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Nietzsche: Of Love, Trees, and Religion
by rjosephhoffmann
Reading Nietzsche is not always the easiest thing to do. He is the okra of philosophers, and his moments of lyricism are offset by yawpish moments like this one from “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life”:
Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again: and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, for he is proud of being human and not an animal and yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal, neither bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak of me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent: so that man could only wonder. But he also wondered about himself, that he cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs with him.” (translated by Peter Preuss)
No points for the Mise-en-scène, but Nietzsche is just about to make an important point: namely, that unlike the animals, we are self-conscious creatures who are attached to the past: “However fast we run, the chain runs with us.” The chain is memory. Just when we think we’ve shaken it, “the spectre comes back to disturb the calm of a later moment.”
Nietzsche’s “No” to history comes from the schoolhouse, where the young are subjected to the givens of a catalog, offered up as facts, but are really nothing more than the concrete of national prejudices, the residue of wounded pride, battles won, ground gained. His contempt for history taught and learned this way is exquisite: he laments how facts, “rolled into ugly clumps,” are then thrust out as food for the youthful soul. Who can blame the thirteen year-old for resisting it by showing “a blasé indifference [to history]” from boyhood on. (ADHfL, 41, 42).
I was pondering this way of doing history in connection with a project I am working on, a history of Christian ideas about marriage. The subject is timely since the opponents of civil same-sex unions almost always have a relatively high view of the “institution of matrimony” that was not at all typical of the Church of the first eleven centuries. It is odd to me–or perhaps not odd at all–that in the century when marriage is at its most optional and vulnerable as a sacred compact, its sanctity–or at least its traditionally “high” social status–is being invoked by the very people who have been excluded from its grace.
Nietzsche did not think that the history of a subject was a good means of settling disputes about a subject. Many of the people I know, when they tell me they “like history too,” especially my hair-cutter, will then go on to say they collect World War II paraphernalia, or quarters, or pottery from the Old Queen’s reign. What they really like are relics that tie them to events from the past–for whatever reason. But all the relics in the world, and all the histories of warfare from Marathon to Waterloo do not explain or solve war, or (assuming a distinction) marriage. That is why Nietzsche worries about the packaged certainties offered to schoolchildren as a history of their nation, or religion, or family pedigree. That kind of history is almost always designed to shape minds and bend wills, rather than strengthen them. It is one of the reasons, and perhaps in some sections of America the only reason, that school boards still take an interest in how history is taught. They mean our history.
Peter Preuss, the learned translator of the works of Nietzsche’s Untimely Observations (from his early period) boils it all down to what three post-Kantian philosophers were trying to say in different ways: As the self-conscious animal, life is not something that happens to man. It is something he creates: “Life is a task.” Hegel turns this task into something sublime;Kierkegaard turns it inward; Heidegger sees it as preparation, a quest for authentic Being. Nietzsche, more radically than any of the others, sees human life within history. The bit above, about the animals, is his way of saying that human beings are historical in a way that animals are not: “Man is not wholly the product of an alien act, human or divine,” and unlike the animals “he produces his own nature,” at least in part.
“History is the activity of producing that nature within the limitations of [his] situation. History is the record of this self production. It is the activity of a historical being recovering the past into a present which anticipates the future. With a total absence of this activity, man would fall short of humanity. History is necessary.” (Preuss, Intod. 1, 2)
One can quibble with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the existential role of history. Is all history biography? Can general principles ever be educed from individual records, from the products of self-discovery or self realization? Is there any role at all for Nietzsche’s ogre, the “disinterested scholar.”
The clue is the between-state that we find ourselves in, as being not the children of a higher being, not endowed with rights of any sort (at least none that matter), purely–like our animal brethren–natural and materially wrought, but with a power to remember, symbolize and shape the past. This means of course that history can never be thoroughly demythologized because its earliest form is the compact between memory and story. The story itself is not what the “modern,” self-confident scientific history of Nietzsche’s day was offering. The source-based work of scholars like von Ranke, which periodized and typified history and offered “solutions” to conundrums like the history of the renaissance papacy, was of no interest at all to Nietzsche, who hoped that the scientific methods of his day would be seen as a kind of superstition.
In his later work, especially Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche would return to the theme of history in a more pessimistic way. But even in the early work he is concerned with its power: “Unrestrained” history–a pure historicism that pulls no punches, leaves no myth unploughed and nothing to be guessed at, is “always annihilating.” It is a drive unto itself, a drive for explanation. It is inherently destructive, “for if no constructive drive is active behind the historical drive, if one does not destroy and clear away so that a future already alive in our hope may build its house on cleared ground, if justice alone rules, then the creative instinct is enfeebled and discouraged.”
History can express this destructive drive in any direction, toward any object susceptible of historical study: marriage, art, the history of nations, morals, literature, warfare.
But of the subjects over which history can wield its authority, none is more vulnerable to destruction, Nietzsche thought, than religion. Perhaps that is because religion belongs to the genealogy of history (as it does to science and philosophy). Whatever Nietzsche would later think about the process of destruction, his early work finds a kind of piety and regret close to the surface:
“A religion, which is to be transformed into historical knowledge, a religion which is to be thoroughly known in a scientific way, will in the end also be annihilated. The reason [for this] is that the historical audit always brings to light much that is false, crude, inhuman, absurd, violent, [such] that the attitude of pious illusion in which alone all that wants to live can live is necessarily dispelled. Only with love, however, only surrounded by the shadow of the illusion of love can man create. That is, only with an unconditional faith in something that is perfect and righteous.” (38-9)
Hence the dilemma. History is necessary. But for creativity to operate, so must love.
It comes down in the long run to what you are willing to ignore, pass over, or forgive for the sake of creativity which is rooted in the illusion of love. It isn’t that history (or science) can’t chop religion down to size: it can, because it has the power and the tools to do so. It’s a question of whether–in chopping away at the trees to clear the field–you have a house to build or simply enjoy the sound of an axe as it bites the wood.
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Published: October 25, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: history : Nietzsche : philosophy : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
17 Responses to “Nietzsche: Of Love, Trees, and Religion”
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steph
October 26, 2010 at 11:03 am
You always capture things so incisively and have a profoundly beautiful way of expressing them. History will annihilate religion if it’s critical and not embellished with glorifying interpretation, but as Nietzsche points out, we have no bare facts, only interpretations. If only histories of the war could dispose of war but they are always packaged interpretations. Maybe we need to ‘let go’ of history as any indication of history, and love the story, as story. Or appreciate the story and let it go. I have found Nietzsche immensely difficult to read – and he is so tragic, I have always needed to purify my own soul after getting lost in his words, to wash away his pain.
x
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ken
October 26, 2010 at 12:39 pm
This essay brings to mind Camus’ observation on history…
“It is true that we cannot “escape history,” since we are in it up to our necks. But one may propose to fight within history to preserve from history that part of man which is not its proper province.”
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rjosephhoffmann
October 26, 2010 at 3:50 pm
I hadn’t thought of that Ken, or I would have cited it. Brilliant analogy.
steph
October 26, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Thank you Ken, I’m grateful to you for drawing attention to that wonderful article: http://www.ppu.org.uk/e_publications/camus.html
ken
October 26, 2010 at 6:49 pm
It’s one of Camus’ more obscure observations, since it appeared in one of the essays he composed for the French Resistance newspaper “Combat” back in the 1940′s. The essays were later assembled into a small book titled “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, which I came across a number of years ago.
steph
October 26, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Yes – 1946 in Combat, and published in English in ‘Politics’ in 1947. I hadn’t read it so I’m grateful to have found it now.
ken
October 26, 2010 at 8:18 pm
And the next question, and possibly the most difficult, is what is that part of the human that is not the province of history. Does such a thing exist at all?
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drdave
October 28, 2010 at 2:35 am
In 1964, in the midst of the Free Speech events at Berkeley, my class on Camus and other Modern Spokesman met one evening at a TA’s home for discussion. One point was that the arrow of flight, the journey, and not the destination, was what was most important. That is to say, it was the story of the individual, the history, that was important.
Today, I sat reading Bill Nye’s comments from the Humanist of the Year award: “Science is the best idea we’ve had so far. It could change, right? Got a better idea? Bring it on.”
Perhaps that is the part of the human that is not the province of history. Science is, in some sense, outside the individual’s story. And, from what I know, history is the story of individuals.
steph
October 28, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Dave: Bill Nye the ‘science guy’ is a strange choice for Humanist of the Year, or perhaps it’s just that I don’t think he’s much of a humanist. I’m not sure I’d choose his quotation as a response to Camus’ dilemma. His atheistic anti religious stance is more akin to that of the ‘new atheists’ I think, than the atheist contexts of Nietzsche and Camus. The popular American science guy’s claim to comedy fame seems to be won by his laughing at people rather than creative humour, although I suppose the ridiculous big bow tie is amusing especially as it’s generally crooked. I’m not sure I’d want him to teach my children. Nevertheless, doesn’t science too become history tomorrow? I don’t agree either that history is only the story of individuals. Societies play a large part for a start.
Ed Jones
November 3, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Friedric Nietzsche’s certain understanding of Jesus with his idiom the kingdom of God must be made a comment,
“What is “the good news’? That true life, eternal life, has been found — it is not something promised, it is already here,it is within you: as life is lived in love, in love without substraction, exclusion, without distance. Everyone is the child of God — Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone — and as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else.
Jesus’ faith dosen’t prove itself, either by miracles or by rewards and pomises, and least of all by ‘scripture’ (as NT “proved” the Christ of faith): it is, as every moment, its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own ‘Kingdom of God’.
In the whole psychology of the ‘Gospel’ (of Jesus) the concepts of guilt and punishment is lacking;
also the concept of reward. ‘Sin’ (all basic tenets of Christiaity)– any distance that separates God and man — is abolshed; prescisely this is the ‘good news’. Blessedness is not promised, is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality.
The deep instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself ‘in heaven’. to feel ‘eternal’ while in every other condition one certainly does not feel oneself ‘in heaven’; this alone is the psychological reality of ‘redemption’ — A new way of living, not a new belief. The kingdom of heaven is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘above the earth’ or ‘after death’.The ‘hour of death’ is not a Christian concept –The kingdom of God isn’t somthing tht one waits for; it has no yesterday and no tomorrow, it dosen’t come in ‘a thousand years’ — it is an experience that takes place inside the heart, it is everywhere, it is no-where.”
“
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Ed Jones
November 9, 2010 at 10:43 pm
However irreconsilable some of Nietzsche’s beliefs, like “superman” and that men should obey their will to power irregradless of the consequences, teachings used by dictators Hitler and Mussolini, in spite of all, his understanding of the teachings of Jesus with his idiom the Kingdom of God, stands as one of the most insightful of any like interpretation I am aware of amd one which I take to be the content of his statment: “an unconditional faith in something that is perfect and righteous”. This clearly reflects the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson one of his mentors.
Ed Jones
November 10, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Joe,
I cannot let go of Letting Go of Jesus. However belated, I am compelled with deepest concern to attempt further comment. Your statement “Jesus as an ethical teacher has to go the way of his divinity and miracles – I am saying what I think is historically true in terms of the way history deals with its own – we leave him at the door of the church – as one unknown”. This has a final dogmatic sense, however, your October 10 comment “I myself cannot let go in the sense of leaving history behind”, may yet say the door is not fully closed. I want to challenge your “to let go’s” by arguing from your essay Nietzsche: Of Love Trees and Religion.
But first Camus’ statement: “It is true that we cannot escape history since we are in it. But one may purpose to fight within history to preserve from history that part of man which is not its proper province.” It is this fight which I attempt. That part of man which is its proper province relates to the history of sense perceived events, but sense perceivd knowledge is not the extent of reality, there is that integral thought, beyond all sense perception, lacking which our thinking must fail. It is integral thought which is that part of man (which is only within consciousness – Plato’s ideas) that is not the proper province of history. Jesus with his idiom the Kingdom of God was about integral thought, the ultimate solution to the human condition, God-man relationship, Ultimate Concern. In spite of the extent to which history has corrupted Scriptural credibility, history can yet take us to the Scriptural source for apostolic witness, but history cannot interpt its meaning – this is not its peoper province.
Now to Nietzsche, his quote: “A reigion which is to be transformed into historical knowledge, a religion which is to be thoroughly known in a scientific way will in the end be annihilated. The reason for this is that the historical audit always brings to light much that is false, crude, inhuman, violent, such that the attitude of pious illusion in which all that wants to live is necessarily dispelled. Only with love, however, only surrounde by the shadow of the illusion of love can man create. That is only with unconditional faith in something that is perfect and righteous”. See the above coment for Nietzsche’s explication of his faith.
I take the above to be Nietche’s commentary on traditional Christianity, his deep lament over hisory’s inability to credibly report this ultimate revelation of Jesus so creatively explicated in his faith statement.
The Jesus tradition has been transformed into histroical knowledge: the Jewish common sense Pauline kerygma: all men inherit an irresistible urge to sin, God, obligated to maintain His justice, cannot forgive man without the proper sacrifice which no mere man can offer. Jesus a semi-god, not of human procreation thus sinless, by his death offered the proper sacrifice – now God can in justice accept sinful man forgiving his sins. Thus to transform the revelation of Jesus into historical knowledge. Paul the primary “audit” brings to light much that is false, etc. It is within this Pauline context that the real Jesus has been corrupted, robbed of real significance, even to the extent of raising the doubt if he ever was.
Again I make reference to the March 24, 2009 letter which by strange happenstance ended up as comments to your essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodblet. as a reconstruction of the Jesus tradition. I believe it connects the essential dots to serve as a frame of reference for the path to the real Jesus. I dare a brask question: Can we afford to remain part of the problem, stuck with an over critical
bias?
Ed Jones
November 13, 2010 at 11:52 am
Steph, I must challenge your October 28th reply to Dave as beeing seriously false. Not only have you misinterpreted Nietzsche’s statement, but to make the implication in any sense that Nietzsche is atheist is flately false. Read again “as if for the first time” my September 3rd comment: Nietzsche on Jesus. However erratic some of his belif, just here he is an indisputabe believer. Further read my November 10 comment for my understanding of both Camus’ and Nietzsche’s statements. If I am missing something kindly reply.
Reply
steph
November 13, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Must you? I specifically mentioned “atheist contexts”. I differentiated this from contemporary atheism. But I do not wish to engage in debates. Life is precious, time is precious, so be blessed that yours is too.
Ed Jones
October 28, 2010 at 3:53 pm
drdave,
you make reference to Bill Nye’s comment: “Science is the best idea we’ve had so so far — ” forces me to wonder if you have read “Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists”. The concluding paragraph of the Introduction: According to their view: “physics deals with shadows, to go beyond shadows is to go beyond physics, to go beyond physics is to head toward meta-physics or mysticism – and that is why so many of our pioneering physicists were mystics, The new physics contributed nothingg positive to this mystical venture, except spectacular failure, from whose smoking ruinss the spirit of mysticism gently arose”.”
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ken
October 28, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Kurt Vonnegut once said..”Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
Science is fine and marvelous, but like any tool it can be used for destructive purposes. It hasn’t put an end to our unending violence, only refined and honed the techniques of destruction. And scientists have been taken in by all sorts of lunacies…like the practice of lobotomies and the defense of Eugenics.
As Mr. Hoffmann has observed…”Putting Science in God’s throne doesn’t make the diktats humane, it just changes tyrants.”
Reply
Thomas Garza
November 23, 2010 at 8:23 am
Nietzches’ cynicisms of Christianity, like most men, tend to be built upon a life of “observations” not “participations”. To opine about the “Kingdom of God” without experiencing it as a citizen is one of the problems with some men who WRITE history. Passion is “between the sheets” ( going at it ), not sitting beside the bed smoking a cigarette and watching someone else “go at it”, yes? It is more enjoyable to listen or read the remarks of men who have LIVED life ( religious experiences with substance concerning the kingdom concept/reality) than to waste good beer wondering why they had so much time to sit and write about it. Moses taught, “Love thy neighbor as thyself..”, but Jesus taught, “Love your neighbor even as I have loved you and lay my life down for you…”. Loving someone from the vantage point of self is much different than to “love selflessly”. I wonder if Nietzche ever had the priviledge of that lind of love ?
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Books etc.
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Vita Brevis
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Sins of Omission
by rjosephhoffmann
Catholic theologian and former priest Paul Collins, as every one who has previewed this book has recognized, has a tough job. After saying flat-footedly that “those of us born after World War II will be among the most despised and cursed generations in the whole history of humankind,” it behooves him to say both why this is so and what we can do about it. (Judgment Day, University of New South Wales Press, 291pp, $34.95)
Ecotheology has been around for more than a generation and its themes have become stereotyped. They depend on a particular reading of the creation myth of Genesis that understands mankind as being placed in a stewardly or custodial rather than a dominant position towards nature. It was given to us in perfect condition: we messed it up.
Using myths in this way is perfectly permissible as far as I am concerned, as long as we understand that the Genesis story doesn’t actually teach us anything you can take to the bank or use in constructing environmental policy. According to Genesis 1.26-32, God is quite emphatic to Adam about fertility, productivity, and “dominion” over the earth. –A whole school of theology has taken its name from verse 28, which sees this dominion or authority extending beyond the natural world to politics and society. Whether out or not, most conservative Christians, especially the Tea Party variety, espouse some form of dominionism. Their numbers will grow in the wake of the American congressional elections of 2010.
According to a different account of creation in Genesis 2.15ff., Adam was created as a live-in caretaker of the Garden God had planted for his own pleasure and relaxation. He likes to stroll there in the cool of the morning (Gen. 3.8) and can be heard humming. Adam’s benefits (in kind) include free use of the property except for the tree of life (2.9) and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil–two trees whose magical fruit mythically explain God’s moral powers and longevity to the Hebrew writers who tell the story. And just to mention it, the story is not entirely consistent. Adam’s job description is that of an unskilled labourer, in or out of the garden. His punishment for being a bad caretaker (what if some other god or a mere mortal got hold of the fruit?) is just to transfer him to Arkansas with a shovel and a scolding. His status remains unchanged. The real estate changes.
Scholars see the second creation story as an etiology, a story told to explain not just the origins of agriculture and “sedentary” (non-nomadic) existence, but of the tribulations of crop failure and lack of irrigation. Things were much better back in Babylon, even Egypt-land according to Genesis 12.10ff; not so good in Canaan.
Paul Collins is deeply sensitive to his own better lights in seeing the biblical story, and the traditions it spawns, as a kind of “creation theology.” After all, didn’t God say that what he had created was good, and aren’t we the ones who have made it bad? What Collins especially dislikes is “development”, a trend he sees extending from ancient China in the east and Sumer in Mesopotamia (close to the mise en scene for Genesis 2) when the human race became “irrigation crazy.” And for Collins, irrigation is just the most primitive form of technological and industrial development.
It’s no good saying that at any stage along the way we have ever given a thought to the environment: not in the Middle Ages when the vastness of the earth was being intuited; not in the Age of Discovery, when greed for gold and possessions ruled the heart and inspired armies; not in the Renaissance when our planetary smallness became obvious, nor in the industrial era, nor in the nuclear age, and not nearly enough today. The term biocide did not exist before the twentieth century, but religion (not only Christianity) has been one of the great facilitators of killing the planet in the Name of its creator.
Is material development moral? Should leases be given to BP and other “oil giants” for deep water drilling, after the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe in which–it becomes increasingly clear–human greed and shortcutting and not merely human error played a significant role. How do you go about convincing a fickle electorate that the sin-deaf political party that gave us Dick Cheney (who gave us the vamped up Halliburton behemoth that gave us the cement that led to the rig that Jack built exploding in Jack’s face) should not be returned to power, just when we are becoming aware of the price the earth has had to pay for bleeding so much oil for so long, for so much money?
Collins’s thesis is that everyone should be indignant, but Christians (he thinks) especially so, because they have a mechanism for dealing with what’s going on. It is called sin. And sin is what God looks at, according to traditional theology, when he judges the world–and what we have done with the world.
Because we are both selfish and fickle, but don’t regard selfishness as particularly sinful, it is easy to think of sin as an equivalence-game–to focus on other people’s trespasses compared to our own meager wrongdoing and lapses. Who me? No, that’s you, not me. Better yet, it’s him, not us.
The planet is a very big thing. BP is a very big thing. But private sinners are something you can get your head around–or at least your nose into their business. It is why we love reality TV, Desperate Housewives, Jersey Shore, the Kardashians. They have the courage to be so much more sinful than we have the time or money to be, brave enough to make their private sins public so that we can enjoy them with tortilla chips and beer. Thievery, murder, backbiting, bare-faced lying, serial adultery–the “individual sins” that Protestants are grateful Jesus paid the price for (it saves us so much work), and Catholics can reference on mental index cards during their infrequent confessions–enumerated, of course–are hugely entertaining. Add to these hatefulness and attitude. It is difficult to judge what we have come to love, or the things that have seduced us, as Augustine once sighed reflecting on a boyhood theft at the age of sixteen: “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error — not that for which I erred but the error itself” (Conf. 2,5)
But the thrill of other people’s sins, and the voyeuristic mind-set that ensures its success as entertainment, is really not what sin is about. Collins is deeply sensitive to the way in which the Church has trivialized and individualized sin. Christian teaching is that the world itself is under judgment. We are under judgment for how we treat it–world both in the metaphysical sense (“world, flesh, devil”–delight) and in the physical way–its beauty and bounty. Sin is not just who you’ve slept with, you bad boy, or lied about not sleeping with, you clever dog, but lying to yourself for your own irresponsibility for the social, political and corporate sins you conveniently overlook. All sin in encapsulated in crimes against the idea of “world.”
It is difficult for the modern believer to vindicate God’s destruction of the “world” by flood “in the time of Noah,” except for this: it never really happened, and the story is told –de pilo pendet–to show that creation hangs on God’s favor, a grace that mankind has abused recklessly through that most biblical of words, “wrongdoing.” No one would argue with the story if, for God, we substituted the word “Planet” and saw the catastrophe as the consequence of inaction, greed, and stupidity. Only the most obtuse literalist can take exception to the need for stern correction of a race that has fallen miserably short, like the mythical Adam, of the role creation requires of it.
Once upon a time, there was a healthy sense of this: In Paul’s declaration that “The good I would do I do not and the evil I would not do, I do.” And in Cranmer’s eloquent rendering of the sentiment in the Book of Common Prayer, turning it into a general confession of responsibility:
“Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,: we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and have done those things which we ought to have done.”
Confiteor
Or in the Catholic church’s ancient catechism,
“…quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissióne — “in thought word, deed, and omission.” Or in Martin Luther King’s aphorism, that “In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
The numerical approach to sin favored by conservative Christians and dominionists will always be at odds with the social construct, the idea of a world under judgement for social failures and private indifference, especially when verses such as Genesis 1.28 can be used as an entitlement to wear and tear–drill, pollute, waste and wreck, or Adam’s punishment can be interpreted as an argument for better tractors and antiperspirants. “Development” is no more a neutral word than the word “weapon,” which forces to our consciousness the correlation between a greedy man and a murderer.
It is a tribute to the stupidity of Adam’s children that we can wring our hands over whether we are passing a trillion (three trillion, six trillion?) dollar debt to our grandchildren, but not worry too much about clear lakes, blue skies and green pastures. As Collins recognizes, generations of Christians (including a great many in the “dark ages”) used these very symbols as a cipher of God’s grace, beauty and bounty. Many of the Psalms could not have been written without a sense of the transcendental power of God in nature.
“… Sing praises to our God on the lyre, Who covers the heavens with clouds, Who provides rain for the earth, Who makes the grasses grow on the mountains, who gives the beast its food, and food to the young ravens which cry…. He makes peace in your borders; He satisfies you with the finest of the wheat.”
No one needs to believe in this sentiment descriptively, or in this God prescriptively. But it seems to me, the image of a God who provides for and cares about the world is at least as important as the image of a God who cares about stealing, adultery, how you feel about your neighbor’s wife. Or oxen. As the Church’s attention to sin has now shrunk to focus almost entirely on the uterus, the social, political, and environmental sins against the world receive proportionally less attention. Conservative Christians who believe in the “uterine sins” but cannot turn their attention to the skies, the air, the melting glacial fields, the rapid spread of ignorance and poverty by irresponsible parenting really need to have their baptismal certificates revoked. The only problem is, the Church condones and encourages their ignorance. It tells them to be good Christians by not having sex, or being very careful when they do. When this does not work–in Uganda or Bangladesh or Wasilla, Alaska, it is–reproachably–attributed to the will of God. And yet no one keeps track of how many deaths the culture of life evinces through poverty, disease, starvation, ignorance. The Catholic Church and missionary protestantism do not answer the door when the collection agent presents the bill for the culture of life.
The biblical writers made a close association between sin and destruction. A tormented first-century writer, Paul of Tarsus, sees the whole world order “passing away” as the eschatological reality of his time. It’s corrupt like an apple is rotten: to the core. There is nothing permanent about it.
The literature of judgement–called apocalyptic–can be amazingly detailed about how uncreation will work at the time of judgement; the images range from stars losing their place in the sky to mountains crumbling and seas overflowing the boundaries that were set for them in the beginning, a dizzying succession of events that resembles a super-fast rewind of creation saga. Instead of births, there will be miscarriages–because there will be nothing left to take care of. We will have become unnecessary. The world will end, but badly.
The apocalyptic vision, all of it frantic and fanciful of course, continues to fascinate the most literal believers because of this grotesque detail. They see themselves being scooped up to heaven with the angels because they were, after all, better than the desperate housewives and avoided the fleshpots of Reno. But for the creators of the genre, and the Christian copycats who followed them, it was all about sin and judgement. The world had got very bad. People had lost focus. The Law was being forgotten. The prophets had stopped prophesying, their work done. The unjust triumphed over the oppressed and the weak. Politics then as now, was rough, raw, corrupt, and open to the highest bidder. Eden’s apple lay rotten on the ground as a token of what cost our ancestor his job: abject failure to tend the garden. “Let thy Kingdom come” is a perfectly rational prayer under the circumstances.
It did not come. Jesus did not come. Salvation of the sort expected anyway–the incursion of a divine power from above–did not come. As Loisy once said the Church came instead. But what Christianity in the widest sense did possess is an ongoing sense of judgment and accountability.
It has not solved the problem of the cheap-grace Christian who is still obsessed with the uterine sins and calls herself “pro-life.” The church is now, and has been for a long time, in the reflexive mode of taking counter-cultural positions that it deems unpopular and therefore correct. It has pronounced secular culture evil and knows that other voices are competing for listeners. But in focusing on the “uterine sins,” it has lost track of the larger idea of sin and salvation and traded the chance to be a truly prophetic voice for the far easier task of singing the song it has always sung.
But secularists should take no comfort in the Church’s failure and shortsightedness. A consciousness of judgement, something equating to the ancient religious vision, might be necessary in assessing what anthropologist Thomas Berry calls “our inability to deal with the devastation of our planet.” Ironically, this failure of cognizance and will comes at a time when we know more than we have ever known about our wasteful and wanton habits, the effects of millennia of predation on the earth’s goodness and bounty.
It may be difficult to fathom, knowing what we know about the dangers of overpopulation, starvation, disease and poverty, why conservative religion’s remedy for this failure is to preach against birth control and family planning. But but is also difficult to know what the secular-moral alternative is. In a review of Collins’s book by John Birmingham, published in The Australian for October 9th, 2010, the following paraphrase struck me as significant:
Secular humanism and rationalism, which led us to the edge of destruction, offer little in comparison because, having driven God from our moral discourse, that discourse has become difficult in secular democracy, which has ‘neither the ethical apparatus nor the rhetoric necessary for it’.”
Is it the case that there are no good naturalistic arguments against raping the planet for fun and profit? Or, if it is too easy to say “Don’t be silly” to that question, is it the case that the dual role of applied science in the contemporary period has been contradictory and conflictual, especially for those of us who are not scientists but reap its benefits every day: to guarantee our pleasure, our longevity, our convenience and comfort by extending the outreach of technology, while pausing occasionally to warn us that the reach cannot be extended indefinitely. The warnings are not usually framed as moral caveats. They seldom involve the idea of “judgment”; they are framed as arguments about non-renewable energy resources and diminishing capacity. They are arguments for greater ingenuity and more development.
Drill, Baby, drill!
I do not see a consistent ethic of responsibility on the secular side. And like Collins, I find the vocabulary so far developed to be vacuous and uncompelling. It lacks what philosophers might once have called a “telic focus”: we need to know why oiled pelicans off the coast of Louisiana are an evil. We need to know why it is ever so much worse to pass on black rain and unbreathable air to our descendants than a trillion dollar deficit. We need to to know that in some way we are judged, not just that we need to be careful when we buy our next car.
sins of the flesh
Science as a facilitator of human pleasure, the life span, the ethics of convenience, can issue perfectly sane warnings about this urgent state of affairs–much as the ancient apocalyptic writers once made promises of judgment to overreaching kings and idolaters. But now, as then, consequences postponed do not constitute effects. Long range predictions are not threats. They are merely mystifying to most people in a distractable age. The delay between an eternal God’s anger and his punishment for wickedness extends back three millennia and promises to reach into futures we cannot imagine, because it will never take place in history and time. Our situation with respect to judgement for sins against Nature is more dire because there is no God to save us and no God to judge us. Scholars have found that the favourite prayer added to the numerous litanies developed during the Black Death in Europe was a a modified version of the ancient prayer, “Agnus Dei“: “Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, spare us O Lord.” But we have to help ourselves.
The consequences that science envisions are real enough. And without the moral equivalent of God, we need to develop ways and words to make the consequences and the judgement of our own irresponsibility plain and real: a people guilty of lethargy, hardheartedness and inaction–the sins of omission, a world under the judgment of universal conscience, a betrayal of the knowledge we might possess, and do possess, shoved to the margins of our collective vision.
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Published: October 30, 2010
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Tags: Bible : Catholic Church : creation : dominion theology : ecology : ecotheology : environment : environmental ethics : ethics : Genesis : God : judgement : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
3 Responses to “Sins of Omission”
.
steph
October 30, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Wonderful analysis of creation myths, and such an ironically tragic review. This is so relevant in the dawn of this coming week – from the rather bizarre Rally to Restore Sanity drawing hundreds of thousands of people across America today, to Halloween, Guy Fawkes and the depressing and moronic options in the American upcoming elections. John Birmingham’s “Australian” article was very good too. Secular humanism and rationalism fail to provide solutions, and neither do Tea Party religious politics. They fail to provide anything like the approach to the four Christian cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice as reflected perhaps in the ponderings of Christians like St Francis of Assisi or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that Collins locates as the basis for a system of ethics by which we might remake our relationship with creation. But basically neither religion nor humanism have anything in place to save us from ourselves. As the poet Leonard Cohen sings, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, everybody knows… the poor stay poor, the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, everybody knows, everybody knows that the boat is leaking… Everybody talking to their pockets, everybody wants a box of chocolates, and a long stem rose, everybody knows… Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes, everybody knows…’
x
Reply
Ed Jones
November 1, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Steph,
Your comments on the “dawn of the coming week” – the Tea Party, etc.: “They fail to provide anything like the approach to the four Christian virtures of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice as reflected perhaps in the ponderings of Christians like St. Frances of Assisi or Ricne Teilhard De Chardin, that Collins locates as the basis for a system of ethics by which we might remake our relationship with creation”, so overshadows my October 30th comment to Letting Go of Jesus, in the negative reference to differinces in senseablilties, that I want to withdraw it. Your reference to St. Francis opens an entirely positive diaglogue, however puzzled I remain with your assessment of Beginning From Jerusalem. My pace is slow but I still hope to make some advance to knowledge for “that growing number in the modern world who become more devoted to Jesus as they become more alinated to the church or as they have phrased it, between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus.” (Jaroslav Pelikan).
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Sins of Omission (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
December 5, 2010 at 8:48 pm
[...] Catholic theologian and former priest Paul Collins, as every one who has previewed this book has recognized, has a tough job. After saying flat-footedly that "those of us born after World War II will be among the most despised and cursed generations in the whole history of humankind," it behooves him to say both why this is so and what we can do about it. (Judgment Day, University of New South Wales Press, 291pp, $34.95) Ecotheology has been arou … Read More [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy
by rjosephhoffmann
The Right to Vote
The elections are over. The election is upon us. Long live the Democratic Process! And a tip of the hat to the founding fathers, who in their prescience must have known that the fundamental metaphor for twenty-first century politics would be an endless and pointless NASCAR race.
Now we sigh deeply, wipe away a wanton tear, and try to adjust to the fact that barely two years after the election of Barack Obama (Hope, Change, Fired Up, Ready to Go) America has lost its energy, its nerve, and possibly its mind, and decided it wants to sit on the stoop and watch the civilized world (which it has just voted to quit) pass by for a spell.
Meantime, we will half-hear as the political assessors talk their heads off about what went wrong and whether Obama is listening, whether he gets it, whether the sting he was stung stung enough to hurt, whether he is paying attention or is just out of touch with the American people, and why someone with such a hoity toity education is tone deaf, can’t communicate, and acts sooo professorial. Just who does he think he is?
The assumption on almost everyone’s part is that a (virtual) vote of no confidence conveys a kind of popular wisdom because it is an expression of the collective will of the people and in this Man Up Democracy, vox populi vox dei, People Rule. A little attention to the full quotation from Alcuin to Charlemagne in the eighth century yields a slightly different flavour, however: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” : “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” Leave it to an ingenious country like America to prove Alcuin spot on.
Alcuin, proved right in 2010
I am not a political scientist, not a “political analyst” (read: sports announcer in ill-fitting gray jacket), not even much of an activist, though I do have longish hair and wear turtlenecks. Ideologically, I am a proservative, a progressive who is afraid of the consequences of progressive ideas. I am not even sure I care very much about politics unless it has the capacity to catch my attention, as it did a couple of years ago when Obama struck me as a rare bird in a nasty profession, and may still prove too rare to escape extinction in 2012.
But after last Tuesday I’m fairly certain I will not be paying attention again for a long time to come. Maybe not again in my lifetime. I have talked to many people who feel the same way–even worse, because my cynicism is greater than theirs, and my immunity to bitterness and disappointment slightly more developed. I once stretched my student budget to the limit to attend a Van Cliburn concert, and was virtually giddy the evening of the performance. Even by my pathetic expectations, he was not up to his standard, pleaded the flu before he sat down to play, and cut the program short by thirty minutes. It’s a bad analogy, I know, but I think that is vaguely similar to the performance-reality gap America is dealing with right now. The question really is, whose fault is it?
"Not mine."
I do not think politics matters very much because I do not think it has the power to change things. War and science, and occasionally poignant ideologies, perhaps the odd book, have the power to change things (usually because they lead to war or new technologies), but because people do not change very much, the collective voice of the people is only ever going to be an expression of their state of mind and emotional condition at a certain moment. Modern American elections are fought with only emotion in view–not government, leadership, not the social welfare of the people, and certainly not ideas. The idea of what is “good for me” and what is “best for the country,” for example, are not complementary: Obama worked for the latter and ran afoul of the former. There were no ideas in this election, if you except (as I think you have to) the idea that taking your country back is an idea.
Besides being terribly depressing for smart people, the election was terrifying because it displayed, for the first time, that the American Constitution is not well adapted for the new millennium. The tears and cracks become more obvious with every passing election season and every Supreme Court decision. But the Constitution, which is political sacred writ in the United States, especially among those who have never read it, is an eighteenth century playbook for eighteenth century ideologies about limited government, seldom amended, and largely unable to serve as a proof-text for social reform. Only its plagiarized Lockean preamble (the only bit ever quoted extensively) has lofty rhetoric. The remainder reads like a tax form, like most constitutions throughout history.
But when you think about what it–the Constitution–put into place–the “system” of checks and balances, the bicameral legislature, the separation of powers, the electoral college, the cumbrous protocol for amending the sacred text, and the oligarchical method of interpretation by a panel of men and women who, for all practical purposes are political appointees with private agendas–you have to lose a little sleep. What it also put into place is the scourge of elections to the “lower house” every two years–a practice based on the need to “refer” to the mood of the people frequently in matters directly affecting them, but totally unsuited to an attention-deficient population who are accustomed to doing their Christmas shopping in September. It is true that the closest ancestor of our representative system, the British Parliament, also has provisions for “bringing down a government,” but in the best of times, and as an encouragement for the people to take government seriously and weigh their reserve power carefully, the normal (legal) stretch between elections is five years.
To put this a little more cogently, if this were England, and the “executive” was simply the leader of the party in power, Obama would be out the door. But, as it is, he survives to limp along until 2012 as the mercy of his persecutors. This is democracy, American-style, in action. This what America wants for the rest of the world.
There is a new apocryphon in the press, so popular that it is has a life beyond facts. It is this: Aristotle said democracy “is the worst form of government except for all the rest.” Aristotle, who was not known for his humor, never said any such thing, but it is instructional to look at what he did say in the Politics:
Book III -”But the citizen whom we are seeking to define is a citizen in the strictest sense, against whom no such exception can be taken, and his special characteristic is that he shares in the administration of justice, and in offices. He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizens of that state; and, speaking generally, a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.
…
For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all. Tyranny, as I was saying, is monarchy exercising the rule of a master over the political society; oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”
Book VII
“The citizens must not lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble, and inimical to virtue. Neither must they be farmers, since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties.”
That kind of language will strike every Tea Party operative as elitist because it shifts the blame for the wretchedness of a political outcome such as the recent American election away from a “tone-deaf” ruler to a dumb and blind electorate who vote their gut, not their head, and call it conscience. Equally, it will strike liberals as offensive, not because it emphasizes “smart politics” (which liberals profess to like) but because it sees the citizen-voter as a subset of the whole population and not the whole population. Both liberals and conservatives appeal to the archetype of the Working Man, not the educated “man of leisure” who is simply ridiculous and probably unemployed in our system. (Additionally, the Republican Working Man works in a bank or on Wall Street.) Regardless, both groups depend on the myth of the popular will, as opposed to the idea of informed citizen choice; neither group can afford to stray very far from the modern concept of “constituency” because constituencies vote. In the era of special-interest voting, scientific polling and frontier politics, Aristotle’s ideas about democracy being inherently defective don’t wash well with either political party. Democracy, George Bush famously said, on being told the death toll in Iraq had reached 4427 in 2003, is “messy.” A grateful nation returned him to power in 2004.
Aristotle was both an embarrassment and a challenge for the founders, who weren’t certain whether “mechanics and tradesmen” in addition to men of property and leisure (who had time to read Aristotle) should be factored into the process. Slaves and women were another matter. As every schoolchild used to know, that did not really happen until the nineteenth century for black Americans, and for women not until the twentieth. Enfranchisement on the strict basis of “legal” citizenship (or rights) as opposed to philosophical formation was considered an end in itself. But what was achieved by virtue of stressing the value of participation and inclusion was highly problematical, and the founders weren’t around to fix it. The rights of citizens had been a slogan since the time of our own and the French Revolution. What happens when Leviathan grows so many legs he can no longer walk? Government by whim and need, faction and passion–but worst of all ignorance.
Which brings me to the theology of the whole sordid affair that has emplaced in the chambers of the most powerful legislative assembly in the world a clutch of Know-nothings unlike anything this Needy and often Know-nothing Democracy has ever seen. I am talking, of course, about biblical Israel.
The Old Testament is more relevant to the current crisis than our Constitution because the suspicion of monarchical government originates there and not in Aristotle. The founders had monarchy on their mind, and they had concluded with the philosopher that monarchy unchecked was tyranny, a system that operated only in the interest of the ruler. (They were wrong of course: the English had fought their own civil war and had debated monarchy much more thoroughly than the colonists ever had by the time the Declaration was issued in 1776.) But as men of literary accomplishment, they also knew that monarchy was regarded by the ancient Hebrews, and even the early Christians, as the source of calamity and political distress. Polemicists like Paine referred to George III as a “Herod of uncommon malice” who could rightfully be deposed because “God’s favor has parted from him.”
George III: "Temperance"
It’s amazing, in reading through the historical books of the Bible, from 1 Samuel onward, how king after king is a disappointment, a disgrace, a mistake in God’s eyes. Kings are given to men as a punishment (Saul) and even when very famous (David, 2 Samuel 11.4) are not very nice. British monarchical history seems to follow the biblical pattern (perhaps this is why “Zadok the Priest” is still sung at Coronations?); the American presidency, while young compared to English history, seems doomed to follow suit, though no Shakespeare will arise to sing the praises or recite the flaws of an Eisenhower or a Coolidge.
If there is one thing worse than bad kings, however, it’s people. People, according to ancient Hebrew calculus, are rotten, passional, fickle. They are incapable of paying attention, following the right path, or doing the right thing, or keeping the faith, or enduring hardship, or working together, or solving problems. In metaphor, they “chase after false gods,” and always come back depressed, defeated, and empty-handed. It’s not a track record that would necessarily lead to the vox-populi philosophy.
In the biblical scheme of things, the God of Israel, is “constant.” His constancy is not “personal,” however; it’s embodied in his law and justice, a theme that actually undergirds the judicial philosophy of most modern constitutional democracies. The justice and goodness represented in the Hebrew idea of God through myth remains, primarily, a concept or abstraction in Greek thought. Because certain questions, Euthyphro-style (Which god likes what?) don’t arise in the monotheistic context, the Hebrew vision is crystal clear: People are ingenerately unable to keep to his standards of justice and righteousness. Coaxing, threats, punishment, don’t seem to do the trick (and the Bible is not famous for subtle approaches like irony and appeals to self esteem). So the burden falls roundly on the people–who would change gods if need be–to figure out what kind of system would work. They choose kings.
The writer of I Samuel imagines the following scene: The Judge Samuel has experienced a succession crisis. In old age, he appoints his sons as “judges” (tribal chiefs, fair-minded warlords) to succeed him. They turn out, as sons often turn out, to be bunglers and scoundrels who “took bribes and perverted justice.” In despair, Samuel agrees to the demands of the elders for a monarchy, “a king over Israel.” The people have “voted”–for their own subjugation. They want to be like their more prosperous and successful neighbors. Monarchy is all the rage. Samuel confers with God, and God instructs him to warn the people what they have in store for them when the newfangled system is in place. It is worth quoting:
“Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.”
And so it began. A history of tyrannical, faithless, lustful, war-hungry, greedy, and immoral men, punctuated (but not in time to have done Israel or the hybrid kingdom of Judaea any good) by a few good rulers. Passion gives you the form of government you want until you don’t want it anymore.
Is there a convergence between Greek and Hebrew political thought, these widely divergent cultures from the first millennium BCE? Of course. Both show the common ancient opinion about the “will of the people.” The people can’t be bothered with the consequences of any political decision, whether it’s shouted or registered on a touch screen. They vote their passion.
The Voice of the People
That is why Aristotle cautions against “need” and ignorance in the choice of political operations. People will choose tyrants who promise them bread, and execute the tyrant when the bread doesn’t appear on the table or costs too much. On the biblical side, they will choose kings who lead them to victory, then rue the day when their sons die in battle. No wonder the two streams of thought have had inordinate influence on the way we think about politics and government in the West.
Democracy was not an option for the Hebrews, and not what we mean by democracy for the Greeks. Given the amount of money the plutocrats inject into political campaigns in the United States in order to keep their hands on the wealth, it is arguable that American democracy isn’t what Americans mean by democracy either–but that’s a different point. In a naive and unexamined way, Americans think that certain phrases like “majority rule,” “the will of the people,” and “representative government” are self-authenticating, even though they smack of power rather than statecraft. Loftier ideas like “good government,” “sound counsel,” and “wise leadership,” even “justice for all” betray their biblical origins: there is not enough time to cultivate ideals like that when the complete political reality of our time, the definitive feature of messy democracy is change on demand. From where we sit, democracy means sending the menu item you thought you’d like, but didn’t, back to the kitchen.
The recent election has proved two things to me. First, we can never count on the American people to do the right thing, whether they choose kings over republics or republics over kings. The political history of the world, as every historian knows and every political “analyst” conveniently forgets at election time, is a history of disappointment, punctuated by remorse, followed by revolutions and wars.
That is the religious and political history of Europe. It is also the history of America in its revolution, its Civil War, and its most recent political spasm, the triumph of the Tea Party para-revolutionaries. When the frighteningly ignorant and undereducated Christian fundamentalist, Sharron Angle of Nevada, announced that Americans were ready for “Second Amendment remedies” to the current “regime” she was using language (probably scripted) in a deliberately provocative way. Alas, however, she may have been right. But I did not hear a single “analyst” with the historical presence of mind to suggest that both John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (to name only two successful assassins) used these remedies. The phrase “We’ve come to take our government back” may sound more like a football cheer than a threat, but the underlying idea that a particular government is “owned” by a class of people and has been unlawfully seized by the unrighteous is not democratic rhetoric: it is populism gone berserk, Israel shouting for its king. This time, however, the king is not a man: it is their enthroned Echo.
America has fought only two continental wars, one against its colonial masters, the other against itself. Lincoln’s exegesis of Gettysburg–that it was a battleground to test whether the idea of equality and union could survive in a nation without much history (a scant eighty-seven years at the time) to guide it–has not been settled. Lincoln was depicted in the lore of his generation as a Hebrew patriarch: “We are coming father Abraham, 300,000 more.” was one of the most popular songs of the Civil war era.
But he was hated by at least as many thousands. John Wilkes Booth’s shout as he leapt onto the stage of Ford’s theater on the evening of April 14, 1865 summed up the feelings of the Tea Partiers of his day: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus to tyrants, always”). He served exactly four years, one month, and twelve days as President.
What is it about the Lincolns, the Kennedys and so far, thankfully, nonviolently, the Obamas of this land that awakens the crouching demons of American democracy, the shouters, the haters and the merely suasible, and entitles them to bring their swords?
Some fairly impressive scholars think that the Civil War was merely the first outburst of regionally and socially stratified tensions that are even worse in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth and twentieth. America, lacking a common enemy–the British, the Nazis, or the Communists–turns predator on itself and sees in the faces of Others traits it has managed to overlook. Until now. Some of us think that people are no smarter and may–if these absurd and destructive elections are any barometer–be getting less smart all the time. They are to enlightened government what obesity is to nutrition. And some of us think that the United States Constitution is simply inadequate (not imperfect, inadequate) to cope with the growing realities of this system of government.
Contrary to what the “winners” of this election say publicly: there is no divine mandate here. There is no country to be “won back,” no regime in place. There is no guarantee that America will survive the savagery of the masses and massively under-informed. The Constitution is not a magical formula, just a rather dull diagram for a political order that seems hopelessly out of step with the times.
As to the victors, the “voice of the people,” may God give them the king they desire, one who looks, feels, speaks, and thinks just like them.
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Published: November 5, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Aristotle : Christianity : David : democracy : election : Obama : Old Testament kings : political science : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Saul : Second Amendment : Sharron Angle : Tea Party : Theology ..
8 Responses to “Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy”
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steph
November 5, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Wonderfully written, whimsically witty, woefully tragic, eloquent, incisive. Kyrie eleison.
x
x
Reply
Mike
November 6, 2010 at 2:11 am
Thank you for taking the time to post. A great (if tad long) read that makes me glad to be a subscriber.
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Brian
November 6, 2010 at 2:43 am
Wow, that’s brilliant!
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Yesh
November 6, 2010 at 5:35 am
Simply marvelous. Gives voice to my deepest concerns with much thought, eloquence and insight. Add to this, the amount of money spent on this election while states, cities, local , schools go begging, all makes your post so relevant; in questioning the validity of our political system and it’s usefulness going forward. Thank you.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 21, 2012 at 12:29 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Remembering the Fiasco of 2010. Anticipating the doldrums of 2012.
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scotteus
March 21, 2012 at 9:56 am
2 years gone and there doesn’t seem to be much difference between Dems and Repubs any longer, they just use different language but the results are largely the same: War and Spend, War and Spend, War and Spend.
Reply
steph
March 21, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Kyrie eleison… “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed” (Mao Zedong) It’s just more of the same and they’re becoming, it seems, more the same. So… people kill people who kill people because killing people is wrong. Put down the guns and ban the bomb. But as GB Shaw said, you’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
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Usama Khawar
March 21, 2012 at 1:37 pm
BRILLIANT! What about Occupy movement?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Atheist Nation Celebrates the Holidays
by rjosephhoffmann
The Intellectual Highground
Nothing puts atheists in a worse mood than the holiday season. All these dimly-lit people and brightly-lit window displays, making merry over things that never happened, spreading lies, propagating falsehood, singing their rancid carols, and worst of all teaching impressionable, if rather preposterous, children to believe in intellectual crap when they could be playing Megaman 11 or Worms Reloaded–which they got last Christmas. How obscene, how humiliating: Behold, little Buddy praying by his bedside for Megaman, versions, 12-16 (“conveniently boxed as one item” from Amazon.com) to a non-existent deity, having just lodged the same request with the sex-offender in the Santa suit at the mall. No wonder America is going to the red dogs and blue dogs. “Isn’t anybody listening to the Voice of Reason?”
God to a six-year old
Help is on the way.
To combat the forces of Darkness and Superstition, the American Humanist Association and some allies have launched a new ad campaign to put the Grinch back into Christmas. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times charts the new ecumenical spirit of the quest, spearheaded by the same blithe folk who brought us the “Good without God” bus-o-rama and the “Just be Good for Goodness Sake” billboard extravaganza. The campaigns are financed by “a few rich atheists” with money to throw to the wind, and buoyed by research being done by the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life (Trinity College), headed by the eminently reasonable Mark Silk and based on Barry Kosmin’s American Religious Identification Survey, showing that as many as 15% of Americans are “Nones,” i.e., have no religious identification or association.
It is pretty obvious and at the same time hopelessly obscure how Nones relate to atheism (atheists hope they do: this is largely, sad to say, a recruitment push for membership and dues), but as Goodstein points out in her article, the combined membership of the sponsoring organizations numbers only in the thousands. The best course might be to see whether Nones can be divided into groups: Certainly Nones, Possibly Nones, and None Just Now, Thanks–but I mix my politics and religion, which is never a good thing.
Possibly None
I will be blunt: This whole business is idiotic. It is hard to imagine that people like Todd Stiefel, one of those well-endowed atheists with cash to burn, are really on a rampage because of passages like the one he cites from the Bible:
“The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” (from Hosea 13:16, New International Version).
Reassuringly if a little obtusely Stiefel says that “It [our democracy] has not been based on [verses like these] and should never be. Our founding fathers created a secular democracy….We must denounce politicians that contend U.S. law should be based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments.” I agree. Anyone who wants Hosea 13 added to our Bill of Rights should be tied to a chair, gagged, blindfolded, and made to listen to Diane Rehm read slowly through the whole Book of Leviticus. Presumably (or is it implicitly?) he is willing to throw serous money at billboards so that America does not become a country that kills babies. He will find many friends among Catholics and Evangelicals on that score.
Diane Rehm
If you think ripping open pregnant women is bad, read the story of the wandering Levite in the Book of Judges (ch. 19) where a consummately self-absorbed kidnapper–a Hebrew–offers his concubine to some Village- of- the- Damned- crazed youth who want to have sex with him, gang rape her, leaving her for dead–whereupon the Levite butchers her semi-conscious person into twelve pieces and forwards a limb to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Please: Don’t quote Hosea to me when there are passages that would make Tarantino wince.
The Levite's Discovery
But to be serious: Do the sponsoring organizations (which include besides AHA the American Atheists and the Freedom from Religion Foundation) think that these stories are read to Christian (or Jewish) children at bedtime? Is it bloody likely that a craven priest in Spokane is going to substitute the Legend of the Lethiferous Levite for St Luke’s Nativity story on Christmas Eve? I know that atheists feel they know a great deal about the mindset of the religious principles they reject, but one has to wonder why this isn’t reflected in their anti-Christian strategies?
Or are the campaigns only a reflection of the sponsors’ shocking ignorance of ancient myth and legend, whereof the Bible is a treasure hoard. I get the sense that the sponsors need to begin with the Brothers Grimm and then read backward in literary time to get a sense of how the grotesque has been used in history for both entertainment and moral instruction. Most “reasonable” people who are slightly sophisticated about the contours of culture know this. Many very nice religious people know this. They know that scaring people to death has been used by religion and nasty aunties for a long time to get people to change their wicked ways, clean up their act, and lead a better life. The question is, why don’t atheists know it? The shock of discovery seems entirely their own; it will not surprise the educated or awaken the irreligious passions of a Certainly None.
We don’t do that any more–scare people to death to make them good. Even very religious people don’t do that any more. The last really good sermon on hell was preached in 1917 by the torture-obsessed priest in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. And I can’t name the last time I heard a robust sermon on Hosea 13.16. Given that real life lascivious priests are frightening enough, it seems unnecessary to reach back to the first millennium BCE for material.
Hell as you like it...
The intellectual isolation of the atheist from wider cultural movements and shifts in perception is one of the great stories of our time. Almost no one is covering it. If the question they are asking about religion is, Don’t these damned believers know what’s in the Bible, the answer is somewhere in the range between probably not to possibly so; but even if they do, they probably know that the Bible is not recommending carving up your girlfriend. And probably can guess that when you find blood and gore of this magnitude the story is about something else. Phrases and words like “symbolism,” “surface meaning,” “allegory,” “folk legend” and “myth” come to mind. Put it under the heading “Things Atheists Missed in College,” along with a good course in comparative religion, ancient history, mythology, and anthropology. It’s only people who have never studied myth who can write in such a yawningly banal way about religion being one.
I find myself constantly challenged on panels with atheists to lecture them on their understanding of words like “superstition,” the “supernatural” and above all “myth.” They in turn find me niggling and pedantic. But really, does the average atheist, village or city style, assume that the toxic texts of scripture are “in” the Bible for moral edification or because they reflect a time and culture different from lunchtime in Chicago?
Richard Dawkins lectures me, London 2007
Which brings us to the question, Who are these ads for? We’re told that a key reason for the aggressively confident style of the campaign (not to mention the unusual spirit of ecumenism that currently reigns in the atheist camp), is owing to their determination to get their “market share [of the Nones].” Leaving the most grievous puns aside, they are also inspired by the need to resist the Myth of the Not Lying Down Dead Horse, that America is a Christian Nation. And as we all know, there is nothing like a Billboard over the Lincoln Tunnel that announces, “You know it’s a Myth. Believe in Reason.” to get uncommitted people thinking and committed people scrambling for the nearest AHA meeting. Add a Hosanna to that and you’ve got something. (Tip for vandals: Spray paint “I’m Lucifer, and I approve this message” on the sign.)
In a particularly poignant way, weary commuters will also be treated to the cheery salvo of The United Community of Reason (not to be confused with Christians United to Oppose Rationality), a group in Washington. Their idea of decorating for the holidays includes spreading the good news of Reason on billboards and ads on bus shelters in about 15 cities: “Don’t Believe In God? Join the Club.” Fortunately, number-wise, the club can actually meet in the bus shelter. Add a few Nones and they can meet at a subway stop, except in cities where there are subway stops no one gives a rat’s whisker about organized atheism.
Far be it from me to lecture atheists. But please accept, along with an eggnog salute, the following advice. Grow up. Learn a little about what Being Clever means. I know we live in a world defined by short attention spans, coffee mugs, T-shirts and bumper stickers. But it’s completely unclear to me whether your ad campaigns will change a single mind, or even whose single mind your campaign is designed to change.
This is not a “struggle.” The upward march of unbelief is not the forces of liberation against the sources of slavery and oppression. I’m afraid religion beat you to that metaphor. It’s called Exodus. No one is paying attention because no one except your club members actually cares about the private conclusions of people who want to turn being disagreeable into a civil rights event.
Launch of Consider Atheism Campaign: Attended by Several
The slogans are insipid and can only have been vetted by very small committees of Like-minded People–and that’s a real problem, The modern atheist seems to get off on being distaff, minority, contrary, and ornery–the legate of a long free-thought heritage. Would your heart beat faster if you could persuade society that overturning a Salvation Army worker’s collection pot is an act of charity–extra points for snatching the bell? Would you praise a convert who defaced a nativity scene at Christmas, or saved a turkey’s life at Thanksgiving. Don’t be ridiculous, you say: that’s not what this is about. Don’t be ridiculous, I say: this is what you have made it.
Two last things in this little lecture:
Give up using the name humanism. You’re ruining it for people like me who don’t mean by it what you want it to mean. Equating atheism with humanism is a cheap trick, a cop behind the billboard (maybe one of yours?) kind of trick. Be proud of being an atheist. I know I’m not. You are not the American Humanist Association. You are full- frontally and outwardly the American Atheist Association.
And stop this ridiculous invocation of secular saints from Socrates to Einstein. Virtually none of the people you pray to became famous for being atheists and you know it. Not even Darwin. Certainly not Socrates. And Einstein: who knows?
“Yes, you can call it that,” Einstein replied calmly. “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” (Quoted by Isaacson in Einstein, 2007)
1933, on a deserted beach in Santa Barbara, California
But the point is, you cannot claim the intellectual upper hand in arguing against “God and religion” and then resort to the authority-argument to win your case. Even if you were joined by all the Nones in America, yours is a lonely lot. Especially at Christmas. Accept it. Live with it. And take down those absurd posters.
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Published: November 11, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: american humanist association : Americans United : atheism : Atheist Ad Campaign : Bible : Blasphemy : Catholic Church : Christmas : Dawkins : ethics : freethought : Good without God : humanism : Laurie Goodstein : New York Times : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
30 Responses to “Atheist Nation Celebrates the Holidays”
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Brian Westley
November 11, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Sounds like the atheist campaign really bothers you: “Nothing puts atheists in a worse mood than the holiday season.” “This whole business is idiotic.” “The intellectual isolation of the atheist from wider cultural movements and shifts in perception is one of the great stories of our time. Almost no one is covering it.” “Grow up.” “The upward march of unbelief is not the forces of liberation against the sources of slavery and oppression.” “Even if you were joined by all the Nones in America, yours is a lonely lot.” etc. etc.
Meanwhile, one person has been sentenced to death and another to life in prison for blaspheming the local superstition. But I guess that’s nothing compared to how annoying signs are to you.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
November 12, 2010 at 7:54 am
Please provide the specifics of your allegation: “Meanwhile, one person has been sentenced to death and another to life in prison for blaspheming the local superstition. But I guess that’s nothing compared to how annoying signs are to you.” Are you saying the ad campaign is designed to free atheist prisoners of conscience in America?
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maryhelena
November 12, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Perhaps these are the two references….
Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/11/christian-woman-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy-in-pakistan/
Palestinian Authority seizes atheist after he criticizes Islam on Facebook and blog
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/palestinian-authority-seizes-atheist-after-he-criticizes-islam-on-facebook-and-blog-107290433.html
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
November 12, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Clearly this post has to do with the limited purview of American atheism, the focus of which is not the predations of Islamic extremism, except indirectly. It is precisely the tendency to tar all religion from benign (and yes, I believe there is such a thing) to toxic with the same brush that I’m dealing with here. Even if this were not so, do we really kid ourselves into thinking that an ad campaign targeting Xmas shoppers has anything at all to do with these cases?
Reply
Herb Van_Fleet
November 12, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Dr. Hoffmann, I have enjoyed your essays immensely since stumbling onto this site a few months ago. As to your recent post re the “Consider Humanism” advertising campaign, I agree with you. In that regard, the following is a post I made on the American Humanist Association Facebook page:
As a card-carrying, dues-paying Humanist, I have become concerned with the signals being sent through the recent “Consider Humanism” campaign. (See http://www.considerhumanism.org/)
In a press release, American Humanist Association president, Richard Speckhardt, has said that the premise of the campaign is proclaim, among other things, that, “Humanist values are mainstream American values, and this campaign will help many people realize that they are already humanists and just did not know the term.” But upon inspection of the advertising materials, the message seems to be that “Humanist values” (whatever those are) are exclusive of, if not superior to, religious values (whatever those are.)
Mr. Speckhardt goes on to say that, “a literal reading of religious texts is completely out of touch with mainstream America.” From what I’ve seen so far, I would argue that it is the Humanists who are out of touch with mainstream America. The referenced bible quotes in the ads are almost completely irrelevant today. Mainstream religion (meaning the Judeo-Christian faiths) condemn those passages as much as we non-believers. It’s as if the Humanists are trying to persuade the Christians and Jews to quit behaving as if they lived two or three millennia ago. This is as absurd as saying that all Indians are alcoholics, that all blacks are lazy, and that all Asians operate laundries. In that respect, the Consider Humanism campaign, in my opinion, is intellectually dishonest and thereby counter-producive.
As to the comparisons of ancient scripture to the current Humanist dicta used in the ads, they merely reinforce the animus of the religionists toward the non-believers, thus producing, perhaps, the exact opposite of the reaction they seek. Whoever came up with this campaign idea must have been absent that day in Public Relations 101, where they were taught that more flies are attracted to honey than to vinegar.
Therefore, I would hope that Humanists who truly value compassion, tolerance, and empathy will not participate in this project. Otherwise, we will surely have met Pogo’s enemy.
Herb Van Fleet, President
Humanist Association of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
November 12, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Thanks for the feedback Herb–I fully agree with these sentiments.
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maryhelena
November 13, 2010 at 8:54 am
It’s possible that some atheist do actually think that their ad campaigns are contributing to this issue – the human rights issue in countries other than the US – and that those atheists who do not join in the ad campaign are slacking off. Oh, well – perhaps they need to learn that hitting soft targets is not everyone’s cup of tea….
Seth vs R. Joseph Hoffman « Seth's World says:
November 12, 2010 at 3:10 pm
[...] I dislike half of him because he’s always separating himself from atheists. You should read his post before reading mine. But if you want the short summary, here it [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
November 12, 2010 at 3:52 pm
I just wonder whether some of my readers are in tune with Atheist Nation: http://www.atheistnation.net/video/?video/00015/atheist/how-do-we-know-that-christians-are-delusional/ My quarrel is with simplism, whether its religious or anti-religion. What do you think of the video?
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maryhelena
November 13, 2010 at 8:39 am
OK – I went and viewed the video. It’s author is surely hung up on the word ‘delusion’. I should have kept a pen handy to take note of how many times this word was used! Sure, it’s a great word for getting attention re the god/religion debate. What with ‘meme’ and ‘delusion’, Dawkins has certainly achieved considerable impact with his books. However, the jump from ‘god is a delusion’ to religion is a delusion is a very big jump. The theological diet may be wrong – and causing serious problems (especially when tied up with social/political structures) but the need for spiritual nourishment is not a delusion, it is a fundamental human need. And as such has the capacity to produce values.
Religion, seen as an expression of what each of us value as spiritual values (love, kindness, charity etc) seen as an expression of how humans strive to live and interact beyond the bare fact of existence, is, in actuality, something about human nature that could well be viewed as ‘sacred ground’. And perhaps it’s this ‘sacred ground’, that when trampled upon by the call to blaspheme, will give one big shudder of rejection, one big irrational outburst, will produce one big hole in the ground that will swallow up those who dare to challenge it’s power.
(I love the words of Yeats: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”.)
In contrast, theology, does not stand upon ‘sacred ground’. It stands upon purely intellectual premises. Premises that are continually subject to the winds of change, to the onward call of intellectual evolution.
Sure, the link between the ‘sinner’ and the man, between ideas and the man who holds them, is indeed there. But so also is the line between the two. A line that should never be crossed in equating the two. And this is where I think that all the calls for blasphemy fall down. This distinction is not kept in focus and the line is crossed. Resulting in a failure to uphold basic human values. Because however bad the man’s actions are, however bad is the theology, that is only a part of the man not the whole.
The courage to mount the barricades is a wonderful thing. But for it not to end in a futile endeavour the target must be clearly seen. I don’t think the current crop of ‘revolutionaries’ are able to see further than their distain for all things religious – at least seems evident by the soft targets they are aiming at. Theology will keep spinning it’s wheels – that’s not the issue. The issue is keeping those wheels from running rough-shod over any social/political structures. Which means – that the social/political structures need to be aware of, and able to counter, any infiltration from theological sources. That’s where the barricades should be set up – not on buses, billboards and what have you. Canvassing for more atheists will not change the status quo – it’s more people, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, etc standing up to the fundamentalists, and the intrusion of theology into social/political structures, that has any hope of achieving a way out of the present social/theological problems.
Yes, indeed, the super-naturalist god is a delusion. But there is much more to our fascination with religion, with seeking and upholding spiritual values, than simply a case of delusion.
ken
November 13, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Well, my comment was deleted.
steph
November 14, 2010 at 5:04 am
I adore Yeats, Maryhelena, and bless you for citing him here. And for me personally at this point in my own time, I have ironically been reading him. “..I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet…” seems to resonate so well in this essay’s context too, though. If only ‘they’ could recognise that while parsimony does not reflect reality. If only they could understand the complexity of reality, and appreciate the human spirit. I do love the second poem too – it mirrors an image I have of my own when I close my eyes. Peace, inspiration, and nature.
rjosephhoffmann
November 13, 2010 at 9:31 am
Lovely comment, thanks–very nicely stated. The Yeats (Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths…) is my second favorite poem.
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Karla McLaren
November 13, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Thanks so much for this. I’m standing at the outside of the American atheist/skeptical community watching the “tone wars,” and really, it’s very absurd when you get right down to it.
To underscore your essay, I present you with this: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/11/atheist-advertising-or-evangelizing-the-holiday-ad-blitz-sta/
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maryhelena
November 13, 2010 at 3:35 pm
If you feel like having shivers run down your spine – go listen to Yeats reciting ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’….
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1688
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Ed Jones
November 13, 2010 at 5:40 pm
I offer this as an open ended challenge. I am not a theologian or an academic in any discipline. I have to depend on my best judgment of authority sources in any field.
I take Albert Einstein to be generally regarded as the greatest physicist ever to have lived. As with the leading physicists in this century Einstein is committed to a mystical world view. As unconditional as I accept his contributions to physics, I as readily accept his religious covictions over against which I am forced to challenge whatever conflicting religious preconceptions I may have.
The following quotes from Einstein: “There is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them (the development of religious experience from religion of fear to moral religion) even though rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. The religious geneiouses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling which knows no God conceived in man’s image, so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. However it is among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were, in many cases regarded by their contempories as atheists, sometimes as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Francis of Assisi amd Spinoza are directly akin to one another. While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religion or moral considerations, those individals to whom we owe the great creative achievements that this universe of ours is something perfect and suspectable to the rational striving for knowledge, if this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and of those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza’s “Armor Dor Intellectuals”, they would not have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievments”. Now to Baruch Spinoza.
A correspondent wrote to Spinoza: People say that you conceal your opinion concrning Jesus Christ.
Spinoza answered: “I do not think it necessary for salvation to know Christ in the flesh, but with regards to the eternal Wisdom of God, which has maniested itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, amd above all in Jesus Christ, the case is far otherwise. For without this no one comes to a state of blessedness, inasmuch as it alone teachess what is true or false, good or evil. And inasmuch as this wisdom was made especially manifest through Jesus Christ, as I have said, his disciples preached it, insofar as it was revealed to them through him, and thus showed that they could rejoice in the spirit of Christ more than the rest of mankind. The doctrines added by certain churches, such as that God took upon himself human nature, I have expressly said that I do not understand, in fact to speak the truth, they seem to me no less absurd than would a statement that a circle had taken upon itself the nature of a square.” How much more could and needs to be said!
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
November 14, 2010 at 8:27 am
Poignant comment Ed. I think if I am anything at all it is a Spinozist. Einstein shared the same basic instinct, and I think Emerson did as well, though more poetically. What I don’t accept is the reductionist view that all religion that postulate “God” derive the same tenets from them. Clearly they don’t. It would be like deriving a theory of the “nature” of mankind from the fact that we are all human. And I am at a loss to see how the most vocal atheist can sell this palpable illogic.
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Ed Jones
November 14, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Thanks Joe – naming Emerson requires a a few of his thoughts on Jesus.
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of His World. He said, in the jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, Good acts, trough me speaks. Would you see God, see me, or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think”.
But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, and in the the next, and the following ages. The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth, and churches are not built on his principles, but on his trops. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetc teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles, for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the Miracle, as pronunced by Christian churches, gives a false interpretation, it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing-clover and the falling rain”. Hitorical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal. It has dwelt, it dwells, with exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.
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Nathan Bupp
November 14, 2010 at 12:15 pm
@ Ed Jones: Wonderful quote from Einstein. Thank you very much. There is much wisdom contained therein. It seems that wisdom for the new atheists is pretty much limited to dispatching the God of theism through evidentialism, and not much else. I too place myself on the map close to Spinoza. Along with Santayana and Schopenhauer in the same geographic area.
Reply
maryhelena
November 16, 2010 at 2:05 am
Steph
Lots of emotional pull in some of the lines of poetry that Yeats wrote. And yes, some of those pesky ‘New Atheists’ would do well in realizing that intellectual ‘wars’ are not the be all and end all of our existence. Sure, Yeats saw dangers ahead in his day – as the “New Atheists’ do today with fundamentalism.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
……
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The problem is not voicing warnings etc re dangers ahead. The problem with the ‘New Atheists’ is that they stop there – they don’t look down at their feet. I often think some atheists are in danger of putting a new god up there in the sky – the atheist ‘god’. It’s a bit like Galt in Atlas Shrugged (been there, done that and moved on…) who, in the last words of that book “raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar”. Having new gods to ones taste is all very well – but it’s the corresponding sign – the sign of a heart upon the sacred ground that seems to be missing…..
Back to Yeats – yes, the man, however much he played around with mysticism and spiritualism, was never able to get away from that ‘old sod’ – the Irish ground beneath his feet.
“He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.”
(The Rose of the World)
Ground zero, basic fact of reality – the world beneath our feet. The beauty of our intellectual wanderings cannot surpass the sacred ground upon which we place our feet. So, in the context of the ‘New Atheists’, that means giving ‘ground’ to people’s dreams – however illogical such dreams might be – and taking the intellectual/theology ‘fight’ to the political arena ie set up the barricades against the would be ‘rough beast’ there.
Reply
steph
November 16, 2010 at 8:47 pm
They obnoxiously tread on our dreams, Maryhelena. Religion is so simplistic to them but reality is complex and there is a fine silky line quite indistinguishable between reality and non reality, I think. Story telling, mystery, wonder, magic, imagination, creativity all run like little streams in between. Why crush or ignore those? How do you define love, emotion, spirituality? Don’t let go of the mystery. There’s no sense of humour in simpletown, wit wanders freely without laws. But over there, it’s Christmas approaching, and raucous rivers of religious resentment resound.
maryhelena
November 17, 2010 at 4:56 am
Steph, but they, the ‘New Atheists’ have dreams also. They dream of a world free from the infiltration of theological ideas into the social/political environment. They want to see theological ideas kept out of social/political structures. The problem is that their instruments for achieving their goal are useless. Mockery, ridicule, billboards, TV advertising etc can only serve to bounce back at them.
Their ‘enemy’ can just laugh all the way to the bank of public opinion. The ‘enemy’ is there, the Rogue Elephant does exist, but caterwauling from the rooftops is not able to penetrate it’s very thick skin – or cause discomfort for it’s very large ears.
So, those of us who may think we know better……….should at the very least recognize that for all their kindergarten antics the ‘New Atheists’ are, however inarticulately, giving voice to a dream that needs to become a reality. The achievement of a peaceful social/political environment will require the erecting of a “NO Theological Premises Allowed Here” notice on the door.
Issues of social/political importance are never black and white. It’s not a case of either or. It is a case of accommodation, a case of a win/win context. Horses for courses. Context matters. Religion and theology are not going away. That’s pipe dream stuff, illusion. It’s simply a case of allowing space – and thus boundaries – for it to function.
So, while we can knock those ‘New Atheists’ for their often obnoxious antics – we sell ourselves short if we think that is all they are about. We need to applaud their goal while we shake our heads at their methods.
Yes, Steph, “Story telling, mystery, wonder, magic, imagination, creativity” are all important in our lives. But they won’t be bringing peace anytime soon. For that we all need to get our hands very dirty and engage in the rough and tumble of the reality of social/political problems. It’s not the dreams of the night that bring peace and harmony to our social interaction – it’s the eyes wide open dreamers of the day that see what is – and that what is does not have to be…
“All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Reply
steph
November 17, 2010 at 5:53 am
oh yes indeed, I know, I agree, and Lawrencian wisdom is very relevant and well chosen.
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Ed Jones
November 17, 2010 at 10:19 am
Steph,
Would you say as much about Einstein’S wisdom in response to my November 13th comment?
steph
November 17, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Einstein is nice and generally full of wisdom but more simplistic here than Spinoza whom I possibly prefer. However I am dealing with grief and travelling from one side of the world to the other and round again mourning and trying to celebrate my mother’s life. Ergo, I want no debates.
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Ed Jones
November 17, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Steph, In sympathy I am sorry for the intrusion. Best.
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Nathan Bupp
November 17, 2010 at 4:41 pm
It is worth noting that Einstein had portraits of both Spinoza and Schopenhauer hanging on his wall in his Berlin study.
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steph
December 15, 2010 at 10:10 am
I’m a bit sleepy and suddenly remembered this: the best billboard I’ve seen is one put up all over Auckland last Christmas by St Matthew’s in the City, a progressive Auckland Anglican Church in New Zealand. Unfortunately a very small minority of fundamentalists objected… The billboard shows Joseph and Mary in bed together and says facetiously, “Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow”. …. Anglican Christians who read biblical stories reasonably, no less.
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Brian Westley
January 2, 2011 at 1:25 am
“Please provide the specifics of your allegation” (which was “Meanwhile, one person has been sentenced to death and another to life in prison for blaspheming the local superstition.”)
Sure…
Walid Husayin (an atheist) was arrested for blasphemy; as far as I can tell, he’s still in prison. This story is from Nov 12:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/new/7291256.html
Asia Bibi (a Christian) was arrested for blasphmey and sentenced to death. As far as I can tell, she is still in prison and her family has had to go into hiding due to death threats. This story is from Nov 9:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8120142/Christian-woman-sentenced-to-death-in-Pakistan-for-blasphemy.html
“Are you saying the ad campaign is designed to free atheist prisoners of conscience in America?”
Not at all. I’m saying that religious oppression needs to be fought, and one way to fight it is to loudly and repeatedly announce that there are people who disagree with the majority religious opinion.
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Attali
September 23, 2012 at 10:58 pm
This is a beautifully written and very funny piece.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Attribute and Affect
by rjosephhoffmann
I have argued against theologians like Richard Swinburne that they play a dangerous game in moving from abstracted notions of God to specific characteristics of God and the doctrines of Christianity. In the long run, the snowman they build feature by feature is still snow. It will melt. Both believing and unbelieving philosophers of religion have played this game for a very long time–perhaps since the time of Aquinas–but the bottom line is: No one is an atheist on general principles. There is some X that you reject, and that X comes with attributes or “properties” attached. Any working notion of ontology requires not merely existence but attribution.
This is why the most damaging arguments against ontology, going back to the eighteenth century, begin with the criticism that “existence” is a state (being) and not a property. Anselm had argued against his hypothetical unbeliever that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived [to exist],” and then took the leap to existence by stating that the existence of the greatest conceivable thing can not be merely conceptual since perfection requires actuality. Anselm limited this state of perfection to being and not to racehorses or desert islands because ordinary things can be conceived in degrees but not in states of perfection. God thus becomes a supreme case of perfection existing in actuality because it cannot simply exist in the mind for — “Si enim vel in solo intellectu est potest cogitari esse et in re quod maius est” (Proslogion 2). Now that you have the snow, it is possible to add goodness (Aquinas’s summum bonum), and the so-called Omni-properties of God (knowledge, presence, benevolence, etc.) as well as the Not-properties of God: infinite, immutable, impassible, etc. Snowman, meet your maker.
It is perfectly possible to believe in snow without believing in snowmen. But in historical theology we have long come to accept that the God of the western tradition, and by and large the God rejected by the first brave souls of the pre-Enlightenment, like John Biddle in 1615, is more slush than shape–to wit, Biddle on trying to make sense of the Trinity:
“The major premise is quite clear inasmuch as if we say that the Holy Spirit is God and yet distinguished from God then it implies a contradiction. The minor premise that the Holy Spirit is distinguished from God if it is taken personally and not essentially is against all reason:First, it is impossible for any man to distinguish the Person from the Essence of God, and not to frame two Beings or Things in his mind. Consequently, he will be forced to the conclusion that there are two Gods.Secondly, if the Person be distinguished from the Essence of God, the Person would be some Independent Thing. Therefore it would either be finite or infinite. If finite then God would be a finite thing since according to the Church everything in God is God Himself. So the conclusion is absurd. If infinite then there will be two infinites in God, and consequently the two Gods which is more absurd than the former argument.Thirdly, to speak of God taken impersonally is ridiculous, as it is admitted by everyone that God is the Name of a Person, who with absolute sovereignty rules over all. None but a person can rule over others therefore to take otherwise than personally is to take Him otherwise than He is.”
Granted that the early atheist thinkers were less concerned with the Big Picture than with dismantling inherited beliefs member by member. Many had long since concluded that the wheels of theology spun around doctrines rather than biblical texts, which had been gratuitously laid on or cherry picked to support beliefs that otherwise had been fashioned by councils without any scriptural warrants at all. A classic case, as it relates to Biddle’s long winded dilemma, above, was the so-called Johannine Comma. Based on a sequence of extra words which appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in some early printed editions of the Greek New Testament:
ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες [ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, ὁ Πατήρ, ὁ Λόγος, καὶ τὸ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα· καὶ οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς ἔν εἰσι. 8 καὶ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες ἐν τῇ γῇ] τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα, καὶ οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν
and which were included by the King James translators, thus:
“For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth], the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one…”
Is this not the Trinity, beloved of both Catholic and Protestants since the fourth century? Well, no, because the italicized words are absent from Greek manuscripts, and only appear in the text of four late medieval manuscripts where they seem to be the helpful clarification of a zealous copyist, originating as his marginal note. Think of it as new snow.
The point of these examples is that modern unbelief is highly confused about the difference between snow and snowmen, between being and somethingness. Simply put, what does it mean to say “I don’t believe in God,” if (as many atheists have reminded me) that is all an atheist is required to say to be a member of the club? My query is really the same at Robert Frost’s poetical question in “Mending Wall”: “Before I build a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense.”
I maintain that it is impossible to accept Anselm’s ontological argument. Kant was right. “Existence is not a predicate.” The ontological argument illicitly treats existence as a property that things can either possess or lack: to say that a thing exists is not to “attribute” existence to that thing, but to say that the concept of that thing is exemplified–expressed and experienced–in the world. Exemplification requires attributes. That is why the obscure language and syllogisms of philosophy (for the above, e.g.: “S is p” is true iff there is something in the world that is S, satisfying the description “is p”) have never really appealed to robust varsity atheists. But Kant’s critique of ontology slices both ways: if ontology is defeasible because existence is not a predicate, it means that the statements God exists is not falsifiable because there is nothing in the world corresponding to God, at least not of the S is p variety.
Kant
Many atheists know this, and they also know that their rejection of “theism” (a very funny word derived from the Greek θεός — a god, hence, a-theism, being without such a belief) is not based on snowflakes but fully formed snowmen: the God of “Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) “theism” who comes to us in a manifestly literary, messy, and inconsistent way in scripture. You cannot be an atheist in the abstract; you have to be an atheist in terms of attributions that have been applied in specific historical moments and which can be traced to particular historical contexts–such as the legislative “creation” of the Trinity in 325 AD. You must be walling out something.
I am perfectly at home with this kind of unbelief, comfortable with the truism that most people are atheists with respect to 99% of all the gods who were ever believed to exist. The statement is inadvertently poignant because it suggests that what we find it easy to contradict or reject are specific “attributes” or characterizations, and then to construct from these a more complete rejection of the whole picture. Every clever schoolkid knows the game and the logic: How can a God who is all good tolerate famine, cancer, premature death? How can a God who is all-wise put the prostate near to the male urinary tract (was he cutting costs?); Why would a God who is all powerful not create us, like Adam, in a post-adolescent, decision-making state free from high school, acne, and nagging parents? Note that what is being rejected are the attributes laid on this God, attributes which are construed from “S”: the state of existence as we know it.
Conveniently, for unbelievers, the rejection of attributes is facilitated by books thought to reveal the nature and purposes of God himself, especially the Bible and the Koran. The existence of texts that were never designed for use in philosophical and theological argument is a treasure chest for unbelievers–full of informal literary proofs that the God made from scriptural snow doesn’t correspond to the God made from theological snow: His whole story is an epic tragedy that could have been avoided if he had but exercised his omniscience and power at the beginning of time, avoided making fruit trees, or refrained from making Adam, or simply said “Apology accepted” when the First Couple betrayed his sole commandment. The manifest insufficiency and limitedness of this literary deity measured by the philosophical yardstick brought into the Church with theology–moments of remorse (Genesis 6,6) and petulance (6.1-16) and violence–flood, war, disease, death–makes the job of the skeptic a walk in the Garden.
What the unbeliever discovers in an amateur way is the composite nature of tradition: God-traditions that developed in Jerusalem and Athens being spliced together with sometimes implausible ingenuity and impossible contiguity. The illegitimate move is for the skeptic to conclude that the process of development is in some sense a “system” of untruths devised by ignorant or malicious men to keep the facts hidden or science suppressed. The real story, like all real stories, is much more complicated. But science does not emerge from the total exposure of the God traditions as deliberately false–the wreckage of a false system on the shoals of fact. It arises because of the inadequacy of the explanatory power of religion: the appearance of nature beneath the melting snow, to cop a phrase from Emerson.
End of winter
I think it is important, if only at an educational level, for unbelievers to avoid the error to which their commitment easily gives rise. One is a version of what W.K. Wimsatt called in 1954, in conjunction with literary criticism, the “affective” fallacy. He used the expression to mean that the ultimate value of a piece of literature (or art) cannot be established on the basis of how it affects a reader or viewer:
“The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism [ . . . which . . .] begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism [with the result that] the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.”
Applied to the God traditions, atheists are fairly quick to judge religion solely on the basis of its (presumed) affect on believers, such that the details of the question of God’s existence and the implications of belief for everyday life disappear. We can see this tendency especially in the writings of atheists who cherry pick the toxic texts of scripture to conclude that believers who accept such stories as true are delusional or dysfunctional. I remember listening passively at an Easter Vigil celebration many years ago as the following, called the “Song of Moses” from Exodus 15, was read out:
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord:
‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2The Lord is my strength and my might,*
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.
4‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea;
his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea.*
5The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
6Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.
7In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
you sent out your fury, it consumed them like stubble.
8At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up,
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
9The enemy said, “I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.”
10You blew with your wind, the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
11‘Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders?
12You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
Invested with the spirit of Monty Python, I struggled not to laugh: God is great–just look how many Egyptians he killed, how many wives would now be husbandless, how many daughters fatherless. The vast majority of worshipers around me listened inattentively. Some slept. It was the drone of words. The same liturgy would have been performed in 1278. But no one would have heard very much because it would have been executed only in Latin.
To be affected by such passages (even if the effect is indifference) is a function of human perception. To conclude that the people who endure such banality in the name of religion need to be rescued from their belief in the God who seems to like to drown people or reduce their sinful cities to ashes is the affective fallacy. For every smitten, leprous evildoer and every reference to Israel behaving like a whore, there are passages of immense beauty, human pathos, literary quality and even historical importance.
To deny this human quality is to make the text disappear in the interest of sticking to a narrow and unformed reaction to it, normally based on a lack of familiarity with Hebrew (or Hellenistic) literary tradition, story telling, and historical context. Ironically, it is precisely this same lack of familiarity that permits a fundamentalist to accept “the Bible” in its undifferentiated and inspired totality as the word of God–whose imperfections can be overlooked as part of a divine plan that the book does not reveal in its entirety: 1 Corinthians 13.12.
A healthy skepticism is always preferable to uninformed credulity. But I maintain that unbelievers are often terribly credulous when it comes to their view of the positions they have taken. The fact that biblical passages can be shocking to modern sensibilities has no bearing on their “truth” at a literary, cultural, or experiential level. Nor can the value be determined by taking an average of nice texts and nasty texts without exploring individual judgments and categories. “Everything,” Jacques Barzun once told a resolute graduate student who had made up her mind about what a poem really meant, “is a seminar.” Without the seminar, we turn impressions into conclusions, and that is where the affective fallacy leaves us.
Barzun
To say that one does not believe in the God whose attributes are those (more or less, and with no consistency) described in the Bible puts the unbeliever in the company of hundreds of thousands of believers. To say that one does not accept the God of theology, with or without the reconcilable attributes of literary biblical tradition, probably would not greatly reduce that company.
The remaining issue, as John Wisdom once put it, is whether believing in a God without attributes is possible at all, or no different from not believing in God.
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Published: November 14, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: affective fallacy : atheism : Philosophy of Religion : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Richard Swinburne : Unbelief : W. K. Wimsatt ..
9 Responses to “Attribute and Affect”
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mikelioso
November 14, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Great article. I’ve often thought that the claim that there is no god leaves me wondering “what is a god exactly?”. Its like saying there are no monsters; well it depends on what you think a monster is.
I mean a person may worship there ancestors, and surely they existed. I can’t say that god doesn’t exist. If I claim that it is not a god because they aren’t all knowing and all powerful etc I think I might be stepping out of my bounds as an atheist to define what god is to someone else. At best I can say your ancestors aren’t gods to me.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 14, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Exactly, Mike. The ancestral gods are normally the ones we reject: it helps to know what the other side means.
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Herb Van_Fleet
November 22, 2010 at 1:57 pm
OK, I’ll admit to being metaphysically challenged. Thus, trying to appreciate the nuances of your analysis of “Attribute and Affect” as related to the biblical God was a struggle. But then I was reminded that it was the paragon of reason himself, Emmanuel Kant, who once said, “”Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.” So, I don’t feel too bad.
From my perspective, I would not look to Kant for answers or explanations here. I think Joseph Campbell may be a better source. When looked at as myth, many of the ontological and epistemological issues become moot. (See, I can use big words too!) Mythologically, we then can deal with God as Santa Claus, which is a much easier task. We can also call on the cognitive sciences to help us understand the associated psychology (and pathology) associated with religious belief.
Surely, anyone alive today who got through the eighth grade can at least apprehend the empirical (and logical) impossibility of virtually every story (myth) in Genesis. To accept those events – creation, world-wide flood, walls falling by the sound of trumpets, women turning into salt, etc., etc. — as true is to deny the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, genetics, and mathematics. Even God can’t violate the law of non-contradiction; either 2+2=4, or 2+2= not 4, but not both at the same time. Of course, for believers, denial is just a long river in Africa.
It was the late, great Carl Sagan who reminded us that, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” That should be emblazoned on the cover of every bible under the caption “WARNING.”
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Attribute and Affect (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:16 pm
[...] I have argued against theologians like Richard Swinburne that they play a dangerous game in moving from abstracted notions of God to specific characteristics of God and the doctrines of Christianity. In the long run, the snowman they build feature by feature is still snow. It will melt. Both believing and unbelieving philosophers of religion have played this game for a very long time–perhaps since the time of Aquinas–but the bottom line is: No … Read More [...]
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Tristan D. Vick
June 17, 2011 at 2:25 am
Personally, I have always felt it comes down to who are realists and who are not.
As my critical thinking abilities developed (ever so slowly) I began to realizethat things which exist in reality usually almost always have referents.
Things without referents tend to be classified as theoretical.
This is why any (and all) God hypotheses are only theoretical concepts until a valid referent can be emperically established. Failure to adequately provide referential support for any given concepualization probably means the conceptualization is wrong–and the person offering it is likely to be mistaken.
What I find theologians doing is creating theoretical models which align with their metaphysical assumptions, and once they discover a logically sound hypothesis, they frame their God conceptualization according to this theoretical framework. Providing a philosophically sound framework then, in theory, allows the concept to at least be feasible (in philosophical terms).
The problem with theologians is they tend to habitually use the old bait-and-switch style of demonstration. If you buy into their premise, and their logic is sound, then low and behold this logic becomes evidence, not for the plausibility of the theoretical concept they have been divising, but as support for their premise.
In otherwords, rather than offering a testable hypothesis for their God concept, they have merely substituted their theoretical framework as proof for God proper. All they were looking for is our agreement that the philosophical concept is logically sound. Once they have this, then all they need to do is suggest that any attempt to deny such a logically air tight proof would be foolish. Therefore God surely exists.
Thologians always want us to agree with their logic but forget our own. As if we hadn’t caught them begging the question, or switching out the question about the feasibility of their individual God concept with one of his existence (as if logical agreement somehow equated to proof of existence), all the while neglecting the fact that they are still absent a valid empirically validated referent for something with a supposed real existence.
Realists have to be skeptical of theistic claims for these reasons and many more like them.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 17, 2011 at 9:10 am
Well said: I think the real problem is that the incredible shrinking God of liberal theology is indifferent from a God who (qua Wisdom) may as well not exist. Reminds me a bit of the gods in Lucretius who are complacent and useless, Conceptually, the more robust the attributes ascribed to God the more there is to deny (or pronounce absurd). Still, I cannot imagine any significant theistic claim in which attributes would not play a role, unless you go the apophatic route–but in that case attribution is going on too since the reference points are all relative to S.
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Evan Guiney
June 17, 2011 at 5:14 pm
I like this way of thinking of it. Some atheists seem to feel that they must be able to deny the existence of *all* gods, no matter the particular attributes; but as you point out here that is a fool’s errand. But if one is more modest one finds that there are two kinds of attributes- some that are easily disproved (and most, perhaps all, of the traditional theological attributes like omnipotent omnibenevelence are of this sort) and some that are unfalsifiable because they have no traction on the world whatsover. Perhaps God always hides from and tricks scientists; or perhaps God is in every way indistinguishable from the universe itself. Well then; so what? The existince or nonexistence of beings with such attributes would have no effect upon the rest of reality.
To riff on CS Lewis- Either God doesn’t exist, or he’s mad, bad, or irrelevant.
rjosephhoffmann
June 17, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Brilliant–thanks Evan.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
June 20, 2011 at 5:41 am
The remaining issue, as John Wisdom once put it, is whether believing in a God without attributes is possible at all, or no different from not believing in God.
yup
nice post.
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Minding the Flock: The Ordinariate
by rjosephhoffmann
"You won't mind if I take a few sheep back with me?"
If you’re paying attention, the Pope is rolling out the red carpet to Tiber-crossing Anglicans. Having been offered a special corner in the Latin Church called the “ordinariate,” conservative (who like to be called “traditional”) Anglicans can now flee their postmodern Church, that Babylon where even women can be ordained priests and bishops, and not have to worry about their souls turning pink. It’s all good.
According to The Telegraph citing (the Catholic) Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols:
“Hundreds of Anglican churchgoers will join [five bishops and uncounted numbers of priests] in the Ordinariate – a structure introduced by Pope Benedict XVI to provide refuge for those disaffected with the Church of England. The number of worshipers who leave the Church is predicted to double as the new arrangement finally begins to take shape.”
Of course, this is not what John XXIII and Paul VI had in mind when they talked about “ecumenism” in the last century. But two things have since become clear: One is that the Catholic Church is still the “Hippopotamus” of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem on the topic of slow change. –Not quite the rock of ages, but ageless in other ways.
The second is that the Church of England has other ideas. Change and adaptation to the culture prevent religion from ossification. (Look at the religions that don’t change, runs the argument). And if consultation with Rome was ever a condition of implementing change, it hasn’t been evident in the last generation of stalled “unity” discussions between Canterbury and Rome. Given the choice between As in Rome and As at Home, the English as a rule will pick home.
In fact, the C of E has always been more protestant than Catholic, in a uniquely British kind of way, since its sixteenth-century founding. It was born of dissent, tested in the political fires of the English reformation, and doesn’t necessarily regard its martyrs as any less Christian than the ones Rome stubbornly insists on canonizing for their fidelity to the Catholic cause–a cause that included in its day a hit list with the Queen’s name on it.
So let us not be fooled by the pointy hats and outward appearances of Christian charity that were on display during the papal visit in September. The Pope and the Archbishop do not like each other. Why should they? The pope was in town to beatify the nineteenth century’s most famous escapee from the Anglican Church, John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman and to reinvigorate devotion to the English martyrs like Edmund Campion and bishop John Fisher.
If you ask me, the cameras didn’t hide the tension very well: at the entrance to Westminster Abbey–the first pope ever to set foot in the place, the media intoned with wearying regularity, serenaded by the vastly-superior-to the-Sistine-Choir Westminster boys–the pope looked for all the world as though their rendition of Max Reger’s postmodern, atonal “Benedictus,” was a musical joke. (Has he tasted the liturgical wares in Detroit recently, I wondered.) And I have no doubt that when he prayed side by side with the Bish at the tomb of Edward the Confessor, whose bones are the centerpiece of the whole stone pile, Benedict was praying for the conversion of England–or at least for the success of his scheme to poach traditionalists from his host’s field.
We come in peace, for the lambs.
But never mind all that. Ecumenism isn’t dead simply because, when confronted with an invitation to snuggle up with foreign princes, the English heart flies back to the passions of the Reformation. All over, that. Time to make up, have done, move on–stout fellow. After all, the English do not hold grudges. Not like the Italians, I can tell you. And the Germans! Don’t mention the Germans.
Ecumenism is dead because in Rome’s view the English church has an obedience problem. It isn’t simply that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a pontifical figure in the “worldwide Anglican communion” (cough), but that he is not a significant authority-figure in the Church at home or anywhere else.
Who was surprised when after the Pope’s third reference to himself as the “successor of Peter,” sitting opposite the splendidly mitred Rowan Williams, the Archbishop took a tutorial moment to remind his guest that “Christians differ as to the significance of the Petrine office.” Unspoken: (Pope) “My bloody predecessor sent Augustine here when the people on this soggy island were worshiping stones.” (Archbishop): “We’d have kicked your sorry arse back to Rome two centuries earlier if Becket hadn’t managed to get himself killed and become so damned popular.”
Of course the immediate reasons for the death of ecumenical dialogue are meant to be much more obvious: saith the Telegraph quoting Bishop Andrew Burnham, one of the episcopal poachees whose bags are packed:
“…Clergy have become dismayed at the liberal direction of the Church of England and the way traditionalists have been treated…There’s only a certain amount of time you can accept being described as the National Front of the Church of England…We’re seen as out of date for not accepting women’s ministry as equal, but the debate concentrates on sociology rather than theology… [And] there is no doctrinal certainty anymore. It has become more relative. “I’m sad about leaving as I owe a lot to the Church of England, but this [the Ordinariate] is a joyful opportunity.”
The creation of the ordinariate, created unilaterally with no conversation between Rome and Lambeth Palace on the move (though discussions between disaffected Anglican bishops and the Vatican had been going on for some time), is probably just a lid on the pickle barrel of a nice 1960′s idea: ecumenism belongs to an era of poster-philosophy and the cozy belief that there’s more that unites Christians than divides them.
All over, that. Have done, move on–stout fellow.
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Published: November 21, 2010
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Tags: Anglican communion : Archbishop of Canterbury : Benedict XVI : Book of Common Prayer : Catholic Church : ecumenism : episcopal church : Latin rite : Ordinariate : pope's visit to the UK : religion : Rowan Williams ..
One Response to “Minding the Flock: The Ordinariate”
.
Herb Van_Fleet
November 21, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Well said, as usual. The Pope and his red hatted minions got it wrong again. These guys need to hire a real honest-to-god, er, honest-to-Jesus, PR firm. I hereby nominate Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
But, the larger point here is that, for the sake of humanity, past, present, and future, and in my opinion, we need a latter-day Howard Beale railing against the hypocrisies of the Catholic church, and pleading with its members to throw open their windows, stick out their heads, and shout as loudly as possible, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.” Maybe that will be enough to drown out Bill Donohue and his little band of brainwashed miscreants.
I think it was comedian Sarah Silverman who suggested, uncomedically, that if we could shut down the Vatican and then sell all of its art and artifacts, there would be enough money to feed the world for decades. Something to think about. Seriously.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Empty Cup Theory of Everything
by rjosephhoffmann
Scipio came to coffee yesterday at Gimme and said he was amused by the debate going on between atheist confrontationists and another group he called accommodationists.
“What debate?,” I said distractedly, noticing that the coffee barista had given me three eyedroppersful of espresso in my cup, because she hates me.
He named names. I had never heard of most of them, so I asked Scipio to cut to the chase and tell me what the Big Deal was.
“Most of the confrontationists want atheism to be the Big Bad Wolf. Think of religion as the three little pigs.”
“That’s a terrible analogy,” I said. The whole point of the story is that the dumb little pigs get eaten but the smart pig survives and the wolf gets killed.”
“That’s not the way it ends,” Scipio said slurping away at his cup, filled halfway to the top with a lovely espresso emulsion. “All the pigs survive.”
“No, ” I said, “That’s Disney. They get eaten. One survives. And the wolf dies a hideous death.”
Scipio frowned. Nothing distresses him more than being bested in a controversy about folk tales, unless it’s being accused of a bad analogy.
“But I see your point,” I said, trying to soothe his feelings. “Maybe at the end of a confrontation there’s a pot of boling water just waiting for you. Never underestimate your opponent. Accommodation reduces the chances of humiliation. But honestly, Scipio, before I worried too much about tactics, I’d want to know how solid the ground was under my confrontational feet–or how solid my house was, if we stick with fables.”
He seemed cheered by the comment. “Let me ask you a question. If you had the choice between telling an atheist he is right or telling him he is wrong, what would you say?”
“It would depend,” I said. “If the atheist said that men are smarter than women, I would say, ‘You’re wrong. You cannot prove a thing like that because the word smart only possesses connotations, not an absolute meaning like ‘the freezing point of oxidane’.”
“Why would you get into a conversation about water with an atheist,” Scipio said, clearly annoyed.
“Why would I get into a conversation about the three little pigs?” I asked.
“If the question was the question of God–which is the only issue you would want to discuss with an atheist, would you tell him he is right or wrong.”
I stared at the darkish brown, scarcely damp bottom of my empty cup. “Scipio,” I said. “Would you agree with me that this cup is empty?”
“Yes,” he said cautiously. “I think we might agree on that.”
“Not so fast. What persuades you?”
He hated this game. We have played it for years, sometimes several times a day. “Our agreement or something else?”
“The evidence is the emptiness of the cup. Our agreement is simply a result of our examination of the evidence, an assessment.”
“But there is no evidence,” I said playfully. “There is only an empty cup. You’re sounding like a theologian: you believe “in all that is visible and invisible?”
“You’re going to lecture on cups now,” he said unhappily, “potens and form and substantia and all of that…please can we get through an afternoon without Aristotle.”
“There is no such thing as an afternoon without Aristotle. There are only geese who think there are. You have to agree that the only way of concluding the cup is empty is to evaluate the nature of the cup–a cup–which is meant to hold things, even though mine held almost nothing and yours held a lot and came with biscotti.”
“Can we talk about the barista instead,” he said, “I think she likes me.”
“No,” I said. “At most she’s an instrumental cause related to fullness and emptiness, and if you ask me, more the latter. But we can talk about the universe,”
“Sweet,” Scipio said. “From coffee cups to the cosmos. Another one of your horrid analogies.”
“Is it full or empty?”
“Please don’t go where I think you’re going or I’ll start quoting Stephen Hawking to you.”
“Until he has his theory of everything figured out, quote away; what do you think he would say to the question?”
“I think he would probably say it depends on gravity, but that the existence of the strong force, electromagnetism, weak force, and gravity point to the fact that it is not empty.”
“God, Scipio,” I squeaked. “You are so…careful. ‘that it is not empty’ is not an answer, it’s a whimper, a pule. I’m not trying to get a Creator out of this conversation, just some fun. -So is it full or not.”
“It’s not full in the eighteenth century sense of full because if it was–I know you–you’d start talking about creation and chains of being. Besides, full is a word like smart, isn’t it? Is it full if it has stuff in it or full if it can’t hold an iota more?”
“Is it full in any sense,” I said, seeing Scipio had also drained his cup.
“I don’t think we can know that, because the universe is not a coffee cup.”
“You mean we can’t look down into its bottom or that we can’t see the limit of its top?”
“Ok, for the sake of an argument that is really becoming tiresome, I’ll grant you that it is full if full means that it is not empty and if it has limits and if we can know something about its limit by observing events. It doesn’t matter that we can see edges, tops, and bottoms because we can know about events and forces. And there aren’t any real edges, anyway.”
“But I disagree. I think it isn’t full. I think it’s as empty as this coffee cup and the microscopic particles that are still invisibly occupying space down below are to full what the planetary masses are to the totality of the universe. Isn’t that what you’d want in subatomic theory anyway? I agree with Richard Feynmann: no one understands quantum mechanics. Not even Stephen Hawking.”
“Listen mate,” Scipio said testily. “I asked a simple question. Would you confront an atheist or accommodate an atheist on the question of God’s existence?”
“I answered your question,” I said, summoning the barista. She pretended to be busy polishing the bar glasses, but smiled at Scipio.
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Published: December 2, 2010
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Tags: accommodation : atheism : confrontation : new atheism : philosophy : quantum : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Dawkins : Stephen Hawking : three little pigs ..
12 Responses to “The Empty Cup Theory of Everything”
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steph
December 2, 2010 at 3:13 pm
hilariously funny. nothing is ever that simple, not even an espresso.
x
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mjcache
December 3, 2010 at 1:17 am
An entertaining discourse on nothing, yet everything.
You really need to have a word to the barista on the mandatory
level of an expresso. There is nothing worse than sniffing one and it is gone.
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 3, 2010 at 12:18 pm
It is my unerudite opinion that nothing is, in point of fact, something. Indeed, nothing is a wannabe something, a something lying in wait, if you will. Of course, nothing is also something that ceases to be.
Trillions of years from now when all the suns in the universe will have burned up all their fuel and the forces of nature will have stopped being, well, you know, forces of nature, then, M theory notwithstanding, nothing will not only be something, but nothing – call it emptiness – will be everything!
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rjosephhoffmann
December 3, 2010 at 1:57 pm
You’re pretty erudite: the quantum view according to Stenger is that something exists because nothing is unstable.
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 3, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Then there’s always Einstein: “Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.”
Ophelia Benson
December 3, 2010 at 3:39 pm
This is a very very very subtle story all about me, disguised as something else. I’m a confrontationist, one of the ones nobody has ever heard of, except that there is a persistent rumor that I am the barmaid in “Jesus and Mo.” This conversation is between men and the generic “atheist” is assumed to be male – it’s all very male, and yet and yet – they keep talking about the barista.
You see what I mean? It’s all about me!
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rjosephhoffmann
December 3, 2010 at 4:24 pm
You are incorrigible. I think a confrontationist is someone who says “Don’t tell me what to do” when a politically cautious sales clerk says “Have a good holiday season, if in fact you celebrate, which I’m not suggesting you do.” But yes, it’s all about you.
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Ophelia Benson
December 3, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Ahhhh it’s just as I thought, a confrontationist is someone who barely exists. Although…I did scowl very ferociously once when I was handed some sort of Christian message on an Alaska flight. Nobody was looking, but I did scowl.
Ed Jones
May 22, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Beyond fun and games The Theory About Everything is about you and me – Knowing or not Knowing – Ultimate Reality – the ultimate solution to the human predicment.
Paul Davies wrote: “The search for a closed logical scheme that provides a complete and self-consistent explanation for everything is doomed to failure. – such a thing may exist “out there” – but we cannot know its whole form on the basis of rational thought.”
You quote Richard Faymann: “no one understands quantum mechanics. Not even Stephen Hawking.” (with his M theory – no need for God).
A bit more about Faymann, that his context may not be misunderstood. Davies once asked Faymann whether he thought of mathematics and the laws of paysics as having an idependent existence. He replied in part: “The problem of existence is a very itresting and difficult one. If you do mateematics,which is simply working out the correspondence of assumptions, you’ll discover for instance a curious thing-” (he goes on to describe a numeral interrelationship). “Now, that fact which I’ve just told you about might not have been known to you before. You might say “Where is it, what is it, where is itlocated, what kind of reality does it have?” And yet you came upon it. When we discover these things, you get the feeling that somehow they existed somewhere, but there ‘s nowhere for such things. It’s just a feeling – - Well, in the case of pyhsics we have double trouble. We come upon these mathematical interralationships but they apply to the universe, So the problem of where they are is doubly confusing –These are philosophicl questions that I don’t know howto answer.”
Fred Hoyle reports a conversation on the topic of reveation with Richard Faymann: Some years ago I had a graphic description from Dick Faymann of what a moment of inspiration feels like, and of it being followed by an enormous sense euphoria, lastin for maybe two or more days. I asked how often had it happened, to which Feymann replied,”four”, at which we both agreed that twelve days of euphoria was not a geat reward for a lifetime’s work”.
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steph
February 14, 2012 at 7:43 pm
This cup will never grow stale – fulsome flavour, awesome aroma. There’s nothing really to talk about except Aristotle and baristas and false analogies (which all analogies are). The lack of evidence isn’t evidence of anything, so there is nothing to confront or accommodate with an atheist or a theist on the question of existence or non existence of something not seen…
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hypatia
February 15, 2012 at 7:53 am
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
So said Samuel Butler, anyway…
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boy birthday invitations
July 1, 2013 at 12:10 am
Great post.
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James Luther Adams: On the Theological Significance of Unbelief
by rjosephhoffmann
Jared Sparks
James Luther Adams was required to retire from Harvard Divinity School in 1968 at the ripe young age of 67. He had been at Harvard since 1957, but it seemed much longer since, by the mid-sixties, he was the most famous theologian in America and the unanointed successor of the social justice prophet Reinhold Niebuhr, who died in 1971.
Harvard had a way of making theologians who had spent years labouring in the vineyards of Chicago or (in the case of Paul Tillich) Union Theological Seminary “famous,” or at least obvious and quotable. Unlike the fully academic Tillich, Niebuhr and Adams used the pulpit as often as the classroom as their pied a terre for prophetic discourse on social ethics and reflection on the role (and limits) of the church in society.
I was thinking about Adams yesterday after re-reading Chris Hedges’s much undervalued book I Don’t Belief in Atheists. Chris, like me, was at HDS at the end of the Adams era and probably would not mind calling himself an Adams disciple. In fact, if you were in Cambridge in those days, you almost had to be: Adams was everywhere. He continued to teach at Andover Newton but maintained an office on Francis Avenue, strolled the corridors, talked with students, preached often, and lectured frequently. So frequently that many of us who never received credit for an Adams course still counted him our teacher, and perhaps the most profound influence in the development of our ethical theory. He had the most welcoming face in the world, the sort of man who without saying a word invited you to stop and chat–chats that became half-hour conversations. His colleagues almost always referred to him as “our dear Jim” or “our beloved friend.” I heard no other faculty member referred to with the same natural deference.
Divinity Hall: Site of Emerson's Divinity School Address
In 1976, Harvard was transitioning from being an incubator for Unitarian and liberal religious thought to a school where socially progressive ideas were born, selected, cultivated, and exported. What Union Theological Seminary had been in the 1950′s and 1960′s, Harvard was by 1975. The Divinity School (always underfunded and predestined to produce a class of alumni who could never compete with the high-earning graduates of Harvard Law or Harvard Business), existed as the conscience of the world’s richest university and America’s most influential educational factory.
Like many of the progressive theologians of his day Adams was deeply immersed in German scholarship and thus in German politics and Kultur. During his time at Chicago, where he taught at Meadville Lombard, the Unitarian seminary of the Federated Theological Faculty, he tried to persuade students that the same forces that resulted in the rise of Hitler were nascent in all societies, even within American democracy. For him, the biblical account of evil was “true” in the sense that it was natural: it summarized the craving for what injures the human spirit and causes our separation from the sources of human good.
Similar ideas were being promoted by Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth and the “Barmen Theologians” who resisted Nazi influence over the German churches. In 1935, during a period of leave from teaching Adams was interrogated by the Gestapo and narrowly avoided imprisonment as a result of his engagement with the Underground Church movement. Using a home movie camera, he filmed Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer and others, including those who were involved in clandestine, church-related resistance groups, as well as pro-Nazi leaders of the so-called German Christian Church. Adams returned to the United States persuaded that the tendency of religious liberals to be theologically content with vague slogans and platitudes about open-mindedness could only render liberal churches irrelevant and impotent in face of the world’s evils.
His world-view, a phrase he would have detested, could be traced to Kierkegaard’s dissatisfaction with the comfortable protestantism of his own day. The role of the church was to proclaim freedom to captives, light in the darkness of political corruption, salvation (which almost always meant economic or social amelioration) to the afflicted. When it stopped doing this–when it lost sight of its prophetic mission–the church became an arm of the state, complicit in the sins of the state, as officially it was in Germany and long before during the Dark Ages. The church could only fulfill its role in a completely secular context where its freedom to stand apart from the institutions of government was guaranteed; where it existed on a strictly voluntary basis, expressing the same freedom of choice that mythically the apostles had in choosing to follow Jesus–the freedom to be a living witness that the state does not exhaust the perquisites of human liberty and personhood. The Declaration of Independence, he never tired of reminding his classes, has no legal force: it invokes rights that every religious woman and man knew to be self-evident. It does not define them. “The pursuit of Happiness,” in particular, was not just a rejection of Locke’s use of the word “property” in his 1693 Essay Concerning Human Understanding but a call for the good life–the pursuit of morality and conscience, informed by religion.
Peale's Jefferson, 1791
But I was also thinking of James Luther Adams in conjunction with what he thought about the role of atheism in American society. A certain accommodation to unbelief is at the foundation of the Unitarian tradition in the eighteenth century; it’s part of the mortise and tenon of Harvard. It deeply influenced Jefferson and Franklin, neither Harvard proper, though Franklin received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford before the Revolution, and Jefferson fell under the Unitarian spell of Harvard’s president, Jared Sparks and to a lesser degree the religious ideas of John Adams, a devout Unitarian. And later it was formative in the thought of Emerson and Thoreau, neither of whom professed a decisive unbelief but held up their disbelief in church doctrine as an essential element of religious freedom. For James Luther Adams, as for his predecessors, the freedom to believe entailed the freedom to disbelieve as a logical complement. Neither option was worth much if it was compelled. Christianity would lose its soul to the state, as it had to the Nazi regime. Atheism would lose its intellectual integrity, as it had to the socialists.
But atheism served an additional purpose, Adams thought: it could be prophetic. It could expose the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of religion in a society that expects religion only to mouth words of comfort: “An authentic prophet is one who prophesies in fashion that does not comfort people, but actually calls them to make some new sacrifices. That’s an authentic prophet, whether one speaks in the name of God or not. A great deal of authentic prophetism in the modern world is to be found in nonreligious terms and in nonchurch configurations, often even hostile to the church. The churches themselves have broadly failed in the prophetic function. Therefore a good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgment upon the pious. An authentic prophet can and should be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.”
It’s true, of course, that atheists who find their own position comfortable and self-authenticating will hardly find it thrilling that their core position is useful chiefly as a means of keeping religion faithful to its mission. But that is because atheists of a certain sort do not mean by religion what Adams meant. A “religion” whose dimensions extend only from Christian fundamentalism to Islamic terrorism–the unevolved parody of religion that new atheists have made their quarry–Adams with a typical Harvard reliance on common sense, leaves for history to sort out. But the elements of religion that transcend the emotional, the pedantic, and the irrational–what he took to be especially the ethical elements of the Christian gospel, had to be protected from social respectability, from living the comfortable life of country club Presbyterians. Atheism is there to wake the Church up, to call its cherished assumptions, including its claim to possess the unvarnished and final truth, into question. And in the process of challenging the Church to say what it believes, atheism is called upon to define and explain what truths it holds to be “self-evident.”
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Published: December 6, 2010
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Tags: Chris Hedges : Emerson : ethics : Harvard : Harvard Divinity School : James Luther Adams : Paul Tillich : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Reinhold Niebuhr : Separation of Church and State. I Don't Believe in Atheists : social gospel : Unitarian : UUA ..
4 Responses to “James Luther Adams: On the Theological Significance of Unbelief”
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Ed Jones
December 7, 2010 at 11:51 am
Joe,
As recent as October 24th in Letting Go of Jesus you wrote: “- – if they (historical Jesus scholars) announce to an unsuspecting and credulous public that they have found ‘new historical materials,’ better ‘gospels,’ the ‘real story’ or the bone boxes of Jesus and his wife and family, they simply prove the axiom: Jesus may not save, but he sells. It has been a long time since theology’s dirty little secrete was first whispered: ‘The quest for the historical Jesus leads to the door of the church.” But that is still where it leads. We leave him there,’ as Schweitzer lamented, ‘as one unknown.’”
Now, by sharp conrtast, we have Jemes Luther Adams who wrote: “Jesus reveals to us in his life and teaching that there is a soverign, universal moral law, a nonmanipulable reality, worthy alone of ultimate loyality, and the source of peace and human fulfillment”(that kind of God).
One cannot avoid the implication that you now may be recovering something crucial which you missed during your student day associations with Adams.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 7, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Hmmm. I think the Jesus question and the ethical Jesus of theology are not incompatible. How much of Socrates is Plato? Whatever the case with Jesus, I don’t think the evangelists simply created the love and justice ethic ex nihilo; it must have been shaped by community perceptions. I confess to being a bit of a chauvinist this way, in terms of thinking that however the gospel arose its essential features are occasionally sublime, and when you see jesuine “teaching” reflected in the life and work of a man like Adams it enhances the moral force of the new creation. So, enigmatic in historical particulars–sure, but dynamic and almost unique in moral vision.
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Ed Jones
December 31, 2010 at 11:56 am
I am compelled to revisit your comment.
“I think (1) the Jesus question and (2) the ethical Jesus of theology are not incompatable” in my overview of your thought (1) questions if he really was, while (2) says even if he was, the sayings tradition “must have been shaped by community perceptions”. Thus “whem you see jesuine ‘teaching’ reflected in a man like Adams, it is ethics which must have been shaped by community perceptions – enignatic in historical particulars – sure, but dynamic and almost unique in moral vision”. Thank god for at least such a community — Jesus is left at the door of the church – as one unknown”.
(Even when you see jesuine “teaching” reflected in a man like Adams” one must ask, how can such a man be so misguided?)
Ed Jones
December 7, 2010 at 10:43 pm
I did not intend to begin a debate, however I must attempt one reply:
“The Jesus question and the ethical Jesus of theology” seem to be compatable in the sense that the former was: did he really exist? while the latter is saying: even if he did the “jesuine teaching” was “shaped by community perceptions”. I confess, both notions may be derived from the problematic of the writings of the NT. Your “once intelectual hero” Schubert Ogden, since you let go of him, has made the most straight forward explanation of the problematic that I am aware of: “None of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus – all of them depend on sources earlier than themselves and hence are not the original and originating witness the early church mistook them to be. The apostolic witness is located in the earliest layer of the Synoptic tradition.” My March 24th, 2009 letter tries to makes this explicit. The truly authentic scholars across the centuries consistently were quite able to make this distinction between apostolic witness and tradition.
Imagine confronting a man like Adams: Professor (or Jim), I honor your high moral life and work, however how can you know that your beliefs derive from a man named Jesus? Might he not at least think: man what is your problem?
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Defining Fundamentalism
by rjosephhoffmann
“To be a fundamentalist, you have to have a book. And you have to forget the book has a history.”
A New Oxonian Oldie
I’ve been puzzling about this recently: whether there is anything that Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have in common. I’ll leave the Jews and the Sikhs and Hindus to one side for a minute. Just because I want to.
First of all, you have to have a book to be a fundamentalist. It’s no good trying to say you take your religion seriously if you don’t have a page to point at or a verse to recite.
Theoretically, various gurus can exert the same sort of control that a book can exert over the mind of a true believer. But usually gurus begin by pointing at books as well.
That’s what both Jim Jones of People’s Temple, Inc., and David Koresh of Branch Davidian fame did. They were just the messengers, albeit the ones you had to sleep with to get the keys to the kingdom.
They became convinced that they were the fulfillment of texts they’d read one too many times. In the same way, the music of rote repetition seems to inspire Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar and the late and invidious Baitullah Mehsud as well. Fundamentalists read texts written 1000 years ago as though they were hot off the press–like this from the world’s most famous MIA:
“Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)….The Arabian Peninsula has never–since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas–been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.” (1998 fatwah)
It’s so easy to forget the Crusades, isn’t it? Especially since the last one ended in 1291 with the interlopers in full retreat, barely managing to keep the booty in their saddlebags as they galloped away.
But to review, two things pop out at us immediately when you think of fundamentalism: you have to have a book that you take deadly seriously, and you have to forget that the book has a history.
The second point is massively important, because it permits the fundamentalist to ignore science, cultural change, and prevents the possibility of seeing the book as being, in any sense, out of date, irrelevant, or out of touch with current political or ethical contexts. If people had prophets then, who’s to say they can’t have prophets now?, say the David Koreshs and Dale Barlows of this world. We say so, say the Omar Bakri Mohammeds and Abu Izzadeens right back. After all, we’re reading different books. We can’t all be right. Fundamentalism is always particular to the truth claims of a group: one man’s fundamentals are another man’s pornography. Both responses to books written a long time ago are manifestations of historical illiteracy.
Revd Hagee
Another thing, an important feature: fundamentalists have to be right. Not in the sense you and I might be right if we scored a Daily Double on Jeopardy. Right in the sense that there has to be a slope-shouldered, humiliated wrong sitting next to it. Right in the sense that there can’t be a middle way between good and evil.
Fundamentalists have no trouble doing this because the world of late antiquity where their ideas were forged in an atmosphere of petty monarchic rivalries and mythic theomachies–mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, by the way–was an easily divisible cosmos. Us and Them, equated easily to good and evil, in political and hence in religious terms. That’s what Mani taught, what Zoroaster taught before him.
Zoroaster
It’s also what Muhammad and his followers preached, what the Qumran War Scroll is all about (1QM, 4Q491-496) and (no good trying to wriggle out of it: read Mark 13.13) what Jesus taught, in his eschatological rhapsodies at least.
The notion that in the end, “all of Darkness is to be destroyed and Light will live in peace for all eternity” is very appealing. But there’s a good chance the person next to you belongs to the other side. At least that’s what you’ve been taught. To be a fundamentalist is to have the religious equivalent of a teenager’s fear of vampires.
That’s what makes the next two characteristics of fundamentalism so important: extermination (in two forms) and conversion. The People’s Temple, the Yearn for Zion (YFZ) Mormons and the Branch Davidian “cults” created or were ready to create manufactured mini-holocausts to vindicate their beliefs.
When the sheriffs’ cars rolled up on the edge of their compounds, the sacred boundary between purity and corruption, they were ready to go home. Everything about the outside world was smutty, dirty, and unchaste–huge horrible spaces swarming with unbelievers who mocked them and raced home in a satanic frenzy to watch smutty, dirty and unchaste television shows.
They had a point of course. The culture is filled with crap and we do tend to regard people who wear gingham dresses (and worry so much about chastity that they will only have sex and babies with a purified leader) as a bit off the beam. It’s a tired observation, I know, but fundamentalism is self-marginalizing:the blessings of secular culture and the contempt of its protagonists for nonconformity serve as proof to every child eight and up that daddy and mommy are “right” because difference is the ultimate distinction.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, self-extermination, a form of martyrdom, is a way in which Christian crazies can vindicate their readings of sacred writ.
Homicidal martyrdom is the trademark of Islamic fundamentalists, a much messier way to do business. You begin with the same premise as the one quoted above from bin Laden, the exemplary coward who has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of his fans, as when he sings the praises of young men who behead unbelievers:
The youths also reciting the All-Mighty words of Quran: Smite the necks…(Muhammad; 47:19). Those youths will not ask you for explanations, they will tell you, singing, there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck smiting….They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same hell with his righteous executioner. (bin Laden, 1996)
Pleasure to know, moreover, that the martyr-fundamentalist does not experience the excruciating pain of his bleeding or burning infidel victims; they have the word of no less an authority than Saheeh Al-Jame’-as-Sagheer, who lived “in the seventh generation” after the Prophet and attributes the saying to Muhammad. “A martyr will not feel the pain of death except like [sic] how you feel when you are pinched.”
The idea that the martyr dies painlessly while others are screeching around him is meant to be reassuring to the half-hearted volunteer, whose rational soul tells him that he has never witnessed a death free from agony and that comrades who have been wounded in engagements with the unbelievers suffer immensely. Still, they have the word of as-Sagheer ringing in their ears: “With the first gush of [your] blood, [you] will be shown thy seat in paradise, decorated with jewels.”
Finally, fundamentalism is all about conversion, heavily infatuated with growth. It isn’t enough that the fanatic kingdom-comers of the world erect temples. They want to put people in them. That requires a recruitment program.
The statistics speak for themselves. In our stunningly up-to-the-minute culture where we can instantly communicate mathematical solutions and the latest groundbreaking article in medical research from The Lancet around the world with the flick of a key, people who think death can be like a loving pinch or noogie are clocked (in terms of percentage increase since 1989) as follows:
Islam in North America, +25%
Islam in Africa: +2.15%
Islam in Asia: +12.57%
Islam in Europe: +142.35%
Islam in Australia: +257.01%
This is not all “conversion,” of course; but conversion is a geographical and cultural mandate in Islam, and conversion from more lenient to more literal forms of Islam is also on the rise. According to an October 2009 estimate, Taliban numbers of fighters alone–those who are attracted mainly by martyrdom rather than philanthropy and virtue, went from 7,000 in Northern Afghanistan to 25,000. (Reuters, Saturday Oct. 10, 2009).
By comparison, it is becoming more difficult to define what a “fundamentalist” Christian is, potentially because the ground under his feet is more prone to cultural shift. But if we think of biblical literalism, an intolerance of ”soft” forms of Christianity (often equated to a kind of mainstream liberal heresy), the importance of conversion (in this case, evangelism), and prophetic fulfillment as the non-negotiables of fundamentalism, the following statistic is, you should pardon the expression, revealing:
Pentecostal and charismatic denominations have grown by 37% since 2001; the Churches of Christ by 48%; the Assemblies of God by 68%. (United) Methodists and Northern Baptist by 0%, Jews, -10% and Catholics, through a healthy infusion of Hispanic and Latino votaries, a mere 11%. The undeniable appeal of taking God’s word seriously is unslaked by contemporary life.
Which causes me to muse: Did you ever stop to think that no matter how many times you read Peter Pan as a child you could never quite persuade yourself that you could jump out of a third story window and fly, just by thinking wonderful thoughts? Maybe you tried launching yourself from the top bunk–just once, but never the window.
I hope I make my point.
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Published: December 9, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : Christianity : Fundamentalism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
35 Responses to “Defining Fundamentalism”
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 9, 2010 at 1:39 pm
In re Islamic Fundamentalists, here are a few pithy quotes from the famous and not so famous to add to your collection:
“The militant Muslim is the person cutting the head of the infidel while the moderate Muslim holds the victims feet.”
– Marco Polo
“I studied the Kuran a great deal … I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.”
– Alexis De Tocqueville
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
– Will Durant
“How dreadful are the curses which Muhammadanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Muhammadan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”
– Sir Winston Churchill
“We have stood mute when Cyprus was conquered and the Greek Orthodox churches were razed and the stones from the churches were used to build mosques. We made no protest when the Sepulcher of Saint Joseph was destroyed in Palestine and a mosque erected using the rubble for the foundation. We made not a whimper when Buddhist and Hindu Temples in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Ceylon were destroyed, losing hundreds of years of cultural heritage in the process.”
“It is our right – our duty – to protest while a nation/faith erects a monument to their victory on the battlefield and tombs where our countrymen, loved ones and valiant heroes became the war dead.”
– Anon. (Comment regarding the so-called “ground zero mosque’ in New York City.)
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rjosephhoffmann
December 9, 2010 at 1:42 pm
A nice anthology–what is the source of the quote attrib to Marco Polo? I ask only because the idea of “moderate” vs any other kind of Muslim seems askew in his era….
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steph
December 9, 2010 at 7:23 pm
I googled it -I found all those in a slightly longer list of quotes of ‘non muslim thinkers’ on Islam,compiled by Ayesha Ahmed, which he has published on several sites. However he doesn’t attribute sources for any of the purported quotations which includes others from Bertrand Russell to the current pope.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 9, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Am highly skeptical of that…
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steph
December 9, 2010 at 9:32 pm
In any case didn’t the term ‘moderate Islam’ arise well after some twentieth century Protestants became the first ‘Fundamentalists’, and the West applied the term to Fundamentalist Islam in order to differentiate Shia from Sunni, which became known as ‘moderate Islam’? And anyway a Shia (arguably the so called militant) and the Sunni, wouldn’t be collaborating. There might be something funny going on in translation here but I’m highly skeptical of nearly all his ‘quotes’, all without references. And everything googled…
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rjosephhoffmann
December 9, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Yes yes yes
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 10, 2010 at 12:40 pm
According to Wikipedia, Marco Polo wrote “Il Milione” circa 1300, which introduced Europeans to Central Asia (including Islamic Persia) and China. “Marco Polo maintains a Christian bias against some of the religions he encounters along the way,” says Wikipedia. “Most notable of these is his depiction of Buddhism as “Idol-worship”, partaking in both sexual indulgence and the taking of multiple wives. He also makes several derogatory comments regarding Islam.” This source also notes that, “Il Milione was translated, embellished, copied by hand and adapted; there is no authoritative version.”
So, it is within the realm of possibility that Signor Polo could well have made the statement attributed to him. I personally think the word “moderate” was a mistranslation of the Italian word for “slave.”
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steph
December 10, 2010 at 2:06 pm
I was well aware of the dates of his life and his Christian bias. However I would never depend on Wikipedia and am skeptical of anything without proper reference. I have no evidence that he differentiated between types of Islam in this way. Maybe he said something vaguely like this, maybe he didn’t, maybe somebody else did, maybe they didn’t.
steph
December 10, 2010 at 2:07 pm
also I can be a bit of a pedant about double checking references … sometimes they’re wrong.
mark dietz
December 10, 2010 at 4:30 am
The term may be new, but was there not a fundamentalist turn in Islam as the reconquista in spain proved more and more successful?
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rjosephhoffmann
December 10, 2010 at 2:11 pm
There is obviously something askew with the quote as given; pardon Steph’s and my grittier than average approach but we belong to the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion.
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 10, 2010 at 4:09 pm
OK. I’m way too subtle. I first qualified the reference as, “Wikipedia says.” I then used another qualifier “This source also notes,” to mean the information is delimited to Wikipedia; accuracy notwithstanding. This is followed by, “Il Milione was translated, embellished, copied by hand and adapted; there is no authoritative version,” which suggests that what Marco Polo actually wrote, given Wikipedia’s understanding anyway, should be approached with some degree of caution. That lead to my final qualification, “it is within the realm of possibility,” to suggest, (but apparently lacking the appropriate emphasis for some readers,) that what Wikipedia asserts is contingent per se.
Now, that said, there is the issue of whether it is possible, if not probable, that the relatively modern English words “fundamentalism” and “moderate” have equivalents in the thirteenth and fourteenth century Italian language, including its Venetian variants. Lacking any other evidence, then, it’s a question of reasonableness; e.g., dully salted.
What would Jacques Derrida do?
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steph
December 10, 2010 at 11:24 pm
My point was that the perception of a distinction between fundamentalist belief and non fundamentalist or moderate, liberal, modernist or any other form of belief, didn’t occur in Islam until the twentieth century, as an analogy (and a bad one) to the American Christian phenomenon which wasn’t conceived until the end of the nineteenth century. Islamic fundamentalism is more about a revivalism in reaction to and in its relationship with the modern West. I don’t know what Derrida would have done – maybe he’d read Marco Polo – but I’m pretty sure he was also a member of the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion and would have been equally skeptical of nearly all of the purported ‘quotes’ on Ayesha Ahmed’s page.
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Mark
December 10, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Oh, I don’t even want to know what Derrida would do — no matter what he would say it would most likely destroy any chance for dialog of any kind.
My comment was not so very semiological anyway. I am willing to accept that there is something we call today fundamentalism and that in the past we saw behavior that was not dissimilar. (Although I think modern fundamentalism in the United States has one unique quality — it appears to be a product of literacy, not of lack of literacy.)
Joseph, let me offer some slightly different takes on fundamentalism.
1) Fundamentalists have a book. Yes, but so do others in the same tradition. The real question is how do they differ from those others in how they relate to the book and the tradition. I think fundamentalists tend to take the tradition very personally to the point of conflating their sense of self with the tradition. They are the tradition, and that step toward identification can have a very mystical quality to it, one that makes it easier for them to adopt other mystical paths of reasoning, while still retaining an often astonishingly rational perspective on the world in general.
2) I think environment is very important. The fundamentalist often feels (and generally they are correct in this) that pressure has been placed on their tradition. They relate to their tradition so initmately that they think the self-same pressure has been placed on them. (Note how the gentleman in the other thread reacted to your attack on secular humanism — he seemed to take it personally — he kept saying that we were attacking secular humanism — which we were?)
3) These intimate feelings associated with the tradition lead the fundamentalists to want to preserve, protect and conserve their tradition. They will even change the tradition radically if they think these changes will protect the tradition. (Inconsistent on one level, but not so inconsistent on the level that matters, the level of defense and reprisal against the attacks coming from the environment.)
4) Small, cult fundamentalism is, to my mind, different from fundamentalism in a large established tradition. The small cult has no real need or desire to grow. It tends not to evangelize beyond a certain point, the point at which a community ceases to be personal (somewhere around 100 members, I would suspect, is the upper limit). In small cult fundamentalism personal contact with the leader is essential; so large is not a good thing.
I think when you turn toward an environmental view of fundamentalism, it begins to take a different shape than if you focus on the inevitably irrational behaviors. Because when it is large and working across a larger tradition so many other environmental factors are going to come into play that will eventually undercut or tone down the irrational behavior, particularly the violent irrational behavior.
However I think we have seen a number of small cult fundamantalist groups that have formed within the larger traditions. Al Qida is one such group because it works in small isolated cells that retain the qualities of the small cult and the radical violence that small cults seem somewhat more capable of than do larger fundamentalist movements. When large fundamentalist movements turn to violence, e.g. the inquisitions of the middle ages, they must do so within an agreed upon political and even legal structure. Small cults have no such problem; thus suicide bombers are more likely to come out of the cult mentality than out of the large tradition fundamantalism.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
Mark
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Stevie Gamble
December 11, 2010 at 9:14 am
I think we are on reasonably safe ground in concluding that Jacques Derrida would do nothing; he is, after all, dead.
So is Winston Churchill, whose approach to ‘Muhammadanism’ may be supplemented by another of his comments:
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
He was talking about Hindus at the time…
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rjosephhoffmann
December 11, 2010 at 9:22 am
C’mon Stevie: you know that Derrida being dead would not inhibit his ability to say something.
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Stevie Gamble
December 13, 2010 at 9:06 pm
Oh bugger! I forgot the ouija board…
Herb Van_Fleet
December 13, 2010 at 1:36 pm
To those who pray at the alter of the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion, the case of the alledged Marco Polo attribution may be solved. Using my trusty Google machine, I searched a number of sites looking for the quote. I finally came across one (http://jillosophy.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-thinkers-on-islam.html) that offered these quotes:
“DR M. SABIESKI (PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY)
“The militant Muslim is the person cutting the head of the infidel while the moderate Muslim holds the victims feet”.
**
“MARCO POLO (WORLD TRAVELER)
“The law which their prophet Mohamed has given to Muslims is that any harm done to any one who does not accept their law and any appropriation of his goods, is no sin at all.”
**
The Polo quote sounds much more reasonable. But just who the hell is this “DR M. SABIESKI (PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY)” you no doubt ask while still on your knees at the alter? Well, there is no such “professor” that I could find. So, the name could be make up, or maybe an anagram, or even some kind of inside joke.
In any case, mystery solved. Kind of. Please don’t forget to leave a few shekels in the collection basket on your way out of the church to help recruit more converts.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 13, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Afraid someone who simply advertises as “professor of Philosophy” with no further bona fides is dodgy in the extreme, like the quote. A bit like Professor Harold Hill, with the 76 trombones. Your effort in myth-busting is to be commended, Herb!
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steph
December 13, 2010 at 2:27 pm
I am no less suspicious. It is still a ‘quote’ with no reference to a primary source. Probably, this blogger and the infamous “Ayesha Ahmed” share the same (illegitimate) source. There are lots of false ‘quotes’ floating round the internet and you see them repeated everywhere. Even in literature, things attributed to Jesus almost verbatim in Matthew and Luke for example, whether they were interdependent or dependent on a similar source, I have reason to suggest cannot be historically true. For example the temptations in the wilderness and then the rending of the temple veil which is in Mark as well, cannot be historically true. And while I’m pretty sure I’ve read everything published by Albert Schweizer, for another example, I never read him say ‘There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats’. Yet I read it quoted without reference to a primary source all over the internet. I know he loved music and quite probably liked cats but I have no reason to believe he said that.
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Mark
December 17, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Joseph,
If you would not mind, could you delete my two comments above, and this one.
Thanks, Mark
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TerryB
January 6, 2011 at 11:36 am
Nearly all articles and blogs on ‘Fundamentalism’ mention the ‘Crusades’. I have yet to find one that mentions the Muslim invasion of Europe. A.D. 711 to 1248 saw the Emirate of Cordoba in which Christians were unmder subjection as dhimmitis in their own land. The Crusades should be seen in context not quoted out of context!
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steph
April 4, 2011 at 11:51 pm
An enlightening revival, a beautiful and welcome spring refreshment. I wonder if there’s such a thing as fungusmentalism? If there is, I wonder if it hangs uncritically on the words of four heros, plus one more, with maybe the additional thrown in or kicked out once in a while. And if it did exist, would it faithfully defend these heros until death? If there is such a thing as fungusmentalism, of it, I would be very very suspicious.
8X8
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steph
April 5, 2011 at 1:17 pm
I wonder what would happen if this new testament of heros, was canonised. Would the heros or gospeliers, and the letter writers, become saints, or divinised as gods? And what would the revelation be? I wouldn’t trust it, would you?
8X8
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steph
April 5, 2011 at 4:19 pm
and would all their writings be collected into one “Good Gnus Bubble[sic]” (RJH)? Very suspicious, possibly apocryphal.
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Argelia Tejada Segor (Argelia Tejada Yangüela)
April 6, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Joe, when you visited Miami back in 2006 you mentioned that the Catholic Church was fundamentalist; not fundamentalism of the Book but of the Church. Your statements help me better appreciate the risky impact of church fundamentalism on people.
I also think that there is a common ground between Muslims and Catholics: they must be obedient to a hierarchy that is prompt to establish theocracies. Up to the present, this has been our problem in Latin America. The influence of Pius II was not only felt in Europe with the Jewish persecution. In Latin America the church created theocracies by means of Concordats to get state financing of the church and official privileges to teach catholic morals and dogma in public school and wherever populations were confined. It also got judiciary privileges, to get priests and religious tried by church courts, rather than the Judiciary branch of government; and to get the state to validate church marriages by not admitting divorce. (Abortion and gay marriages were not social issues in those days but now politicians inserted it on the reform 2010 Constitution, which is worst).
In other words, both Muslims and Catholics have political theologies that create an impact in the public sphere and can be extremely dangerous. Even thought Pentecostal and Evangelicals are growing in the USA and Latin America, their impact is more in the psychic of individuals: alienation from reality in the Marxist sense. We face a revival of religion as opium of the people. Isn’t this the reason why in America the working class votes against their own interests and think themselves as middle class?
I wrote an article about how the policies of the Vatican from 1930 to the present have affected Church-State relationships in the Dominican Republic. I raise the issue of the new political theology expressed by Ratzinger: separation of church and state. Who will end the Concordats, the local churches or the states? It made it to the press. It is in Spanish, if you can read it: http://argeliatejada.blogspot.com/2011/04/iglesia-estado-y-lamboismo-dominicano.html
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Defining Fundamentalism (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
August 16, 2011 at 11:42 am
[...] "To be a fundamentalist, you have to have a book. And you have to forget the book has a history." A New Oxonian Oldie I've been puzzling about this recently: whether there is anything that Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have in common. I'll leave the Jews and the Sikhs and Hindus to one side for a minute. Just because I want to. First of all, you have to have a book to be a fundamentalist. It's no good trying to say you take your religion s … Read More [...]
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Dwight Jones
August 16, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Joe, in the patriotic humanist struggle, your are our Zhukov.
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steph
August 16, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Yikes!!! Fearless patriotic ‘hero’ of wars, controlling nuclear testing resulting in deaths… No analogies – they’re always wrong. The pen is mightier than the sword and Zhokov spoke with a gun. Words, not bullets! Words are more powerful and Joe can bring the present up to date with its history with more clarity, poetic satire and wit than pretty much anybody else. And I think the ‘humanist struggle’ is about education… it’s not a war or a revolution of violence.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 16, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Long live the Revolution!
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steph
August 16, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Oh yes indeed, long live the revolution!! Power to the as peaceful as possible!! And power to the pen… yours.
Graham Dunstan Martin
September 6, 2011 at 5:19 am
The real problem with fundamentalists is not that they have a book. It’s that they think they know what the book means. Whereas language is radically ambiguous.
Unfortunately fundamentalists think that words have absolutely solid, certain meanings.
So they don’t understand how language works. So threfore they don’t understand their own holy book.
By the way, this doesn’t mean I’m a materialist. I’m not. But fundamentalists are a menace to any true spirituality.
See my new Blog entitled Soul Reasons.
Graham Dunstan Martin
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Dan Gillson
September 7, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I’m not even sure what “language is radically ambiguous” can possibly mean. Does it mean that your words don’t line up with the meaning or your intention for them? Does it mean that the best we can do is approximate or guess at what another means? Could you explain to me how it is that language works?
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Graham Dunstan Martin
September 15, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Sorry I’ve not replied for a while, but here goes. You ask how language works. Wow! That’s quite a subject. Here are a couple of points.
People tend to think crudely of meaning as if it coincided with dictionary meaning. But that’s merely a word’s denotation, its ‘outer surface’, as it were. It’s possible to analyse the meaning of a word into the things it implies, presupposes, etc. These are termed its connotations. But these connotations vary from context to context. But also from person to person because my knowledge, understanding and experience of the world is always different from yours. A woodcutter’s experience of ‘trees’ is quite different from mine. A fisherman’s notion of ‘fish’ is quite different from mine: I don’t have the same experience of them. I don’t have the same definition as you of the same words, because you and I don’t have the same experience either of words or of the world. When you say something to me, I interpret it in terms of what I understand by the words you use. You do the same. Hence, when we talk to each other we have to take a lot on trust. Hence it’s hard for communication always to be 100%. We hardly notice this nor does it matter most of the time, but sometimes it becomes a problem.
Hence the words of a book will always be read differently by different readers. There are no doubt better and worse readings too. By the way, does a writer always realize all the implications of what he writes? Of course he doesn’t.
But there’s also the question of the extension of words. If you’ve got the speaker in front of you, you can ask him. But how broad is the intended extension or reference of “Thou shalt not kill”? Who does that apply to? Your tribe? Your nation? Animals as well? Every human being? Who do you include within “everyone”? Does it apply to murderers too? Are there any exceptions, and which ones are they? Or is it just a guide asking us to refer to what we might make of it these days? The commandment didn’t come with a commentary. Even if it had, the commentary couldn’t possibly have covered all the possible interpretations.
That’s what I mean by saying that language is “radically ambiguous”. Statements of truth, history, morality, religious truth, etc, are up for discussion. Anyone who thinks he can or should simply hand over the interpretation of texts to some alleged “authority” or other is copping out.
Nor have I mentioned metaphor.
Graham Dunstan Martin
October 4, 2011 at 3:57 am
By the way, have any readers of this blog come across Edmond Wright’s book “Narrative, Perception, Language and Faith” (Palgrave Macmillan 2005)? Much thought-provoking obsservation as to how language works, and as to the approximations inevitable in our understanding of others’ words — and even of our own! This shouldn’t drive us however to extreme relativist conclusions — as I fear it may Edmond.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Audrey
by rjosephhoffmann
I have received an extraordinary number of replies to this which apparently missed the fact that it was satire directed against billboard campaigns and anti-Christmas warriors like Audrey. So in the spirit of good will let me endorse Jim’s response: “If we are going to criticize and detract religious charities, we had better be ready to vigorously create and support alternatives. Only when atheists and agnostics start opening their own soup kitchens and shelters will this kind of protest ever be anything other than cruel.”
Exactly! As to satire, I am only slightly encouraged that Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) was similarly taken for serious. [jh]
I am naive about the cost of billboards but luckily I have secular friends I can call or tweet to on the subject.
I want to buy one. Just for a few weeks (maybe there’s a discount for signs after January 2nd.)
Mine is going to say “Hey moron! Do you feel any richer now that you blew all your money on God?”
My first idea was to paste a huge picture of Peter Pan, preferably Disney’s (face recognition) next to a picture of Jesus in the manger. It was going to say “Grow Up!” But my friend Scipio said the point was oblique.
Grow Up!
I don’t know what that means, exactly, but Scipio is pretty smart. And getting the rights to anything Disney would be expensive.
My inspiration for this was seeing a woman and a little girl coming out of Walmart on the weekend, toting their Christmas goodies. My stomach churns when I see sights like this. The little girl reached into her pocket for some change to throw into a Salvation Army pot. She smiled at the worker. The worker smiled back.
Fortunately, a member of the local Students for a Secular Season named Audrey intervened. I used to teach Audrey. She is very committed to every cause she takes on. When I knew her, she was a member of the Campus Crusade for Christ and used to hand Bibles out on the quad. Then she saw the light and was transformed. I think of her as one of my success stories.
“Not so fast little girl,” she said with a firmness that would impress anybody. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“That’s none of your business Miss,” said a lowering black woman next to the little girl. “My niece wants to spread a little joy. We’ve always believed in helping others out. Especially in these times.”
The little girl stood with her fist clenched, not able to release the offering into the pot. The Salvation Army worker stood helplessly by and looked in my direction. I have to say, I felt a little awkward.
Audrey stood her ground. I knew she would. “This is between me and your niece,” she said. “She looks like she can speak for herself. Little girl, Did your aunt tell you to give money to this stranger?”
“No ma’am,” the girl said. “I had it to give.”
“Are you giving it to this woman just because she is ringing a bell. That’s called coercion, you know. Would you give me money if I rang a bell at you?”
“No ma’am,” she said.
“”Why not?” Audrey was clearly taken aback. “Is it because I’m an atheist.”
“A what?” the little girl said.
“An atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t think you should give money to strangers just because people ask you. Just because it’s Christmas. That’s not reasonable because God doesn’t exist and there wasn’t any Jesus.”
“No ma’am. I wouldn’t give it to you because you aren’t wearing an awesome hat.” She turned to the distraught Salvation Army worker. “Ma’am, that is an awesome hat.”
By this time a crowd had gathered and the student SSS van had come to collect Audrey and take her down the road to Target, where the Knights of Columbus hung out. It sported a banner that read “You KNOW it’s a Myth.” In silhouette it showed the three wise men following the star of Bethlehem, and just beneath, “This season celebrate reason.” Audrey straightened her hair, tugged her coat tight around her and prepared to climb on board. The six passengers had broken into a chorus of “O Come All Ye Salesmen.” The crowd had begun feeding the Salvation Army Kettle doses of dollar– even five dollar–bills. Superstition is never-ending, I thought to myself.
“If you got an awesome hat I’d give you money too. You’re pretty. I love your hair. What did you ask for for Christmas? I’m asking for hairclips and some new notebooks and pens. Auntie couldn’t get them for me. She hasn’t worked since August.”
Audrey tried to smile, but I could tell, it wasn’t her best moment. She always had an answer. I haven’t seen her since to tell her what I was going to tell her: You have made a difference back there. That little girl needed to meet you.
Just to make my point, I opened my wallet, counted all my bills in front of the Salvation Army woman, and returned it to my back pocket. I walked away feeling good, thinking about better billboards.
I know a thing or two about changing minds.
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Published: December 10, 2010
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Tags: atheism : billboard campaign : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Salvation Army : War against Christmas ..
8 Responses to “Audrey”
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 10, 2010 at 4:36 pm
I think the atheists should put up another sign, this one with a picture of Santa Claus that says, “You know it’s a Myth. This Season Tell Your Children.”
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Mike
December 10, 2010 at 11:17 pm
If we are going to criticize and detract religious charities, we had better be ready to vigorously create and support alternatives.
Only when atheists and agnostics start opening their own soup kitchens and shelters will this kind of protest ever be anything other than cruel.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 11, 2010 at 8:37 am
Mike–I not only fully agree–but that was the point of the satire (see revised post). jh
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Chris Stedman
December 12, 2010 at 11:10 pm
@Mike – I couldn’t agree more. I said nearly the same thing in my talk for the Greater Boston Humanists today, and was relieved to see a few heads nodding affirmatively.
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Ed Jones
December 11, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Dismay over the Audrey story forces an imagined encounter: Resolute Audrey confronts Baruch Spinoza: ” I am an atheist, I don’t believe in God, there wasn’t any Jesus. I was converted from believing by my mentor Professor Hoffmann. With all of your great knowledge, I am dismayed at your scandalous belief in “the eternal wisdom of God which has manifested itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, and above all in Jesus Christ -”
All over against your Nov.14th comment to post: Atheist Nation Celebrate Christmas: “Ed, I think I am if I am anything at all it is a Spinozest”.
So much for one emerging hope.
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steph
December 12, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Ed I cannot penetrate your comment. You couldn’t possibly have read it literally could you?
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Ed Jones
December 12, 2010 at 10:59 pm
Steph, if “it” refers to the Autrey story, yes I did so read it. If satiire, I yet fail to get a positive point. But I am leterally a believer, thus I read with a secular naivete.
See the comment as a quick of age. If I had computer savvy I would eliminate it.
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steph
December 13, 2010 at 12:34 am
“I am naive about the cost of billboards but luckily I have secular friends I can call or tweet to on the subject.
I want to buy one. Just for a few weeks (maybe there’s a discount for signs after January 2nd.) …”
isn’t that just slightly ridiculous? And so it goes on, ridiculouser and ridiculouser (sic). And it’s vile and cruel and horribly funny and ironically (not literally) true.
The point of the satire is summed up pretty much by Mike in his comment above.
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Killing Audrey
by rjosephhoffmann
Audrey must die.
My post on the self-confident SSS (Students for a Secular Season: fictional, I think) representative accosting a little black girl as she tried to drop some change in a Salvation Army kettle was a nuclear disaster.
A few ardent unbelievers have come to regard her as a folk hero and asked for her contact information.
A larger number of critics thought I had lost my natural theological sponginess and had taken secularism over the line into churlishness. (I am not Mark Twain so I will not follow with “and have joined the Salvation Army.”)
A few others thought it was “obvious satire,” but disagreed with its inobvious point–that atheists need to be more Christian in their giving habits. Note to some of my readers: This is called Irony.
I know that religion can get ugly. Not as ugly as politics, its natural twin for the better part of human history, but pretty awful. No one needs to remind me that the church has ignorantly done its bit to exacerbate poverty and disease, so forgive me if I remind you that the church did not create poverty and disease. It is darkly ironic (that word again) in a world where the state professes to care about people that the promoters of religious violence in Pakistan and Lebanon, the Taliban and Hezbollah, also run the most efficient social relief operations in those countries and do so because they believe their religion commends it. Now if they could just sign on to the Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards Men appendix.
But just as a pedantic point, Christianity has a long and fairly impressive record of cor ad cor loquitur–heart speaking to heart. The early Christians remembered Jesus having said radical things about giving: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. (Luke 12.33). True, he had a long prophetic tradition to draw on–for example, Isaiah 58: 6,7-10: “I have chosen…to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke… To share food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter. When you see the naked, clothe him, and do not turn away from your own flesh and blood …And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”
The early church turned these traditions into what even Roman emperors like Julian (the last “pagan” ruler of a socially unglued empire) recognized as the distinguishing, if cloying, characteristic of the Christian faith: its conscience. “The religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1.27); or “If anyone has possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3.17-18). Saints ranging from Francis of Assisi to Martin of Porres and Vincent de Paul to Mother Cabrini, Elizabeth Seton and Louise de Marillac deserve, in their contexts, to be viewed as social justice activists, and many cared just as deeply about education as a way of climbing out of the conditions that made poverty and ignorance flourish. True, their church bureaucracy was not always so concerned and while they rang bells–the ancient symbol of being outcast and downtrodden or diseased–bishops prospered. But for many people until the rise of the secular state, charity did not begin at home because there was none: it began at the rectory door. Education, such as it was, at the parish school long before the state thought about getting into the game.
Elizabeth Ann Seton
Even critics of the early Christians found their charity remarkable, if also cloying. The second century writer Lucian tells the story of a particularly dodgy philosopher named Peregrinus who apparently decided that becoming a Christian teacher would be the quickest route to advancement among the yokel adherents of the new religion. He quickly “masters their books and writes a few of his own.” Peregrinus has no real interest in the doctrine of Christianity, but he does know that once you’re in, you’re in and that even the poorest converts will spend what little they have to help a teacher in distress. When Peregrinius finds himself on the wrong side of the law and is imprisoned for professing his faith openly, if insincerely, Lucian takes the occasion to tell us the following, half of it ridicule, half informative:
The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day—the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account. Well, the end of it was that Proteus [Peregrinus] was arrested and thrown into prison. This was the very thing to lend an air to his favorite arts of clap-trap and wonder-working; he was now a made man. The Christians took it all very seriously: he was no sooner in prison, than they began trying every means to get him out again,—but without success. Everything else that could be done for him they most devoutly did. They thought of nothing else. Orphans and ancient widows might be seen hanging about the prison from break of day. Their officials bribed the jailers to let them sleep inside with him. Elegant dinners were conveyed in; their sacred writings were read; and our old friend Peregrinus (as he was still called in those days) became for them ‘the modern Socrates.’ In some of the Asiatic cities, too, the Christian communities put themselves to the expense of sending deputations, with offers of sympathy, assistance, and legal advice. The activity of these people, in dealing with any matter that affects their community, is something extraordinary; they spare no trouble, no expense. Peregrinus, all this time, was making quite an income on the strength of his bondage; money came pouring in. You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws. All this they take quite on trust, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike, regarding them merely as common property. Now an adroit, unscrupulous fellow, who has seen the world, has only to get among these simple souls, and his fortune is pretty soon made; he plays with them.”
Finally rejected even by the Christians, Peregrinus becomes a cynic (i.e., wandering) philosopher and ends his days around 165CE by igniting himself atop a funeral pyre in full public view. Had he stuck with the Church, he would have had the distinction of being the first Christmas light display.
It’s plain from Lucian’s story that shyster evangelists have always been the other side of the Christian mission; but that notwithstanding, so has this strange habit of actually caring about other people. Organized caring, mercy, and compassion have never (alas!) been much prized among the non-believing intelligentsia, and perhaps that is why they are in such short supply among atheists.
Bright doesn’t do compassion well. Think of Audrey. Now we’re getting somewhere.
At the risk of being outrageous, I think I know why people like me are so stingey. It’s because our concern for the downtrodden isn’t actually mandated by anything we believe about ourselves. In fact, thinking of ourselves as an intellectual minority is only possible because, truth to tell, smart, rich, good-looking, healthy and successful is the finite set we’d prefer to dim, poor, sick and useless. There is nothing in our life-stance textbook that explains for us why we should care about the second set, and the cleverer and more self-reliant and progressive we are, the more tempting it is to become slightly (how shall I say) Darwinian or at least Marie Stopes-ish about this. Let’s not mention Margaret Sanger; she did so much good in other ways.
Belief in a God who cares about you no matter how craggy your skin, crappy your life or your credit score is both the bane and benefit of religion when it comes to “philanthropy”–literally, love of human-kind. What your faith insists on is a human family where imperfection and disadvantages can be accepted within a context where human perfection, religiously speaking, isn’t possible. I know: it isn’t fair, and for an atheist totally irrational. But as a prod to loving your fellow human creatures great and small, irrespective of their girth and goodness, there is nothing quite like God to get you moving. If he can do it–and think of how rich he must be, and how much smarter!–then who am I to resist putting a few pennies in the old man’s hat at Christmas? It seems to me that you can reject this logic entirely and still enter into the spirit of the season without compromising your secularity.
But don’t take my word for it. My secret love, the Naked Theologian (a discreet UUA minister herself) recently commented that the whole “Good without God” campaign was based on the false notion that liberals and seculars were just as inclined to charitable giving as religious folk.
“Several studies have shown that American liberals—namely, those most likely to have little or no God, are least likely to give to charity. Hurts, doesn’t it? Where’s the proof, you say? Robert Brooks, who recently wrote a book, Who Really Cares, about charitable donors discovered the following (as reported by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof): ‘When I started doing research on charity,’ Mr. Brooks wrote, ‘I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.’
Although liberals advocate on behalf of those who are hungry and homeless, Brooks’s data shows that conservative households give 30% more to charity. A Google poll puts these numbers even higher—at nearly 50% more. Conservatives even beat out liberals when it comes to nonfinancial contributions. People in the conservative states in the center of the country are more likely to volunteer and to give blood. But what about the relationship between having a God and being generous? Based on a Google poll (again, as reported by columnist Kristof), religion is the essential reason conservatives give more. And although secular liberals tend to keep their wallets closed, it turns out that religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives.
Reading this made me re-think Audrey. If I had finished her story, rather than send her into her back yard where she fell down a well and drowned, it would have gone like this:
Audrey joined her SSS colleagues at Target. It was December 16th, and the group had a thousand bumper stickers to distribute to shoppers. Each one had a picture of a quarter, with the motto slightly altered to read, “In Good we trust.”
An old woman adjusted her shopping bags, took one graciously, inspected it, then handed it back to Audrey saying, “I think there’s a misspelling here.”
Audrey said, “That’s no misspelling. We don’t believe in God. We believe in good, get it?”
“Oh yes dear,” the old woman said unfluttered, “So do I. But that’s not what our money says, is it?”
Audrey turned around in exasperation. She was surprised to see the little girl and her auntie–the ones she had encountered at Walmart–standing at the card table, which had been draped with a banner that read “No God, No Problem: Just be Good for Goodness’ Sake.”
“I like these,” the Auntie said to Audrey, as though their previous interchange had never happened.
“They’re free,” Audrey said flatly. “But you’re welcome to make a donation to the SSS to help our efforts.”
The Auntie’s face took on an expression of concern. “Now do those efforts go to supply kitchens and shelters or buy medicine for sick folks?”
“No,” Audrey said, turning a suppressed sigh into a yawn. “We need fuel for the van.” “Uh-huh.” Auntie said looking first at the little girl, then back to Audrey as though they were the same age. “And where’s the good in that?”
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Published: December 13, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: agnosticism : atheism : charity : Christmas : Good without God : New Testament : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : SOCIAL JUSTICE ..
3 Responses to “Killing Audrey”
.
Stevie Gamble
December 13, 2010 at 8:47 pm
I attended our Parish carol service this evening; over these weeks thousands upon thousands of people will visit our church for the same reason, but they are people with connections to the City of London whereas we live and work in the parish itself.
So tonight was for us, in the company of the shades of our rather more distinguished forebearers, and the mince pies and mulled wine thereafter only partially compensate for the stress induced by endeavouring not to stand on Milton, nor, for that matter, John Speed or even John Foxe.
It may be ironic (that word again) that, as the Rector pointed out, there have in the past been sincere and wholehearted attempts at abolishing Christmas; were it not for Audrey’s abysmal ignorance of history she would realise that the people trying to abolish it, in a thoroughly sincere and wholehearted manner, were themselves Christians.
The Puritans lost…
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rjosephhoffmann
December 13, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Lovely, in a very unsettling way…. Wish I’d been there.
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steph
December 14, 2010 at 8:57 am
That sounds absolutely beautiful Stevie. I’m so glad the Protestants lost – frivilous holidays banned? You couldn’t stop Englishmen from being Englishmen and holding secret Christmas ceremonies. And look what happened to horrible Puritan Cromwell. They banned the holiday and instructed wine sellers to sell wine, but I was always a Cavalier anyway, and hid Charlie under the bed. (Of course I was there – I had Captain Marryat read to me).
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Giving Up on Spirituality
by rjosephhoffmann
Ah, remorse. If I believed in its sanctifying effects, I would be a saint.
My Picture Here
Not for anything downright wicked, exactly, but for an article I wrote a few years ago called “The Soul of Spirituality.” In it I argued that the term is spacious enough–or fluffy enough–to accommodate all kinds of people who just can’t make up their minds about religion. Talk about wrong.
Now I think that my defense of the word was a little like asking for a bigger ballroom for bad dancers.
It isn’t that I don’t “believe” in spirituality. It’s that people who are advocating spirituality as a meeting place for religious and non-religious people are digging semantic holes while seriously confused people are filling them up with goo.
That was the late, great Tony (Antony) Flew’s point before he was seduced into a kind of vague, sentimental, tentative religiosity by some intelligent design advocates.
Flew believed in complexity, order, Newton, and Hume in that order. When he was confronted with the ID arguments of physicist Gerald Schroeder (misrepresented of course) he succumbed to his eighteenth century instinct and became (he said, somewhat confusedly) a deist. Something as grand as this world may as well have had intelligence behind it because it takes a very great deal of intelligence to comprehend it. The emerging headline was: Flew is a Christian.
Antony Flew
But I knew him pretty well, and at his sharpest, and he never was a believer, after adolescence (his father was a Methodist minister). His withering attack on “spirituality,” which he delivered at a conference at Oxford in 1994–the remains published under the title “What is Spirituality?” (Modern Spiritualities: An Inquiry, 1997) will always be an adequate summary, for me, of what he did believe. The strange case of his conversion will always be a reason for me why informed unbelief is preferable to the belief of the people who went after him for a trophy.
I highly recommend this book, even though I was one of the editors, and I strongly recommend Flew’s along with one other essay in the same collection by the renowned Gandhi scholar, Margaret Chatterjee: “The Smorgasbord Syndrome,” in which she asserts that westerners are especially prone to make a Swedish salad bar of Hindu, Buddhist, Kabbalah, Sufi and assorted esoteric traditions–as though spirituality is something you pick up at the supermarket, not something that comes to you through a specific religious tradition. I can’t imagine what she would make of adding the current frontrunners to the shelf: Mayan, gnostic, shamanistic-magical, and Microcosmic Orbit. (Whee: here I come again).
"Gathering the Light" Taoist yoga Chi energy cultivation technique.
My gripe about the seekers–well, one anyway–is that as they don’t know what they’re looking for, any dream will do. The modern idea of spirituality is that it’s disconnected from religious tradition–neither grounded in it nor corrective of it but an alternative to it. If that weren’t the idea, it wouldn’t be half so attractive to the shoppers. Rule number one: it has to be easy. Rule two: it has to be available. Rule three: it has to be blendable. The mix and match approach means you can remain a Presbyterian while having a Zen master on the weekend, or believing into existence the syzygy between Yeshua and Buddha, perhaps even thinking that a completely useless text like the Gospel of Judas can teach you secret wisdom that was erased by the villainous, earth-bound writers of the synoptic gospels.
Religions have always been syncretistic of course; but this hefty word simply means that, like language and political systems, as they encounter their others–other practices, other doctrines–they both accommodate and assimilate features orginally foreign to themselves. Even religions that have an obsessional worry about such evolutionary developments and overlays, like Judaism, have not been spared its effects. And religions that did not scruple to accommodate the stories and practices of its neighborer-faiths–Christianity and Buddhism come to mind–represent a pattern that is common from antiquity to the Reformation period and beyond. Sociologists sometimes call the process in its constructive mode “adaptation” and in its corrective or adversarial mode “fissipiration.” Spirituality and mysticism can be a case of either, but both are dependent on often well-defined religious traditions, both textual and liturgical. At a minimal level of popular spirituality, for example, the Catholic rosary is a borrowing from the Japa Mala(s) beads of Mahayana Buddhism, which also influenced the prayer life of Islam through the use of the Tesbih or Tasbih beads, and all of which derive from the Japa traditions of ancient Hinduism. In all cases you get about 100 repetitions (but often many fewer beads) of prayers special to the individual traditions. The official version is that the rosary came to St Dominic in a vision in the year 1216. The truth is, it probably didn’t.
18th century rosary
The “spiritualities” of an Eckhart, a Luria, a Rengetsu or a Jallaluddin Rumi were evoked by particular historical situations. They were attempts to reform or restructure what the spiritual writers regarded as morbid or threatening to the religious life of their own traditions. They derived their meaning and sometimes their success as regenerating movements from contingency, not from independence of tradition. Usually this meant moving beyond the textual level. In fact, the real opposite of the word spiritual is not religious at all, but literal from the Latin word for letter (litera).
The church, synagogue and mosque have always worried about mystical movements and spiritual revivals because the mystic is a borderline heretic when it comes to ideas like canon, authority, scholarly interpretation, exclusivity, and the finality of what was written in the sacred text. The fates of the Spiritual Franciscans (Fraticelli, declared heretical in 1285 by Pope Boniface VIII) and groups like the Ismailis, the Hurufiya, the Alawis, the Bektashi and even the Sufis, often regarded as heretics by the Islamic mainstream, tell the same story: suspicion and mistrust of groups pretending to deeper insight and a more direct channel to salvation than the unredeemed of the main body of believers or the hierarchy of authority.
A massacre of Anabaptist antinomians
We have to confront the possibility that someone who says “I’m spiritual, not religious,” is really just saying, “I’m not religious.” Or that they don’t know what “being spiritual” means. But that is obviously very different from what the term has meant throughout history, where it has implied either “I am very much more religious than you book-reading louts,” or “I am gifted with special wisdom and knowledge of the truth that you don’t possess.”
Putting history to one side, however, we can choose to side with Flew: “Spirituality doesn’t mean anything in particular because we don’t believe in spirits anymore.” Or we can go with Chatterjee’s view that the perpetual sloppiness of the western pick and choose culture robs the term of any meaning at all. Either way, we are left with a word that is gradually losing its power to describe a commitment of any significance or any particular valence with regard to belief. At no time has spirituality meant “I just don’t know what I believe.” But it has often meant believing too much.
Perhaps it’s owing to the malleability of the word that the self-anointed shamans of Los Angeles and Amsterdam and Munich, where spirituality-training centers thrive, can draw hundreds of lost, confused, religiously dysfunctional souls [sic] into their courses, retreats and workshops. Like “new religions” (with which they share a number of unfortunate characteristics), modern spiritualities are appealing to spiritual libertarians who aren’t too choosy but do like variety in their life. Example: you are standing behind a seventeen year-old at your favorite fast-food emporium, waiting to dispense a cup of yummy diet Minutemaid lemonade, when into her cup, in measured squirts, she releases Coke, Fanta, Mr Pibb, Hawaiian Punch and lemonade. That kind of variety.
There are hundreds of examples of how this spiritual smorgasbord works, but my favorite find is Sunflower Health, which promises registrants spiritual light, happiness, and the means to become “one with all creation.” They link their teaching to “lightworkers, ascension, harmonic convergence, and the end of the Mayan calendar.” The Midas Muffler of spiritual garages, Sunflower offers Chakra Clearing (“the energetic fabric of ourselves and our universe”) and the opening of the “third (Visionary) eye to psychic visions.” For a few bucks more (Tuesday special: free psychic alignment included), Kundalini and microcosmic orbit chi cultivation practices are yours.
If you like your spirituality with a Christian flavour, Mystic Web offers instruction in the “true” meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic Gospels, Pati’s spiritual path, and the Gospel of Judas. Says one satisfied customer in praise of the “Gnostic Web-Master” -
I may not understand every single line of the document, but the Gospel of Judas speaks to me as a whole. I read it, re-read it, understand bits and pieces, understand things here and there and see parallels between this lost Gospel and the teachings of modern Gnosis. More important than the understanding, however, is the strength it gives me, how good it makes me feel to see that mankind has searched for the truth, for liberation, for thousands of years, and that the findings have been the same as those Master Belzebuub teaches us today; the only difference is that he teaches in a way that everyone can understand, making the path to liberation attainable for all of humanity.
I just want to say this about the vast majority of modern mystics, spirituality-seekers, and spirituality vendors: This is crazy stuff, taught for the most part by desperately unknowledgeable fakers who make old fashioned theosophy look like biochemistry by comparison. You are wasting your money, your time, and the language. I apologize for throwing you out of alignment, but somebody had to tell you.
But you have performed a service: You have convinced me that the term “spirituality” is unusable. And that the next time the woman next to me at the bar volunteers that she is “not religious but, you know, spiritual” it is time to pay my tab and walk away before another word is spoken. Hoping Master Belzebuub doesn’t follow me.
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Published: December 15, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Catholic devotion : mysticism : new age : new religions : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Rosary : spirituality ..
21 Responses to “Giving Up on Spirituality”
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Seth Strong
December 15, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I’d say the biggest discouragement from belief systems these days is my feeling that a general dedication to critical thinking is not a modern priority. If you can’t be guaranteed that the adopters of a belief stance have thought about it, it’s really hard to agree with them.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 15, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Agreed, and that some people who are looking for “something” are running away from dogmatism but away from thinking too deeply at the same time. Maybe they will meet themselves around the corner.
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 15, 2010 at 5:00 pm
For us more pedestrian folk, here are a few quotes to consider:
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
– Carl Sagan
and;
“Religion is for those who don’t want to go to Hell. Spirituality is for those of us who have already been through it.”
– Anonymous
and my favorite;
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
– Alan Watts
(With all due respect to members of the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion, please enjoy the “spirit” of messages and try not to shoot the messenger. Thanks.)
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steph
December 15, 2010 at 5:44 pm
This is laughaholic, you at your best. And you are a pillar as always of fresh honesty and self criticism who has the courage to change your mind and admit self error – if only we all did, because we do change our minds as we progress, it would benefit scholarship and knowledge so much – but many don’t.
I think spirituality is over used, misinterpreted and agree that it is something that seems to be available packaged neatly on supermarket shelves. I know lots who when we discuss religions, they say they are spiritual which seems to say nothing except make me cringe. It should be deleted. I still believe ‘spirit’ however, is a useful metaphor, as is ‘soul’ perhaps to express that powerful part of us otherwise called ‘feeling’ or human ‘emotion’. And it’s pretty in poetry. The sort of thing that expires when we die (poetry is eternal).
On Gnostics, a friend of mine, Deane down in Otago, scrawled across the whiteboard at their department Christmas bash, ‘Gnostics are those who miss the joke of Christianity.’
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Paul LaClair
December 19, 2010 at 8:11 am
Mr. Hoffman, I respectfully suggest that your previous error was in thinking of “spirituality” only as a spacious – I would say amorphous – concept. Spirituality is a human experience. Flew’s error, and the most common error in the use of this term, was in using it to say something about the universe. Spirituality is a perfectly good term when it is clearly understood to refer to a human experience. That experience usually is described as “connectedness.” As a scientific naturalist, I emphasize that this is a feeling, a sense of things. It is the same sense that Einstein expressed repeatedly and his thinking was perfectly sound. In addition to the recognition that we are part of nature – an unassailable point if ever there was one – I add that spirituality includes a sense of self-integration, or wholeness, and a sense of intense vitality. Seen that way, the word is a perfectly good one; the mere fact that many people misuse it is merely another reason for those of us grounded in fact and reason to use it properly.
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Ed Jones
December 20, 2010 at 11:10 am
Paul,
Thanks for that. I can add little, only to say: you are right on, and much needed.
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Giving Up on Spirituality (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
February 10, 2011 at 5:31 pm
[...] Ah, remorse. If I believed in its sanctifying effects, I would be a saint. Not for anything downright wicked, exactly, but for an article I wrote a few years ago called "The Soul of Spirituality." In it I argued that the term is spacious enough–or fluffy enough–to accommodate all kinds of people who just can't make up their minds about religion. T … Read More [...]
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maryhelena
February 11, 2011 at 2:56 am
I think that Paul LaClair has captured the essence of what I understand spirituality to include. It’s not anything to do with anything ‘out there’. It has everything to do with living a life in the reality that we do know, the reality we experience. Not just the bare facts of life but the appreciation of life and the acknowledgement that life itself holds a mystery way beyond the face of it. It’s not connectedness to some unknown ‘god’ that sustains the human soul – it’s the connectedness to living a life among other souls, other humans. That is what organized religions offers people – hands to hold and hearts to care. It’s not intellectual premises, not that theistic god in the sky, that fills the pews on a Sunday morning: It’s the prospect of validation, of being seen by ones fellow man. The power of the collective, if you will. One for all and all for one. An atheist intellectual movement can have no counter for a collectivist culture. By denying the ‘glue’, the spirituality, it is nothing more than a flash flood – unable to provide a sustainable and flourishing alternative culture. It’s higher ground that holds out some safety from the ravages of natural disasters.
Spirituality, a sense of life, an experience of life that knows that beyond all of the disappointments that might come ones way – one has lived life, one has seen it’s potential as well as it’s challenges. And in the end, is that all that one can realistically wish for – a sense of contentment, a smile on ones face at life’s close. Sure, intellectual adventurism, that “never ending road to ‘Calvary”, (apologies to Les Mis) is a big part of what excites us all. ‘Truth’ as the ‘heartbeat’ of the mind that propels us forward – but such journeys need two feet firmly placed upon terra firma. And it is here that a spirituality, founded upon the experience of living, offers some protection from those intellectual flights of pure fantasy
(Now I suppose all that is a somewhat modern take on the New Jerusalem coming down to earth from heaven :-) but you know what – what needs redeeming is the whole spirituality concept – redeemed from being ‘out there’ to being down here….)
Paul LaClair: “Spirituality is a perfectly good term when it is clearly understood to refer to a human experience. That experience usually is described as “connectedness.” As a scientific naturalist, I emphasize that this is a feeling, a sense of things. It is the same sense that Einstein expressed repeatedly and his thinking was perfectly sound. In addition to the recognition that we are part of nature – an unassailable point if ever there was one – I add that spirituality includes a sense of self-integration, or wholeness, and a sense of intense vitality. Seen that way, the word is a perfectly good one; the mere fact that many people misuse it is merely another reason for those of us grounded in fact and reason to use it properly.”
Reply
Seth Strong
February 14, 2011 at 8:42 am
maryhelena, one day soon, you’re going to turn around and see that the atheists have been working on their connective glues already. I wouldn’t mind a spirituality which had no explicit magic associated with it. But I agree with what I think Hoffman intended which is that using the word spirituality without invoking gods or something requires a lot of explanation and so the word saves very little time or communicates very much.
My opinion differs in regards to your statement about atheists not having the glue of spirituality. We do actually have such a glue. More and more atheist groups are popping up and we’ve been looking out for each other as much as we can the whole time. In your sense of the word, you can say we never lost our spirituality.
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Paul LaClair
February 14, 2011 at 9:13 am
There are several things wrong with Seth’s approach. Just because we don’t use the term doesn’t mean that others won’t use it. Our opting out will not reduce supernatural ideation or the use of this word; it will merely put us on the periphery of the conversation.
Second, we can explain by context, as Seth has just done. Secularists can use a word like this to create cognitive dissonance and invite people to think, which is what we want.
Where’s the harm? If people don’t understand, it will only be because they haven’t taken the time to consider our views; in which case, so what? What harm is done if they think we mean what they mean? Eventually, if they pay attention to us, they’ll see the disconnect, and that might get them thinking. If they don’t pay attention to us, then what they think about us isn’t affected by this language.
In short, there is no down-side to using the “s” words (soul and spirit) or the “f” word (faith). There is only an opportunity to get people to see these ideas in a different way.
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maryhelena
February 14, 2011 at 9:48 am
Seth: I love that – “…you can say we never lost our spirituality”. Though seems to me that some atheists are hell bent on trying….
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Seth Strong
February 14, 2011 at 10:47 am
This subject is a bit like an onion. On one hand, we’ve got Hoffman’s opinion for himself (at the time of writing, even) and then the prescriptive idea that we should all embrace that view point. Then we’ve got our viewpoints mixed in with whether or not we think our viewpoints should be adopted by other people.
I personally wouldn’t use the word spirituality because I wouldn’t want the other people in my conversations thinking I thought I had a soul or spirit and so forth. That doesn’t mean I know for certain but it’s my approach and I still like it. I’m even willing to suggest that this is my approach and it might not work for everybody. So I’m not suggesting anyone act like I do, but I am suggesting I act as a subtype of American Atheists.
I might use spirit, spirituality and so forth in any place in which I felt awe. But it’s also one of those words that I’ve flagged to make sure I think about my use before I use it because in my environment (2 hours south of D.C) there are large populations of certain types of believers who will predictably be confused.
In a conversation with people who like dissecting positions and concepts, I’m more likely to risk more with my metaphors because they will be better understood. But for me, I would never use “spirituality” in a conversation that people might overhear with the attention span of a driver reading bumper stickers in traffic because selfishly, I don’t want people interpreting my meaning of spirituality their way.
I would stand with the atheists maryhelena mentioned are hellbent on trying to remove spirituality until the point is reached that spirituality is a concept that needs to be defined by the speaker before the audience can truly understand what they are saying. After that point has been reached, I might differ with some of my fellow atheists and say such poetic language isn’t all that troublesome.
My issue is with people who use beliefs instead of their own thoughts and you see those types in religions but also in politics or on activism campaigns. Those people irritate me with their use of spiritualism. And those people are in high concentrations in my area.
In short, if you’re here reading and commenting, it’s probably not going to bother me when you refer to spirituality.
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rjosephhoffmann
February 14, 2011 at 11:42 am
The difficulty is, regardless of what Flew said, that it does not self-evidently refer to a human experience except to the extent that all experiences do, including mysticism according to William James, the point is, “spirituality” doesn’t mean a vague sense of wellbeing to the many religious traditions that promote the idea: check the catalogue of any seminary and divinity school and you will find it treated as an esoteric subject, not as a weasel way of not saying “religious.” Mind you I’d like to use it. I used to use it. But I think we need a new word.
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Paul LaClair
February 14, 2011 at 5:36 pm
It doesn’t work that way, Joseph. You can try to invent new words but they rarely take hold. Since you’re referring to a common need, that means that there are strategies that we should be thinking about as a group, so the comfort level of any of us is secondary. No words self-evidently mean anything. The point is that we have an opportunity to use this word to refer to a human experience. If we’re misunderstood, where’s the harm? If we’re understood, that will represent a step away from supernaturalistic thinking.
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rjosephhoffmann
February 14, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Well, to be Flewish: tell me what it means in 25 words or less that we can get full assent from all affected parties on. Then what do you do about ambiguity, which is something humanists and atheists tend to dislike. Are you happy with the idea of Benedictine spirituality, orthodox spirituality. Me too. When we add humanist spirituality we may be inviting disaster. –Though I want be be accepting. I just need a definition.
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Paul LaClair
February 14, 2011 at 7:02 pm
Spirituality: a sense of being part of things, usually expressed as a sense of integration, external and internal, and an intense sense of being alive. I believe that’s 24 words.
And I ask again, where’s the disaster even if we’re wrong? I’ve heard people say that we would “open the door” to this word. Are they kidding?
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rjosephhoffmann
February 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Paul, I think that’s a great definition. I would even say, a part of being something greater than oneself, grounded in a common humanity and purpose. I call that humanism. But in fairness your other question is poignant: what is the harm even if we’re wrong? I don’t think there is any actual harm. Though I do not want to be identified with the spirituality mongers I’ve described. If we have a humanist spirituality then we need to define it carefully and not risk being misunderstood. Surely it can’t be “anything that isn’t dogmatically religious.”
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steph
February 14, 2011 at 9:55 pm
“Spirituality: part of being something greater than oneself, grounded in a common humanity and purpose”. Absolutely, sewn up perfectly. That’s what it is, should be, when it’s not adopted by the religious sects. It is ‘humanist spirituality’ and we all have it, don’t we?
Paul LaClair
February 15, 2011 at 7:40 am
Fair enough. How about this: “A vibrant sense of being part of something greater than oneself and of being whole within, grounded always in our common humanity.” That shaves off two words and I like it better than mine.
Not to continue an argument where there isn’t one but I am not willing to foreclose my choices because of what others are doing. If we don’t use words because people we don’t agree with are using them, we won’t have many words left to use. That will only feed the perception that non-theists are cranky old . . .
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rjosephhoffmann
February 15, 2011 at 6:44 pm
I’ll get the T-shirts. Sold. I do like it. We need to find a way to use it.
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steph
February 16, 2011 at 2:12 am
“A vibrant sense of being part of something greater than oneself and of being whole within, grounded always in our common humanity”
that’s not a ‘slogan’ either. It’s a vision.
:D
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Cleopas the Atheist
by rjosephhoffmann
The dilemma for thoughtful people who find much to commend in serious unbelief is brought about by unthoughtful and (often) unserious people. Even if their intentions are good (as in nice, not naughty) their tactics are terrible. I quote me:
‘My real quibble with redivivus atheism is that it has taken a sideshow approach to a subject that ought to be viewed and debated seriously. Atheism, as such, is an intellectual position, not a moral philosophy. But sideshow atheism is neither. Blasphemy Days, sloganeering, bus campaigns, unbaptisms, video challenges, cartoon contests — whatever motivates this activity (bonding, boredom, or the lust to be noticed?), it is not of a kind nor quality that does atheists any good. If instead of arguing their case, the atheist strategy for growth was to build the world’s most repulsive bogeyman, they have done a good job.
‘I am not even certain why atheists feel they have the right to feel more agitated and annoyed by the noise of the religious right, which after all is simply a bigger and more influential sideshow, than liberally religious, studiously ethical, or indifferent men and women — where I think the real and growing numbers of “converts” are. Most absurd of all is the persistent effort of younger new atheists, the Dawkinsians and Flying Spaghetti Monstratarians, to see their “cause” as equivalent to the civil and sexual rights movements of the twentieth century.’
Ophelia Benson has claimed that it’s now fashionable to kick the new atheism around: it’s so first-half decade of the new millennium.
She is probably right. Nothing is more fun than to trample on icons when they’re already on the ground, whether it’s Lenin or Saddam Hussein, or the dude you were rooting against on Survivor Nicaragua. There is something immensely satisfying about knocking the hubris out of heroes who only yesterday were treading on red carpets, as the Greeks discovered when Aeschylus sent Agamemnon for a bath. If you ever wondered about the phrase “kicking Johnnie when he’s down”–it’s all relative to how far up Johnnie was when he fell.
Time marching on
And I have done my share of kicking–even before the final Act of Pride when four mediocre thinkers, none of them especially knowledgeable about religion, dubbed themselves “new” (as in atheism) and imagined themselves riding like Durer’s Four Horsemen against the horizon of the new age of unbelief. In fact, modus-operandically, they were much more like the Four Evangelists, telling much the same story: God does not exist; Religion is awful; People who think otherwise have IQ’s somewhere lower down on the evolutionary scale they don’t believe in.
Messiahs over Perrier
There was absolutely nothing new about new atheism except a naive confidence on the part of certain organizations (here nameless) that their messiahs had come. Unable in their own right to be anything but small, they found a role as booking agencies for the rock stars of the atheist wave.
The funny thing about messiahs, religious and political, is that they both come and go. That’s why Christians have always held to the second coming–the really important one, when all the things that were disappointing about the first one, especially the non-recognition of the savior and his untimely death before his work was done, will be put right. In the case of the new atheists, messiahship even came with choice: a couple of professors, a plain-spoken but slightly mystical graduate student (then), a sharp-penned intellectual. It was an embarrassment of bitches.
But it could not last. And now the question is, what was it all about, this shining anti-Christmas star that adorned the secular heavens for five years, give or take a year.
I have never been able to resist analogies to religious experience because, whether atheists like it or not, religion and irreligiosity have a lot in common. In fact, as atheism has everything to do with religion, only religious analogies are apt. Here is one:
In a piercing note of disappointment recorded in the Third Gospel (Luke before you peek), a group of wayfarers returning from celebrating Passover in Jerusalem encounter Jesus incognito on the road. It is, suggestively, three days after the crucifixion. Jesus asks them, in so many words, “Why the gloomy faces?” And a certain Cleopas proceeds to recount the events of the last few days, including reports of the empty tomb. Cleopas also registers his own disappointment:
“We had been hoping that he was the one who would liberate Israel.”
The story has been overwritten by a heavy hand with no appreciation for the irony of Cleopas’s belief that they had it wrong: that Jesus was not the messiah after all. The story does not end there, though it should have.
Before atheist pecksniffians point to the improbability of this little scene: I do not believe this encounter ever happened. But I do believe the scene is instructive far beyond its grounding in folklore and legend. Stories are funny that way. Less than a century after this piece was composed, the Jews of Palestine had found a new messiah and went down to defeat, once again, by choosing the wrong man for the job of deliverance. If they had only had two-year election cycles they could have chosen many more and been spectacularly wrong each time.
Bar Kochva
The early Christians developed their faith without books, on the basis of stories that eventually got written down and much later canonized.
The fame of the new atheist messiahs followed a far more rapid course: They began with texts, four of which became virtually canonical within four years.
Their following developed as “book events,” helped along by media, and driven by sales. It’s the difference between a reputation culminating in a book and books culminating in reputations. And yes, for purposes of my little analogy, it does not matter that the reputation of the former is sparkling with stories of the miraculous and the improbable, anymore than it matters that the books of the latter are derivative and repetitious.
The atheist authors, without pressing the analogy to its pretty obvious margins, enjoyed immense stature. Extravagant claims were made, not least in titles like The End of Faith and Breaking the Spell.
Of course there was nothing to prevent religious apologists from writing back, and they did–in droves–books that with one or two exceptions were even worse than the books that evinced them. The intellectual battle was really fought in the reviews and even in the blogosphere, much of which was acidly critical of language, argument and methods–including my own review of Daniel Dennett’s book. But nothing stood quite as tall, for a while, as the icons their followers erected to them in the naked public square. Nothing seemed to pierce the aura of the atheist olympians. Except time.
The key similarity between Christian messianism and atheist messianism is the idea that “at last” things are going to change. That liberation is at hand, achievable in the work of others. It just takes knowing who to trust–who the real deal is. I would be the first to say that the resumes of the canonical new atheists were impressive–a bit like being born of Jesse’s lineage, David’s son. It is interesting that we require our messiahs to be credentialed–either by signs and wonders, priestly and preferably royal lineage, or failing that an Oxford degree.
But at its heart, messianim is all about people wanting a change–people who feel they’ve waited long enough. People, to put it bluntly, who are feeling a bit desperate, outnumbered, isolated.
Atheists in the last century have relished being a minority, in the same way Christians basked in their minority status in the Empire. Small is good when big is bad. David and Goliath, the short guy taunting the big bully–archetypal, isn’t it, but fraught with danger.
It is hard to imagine that once upon a time Christianity (the world’s largest religion) had that kind of radical reputation, an immoderate sect, a philosophy, to quote the emperor Julian, that turned the world upside down, and from an earlier period even the stigma, according to Tertullian, of being organized atheists. But it did.
We live in a twenty first century global village, not first century Roman Palestine, so what counts as radical and revolutionary will obviously be different from the faith of the ragtag confederates who “believed the gospel.” What they believed in their time we will never quite be able to comprehend. That includes people who think they believe it now as well as people who don’t believe it because, sensibly, they think its shelf-life has expired. Those who think they know, don’t. Those who feel they are brighter than those who think they know fail to understand the unavoidable intellectual boundaries of the ancient world. This is no one’s fault exactly. The surety of the fundamentalist Christian and of the atheist are equally based on a marked indifference to the weird nexus between history and imagination, myth and reality. I can honestly say that I have no real sense of what made someone a Christian in the year 50CE other than what I know about frustration and a gnawing feeling that my time has come. And I think that no first-century Christian would make it even as far as the writings of Augustine (which they would not have been able to read) before he would find Christianity unrecognizable. Time wounds all heals.
The early Christians were “atheists” because they rejected the imperially-approved gods, making them the religious minimalists of their time. –Richard Dawkins’s over-quoted quip that some of us go one step further performs the inadvertent service of pointing out just how radical the church was in its day.
Yet I have to admit that I’ve always found it remarkable that the Christians not only survived the execution of their leader but turned the symbol of his humiliation into a symbol of their success. Ever wonder why the icon of choice isn’t some crude rendering of an empty tomb? Yes I know: crosses are easier to make. But even before they were made as amulets to hang around Christian necks, Paul comments on the fact that the death of Jesus, not his life, brings about that apparently most desirable of states, salvation. And this is because in the theology he strives stutteringly to adapt to his non-Jewish listeners, instruction, even a literal physical resurrection of believers counts for nothing. Death? Sacrifice? Immortality as a bonus? Now you’re talking. But what is key is that you can’t do it by yourself: the Christian is in an utter situation of dependence on the deliverer from sin and death.
Paul of course had the salvation myth of the mystery religions in view, a kind of thinking that has not made much sense or borne scrutiny for over a millennium. His huge disservice to humanity is that he taught people to distrust themselves–that the empty tomb was a real promise, a symbol, of eternal life, not an image of a life that has to be lived here and now, built block by block and choice by choice. His whole message pivots on the Old Testament idea that salvation comes through a heavenly other, not through human effort. Even an amateur like George Bernard Shaw knew that Paul’s “monstrous imposition upon Jesus” had profoundly negative effects on the course of civilization. It still does. They don’t know it, but when unbelievers begin to disbelieve, it’s Paul they disbelieve in.
But as a post-Christian radical theologian I have my own interpretation of what the gospel means. As a humanist, I believe it means no God will save you–us. The life of all messiahs ends in the same message: Do it yourself. It does not matter whether the message is oral or written, offered in philosophical jargon, rendered in code. It’s all the same. People who put their faith in deliverance by others will ultimately have to find their own way out of every mess.
Religion has not been the solution to the troubles of humankind–we all know that–and it has created conditions of war and poverty that don’t resemble, to any recognizable degree, the angelic salutation of Christmas night. It should come as no surprise therefore that Christmas night was no part of the original story, and despite the annual maniacala of the holiday season, Christianity has almost nothing to do with Christmas.
It has much more to do with Cleopas’s disappointment, or, in Mark’s gospel, the shuddering awareness of the women that the tomb is empty; Jesus was not there. They were alone. Maybe he had never been there. They had certainly always been alone.
What does all of this have to to do with new atheist messiahs? Curious isn’t it that so many atheists had waited in the dark for so long for light to shine in their darkness. Every secular organization was ready to hitch its wagon to their rising star. Every evangelical pharisee was ready to pounce on their message of liberation from the darkness of superstition and credulity. The defenders of the old religion, especially in what had come to be called the “post-9-11 world,” almost guaranteed their prominence. The unchurched created a virtual church around them. At its most extreme, and fair to say mainly among the organizations who exploited their work, religion became the very devil and “science and reason” sacraments of deliverance.
The stunts and gimmicks like Blasphemy Day, for anyone with a little historical savvy, resembled nothing so much as the pageant wagons that rumbled into medieval European villages with their stock of stereotyped nasties: Herod, Caiphas, Pontius Pilate, the Devil himself. Whatever the new atheists were, the atheistism they spawned was part polemic, part simple buffoonery, mainly humbug. It was strangely suited for an illiterate age in which the movers and shakers themselves, like false messiahs throughout time, thought they were original and promised goods they couldn’t deliver.
Popularity is the death of every radical movement, or rather the death of its radical nature. New atheism didn’t die because fundamentalists were “right” or because evangelicals crucified it, or even because philosophical critics (maybe that’s my niche vis-à-vis this movement) warned that it wouldn’t last for long.
It set itself up for a free fall proportionate to its quick rise because its messiahs accepted the title–relished the title. Not a bit like the Jesus who, in one account of his interrogation anyway, demured by saying, “Call me what you want to.”
What is required of any believer and every atheist is the frank acknowledgement that the tomb is empty. The harvest is passed. The summer is ended. The messiah has never come and will not come. And we are not saved. But that is the challenge, not the end of the story.
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Published: December 21, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Christianity : Daniel Dennett : Four Horsemen : gospels : humanism : Jesus : messiah : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Richard Dawkins : secularism ..
28 Responses to “Cleopas the Atheist”
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steph
December 21, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Brilliant. Irrespressibly witty, incisive, eloquent and “bloody well right” (Supertramp) too.
x
Reply
steph
December 21, 2010 at 3:46 pm
? espresso irrepressible
Reply
mikelioso
December 21, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Great post. You have a terrific writing style. For many, reading their words is the price to pay for knowing their information. With you, it is entertaining to read your articles and wish they were longer.
Your articles on atheism are very helpful to me. In the course of my studies I came to the conclusion that a position approximating atheism (I have a bit of a taboo about identifying as “atheist”) was most likely, but I didn’t get a strong urge to go destroy the world of faith. This is probably because my experience with religion wasn’t particularly negative, at most it kept me from a couple of awesome parties growing up, at best it connected me to a group of people genuinely concerned for me. I might feel differently if I belonged to some cult where you donate all your money to the church while the pastor boinks your wife and daughters, but I guess my faith was never gung-ho enough for that sort of undertaking. Maybe that is why I choose to keep my light under a bushel basket.
The other day I was reading a couple of post from some online atheist hacks swapping sad tales of how they got screwed by faith. The irony is I don’t think they’ve changed, only their religion has. It would not surprise me if down the road they discover they’ve waisted been wasting more time pushing atheism and convert to all new religions.
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steph
December 21, 2010 at 7:59 pm
haha – and I agree with all your comments mikelioso: I wish they’d go on forever – prophetic, entertaining, and immensely interesting poetry… As for your second point, I suspect it’s those who reject fundamentalist religions or come from fundamentalist cultures who want to destroy faith so much (because they still have ‘faith’ they’re right after all) and on your third point I think perhaps some already have, in a way…
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Christopher Roberson
December 21, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Tsk, tsk. Dawkins and Dennett are not mediocre thinkers. Dawkins is an outstanding biologist and science writer, and Dennett is an excellent philosopher. (I’m not going to take a position on Hitchens or Harris.)
Dawkins and Dennett are not experts on religion, but they are deservedly well-regarded in their proper fields.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 21, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Let’s try mediocre thinkers about religion.
Reply
Geoff Arnold
December 21, 2010 at 10:46 pm
OK, I’ll bite. Exactly what do you disagree with in Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell”? I assume that you’ve read it….
Further, when you say “mediocre thinkers about religion”, are you referring to religion considered as a psychological and social phenomenon, or religion qua theology?
rjosephhoffmann
December 28, 2010 at 4:18 pm
“….Of course there was nothing to prevent religious apologists from writing back, and they did–in droves–books that with one or two exceptions were even worse than the books that evinced them. The intellectual battle was really fought in the reviews and even in the blogosphere, much of which was acidly critical of language, argument and methods–including my own review of Daniel Dennett’s book” (Free Inquiry, February / March 2007, Volume 27)
steph
December 22, 2010 at 7:19 pm
I think mediocre thinkers of religion, despite for example, their brilliance or expertise in their scientific fields, tend to reject religions outright. This rejection is sometimes influenced by their personal previous experience, which shapes there generalising descriptions of religions, and impose their scientific methods on the religious mind to explain the religious mind’s disfunction. What they neglect to acknowledge or fail to understand, is the complexity in religions, the history and humanistic values, the agnosticisms, the religious philosophers, art and positive contributions of religions and religious people throughout history.
But I don’t know what Joe thinks. That’s just what I mean when I talk about thinkers, such as the four horseriding messianic evangelists above, as mediocre.
Reply
Geoff Arnold
December 22, 2010 at 8:32 pm
I was reading a piece by Greta Christina , and it reminded my of Joe’s odd rant.And I think it makes very clear why his core thesis – there’s nothing new here, and besides the not soi-disant “New Atheists” are mediocre thinkers about religion – is both wrong and irrelevant. It’s wrong, because it ignores the reality of religion as a social, psychological and political phenomenon, and what’s happening now is new, and the analysis from the various writers is far from mediocre.
But then I knew Joe was more interested in polemics than accuracy when I saw his repeated use of the tendentious term “messiah”. Sorry, we atheists “don’t do” messiahs.
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steph
December 22, 2010 at 9:40 pm
…possibly because the messianic concept was derived in a Judeo Christian environment and carries connotations of Judeo Christian belief systems, like ‘faith’, despite ‘faith’ being synonymous with ‘trust’, which surely doesn’t carry such strong religious connotations, despite (most) Christians believing in and trusting God. Atheists, of the self identifying ‘new’ variety, unlike atheists like me, reject all such language. However messiahs can be political, and messiahs are all about bringing in a new age just as four horsemen ride in heralding the new age of atheism and throwing out all belief. That is what new atheists believe, I believe…
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Geoff Arnold
December 22, 2010 at 9:51 pm
ride in heralding the new age of atheism and throwing out all belief. That is what new atheists believe, I believe
What a very curious belief. The term “projection” comes to mind, of course. “Strawman” also seems apposite.
I would be fascinated to read a quotation (with citation) from a leading atheist in which they express the desire (or expectation) of throwing all out belief. Or did you make that bit up?
steph
December 22, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Historically, messianic figures who behave in messianic ways, do not claim to be anointed or messiahs. Despite Christian belief, neither did any historical Jesus, according to the earliest traditions. But he was definitely proclaimed to be a messiah after his death as it was remembered, according to tradition, that he had behaved in a messianic way. He probably claimed no more than to be a son of God as we are all supposed to be his children, and rabbi or teacher – again according to earliest traditions.
rjosephhoffmann
December 22, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Actually, never said they called themselves messiahs; what is said was they did not reject associations in the press as the Four Horsemen and relished it. For the reasons, you need to probe Freud’s use of messianism not mine. As for accuracy, read before you comment….
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steph
December 22, 2010 at 10:24 pm
whoops I didn’t see this…
Geoff Arnold
December 22, 2010 at 10:51 pm
You also wrote:
There was absolutely nothing new about new atheism except a naive confidence on the part of certain organizations (here nameless) that their messiahs had come.
Why nameless? Without some evidence, why should we treat this as anything other than a device to sneak in the term “messiah”, and cast unsupported insinuations about unidentified persons?
And this atheist (though Bible-reader) finds it strange that anyone would treat “the Four Horsemen” and “messiah” as somehow equivalent. Is this what passes for non-mediocre religious thinking?
steph
December 23, 2010 at 1:46 am
Sometimes I think it’s just superfluous to “name” the obvious. And there is no “sneaking” an association that has not been rejected, and is evident from the way they behave and things we hear them say and read they’ve written. I’m sure you do read the Bible, at least in English – I can’t imagine any vocal new atheist who hasn’t.
Geoff Arnold
December 22, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Sorry – please excuse obvious typo. Web browsers on cell phones don’t work well in this kind of UI.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 23, 2010 at 2:01 am
Not sure why this is “quoted”: what do you think “messiah” means/meant–can you not get from context its primary meaning was deliverer or hero? Did I say I didn’t call them that? Or did I say they didn’t call themselves that? And is the inept association between messiahs and horsemen mine or the media’s–or theirs.
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steph
December 28, 2010 at 10:40 pm
I expect so – probably wrote it down too. He doesn’t miss much, you know.
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Dwight Jones
February 27, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Atheism as an entry philosophy sells books. As a considered opinion, it’s the dry default – there’s nobody else in the room. Like the Universe, which is wallpaper.
When we have the crucible of Life in our fingers, and our own kind at our shoulder, heaven awaits..
Reply
He Walks and He Talks With Us | Joyful Jesus Blog says:
April 23, 2011 at 9:55 am
[...] Cleopas the Atheist « The New Oxonian [...]
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 28, 2010 at 3:57 pm
There’s nothing like a good polemical comment and… (you finish it)
Reply
steph
December 28, 2010 at 7:22 pm
oh – what on earth happened to Brian? Was that small explosion of soapbox rhetoric from Brian, the one that wasn’t the messiah, just a naughty boy?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 28, 2010 at 9:08 pm
ah! “Brian”– das weiß ich nicht
Reply
steph
December 28, 2010 at 10:13 pm
maybe he was the young man who escaped, losing his loosely wrapped toga as they grabbed him.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 28, 2010 at 10:28 pm
And “the hoffmann” saw it all?
Reply
steph
December 28, 2010 at 10:41 pm
oh threads – they’re a curse.
Reply
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Vita Brevis
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The God Viruses
by rjosephhoffmann
I never saw a purple meme
I never saw a brown one.
Maybe they’re polyethylene
Maybe you could drown one.
Here is some practical advice to readers: When an author claims that he (or she) has a PhD, beg to discover where he acquired it.
Obviously this is not necessary if the author isn’t using his credentials to support an otherwise half-cooked hypothesis, but if the hypothesis appears to be half- cooked, it’s important to know how it passed muster: what peers reviewed it, what graduate committee passed it, or snickered behind their hands when they turned it down as a thesis. It is also useful to know if the person signing copies of his latest oeuvre on alien plant life at Borders has a PhD in Renaissance literature from Temple, or something more….germane.
I was recently and justly upbraided by a reader when I stated that Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins were “mediocre scholars,” and (suitably contrite) amended my comment to say “in religion.” I could as easily have said “have no credentials in the study of religion that would lend authority to their work.” Anymore than I would have if I developed a learned but totally flawed and useless hypothesis about evolutionary biology. –Or wrote a book tantalizingly called The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God (2010, by a systems engineer named Craig A. James) or its twin, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (2009 by a school psychologist, Darrel Ray.)
Yes, I know these have been around for awhile. Yes, it is shameful that I’m just getting around to reading them. Finally I was suckered by the promo on Amazon.com that said those of us who were feeling peckish after the dinner provided by Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens could find a repast in these authors. Niggardly though my esteem for the “New Atheists,” I was feeling a bit hungry. But what a bad meal.
The new genre of opportunists is proving the axiom correct: “In the beginning was the word. At the end, just the cliché.” They are also proving that there is a reason why, no matter how intellectually omnivorous a specialist in dairy science (for example) may personally feel, he shouldn’t do knee surgery. Likewise, the benefit of having grown up in a church-going family with a Bible in the top drawer of the sideboard doesn’t make an engineer or educationist a religious studies scholar.
Both James and Ray pump their books by saying that their “groundbreaking studies” (naturally) go beyond analogy. In other words, the fact that viruses make you sick and can kill you and the idea that religions can make you mentally sick or sexually dysfunctional is not a comparison but a correlation. Except, in both cases, there is no correlation; there is only analogy. In the case of The Religion Virus, spread out over ten sermonic and loosely organized chapters that read like a sophomore research paper—the kind where the thesis is so starved for persuasive sources that it eventually dies of exertion—the writer moves freely from a discussion of the “general all-purpose God meme” which he associates with animism and some discredited research on Papua New Guinea to a discussion of seven other memes which he claims are “synergistic” and can be compared to the mutation of genes in biological evolution. These trends, he thinks, coalesce in Yahweh (never mind that no one really calls him that but scholars), the “meme that we in the western world call God.”
Craig A. James
Reading the dissociated conjectures of James’s book, interrupted by dubious data, surveys, informal interviews and too many personal recollections and reminiscences (called “interludes” here) about his leaving the God-meme behind, reminds me of some of the reconstructionist history I’ve had to read over the years, the kind of thing that argues that Columbus was a Jew or (long before Dan Brown) that Jesus’ DNA survives in the bloodline established for his caliphate through Mary Magdalene. Yet another case of the facts not fitting the theory and changing the facts, except even more wildly careless about what a “fact” is and who decides.
Take this evocative paragraph:
“By the time Jesus was born polytheism was still widespread but monotheism had a solid stronghold among the Jews. In spite of being a minority view the Yahweh meme had developed all of the critical features that made Yahweh into a viable monotheistic deity….Yahweh was no longer a specialist God of war. Now he could answer all prayers. Instead of merely demanding loyalty he now claimed to be the only God. He had shed his jealousy of other Gods and instead simply denied they existed. Yahweh claimed to be the only God, a much more sophisticated meme than mere jealousy. He began actively to destroy other religions. He told the Jews to vandalize or destroy their temples. Violence against other religions was a virtue not a sin. He shed his regional association[s] and could be worshiped anywhere. He had changed from an earthly corporeal god to an ethereal overpowering figure whose very presence could overwhelm a human. He was no longer subject to the moral judgment of mere humans through natural philosophy and logic. And was instead transformed into the fundamental source of all morality….”
The book ranges on like this for 200 colloquial and illucid pages, reaching its sort-of climax in the following mission statement:
“…If we step back and look at all this activity [religion] through the looking glass [sic] of cultural evolution science, that is, memetics, we see that each person and each house of worship is just one more step in the hundred-thousand-year evolution of religion viruses that infect our brains” (194).
But no matter how far back I stand, I still can’t forget what I see up close. For starters: (a) Polytheism is not a precursor of monotheism and cultural historians have by and large rejected the teleological views of eighteenth century philosophy and nineteenth century anthropology that this error propagated, especially among philosophers who teethed on Hume; (b) It is internally inconsistent to his own case, and violates everything scholars know about the history of the biblical text and its development, to argue that Yahweh, having forsaken his role as a god of war then moved on to command violence against other religions and their destruction; (c) If anything, the God of Palestinian Jews becomes more isolated and regionally specific, not less, and the Hellenistic transmission of the God-idea (not meme) through Christianity fissiparates into the trinity to becomes less restrictive and virtually polytheistic, restoring particular specialized facets to God through a compartmentalization of his “revealed” activities. (d) The God of the Hebrew Bible was never “subject to the moral judgment of human beings through natural philosophy and logic” (what civilization is he trekking through?) and was regarded, anachronistically, as the source of right conduct (morality is not a good word in this context; wrongdoing and law-breaking are) even before the law was given on Sinai. What Exodus and Deuteronomy spell out in laws, Genesis collapses into an unmistakable poetic introduction on the price of disobedience.
Religion Memes (1,000,000 X magnification)
For the alleged memes or memeplexes to operate in anything approaching an evolutionary way, it would be important to get the chronology right, the data right, the lines of transmission right, the cultural syncretism right, none of which are right in this book. A “viable monotheistic deity,” you say? There is no historical or textual support for this view: But for the rise of the Christian movement, which wasn’t exactly servile to Hebrew monotheism anyway, the religion of the Jews was about an inch away from being discarded or subsumed by those “still-widespread polytheists” called Romans and it was not the tenacity of the Jewish God idea that saved it.
Politically unpopular, demographically Judaism was virtually untenable. There is nothing inherent in the nature of a “monotheistic” religion that guarantees its survival or explains its adaptation, anymore than the fact that Mediterranean and bedouin-desert cultures got more sun explains the fall of multi-god religion. Yes, that has been seriously argued.
Apparently historical fact makes no claim against a “memeplex,” especially when the architecture of the memeplex can be changed, like Playdoh, by the “scientist” to suit his private theories of how it all happened. It also shows that while writers like Mr. Ray (The God Virus) can invoke “cultural evolution science” against religion, their simplistic Evangelical understanding of history has not changed since their church-going days. It seems to me that if a meme is going to be described, you at least need to know where to find it. Ray seems to have found his in his Church of Christ heritage, and in beliefs about the Bible that originate with pastors who hadn’t read any other books. It permits him to expound on the God-meme without taking into account the billion religious people across the globe who aren’t monotheists and hundreds of thousands more who seem to have developed an immunity to the infection. When he talks about religion, like Parson Thwackum, he means Christianity—the one he knows best and in a disquieting kind of way seems to think is a suitable paradigm for explaining other aspects of the memetic theory.
In fact, Ray’s own peculiar paradigm of Christianity could not even be used to explain Presbyterianism or Roman Catholicism. But that doesn’t prevent him talking about the “Roman Catholic virus” in pseudoscientific language derived from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and “Viruses of the Mind,” both of which have achieved not just celebrity but canonical status among meme-believers:
“Christianity uses guilt to ensure sexual and marital fidelity as well as fidelity to the Church. Guilt is an important cause of sexual dysfunction in males and females. Sex for pleasure, from religion’s point of view, is a waste of energy, especially if it detracts from propagation of the God virus. For that reason, sexual pleasure is seen as suspect in Catholicism.” (103).
No, he said staring down the passage in front of him, this is not why sexual pleasure is “suspect” in Catholicism. The Church fathers (some anyway) endorsed celibacy and prized virginity above marriage and sexual encounter because they were saturated with Plato’s notions of greater and lesser good. Human appetite being what it is, such dissuasion against pleasure was never a powerful incentive to holiness except among the monastic minority, who were notoriously slipshod about the purity-meme. By the twelfth century it–the rhetoric–had failed. Especially among the higher clergy who were not known for sexual dysfunction, or moderation, and the peasantry, who could not read. By the fifteenth century Christian art was sensuous and erotic and the church was in the marriage business for good. In the sixteenth, Catholicism was in an isolated position with regard to the pleasure-principle, and still is.
The hop-scotching between premises is bad enough from a logical point of view, but it is also deplorable in personifying “religion” as a complex of ideas interested in its own viral propagation.
Even if memes had an existence any more substantial than the reality proposed for them by Dawkins and, until 2010 by Susan Blackmore (before her very sensible recantation of her view of memes as “real replicators” and thus equatable to biological viruses), their development, adaptation, selection and exportation from culture to culture would still be fraught with inexactness. The cultural equivalent of a genome project would not only involve what is but the multiple variants of what has been and what might have been if an opposing army had won (as in the example of Judaism above) or a particular emperor had ordered a religious genocide. The invention of an ever-more complex algebra to explain the anomalies involved in this new hieropany is not impressive even when done by people who think they know what they’re doing. But when done by people who simply believe the people who think they know what they’re doing, it is simply a case of quoting the bishop, a form of scholasticism in which quibbles and variant data that would be vitally important in real science are smoothed over and discarded in the interest of a master-hypothesis. At a certain point in building a meme-complex, the variants overpower the thesis: science becomes science fiction. The memeplex is no longer an explanatory entity but a blob that swallows data for its supper.
It is a fact, for example, that grasshoppers infected with the hairworm (spinochordodes tellinnii) are more likely to jump into ponds where the hairworm propagates itself. But it is only analogous that “all kinds of infectious memes thrive in religions, in spite of being false, such as the idea of a creator god, virgin births, the subservience of women, transubstantiation and many more” and that people infected with such ideas hop into the congenial atmosphere of churches where the infectious memes thrive (Blackmore in 2002). Let’s not forget war, male impotence, and the near recession of 2008.
Let me repeat: the problem is not with theorizing about memes and memeplexes, non-existent as Dawkins’s God as they may be. They have a use as analogues and modes of comparison, like Jung’s archetypes (the theory they most closely resemble). It is the easy abuse to which memes can be put, like Filipino workers in the Arab world, that troubles me—the cult following that’s always the signal of bad science. Atheists who profess to believe only what can be seen under a microscope or otherwise detected by observable effects have accepted the jargon and complexity of meme theory in the same way that Romans turned on to the salvation theologies of the mystery religions. This is just an analogy of course: I would not suggest for a moment a correlation between ancient Romans and modern pseudoscience, as though a jargon-loving-oversimplification meme could be replicated.
Memes are not snake oil. But they are not needed to understand the transmission, tenacity, adaptation, recombination and endurance of the symbols and practices we associate with the religious life.
They are probably not even the best agents for developing a “new paradigm” for understanding religion, judging from recent attempts to cut templates to fit all possible data. The greatest hazard they pose is reductivism in the assessment of religion, because science is necessarily a reduction to simplest elements and processes. A true memetic theory of religion, for example would be indifferent to the effects of replication. It would be neutral, [perhaps even admiring?) of religion’s awesome adaptive abilities (which I do not believe exist). But a true memetic theory does not exist, which is why depending on your orientation towards religion, you may see the meme as contagion or simply as adaptation. Not, however, as the cultural equivalent of HIV-AIDS or a Doomsday virus.
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Published: December 29, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Craig James : Darrel Ray : Dawkins : God virus : memes : pseudoscience : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Religion virus ..
21 Responses to “The God Viruses”
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ken
December 29, 2010 at 6:37 pm
A long overdue and brilliant critique of this memetic nonsense as applied to religion. I tried reading Blackmore’s book on memetics a number of years ago and thought the whole enterprise an example of non-falsifiable wishful thinking.
Invoking Occam’s Razor could not be more justified.
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steph
December 30, 2010 at 2:31 am
I belong to the Universal Church of Hermeneutical Suspicion. I do not believe in memes, analogies, jockeys on horseback, or books about religion by heart surgeons. But I do believe, as an informed reader, and with evidence to support my belief, that this article is witty, wise and true.
x
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Mike Wilson
December 30, 2010 at 3:32 am
I rather like memes. Unfortunately I think folks get too excited by the “like a virus ” bit. Sounds bad, don’t want viruses. Which is where the analogy breaks down. People don’t want virus. They do want memes, whether it is Christianity, “Grapes of Wrath” or “Bad Romance”. Bad memes like a cold will have you humming the tune a few weeks then dumping it into the back files of memory, where it will die with you, since your not going to make your kids learn the song. But even then, the meme has to bribe its way into your mind for that opportunity to convince you of its value.
Unlike germs, memes have to provide a benefit for renting your brain. The longer the meme is around, the more likely it is providing real benefit. Given the pressure societies are under to survive against one another, it is hard for me to believe that religion is a parasite of culture.
I haven’t seen much survival advantage for secularism in a society. The books reviewed support this, as they appear to be Augustine’s “Confessions” for atheist. If they want their idea to thrive, it has to be dressed up as religion!
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Tristan D. Vick
December 30, 2010 at 10:15 am
The only real meme I know of is called semiotics. But since we already have a word for it–I think we should just dispense with the term meme altogether.
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ken
January 1, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Memetics is the skeptic’s version of psychokinesis. If a parapsychologist had put forth the theory, everyone at CFI would be spilling buckets of ink trying to debunk it.
Reply
ken
December 30, 2010 at 10:52 am
I don’t think we need memetics to explain why certain ideas “catch fire” while others don’t. Memetic viruses aren’t taking over the culture…stupidity is.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 30, 2010 at 2:23 pm
I wish someone would say they believe in memes. My razor is getting dull. But I agree about viral stupidity.
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Herb Van_Fleet
December 30, 2010 at 5:33 pm
It should be a legal requirement to emblazon the following in large print on the front cover of each and every bible:
WARNING: The contents of this book should be considered myth rather than history, wishful thinking rather than reason, and fantasy rather than science. The reader should take note that there are numerous errors, contradictions, inconsistencies, and fallacies throughout this book.
Due to the graphic descriptions of atrocities, violence, torture, rape, child abuse, misogyny, murder, and genocide, parental guidance is highly recommended.
Also, beware of “memes.” (Whatever those are.)
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steph
December 30, 2010 at 7:12 pm
On the other hand the many books contained therein consist of storytelling and tradition, written down, by different people, translated, edited, interpreted and compiled over time during the processes of copying and debates by councils, and nothing, including warnings and interpretations, should be read uncritically or literally, anywhere, ever, at all.
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Tristan D. Vick
January 1, 2011 at 11:54 am
I guess memetics would be the practice of generating memes and memeology would be the study of memes? (I dunno)
This time I agree with Mr. Hoffmann. Trying to apply the idea of memes to religion is just a bad idea. Because darn it, now we have to spend all our extra ours devoting our time to studying these darn memes (whatever the heck they are).
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ken
January 1, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Memetics is the skeptic’s version of psychokinesis. If a parapsychologist had put forth the theory, everyone at CFI would be spilling buckets of ink trying to debunk it.
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Mike Wilson
January 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm
“Psychokinesis” that’s interesting Ken. I was thinking that if ideas have a reality outside the brains of people, then you have a non-physical force that can affect physical forces, so that one could say that Paris wasn’t built by the French, but by French culture.
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ken
January 1, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Yes. Well cultural conditioning is a more parsimonious way of accounting for why people believe the things they do without having to invoke invisible “units of cultural information” that are passed on from one generation to the next. This makes about as much sense as Susan Blackmore saying that she’s a Zen practitioner but doesn’t identify herself as a Buddhist (Wikipedia). This is like saying I attend Mass every Sunday, but I’m not a Catholic.
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The God Viruses (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
February 21, 2011 at 11:35 am
[...] I never saw a purple meme I never saw a brown one. Maybe they’re polyethylene Maybe you could drown one. Here is some practical advice to readers: When an author claims that he (or she) has a PhD, beg to discover where he acquired it. Obviously this is not necessary if the author isn’t using his credentials to support an otherwise half-cooked hypothesis, but if the hypothesis appears to be half- cooked, it’s important to know how it passed muster … Read More [...]
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R. E. Aguirre
February 21, 2011 at 1:25 pm
This is a question for the author of the article. Has he read David Wilson’s (Binghamton U) Darwin’s Cathedral, Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and if so what would be his thoughts on Wilson’s thesis as it is related to this article?
_______________
R. E. Aguirre
Content Editor., Regula Fide Blog
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Seth Strong
February 21, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Are you, Dr. Hoffman, arguing that the transfer of combination of ideology by virtue of memes is bad in general or that the practice of such an idea is slipshod? It seems like you’re arguing that which things get called memes gets made up on the fly. But that seems to be an argument against how rigorous people use memes rather than the usefulness of memes.
I’d agree to the idea that it would be great to have history buffs do the heavy lifting of determining which memes are actually in play. Isn’t the core notion of a meme something that is replicated and so it seems as if the idea takes a life of its own and our hardware is often sabotaged for this purpose? That doesn’t seem that controversial to me.
The meme has a definition. Doesn’t that idea have some use?
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steph
February 22, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I love this post, it’s typically witty, and incisively clever and eloquent. Of course analogies are invariably wrong – always wrong. They’re never the same. Sometimes they’re amusing and useful but most often not, and applied to religious contexts, they’re tommy rot.
x
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steph
February 23, 2011 at 7:30 pm
although on the other hand, as the wonderfully witted, but Parisian, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr quipped “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (Les Guêpes). So maybe the fact these memes are so completely different, just makes them more exactly the same.
… but then, again, “I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit.
x
x
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Atheist
February 26, 2011 at 5:35 pm
Deut.7:1,3,16,2., Deut.20:10-17.
Matth.1:1., John 8:13,44., John 10:30.
Matth.5:17-18.
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heraldinthewilderness
March 8, 2011 at 5:01 am
I came to the blog by clicking on a picture of a bedouin and stumbled upon a good read. This was very well written. Thanks for taking the time and thought to write this.
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Meme Pics | Pafos Photos says:
April 24, 2011 at 5:30 pm
[...] I never saw a purple meme rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com [...]
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