters and money launderers through the IOR (vatican bank) ? Banco Ambrosiano connection. The catholic church still apparently cherishes the good old days of the Borgia popes and wants to emulate them.
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Ophelia Benson
June 26, 2011 at 1:05 pm
One final turn of the screw on item # 6 that you left out – the fetus was doomed either way, so it wasn’t actually even “In the spirit of the Church’s robust defense of unborn life” – it was death for its own sake. The only choices were: mother and fetus die, or, fetus dies. The bishop of Phoenix tried very hard to compel the hospital to agree never again to choose the second option, but it explicitly refused. It would be illegal for the hospital to agree to that. It would be interesting to know how many Catholic hospitals have tacitly or explicitly agreed to it.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Stealth Theology of Michele Bachmann
by rjosephhoffmann
The media likes simple analogies. That’s why when (rarely) the question of Michele Bachmann’s religious beliefs comes up, they immediately think Kennedy 1960–the Catholic thing. Soon they will have the voting public believing that Michele Bachmann believes the same thing about religion and political life as JFK did: that they are oil and water, and must be kept strictly apart, as the Constitution decrees. For her part, Bachmann doesn’t care what you believe as long as you don’t look too closely and permit her to win.
But she doesn’t believe in the wall of separation. Nope, not even a lace curtain.
Michele Bachmann believes that faith is a key element in politicial decision-making: ”I became a Christian when I was 16 years old,” she says. “I gave my heart to Jesus Christ. Since that time, I’ve been a person of prayer. And so when I pray, I pray believing that God will speak to me and give me an answer to that prayer.”
To be clear, we have moved in fifty years from Kennedy’s belief that religious faith should not be an impediment to holding elective office to Bachmann’s eerily commonplace view that strong, active and directive religious faith is an indispensable virtue in elected officials.
In addition to being a staunch defender of such evanglical idiocies as creation science and the hoax-theory of global warming, she has also heard voices: “That’s what a calling is — if I pray, a calling means that I feel like I have a sense from God. … It means that I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go.”
Bill Prendergast has called Bachmann a “stealth evangelical”– dangerous precisely because she is pretending to be something else, anything else. There is a word for this tactic: it’s called dissimulation, but because it is five syllables it’s above the SAT-level of most media analysts and probably won’t be used much.
Instead Bachmann will continue to deflect the more superficial charges of her “flakiness” when the real issue–the real challenge to her constitutional suitability–is her explicit denial of the purport of the First Amendment.
This is a woman who asks for Americanism tests for members of government, but like so many religious nutters has no idea that the Constitution was designed to protect the civil body politic from religious zealots like her.
She is already perfecting the shill: How can I be a flake when I have “a postdoctorate degree” from William and Mary in federal tax law. (Translation: She has a degree beyond her basic law degree from Oral Roberts University, where she was a member of the final graduating class of its failed law school. It got her a job with the IRS. A cursory check of the William and Mary site shows that the LL.M. degree is no longer offered, except to foreign students.)
Her only other education is from Winona State University. Except for her gig with the IRS, she has never practiced law. Whatever the case about her meager accomplishments outside the church, get ready to hear a lot about her “postdoctorate” in the coming months. It’s her surest protection against the charge that she is a screaming fundamentalist loon with no education–a virtue she shares with sibling loonies like Sarah Palin, her rival for the Bible Knowledge award.
Bachmann and her husband Marcus, whom she met at WSU in the Christian Intervarsity Fellowship, run a Christian counseling service in Stillwater, Minnesota. She is a vicious opponent of abortion rights and symbolizes her right to life philosophy by being the foster parent of 23 children. For a decade, her home has been recognized as a “treatment house.”
Since 1988, when she became infatuated with the Christian exceptionalist theology of Francis Schaeffer, she has prayed outside clinics and provided counseling to girls and women seeking to end their pregnancies.
Prendergast writes that Bachmann’s threat is a life or death battle for American democracy. I agree. Some of us believe that this battle may already be lost in the faith-sodden atmosphere of this perishing republic. But insofar as some threats are more worthy of attention and response than others, consider this:
“It’s great to be a ‘stealth evangelical political movement politician’ when it comes to media news coverage. The state’s political media must help you out there by downplaying your ties to politicized religion, because if the voters at large pigeon-hole you as a Dobson puppet, you’d never get elected to anything. …If [Bachmann] ran openly as a candidate of the Christian conservative party (which she is), she’d take her ten thousand votes and get sent home on election night. But if the very same Christian conservative party candidate runs with the label ‘Republican,’ she takes all the Republican votes. It’s the branding, see? That’s why she (and plenty of other evangelical conservatives) run as local ‘stealth’ candidates, claiming to want to represent ‘all’ the voters in district–but actually moving in concert with this national politicized religious movement.”
In general, as everyone knows, the media doesn’t “do” religion well. The only thing it does worse is science. And it especially doesn’t like to be openly critical of the religious beliefs of political aspirants unless something really juicy–like the “anti-Americanism” of a Revd. Jeremiah Wright–rears its head. Remember Obama’s rather pitiful and halting performance in the NBC-sponsored Faith Forum, hosted by evangelical teddy bear Rick Warren? –Now imagine Michele Bachmann in the same setting. The larger question–why such a “forum” should have any bearing at all on the electoral process in a secular democracy–went virtually unasked.
Meanwhile, the stealth movement has learned a few lessons since the good old days of the Moral Majority and the explicit Christianism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Political groups like Focus on the Family, the Council for National Policy and the Family Research Council have their teams and fundraisers at work in every state.
Since the stupidity-induced implosion of Sarah Palin on Bunker Hill (the irony should not escape us), the darling of the stealth-religious conservatives is Michele Bachmann. Yet one of the grievous flaws of the American media, as opposed to enlightened bloggers and observers like Michelle Goldberg, is that big media frankly doesn’t know how to frame a story like this. They still labor under the assumption that equal time means that good and bad ideas, true and false ideas, should get a fair hearing.
That’s why the same media that’s often assumed to be liberal and lame has actually been complicit in the survival of anti-science absurdities like the belief that global warming is a socialist conspiracy and that the cosmos is between 5700 and 10,000 years old rather than 15-billion years, the number generally accepted by scientists as “the point of infinite density”–the conditions for the Big Bang.
More and more people are recognizing that Bachmann’s struggle is not just political. She believes she is engaged in spiritual warfare. She is an angel of light fighting the powers of secular, atheistic liberal darkness. Her view of every significant social and moral issue is largely framed in language that Francis Schaeffer (the son of the more famous Christian dominionist) himself has termed ”familiarly Evangelical.” Look deeply into those sort of scary eyes and you will see Jesus.
She is able to signal her Christian followers by using language familiar to the born again, but totally strange to secular listeners and viewers. Goldberg writes,
“On Monday [the first Presidential debate], Bachmann didn’t talk a lot about her religion. She didn’t have to—she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama’s Libya policy, for example, she said, “We are the head and not the tail.” The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail.” As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it’s often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.” Voices.
This is a long way, brothers and sisters, from Kennedy’s pre-election assurances to suspicious protestants,
“Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.” (12 September 1960)
Just look at how far we haven’t come in fifty years.
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Published: June 28, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: American media : dominion theology : election 2012 : Francis Schaeffer : Jerry Falwell : Michele Bachmann : Michelle Goldberg : Moral Majority : religion : Republican party : Sarah Palin : spiritual warfare ..
10 Responses to “The Stealth Theology of Michele Bachmann”
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Scott
June 29, 2011 at 9:50 am
She’s hearing “voices”? I’m hearing “voices” too, they’re saying don’t vote for Michele Bachmann.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 29, 2011 at 10:23 am
You know the joke: When people talk to God it’s called prayer. When God talks to people it’s called schizophrenia.
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Mike Wilson
June 30, 2011 at 1:44 am
The primaries always get a few oddities like this. I think the improvements in modern communication may make them a bit more visible, while at the same time the public is more detached from Bachmans world view. Evangelicals are 21st century Klansmen. I have no doubt she will not make it to the primaries. The Republican Party is very tightly controlled by its big business supporters. They know how to pick candidates that work best in their interest, and with half the nation thinking she is a “flake”(and this from Fox News, a republican friendly group). Rich guys are not going to bet millions (their contribution plus their taxes) that such an odd woman will be beat Obama.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 30, 2011 at 11:12 am
I hope you’re right about the screening process. It may be her fatal flaw that she isn’t well connected–to business or to old money–and her religious convictions may not be enough to do the trick.
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Mike Wilson
June 30, 2011 at 2:25 pm
People in the ground seats respond well to Jimmy Carters and George W’s that talk about being born again and speaking with God, but those who who know that camels will pass though needles before they get into Heaven like to see clues that the candidate understands that God is still on the side with the best artillery.
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andrew
July 13, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Mike:
What?!?!?
God doesn’t “take sides”… that’s like saying that He is a Patriots fan or a Cowboys fan because they have the first the round draft.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Ha, maybe more like a recruiter offering cars and vacations to the A List.
Mike Wilson
July 16, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Andrew, it was a Napoleon quote (I think), the meaning is that the best artillery is God on the battlefield.
Robert
July 5, 2011 at 4:36 am
A very good read. Kudos!
Reply
madeline
July 7, 2011 at 9:03 pm
I`m a lapsed Catholic, pro choice, and believe all religious issues should be kept out of politics and, quite frankly dont care what gays do as long as they keep it to themselves. And I`m a Republican too.
When I hear that someone “talks to God”, it raises major doubts about their credibility.
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