RJH January-June of 2012 Part 12

The New Oxonian
Books etc.
 Comments and Moderation
 Vita Brevis
 ..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)
by rjosephhoffmann

by admin Posted on January 1, 2012

UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh
 
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

The Missouri boy in Connecticut
 
HO remembers their Huckleberry Finn? In chapter 19, Huck, Tom and Jim, afloat on the Mississippi River, meet up with two grifters, the Duke and the Dauphin, who claim to be exiled European royalty.
Their scam is going from town to town performing makeshift “scenes” from Shakespeare’s plays, then escaping with their lives when the rube public hear declamations like this:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
 That makes calamity of so long life;
 For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
 But that the fear of something after death
 Murders the innocent sleep,
 Great nature’s second course,
 And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
 Than fly to others that we know not of.
After spending a few hours with the scoundrels, Huck reflects,

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.
But (in one of the great mysteries of the book) Huck continues to aid and abet, pastes their playbills on buildings in towns along the river, enjoys swapping tales with them on the raft, and even saves their skin when they have a close shave.
The Duke and the Dauphin are Mark Twain’s contribution to a a literary stereotype that goes back to plays like Our American Cousin (an English drama of 1858) that pit a pampered and brainless British aristocracy against the dull, stammering but basically honest Yankee (Lord Dundreary and Asa Trenchard, respectively, in the play): Americans are naive, optimistic, uncultured, energetic and gullible; the British are cunning, cynical, indolent and intellectually dissipated. America is a good place to make a buck by selling wares that His Majesty’s subjects either can’t afford or simply don’t have much use for.
Edward Sothern as Lord Dundreary
Things like atheism. I recently cited the statistics for religion in Britain. If you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is not an encouraging thing to note that only about 36% of Britons claim to be religious and a higher number claim not to believe in God.
Compare these to statistics for atheism in America. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009, found that 34.2 million Americans (15.0%) claim no religion (“nones”), of which only 1.6% explicitly describes itself as atheist (0.7%) or agnostic (0.9%). If you are an atheist-front organization, also not an encouraging picture, no matter how you fiddle the stats to make “No religious preference” or “Sorry, really in a hurry” survey-takers into atheists. Nones further have to be adjusted for mothers whose safety clasp just failed on their child-seat doing a drive-by after school pickup, and shoppers standing in line at the exchange counter on December 26th.
If I were an atheist strategy specialist there is at least one biblical story I would need to believe was literally true: the saga of David and Goliath. I’d want to know how a very little movement can bring down a cultural behemoth like American religion by throwing a few stones.
The part nobody remembers
This led me to reflect on how the new atheism arrived in America and who is in charge of pasting the playbills on the storefronts.
OT to deny the contribution of several authors to the “movement”–Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens–I think it’s safe to say that the style of the new atheism extrudes from the work of Richard Dawkins. The paradigmatic shift from detente to full scale assault against religion as an undifferentiated mass of human error and superstitious thinking belongs to him: Why should we live with ideas that we find absurd and repugnant, or indulge people who fantasize the truth of their beliefs into norms that other people ought to follow? Gloves off, me hearties: Error should be resisted, countered, argued against, corrected, defeated–not coddled.
And what is the truth? Science is the truth.
The God Delusion (2006) and the wave of comment it created is now yesterday’s news. To remind myself of how I felt in 2006 while reading it, I talked myself (under the influence of several spirituous incentives) into re-reading it, and, much to my surprise, I liked it better the second time around–as a book rather than a best selling icon. It was a better book than Daniel Dennett’s really very sloppy Breaking the Spell, which I reviewed soon after it appeared in 2007. But then I forced myself to re-read a few of the reviews I had archived over the past several years, and this one by Murrough O’Brien from The Independent flagged itself. Just after pointing out Dawkins’s abuse of Bertrand Russell’s famous “Teapot Argument,” O’Brien notes.

Some of [Dawkins's] arguments are old atheistic chestnuts, and how merrily they crack in the roasting pan. The palm for outrageous question-begging goes to the Who Made God “argument”. Dawkins squirts this sachet of puerile pap (most of us had outgrown it before hitting double figures) over the whole book, to inadvertently comic effect. He writes: “The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” The short response to that is a simple “Why?” The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?”only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?
But then the real punch, trilitorally speaking, of The God Delusion was panache. Dawkins was an extrovert and spellbinder compared to Dennett, with his Darwinesque looks, and the singularly incoherent Harris, whose work Scott Atran, a serious researcher and cognitivist, called playacting at science and politically pernicious while also getting basic anthropological theories backwards, like his famous wowser concerning the work of Franz Boas.
Dennett
The real success story of the new atheism is that it was bought and sold after being intellectually panned by almost all the cognoscenti who weren’t atheist activists. In fact, as the circle closed around a tightly knit cadre of God-opposers, opposing God became virtually the sole criterion for what, in their parochial view, counted for anthropology, archaeology, sociology and the study of religion–about which all of the four (check the footnotes) were blissfully ignorant.
And I mean that in the most damning sense. Virtually all of the credible reviews alleged it of Dawkins, and the others didn’t fare much better outside the atheist camp. The reflexive answer was to accuse anyone who opposed the unscientific, malformed, and totally ignorant premises of these books of being “faitheists” and to say that dispute would be treated as treason against the higher purposes for which the books had been written.
If that didn’t stick, sane voices were denounced as jealous voices, as though reputable scholars wished they had written historical and philosophical travesty under their own names.
The repetitive accusation against Dawkins–that he was attacking a straw man, a sort of tertia res religiosa that did not exist–became the new framing device for every critique of new atheist tactics: its critics (despite manifold evidence to the contrary) were attacking a form of atheism that did not exist. Sensible, if complex views like those of John Gray on the origin of humanitarian impulses, were conveniently set aside in favour of a new recipe for a scientific-evolutionary morality that floats above historical causality: Wrote Atran,

There is an irony of history that completely escapes Harris and other new atheists in their evangelical quest for a global morality rooted in scientific truth. As philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics convincingly argues, it is universal forms of monotheism, such as Christianity and Islam, that merged Hebrew tribal belief in one God with Greek faith in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation that originated the inclusive concept of Humanity in the first place….Harris’s own messianic moral absolutism, based on devotion to “truth,” leads to some rather nutty proposals that defy common sense and are justified by made-up history that is patently untrue.
So much for Harris’s pop-psychology, or rather MRI-enhanced pop-psychology. Dawkins and Dennett were serious academics working out-of-field but who seem honestly to have believed that the methodologies developed in other disciplines were easily mastered and just as easily dismissed–a cavalier attitude toward critique that bordered on Dominican hubris at best and anti-intellectualism at the deep end.
Hitch
Always guided by the nature of the game, Hitchens, the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group, was in it for the ride. All four looked as though they had powered their way through their task by reading the Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and in some cases not even those carefully enough.
From any objective reading of the serious reviews, their mission to God’s kingdom was an epic fail in terms of what they brought home from the journey. It was all finished, critically speaking, in 2006 when Terry Eagleton said,

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

Dawkins’s precedence in ignoring the opposition by denying they constituted serious opposition became a trademark of the movement he put into place. But despite the discounted value of the books as credible intellectual proposals, there were plenty of people prepared to spread the mission stateside, where Dawkins’s accent, his unabashed science-thumping and his wares were more valuable than in Blighty, where people had been giving up on God (in droves) for decades without his help.
What hath anti-God wrought: The new atheism, which was really an American phenomenon, like Spam.

 
One can’t simply blame Richard Dawkins for creating the kind of poster-pasters his leadership had produced in Gotchaland. He didn’t ordain them, exactly. That would be like blaming Jesus for founding the church. Is a rock star guilty of the excesses of his fans? Of course not.
But it is undeniable that new atheism would never have congealed, to the extent it ever congealed, if American neo-Darwinist soldiers and a few strays hadn’t taken on the fight. Dawkins, as Garry Wolff commented in 2006, was very old news in England when he decided to try plowing the fundamentalist pastures of America. And soldiers there were, just waiting for the right fight and marching orders. And a good thing too: Dawkins himself came off relatively unsullied by these battles, while his American promoters didn’t mind a little mud.
Headlights:
Coyne
Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a biology professor at Chicago. His only book, Why Evolution is True (2009), is his contribution to the anti-intelligent design debate and carries endorsements from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker and others in the atheist-neo-Darwinist klatch. Dawkins reviewed the book for Atheist News in 2009. Hardly anyone would fault Coyne for his attempts to combat the anti-evolution fever that grips the establishment that is failed American science education. I for one think Jerry Coyne has struck a blow for rationality and common sense by writing this lucid book. It’s a shame therefore that Coyne buys into the Dawkins incompatibility model that makes religion the sworn enemy of science and science the salvation of the race. It is frankly embarassing, after two hundred years of the scientific study of religion, to hear a scientist saying things like this:

In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.
Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion? And some information: the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the most venerable in the nation–after which the Chicago School of Religionswissenschaft got its name (and turned Europeans green with envy at its methods)–one notably lacking in Irish elves–is located at 1025 E. 58th Street. Any number of evolution-accepting scholars–including Martin Riesebrodt would be happy to have a chat and set you straight. Of course, if you really believe that a degree in biology trumps every other discipline, then why bother?
P Z Myers. Winner of the 2009 “Humanist of the Year Award,” a lapse of judgement for which the American Humanist Association will burn like cotton floss in a non-existent hell for their abuse of the word humanist,
Myers
P Z Myers is cut from the same neo-Darwinist fabric as Dr Coyne, but without the credentials. That means he is anti-intelligent design, pro-evolution, and happy to be known as the Don Rickles of the Dawkins theatre troupe. He’s the purveyor of the award-winning science blog Pharyngula where he specializes in calling people who don’t agree with him stupid and moronic.
To his credit, Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit though if his rep holds up as the sun goes down on new atheism he does have a collection of his favourite anecdotes and outrages coming out in 2012. But this does not stop him from being the voice to which most of the young neo-atheists pay heed. I was reminded last year, after being told by P Z that I needed to be more respectful to the cause, that he deserves to be called Dr Myers. I had asked why someone who teaches in a university could not distinguish between free speech and inciteful behaviour–like that associated with Koran-burning Florida yahoo Terry Jones.
Myers, who describes himself as a moral nihilist, writes like this:

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. Webster Cook smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. This isn’t the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. …. It is just a cracker! So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls.
So, God love him, P Z Myers got the chance to kick the pope in the balls by spearing a consecrated host (eucharist is the name of the sacrament you fucking ex-Lutheran moron–whoops, just resorting to idiom) and a few other factotums. For this he is famous. And humanist of the year.
But let me just say this about the evolutionary, neo-Darwinist, religion sucks, anti-intelligent design phalanx of new atheism: If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger. If there were ever an occasion for a serious scholar like Dawkins to say, this is over the top, P Z Myers is that opportunity. So far–nothing. The clowns are now the whole circus.
Greta Christina
Greta Christina. I’m not sure whether Greta is a headlight, because there can only be two and she will see any reference to three as some sort of weird sexual joke. That’s the problem. She sees everything as a weird sexual joke. Ranked as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers, Christina exemplifies in her work the increasing influence of LGBTQ trend toward identifying atheism and humanism with victimization and social marginalization. She can be amusing, but needs to take on some serious issues, such as why radical feminism and lesbianism are often perceived to be anti science when new atheism is purely devoted to an evolutionary model that, frankly, is not friendly to special pleading for biological exceptionalism based on sex. Didn’t understand that sentence? You need to.
Sidelights.
Mark Twain just needed Huck and Tom to paste the handbills to the walls. Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.
Ophelia Benson, host of Butterflies and Wheels, has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen. I still regard her as a fair-broker who needs to rise above the temptation to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the grousers who loiter around her kitchen table. I mean campfire.
The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of the Hemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…
Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician qua neo-Darwinian atheist who teaches at James Madison University in Virginia. Rosenhouse [sic] essentially does book reviews of things that cross his path and passes judgment on what he doesn’t like, usually anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism. Of Rabbi Alan Lurie’s recent HuffPo piece on religion, Rosenhouse opined,

We’re really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I’m not sure what he means by ‘the histories,’ but I find nothing to admire in the remaining items on his list. I am not only unimpressed by the world’s various alleged holy texts, but I frankly dislike the whole idea of a holy text. Most religious rituals and practices leave me beyond cold, I think the world’s ‘mystical teachings’ should be discarded in toto, and I think better uses could be found for sacred spaces.
To which I say…Go on. Suggest already. KFCs, meth clinics, museums, failing public libraries, Starbuck’s. You choose. America, as we know, is awash in sacred spaces so the fewer of these antiquities the better. Let’s use the real estate for what we really hold sacred. I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating? Can’t he do this on Facebook and get a thousand likes to boot?
S0 many other poster-pasters, but time is up and I hope my case is made.
The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty-first century England.
HERE is a final question. Why does this matter? Why, more specifically, does it matter to me–why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all? –So what if the ranters are ranters, that they pay no attention to serious religious studies scholarship, ignore the realities of two hundred years of academic inquiry into the foundations of religious thought and dismiss tons of modern scientific investigation into the nature of religious belief as worthless?
Jason Rosenhouse says, presumably with a straight face and clear conscience, he doesn’t know what “scientism” is. Naturally his question, in the ringaround-the-rosey style of this support group, is enthusiastically echoed by Coyne.
Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term (“science”) as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology or physics, for example, have been to their own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.
To deny the authority and validity of specific methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.
Richard Dawkins
The willful ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
In the long run, real science acknowledges failed experiments and the humbling contribution of being wrong as a way of moving toward the right answers. It can’t rest like a medieval pope on its teaching authority. The “scientism” of the new atheists consists in a failed experiment in the misapplication of method. Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that religion is the trivialization of complexities, a default position favoured by “dims” who just don’t get science. The scientistic worldview favoured by his promoters has relied heavily on the trivialization of appropriate methods for understanding religion. Given the starting point of his argument, there can be no other outcome.
The way forward in any useful critique of religion does not depend on activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Eric MacDonald, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, Mark Tawin, new atheism, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, scientism. Bookmark the permalink.

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Published: January 1, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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48 Responses to “Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)”

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 Veronica Abbass 
 January 1, 2012 at 11:17 am
I want to get my comment in before Steph can say (ad nauseam) how wonderful this post is. I want to be the first to not like this post.
You say, “Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.”
Eric is a Canadian and spells favour the same way you do.
You say “Ophelia Benson . . . has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.”
I know you used to contribute regularly; I read some of the posts you wrote when you were not angry and cynical.
Thank you, you have provided your readers with links to the best atheist websites available.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 1, 2012 at 8:48 pm
That Eric MacDonald is a Canadian doesn’t seem worth the bother of changing the sentence to North American. Will “former colonials” do?
Reply
 
 steph 
 January 1, 2012 at 8:49 pm
You’re so funny Veronica. Yay, congratulations you beat me! Isn’t it ‘wonderful’… I know how that makes you screech and run and tell every other ant all about it. “Everybody knows”: it’s a song. Do you know it?
Mr MacDonald grants Dawkins favours freely too? More fool old Mack, eh?
I wonder what your definition of angry is. This post is witty, yes, and incisive. Accurate as always. The style is no different from previous essays on other websites. Erudite and eternally critical, which is the nature of good academic scholarship. He’s always consistently interesting don’t you think? No? It’s fascinating that when the subjects of a critique are atheists, the subjects angrily growl that it’s ‘angry’ critique. Generally critiques of atheism are described by atheists as either ‘angry’, written by a ‘faitheist’ or even as ‘passively aggressive’ or ‘accommodationist’. How can anyone be ‘angry’ with something that’s destroying itself Veronica? How can anyone be angry with something so small? It’s blindingly obvious the ‘atheism’ in this essay is on the road to oblivion and I can’t imagine how your imagination stretches to Joe being angry unless it’s evidence of your own psychological projection. If only David and Goliath were true … but atheists just ain’t go the right pebbles.
Cynical? Veronica, who is never cynical! What is there not to be cynical about? You say, ‘Thank you, you have provided your readers with links to the best atheist websites available’. Indeed. Isn’t it ironic? The proof is in the pudding as they say. That’s the old cliche.
Fantastic review by Murrough O’Brien. Perfectly visualised and nothing could be more fitting than an old chestnut – and the trusty old teapot…
Reply
 
 
 Apuleius Platonicus 
 January 1, 2012 at 3:47 pm
This a great overview of the whole New Atheist phenomenon! I especially agree with your appraisal of Hitchens.
Reply
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 1, 2012 at 4:17 pm
I wonder if it is even worth it anymore to criticize “new” atheism; the movement only exists for the unsociable to vent their grievances about religion. As far as I am concerned, they can complain as much as they want as long as they do it at their computers.
Reply
 
 Peter 
 January 2, 2012 at 9:27 am
As well as all of the other things you got wrong – there is no shortage of apple pie here in England.
Peace and love,
Peter
Reply

 steph 
 January 2, 2012 at 10:48 am
Seems like it’s only apple pies you could pick on though. I’ve been in the UK for several years, but all I see on the menus are pork or steak and kidney. And I’m a fruiterian. Apple pies? Perhaps the English need all their apples to sauce for the pork. I’m sure you know your way around better than me – but they’re not visible here to a foreigner, like they are in America. Everywhere I go there, they’re glaring through cake shop windows, littering the supermarket shelves and billboards paid for by MacDonalds. I’ve even seen someone stuffing one down his throat as he walked alongside me in New Orleans. It was apple – I saw the apple when he opened his mouth to talk… But I don’t like pastry anyway. I have a feeling that they’re out of favour and fashion in the UK as far as pie flavour goes. I did inherit Kate Greenaway’s original “A is for Apple Pie” though. Published in 1900, it fell to bits, was restored by a bookbinder, and later meticulously copied by an artistic aunt. I have the original, as well as the copy which would be difficult to distinguish from the original if it wasn’t for the condition.
And just for fun:
 A was an Apple pie;
 B bit it;
 C cut it;
 D dealt it;
 E eat it;
 F fought for it;
 G got it;
 H had it;
 J joined it;
 K kept it;
 L longed for it;
 M mourned for it;
 N nodded at it;
 O opened it;
 P peeped in it;
 Q quartered it;
 R ran for it;
 S stole it;
 T took it;
 V viewed it;
 W wanted it;
 X, Y, Z, and all wish’d for a piece in hand.
Famous old rhyme from the nursery. Peace and love and goodwill.
Reply
 
 
 ken 
 January 2, 2012 at 9:56 am
I imagine we will always have these issues. C.P. Snow was pontificating on the subject decades ago in his highly influential 1959 Rede lecture “The Two Cultures” which was later published in book form. Snow was bemoaning the rift between the scientific world view and that of the humanities, which is simply an earlier and broader variation of the present day Science/Religion animosity.
 How many of the interests and pursuits which enrich our lives but cannot be quantified are supposed to be whittled away because they contribute nothing towards the advancement of science? The arts? Opera? Dance? Degas? Should one stop reading Cervantes because he’s a distraction from Darwin? No weapon in the new atheist’s arsenal will ever convince me of that.
Reply

 Snowflake 
 January 2, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Thankfully, there seem to be approximately zero new atheists who would claim that occupations other than science should be “whittled away”. Religion is not like opera: it actually makes claims about facts and morality which it cannot back up. Opera is ever aware of its status as entertainment (though lovely, sophisticated, etc.).
Reply

 ken 
 January 3, 2012 at 8:56 am
I’ve conversed with these people and they invariably belittle most interests that fall outside the scope of science, unless it happens to be, curiously enough, science fiction.

 
 
 Apuleius Platonicus 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:38 am
Snow and “The Two Cultures” are very relevant to this discussion. The one word that most completely describes the New Atheists is “philistines”.
Reply

 Apuleius Platonicus 
 January 4, 2012 at 3:05 pm
And I should have added that Christopher Hitchens was the one New Atheist to whom the “philistine” label did not apply.

 
 
 
 Ned 
 January 2, 2012 at 10:05 am
Great job, and I’m sure you will top it with your 2012 obit for new atheism. I’m looking forward to it!
Reply

 dwomble 
 January 3, 2012 at 2:53 am
Another quote attributed to Twain seem apropos here:
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”
Or perhaps we should consider
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
and just leave it at that.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 3, 2012 at 8:40 am
You seem to think I don’t appreciate Mark Twain’s skepticism. I do. I still laugh every time I read ‘The Damned Human Race,” the “War Prayer” and especially “The Mysterious Stranger,” which is one of the most scathing indictments of religious morality ever penned. When I teach freshmen seminars occasionally, Mysterious Stranger is always on the reading list. I don’t have the massive 2010 biography in front of me, but in it he expresses the view that Christianity is a religion of blood and gore and that neither Jesus nor his father would approve of it. But his views on religion were complex, not settled. Do you know his book on St Joan of Arc? And many of his thoughts can only be understood as theological dilemmas of a theodical kind. Let’s be careful of using critical views as broadly atheistic ones, because his weren’t, and he might have been the first to call a PZ Myers a self-promoting huckster.

 
 
 
 Gareth Richards 
 January 2, 2012 at 10:32 am
As Mark Twain said “No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.”
Your jokes are just aren’t as funny as theirs, keep trying.
Reply

 steph 
 January 2, 2012 at 11:04 am
That’s a bit lame. I never liked Mark Twain much anyway. I liked that era of literature generally, but Huckleberry Finn didn’t appeal, and Twain’s ‘jokes’ are all too deliberate and corny. No subtlety. Real wit is a rare but natural quality and appears effortless. The author isn’t ‘trying’ to be funny. He is just dealing with a subject in his naturally articulate and original way. Not to your taste? Maybe you’re being a little ‘trying’ perhaps? Try apple pie.
Reply

 Bruce Heerssen 
 January 2, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Hoffman has rung the death knell of the New Atheism far too early. How easy it is to simply declare victory and walk away from the battlefield, and how foolish. Will he write this piece again next year when the players have so rudely refused to quit the stage?
Coyne is right to pan the idea of “scientism.” Science is the process of rigorously evaluating evidence to arrive at natural truths: that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that populations evolve over time so that one organism can be clearly seen to have been derived from a previous, similar organism. There’s no claim to a higher “truth” such as we see in esoteric ramblings about angels dancing on pins. Nor are there Faustian bargains or Pascalian wagers that sacrifice validity in the service of higher “truths”. There is only relentless examination of evidence and the pursuits thereof, regardless of personal feelings of where that evidence may lead.
For all the tortured and convoluted subtleties of Hume’s and Aquinas’ vaunted theologies, they have failed to justify the basic premise: is it true? The New Atheists (An unfortunate term, as it is not all that new.) apply the scientific method to such claims, and in every case, find them wanting. Before one can pontificate on the nature of angels, one must first establish that angels (or gods) in fact exist. None have been able to do this conclusively and definitively, and it is this point the New Atheists emphasize.

 
 
 ken 
 January 2, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I sometimes think parody is the highest form of intelligence, whether it’s directed towards religionists or atheists.
Reply
 
 
 Wanderer 
 January 2, 2012 at 10:59 am
Many came out of the atheism closet precisely thanks to the New Atheists.
 We need more voices, more variety, not less.
 Why should we be afraid of calling something or someone stupid, when it is ?
 We are not dealing with 6-years old calling each other names, but grown-up trying to govern the world their way, whatever the means, because their imaginary friend said so.
Thanks to Prof. Dawkins or Dr PZ Myers for using words that everybody can understand.
 With Hitchens, Harris, Onfray (french) and all the other “New Atheists”, they have created the next generation of atheists.
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 Human Ape 
 January 2, 2012 at 11:01 am
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope?”
It’s not necessary to be a bullshit expert to be able to identify bullshit.
“Why does this matter? Why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all?”
Many reasons. Here’s three:
ONE: 9/11/2001
Three thousand people had a choice that day. Be burned alive or explode into a red mist when crashing into the pavement below. For what? For the childish cowardly heaven fantasy virtually all theists believe in.
TWO: The never ending Christian war against science education.
Not all Christians are evolution deniers but they all have anti-science fantasies, including the disgusting resurrection of the dead Jeebus, and the magic god fairy every superstitious theist believes in. Even the most moderate Christian belongs to an organization that has a long history of getting in the way of scientific progress. A normal person wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it.
THREE: Religious indoctrination. It’s child abuse and there’s no excuse for it. The child abuse is legal but the brainwashers are no better than terrorists. The only difference is instead of destroying buildings with their flying skills, they destroy the minds of innocent children, making them as permanently stupid as their parents.
By the way, has any theist ever provided evidence for their magical master of the universe? How about evidence for its magic wand? Where has this fairy been hiding the past 14 billion years?
There will never be any evidence for a magical god, an idea no less childish and idiotic than the Easter Bunny fantasy,.
Also, why are theists so terrified of reality? Why don’t they grow up and join the 21st century instead of hiding in the Dark Ages?
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 Matt 
 January 2, 2012 at 11:26 am
“…Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit….”
Dr. Myers is a scientist who focuses on writing primary rather than secondary literature. He has numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, the kind that publish empirical studies rather than reformulated supernatural speculations. You probably know little about what this is like as your field of study only involves thinking about something for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence and never bothering to test its speculations (I won’t even call them hypotheses). Empirical research has an elevated status in scientific literature over books and reviews. In fact, scientists measure their stature in the field largely by the number and influence of their journal publications. How many empirical papers do you have, sir? Myers’ contributions to human knowledge far exceed yours.
By the way, what is up with calling him a “fucking ex-Lutheran?” You had just criticized him for name-calling, and in classic Christian charity turn around and commit the very thing you were criticizing in him.
I used to be a Christian before I realized that Christianity makes empirical predictions about the world (e.g., intercessory prayer works), and that numerous scientific studies show these predictions to be untrue. Other predictions necessary for the classical Christian model include the existence of an immaterial soul, the existence of other disembodied non-material personalities (angels, demons, god), the existence of domains outside the physical universe in which these beings dwell and where the souls of the deceased go, that there is an essential difference between the redeemed and unbelievers, and many other claims for which there is either no evidence or evidence which contradicts these claims. This is a simple issue, and the data clearly exclude the possibility that most of the core Christian claims are true. But theologians and apologists muddy the waters and move the goalposts. They retreat into ever-diversifying revisions of the model until each claim is so detailed that one can get lost and not know which way is up or down. Show me data that the claims I listed above are true and not better explained by a more parsimonious naturalistic hypothesis.
You are wrong to suggest that the New-Atheism is over. A quick look at iTunes will show you that there are more skeptical and atheist podcasts with larger audiences than there are religious podcasts. Christianity is retreating on multiple fronts losing the argument on cultural norms, public policy, and education. Christianity has been forced to evolve in order to adapt to a rapidly changing environment in which its relevance shrinks and its claims sound increasingly ridiculous. In chess, the loser is usually the one who is forced to move in response to their opponent; science and reason have been chasing Christianity all over the board for decades forcing it to change in order to avoid a final check-mate. Let’s talk in 10 or 20 years; my prediction is that atheism will be much more common in America and that traditional forms of Christianity will be less common. We live in a time where people have unprecedented access to data online. The days of the mysterious priesthood with all of the answers is over. Science leads to answers. Christianity leads to pseudo-philosophical musings attempting to resolve conflicts between ancient mythology and the real world. The tyranny of the relgious “academy” is over.
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 Adam Lewis 
 January 2, 2012 at 12:54 pm
I do not understand this vein of criticism that calls the “new atheism” ignorant. It is ignorant. I agree. I consider myself something of a scholar of religion and I do recognize the low-brow nature of the Dawkins-type arguments for atheism.
Yet, these accusations of ignorance coming from supposed serious scholars of religion seem to be ignorant themselves of the general profile of the religious population.
Would Dawkins’ arguments faze a serious theologian or biblical scholar? Hardly. But the average believer is also no serious theologian or biblical scholar. This is factual. Lodes of empirical data testify to this. Jason Slone’s work shows this is true even on a conceptual level.
The “new atheism” is a political movement and as such tries to address the largest section of people. Complaining about their ignorance is like complaining about the ignorance of politicians. It is valid yet futile and ultimately misunderstands the nature of the beast.
I don’t particularly like the “new atheists” either. I personally, as someone learned in religious psychology, find their ignorance sometimes stunning. I’m more in line with Atran’s views.
But it bugs me to no end when I hear your argument advanced without the distinction I outlined here. The new atheists are simply correctly addressing their target audience. Perhaps they can be unsophisticated but so is their intended listener.
Reply
 
 Sam 
 January 2, 2012 at 1:48 pm
I found this to be a very accurate description of the New Atheists. Very well done. What’s interesting is that none of them seem to have a real passion for science.
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 Linda Jean 
 January 2, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Thank you Sam: for a long time we argue that Dawkins, Harris, Dennett are (were) not scientists sensu stricto (actually not even sesu lato). Dennett claims he is the first experimental philosopher. Dawkins trained in ethology(?) and published really boring original work, Harris has published in the neuroimaging of belief, unbelief and uncertainty. Coyne was well known for releasing large large numbers of fruit flies in point A to fetch them in points B, C, thereof. Of Myers I know he is fond of cephalopods and works with zebra fish: they all share the passion that science will ultimately reveal our true nature (it seems we have none; we are a predetermined collection of molecules devoid of meaning: so, whats the point?)
Reply
 
 Jeff R. 
 January 2, 2012 at 6:00 pm
This comment is parody, yes?
 (Oh golly I hope so)
 Otherwise it reads like someone who hasn’t listened to a single word written by Harris, Dennett or Dawkins.
Reply

 steph 
 January 2, 2012 at 6:47 pm
That’s a very bold and unqualified assumption Jeff R. But you’re kidding, “yes?”. You must be. Harrisy, Dawkins and Dennett, hahaha.

 
 Linda Jean 
 January 3, 2012 at 9:29 am
Parody not in your sense. I could have not listened to their written words, I read them: nothing that has not been said one way or the other long time ago.

 
 Sam 
 January 3, 2012 at 3:36 pm
They’ve done a nice job of figuring out how to make money by referring to science in their writings. That’s not a passion for science. People with a passion for science are either in the lab or the field.

 
 Jeff 
 January 3, 2012 at 4:19 pm
“What’s interesting is that none of them seem to have a real passion for science.”
I’m not sure what you base this observation on, but it doesn’t agree with my experience. Most passionate scientists are atheists, by the way. There’s no room left for wishful thinking and superstition once you understand that the Universe is governed by consistent natural laws.
“People with a passion for science are either in the lab or the field.”
People with a passion for religion are either at the pulpit, in a monastery, doing missionary work, or hanging on a cross. So that leaves well over a billion of them that don’t seem to have a real passion for religion.

 
 
 
 Rob C 
 January 2, 2012 at 2:59 pm
If you can’t come up with new ideas, come up with new words. Like Darwinism, scientism is a small-minded attempt to put an “ism” on science.
 Sorry, you can create words, but they don’t have to mean anything.
All humanities (humanisms?) do not have a way of knowing beyond the terms and principles agreed to by people who have read a lot of what others have said. Science is distinguished from the humanities way of knowing by having an arbiter of truth-empicial testing and observation. That science is a different and superior way of knowing is seen in the fact that it “works”–humans gain predictive ability and control through it. Philosophy, the basis of most humanities thought, never really produces any useful information. It is sort of a verbal game–a way of talking.
Religion “studies” attempt to mimic philosophy. And, likewise their “way of knowing” is what others have thought long and hard about an concluded without any sort of empirical evidence. Once, however, their ideas enter canon, the ideas assume a mantle of truth that every one else can refer to (as the blog author does in recommending Aquinas, etc.).
Reply
 
 English apple pie lover 
 January 2, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Well done for debunking that “Who made God?” argument. Oh – no you didn’t, did you? You, like all the “sophisticated” reviewers I have read just say you “outgrew it” or dismissed it as childish. Postulating an all-powerful, intelligent, creator God that needs no explanation to explain something for which we have no explanation is so bogus it is laughable. It is the joke upon which the entire religious house of cards is built and pointing this out is the strongest argument against that world-view. If you have an answer to why it is not, other than vague platitudes, please enlighten us.
Apple pie is very much alive in England – it is definitely my favourite fruit pie!
Reply
 
Atheist writers respond « Vridar says:
 January 2, 2012 at 6:17 pm
[...] against the “New Atheists”. The professor has kicked off the new year with another Re-made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011) and this time some of his targets have [...]
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 Red Mann 
 January 2, 2012 at 8:56 pm
I’m going to jump in here as a complete non-academic. I have no fine degrees in philosophy or theology, not even biology; just an AA in management from over 30 years ago. Just a worker bee programmer. I have to say that Mr. Hoffmann’s treatise is a bit muddled. I’m having a hard time understanding what he is trying to say outside of some intellectual snobbery and a whole raft of ad hominems.
 I have read a lot of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne and Eric McDonald. I find them to be very clear in calling religion what it is, belief(s) in imaginary, unsupported entities which makes a great many truth claims. Truth claims which are universally shown to be unfounded. So, yes, religion and science are not especially compatible, and just because some monks transcribed the works of pre-Christian thinkers doesn’t make religion responsible for it’s content any more than a Xerox is responsible for the Shakespeare someone may copy on it.
 We Gnu Atheists are accused by our more, apparently, more sophisticated betters because we haven’t read every philosophical argument and digested each and every apologia ever made. I happen to think that PZ’s The Courtier’s Reply, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php, is a wonderful exposé of this intellectual snobbishness. As to Leprechauns, there is just as much evidence for them as for anyone’s god.
Reply

 ken 
 January 3, 2012 at 8:47 am
On the contrary. The Courtier’s Reply is a perfect example of intellectual snobbishness. Basically, it’s an appeal to specialization, which is perfectly understandable as the notion is the product of a thinker steeped and defined by specialization. As I stated earlier, how much of our life enriching experiences should be rejected as irrelevant to the advance of science?
Reply
 
 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 2, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Let me respond briefly to some of what is going on in various strings. It isn’t worth a blog, so find it here and tell ‘em Groucho sent ya..
1. Why is my blog called New Oxonian? Incisive. I was going to call it the New Arkansan but have never set foot in Arkansas. The definition of Oxonian is a graduate of Oxford. Last time I checked I qualified–my doctorate has not been revoked–as do Professors Dawkins, Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, so your quibble is obviously with the word “new.” More important, how does this have anything material to do with the blog? And why isn’t a quick click on the vita brevis tab on the blog enough to give you the basics? Or is this just more ad personam horse doodie?
2. The new atheists don’t oppose the study of religion. Not true: in fact the famous “Pinker Intervention” at Harvard in 2006 prevented religion from becoming a part of Harvard’s core curriculum, on the premise there was no difference between theology and religion-studies, though Harvard was the first university in America to introduce such study in the 1930's, apart from its Divinity School. Read all about it here: http://www.somareview.com/godandmanatharvard.cfm Stephen Pinker (who is far more considerate of religion in general) is not the issue here, btw; a number of the newbies have gone on record as saying that the study of theology does not belong in a university, though in some places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, this would mean closing down their divinity schools where the study of religion is alive and well. That’s half the problem: the other half is that rank amateurs like the newbies have already pronounced their verdict on such study by mixing up the objectives. Frankly if this confusion is any indication of the state of their information, they’d better hold off on the God thing for a few years. If you want to see the nadir of this imbecilic conversation, here you go: http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/06/dawkins-myers-religion-faith
3. Style. I’ll work harder to use shorter sentences and not include so many ideas in a paragraph. I know it is difficult for some readers. In the future I’ll skip the finery and get straight to the insults. If PZ feels he knows me well enough to call me R, I can return the favour my calling him P. Badda Bing.
4. All further questions. Check out the
Atheist Sure Fire Rapid Rapid response Manual for up to the minute information in making a straw man, trolling, the strategic uses of the courtier’s reply, and PAP (the Pomposity Argument Parsed). http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2011/12/01/the-sure-fire-atheist-rapid-response-manual/ It will save you loads of time and save me the trouble of replying to you.
Reply
 
 SocraticGadfly 
 January 2, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Without getting into the “Gnu” issue first, I’d have to disagree that Hitch is the only true intellectual of the Gnus. I find him a “poseur,” much like the Oscar Wilde he so likes, who has fallen far from his literary height of a century ago and, overall, rightfully so.
If there is an intellectual among the Gnus, even though he recycles himself as he gets older, it’s Dennett if anybody.
That said, on the “science” issue, Harris, above all the others, is guilty of “scientism.” I said so in reviewing his latest book. He’s also guilty of religious hypocrisy himself, when he claimed in “The End of Faith” that Buddhism is “just a psychology.” I’ve wondered ever since then if Harris isn’t a closet Buddhist, to have said such a whopper. (And, if he ever talked to Hitch about Eastern religions.)
At the same time, I think that Mr. Hoffmann sometimes longs for an Enlightenment humanism of 200-plus years ago, and in throwing out the bathwater of “scientism,” he, in things such as cognitive science, etc., throws out too much of the baby of “science.”
MRIs of today may be relatively crude, Mr. Hoffmann, but they’re getting better. The brain as the origin of the mind will be scientifically studied in more detail and accuracy as the years advance.
Reply
 
 Veritas Serum 
 January 3, 2012 at 9:30 am
To steal a riff from Hillel, ‘There is no god. All the rest is commentary.’
Reply
 
 steph 
 January 3, 2012 at 10:09 am
I’m surprised the pie loving Poms are misunderstanding the point here. The author never suggested an apple pie couldn’t be found. The English pie eaters are not reading. The author didn’t claim atheism couldn’t be found up in England either. The point is the re-making of each in America. The American apple pie is distinctively American as is the new atheism. It’s an analogy, useful and amusing, one of the literary tools used to illustrate a point. There’s an international joke about the apple pie and who ‘invented’ it. But the evidence is in history and literature. The English put the apples in pastry before the American colonies planted the seeds.
I’m destined to drive Ophelia and Veronica (and Eric) completely mad, who in their attempts to humiliate and separate are beginning to look like jilted lovers. Never mind. Isn’t it “wonderful”.
Echo…
Reply
 
 Christopher 
 January 3, 2012 at 11:55 am
I think we should stop using the description “new atheists” and instead call them “honest atheists”. I am a fan of all those you call “new atheists” and am grateful that someone(s) has the balls to point out the obvious, not only is the king not wearing any clothes, he’s a bit hideous to behold in the nude.
And no matter how much perfume you sprinkle on a dog turd (“sophisticated theology”) it’s still a piece of dog shit when you bite into it (religion).
Just sayin’ :-)
Reply

 steph 
 January 3, 2012 at 4:15 pm
There are honest atheists, dishonest atheists, honest Christians and dishonest ones and on and on it goes. Some “news” chose to call themselves “gnus” and I reckon they’d all claim to be honest. Some aren’t – I know that for a fact. A gnu has claimed to know things “for a fact” about somebody and I actually know these things aren’t true. So she’s dishonest. So what’s your point? Why do you need an epithet? Are you implying religious believers are dishonest? Perhaps instead of liberal Christians we should call them honest Christians. No matter how many silly caricatures and vulgar metaphors you strain yourself to defecate, the fact is some humans are honest and some are not. Religion and atheism are not the distinguishing markers but personal agendas or motives often are. New atheism, despite shrinking theological questions of meaning and reality down to simplistic caricatures and vulgar metaphors will never demolish religious ideas which remain open to people without convictions of any sort, for critical and constructive thought. New atheists will never contribute to this creative thinking process because they lack sophistication and think sophistication is a slur. Some, with an avalanche of expletives, will even dismiss theology as irrelevant. This is ironic as new atheism is fast becoming irrelevant in the global community. With a little more education it will be sufficiently diluted with some aspects comfortably dissolved. Like a soggy firecracker it will fizzle. I shouldn’t imagine you look pretty without clothes on. Just sayin’.
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Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011 … | churchoutreachministry.net says:
 January 7, 2012 at 4:14 am
[...] Read Full Article- Click Here Christian Spirituality Headlines Excerpts from Churchoutreachministry.net This entry was posted [...]
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 Todd Jackson 
 January 7, 2012 at 3:06 pm
The New Atheists do represent an important moment in human intellectual history, but that moment has nothing to do with the existence of Gods. It has to do with the limits of Empiricism. What we have is the point at which empiricism – the entire use of scientific evidence as validation – fails.
Empiricism only works when the subject of the experiment is of a lower order, technologically, than the experimenter.
Once the subject of the experiment is of a higher order than the experimenter, the relevant question is no longer whether there is evidence of the subject’s existence. The relevant question is whether the subject wishes to be detected through empirical means.
That is a 50%/50% proposition. A coin flip. Where empiricism can yeild no better result than a coin flip, empiricism has failed. The lack of evidence for God can NEVER be taken as evidence of God’s nonexistence. Avanced space aliens are certainly not God. But we haven’t found space aliens through empirical means for the same reason we haven’t found God.
If any significantly advanced “subject” were to decide, “I don’t want the humans to perceive my existence,” we won’t, whether through control of the evidence itself, or control of our minds.
Whenever I give this argument, the atheist always resonds by saying I’m trying to conclude the lack of evidence is itself positive evidence. I’m not. I’m saying that science is categorically mute on the existence of any God. It is even impermissible to say, with Dawkins, that the existence of God is “extrememly unlikely” and base that on science.
Atheists who rebut this always succeed in revealing how epistemologically trapped they are within an empiricist framework.
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Still alive | Butterflies and Wheels says:
 January 9, 2012 at 1:36 pm
[...] the latest one, the New Year edition, is pathetically titled “Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011).” As if he could make it be dead just by entering a terminal date. Nice try, Joe, but it’s not [...]
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 June 20, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
 
 Steersman 
 June 20, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Speaking of which … :-)
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 JonLynnHarvey 
 June 22, 2012 at 10:12 pm
I am somewhat critical of some elements of the “New” Atheism- especially its apparent cult of celebrity and reveling in ridicule, and selective study of the most toxic forms of religion.
However, it seems premature to pronounce it dead just yet, nor do I think Hitchens was necessarily the intellectual powerhouse of the movement.
This article totally failed to mention how extremely civil Daniel Dennett is towards religion in comparison to PZ Myers (though Dennett is uncompromising in his atheism), which ought to have gotten a mention if we’re talking about civility as an issue.
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 stevenbollinger 
 August 13, 2012 at 11:51 am
I must agree with you that Sam Harris is ” singularly incoherent.” and it irks me quite a bit that so many people consider him to be a genius. I think he’s an enormous impediment to learning, posing as its champion. I feel a bit like Schopenhauer glowering at Hegel.
I like some of the other “New Atheists” much more than you seem to. I regard them as less of a unified group as it seems you might. How many of them actually refer to themselves as New Atheists, I wonder? The term is sometimes applied to me. I leave out the “New” and don’t capitalize “atheist.”
“Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did.”
Yes. We should not forget for an instant that almost the entire corpus of at least the Latin portion of the Classical literature which we now possess, is made from copies made from Catholic monks. Not to mention very valuable original writing in Latin done in the Middle Ages, much maligned for centuries by people who’ve never read any of it, which some — not all! — atheists unfortunately ignore because of the obligatory pious preamble and ending to almost every text. (And sometimes merely because it’s in Latin and some of the atheists are angry ex-Catholics with issues, or anti-Catholic bigots, and to them Latin = Catholic.) (Not to mention extremely-influential and thoroughly stupid atheists such as Tom Paine, the Sam Harris of his day, who declared that all the valuable ancient texts had already been translated — think of all the ancient texts discovered since Paine died! — and that therefore education in the ancient languages should cease. What an idiot!) I know much less about what the Orthodox and other eastern Christians and the rabbis were up to in the Middle Ages, but if you say the rabbis performed services of preservation comparable to those of the monks, I see no reason to doubt you. And of course the so-called Western “Renaissance” was mostly a matter of Westerners learning Greek from Greeks and Arabs, and then exclaiming, “Look at what WE brought back to LIFE!” As if the ancient Greek culture had been dead just because the West was ignorant of it.
So, yes, without a doubt, we owe a great debt of gratitude to those individuals who preserved ancient texts, and during the long, long Middle Ages almost all of them were clergypeople. However, we must also consider what it meant to belong to the clergy in a time when religion held an almost-complete monopoly on the institutions of learning, as it did in the Catholic Middle Ages. If a medieval monk became prominent for his learning, did that mean that he worked hard and obediently for the greater glory of the Lord, or merely that he liked books? If the former was not true he was still required to behave as if it were. In an age when religious dissent was punished so harshly, it is impossible to know just exactly what most people’s real attitudes about religion were. You may point to the licentious troubadours, who came into their own when so many pious knights were off warring in the East — pious and/or power-hungry, impossible to know the exact proportions of their motivations — as refuting what I just said, but even the troubadours were required to say that they were going to Hell for enjoying themselves so, when they may really have believed that Heaven and Hell were purely imaginary.
Many of the monks may have believed the same thing, and put up with the sermons and rituals and inserted the required pious preambles and endings to all of their correspondence for the sake of their access to the manuscripts of the pre-Christian ancients. Must we assume that all medieval monks were Christian in more than name? And must we be grateful to Christianity because it only partly obliterated Classical antiquity, not completely?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Accommodationist of the Year!
by rjosephhoffmann

by admin Posted on January 3, 2012

 
I’d like to thank the Academy.
Jerry Coyne has just awarded me the Mooney Prize for “Accommodationist of the Year” and pays a lot of attention to why, he says, no one is paying attention to me.
He defends his fellow atheist headlights and several sidelights by calling Eric MacDonald “Venerable” (which I thought was a title only a pope could bestow on a saint-in-waiting) and to Jason Rosenhouse as a promising young atheist blogger. He has more trouble finding a name for Greta Christina so he just asks, “Has he read her?” Yes, he has.
Since Jerry seems to have the power to hand out titles (who knew?) I will take him at his word that the chums he defends are everything he says they are. And more. He even seems to have access to my insanely jealous private thoughts (“Why not me… Dear God, why not pay attention to me.”) This maddening envy should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t until Jerry pointed it out.
I thought I was attacking the newbies because they are turning atheism into a private joke, or blague privée as we pompoustuans prefer to call it.
But there is no petulance here. –Nor in Jerry’s comments, where he reminds me that he has written two books. One of which, Speciation, “has become the standard text on modern views about the origin of species.” Damn, I wish I’d written that.
He also quotes the Venerable Eric’s humble and charitable response to a note I left on the Venerable’s blog:

“I feel so embarrassed for you, and for the pitiful criticisms you try to make. It won’t do simply to snipe at us. You must respond to what we say, and if you do not have the time to do that, then you should just get out of our way, because your criticisms invariably miss their mark and we have places yet to go.”
It is not everyday you see largess like this in action. And don’t think twice about it: I will be glad to get out of your way–if you just let me know which way you are marching. So far it isn’t clear. (Btw, loved the Robert Frostiness of that last line.)
I know zombies can sometimes also be unpredictable in their clamber for human flesh. What are new atheists after? Where are you heading? A Christian would say to hell, but based on Jerry’s–not to forget the others’ posts–I tend to think nowhere. And that’s pretty clever. It keeps people off guard when you do the God-snatch at the end.
Get Out of our way…
I’m sorry if this seems pompous and incoherent. Accommodationists are a little like theologians that way, I guess. I sometimes find it hard to finish my thoughts in a jealous rage.
I will try to do better in 2012. I plan to study the blog sites of all the headlights and sidelights and use them as models of how it’s done. Whatever it is.
Further reading:
The Surefire Atheist Rapid Response Manual (December 2011)
Atheism’s Little Idea (November 2011)
 This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Greta Christina, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, new atheists, Ophelia Benson, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, zombies. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: January 3, 2012
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19 Responses to “Accommodationist of the Year!”

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 Dwight Jones 
 January 4, 2012 at 12:09 am
Sounds like you could run a comfortable B&B.
Reply
 
A few good links | eChurch Blog says:
 January 4, 2012 at 5:01 am
[...] The New Oxonian – Accommodationist of the Year! [...]
Reply
 
 Stevie 
 January 4, 2012 at 7:32 am
I went and had a look. Oh, dear.
Alas, Jerry still has not yet grasped that he has not written two books. He has written one book, and is the co-author of a second book. This may seem a trifling detail to him but I suspect that his co-author does not view it in that light. Nor do his co-author’s lawyers, who tend to be picky about such matters. This is not reassuring in a man claiming to be impelled by the values of evidence and reason.
And when it comes to speciation I prefer Raup and Niles Eldredge; they, at least, can deal with the hyper-mutators in their hypotheses and don’t wander around stoutly ignoring the existence thereof…
Reply
 
 Linda Jean 
 January 4, 2012 at 8:39 am
i have always wondered if New atheists realize the history of the word “accommodationist”. from Wikipedia (sorry) about Booker T. Washington”…..Late in his career, Washington (Booker T.) was criticized by leaders of the NAACP, a civil rights organization formed in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois advocated activism to achieve civil rights. He labeled Washington “the Great Accommodator”. Washington’s response was that confrontation could lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks. He believed that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way to overcome racism in the long run.Washington contributed secretly and substantially to legal challenges against segregation and disfranchisement of blacks.[3] In his public role, he believed he could achieve more by skillful accommodation to the social realities of the age of segregation.[1]..”
from the Oxford Companion to African American Literature”. “…..If Washington’s racial accommodationism is unpalatable, it needs to be understood in light of his beginnings in West Virginia….rom working in the coal furnaces and salt mines of West Virginia to doing housework, Washington’s insistence is that he achieved his position as racial spokesman through hard physical labor. He goes to great lengths, for example, to describe his admittance into Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1872 as the result of his ability to clean and dust a classroom. It is clear that Hampton would have a profound impact on Washington’s views, for it was there he met General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who would become his mentor and benefactor. Graduating from Hampton in 1875 with honors, Washington returned to Hampton briefly after two years of teaching back in his native West Virginia to implement a program for Native Americans. In 1881 Armstrong recommended Washington to the Alabama legislature, which was seeking to open a normal school for African American students in Tuskegee.”
Reply
 
 Sam 
 January 4, 2012 at 9:47 am
“He even seems to have access to my insanely jealous private thoughts (“Why not me… Dear God, why not pay attention to me.”) This maddening envy should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t until Jerry pointed it out.”
So, are you jealous of his LOLcats? Or is it his boots? Don’t you wish you came up with that hilarious term, “faitheist?” Yet I wonder if HE is jealous of Myers and Dawkins for figuring out how to get their followers to send them money. How much longer before this scientist begins selling ceiling cat t-shirts on the internet?
Reply
 
 Apuleius Platonicus 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:15 am
Congratulations!
All of this reminds of that paper written by George P. Hansen (20 years ago now!) on the whole CSICOP phenomenon: http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/CSICOPoverview.htm
Among Hansen’s observations about CSICOP that are most relevant are:
(1) It’s rhetoric relied heavily on “vilification”, “ridicule”, and “decrying the dangers” of ideas they labeled as irrational.
 (2) The activities of CSICOP “display more parallels with political campaigns than with scientific endeavors.”
Reply
 
 Eric MacDonald 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:50 am
Just a comment, RJH. Since I was an archdeacon and an archdeacon is addressed The Venerable, Jerry’s attribution is not that far off base.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 4, 2012 at 7:19 pm
The irony of using an ecclesiastical title doesn’t escape me, though in your current church hating mode it does seem a cynical use of phrase that’s meant the bearer is worthy of veneration and not simply old. Would you accept “Contemptible” as a suitable alternative titulus and wear it proudly if it were offered? –Though in its current reduced circumstances, not sure the Anglican communion should be making plans for any titles that would run beyond 2015.
Reply

 Eric MacDonald 
 January 6, 2012 at 11:20 am
Well, RJH. I don’t use any title at all now, though it is sometimes accorded to me by others. My only point was that you were wrong about the use of the title Venerable. As to your suggestion that I should wear the title ‘Contemptible’, are you suggesting that that is what I am? If so, what became of your concern about having a reasonable conversation?

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 6, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Eric, I understand the comment and the convention. I put it to you that if you are willing to justify another blogger’s use of the word venerable as being not far of the mark, would you wear the word contemptible if it were offered by a church that characterized its opponents that way. I doubt very much that you are contemptible, though some of your comments are. By the way, though, What an Unbeliever Believes is a much earlier post, but I did find some of your commentary interesting and I mean that in earnest. It should have been marked as such; I am in China and many blogsites including my own are not accessible here, so evidently the instruction to mark it as a re-post didn’t get through to the person giving me information. The less said about the information deficit here the better.

 
 
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 4, 2012 at 3:09 pm
I’ve compiled a helpful list of things to do to get your blog up to “new” atheist quality:
1.) Search the internet for something that makes you angry, preferably something about religion.
 2.) Blockquote part of it. Rant desultorily. Repeat.
 Tip: The more off-topic and tangential your rants are, the more your readers will think that you are right.
 3.) Repeat steps 1 and 2 frequently throughout the day. If you leave your computer UR DOING IT RONG.
 Tip: Remember, lolcatz are funny, and you need to be funny too. Readers like funny, and since you probably aren’t funny, they won’t like you unless you use lolcatz.
This is by no means an extensive list, but hopefully it’ll help you start out 2012 on the right foot with the wrong people!
Reply
 
 Scott 
 January 4, 2012 at 7:23 pm
“it is most important to be angry at the right person, at the right time, and most importantly for the right reason(s)”
Seems like some folks in the atheist community just want to be angry for the sake of being angry.
Reply
 
 Stewart 
 January 4, 2012 at 7:32 pm
I have hesitated with this comment, but am finally more curious than insulted, for I do consider myself part of the movement under attack here. I shall keep it polite, as trading invective would defeat my point, which is to receive a reply, preferably a serious one.
Unlike quite a few who have responded negatively to things you’ve written lately, I’m not wondering who you are and where you came from; for a number of years I enjoyed your contributions to Butterflies and Wheels. I hope you don’t dispute that the change that has taken place has been more with you than with your outspokenly atheist readers; there are too many of us who agree on that point for us all to have changed in the same way over the same period of time. Even Eric MacDonald, who had not read you earlier and was very dismissive, conceded when he read some older pieces that there was a great difference. The obvious question is why the change? I’m not an insider of American Humanism and thus feel I can put the question point blank in unfeigned innocence: is it all, or mainly, as some have suggested, just a side-effect of institutional politics?
I see there have been exceptions to your condemnation. Hitchens, of course, is no longer with us, but you did give Ophelia a kind of partial exemption to the charges you level at the others, preferring to blame the low tone on her commenters. You even left something less withering in a comment on Eric’s blog, that to me seemed to express regret that the conversation could not be calmer. If I am in error and attacks on you from the New Atheist side began before you had said anything critical of them, please give me a detailed correction. If not, surely you must see that it’s been hard not to react in kind and it is in your power to alter the dynamic that I, frankly, hope you are not enjoying. Of course, if the answer to my question about institutional politics was “yes,” then this question has already, sadly, been answered.
Lastly, as an occasional reader and very infrequent commenter to your blog (and please forgive me for the oversight if you’ve already answered this somewhere before), have you delegated Steph to answer comments in your stead, or is she acting entirely independently of your wishes? Not merely the frequency of her responses, but the proprietry tone she employs does give the impression that her comments all have an a priori blessing and approval from you; the absence of any statement to the contrary from you merely strengthens this impression.
I’d be happy for even brief answers to these questions and appreciate the time taken.
Reply

 Dan Gillson 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:39 pm
I’m not answering in Prof Hoffmann’s stead, Stewart, so please don’t take me wrongly.
I’m curious about something too: Where exactly is the movement that is under attack? When I go out, which I do frequently, I see no signs or traces of “new” atheism — or even atheism in general. Sometimes I see some smiling faces pasted on a billboard with a silly slogan about being good without God, but that’s it; I see no other signs of a atheistic cultural force afoot. But then I hop on the computer and, lo and behold, there’s talk of a godless revolution going on! And all its leaders seem to be grumpy old people! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!
So tell me straight: Can we really consider a movement to be a movement if its social structure purely consists in the malcontented elderly using the internet? I would think not; real movements have social gravitas. They have observable impacts on the way people relate to one another. What measurable impact has “new” atheism had? It sure does manage to foster a lot of conflict, but that’s really about it. And now I’m curious about something else: Is that really a movement you want to be a part of?
Reply
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:55 pm
I do regret highjacking the conversation with my reply, Stewart. If Prof Hoffman decides to keep my comment, please feel free to ignore them, and please accept my apology.
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 5, 2012 at 9:24 am
You raise some interesting points. I do think however there has been a sea change in the tone of atheism and I blame this on the clowns, not the circus. Of course there has been a change: I used to have a lot more time to attack the excesses of religion, and I did it using the best weapons of criticism and satire I could. I simply cannot buy into the style nor the strategy of the Dawkins revolution with its troglodyte approach to religion in general, its hamfisted tactics, its political naivete concerning tactics and methods, and its almost ( I use the term advisedly) miraculous lack of depth and vision. There are no deans breathing down my throat; but there are plenty of academics who are tsk tsking at the puerility of the Jerry Coynes and PZ Myers. Religion grew up and gave up most of its truth claims not because it was threatened with a lawsuit but because it developed methods of self-criticism that finally led to the modern era. That is not MY opinion, that is the way it happened. Go back and read my blogs on why there’s no islamic tradition in comedy. It’s because Jews and Christians learned to laugh at their gods. Islam can only laugh at other people’s religion. Like atheism. It is not mature enough to be self-critical and so stand in great danger of fracture. Maybe that has already happened and maybe I am on one side of the fracture. Of course this is sad, because unbelief or what you want to call it is infinitessimally small to start with, not like the late medieval church in the 16th century which split under the weight of its own diverse opinions. I am a critic also because I am a historian, not a scientist, and because I think new atheism lacks a sense of proportion and of the prior history of atheism, which is not an encouraging history. The only difference–and you can quote me–between a PZ Myers and a Madalyn Murray O Hair is that he has a PhD and she is dead. In any case, as the dying new atheist movement seems determined to go on having its monologue and discouraging critique, the best thing for me to do is to develop my own ideas in my own way. Unfortunately I can no longer do this in the arena I once could. Simple as that.
Reply
 
 
 DoctorM 
 January 4, 2012 at 10:12 pm
I don’t think I’ve commented here before, though I have thought about it often enough. I came back to this entry to post after re-reading your “What An Unbeliever Believes”— a post that I rather agree with. I do read your blog regularly, and I do tend to support your views on the New Atheists. They are a humourless lot, in general, and depressingly earnest and prone to chest-thumping. I’ve always rather admired Dennett and Dawkins and Hitchens, but too many of their followers (and far, far too many of the commentariat at Pharyngula and Ophelia Benson’s blog) have made unbelief into a very little idea and strike me as both un- and anti-intellectual. You’ve stood up for things like history and cultural context and irony and ambiguity. I don’t find an appreciation of those things at Jerry Coyne’s blog, let alone at Pharyngula—- which is why I do return here for your posts. I hope you’ll keep writing.
Reply

 Stevie 
 January 5, 2012 at 2:38 pm
The difficulty with admiring Dawkins and deprecating the tactics of his followers is that it was Dawkins himself who instigated those tactics, as Andrew Brown has pointed out at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/apr/30/religion-atheism-dawkins-contempt
Abandoning reasoned discourse under the banner of reason doesn’t work, just as refusing to debate with anyone who isn’t a full-bore whacko fundamentalist doesn’t work. I live in England where it is perfectly normal not to believe in one or more gods; one would think this was a promising starting point for atheism.
Unfortunately the ‘new atheists’ are so heavily invested in their victimhood status that the statement ‘I am an atheist’ has to be supported by a round of encouraging applause, because obviously living in a country where only 44% of the population believe in god means that the 56% who do not believe in god are an oppressed minority.
Or something like that…
Reply
 
 
 Scott 
 January 4, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Stewart,
I’m unsure where you come up with the idea that Steph answers for Dr Hoffmann. All of my experience (and I frequent this blog quite often) is that Dr Hoffmann anwers for himself. The only resemblance between the two is that they think alike on more topics than the rest of us do.
And no, I am not anwering for RJH and would not attempt to do so even if he asked (trust me, he wouldn’t).
Reply
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Complacency and Excess
by rjosephhoffmann

January 6, 2012
By admin

“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1959)
“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited (Chomsky 1994)
“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Chomsky 1988)
 THOUGHTFUL response from a reader asked me why I had stopped commenting on the excesses of “religion” and turned my attention to damning the excesses of atheism.
I haven’t. But it’s a good question. I replied that it would be like asking Luther why he stopped momentarily condemning the abuses of the Roman Catholic church and turned his attention to the marauding protestants. For everything nasty Luther had to say about the pope being the anti-Christ and Rome the whore of Babylon, he had equally vicious things to say about the religious militants in a treatise eirenically titled “Against the Thieving and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.” Who were these “hordes”?
They were Luther’s supporters in the protestant cause, disillusioned that he haden’t taken his revolution far enough. So others, like Thomas Müntzer, took it for him. Similar (harder to prove) theories have suggested the same dynamic at work in the transition between Jesus and his followers, and a definite comparison can be made in the transition from earliest Christianity to the studious nastiness of some of the Church fathers, the founders of “orthodoxy.”
Polemic–rhetorical sling-shotting–wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before. It just spreads more quickly now.
I am not anti-atheist. I am anti-excess, and everything about the Dawkins revolution has spelled excess. No matter who tries to persuade me that I am making this excess up in my head, it’s excess. Fueled by the repeated assertion of its promoters that it is (secularly) providential, righteous and true (just as all zealotry convinces itself), it is excess.
Sometimes, as Caspar Melville (editor of the New Humanist) mildy suggested in a Guardian article in 2010, it’s useful to hit the right targets–namely, an aggressive religious fundamentalism–hard, and in that regard “irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.” (Funny, those adjectives remind me of a few things said recently about yours truly: how can it be?).
But I know Caspar to be a smart guy, someone who still sees the humanities in the word humanist, so in reponse to the famous Dawkins dictum (spoken to Laurie Taylor way back in 2007)–that there is no more reason to pay attention to theology than to fairyology– I wasn’t surprised to find Caspar saying this:

Entertainment value aside it is surely false, as well as politically unwise and, well, pretty impolite, to say that “all theology” is irrelevant (some of it is moral reasoning, isn’t it?), still worse to say that “religion poisons everything”, or that without religion there would be no war, or that bringing a child up within a faith is tantamount to child abuse, or that moderate religious believers are worse than fundamentalists because they prepare the ground for extremism, or that “all” religion is this, or that, or “all” faith is misguided, or to suggest that those who believe in God are basically stupid, or that science, and only science, can answer our questions….The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character.
ET me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.
No one with a semblance of a brain would ever suggest that science can’t do a lot, hasn’t done a lot, and that the world science has explained for us doesn’t leave a lot of room for traditional religious beliefs, stories, and explanations of physical reality. It is a leap into nowhere, however, to say that accepting this as a fair description of the current state of knowledge requires someone to say, “Look, somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all,” as Dawkins does to Taylor.
First of course, we need to find out what the speaker means by “theology.” Then we need to know what he thinks qualifies as “subject matter.” Presumably English literature qualifies because it exists. But so do the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Pali texts, the movements those texts have produced and the cultures and ideologies they have influenced. –Not to mention alphabets that were developed largely for the preservation of sacred writings.

What aspects of those topics, given the facile dismissal of theology, can be recognized as subject matter? Have the revolutionaries acquitted them of all responsibility to subject matter in the denial of the existence of God? Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist? If so, life is simple and the mortgage is paid.

But, if so, equally–if the texts and traditions of the world’s religions are really no different from stories about fairy tales and leprechauns–then attacking and ridiculing them is just as pointless as systematic exploration of their meaning–which is one of the things theology does. Is the ridicule justified because while nobody believes in the story of the Frog King or Thumbelina (does anyone even know those stories any more?) a few do believe that Jonah was swallowed by a ravenous fish and (a few more) that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee? I’d rather buy Plantinga’s argument for epistemic defeaters than that rationale for why ridicule is justified but explanation isn’t.
Or does “subject matter” mean a certain kind of theology?Or does it mean (I think it often does in new atheist harangues) apologetics–which is unknown in many religious traditions? The analogy to fairies and leprechauns makes it difficult to know. If you say the analogies are all wrong, remember: I didn’t make them.
God
Predictably, I am going to say that the best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”–are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time. Even many not very good theologians see things this way but pretend it’s none of their business.
The history of religion in the last two hundred years has been a history of religion redefining itself–a bit like Britain when it went from imperially great to little England. Yet religion has done a pretty good job of doing just that: the “war between science and religion” is treated in history-of-culture classes as a topic in nineteenth century studies, especially in the work of Cornell’s first hard-headed, science-first president, Andrew Dickson White. But if you look at the section headings of White’s famous book on the subject, you’ll see that he had a broad and humanistic definition of culture in which science played a magisterial, not an imperial role. He was as impressed with the results of the higher biblical criticism as he was with development in chemistry and medicine.
Andrew Dickson White, Yale ’53
Too many vaguely religious people aren’t aware of the “magisterium issue,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s linguistic stab at declaring a truce. Religion and science are compatible (to the extent it even occurs to ordinary people to wonder) because they don’t know much about either, and because they are encouraged in this superstition by dumb priests and ministers, the self-interest and reflexes of many churches, and the at-best tepid curiosity that characterizes their day to day life–whether in relation to politics, religion, world affairs, or national education policy. (And don’t mention vote-grubbing politicians who try to out-right-to-life their way into office by appealing to the worst instincts of NASCAR America. This may be the year that foetuses are declared citizens of the United States at seven months.)
What is the effect of this dumbness, this complacency? Loud, that’s what. Getting attention for your “message” by forcing people to pay attention to hate ads, grotesquery, libelous caricatures of ideas, and repeated falsehoods–all of it communicated in a kind of pidgin that can only be described as Dumbglish: these aren’t tactics that diminish and cheapen the American spirit. This is the language that American culture seems to require to wake it up. It flows like poison soup in the veins of the internet. This is where the American spirit is.

After some thought, I have to concede that maybe the shouting is necessary. Most people don’t pay attention to much of anything–not what politicians say, or what bishops teach, or what Atheists.org billboards shout at them along the highways.

The failure of the culture to inspire has led to the failure of people to be curious and a general acceptance of the status quo in most things–especially religion. Why should people want to know more about anything when they have a thousand bucks in the bank, an iPhone, and a new MacDonalds opening up down the street? Starbucks is for people with jobs.
American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.
AN indirect proof of that is an unbroken succession of wars, thousands of American dead, a broken Middle East, an Arab spring that looks like winter, and nary a protest movement to remind us that man is a moral animal [sic, or lol] who ought to oppose such things. Bishops made noises and a few liberal protestants and Jews occasionally marched. Atheists, as usual, weren’t quite sure what to do because while many hated George W. Bush they hated Islam more and so–like Christopher Hitchens–they backed the wars. They were, in a phrase, paralyzed and morally invisible. No William Sloane Coffin emerged, no John Howard Yoder, no Elie Wiesel. Complacency.
Rather than say Europe isn’t far behind in this, I’m going to say Europe is far ahead. Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.
The Christianity that Kierkegaard tried to resuscitate in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1843) became the Denmark where only 31% of the population believe in God but 82.1% are members of the Evangelical Lutheran (the State) Church.
How can this be? It can be, according to Richard Norman, because religion ”is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected….Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”
It follows as the night the day that Danish religion is not American religion. British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism. This cultural specularity has always been true, as when long ago German Christianity was not Roman Christianity.
HE opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter- argument is that excess has much, much less.
The classical aphorism, spe?de ß?ad???, “make haste slowly” is a good motto for what needs to be done in the conversation between science and religion. It was the motto of the Emperor Augustus who as a military commander deplored rashness. Suetonius says that he would often tell the generals, “Better a safe commander than a bold,” and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”
In the final tally, as long as rashness rules and shouting scores, the atheists worry me at least as much as people who believe in souls. Realizing that he is now a template for what I consider atheist rash, as in red and irritating, consider this of P Z Myers reviewing the conservative philosopher Alvin Plangtinga

I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing.
After a scissors and paste attack on the philosopher punctuated by non sequiturs and hooplah that makes no sense, Myers says simply that it is all “muddled lunacy.” As a matter of fact, I don’t like Plantinga much either. The summary Myers attacks (fortunately for him) appeared as a piece in a religious periodical. But Plantinga deserves much better, even if only because once upon a time academics who despised each other didn’t mistake emotionalism for argument. A vestige of this is that not once in his summary does Plantinga call the proponents of naturalism “stupid.” The legacy of the Dawkins revolution will be to make this completely emotional, unquantifiable term and all of its sisters and cousins and aunts permissible discourse in the defense of science. I know, I know: I have had my lapses in calling screed-writers screed-writers in screeds of my own.
SO let me revert to someone else. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his famous 1997 Natural History article a couple of paragraphs which would have caused his immediate expulsion from the atheist camp as an accommodationist or worse if he had written it in 2007. He died in 2002. With him at the Vatican meeting on NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) in 1984 was Carl Sagan, who had organized the event.

…I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)
Stephen Jay Gould
I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.
Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.
I stop what will be described as a tangent, a screed, a hateful assault, another outburst close to tears at Gould’s words. The year he wrote this article (1997) was also the year of Carl Sagan’s death. Sagan perhaps did more to make science magical than any other scientist of the twentieth century, though his primary celebrity was where it belonged and was most needed: in the United States. Gould commenting on Sagan’s death had this to say: “Carl shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship.”
That is the language we need.
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Published: January 6, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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52 Responses to “Complacency and Excess”

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 Scott 
 January 6, 2012 at 5:50 pm
“Festina Lente” Hasten Slowly is the one I received from my days in college several moons ago. It’s the best way i’ve found to live.
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 Dwight Jones 
 January 6, 2012 at 7:26 pm
The New Atheists are the infantry of humanism. Specialists in living Heller, they shanghaied themselves and are now growing weary of hardtack. Whose words will next be their rum?
Bravo on bringing the ship about.
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Complacency and Excess | saynotoiphone says:
 January 7, 2012 at 8:04 am
[...] this article: Complacency and Excess This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged article, business, christianity, church, [...]
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 steph 
 January 7, 2012 at 10:48 am
“The opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter-argument is that excess has much, much less.”
It couldn’t be clearer. What an excellent motto, and one history has proved to be true.
“[T]he best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”– are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time.”
That’s perfectly true too. It’s a shame about the not-so-goods. We’re all embarrassed to know a few. They don’t deserve their theology degrees…
Ursula Le Guin writes in ‘Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction’: “True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”
I appreciate the quotation of Noam Chomsky, “We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” As Somerset Maugham writes in ‘Cakes and Ale’, “…it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.” The novel is the genre which allows incisive expression of characters with unshackled freedom.
The wisdom of the past enriches the present.
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 Dwight Jones 
 January 7, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Indeed. The atheists face a Sisyphean prospect, as befits them, with their projects to destroy myth. As Twain commented “A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”
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 Stevie 
 January 7, 2012 at 2:57 pm
I was at the debate at the RSA which Caspar mentioned in the article you quote, and can thus personally attest that he had very good reason to worry that:
‘I have a more base reason for wanting to move beyond New Atheism. I’m bored, and I fear my readers are becoming so too.’
It was then that I discovered the intellectual level of the NAs had sunken so far that the NAs believed that asserting that one is an atheist deserves a round of applause. Asserting that one is a NA deserved a standing ovation, and ‘I believe in science’ would have brought down the rafters were it not for the fact that Robert Adam was rather good at designing buildings.
Unfortunately the NA’s language skills did not extend beyond simple declarative sentences, and thus they probably did not even know that they were abnegating reason, much less that they were doing so in one of the great temples of the Enlightenment itself.
Caspar’s hope that the debate might:
‘map out a new, specific, patient and subtle future for the God debate’
was, I fear, doomed at the outset. The vast majority of intelligent people know that they are intelligent; they do not need to shore up their egos by buying books which tell them they are intelligent.
The fact that so many do buy the books reflects the -at the best- intellectual insecurities and -at the worst- intellectual inadequacies of the purchasers. Neither group is capable of providing what Caspar seeks.
Unfortunately their shortcomings pose a rather more important problem than the declining readership of the New Humanist; we do not need people who ‘believe in science’. We need good scientists as well as good historians, and, since neither good scientists nor good historians spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, we need intelligent schoolchildren to conclude that doing science is just as worthwhile a way of spending their lives as doing history.
Unfortunately, if you want to persuade intelligent schoolchildren that science sucks then directing them to PZ Myers’ website is an excellent way of setting about it…
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 steph 
 January 7, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Thanks for that Stevie. I enjoyed your incisive analysis. And so true, “we do not need people who ‘believe in science’. We need good scientists as well as good historians, and, since neither good scientists nor good historians spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, we need intelligent schoolchildren to conclude that doing science is just as worthwhile a way of spending their lives as doing history.” Sorry to quote you back at you, but … :-)
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 Stevie 
 January 11, 2012 at 7:45 pm
steff
Thank you but we need to be cautious here; if we are not careful you and I will be categorised as Joe’s sockpuppets. After all, we share 3 first letters in our names and what better evidence could exist to prove that neither of us do exist? Bearing in mind, of course, that reasoned arguments and logic are not strong point in the NA’s mindset…

 
 steph 
 January 12, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Probably a bit late, alea iacta est. I wasn’t familiar with the sort and didn’t anticipate their imaginations or the weaving of such myths, but the myths, if believed, are believed only by themselves. Life goes on. As Joshua Rosenau wrote yesterday “It’s odd, people are wrong on the internet, but somehow, I can’t work myself up over it. Maybe it’s because they’re just talking in circles and making things up.” Sensible man. He has his feet on the ground.

 
 steph 
 January 13, 2012 at 7:33 pm
You’re right of course Stevie. I should have called myself Hohepa Kahu and posted a profile of George Nepia leading the Rugby All Blacks in a haka before the game.

 
 Dwight Jones 
 January 13, 2012 at 10:29 pm
The haka in the World Cup final was something to see. I think we all went back to the chimpanzee stage and loved doing it.

 
 
 
 skholiast 
 January 12, 2012 at 5:23 pm
I was extremely encouraged by this post. Articulate and apt. There is an element of hyperbole, perhaps, in the characterization of European Christianity’s “not giving damn about anything,” but the same diagnosis was made by Nietzsche, By Dostoevsky, by Baudelaire (“Ennui! …You know him reader! Hypocrite reader, my twin, my brother”). Excess and complacency tipping back and forth into one another seems a close description of the dialectic of our time: boredom tends to secrete excess, as an attempt at self-therapy (the most obvious example of this excess is fear, for excess usually has to excuse itself, and fear is the usual suspect named in these excuses –see here the panic over Islamicism which justifies the indignant gnu), and every excess in turn becomes boring. This is why I am most struck by the perspicuity with which you call the opposite of complacency “Moderation,” a stance with an ancient philosophical pedigree. In the interests of “keeping it brief” I have kept most of my remarks over at my blog. But thank you for this.
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 Dwight Jones 
 January 13, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Joe sed: ” …if Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily.”
It may not be useful to characterize (malls et al ) as such. As a species we once were eagles, and are now learning to live like ants – the malls are happy anthills for families and ‘dreams are thunder, lightning is desire’ venue for teens and earnest house cows.
To denigrate ‘the wasteland’ may be to repeat the nothingness of the NA’s junior relationship with religion – this was tired with Eliot, Camus and Sartre when we were Childe Harold’s puppies – let’s lift up our eyes,
Intellectuals have plenty to contemplate, and it may be best to address issues directly. We don’t always have to grind the same blade, and faith takes many forms.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 13, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Eloquent dear Dwight!
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 17, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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 scotteus 
 July 17, 2012 at 8:48 pm
I second Dwights response, however, there now seem to be too many who wish to see faith as only being a religious manifestation rather than part of a deep seeded desire to understand, to penetrate the more complex aspects of human existence.
Socrates, if we’ve ever needed your measured, undogmatic approach it is now! Time to read “The Aplogy” and “Before And After Socrates” again.
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 davidjohnmills 
 July 18, 2012 at 9:41 am
Wow. There is a a lot here to agree with, and a lot to disagree with. Where to start? I’ll pick one of each. Better to start with the former and finish benignly, I think. :)
From ‘The Poverty (sic) of the New Atheism.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/01/19/3116506.htm
‘….Rather, to be “dis-illusioned” is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one’s existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called “the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth”.’
Don’t share this gloomy prognosis myself. It’s a bit, er, unnecessarily gloomy. Perhaps the writer is speaking personally?
‘In Capital, Marx demonstrated that the advent of capitalism itself had the effect of denuding the world by ripping off the shroud of religion and dissolving the communal and familial ties that bind. But the mechanistic world laid bare by industrial capitalism induced madness among those that prospered from the wealth it generated and among those that found themselves dispossessed of the fruits of their labour.
Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its devotees. Walter Benjamin developed this further, suggesting that “capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement … A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind.”
And yet even the atonement for guilt comes within the purview of capitalism. This religion now has its own acts of penance for one’s economic debauchery in the form of tokenistic charity, delayed gratification and the production of “green” or “fair trade” commodities.
The great irony of capitalism is that its progress has seen the corruption and fragmentation of morality and the decimation of institutional religion, but in their place persists the menagerie of pseudo-moralities and plaintive spiritualities (often in the form of so-called Western Buddhism or what Martin Amis calls “an intensified reverence for the planet”) that somehow sustain, or perhaps lubricate, its global machinations.’
And what’s this? A smooth segue into conflating capitalism with atheism? Surely not?
Sadly, unless one can justify this segue, the bulk of the article is very suspect, IMO.
‘To paraphrase Marx, the abolition of these false moralities and neo-paganisms would constitute the demand for the rediscovery of authentic reason, integral morality and sustainable, virtuous forms of communal life. And here the “New Atheists” fall tragically short.
By failing to pursue the critique of religion into the sanctum of global capitalism itself, by reducing discussion of morality to a vapid form of well-being and personal security, and by failing to advocate alternate forms of virtuous community – all in the name of “reason” – they end up providing the pathologies of capitalism with a veneer of “commonsense” rationality.
However noble the goals of the “New Atheism” may be, armed with nought but an impoverished form of commonsense rationality (of which Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape and the rather unwieldy The Australian Book of Atheism are the most opprobrious examples I’ve yet seen – but more on these books in a later piece) it is simply not up to the task of confronting the idols and evils of our time. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has recognized as much and has thus proposed – though not unproblematically – an alliance between atheism and Catholic Christianity.’
To blame atheism for not tackling the evils of our time is a bit like blaming the London Symphony Orchestra for not tackling Osama Bin Laden. :)
In short, there is nothing ‘lite’ about New atheism, any more than there is anything ‘dim’ about theology. When Dawkins says that it is for him about as important as faeriology, he is correct, in the context in which he meant it, as he is, IMO, in rejecting NOMA.
Regarding agreement, I can understand what irks non-atheists about some of the New Atheism. Not sure how many New Atheists are culpable of the charges laid, not even sure the main protagonists are (did Dawkins actually say that he thought religion was the root of all evil?).
I do agree that the sentiment that ‘accommodating’ liberal (theists) gives cover to extremists is, IMO, unhelpful and mostly incorrect, and I have personally heard this one more than once, on atheist forums, and disagreed, though to be fair even at said forums it was probably a vocal minority saying it.
And, as I’ve said, Dennett’s ‘brights’ was lamentable and embarrassing.
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 Dwight Jones 
 July 18, 2012 at 10:51 am
“Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its devotees.”
Superbly said. Somewhere in there, Henry Ford is one more fallen, anti-Semitic pope, and Detroit his ruined, satanic legacy.
Lest we chart only Caucasian pilgrims, it may be time to review the influence of Confucius over the past millennia, and whether his common sense admonitions of personal responsibility (of all things) might find appreciation, at last, among the white guys.
Somewhere in Asia, the next Karl Marx is likely among us, a kinder, gentler mentor who does not require grand sociological schema to explain anything.
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 Scott 
 July 18, 2012 at 12:01 pm
“Somewhere in Asia, the next Karl Marx is likely among us, a kinder, gentler mentor who does not require grand sociological schema to explain anything.”
Well, if that’s the case lets hope this person is truly kindernot to mention gentler and will refrain from imposing anything upon us in a jackbooted fashion.
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 Dwight Jones 
 July 18, 2012 at 1:04 pm
“Well, if that’s the case lets hope this person is truly kinder not to mention gentler and will refrain from imposing anything upon us in a jackbooted fashion.”
You mean compete with the Pentagon? That’s not the Asian way; in that culture a man’s character has value.
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 Scott 
 July 18, 2012 at 1:35 pm
No Dwight, no competition with the Pentagon, just hoping the person is kinder and gentler. I do think that character is in the person and expands into the culture, provided it is a healthy culture.
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 davidjohnmills 
 July 18, 2012 at 5:44 pm
@ joseph,
I gotta say this, I’m not with this guy Scott Stephens, who wrote the ‘Poverty of New Atheism’ piece. If I were to sum it/him up in one word, I’m afraid that word would have to be ‘floundering’. His problem, it seems to me, is this – what does religion (the supernatural variety) have to offer, as a role, now? And, rather than bite the bullet and admit ‘not a lot’, he has a go at atheism (as if it were to blame) and largely gets it confused with capitalism, or religion with anti-capitalism or whatever. And to cap it all off, he finishes with;
‘In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart has described the original Christian revolution in terms of the stripping bare of the pagan life-world with its pantheon of gods, demigods and spirits who guaranteed the proper order of things, established political authority and provided life with meaning.’
Er, no, the cult of Christianity displaced earlier cults with a slightly different version of superstious beliefs and explanations. This cult spread more than the others (up to now) for a variety of reasons. Which cult was ‘better’ is almost entirely up for grabs, as is the argument as to whether ‘western’ ‘civilization’ flourished because of christinaity or in spite of it (probably a mixture, as ever).
One of the big problems for Christianity is that it has tied itself to a bunch of writings from some ancient, superstitious middle eastern chaps who I have heard described (by one of the most perceptive people I have ever met online, and a devout Catholic) as ‘the Taliban of their day’.
Really, what could those goat-herding blokes have written that we can use (sans clumsy cherry picking, which is possible, I’m sure, even with any set of writings) to address the big issues of today, such as overpopulation, environmental issues, human rights, etc. Not much, IMO, and not surprisingly, since one can hardly blame the writers for not having 20-20 advance hindsight stretching over 2000 years.
As for your article………I would not use the word ‘floundering’……except perhaps to describe the way I feel when I try to understand the nub of what you are saying (repeatedly, here on this website, in various forms). The reason I wouldn’t say YOU were floundering is because I get the impression that you are far too intelligent and ‘properly cynical’ not to be able to handle uncertainty and confusion without casting about for something to cling to.
But, I am still left with this question. Are you (and some others here) really asking for atheists/atheism to be a bit nicer? :)
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 davidjohnmills 
 July 18, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Oh, by the way, although I admire Chomsky a lot, and can go a long way with the idea that literature (as in fiction) can, in many ways, be richer, or as rich as, reason, and that almost everything may be said to boil down to language, and that there is no way, that i can see, to fully and truly escape subjectivity, I have to say I would contend his two statements you quoted.
Anyhows, I have had a bad day at the office and am probably just spoiling for an argument. I am going to go to bed now and count to 10 and remind myself that more comes from agreement than from disagreement, usually, at least in discussions. :)

 
 Dwight Jones 
 July 18, 2012 at 6:17 pm
“But, I am still left with this question. Are you (and some others here) really asking for atheists/atheism to be a bit nicer?”
No, if atheists are ineluctably obsessed with religion; that’s your own cross to bear. For all I care, you might be against women’s make-up, or Rugby League, and how both are a huge waste of money.
My objection is solely that your aggressive non-religion gratuitously terms itself ‘humanism’ for its own aggrandizement. I’d much rather discuss bringing Confucius into humanism than kicking Christ out.

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2012 at 6:54 pm
@Dwight: Sublimely aphoristic. Though as you know, this is not the popular stance to take!

 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 19, 2012 at 2:44 am
@ dwight,
‘My objection is solely that your aggressive non-religion gratuitously terms itself ‘humanism’ for its own aggrandizement.’
I honestly have no idea where you get that idea, but then, it’s not the first time I’m perplexed about what you write.

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2012 at 6:43 pm
@@David:
1. I don’t endorse what I link to. It is the average opinion, not only mine, that new atheism is characterized by not-niceness (that’s what makes it gnu) and I have been in the pincers since (with a few others: you might troll n’ scroll through NO) I suggested that it was strategically suicidal to make antipathy for religion in general the total message of atheism. (Think of saying that science in general is the cure for the world’s ills: we know the good part–maybe we can even be programmed for world peace! Ah, wait: that sounds complicated). That is why my unbelief is way down the list of what I am. I am a humanist.
So I plump for moderation of discourse, even though I know only ten people are listening. The internet makes moderation a quaint custom of the last century.
Carl Sagan was an atheist. Stephen Jay Gould was an atheist. I am an atheist. But the Gnus would probably say, have said, show us your papers. It is this ever-narrowing vision of unbelief that concerns me, and not only me. It is the fact that to criticize atheism, as I have done openly and often, will get you a degree of ridicule usually reserved for a southern Baptist creationist, abortion-hating yahoo. Hoffmann (check it) has become a problem. A faitheist. An accommodationist. The number one frenemy of “secular humanism.” And generally, when things become problems, they are problems in relation to an evolving orthodoxy.
There should be no such thing as atheist orthodoxy, at least not if dogmatism in religion is what you oppose. I am an advocate of the scientific method. The scientific method depends not on certainty but the nagging condition of uncertainty. I regard scientists who retain that uncertainty like Sagan and Gould–and Einstein (all Jews, oh my!)–exemplary. I regard scientists who regard it as a mere posture, a necessary posture in relation to the assumptions of Popperian falsifiability, arrogant and under-trained–and for me, Dawkins showed his true undertraining in The God Delusion. It was a travesty of a book that set into motion a fortunately dwindling “revolution” that is coming (I think) to an end. But harm was done. People are always looking for a messiah; and some thought they had found one.
But this is not a war; it is an “intellectual” conversation; and the new atheist conversation has been leaden-footed, hamfisted and frankly as embarassing as M. O’Hair was in her heyday: this is not the first time atheists have spoiled their chances to take an amorphous anti-church, anti-organized religion demographic and screw it up, making no difference in the long run. Think fishing (but perhaps you haven’t fished.)
2. I won’t comment on your comment about Christianity because to quote the great Durante, “Everybody wants to get into da act.” It looks easy from the outside, I admit. Much harder under the lights.

 
 
 
 steph 
 July 18, 2012 at 7:45 pm
“British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism” and way down in the Pacific, Kiwi atheism is generally unindentified and apatheistic. It doesn’t believe in God but it’s not about pointlessly trying to prove there’s nothing, especially as alot of us grow up not believing. It’s not central to life and is irrelevant considering more pressing issues like the environment, with which we’re united in our concern. Mind you quite alot of Antipodean Christians don’t believe in God either. Religion is rightly seen as a human creation
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 steph 
 July 18, 2012 at 7:49 pm
PS God made the Pacific and his younger brother Fred did the Atlantic. It’s true. Someone told me. I believe him.
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 Reg 
 July 19, 2012 at 1:58 am
Perhaps Don Cupitt has it right: ‘…the Church and the ancient supernatural theology are finished… we need to move on to build a kingdom (sic) theology for our own secular humanist culture (The Last Testament, 8)
 The problem is that that there has been a conservative-turn withim secular humanism in the last few years – climate change deniers, refugees are queue jumpers, resurgence of capitalism etc. ‘God’ might be thought to have died in the 60s, but he (and it’s normally a he!) keeps returning
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 steph 
 July 19, 2012 at 2:43 pm
I’d agree with Don here but as with all good scholarship, humanism is critical, not secular. A secular society is not a society without personal beliefs. What’s wrong with kingdom? I’m not a royalist – it has a lower case ‘k’.

 
 
 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 19, 2012 at 5:27 am
Joseph,
Pardon my harping on, I’m sure it’s possible I’ll be ejected at some stage, given that the word ‘troll’ has been deployed more than once already. I will quite understand if you see my posts that way, and I will not say nasty things about you afterwards. You are entitled to not have your particular brand of confusion, contaminated by the likes of mine. :)
Here’s what I imagine I’m ‘hearing’, in between the actual words, from you and steph and dwight and others: ‘We know god is (probably) dead but we still like having him around’. Fine. Even I like to visit the grave once in a while, put a few flowers there. He wasn’t such a bad old dude, really. He had his moments. Can’t see the point of digging up the corpse and trying to do CPR on it.
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 davidjohnmills 
 July 19, 2012 at 5:50 am
“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.” Carl Sagan 1981
Ok. All is forgiven. If even the Great Carlness himself can get it completely and utterly wrong, I can’t really blame anyone here. :)
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 steph 
 July 19, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Nobody has compelling evidence that all ideas of ‘god’, conveniently termed, maybe for want of a better one, are wrong. We can demonstrate religious creations and stories of God intervening in history depicted in the Bible and Quaran as products of human imagination but we don’t know everything. Sagan got it right here, and he knew about humility. He wasn’t interested in denying people faith.

 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 19, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Yes steph. I know that. I only said that it was incorrect to define an atheist as having certainty or compelling evidence. Oh I don’t doubt there are a few, but they’re not typical. Even Dawkins (spits) would say that he feels only that there is probably no God.

 
 steph 
 July 19, 2012 at 8:06 pm
I’m so glad you know that. You missed the point. Do you think Carl Sagan doesn’t know too? We also know about Dawkins and his atheist slogan and other atheist slogans. We have seen it and talked about it here. Perhaps you ought to read Joe’s posts.http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/atheist-nation-celbrates-christmas/
 and these http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/atheisms-little-idea-2/
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/the-big-idea-2/

 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 20, 2012 at 3:07 am
I’m confused. What point am i missing?
To repeat, that is not an accurate description of atheism, any more than ‘fundie’ is an accurate description of ‘Christian’.

 
 steph 
 July 20, 2012 at 11:00 am
It is a perfectly accurate definition of atheism. It is what atheism is. There are variations of atheism which could be defined as ‘unidentified atheism’ ‘soft-shell atheism’, ‘not central to life atheism’, ‘apatheism’, ‘silent atheism in which like many religious people, personal belief is personal’ and ‘agnostic atheism’ for example. Ideas evolve and language evolves and is used in different ways. There is no law, except in a fundamentist’s concept of language and logic, which restricts ideas from variation. And Carl Sagan’s definition is a strict definition and Carl Sagan demonstrated humility. That is the point. He wasn’t interested in denying people faith or ridiculing and misrepresenting religious people and religion, or eliminating religion from society – he was more interested in sharing ideas.

 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 20, 2012 at 7:16 pm
Steph,
Unfortunately, not for the firstr time, I have to say I fundamentallly disagree with you on something. I have spent a lot of time during the last few yesrs on atheist forums, getting to know literally hundreds of actual athesists. Carl Sagan was not correct. I think we will have to agree to disagree.

 
 steph 
 July 20, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Atheism isn’t just one thing and is defined according to perspective. It certainly has many variations and certainly isn’t the same as the atheism of greater men like Shelley and varies considerably around the world. Sagan wasn’t wrong. People define it according to their perspective. Atheisms are not the same as Australia, or America or Canada, or New Zealand where it’s more personal and not a personal definition. And atheists who spend time on internet forums aren’t the same as each other or atheists who would never bother with such a thing. Carl’s point is about humility and not denying people faith. While I had guessed you’ve spent years on atheist forums, it actually doesn’t matter that you don’t know of any atheists who fit his definition.

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 20, 2012 at 8:58 pm
“Carl Sagan was not correct.” So now we are choosing our science? That is quite a claim. I frankly don’t know any scientists who given the standard parameters of certainty make it. May I know the compelling evidence please? Your reply alas must exclude any reference to falisifiable gods.

 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 24, 2012 at 4:04 am
There appears to be some misunderstanding. I’m not making the claim that there is compelling evidence against god (there isn’t), or that the concept is falsifiable (it isn’t), or that there is certainty, except among a small section of atheist ‘fundies’, perhaps.
What I’m saying is that to define an atheist as someone who would make those claims is to mistakenly misrepresent atheism.
And why this is important is because if one is going to have issues or objections to something, one should at least try to understand it as accurately as possible.

 
 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2012 at 3:58 pm
@David, I meant “troll” as a verb. Go through the list of articles to see how often this topic has come up in the last three years.
Reply

 davidjohnmills 
 July 19, 2012 at 6:25 pm
@ Joseph,
Ah, ok. My mistake. Even as a verb, it is given a different meaning on some forums i have been on. :)

 
 
 
 Scott 
 July 19, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Thank God I’m Agnostic?
Reply
 
 Dwight Jones 
 July 20, 2012 at 11:24 am
If one’s religious tenets can fairly be said to be a personal and private matter for many, or most people, would that give you any insight into why some atheist initiatives are seen as boorish and obnoxious?
Reply

 steph 
 July 20, 2012 at 11:33 am
Yes, and to embrace a slightly wider view, if one’s philosophical perspectives and beliefs on life, religious or not, are a personal and private matter for many or most people, it does provide insight into why some atheists’ (and some fundamentalists’) initiatives are seen as boorish, obnoxious, and uninformed.
Reply
 
 davidjohnmills 
 July 20, 2012 at 7:31 pm
Yes Dwight (to butt in here) I do. I do see that anyone who deals with their religious beliefs as a personal and private matter will see certain atheist initiatives as boorish and obnoxious.
Reply

 davidjohnmills 
 July 20, 2012 at 7:35 pm
I might add that the vast majority of atheists have very few problems with religion as a personal and private matter, and even then, the majority of the minority who take a different view have issues with theism, not individual theists. You may find this hard to believe, but it is an important distinction, and the case.

 
 steph 
 July 20, 2012 at 7:49 pm
Nobody denied it. Atheism isn’t just one thing. It certainly has many variations and certainly isn’t the same as the atheism of greater men like Shelley. Sagan wasn’t wrong. People define it according to their perspective. Atheisms are not the same as Australia, or America or Canada, or New Zealand where it’s more personal and not a personal definition. That was my point above, and Carl’s point is about humility and not denying people faith. I had guessed you’ve spent years on atheist forums. It shows. It actually doesn’t matter that you don’t know of any atheists who fit his definition.

 
 
 
 Scott 
 July 20, 2012 at 11:58 am
I think that while it is important to define terms and have some general agreement, eventually we have to leave the realm of defining those terms and get on to to ideas part.
Reply

 davidjohnmills 
 July 24, 2012 at 5:54 am
Fair point. Indeed, I suspect that there is much we could be discussing, and even agreeing on, or if not agreeing then disagreeing on more fruitfully. :)
I’m sure we all here would like to see a fairer, more egalitarian, less polluted planet, where humans (and indeed other species) are as comfortable and happy as is reasonably possible.
Reply
 
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

So, Atheism is Just a Belief?
by rjosephhoffmann

ELL, what did you think it was?  Let me guess.  You thought it was about not believing–and naturally not believing something is the opposite of belief.  And since the opposite of belief is fact, well there we are.
Of course atheism is just a belief.  One of my favourite websites says it best:

Strictly speaking, atheism is an indefensible position, just as theism is indefensible, for both are systems of belief and neither proposition has been (or is likely to be) proven anytime soon.
The rational position for the non-believer to take is to say that there is almost certainly no god, because no credible evidence exists to support the claim that god exists. This is a stronger position than agnosticism, which holds belief and non-belief on an equal footing.
So the debate between atheism is about the evidence and not about the status of propositions.  Oh, and what beliefs are in relation to personal identity.
Which question brings me to a recent post by Joshua Rosenau at his website– that often touches on some really interesting stuff.  This interesting stuff is directed against a not very interesting notion by Ophelia Benson that “beliefs are not really a part of identity and should not be treated as though they are. “
Rosenau says that

 What’s especially odd about Benson’s claim is that New Atheism is all about belief. The defining difference between New Atheism and other sorts of atheism is that the gnus don’t just want to assert their own belief that there is no god (or their lack of belief that there is a god, depending). They want to assert a belief that other people’s belief in god(s) is dangerous ipso facto. When folks say that belief is only bad if it leads people to do bad things, they reply by emphasizing just how important belief is in shaping personal identity, and arguing that belief matters on its own.
Of course, this has to be true if you are going argue, for example, that bad beliefs cause people to do bad things, and the Gnus think that this correlation goes a long way in explaining why Muslims behave irrationally and why fundamentalist Christians are personally annoying and politically dangerous.

Atheists having their identity revoked in unbaptism: Fun!
Systematized bad beliefs, in the form of doctrine, are the worst because a fully constructed Catholic, or Muslim, will buy wholesale what his faith sells on the subject of sexual morality, suicide bombings, abortion, and who owns Palestine.  When someone says he’s a Catholic he’s making an identity claim, code for any number of agendas stock full of beliefs.  When someone says she’s a good Muslim, same thing.  There are no category errors here, unless you swallow the giddy notion that atheism is not a belief but a non-identity-imposing non-strait-jacketing opinion about belief.
I want to say that Rosenau’s point is elementary, in the sense that it’s fundamental to understanding that religion is identity-shaping.  Is the reason for this sly turn away from seeing belief as identity-forming purposeful among the Gnus?  Maybe it’s a slip of the keyboard: if so there is still time to back away from this preposterous claim.  But if it’s meant as a serious suggestion, somebody’s got some explaining to do.
Isn’t it true that Gnus have a catechism in the making and thus, you should pardon the expression, a fetal identity of their own?  Even though it may be short of the intellectual range of the Catholic Church or the Torah, at least their movement is beginning to resemble the bylaws of a local Masonic Temple. Every movement has to start somewhere.
More important for future development it has in common with these other systems the basic identity-shaping construct that all religions start with: We’re right. You’re wrong.
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Published: January 11, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Butterflies and Wheels : Catholic Church : humanism : Jason Rosenau : Machines Like Us : new atheism : Ophelia Benson : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
35 Responses to “So, Atheism is Just a Belief?”

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 steph 
 January 11, 2012 at 4:17 pm
Very good post. Belief is central to religious and social identity as demonstrated by a large field of anthropological and sociological study. This field of research describes such things as Christian nominalism, where apparently non religious people self identify as ‘Christian’ for social reasons rather than religious belief. This field of research describes alot more interesting phenomena as well to do with belief and identity.
Reply
 
 Cuttlefish 
 January 11, 2012 at 5:07 pm
One word: privative.
The very notion that the godless argue among themselves about the definition of atheism, without splitting into recognized positively-defined groups (“splitters!”) is a big hint that, while atheism is a belief category, it is the privative “none of the above” category that remains once all the belief categories have been spoken for. (I know atheists who disagree with my insistence on the privative definition; fortunately, they help to illustrate my point.)
I will agree wholeheartedly with the “We’re right. You’re wrong” observation, but of course while that may be necessary for religion, it is not sufficient. Sports fans know that their team is superior to all others, and while one may follow the Toledo Mudhens “religiously”, the metaphor is, well, a metaphor. PC vs Mac, Ford vs Chevy, Libertarianism vs reality, there are any number of “we’re right; you’re wrong” relationships that are not religious (although I would say they fill a great many of the functional properties of religion). Ingroup-outgroup bias is more basic than religion, although religion may have raised it to an art form.
Reply
 
So, Atheism is Just a Belief? « The New Oxonian | churchoutreachministry.net says:
 January 11, 2012 at 7:13 pm
[...] Read Full Article- Click Here Christian Spirituality Headlines Excerpts from Churchoutreachministry.net This entry was posted [...]
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 Stevie 
 January 11, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Ok, so it’s one of your favourite websites, but I have to say that my heart sank to my stylish yet affordable boots, sorry, channelling Buffy there, to my Nicole Farhi’s exceedingly stylish, but definitely expensive, boots when I read:
‘We seek out those who express views that are controversial’
Them and a billion other websites, mutters my brain; people desperate for traffic hoping that controversy will find readers flocking.
But it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe…
Reply
 
 dwomble 
 January 11, 2012 at 10:00 pm
Every atheist I’ve spoken to accepts that it is impossible to definitively prove there is no god (perhaps one or two nutjobs aside). However to claim that since atheism is a belief it is on an equal footing with theism is a deliberately logical misdirection.
The default position in regards to any proposition is unbelief. c.f.Russel’s Cosmic Teapot. Thus in the absence of evidence atheism is the logical belief and theism the illogical one. The two are not equal.
Furthermore as humans we believe all kinds of things. How central those beliefs are to our identities varies enormously. For some no doubt atheism is at the heart of their identity. For others it matters little.
Categorizing, labeling and grouping things is a human practice that is not a reflection of the world around us and which, if not very carefully managed, serves us poorly.
Finally, regarding good people and bad things you crossed the correlation/causation streams equating the two. As is so often stated, causation and correlation are not the same thing. To cross and mix them leads to a misrepresentation.
Reply

 steph 
 January 12, 2012 at 4:47 pm
It is a logical analysis that claims theism and atheism are indefensible philosophical positions. Belief is central to religious, non religious and social identity. Anthropological and sociological research has shown that religious beliefs are far less salient than religious belonging. Religious identifications can be shown to complement other social and emotional experiences of ‘belongings’ in the same way that atheist identifications can be shown to complement social and emotional experiences of ‘belongings’. Atheism and theism are both beliefs to which identity is central and neither philosophical position is defensible, so beliefs and apologetic attempt to defend them, are often less prominent.
Reply

 Steersman 
 January 13, 2012 at 11:33 pm
Yes, but do not beliefs come with different measures or estimates of probability? Surely the belief that “nature is subject to law” has a little more evidence going for it than the belief that either an anthropomorphic “Allah” or “Jehovah” or “Zeus” is behind the smoke and mirrors? Although the pantheistic or panentheistic or metaphorical god of the physicists, in Richard Dawkins’ phrasing, seems to be an entirely different kettle of fish.
As Carl Sagan put it:
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. [Broca’s Brain; pg xii]
In addition and relative to the above, it seems to me that “belonging” should not be considered the sole criterion of value as otherwise all groups are on the same footing. Secular humanists no better than fascists? Why join or support one rather than the other?

 
 dwomble 
 January 14, 2012 at 1:57 am
Two questions.
I’d like to read further on the logical indefensibility of atheism (specifically the proposition that it is not reasonable to believe in an entity for which there is no evidence). I’d also like to understand how both a proposition and its converse can be indefensible positions. If neither is defensible surely there must be a logical error.
Secondly you say that “atheism and theism are both beliefs to which identity is central” could you provide your evidence of this? While I recognize that experience isn’t evidence this does not fit my experience so I’m interested to see the evidence.

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 14, 2012 at 6:39 am
Try Felicity McCutcheon, Religion within the Limits of Language Alone. I don’t know how much philosophy you know, but don’t be misled by the use of the word “indefensible.” It only applies in the strict sense to propositions, and all kinds of statements can be put into propositional form. “God does not exist” is not convertible with “There is no God.” “I believe that there is no God” is an evaluation; it can refer to someone’s assessment of an assertion, or of the evidence of the assertion or it may be a statement about the epistemological status of statements of belief (“I do not believe that God exists in spite of evidence that he does exist” and its contrary). A proposition is indefeasible (lit. cannot be defeated) when the evidence for or against it is inconclusive. Read Robert Audi’s superb discussion of indefeasible justification in his Epistemology. A classical theologian might argue that the existence of God is known a priori and thus a “truth of reason” that would trump all evidence to the contrary. But most philosophers would agree that there are no such a priori truths (not even “I exist”) and so “There is a God” (theism) and “There is no God” (atheism) have the same epistemological status and are indefeasible. That does not mean that they are not vulnerable to a variety of skeptical arguments, because even certain logical truths can be defeated by plausible skeptical arguments.
Second: All identity that is not organically (biologically) constructed is socially or psychologically constructed. Religion is a social construction–Freud and his immediate followers thought, an outcropping and projection of infantile need–that provides both individual and group identity. I do have to ask why you would want to suggest (imply) that religion and its expressions in behavior, thought, and social relationships is not a part of identity construction because the evidence seems overwhelming. I’d be much more interested in reading a convincing denial of this. The debatable point is whether the identity is positive pr negative at either individual or social levels. But you can hardly measure that or discuss it if you deny it its role.

 
 steph 
 January 14, 2012 at 11:21 am
Some of the papers on this website might be helpful http://www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/guidingpapers.asp
 There is a whole new interdisciplinary approach into the study of religious identity, belief and practise, and Kent, Sheffield and other universities are leading this field. Anthropologist Abby Day’s book Believing in Belonging, investigates belief and social identity in the modern world. It provides evidence that identity is central to religious belonging and religious doctrine and ritual pale in importance.http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199577873.do

 
 dwomble 
 January 14, 2012 at 12:57 pm
When it comes to philosophy I’m absolutely a layman and far too much of a pragmatist to be a philosopher though I’ve read a little. And I’ll be quite honest. If when you say “God” you mean things like “‘God’ cannot be understood as referring to a metaphysical being who may or may not exist” which from what I can gather is the point of the book (which at $100 is beyond my price range and looks like it will require a vast amount of pre-reading for me to fully appreciate), then your complaint with the new atheists becomes obvious.
Such a definition of God in no way relates to what the overwhelming majority of people mean by God. The majority of people are endeavoring to come to a (partially) rational understanding of the world around them. When the deep analysis of language and philosophy indicates that one can not have any reasoned opinion on either the existence or non-existence of an important being that philosophy becomes useless to practical understanding. The “new Atheists” are about practical understanding. They’re for the layman. Of course their purposes and agenda will be meaningless/irrelevant to you because you’re not even talking about the same subject.
For this conversation, in simple terms, I read Steph’s claim to be ~A && ~~A (NOT god exists AND NOT god does not exist). This is a logical error. From what you said it seems more that she was saying that we cannot defend the proposition that god exists and we also cannot defend the proposition that god does not exist. I take it therefore that we cannot reach any logical (or philosophical?) conclusion in regards to god’s existence. Therefore one must look for evidence and in the absence of evidence for something the default position is non-existence. This, in my admittedly simplistic view, makes atheism a logical and reasonable conclusion.
Regarding identity I was not suggesting that theism/atheism was part of identity. That much is obvious. What I question is whether it is, for all people, central to identity as Steph has repeatedly asserted.
If I may respond to Steph’s followup at the same time. Regarding identity being central to religious belonging and religious belief being central to identity. The two are not necessarily commutative. I’m asking, and you were speaking, about the latter not the former.
Regarding identity I was not suggesting that theism/atheism was part of identity. That much is obvious. What I question is whether it is, for all people, central to identity as Steph has repeatedly asserted.

 
 steph 
 January 14, 2012 at 9:26 pm
I’m a bit worried this is splitting hairs, but I haven’t repeatedly asserted that “theism/ahtiesm” is central to the identity of ‘all people’ and I apologise if you thought that was what I implied. It’s never been central to my identity and I can’t pin myself down from one day to the next. What I tried to say was that these interdisciplinary researchers I linked to, have shown that doctrine and ritual pale in importance beside identity and community, and that choices of religious or non religious identifications can be shown to complement other social and emotional belongings. Results vary geographically with different cultural, political and social environments. For example, Abby Day, concludes that “many people who self-identified as ‘Christian’ on the UK 2001 census – and will likely again in 2011 – may have been Christain nominalists” (p. 174). That is, in certain social contexts these people identified as Christian without faith in God, Jesus, or Christian doctrine, but being ‘Christian’ was central to their identity. (Believing in Belonging was published in 2011 but must have gone to press too early for the census results to be released)
I don’t know what you mean by “~A && ~~A (NOT god exists AND NOT god does not exist).”

 
 dwomble 
 January 15, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Perhaps I misunderstood your statements. I agree that social belonging is an important constituent to what and why we believe things. I took you to be stating it the other way around.
Given your later statements my question about the logic of ~A && ~~A are irrelevant.
In essence your latest clarifications entirely addressed my earlier questions/criticisms and I think we are very much in agreement.

 
 steph 
 January 16, 2012 at 4:00 pm
… or rather social belonging and identity are more important for many people than believing, religious doctrine and ritual. And ‘performative’ ritual is a consequence of identity and social belonging when belief is not present, or agnostic.

 
 Steersman 
 January 18, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Steph,
Since you seem to be belaboring somewhat the issue of “social belonging and identity” and have not responded to my questions and comments on the topic, I hope you’ll forgive, and Dr. Hoffmann excuse, my further observations. Specifically, the following is from Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, the Foreword to which was written, as you probably know, by Dr. Hoffman who gave a strong commendation to the book and, presumably, to the scholarship that it was based on:
The pragmatic suggestion, that we had better teach the Christian religion whether it is true or not, because people will be less criminal if they believe it, is disgusting and degrading … and it is a natural consequence of the fundamental religious attitude that comfort and security must always prevail over rational inquiry. [Robinson; pg 161]
Really think that we are totally lost – as individuals and as societies – if we go very far down the path of putting such “comfort and security” – aka “social belonging and identity” ahead of “rational inquiry”; one might reasonably argue that whatever we have of the former is very much a direct consequence of the latter.
Also, along the same line, Warraq quotes T.H. Huxley as follows:
The truth is that the pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever made, has done endless mischief; with impartial malignity it has proved a curse, alike to those who have made and those who have accepted it; and its most baneful shape is book infallibility. …. Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry and cruelty have accompanied it. It lies at the root of the deep-seated, sometimes disguised, but never absent, antagonism of all the varieties of ecclesiasticism to the freedom of thought and to the spirit of scientific investigation. For those who look upon ignorance as one of the chief sources of evil; and hold veracity, not merely in act, but in thought, to be the one condition of true progress, whether moral or intellectual, it is clear that the biblical idol must go the way of all other idols. Of infallibility, in all shapes, lay or clerical, it its needful to iterate with more than Catonic pertinacity, Delenda est. [pg 104]

 
 steph 
 January 18, 2012 at 10:48 pm
I did not put social belonging and identity ahead of rational inquiry. They’re two quite different discussions. I didn’t address the latter specifically. I was addressing anthropological research of contemporary religious identification, not the historical critical study of religions and ideas. In fact it is with the critical spirit of rational inquiry that these anthropological studies are undertaken. I did not suggest social belonging and identity was either good or bad. However when identity is more important than doctrine and ritual, it’s far from saying anything like ‘religion is true’. And as both atheism and theism are indefensible philosophical ideas, rational inquiry will never prove either position.
Apologies for belabouring. Was endeavouring to clarify.

 
 steph 
 January 19, 2012 at 3:33 pm
I’m sorry for being laborious. I was just trying to clarify my original comment for dwomble. I did not put social belonging and identity ahead of rational inquiry. I didn’t address the latter specifically. I was addressing anthropological research of contemporary religious identification, which is not about teaching religion as true. In fact it is with the critical spirit of rational inquiry that these anthropological studies are undertaken. I did not suggest social belonging and identity was either good or bad. However when identity is more important than doctrine and ritual, it’s moved a long way beyond teaching anything like ‘religion is true’. The historical critical study of religions and ideas, and their evolution, should most definitely be included in public education. I have always advocated that. Rational inquiry may not prove or disprove two indefensible philosophical ideas, atheism and theism, but the critical historical study of religions will enable people to understand the historical and social contexts behind religious traditions, the inspirations for storytelling and ancient quests for meaning with the evolution of doctrines and beliefs, such as the biblical God figure, creation myths and so on. The historical critical study of religions will help future generations understand anachronisms of religious beliefs and make new advances in knowledge through critical rational inquiry.

 
 steph 
 January 19, 2012 at 4:31 pm
oops sorry Steerman. My response to you: I’ve posted two comments accidentally. The first didn’t show up on my notebook so I rewrote it later at my laptop… now I really have belaboured. Never mind. All in celebration of the splitting of hairs. :-)

 
 Steersman 
 January 19, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Steph,
No problemo – but sorry myself; didn’t mean to give you a hard time over the focus of several of your comments. :-)
Just that it seemed that Dr. Hoffmann’s own focus was a question of the consequences of various “bad beliefs” and their relation to “identity claims”, a focus that I think should be sharpened and intensified:
Systematized bad beliefs, in the form of doctrine, are the worst because a fully constructed Catholic, or Muslim, will buy wholesale what his faith sells on the subject of sexual morality, suicide bombings, abortion, and who owns Palestine. When someone says he’s a Catholic he’s making an identity claim, code for any number of agendas stock full of beliefs.
While I will certainly agree with you that “anthropological and sociological research” has an important role to play, as will the “critical historical study of religions” – for example Why I Am Not a Muslim, and as will a greater understanding of mythology in general – it is truly remarkable how quickly the religious will fold their tents and steal off in to the night whenever one suggests some similarities with their current beliefs and ancient ones from other religions, it still seems that the larger encompassing and socially problematic issue is summarized by this from Mark Twain:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
The problem, the trouble, caused by those beliefs and the identity claims they underwrite is that they can frequently turn out to be decidedly pathological, although that tends to be something we’re all susceptible to – part of the human if not biological condition, a case of “my ‘ism’, right or wrong”. My point has generally been that such “isms” are not intrinsically wrong, only that they frequently become so when they become synonymous with group-think; when they lose sight of the fact that the underlying premises are, to varying extents, contingent and hypothetical; when people “buy the beliefs wholesale” without at least kicking the tires and checking under the hood.
And unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of problematic consequences of those pathologies – some recent examples described here, here and here, the last seeming to shade almost into apostasy and which may even necessitate Dr. Coyne rescinding Dr. Hoffmann’s “Accommodationist of the Year” award. But in any case, it seems we should be focusing on those actual or potential consequences and taking steps to attenuate or forestall them – political action certainly informed by academic studies but not academic studies in isolation – as that wicket is likely to get a lot stickier before the game is over.

 
 
 Steersman 
 January 15, 2012 at 4:05 am
dwomble,
Thus in the absence of evidence atheism is the logical belief and theism the illogical one. The two are not equal.
Certainly agree that they are not equal, although it seems more appropriate to argue that atheism is the more logical and theism the less logical belief – at least on the basis of probabilistic reasoning which I note the Wikipedia article describes as a kind of “non-demonstrative reasoning” and akin to “defeasible reasoning.”
But while I don’t claim to have a particularly good handle on either of those in a formal sense it seems to me that the former is relatively straightforward in its broad outlines. And in the case of atheism versus theism the facts of the matter – or at least some salient ones – on which the probabilistic reasoning can proceed are, in words from one of Dr. Hoffmann’s favorite websites, that:
Throughout history human beings have believed in gods—thousands of them. And just as past cultures—many great and lasting civilizations—have all but slipped from our memory, so have the gods they worshiped.
And given the facts that those literally thousands of other anthropomorphic gods have bitten the dust, and that many of those have shown a great many similarities with the current crop of the same type, it seems entirely logical to infer that it is much more probable that the latter derive from the same sources as the former, i.e. the human psyche, rather than from some independent existence in some supernatural realm. Although, of course, that still leaves open, does not address, the quite reasonable possibility, among several, that such gods provide some entirely useful and profound metaphors to understand that psyche.
Reply

 dwomble 
 January 15, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Agreed. Ah the limits of language and the limits of short blog responses.

 
 
 steph 
 January 22, 2012 at 11:23 pm
Steersman, I’ve lost you. I think it’s important to distinguish between different social and geographical contexts when identity claims are made, and recognise how they are differently held and even understood by others in these contexts. It’s also relevant that in some contexts for example, a person may identify with some religious faith, but as it doesn’t affect his daily life, it’s an entirely personal and private matter, declared only on a census form. And there is also a correspondence between biblical literacy, education and moderate religious views and affiliations. I don’t think that people should be robbed of the freedom to hold religious identities when it does not infringe upon the freedoms of others. Harris wrote in that ‘end of’ book “The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism”. He’s wrong. Religious ‘moderates’, who are educated and biblically literate, are better equipped than most atheists, and have just as much if not more, incentive to critique fundamentalisms and biblical literalism. And they do, in the media, in education, on facebook and blogs… That’s why improved education on a global scale is so fundamentally important to the future. Fundamentalisms would be educated out of existence and we’d be left with critical minds and ideas.
Reply
 
 
 artikcat 
 January 12, 2012 at 8:37 am
I thought TimTebow just showed, irrefutably, God exists, well at least listens, by averaging 31.6./throw. John 3;16 he paints in his eyelids(?)(not sure).The Broncos also lost 31-6.
Reply
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 12, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I think that more needs to be said about the nature of the debate. Sometimes I think that the “new” atheists are the bastard stepchildren of Bertrand Russell, though instead of using science and philosophy to correct the implied metaphysics of our language, the “new” atheists want to use science and philosophy to coerce or cajole people into believing what’s politically acceptable to them.
Reply
 
 subayaitori 
 January 14, 2012 at 7:08 am
I usually say that Atheism is not a belief system. That is, there is no positive claim within atheism which could lend to any particular system of belief.
However, atheists need to be careful, especially those who say atheism is not a *belief (singular). In the past I too made the mistake of claiming atheism is not a “belief” in an of itself, but I have come to see that this reasoning is wrong.
Atheism appears to be a belief in the non-existence of a God (and or gods), the rejection of theism, and the proposition that God and or gods do not exist.
Atheism is, in fact, the Formal belief that there are no gods.
Reply

 Dan Gillson 
 January 15, 2012 at 10:41 pm
Atheism: Do You Believe It?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 16, 2012 at 3:38 am
Astronomy: Do you see it?

 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 17, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Gastronomy: Did You Eat It?

 
 
 Steersman 
 January 16, 2012 at 3:47 am
Atheism appears to be a belief in the non-existence of a God (and or gods), the rejection of theism, and the proposition that God and or gods do not exist.
Definitely some problematic nuances there in the various definitions in play and used by various groups of people; tends to cause everyone to ride off madly in all directions – not too productive. But the central and most relevant one for believe seems to be this:
v.intr. 1. To have firm faith, especially religious faith.
And, in turn, faith is defined as:
Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
And that issue of logical proof seems to be precisely what Dr. Hoffmann is getting at with his discussion of indefeasible. And, at least to the extent that some atheists insist that there is no god, that really seems to put such atheists and religious fundamentalists in the same boat – dogmatism also makes for strange bedfellows. And espousing their own idiosyncratic religions, although in the case of atheists that would be based on the somewhat metaphorical definition of religion as:
A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Which tends, I think, to cause the more reflective “atheists” – including, somewhat surprisingly, Richard Dawkins – to hedge their bets somewhat and couch their statements in terms of probability – an apparently far more defeasible, and tenable, position. Although the sticky part of that wicket seems to be that the concept and use of probability is based on multiple previous trials – as in the “calculation” of probabilities for the roll of dice. Which of course is not feasible with the universe and any priors which may or may not include a “god” of one sort or another. Seems that the most that the concept of probability can do is, based on the historical record, to deprecate or reduce the possibility of an anthropomorphic god. But for metaphorical or panentheistic interpretations or concepts I think that all bets are off.
Reply

 dwomble 
 January 18, 2012 at 3:28 pm

at least to the extent that some atheists insist that there is no god, that really seems to put such atheists and religious fundamentalists in the same boat
The reality is that few atheists are absolute in their lack of belief in god. Rather their lack of belief is contingent on there being no evidence of god’s existence. For many, given how much and for how long people have searched for such evidence its lack at this point constitutes an effective (though not absolute) certitude that there is no god.
In normal conversation many atheists will state simply that there is no god without every time making the disclaimer of the subtlety of their position. Conflating the effective certainty of atheists with the absolute certainty of many religious people due to lack of such disclaimers is a mistake.

 
 Steersman 
 January 18, 2012 at 4:42 pm
dwomble said,
Conflating the effective certainty of atheists with the absolute certainty of many religious people due to lack of such disclaimers is a mistake.
Yes, I’ll certainly agree that that conflation is a mistake, although I don’t see that I was making it as I noted the existence of some “reflective atheists” who were less than certain in their assertions.
However, I have also run across more than a few (some) atheists – mostly of the “gnu” variety – who were and are just as dogmatic as religious fundamentalists in asserting the non-existence of all and every conceivable and inconceivable variety of god. Which leads a good many of them to be rather obstinate – to say the least – in rejecting anything that smacks of “accommodationism”, anything that gives the least hint of seeing value in metaphorical interpretations or anything suggestive of the “pantheistic god of the physicists”. Which really looks to me like not being terribly conducive to the necessary dialog with the more rational theists and deists; generally bad karma I think and something to be deprecated at every opportunity.

 
 dwomble 
 January 18, 2012 at 5:43 pm
I think you may be mis-implying the question being answered by the assertion that there is no god. Quite commonly when atheists make such a statement it is not in response to a direct question but rather as part of a narrative or dialogue and the details of such matter a lot.
For example I see it as reasonable to state quite categorically that the evangelical christian god does not exist. That god is a contradiction that logically cannot exist.
Similarly the answer to the question “Are you sure god doesn’t exist?” is often “Yes” rather than “No however I consider the likelihood that god exists to be so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering”.
Could you explain to me what this necessary dialogue is? I was not aware there was a necessary dialogue.

 
 Steersman 
 January 20, 2012 at 2:43 am
dwomble,
That god is a contradiction that logically cannot exist.
While I would agree that that is probably true for the “evangelical Christian god”, in general – for all gods – it really seems to depend crucially on the premises and rules of one’s system of logic.
For example, the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity together essentially entail a contradiction, though not a totally crippling one, which is a consequence of our limited understanding, not of reality itself – presumably. Similarly, I will quite readily agree that there is a whole raft of contradictions associated with anthropomorphic gods, but that hardly means that every conception of god must of necessity exhibit the same flaws.
… often “Yes” rather than “No however I consider the likelihood that god exists to be so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering”.
“Aye, there’s the rub”: “likelihood”. Even though the answer is technically the first one, it is the second one which is in play which tends to be problematic as it closes out any other possibilities. Again, as per my previous statements, given the historical evidence, anthropomorphic gods seem pretty much of a long shot of “vanishingly small” odds. But unreasonable, I think, to conclude on that basis that all conceptions must be and are handicapped by the same improbabilities.
Could you explain to me what this necessary dialogue is?
Not exactly my idea about the dialog. You may have seen an article sometime back about the philosopher of religion Keith Parsons who called it quits arguing in the process that the “case for theism” is a fraud, and on which there was a letter which argued that:
The question is whether or not god-talk is a useful — or even tolerable — way of framing what Tillich called our “ultimate concerns.” Tillich’s end-run definition was really a Trojan Horse. Once “God” has been defined as our ultimate concerns, the game is over.
Which I think is an eminently sensible perspective as I expect that all of our “ultimate concerns” are pretty much the same, except framed in different and quite idiosyncratic terms. While a complete definition of those is and should be open to debate, it seems that many of the salient features are easily identifiable. For example, most of the religious seem to grab onto – frequently with an unseemly desperation, although one can sympathize – the wan hope or promise of immortality. But even many of the secular seem to have similar hopes, although the horses they’re betting on are the less ethereal biophysics or quantum computers – the technological singularity.
Utopias – really, our “ultimate concerns”, I think – have certainly had their bad press and they have some problematic devils in their implementation details. But unless the dialog on them can be extended and developed the prognosis for humanity does not appear especially promising.

 
 
 
 Scott 
 January 14, 2012 at 1:09 pm
I love splitting-hairs, it’s what makes Philosophy fun, if it can ever be fun.
 It is also the best way to make what one call call progress, but not without some dangers.
Reply

 Mark Fournier 
 January 22, 2012 at 1:33 am
And yet, when you put it that way, I’m suddenly struck by a similarity of the process to Zeno’s Paradox, where the path of the tortoise is divided into smaller and smaller halves, providing the illusion that the tortoise never reaches its destination. The hair splitting sometimes seems to serve the same purpose–to prevent us from ever reaching a conclusion, or at least of providing the illusion that you cannot reach a conclusion.
But the answer to Zeno’s paradox was calculus; the tortoise still moves, and it still reaches its destination. The God of the ancient Hebrews was not the God of Jesus, who was not the God of the early church, who was not the God of Luther, who was not the God of the Deists, who was not the God of Fundamentalist Christians, and so on and on and on. All the while, God because thinner and weaker, less necessary and more remote. All of these definitions of God are different, they all end up in the trash, and what I wonder is why we keep using the same word for so many different things when there seem to be as many Gods as believers.
Yet the tortoise still moves, and it still reaches its destination. And I think we all know where that destination lies.
Reply
 
 

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The Bloody, Awful, Horrible Catholic Church
by rjosephhoffmann

In 1961 Robert Frost stammered through part of a poem he couldn’t quite read on a snowy and bitterly cold Washington day.
The occasion was the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected president of the United States. Choosing Frost, then in his eighties,  to lend dignity to a ceremony so prosaic  it can only be compared to buying stamps, was a stroke of genius–a tribute to Kennedy’s New England roots and the liberal protestant tradition that went with it.  Even Presbyterian schoolteachers in Raleigh loved his poetry.

Frost, reverting to "The Gift Outright"
Yes, the new guy was Catholic, the thinking went, but he was also a product of New England’s finest Yankee institutions,  Choate and Harvard.  Some of that must have had a civilizing effect, though few south of Maryland or west of Pennsylvania had heard of Choate and what they knew of Harvard they didn’t like much. They still don’t.
In that era, when there was still a “Catholic vote,” there was also little disagreement between Catholics and protestants over issues like abortion (illegal), contraception (risky, no pill), and  divorce (heinous for Catholics but not recommended for others with political designs, either).
The fear of protestants was not that Catholics would impose a socially conservative agenda on the country  but that America would become a colony of Rome and that the pope would rule in absentia.  Kennedy put a hole in that senseless idea in a famous speech in 1960 when he said,

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
How things have changed.  The Catholic church is now as loud and politically obtrusive  as Kennedy required it not to be to win an election.  Though Catholics and protestants come out nearly even in surveys concerning prevalence of  ”pre-marital” sex (I know:  it sounds quaint, doesn’t it?),  birth control and even the incidence of abortion in cases of unintended pregnancy (Protestants account for 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women for 31.3%, Jewish women  for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation, 23,7%), the Catholic church has decided to make abortion its cause celebre in its battle for social and moral relevance.

HE Gospel of Life -obsession of the official Church is largely based on traditional Catholic moral teaching as expounded by the bewildering and now blessed John Paul II.  Along with its pre-modern understanding of human sexuality,  it carries with its sanctity- of -life prescription a European- friendly condemnation of capital punishment and anti-war bias, as well as a totally incoherent ban on contraception as a way of reducing the instances of unwanted pregnancy. –Call it the Mother Theresa Ultimatum.
The contraception phobia, which dates back to Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae  (and the birth-control hysteria of the 1960's) had nothing to do with a consistent sexual “moral theory” but with a theory of human nature formulated by St Augustine in the fifth century, based on the notion that pleasure was never intended by God as a part of human good.   The equation between pleasure and sin is so firmly entrenched in Catholic psychology that it has to be seen as programmatic orthodox Catholic moral theology: a celibate priesthood, the veiling of women religious (nuns), a virgin birth, an immaculate conception, and a sexless apostolic community are just the doctrinal excrescences of an institutionalized fear of the flesh.
Curiously, alongside this partially disguised abhorrence of fleshly fulfillment the Catholic church still retains its admiration for the productivity of marriage and opposition to divorce.  But when you consider that Ted Kennedy, John Kerry,  and Andrew Cuomo, to name only prominent political figures, are forbidden (and with variable consistency have accepted that they are forbidden) to receive  the Church’s most revered sacrament, while ghoulish mock-Catholics like Rick Santorum and parody-Catholic, spouse-abandoning, thrice married Newt Gingrich get the Church’s seal of approval for their extreme “pro-life” commitments, it is high time for The Catholic Church to declare itself a colony of the Tea Party.
As if this isn’t bad enough, Santorum has decided to break ranks with the Kennedy legacy by repudiating JFK’s robust appeal to the First Amendment as the guaranty that religion plays no role in the affairs of state.  Calling the 1960 speech by Kennedy a “great mistake,” and a “radical statement that did much damage,” he said in a recent speech in Newton, Massachusetts:

We’re seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process. Jefferson is spinning in his grave.
Which of course is true.  At the ignorance of Rick Santorum.  Rob Boston says mildly and to the point,

Look, it’s bad enough that you run around talking trash about Kennedy, but adding Jefferson to your Festival of Ignorance is just too much. Leave the man out of it.  You apparently know nothing about him.  Jefferson spent his entire life opposing government-mandated religion and fought every member of the clergy who supported that foul idea. Here’s a famous example: During the election of 1800, presidential candidate Jefferson knew that many New England preachers were yearning to win favoritism for their faith from the federal government. He also knew that they hated him because they realized he would never let that happen. That’s why they spread wild tales about Jefferson being a libertine who, if elected, would burn Bibles.

Santorum
The social and moral “conservatism” of the Republican field is primarily an appeal to the ignorance of the American people.  It’s the ugliest kind of alliance between the Church’s need to remain relevant by appealing to uteral issues and the political need of soulless office-grubbers to appear moral.  Both are appeals to ignorance, to the Faithful, on the one side,  who are often willing to refer  moral responsibility to higher authorities and to “The American People” (often described virtuously as “the basic goodness and decency” of the American people)  on the other, who can usually be counted upon to follow their gut and are often shocked slack-jawed when their gut takes them in the wrong direction as it did in the 2010 congressional runnings.  It’s a little hard to swallow the opinion-polls of a nation who votes ignoramuses into office and then loses all respect for them once they get to their desk, isn’t it?
HAT is even more depressing is that the ignorance of a Rick Santorum is probably real rather than Machiavellian.  He is as dumb about the history of his Church as he is about the history of his nation. And the machinations of the Catholic church–his church–while Machiavellian, are tragically self-centered and manifestly wicked.
Ever since the Jewish priestly class invented the story of cloddish Adam and compliant Eve, the hierarchy has known how to use an idiot to make a point:  Do what you’re told.  Don’t ask too many questions.  Believe us:  you don’t want the responsibility of knowing the big picture.  Given those marching orders, it doesn’t matter what Jefferson really said or thought.  It’s enough that there is an interpretation of him as a believing Christian who would spout, basically, the same things the Tea Party is saying if he were around today.    There is no difference between history and delusion in Rick Santorum’s world.
Kennedy ended the speech that Santorum calls a big mistake with the following:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
In a scant fifty years, how have we come so far from regarding this kind of rhetoric as fundamental, rational and wise to seeing it as radically mistaken? And how much guilt does the Church bear for encouraging this treason against the first principles of American democracy by egging on the clods?
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Published: January 19, 2012
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18 Responses to “The Bloody, Awful, Horrible Catholic Church”

.
 Stevie 
 January 19, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Well, the answer to your final question seems to be quite a lot, but then the Vatican is itself a country; admittedly it’s a very small one, but it has been exceedingly useful when it comes to providing safe refuge for people who might otherwise have faced the Courts in the US and elsewhere on such trifling matters as genocide and the sexual abuse of children.
Christopher Hitchens wrote in Slate about the influence of a Supreme Court packed with practising Roman Catholics back in 2010; Dan Savage, a reformed cradle Catholic, has taken the baton and is lambasting the current crop of supposedly devout Catholic politicians by pointing to their numerous failings to practise what they preach, as well as creating the now famous definition of santorum to be found in good dictionaries everywhere…
Reply
 
 steph 
 January 19, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Frost said: “Something we were withholding made us weak, Until we found out that it was ourselves”. America was a promising independent nation, but now half of it (hopefully much less than half on the day) seems to be subservient to Vatholican. Which party stands for peace and the environment, healthcare and education? I know which one is fighting the election over uteral issues and divorce rates – the Tea Party in the sanitorium.
Reply
 
 Veronica Abbass 
 January 20, 2012 at 8:57 am
Even Presbyterian schoolteachers in Raleigh could see the error in your sentence:
“Choosing Frost, then in his eighties, to lend dignity to a ceremony so prosaic it can only be compared to buying stamps, was a stroke of genius–a tribute to Kennedy’s New England roots and the liberal protestant tradition that went with it.”
The first it should be removed, so the sentence reads,
Choosing Frost, then in his eighties, to lend dignity to a ceremony so prosaic can only be compared to buying stamps, was a stroke of genius–a tribute to Kennedy’s New England roots and the liberal protestant tradition that went with it.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 20, 2012 at 9:02 am
“Choosing Frost” is the complete subject; the MV is “was” and “it” refers to ceremony (though “that it” might be slightly better). Who taught you sentence construction girl? Your revision makes no sense at all.
Reply
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 20, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Whoa. Error 101 — Epic grammar correction fail. Reboot System? Y/N.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 20, 2012 at 3:15 pm
:)

 
 
 
 artikcat 
 January 21, 2012 at 8:22 am
Jefferson may have burnt bibles (not certain), but he definitely cut and pasted them….
Reply
 
 jsegor23 
 January 21, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Hi Joe, good article. Argie is heavily engaged in trying to drum up support in the Dominican Republic for a secular state and abandonment of the Concordat entered into between the dictator Trujillo and the Vatican. An outrageous amount of money is provided to the Church by the government. You can read some of her material on her blog. argeliatejada.blogspot.com
A question: Did the Jewish priestly class actually invent the Adam and Eve story or did they pick it up from the older surrounding cultures and adapt it for their religious use?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 22, 2012 at 9:39 am
Joe, as to Adam: the cast of characters, the garden, and other parts are familiar and the creation of Eve story probably Babylonian. It’s all been adapted to the Yahwist cult however, probably by priests who wanted to equate stupidity and disobedience by making Adam willful and ungrateful–what you have to be in any religion if the framework is to make any sense.
Reply

 steph 
 January 22, 2012 at 11:03 pm
There are also two distinct creation stories with Adam, literally ‘man’, and his woman, contained in the Hebrew Bible. Both were probably collected and transmitted in writing by scribes. The biblical creation myths, like creation myths in other pre-scientific cultures, arose out of human attempts to understand their environment. It’s important to know and understand these myths as storytelling so that we can all appreciate them for they are: stories with histories and contexts.

 
 
 
 kbrowne 
 January 24, 2012 at 12:01 pm
I take it that when you talk about ‘the equation between pleasure and sin’ you really mean the equation between sex and sin. After all, there are plenty of other pleasures and I don’t think the Catholic church has been afraid of all of them.
As for ‘the doctrinal excrescences of an institutionalized fear of the flesh’ I can understand the reason for including three of the things on your list. But the virgin birth is in the gospels and is in no way the invention of the Catholic church. And as for the immaculate conception, well here I am stumped. What on earth does that have to do with the fear of the flesh?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 24, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Perhaps I might have said sensual or venal pleasures, and the Church has resolutely been against lust, gluttony and sloth. I wouldn’t contest that the virginity of Mary isn’t biblical but it also becomes the paradigm for the chastity of women, as Jesus and the disciples become a model for the chastity of men. Surely therefore this is a pleasure-denying ethos or discipline, isn’t it?
Reply

 kbrowne 
 January 24, 2012 at 1:26 pm
So are you in favour of lust, gluttony and sloth? The Catholic church has always taught that any pleasure can be indulged in to excess. There has also been a strong element in Catholic teaching that any sexual pleasure at all is sinful and I thought that was what you were referring to. As far as I know, the church has never taught that any other sensual pleasure was sinful in itself, when used in moderation.
Yes, the doctrine of the virgin birth may well have been used to discourage women from sex. But the doctrine itself is not to blame for that and was not thought up by the Catholic church.
You do not mention the immaculate conception. Do you agree that that doctrine does not belong in the list?

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 24, 2012 at 3:42 pm
I do not agree that a doctrine tied to venality and biological generation of sin through sex does not belong on the list. Your earlier argument is that the virgin birth “is in the Bible” and while some doctrines have warrants in scripture others don’t. Surely thererfore you can’t mean that the doctrine is not the root of teachings about chastity even if the Church is not the only organization to possess such stories. It would be interesting to publish on the subject of the Church’s teaching on pleasure per se. Augustine’s view is complictaed because he doesn’t speak for the whole church tradition but even he would agree with you that pleasure is both a matter of intensity and an “end,” which if pursued for its own sake becomes an evil,

 
 steph 
 January 24, 2012 at 3:46 pm
As well as the conception of Jesus being bereft of lustful, gluttonous sensuosity there is also an absence of blood. No broken hymen might have appealed to cultural sensitivities regarding purity laws. Bleeding, menstruating women were unclean therefore a breaking hymen… But while the ‘virginity’ of Mary is biblical, the idea is only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The ‘perpetual virgnity’ of Mary was a doctrine created by the church fathers who apparently devised it as a way for women to compensate or pay for, all the supposed sins of Eve. So the implication is that women must suffer in order to pay for inherited sins which are derived from a creation myth. Our ideal image is a virgin (with no ‘impure’ thoughts).

 
 kbrowne 
 January 24, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Obviously the doctrine of the virgin birth cannot be an excrescence of the Catholic church’s ‘institutionalized fear of the flesh’ if it predates the Catholic church. It also cannot be the cause of the teachings about chastity since chastity (at least in women) was highly valued before the doctrine was thought of. I suppose it could be argued that it was a cause of the church’s later very harsh views on the evil of sex but that seems unlikely to me since there are plenty of other interpretations of the doctrine.
I am very far from being an expert on Augustine and I do not feel able to discuss his views on pleasure. As you say, Augustine does not speak for everyone in the church but does even Augustine really say that doing something simply because you enjoy doing it is a sin?
I am very puzzled by your comment on the immaculate conception. I suspect, though I may be wrong, that what you really mean is the doctrine of original sin itself, not the doctrine of the immaculate conception. You talk about the ‘biological generation of sin through sex’. Do you object to the view that we are all born in a state of sin or that one person escaped it?
But even if you mean original sin it still seems a strange vew. Why should the idea that we inherit a propensity to sin cause or be caused by a ‘fear of the flesh’? Would the view that some undesirable character is inherited be necessarily connected to a fear of the flesh?
Anyway, I will leave it at that. Thank-you for answering my posts.

 
 
 
 June 
 February 11, 2012 at 8:51 am
The equation between pleasure and sin is so firmly entrenched in Catholic psychology that it has to be seen as programmatic orthodox Catholic moral theology: a celibate priesthood, the veiling of women religious (nuns), a virgin birth, an immaculate conception, and a sexless apostolic community are just the doctrinal excrescences of an institutionalized fear of the flesh.
IN this regard there is something about the Catholic church that I’ve never understood.
If The Church has such an institutionalised fear of the flesh, then why is so much of its art so sensual?
Even the most moderate Muslim, for example, could never broker what is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Also why is life in so many majority Catholic countries so sensual as well?
Catholic Bavaria has Oktoberfest with its highspirits, music, copious food and the endless cleavage of waitresses.
Oh-so Catholic Brazil has its Carnival, a baccnalian celebration of music, food, dance in which many of the participants are half naked, and which is used to mark the beginning of Lent, a very Catholic time of the year.
And why is it that nearly all of the world’s very best wines, Baccus’ favorite beverage, all come from majority, or at least formerly majority, Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain and France?
You never know what you got till it’s gone.
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“The Bloody, Awful, Horrible Catholic Church” says:
 February 29, 2012 at 10:06 am
[...] Hoffmann’s title for his January 19, 2012 post is the perfect title for this post on the American Catholic [...]
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Shakespeare the Swedenborgian
by rjosephhoffmann

AFTER an exhaustive study of approximately five days I’ve concluded that there is ample evidence to prove that William Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian.
According to Wikipedia, the standard of excellence for studies like this, “Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian.”  He has been termed a Christian mystic by some sources, including the fusty old Encyclopedia Britannica online version and the Encyclopedia of Religion  (1987), which starts its article with the description that he was a “Swedish scientist and mystic.”  Swedenborg termed himself  “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ” in True Christian Religion, one of his published works. Perhaps he thought he was St Paul.  It annoys some people that he lived smack in the middle of the Enlightenment.  But there you go.

Anyway, he was an extremely accomplished guy and had many radical ideas, such as the idea that the last judgement had already happened (or was happening) and that the Bible should be used as a repository of spiritual truths. Likewise, Shakespeare according to some scholars (though none come to mind except F R Leavis and he didn’t say this) was  very radical and used the Bible as a repository of quotations he could skim for his plays.  The first act of Macbeth, for example is full of biblical references and stuffed with mystical beliefs.  As my full length study, Shakespeare and Swedenborg: A Spiritually Dynamic Duo, will show, these similarities cannot be explained as mere accident.
In his book Life on Other Planets, Swedenborg stated that he conversed with spirits from Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the moon.  He did not report conversing with spirits from Uranus and Neptune, however, which had not been discovered in his day.  This crucial piece of information lends veracity to his claim since an unscrupulous scholar might say he had conversed with spirits from undiscovered planets.
Significantly, Shakespeare’s references to planets are also well known. So is his belief in astrology, as we can see in All’s Well That Ends Well (I.i)
HELENA. Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.PAROLLES. Under Mars, I.
HELENA. I especially think, under Mars.
PAROLLES. Why under Mars?
HELENA. The wars hath so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars.
PAROLLES. When he was predominant.
HELENA. When he was retrograde, I think, rather.
PAROLLES. Why think you so?
HELENA. You go so much backward when you fight.
 
And, of course, references to the moon (“the inconstant moon”) abound.
No wonder Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, was an avid follower of Swedenborg, whose more scientific observations must have had their appeal in an earlier century.

Swedenborg's flying machine; cf. A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Act V. Scene I
OT only this, but Shakespeare also enjoyed writing about human beings conversing with spirits and ghosts.  If the ghost of Hamlet’s father weren’t enough proof, there’s also Banquo, Julius Caesar, probably a dozen in Richard III, and the mother of Posthumus in Cymbeline, which no one has ever read, and several in Antony and Cleopatra, which seven people have.
Geographical evidence for the “Emmanu-Will connection” is not lacking. Not coincidentally, Swedenborg lived in London for four years from 1709 until 1713, almost exactly one hundred years after the first performance of Shakespeare’s blockbuster hit, The Four Noble Kinsmen.  Circumstantially but crucially in my opinion: Shakespeare was also born in England.  One of his most famous plays is about a Scandinavian prince; and Swedenborg, as his name suggests, was also a Scandinavian.
Swedenborg’s scientific accomplishments have often been overlooked, especially his work in metallurgy.  He was a pioneer in the study of the smelting of lead and copper.   We find a similar interest in Act 2 scene 7 of Merchant of Venice, where a drawn curtain reveals three small caskets made of lead, silver and gold. In this scene Shakespeare shows his acquaintance with Swedenborg’s work in the quotation, “All that glisters is not gold” but there are equally decisive references to metals that range beyond a mere casual interest in the topic in both Macbeth and Hamlet.

After his retirement from the Board of Mines, Swedenborg was best remembered as a biblical interpreter. Usually abbreviated as Arcana Cœlestia and under the Latin variant Arcana Caelestia (translated as Heavenly Arcana, Heavenly Mysteries, or Secrets of Heaven depending on modern English-language editions) his writings on scripture swelled to eight volumes of impenetrable prose.
In a nutshell he thought thought the last judgement had begun in 1757 because the Christian church had lost faith and charity.  This is the scenario Shakespeare uses in Macbeth 1.2, when Banquo says to the hags, “If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me” (1.3.60).  There are all kinds of references to the supernatural in Shakespeare’s plays, but after five days I have only been able to track down a few.  One thing is sure, however:  both men believed in heaven, hell, and the devil. To wit, the Comedy of Errors (Iv.iii)

Ant. S. Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!
 Dro. S. Master, is this mistress Satan?
 Ant. S. It is the devil.
 Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say, God damn me;’ that’s as much to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.”
This is just one example of Shakespeare talking about spirits and demons.  There are lots of others that point directly to his mystical infatuation with the idea of conversing with the dead.
Finally, Swedenborg wrote that “eating meat, regarded in itself, is something profane,” and was not practiced in the early days of the human race. Swedenborg’s landlord in London, a Mr. Shearsmith, said he ate no meat but his maid, who served Swedenborg, said that he would occasionally indulge in eating eels and pigeon pie.  Similarly, Shakespeare’s vegetarianism, derived from Swedenborg”s, is evident in the Witch’s Brew of Macbeth, Act I:  According to many scholars, the “ghastly preparation” qualifies for a vegetarian repast because it avoids the flesh of newt and frogs.  This cannot be pure coincidence. According to the same calculation, Falstaff, especially in Henry V,  can be seen as an allegory of the price of a strict carnivorism.  Nor is it merely “interesting” that both Swedenborg and Shakespeare wrote a lot about marriage and conjugal love, though both seemed to have lived as bachelors for most of their lives.
T  SHOULD not surprise us that we can confidently add the name of Shakespeare to the long list of famous men who have been attracted by Swedenborg’s ideas.  Kant, William Blake, Balzac, Henry James, Emerson,  Karl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges, to name only the most turgid,  have all been admirers and disciples.  Women, not so much.
Skeptics may contend that Shakespeare cannot have been influenced by Swedenborg because the bard lived in a previous century.  That, in my view, is the sort of discriminatory, limited, and shallow thinking that has kept history the poor sister of the sciences for a long time.
By what right do we proclaim that influence only moves from antecedent to subsequent events?  In the case of Shakespeare and Swedenborg, the evidence is overwhelming that history moves in all sorts of interesting directions, unlimited, like the cosmos itself, by conventional ideas of cause and effect.
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Published: January 23, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: an atheist? Humanism : atheism : Baconian heresy : English literature : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Shakespeare : Shakespeare studies ..
7 Responses to “Shakespeare the Swedenborgian”

.
 steph 
 January 23, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Thomas Carter in “Shakespeare and Holy Scripture” argues that “no writer has assimilated the thoughts and reproduced the words of Holy Scripture more copiously than Shakespeare”. Carter describes his work as “richly stored with the thoughts and words of the English Bible”. It is indeed. PhD theses, academic and dramatic societies, seminars and social conversations, are devoted to demonstrating how Shakespeare doesn’t merely borrow an occasional phrase or allusion from the Bible for enrichment of the dramatic language, but he derives the central ideas and images that run through all his plays.
With so much scholarship focusing on which version of the Bible Shakespeare used, even speculations arising as to whether he wrote the KJV, and all the conspiracy theories created around authorship, including that conspiracy based on the correspondence between marginal citations in Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible and Shakespeare’s biblical references in his plays, there isn’t any doubt that Shakespeare (whoever he was) loved the Bible and that he was a Believing Christian. The only real dispute is whether he was a closet Catholic or whether he was obedient to the newly founded National Church. The general view has tended to favour the former. Finally, this essay settles it: Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian. Time becomes irrelevant, anachronisms become anachronistic, and contradictions are merely arbitrary and shallow. When the evidence is so penetrating and clear, as it is here, this conclusion is overwhelmingly convincing.
I wonder if Shakespeare wrote Swedenborg. William Blake painted Shakespeare and Swedenborg read Blake so there is a striking relationship. I am more than slightly suspicious of John Thomas Looney’s theory about Edward de Vere. Ted may well have read Will’s work but he didn’t write it.
Reply
 
 Steersman 
 January 24, 2012 at 2:46 am
“Surely you’re joking Mr. Hoffmann!”
But a bravura performance, although I wonder which specific targets you had in mind and what motivated it ….
Reply
 
 Dan Gillson 
 January 24, 2012 at 9:34 pm
So, Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian, eh? Oh! — I get it! You’re making reference to Star Trek.
Reply
 
 Glenn 
 January 24, 2012 at 11:13 pm
That Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian is old news, and Dr. Hoffman might have saved himself five days of reading by simply reading the fifth statement of George W. Baynham’s Conclusion in his Swedenborg and Shakespeare: A Comparison (“Swedenborg was the seer, Shakespeare was the poet who illustrated his teaching”).
What might have motivated Dr. Hoffman’s “bravura performance”? Who can say? And who knows what he might have come across during his five days of extensive reading. Perhaps he noticed at one point Swedenborg having written, “There is nothing that cannot be confirmed, and falsity is confirmed more readily than truth”, and thought this principle worthy of illustration. With a wink, no doubt.
Reply
 
 Stevie 
 January 25, 2012 at 7:05 pm
I have to say that I am deeply disappointed in the travesty of scholarship displayed in this article. It is obvious to anyone who has ever studied these questions that the works popularly attributed to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were in reality written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who faked his own death in order to become an actor because he was tired of seeing his masterpieces ruined by people jigging about.
In addition I strongly believe, but cannot yet prove, that he was also the author of approximately 900 works attributed to Lope de Vega, who, as we know, was insignificant enough to sail with the 1588 Armada; I hope that you will at least concede that this was not the sort of role appropriate to the genius of the Golden Age of Spanish literature.
You may, however, have tangentially identified an important point in detecting similarities in the works whilst overlooking the obvious answer; Swedenborg was not actually Swedenborg. He was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had emigrated to Scandinavia when Cromwell ordered the closure of the theatres in 1649.
I realise that some deluded people will want to appeal to the supernatural in explaining De Vere’s longevity, but there is a perfectly rational explanation; I need hardly remind you that the Tudors’ preferred mode of executing aristocrats was beheading. It is difficult to imagine a clearer recognition of the dangers posed to the Nouveau Roi by vampires of the Ancien Régime…
Reply
 
 Franklin Percival 
 January 26, 2012 at 6:57 am
So who did die in a brawl in a public house in Deptford all those years ago? Perhaps the T9 predictive spelling on a mobile ‘phone I possessed many years ago was correct when I tried to write send a text to an employee whereupon it resolutely inserted Bacon. Don’t laugh too soon, much bacon in Europe comes from Denmark, along with Princes and Vikings. The Scandinavian lead is ignored at our peril.
Reply

 Stevie 
 January 27, 2012 at 7:35 am
Actually, Franklin, I reckon that one’s pretty straightforward; the Elizabethans had a robust attitude towards people who didn’t stand their round, hence the widespread use of the term ‘atheist’ to signify someone who did not believe in that fundamental covenant between man and man.
Kit’s death meant that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, could no longer channel his plays to the Admiral’s Men, where Edward Alleyn played the leading roles, and so Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was forced to make do with the Burbages instead.
It’s clear from the texts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was seriously hacked off with the protection team he had in place on Kit, and, since I am far from uncritical of him, I would note that his reliance on werewolves was an undoubted error on his part, given the stage of the lunar cycle. He really should have taken John Dee’s horoscope rather more seriously.
Unsurprisingly, bereft of the supreme works of the age, Edward Alleyn retired from acting in 1597 to concentrate on making a great deal of money, but he never forgot, nor forgave, the architects of his artistic demise. His portrait in a stained glass window at St Giles Cripplegate, here in the Barbican, shows him wearing their pelts…
Reply
 
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Month: January, 2012

Aside  |  January 29, 2012

What We Both Knew
by ADMIN posted on JANUARY 29, 2012 [EDIT]

for HS
“Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.”   – Muhammad Iqbal

HAT one day soon you’d look and find no word
from me. Or you’d say we must ‘stay in touch’, since friends
can love each other just as much or more
than incongruous lovers. So, love ends.
It ends because the half-unconscious heart
that skipped whole measures when I said, “Your eyes
are black as death,” closed me in their smart
and cunning stare. It ends because your tales
were false and I believed them, and you rained
like the hot rain of Pakistan on my desire.
And when it ended, and the winter trained
its white and honest judgement on the fire,
I thought, Just one more try, just one more try
For love.  It ended when you said, I am not Eve
And you were foolish ever to chase me
Among these thorns and call it Paradise.

3 comments
..
January 23, 2012

Shakespeare the Swedenborgian

AFTER an exhaustive study of approximately five days I’ve concluded that there is ample evidence to prove that William Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian.
According to Wikipedia, the standard of excellence for studies like this, “Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian.”  He has been termed a Christian mystic by some sources, including the fusty old Encyclopedia Britannica online version and the Encyclopedia of Religion  (1987), which starts its article with the description that he was a “Swedish scientist and mystic.”  Swedenborg termed himself  “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ” in True Christian Religion, one of his published works. Perhaps he thought he was St Paul.  It annoys some people that he lived smack in the middle of the Enlightenment.  But there you go.

Anyway, he was an extremely accomplished guy and had many radical ideas, such as the idea that the last judgement had already happened (or was happening) and that the Bible should be used as a repository of spiritual truths. Likewise, Shakespeare according to some scholars (though none come to mind except F R Leavis and he didn’t say this) was  very radical and used the Bible as a repository of quotations he could skim for his plays.  The first act of Macbeth, for example is full of biblical references and stuffed with mystical beliefs.  As my full length study, Shakespeare and Swedenborg: A Spiritually Dynamic Duo, will show, these similarities cannot be explained as mere accident.
In his book Life on Other Planets, Swedenborg stated that he conversed with spirits from Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the moon.  He did not report conversing with spirits from Uranus and Neptune, however, which had not been discovered in his day.  This crucial piece of information lends veracity to his claim since an unscrupulous scholar might say he had conversed with spirits from undiscovered planets.
Significantly, Shakespeare’s references to planets are also well known. So is his belief in astrology, as we can see in All’s Well That Ends Well (I.i)
HELENA. Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.PAROLLES. Under Mars, I.
HELENA. I especially think, under Mars.
PAROLLES. Why under Mars?
HELENA. The wars hath so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars.
PAROLLES. When he was predominant.
HELENA. When he was retrograde, I think, rather.
PAROLLES. Why think you so?
HELENA. You go so much backward when you fight.
 
And, of course, references to the moon (“the inconstant moon”) abound.
No wonder Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, was an avid follower of Swedenborg, whose more scientific observations must have had their appeal in an earlier century.

Swedenborg's flying machine; cf. A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Act V. Scene I
OT only this, but Shakespeare also enjoyed writing about human beings conversing with spirits and ghosts.  If the ghost of Hamlet’s father weren’t enough proof, there’s also Banquo, Julius Caesar, probably a dozen in Richard III, and the mother of Posthumus in Cymbeline, which no one has ever read, and several in Antony and Cleopatra, which seven people have.
Geographical evidence for the “Emmanu-Will connection” is not lacking. Not coincidentally, Swedenborg lived in London for four years from 1709 until 1713, almost exactly one hundred years after the first performance of Shakespeare’s blockbuster hit, The Four Noble Kinsmen.  Circumstantially but crucially in my opinion: Shakespeare was also born in England.  One of his most famous plays is about a Scandinavian prince; and Swedenborg, as his name suggests, was also a Scandinavian.
Swedenborg’s scientific accomplishments have often been overlooked, especially his work in metallurgy.  He was a pioneer in the study of the smelting of lead and copper.   We find a similar interest in Act 2 scene 7 of Merchant of Venice, where a drawn curtain reveals three small caskets made of lead, silver and gold. In this scene Shakespeare shows his acquaintance with Swedenborg’s work in the quotation, “All that glisters is not gold” but there are equally decisive references to metals that range beyond a mere casual interest in the topic in both Macbeth and Hamlet.

After his retirement from the Board of Mines, Swedenborg was best remembered as a biblical interpreter. Usually abbreviated as Arcana Cœlestia and under the Latin variant Arcana Caelestia (translated as Heavenly Arcana, Heavenly Mysteries, or Secrets of Heaven depending on modern English-language editions) his writings on scripture swelled to eight volumes of impenetrable prose.
In a nutshell he thought thought the last judgement had begun in 1757 because the Christian church had lost faith and charity.  This is the scenario Shakespeare uses in Macbeth 1.2, when Banquo says to the hags, “If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me” (1.3.60).  There are all kinds of references to the supernatural in Shakespeare’s plays, but after five days I have only been able to track down a few.  One thing is sure, however:  both men believed in heaven, hell, and the devil. To wit, the Comedy of Errors (Iv.iii)

Ant. S. Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!
 Dro. S. Master, is this mistress Satan?
 Ant. S. It is the devil.
 Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say, God damn me;’ that’s as much to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.”
This is just one example of Shakespeare talking about spirits and demons.  There are lots of others that point directly to his mystical infatuation with the idea of conversing with the dead.
Finally, Swedenborg wrote that “eating meat, regarded in itself, is something profane,” and was not practiced in the early days of the human race. Swedenborg’s landlord in London, a Mr. Shearsmith, said he ate no meat but his maid, who served Swedenborg, said that he would occasionally indulge in eating eels and pigeon pie.  Similarly, Shakespeare’s vegetarianism, derived from Swedenborg”s, is evident in the Witch’s Brew of Macbeth, Act I:  According to many scholars, the “ghastly preparation” qualifies for a vegetarian repast because it avoids the flesh of newt and frogs.  This cannot be pure coincidence. According to the same calculation, Falstaff, especially in Henry V,  can be seen as an allegory of the price of a strict carnivorism.  Nor is it merely “interesting” that both Swedenborg and Shakespeare wrote a lot about marriage and conjugal love, though both seemed to have lived as bachelors for most of their lives.
T  SHOULD not surprise us that we can confidently add the name of Shakespeare to the long list of famous men who have been attracted by Swedenborg’s ideas.  Kant, William Blake, Balzac, Henry James, Emerson,  Karl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges, to name only the most turgid,  have all been admirers and disciples.  Women, not so much.
Skeptics may contend that Shakespeare cannot have been influenced by Swedenborg because the bard lived in a previous century.  That, in my view, is the sort of discriminatory, limited, and shallow thinking that has kept history the poor sister of the sciences for a long time.
By what right do we proclaim that influence only moves from antecedent to subsequent events?  In the case of Shakespeare and Swedenborg, the evidence is overwhelming that history moves in all sorts of interesting directions, unlimited, like the cosmos itself, by conventional ideas of cause and effect.

7 comments
..
January 19, 2012

The Bloody, Awful, Horrible Catholic Church

In 1961 Robert Frost stammered through part of a poem he couldn’t quite read on a snowy and bitterly cold Washington day.
The occasion was the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected president of the United States. Choosing Frost, then in his eighties,  to lend dignity to a ceremony so prosaic  it can only be compared to buying stamps, was a stroke of genius–a tribute to Kennedy’s New England roots and the liberal protestant tradition that went with it.  Even Presbyterian schoolteachers in Raleigh loved his poetry.

Frost, reverting to "The Gift Outright"
Yes, the new guy was Catholic, the thinking went, but he was also a product of New England’s finest Yankee institutions,  Choate and Harvard.  Some of that must have had a civilizing effect, though few south of Maryland or west of Pennsylvania had heard of Choate and what they knew of Harvard they didn’t like much. They still don’t.
In that era, when there was still a “Catholic vote,” there was also little disagreement between Catholics and protestants over issues like abortion (illegal), contraception (risky, no pill), and  divorce (heinous for Catholics but not recommended for others with political designs, either).
The fear of protestants was not that Catholics would impose a socially conservative agenda on the country  but that America would become a colony of Rome and that the pope would rule in absentia.  Kennedy put a hole in that senseless idea in a famous speech in 1960 when he said,

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
How things have changed.  The Catholic church is now as loud and politically obtrusive  as Kennedy required it not to be to win an election.  Though Catholics and protestants come out nearly even in surveys concerning prevalence of  ”pre-marital” sex (I know:  it sounds quaint, doesn’t it?),  birth control and even the incidence of abortion in cases of unintended pregnancy (Protestants account for 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women for 31.3%, Jewish women  for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation, 23,7%), the Catholic church has decided to make abortion its cause celebre in its battle for social and moral relevance.

HE Gospel of Life -obsession of the official Church is largely based on traditional Catholic moral teaching as expounded by the bewildering and now blessed John Paul II.  Along with its pre-modern understanding of human sexuality,  it carries with its sanctity- of -life prescription a European- friendly condemnation of capital punishment and anti-war bias, as well as a totally incoherent ban on contraception as a way of reducing the instances of unwanted pregnancy. –Call it the Mother Theresa Ultimatum.
The contraception phobia, which dates back to Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae  (and the birth-control hysteria of the 1960's) had nothing to do with a consistent sexual “moral theory” but with a theory of human nature formulated by St Augustine in the fifth century, based on the notion that pleasure was never intended by God as a part of human good.   The equation between pleasure and sin is so firmly entrenched in Catholic psychology that it has to be seen as programmatic orthodox Catholic moral theology: a celibate priesthood, the veiling of women religious (nuns), a virgin birth, an immaculate conception, and a sexless apostolic community are just the doctrinal excrescences of an institutionalized fear of the flesh.
Curiously, alongside this partially disguised abhorrence of fleshly fulfillment the Catholic church still retains its admiration for the productivity of marriage and opposition to divorce.  But when you consider that Ted Kennedy, John Kerry,  and Andrew Cuomo, to name only prominent political figures, are forbidden (and with variable consistency have accepted that they are forbidden) to receive  the Church’s most revered sacrament, while ghoulish mock-Catholics like Rick Santorum and parody-Catholic, spouse-abandoning, thrice married Newt Gingrich get the Church’s seal of approval for their extreme “pro-life” commitments, it is high time for The Catholic Church to declare itself a colony of the Tea Party.
As if this isn’t bad enough, Santorum has decided to break ranks with the Kennedy legacy by repudiating JFK’s robust appeal to the First Amendment as the guaranty that religion plays no role in the affairs of state.  Calling the 1960 speech by Kennedy a “great mistake,” and a “radical statement that did much damage,” he said in a recent speech in Newton, Massachusetts:

We’re seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process. Jefferson is spinning in his grave.
Which of course is true.  At the ignorance of Rick Santorum.  Rob Boston says mildly and to the point,

Look, it’s bad enough that you run around talking trash about Kennedy, but adding Jefferson to your Festival of Ignorance is just too much. Leave the man out of it.  You apparently know nothing about him.  Jefferson spent his entire life opposing government-mandated religion and fought every member of the clergy who supported that foul idea. Here’s a famous example: During the election of 1800, presidential candidate Jefferson knew that many New England preachers were yearning to win favoritism for their faith from the federal government. He also knew that they hated him because they realized he would never let that happen. That’s why they spread wild tales about Jefferson being a libertine who, if elected, would burn Bibles.

Santorum
The social and moral “conservatism” of the Republican field is primarily an appeal to the ignorance of the American people.  It’s the ugliest kind of alliance between the Church’s need to remain relevant by appealing to uteral issues and the political need of soulless office-grubbers to appear moral.  Both are appeals to ignorance, to the Faithful, on the one side,  who are often willing to refer  moral responsibility to higher authorities and to “The American People” (often described virtuously as “the basic goodness and decency” of the American people)  on the other, who can usually be counted upon to follow their gut and are often shocked slack-jawed when their gut takes them in the wrong direction as it did in the 2010 congressional runnings.  It’s a little hard to swallow the opinion-polls of a nation who votes ignoramuses into office and then loses all respect for them once they get to their desk, isn’t it?
HAT is even more depressing is that the ignorance of a Rick Santorum is probably real rather than Machiavellian.  He is as dumb about the history of his Church as he is about the history of his nation. And the machinations of the Catholic church–his church–while Machiavellian, are tragically self-centered and manifestly wicked.
Ever since the Jewish priestly class invented the story of cloddish Adam and compliant Eve, the hierarchy has known how to use an idiot to make a point:  Do what you’re told.  Don’t ask too many questions.  Believe us:  you don’t want the responsibility of knowing the big picture.  Given those marching orders, it doesn’t matter what Jefferson really said or thought.  It’s enough that there is an interpretation of him as a believing Christian who would spout, basically, the same things the Tea Party is saying if he were around today.    There is no difference between history and delusion in Rick Santorum’s world.
Kennedy ended the speech that Santorum calls a big mistake with the following:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
In a scant fifty years, how have we come so far from regarding this kind of rhetoric as fundamental, rational and wise to seeing it as radically mistaken? And how much guilt does the Church bear for encouraging this treason against the first principles of American democracy by egging on the clods?

18 comments
..
January 11, 2012

So, Atheism is Just a Belief?

ELL, what did you think it was?  Let me guess.  You thought it was about not believing–and naturally not believing something is the opposite of belief.  And since the opposite of belief is fact, well there we are.
Of course atheism is just a belief.  One of my favourite websites says it best:

Strictly speaking, atheism is an indefensible position, just as theism is indefensible, for both are systems of belief and neither proposition has been (or is likely to be) proven anytime soon.
The rational position for the non-believer to take is to say that there is almost certainly no god, because no credible evidence exists to support the claim that god exists. This is a stronger position than agnosticism, which holds belief and non-belief on an equal footing.
So the debate between atheism is about the evidence and not about the status of propositions.  Oh, and what beliefs are in relation to personal identity.
Which question brings me to a recent post by Joshua Rosenau at his website– that often touches on some really interesting stuff.  This interesting stuff is directed against a not very interesting notion by Ophelia Benson that “beliefs are not really a part of identity and should not be treated as though they are. “
Rosenau says that

 What’s especially odd about Benson’s claim is that New Atheism is all about belief. The defining difference between New Atheism and other sorts of atheism is that the gnus don’t just want to assert their own belief that there is no god (or their lack of belief that there is a god, depending). They want to assert a belief that other people’s belief in god(s) is dangerous ipso facto. When folks say that belief is only bad if it leads people to do bad things, they reply by emphasizing just how important belief is in shaping personal identity, and arguing that belief matters on its own.
Of course, this has to be true if you are going argue, for example, that bad beliefs cause people to do bad things, and the Gnus think that this correlation goes a long way in explaining why Muslims behave irrationally and why fundamentalist Christians are personally annoying and politically dangerous.

Atheists having their identity revoked in unbaptism: Fun!
Systematized bad beliefs, in the form of doctrine, are the worst because a fully constructed Catholic, or Muslim, will buy wholesale what his faith sells on the subject of sexual morality, suicide bombings, abortion, and who owns Palestine.  When someone says he’s a Catholic he’s making an identity claim, code for any number of agendas stock full of beliefs.  When someone says she’s a good Muslim, same thing.  There are no category errors here, unless you swallow the giddy notion that atheism is not a belief but a non-identity-imposing non-strait-jacketing opinion about belief.
I want to say that Rosenau’s point is elementary, in the sense that it’s fundamental to understanding that religion is identity-shaping.  Is the reason for this sly turn away from seeing belief as identity-forming purposeful among the Gnus?  Maybe it’s a slip of the keyboard: if so there is still time to back away from this preposterous claim.  But if it’s meant as a serious suggestion, somebody’s got some explaining to do.
Isn’t it true that Gnus have a catechism in the making and thus, you should pardon the expression, a fetal identity of their own?  Even though it may be short of the intellectual range of the Catholic Church or the Torah, at least their movement is beginning to resemble the bylaws of a local Masonic Temple. Every movement has to start somewhere.
More important for future development it has in common with these other systems the basic identity-shaping construct that all religions start with: We’re right. You’re wrong.

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January 6, 2012

Complacency and Excess

January 6, 2012
By admin

“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1959)
“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited (Chomsky 1994)
“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Chomsky 1988)
 THOUGHTFUL response from a reader asked me why I had stopped commenting on the excesses of “religion” and turned my attention to damning the excesses of atheism.
I haven’t. But it’s a good question. I replied that it would be like asking Luther why he stopped momentarily condemning the abuses of the Roman Catholic church and turned his attention to the marauding protestants. For everything nasty Luther had to say about the pope being the anti-Christ and Rome the whore of Babylon, he had equally vicious things to say about the religious militants in a treatise eirenically titled “Against the Thieving and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.” Who were these “hordes”?
They were Luther’s supporters in the protestant cause, disillusioned that he haden’t taken his revolution far enough. So others, like Thomas Müntzer, took it for him. Similar (harder to prove) theories have suggested the same dynamic at work in the transition between Jesus and his followers, and a definite comparison can be made in the transition from earliest Christianity to the studious nastiness of some of the Church fathers, the founders of “orthodoxy.”
Polemic–rhetorical sling-shotting–wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before. It just spreads more quickly now.
I am not anti-atheist. I am anti-excess, and everything about the Dawkins revolution has spelled excess. No matter who tries to persuade me that I am making this excess up in my head, it’s excess. Fueled by the repeated assertion of its promoters that it is (secularly) providential, righteous and true (just as all zealotry convinces itself), it is excess.
Sometimes, as Caspar Melville (editor of the New Humanist) mildy suggested in a Guardian article in 2010, it’s useful to hit the right targets–namely, an aggressive religious fundamentalism–hard, and in that regard “irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.” (Funny, those adjectives remind me of a few things said recently about yours truly: how can it be?).
But I know Caspar to be a smart guy, someone who still sees the humanities in the word humanist, so in reponse to the famous Dawkins dictum (spoken to Laurie Taylor way back in 2007)–that there is no more reason to pay attention to theology than to fairyology– I wasn’t surprised to find Caspar saying this:

Entertainment value aside it is surely false, as well as politically unwise and, well, pretty impolite, to say that “all theology” is irrelevant (some of it is moral reasoning, isn’t it?), still worse to say that “religion poisons everything”, or that without religion there would be no war, or that bringing a child up within a faith is tantamount to child abuse, or that moderate religious believers are worse than fundamentalists because they prepare the ground for extremism, or that “all” religion is this, or that, or “all” faith is misguided, or to suggest that those who believe in God are basically stupid, or that science, and only science, can answer our questions….The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character.
ET me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.
No one with a semblance of a brain would ever suggest that science can’t do a lot, hasn’t done a lot, and that the world science has explained for us doesn’t leave a lot of room for traditional religious beliefs, stories, and explanations of physical reality. It is a leap into nowhere, however, to say that accepting this as a fair description of the current state of knowledge requires someone to say, “Look, somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all,” as Dawkins does to Taylor.
First of course, we need to find out what the speaker means by “theology.” Then we need to know what he thinks qualifies as “subject matter.” Presumably English literature qualifies because it exists. But so do the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Pali texts, the movements those texts have produced and the cultures and ideologies they have influenced. –Not to mention alphabets that were developed largely for the preservation of sacred writings.

What aspects of those topics, given the facile dismissal of theology, can be recognized as subject matter? Have the revolutionaries acquitted them of all responsibility to subject matter in the denial of the existence of God? Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist? If so, life is simple and the mortgage is paid.

But, if so, equally–if the texts and traditions of the world’s religions are really no different from stories about fairy tales and leprechauns–then attacking and ridiculing them is just as pointless as systematic exploration of their meaning–which is one of the things theology does. Is the ridicule justified because while nobody believes in the story of the Frog King or Thumbelina (does anyone even know those stories any more?) a few do believe that Jonah was swallowed by a ravenous fish and (a few more) that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee? I’d rather buy Plantinga’s argument for epistemic defeaters than that rationale for why ridicule is justified but explanation isn’t.
Or does “subject matter” mean a certain kind of theology?Or does it mean (I think it often does in new atheist harangues) apologetics–which is unknown in many religious traditions? The analogy to fairies and leprechauns makes it difficult to know. If you say the analogies are all wrong, remember: I didn’t make them.
God
Predictably, I am going to say that the best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”–are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time. Even many not very good theologians see things this way but pretend it’s none of their business.
The history of religion in the last two hundred years has been a history of religion redefining itself–a bit like Britain when it went from imperially great to little England. Yet religion has done a pretty good job of doing just that: the “war between science and religion” is treated in history-of-culture classes as a topic in nineteenth century studies, especially in the work of Cornell’s first hard-headed, science-first president, Andrew Dickson White. But if you look at the section headings of White’s famous book on the subject, you’ll see that he had a broad and humanistic definition of culture in which science played a magisterial, not an imperial role. He was as impressed with the results of the higher biblical criticism as he was with development in chemistry and medicine.
Andrew Dickson White, Yale ’53
Too many vaguely religious people aren’t aware of the “magisterium issue,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s linguistic stab at declaring a truce. Religion and science are compatible (to the extent it even occurs to ordinary people to wonder) because they don’t know much about either, and because they are encouraged in this superstition by dumb priests and ministers, the self-interest and reflexes of many churches, and the at-best tepid curiosity that characterizes their day to day life–whether in relation to politics, religion, world affairs, or national education policy. (And don’t mention vote-grubbing politicians who try to out-right-to-life their way into office by appealing to the worst instincts of NASCAR America. This may be the year that foetuses are declared citizens of the United States at seven months.)
What is the effect of this dumbness, this complacency? Loud, that’s what. Getting attention for your “message” by forcing people to pay attention to hate ads, grotesquery, libelous caricatures of ideas, and repeated falsehoods–all of it communicated in a kind of pidgin that can only be described as Dumbglish: these aren’t tactics that diminish and cheapen the American spirit. This is the language that American culture seems to require to wake it up. It flows like poison soup in the veins of the internet. This is where the American spirit is.

After some thought, I have to concede that maybe the shouting is necessary. Most people don’t pay attention to much of anything–not what politicians say, or what bishops teach, or what Atheists.org billboards shout at them along the highways.

The failure of the culture to inspire has led to the failure of people to be curious and a general acceptance of the status quo in most things–especially religion. Why should people want to know more about anything when they have a thousand bucks in the bank, an iPhone, and a new MacDonalds opening up down the street? Starbucks is for people with jobs.
American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.
AN indirect proof of that is an unbroken succession of wars, thousands of American dead, a broken Middle East, an Arab spring that looks like winter, and nary a protest movement to remind us that man is a moral animal [sic, or lol] who ought to oppose such things. Bishops made noises and a few liberal protestants and Jews occasionally marched. Atheists, as usual, weren’t quite sure what to do because while many hated George W. Bush they hated Islam more and so–like Christopher Hitchens–they backed the wars. They were, in a phrase, paralyzed and morally invisible. No William Sloane Coffin emerged, no John Howard Yoder, no Elie Wiesel. Complacency.
Rather than say Europe isn’t far behind in this, I’m going to say Europe is far ahead. Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.
The Christianity that Kierkegaard tried to resuscitate in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1843) became the Denmark where only 31% of the population believe in God but 82.1% are members of the Evangelical Lutheran (the State) Church.
How can this be? It can be, according to Richard Norman, because religion ”is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected….Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”
It follows as the night the day that Danish religion is not American religion. British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism. This cultural specularity has always been true, as when long ago German Christianity was not Roman Christianity.
HE opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter- argument is that excess has much, much less.
The classical aphorism, spe?de ß?ad???, “make haste slowly” is a good motto for what needs to be done in the conversation between science and religion. It was the motto of the Emperor Augustus who as a military commander deplored rashness. Suetonius says that he would often tell the generals, “Better a safe commander than a bold,” and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”
In the final tally, as long as rashness rules and shouting scores, the atheists worry me at least as much as people who believe in souls. Realizing that he is now a template for what I consider atheist rash, as in red and irritating, consider this of P Z Myers reviewing the conservative philosopher Alvin Plangtinga

I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing.
After a scissors and paste attack on the philosopher punctuated by non sequiturs and hooplah that makes no sense, Myers says simply that it is all “muddled lunacy.” As a matter of fact, I don’t like Plantinga much either. The summary Myers attacks (fortunately for him) appeared as a piece in a religious periodical. But Plantinga deserves much better, even if only because once upon a time academics who despised each other didn’t mistake emotionalism for argument. A vestige of this is that not once in his summary does Plantinga call the proponents of naturalism “stupid.” The legacy of the Dawkins revolution will be to make this completely emotional, unquantifiable term and all of its sisters and cousins and aunts permissible discourse in the defense of science. I know, I know: I have had my lapses in calling screed-writers screed-writers in screeds of my own.
SO let me revert to someone else. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his famous 1997 Natural History article a couple of paragraphs which would have caused his immediate expulsion from the atheist camp as an accommodationist or worse if he had written it in 2007. He died in 2002. With him at the Vatican meeting on NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) in 1984 was Carl Sagan, who had organized the event.

…I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)
Stephen Jay Gould
I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.
Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.
I stop what will be described as a tangent, a screed, a hateful assault, another outburst close to tears at Gould’s words. The year he wrote this article (1997) was also the year of Carl Sagan’s death. Sagan perhaps did more to make science magical than any other scientist of the twentieth century, though his primary celebrity was where it belonged and was most needed: in the United States. Gould commenting on Sagan’s death had this to say: “Carl shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship.”
That is the language we need.

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January 3, 2012

Accommodationist of the Year!

by admin Posted on January 3, 2012

 
I’d like to thank the Academy.
Jerry Coyne has just awarded me the Mooney Prize for “Accommodationist of the Year” and pays a lot of attention to why, he says, no one is paying attention to me.
He defends his fellow atheist headlights and several sidelights by calling Eric MacDonald “Venerable” (which I thought was a title only a pope could bestow on a saint-in-waiting) and to Jason Rosenhouse as a promising young atheist blogger. He has more trouble finding a name for Greta Christina so he just asks, “Has he read her?” Yes, he has.
Since Jerry seems to have the power to hand out titles (who knew?) I will take him at his word that the chums he defends are everything he says they are. And more. He even seems to have access to my insanely jealous private thoughts (“Why not me… Dear God, why not pay attention to me.”) This maddening envy should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t until Jerry pointed it out.
I thought I was attacking the newbies because they are turning atheism into a private joke, or blague privée as we pompoustuans prefer to call it.
But there is no petulance here. –Nor in Jerry’s comments, where he reminds me that he has written two books. One of which, Speciation, “has become the standard text on modern views about the origin of species.” Damn, I wish I’d written that.
He also quotes the Venerable Eric’s humble and charitable response to a note I left on the Venerable’s blog:

“I feel so embarrassed for you, and for the pitiful criticisms you try to make. It won’t do simply to snipe at us. You must respond to what we say, and if you do not have the time to do that, then you should just get out of our way, because your criticisms invariably miss their mark and we have places yet to go.”
It is not everyday you see largess like this in action. And don’t think twice about it: I will be glad to get out of your way–if you just let me know which way you are marching. So far it isn’t clear. (Btw, loved the Robert Frostiness of that last line.)
I know zombies can sometimes also be unpredictable in their clamber for human flesh. What are new atheists after? Where are you heading? A Christian would say to hell, but based on Jerry’s–not to forget the others’ posts–I tend to think nowhere. And that’s pretty clever. It keeps people off guard when you do the God-snatch at the end.
Get Out of our way…
I’m sorry if this seems pompous and incoherent. Accommodationists are a little like theologians that way, I guess. I sometimes find it hard to finish my thoughts in a jealous rage.
I will try to do better in 2012. I plan to study the blog sites of all the headlights and sidelights and use them as models of how it’s done. Whatever it is.
Further reading:
The Surefire Atheist Rapid Response Manual (December 2011)
Atheism’s Little Idea (November 2011)
 This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Greta Christina, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, new atheists, Ophelia Benson, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, zombies. Bookmark the permalink.

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January 1, 2012

Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)

by admin Posted on January 1, 2012

UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh
 
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

The Missouri boy in Connecticut
 
HO remembers their Huckleberry Finn? In chapter 19, Huck, Tom and Jim, afloat on the Mississippi River, meet up with two grifters, the Duke and the Dauphin, who claim to be exiled European royalty.
Their scam is going from town to town performing makeshift “scenes” from Shakespeare’s plays, then escaping with their lives when the rube public hear declamations like this:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
 That makes calamity of so long life;
 For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
 But that the fear of something after death
 Murders the innocent sleep,
 Great nature’s second course,
 And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
 Than fly to others that we know not of.
After spending a few hours with the scoundrels, Huck reflects,

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.
But (in one of the great mysteries of the book) Huck continues to aid and abet, pastes their playbills on buildings in towns along the river, enjoys swapping tales with them on the raft, and even saves their skin when they have a close shave.
The Duke and the Dauphin are Mark Twain’s contribution to a a literary stereotype that goes back to plays like Our American Cousin (an English drama of 1858) that pit a pampered and brainless British aristocracy against the dull, stammering but basically honest Yankee (Lord Dundreary and Asa Trenchard, respectively, in the play): Americans are naive, optimistic, uncultured, energetic and gullible; the British are cunning, cynical, indolent and intellectually dissipated. America is a good place to make a buck by selling wares that His Majesty’s subjects either can’t afford or simply don’t have much use for.
Edward Sothern as Lord Dundreary
Things like atheism. I recently cited the statistics for religion in Britain. If you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is not an encouraging thing to note that only about 36% of Britons claim to be religious and a higher number claim not to believe in God.
Compare these to statistics for atheism in America. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009, found that 34.2 million Americans (15.0%) claim no religion (“nones”), of which only 1.6% explicitly describes itself as atheist (0.7%) or agnostic (0.9%). If you are an atheist-front organization, also not an encouraging picture, no matter how you fiddle the stats to make “No religious preference” or “Sorry, really in a hurry” survey-takers into atheists. Nones further have to be adjusted for mothers whose safety clasp just failed on their child-seat doing a drive-by after school pickup, and shoppers standing in line at the exchange counter on December 26th.
If I were an atheist strategy specialist there is at least one biblical story I would need to believe was literally true: the saga of David and Goliath. I’d want to know how a very little movement can bring down a cultural behemoth like American religion by throwing a few stones.
The part nobody remembers
This led me to reflect on how the new atheism arrived in America and who is in charge of pasting the playbills on the storefronts.
OT to deny the contribution of several authors to the “movement”–Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens–I think it’s safe to say that the style of the new atheism extrudes from the work of Richard Dawkins. The paradigmatic shift from detente to full scale assault against religion as an undifferentiated mass of human error and superstitious thinking belongs to him: Why should we live with ideas that we find absurd and repugnant, or indulge people who fantasize the truth of their beliefs into norms that other people ought to follow? Gloves off, me hearties: Error should be resisted, countered, argued against, corrected, defeated–not coddled.
And what is the truth? Science is the truth.
The God Delusion (2006) and the wave of comment it created is now yesterday’s news. To remind myself of how I felt in 2006 while reading it, I talked myself (under the influence of several spirituous incentives) into re-reading it, and, much to my surprise, I liked it better the second time around–as a book rather than a best selling icon. It was a better book than Daniel Dennett’s really very sloppy Breaking the Spell, which I reviewed soon after it appeared in 2007. But then I forced myself to re-read a few of the reviews I had archived over the past several years, and this one by Murrough O’Brien from The Independent flagged itself. Just after pointing out Dawkins’s abuse of Bertrand Russell’s famous “Teapot Argument,” O’Brien notes.

Some of [Dawkins's] arguments are old atheistic chestnuts, and how merrily they crack in the roasting pan. The palm for outrageous question-begging goes to the Who Made God “argument”. Dawkins squirts this sachet of puerile pap (most of us had outgrown it before hitting double figures) over the whole book, to inadvertently comic effect. He writes: “The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” The short response to that is a simple “Why?” The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?”only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?
But then the real punch, trilitorally speaking, of The God Delusion was panache. Dawkins was an extrovert and spellbinder compared to Dennett, with his Darwinesque looks, and the singularly incoherent Harris, whose work Scott Atran, a serious researcher and cognitivist, called playacting at science and politically pernicious while also getting basic anthropological theories backwards, like his famous wowser concerning the work of Franz Boas.
Dennett
The real success story of the new atheism is that it was bought and sold after being intellectually panned by almost all the cognoscenti who weren’t atheist activists. In fact, as the circle closed around a tightly knit cadre of God-opposers, opposing God became virtually the sole criterion for what, in their parochial view, counted for anthropology, archaeology, sociology and the study of religion–about which all of the four (check the footnotes) were blissfully ignorant.
And I mean that in the most damning sense. Virtually all of the credible reviews alleged it of Dawkins, and the others didn’t fare much better outside the atheist camp. The reflexive answer was to accuse anyone who opposed the unscientific, malformed, and totally ignorant premises of these books of being “faitheists” and to say that dispute would be treated as treason against the higher purposes for which the books had been written.
If that didn’t stick, sane voices were denounced as jealous voices, as though reputable scholars wished they had written historical and philosophical travesty under their own names.
The repetitive accusation against Dawkins–that he was attacking a straw man, a sort of tertia res religiosa that did not exist–became the new framing device for every critique of new atheist tactics: its critics (despite manifold evidence to the contrary) were attacking a form of atheism that did not exist. Sensible, if complex views like those of John Gray on the origin of humanitarian impulses, were conveniently set aside in favour of a new recipe for a scientific-evolutionary morality that floats above historical causality: Wrote Atran,

There is an irony of history that completely escapes Harris and other new atheists in their evangelical quest for a global morality rooted in scientific truth. As philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics convincingly argues, it is universal forms of monotheism, such as Christianity and Islam, that merged Hebrew tribal belief in one God with Greek faith in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation that originated the inclusive concept of Humanity in the first place….Harris’s own messianic moral absolutism, based on devotion to “truth,” leads to some rather nutty proposals that defy common sense and are justified by made-up history that is patently untrue.
So much for Harris’s pop-psychology, or rather MRI-enhanced pop-psychology. Dawkins and Dennett were serious academics working out-of-field but who seem honestly to have believed that the methodologies developed in other disciplines were easily mastered and just as easily dismissed–a cavalier attitude toward critique that bordered on Dominican hubris at best and anti-intellectualism at the deep end.
Hitch
Always guided by the nature of the game, Hitchens, the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group, was in it for the ride. All four looked as though they had powered their way through their task by reading the Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and in some cases not even those carefully enough.
From any objective reading of the serious reviews, their mission to God’s kingdom was an epic fail in terms of what they brought home from the journey. It was all finished, critically speaking, in 2006 when Terry Eagleton said,

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

Dawkins’s precedence in ignoring the opposition by denying they constituted serious opposition became a trademark of the movement he put into place. But despite the discounted value of the books as credible intellectual proposals, there were plenty of people prepared to spread the mission stateside, where Dawkins’s accent, his unabashed science-thumping and his wares were more valuable than in Blighty, where people had been giving up on God (in droves) for decades without his help.
What hath anti-God wrought: The new atheism, which was really an American phenomenon, like Spam.

 
One can’t simply blame Richard Dawkins for creating the kind of poster-pasters his leadership had produced in Gotchaland. He didn’t ordain them, exactly. That would be like blaming Jesus for founding the church. Is a rock star guilty of the excesses of his fans? Of course not.
But it is undeniable that new atheism would never have congealed, to the extent it ever congealed, if American neo-Darwinist soldiers and a few strays hadn’t taken on the fight. Dawkins, as Garry Wolff commented in 2006, was very old news in England when he decided to try plowing the fundamentalist pastures of America. And soldiers there were, just waiting for the right fight and marching orders. And a good thing too: Dawkins himself came off relatively unsullied by these battles, while his American promoters didn’t mind a little mud.
Headlights:
Coyne
Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a biology professor at Chicago. His only book, Why Evolution is True (2009), is his contribution to the anti-intelligent design debate and carries endorsements from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker and others in the atheist-neo-Darwinist klatch. Dawkins reviewed the book for Atheist News in 2009. Hardly anyone would fault Coyne for his attempts to combat the anti-evolution fever that grips the establishment that is failed American science education. I for one think Jerry Coyne has struck a blow for rationality and common sense by writing this lucid book. It’s a shame therefore that Coyne buys into the Dawkins incompatibility model that makes religion the sworn enemy of science and science the salvation of the race. It is frankly embarassing, after two hundred years of the scientific study of religion, to hear a scientist saying things like this:

In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.
Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion? And some information: the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the most venerable in the nation–after which the Chicago School of Religionswissenschaft got its name (and turned Europeans green with envy at its methods)–one notably lacking in Irish elves–is located at 1025 E. 58th Street. Any number of evolution-accepting scholars–including Martin Riesebrodt would be happy to have a chat and set you straight. Of course, if you really believe that a degree in biology trumps every other discipline, then why bother?
P Z Myers. Winner of the 2009 “Humanist of the Year Award,” a lapse of judgement for which the American Humanist Association will burn like cotton floss in a non-existent hell for their abuse of the word humanist,
Myers
P Z Myers is cut from the same neo-Darwinist fabric as Dr Coyne, but without the credentials. That means he is anti-intelligent design, pro-evolution, and happy to be known as the Don Rickles of the Dawkins theatre troupe. He’s the purveyor of the award-winning science blog Pharyngula where he specializes in calling people who don’t agree with him stupid and moronic.
To his credit, Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit though if his rep holds up as the sun goes down on new atheism he does have a collection of his favourite anecdotes and outrages coming out in 2012. But this does not stop him from being the voice to which most of the young neo-atheists pay heed. I was reminded last year, after being told by P Z that I needed to be more respectful to the cause, that he deserves to be called Dr Myers. I had asked why someone who teaches in a university could not distinguish between free speech and inciteful behaviour–like that associated with Koran-burning Florida yahoo Terry Jones.
Myers, who describes himself as a moral nihilist, writes like this:

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. Webster Cook smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. This isn’t the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. …. It is just a cracker! So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls.
So, God love him, P Z Myers got the chance to kick the pope in the balls by spearing a consecrated host (eucharist is the name of the sacrament you fucking ex-Lutheran moron–whoops, just resorting to idiom) and a few other factotums. For this he is famous. And humanist of the year.
But let me just say this about the evolutionary, neo-Darwinist, religion sucks, anti-intelligent design phalanx of new atheism: If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger. If there were ever an occasion for a serious scholar like Dawkins to say, this is over the top, P Z Myers is that opportunity. So far–nothing. The clowns are now the whole circus.
Greta Christina
Greta Christina. I’m not sure whether Greta is a headlight, because there can only be two and she will see any reference to three as some sort of weird sexual joke. That’s the problem. She sees everything as a weird sexual joke. Ranked as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers, Christina exemplifies in her work the increasing influence of LGBTQ trend toward identifying atheism and humanism with victimization and social marginalization. She can be amusing, but needs to take on some serious issues, such as why radical feminism and lesbianism are often perceived to be anti science when new atheism is purely devoted to an evolutionary model that, frankly, is not friendly to special pleading for biological exceptionalism based on sex. Didn’t understand that sentence? You need to.
Sidelights.
Mark Twain just needed Huck and Tom to paste the handbills to the walls. Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.
Ophelia Benson, host of Butterflies and Wheels, has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen. I still regard her as a fair-broker who needs to rise above the temptation to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the grousers who loiter around her kitchen table. I mean campfire.
The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of the Hemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…
Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician qua neo-Darwinian atheist who teaches at James Madison University in Virginia. Rosenhouse [sic] essentially does book reviews of things that cross his path and passes judgment on what he doesn’t like, usually anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism. Of Rabbi Alan Lurie’s recent HuffPo piece on religion, Rosenhouse opined,

We’re really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I’m not sure what he means by ‘the histories,’ but I find nothing to admire in the remaining items on his list. I am not only unimpressed by the world’s various alleged holy texts, but I frankly dislike the whole idea of a holy text. Most religious rituals and practices leave me beyond cold, I think the world’s ‘mystical teachings’ should be discarded in toto, and I think better uses could be found for sacred spaces.
To which I say…Go on. Suggest already. KFCs, meth clinics, museums, failing public libraries, Starbuck’s. You choose. America, as we know, is awash in sacred spaces so the fewer of these antiquities the better. Let’s use the real estate for what we really hold sacred. I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating? Can’t he do this on Facebook and get a thousand likes to boot?
S0 many other poster-pasters, but time is up and I hope my case is made.
The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty-first century England.
HERE is a final question. Why does this matter? Why, more specifically, does it matter to me–why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all? –So what if the ranters are ranters, that they pay no attention to serious religious studies scholarship, ignore the realities of two hundred years of academic inquiry into the foundations of religious thought and dismiss tons of modern scientific investigation into the nature of religious belief as worthless?
Jason Rosenhouse says, presumably with a straight face and clear conscience, he doesn’t know what “scientism” is. Naturally his question, in the ringaround-the-rosey style of this support group, is enthusiastically echoed by Coyne.
Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term (“science”) as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology or physics, for example, have been to their own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.
To deny the authority and validity of specific methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.
Richard Dawkins
The willful ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
In the long run, real science acknowledges failed experiments and the humbling contribution of being wrong as a way of moving toward the right answers. It can’t rest like a medieval pope on its teaching authority. The “scientism” of the new atheists consists in a failed experiment in the misapplication of method. Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that religion is the trivialization of complexities, a default position favoured by “dims” who just don’t get science. The scientistic worldview favoured by his promoters has relied heavily on the trivialization of appropriate methods for understanding religion. Given the starting point of his argument, there can be no other outcome.
The way forward in any useful critique of religion does not depend on activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Eric MacDonald, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, Mark Tawin, new atheism, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, scientism. Bookmark the permalink.

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The Conspiratoriate
by rjosephhoffmann

On September 16, 2001 I was flying back to Beirut to begin a new academic term at the American University, located in the city’s Muslim district of  Hamra.   Logan Airport, where the two planes (American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175) that plunged into the World Trade Center towers had originated, had reopened only the previous day, and the mood of all of us who were boarding international flights was, to say the least, apprehensive.  I glared at fellow passengers for any signs that they might have something to hide, and they glared at me with similar suspicion.  There were many good places to be in the days just following the attacks.  In the air was not one of them.
Back in Lebanon, out of the blue, my driver began by asking how I was, how America was (the answer: a little shaken) and then for no reason apologized to me for the actions of all Muslims, everywhere, with the caution, “This is not Islam.  These people are not Muslims.  They are madmen who defile Islam.”

It was an explanation I would get in one form or another for weeks thereafter, delivered with sincerity, often with unnecessary and misplaced contrition, from students and colleagues.
Similar platitudes about the “true nature of Islam” were emerging in a constant stream from Washington, which affected to make a clear distinction between Islam as a religion of peace and the image of people leaping from tall buildings to avoid being burned alive by the engulfing fire of a senseless and wholly evil act, done in the name of God, by partisans of a particular faith.
I discussed some of this in a 2006 book, Just War and Jihad: Positioning the Question of Religious Violence.  In doing research for my piece of the book  even I was surprised at how ritualistic the actions of Mohamed Attah, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Hani Hanjour were.  In 2012,  Attah’s name and that of his comrades in arms are all but forgotten by most Americans.  What remains are the recycled images, the date, and the sense that some sort of preternatural evil had touched Manhattan Island that day.

The very scale of the spectacle made theological explanations tempting: irresistible to Christian fundamentalists who believed the events vindicated their belief that Islam was a satanic parody of biblical faith, and also, ironically, atheists who felt that it corroborated their belief that Islam epitomized religion’s inherent destructive power over the mind.  Hollywood could leave it alone; sometimes art cannot imitate nature, and among other things September 11 was irreproducible spectacle.  Few of us in our lifetime will witness even one murder. On that day the world saw the internationally televised ritual murder of three thousand people.
But even the platitude makers in Washington were lying to themselves and then began lying to everyone else.  In the weeks and months ahead, America got used to a new vocabulary.  Homeland Security. The Patriot Act.Operation Enduring Freedom.  Rendition. Guantanamo. And a new cast of  very odd characters, talking endlessly about radical Islam and threats to the security of the American people.  Even the word “homeland” was contrived by Bush phrasemakers to evoke an image of nation and common good not evinced in words like “country” or “national security.”  Home is where you lived, what you loved, where you went to be secure; you would do anything to protect it.  What do you protect a home from? Intruders. Outsiders.  Foreigners.

Bush himself in eight years of incompetent bumbling on all fronts is famous for two magic moments:  one, when he impulsively grabbed a bullhorn at “Ground Zero” (another imbecilic phrase) and said to the crowd, “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people —  who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
The second is his unilateral declaration of a win in Iraq in 2003, against the background of a festoon that read “Mission Accomplished.”  Besides Bush, who before this date was just a guy who’d stolen the Florida election won by Al Gore, there were others the American people got to know from briefings, news conferences, security alerts and news updates.  Rudy Giuliani, the “tough DA” who just happened to be mayor of New York on the fatal day; Ray Kelly, the NYC police chief and tough talker; Tom Ridge, the guy appointed by Bush to be the director of new Homeland Security agency, and under whose leadership the red-green-orange alert system  (reminiscent of how you learned to cross a street in first grade), evolved.  They all seemed like emanations of Bush’s plain spoken Wanted- dead- or- alive approach in his “war” on terrorism.
Alongside them, available on call for public ceremonies, were a modest retinue of Islamic spokesmen who were used by the Bush regime as mannequins for modeling what “good Islam” looked like: Wahlid Phares, Zuhdi Jasser, Tawfik Hamid.

If you have missed these faces (I have not) they are reunited for the first time since the passing of the Bush era in a video (released in 2009, but not widely distributed), designed to warm the cockles of your heart’s worst paranoid fears.  If you do not have the stomach for the full 72 minute version (Netflix has it) of The Third Jihad, there is an equally disturbing 32 minute free version that cuts right to the most graphic images and the bottom line delusion:
There is a well developed underground jihadist movement in America.  It is in a perpetual state of struggle against American culture and American values. It wants no prisoners, only victory. Your children are not safe.  ”We the people” (i.e. “real Americans”) are not safe.  Wake up and tell a neighbour.  They use our laws against us.  They will not stop before the Constitution of the United States is replaced by Sharia.  Their first real victory? The presidential election of 2008.
For those of us (barely) old enough to remember the None Dare Call It Treason scare tactics of the 1960's that kept the Domino Theory and rumours of atheist dominion flowing like sewage through the psyche of the American right, this is the Islamaphobe X-rated version of the same lunacy.
The film  is the brainchild of  former Navy physician and “concerned” Muslim Zuhdi Jasser who is most celebrated for his testimony before Congress in connection with the June 24, 2011 hearings on HR 963–known as the “See Something, Say Something Act.” Jasser is also heavily in with the American Islamic Forum for Democracy which recently has been shouting down the New York Times’ campaign against the film, especially its use in training New York City policemen.
If anyone has any doubts about the second-rate nature of the AIFD, then the quality of its website, its projects, and literature should out all doubt to rest.  It has the smell of a hate group whose odour has been unsatisfactorily sprayed over by the use of academics like Bernard Lewis and (important) dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  The majority of the interviewees in the film are self-styled experts with a book and a private theory to sell: Rachel Eherenfeld, Mark Steyn, and Melanie Philips fit that description; other like Giulinai and Tom Ridge are there because they bring back the fragrance of Bush era fear management.  It is not that independently these writers don’t have a piece of a thesis to argue; it is that they have been made in the film into a chorus of frogs.  Their incoherent views aren’t intended by filmmaker Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping to lay out their worries in a coherent way but simply to bludgeon the viewer with  the director’s master-theory of radical Islam.
Confronted by the New York Times blast against The Third Jihad, Mayor Bloomberg ordered its use in training sessions discontinued immediately.  It was soon revealed that Commissioner Ray Kelly (listed in the film’s credits), after initially denying he had had any knowledge of the NYPD’s using the film, had actually cooperated in its development.  The AIFD explained the reversals this way:

The NYPD’s initial denial of having widely used the film for training purposes-and subsequent public apologies issued by Commissioner Kelly (“It shouldn’t have been shown”) and Mayor Bloomberg (“Somebody exercised some terrible judgment. I don’t know who. We’ll find out.”)–are in and of themselves deeply troubling, and say far more about the current state of American society than about The Third Jihad itself. In fact, these public denials and apologies demonstrate the remarkable success achieved by the Islamist lobby in North America, which seeks to prevent any and all public discussion of the supremacist political ideology that non-violent Islamist organizations share in common with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, the behavior of the NYPD, in this matter, tends to confirm the film’s thesis.

Well, why not?  The best proof of anything is to say that suppressing it proves it was (dangerously) correct.  In rare cases, as with Galileo and Yu Jie, this turns out to be be right assessment.  But in most cases, there is no real suppression–just a correction of hideous error, and this film is designed to be hideous, with its visual manipulation, dark corners and spliced commentaries.  New York cops were being taught that homegrown Islamic terror cells are growing like cancer in the United States. (Remember Fort Hood? The film was begun in the year of the shootings, 2008). Now the public is meant to believe that vital information is being withheld by a government gone soft on terror because the Islamist lobby is hugely influential in media and politics.  Make you blood boil?  Oh George, Tom, Dick: where are you when the country needs your help?
The thesis is so absurd at every level that it beggars serious discussion. All the more reason that we should be indignant that officers pf the law were told to believe every word and image in it was true.
The worst part of The Third Jihad-philosophy, however, is that it is not the face of American Islam.  It is the face of fear-mongers left over from the (pardon the expression) Bush intelligentsia who are driven by their own political agendas.  Fear, after all, was good for them; it got them legally elected once and kept the country in the pocket of mean-spirited men for almost a decade–an unforeseen stroke of luck for an ignorant man and his lunatic far-right supporters.  These are the same voices who would have goaded Bush into bombing Iran if the mood had struck him, the same cohort who succeeded in pushing him to invade Iraq and stir the hornets’ nest in Pakistan.  These are people who want the Peacock throne and their villas back, but who are not so stupid as to think they can say this out loud.  It is not about Islam; it is about the private agendas of a distraught expatriate community and oil guzzling supporters who think American-style democracy would be good for the Middle East, good for the Islamic wold in general.
They’re banking on a tried and true constant in American politics:  American ignorance of the inner workings of the world beyond these shores. To do this they have to convince Americans that they are complacent while really under siege.  The message of the film is that smart (and patriotic) Americans will not be led astray by peace and tranquility.  Smart and patriotic Americans know that there is a war going on between their values and the values of foreigners.  The film argues, if that is the right word–rather impresses–that while violent jihad against the United States may be in suspension right now, cultural jihad is being waged by Islamic groups who are using the laws and rights they are given to work against society and overthrow it.  The tissue of silliness on which this master theory is based is something called the Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America.  Written by a member the Muslim brotherhood, Mohamed Akram,  in 1991,  it reeks of the overblown jihadist sentiment of that era, sentiment more eloquently purveyed in bin Laden’s fatwahs against America.
But it is all mularkey. The kind conservatives in Washington seem to get off on. –Factory-produced xenophobia repackaged as patriotism. There is no “Third Jihad.”  There is no “stealth jihad.”  And the third Jihad conspiracy-sellers can only persuade two kinds of people: people who feel more secure when they are fighting a war against some spectral enemy they are largely ignorant of, and people who stand to profit from convincing the public that they must be eternally vigilant, eternally suspicious, and as a consequence, eternally irrational.
We have a lot of people who fit that description, and a lot more who might buy  the sinister vision of an Islamic apocalypse that the film promotes.  It seems to me we have a lot more to worry about from those kinds of people.
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Published: February 3, 2012
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Tags: 9/11 : films about terrorism : Islamism : Mohamed Attah : R. Joseph Hoffmann : radical Islam : terrorism : The Just War and Jihad : The Third Jihad ..
4 Responses to “The Conspiratoriate”

.
 Endre Fodstad 
 February 4, 2012 at 2:54 am
Excellent article. It feels quite relevant to me as a norwegian – the tragedy this summer was perpetrated by someone who was trumpeting a similar mixture of fear-mongering and conspiratorial delusion.
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 steph 
 February 4, 2012 at 2:31 pm
It is an excellent essay describing a dire situation. I was unaware of many details you have highlighted. The reference to “Bush intelligentsia” reminds me of a former NZ Prime Minister David Lange’s quip, to another Republican in 1986, former US Ambassador H. Monroe Browne. Browne owned a racehorse called Lacka Reason. Lange said: “You are the only ambassador in the world to race a horse named after your country’s foreign policy.” Lacka Reason reflects aspects of domestic policy too.
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 Scott 
 February 6, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Classical form of Despotism: alway keep the populace in fear, then you can get them to believe anything and do almost everything.
Reply
 
 Steersman 
 February 11, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Interesting and persuasive article illustrating the problematic nature of paranoia and xenophobia, and which underlines Roosevelt’s aphorism about nothing to fear but fear itself. They say that the first casualty in a war is the truth itself, and the propaganda war which The Third Jihad appears part of is no exception – although I think what Islamic countries are peddling is far worse.
However, the tenor and thrust of your article does seem just a little incongruous given that you wrote the Foreword to Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim which makes no bones, in what seems to me a very credible argument, that Islam itself poses a serious threat to universal human rights and democracy:
Indeed autocracy and Islam are far more natural bedfellows than Islam and democracy. Democracy depends on freedom of thought and free discussion, whereas Islamic law explicitly forbids the discussions of decisions arrived at by the infallible consensus of the ulama. The whole notion of infallibility, whether of a “book” or a group of people [or an individual such as the Pope], is profoundly undemocratic and unscientific. [pg 181]
A case in point being the recent thuggish attempt by a group of Muslims to suppress a discussion of Sharia law noteworthy for a rhetorical question by one such individual unclear on the concept of democracy: “who gave these kuffar the right to speak?”
To quote Von Hayek: “Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole society must be entirely and permanently subordinated.” [pg 183]
The purpose for Muslims apparently being jihad which, apparently, all believers must commit themselves to, with “dhimmitude” – the “divinely sanctioned system of discriminatory provisions” [The Trouble With Islam Today; Irshad Manji; pg 70] – being the fate of lesser creatures: i.e., Christians, Jews, pagans, unbelievers, etc., etc., etc.
The truth of the matter is that Islam will never achieve democracy and human rights if it insists on the application of sharia and as long as there is no separation of church and state. But as Muir put it: “A reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which they [the institutions of Islam] rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer.” [pg 187]
While one might quibble somewhat with his related argument that “there is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism” [pg 185], I think it is essentially correct. For example the Pew Forum report on religion in America notes that only some 8% of Muslims concede that the Quran was written only by men – no divine entities in the loop. But that only raises the minor question as to how they could consider themselves as such and the major one of just how much of the hateful schlock therein the rest really do buy – schlock that manifests so much savagery and barbarism that is so egregious that one finds it hard to see any redeeming features to it – Sufism, maybe – or the culture it has crippled so pathologically and so extensively.
As you probably know Warraq starts off with a quote from one E. Renan: “Muslims are the first victims of Islam. …. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service one can render him.” In the service of which and in consideration of the fact that Islam is intrinsically and fundamentally inimical and antithetical to the principles of democracy and human rights then it very much seems that questions of identity have to take a back seat.
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Talking Points from Rick Santorum’s Ethics Playbook
by rjosephhoffmann

1.  No fetus should be denied health care.
2. My mother Cathy used to say, God love her,  The best solution for unwanted pregnancy is to learn to want it.
3.  All men are created equal.  All women are created  to be mothers and teachers or nurses.
4. Life begins at conception and ends with a funeral.
5.  Marriage is between one man and one woman, Mormon losers.
6.   Abortion is a sin because the Bible says “Honour thy father and thy mother,” and how would you even be here if they had aborted you, pervert?
7.  Despite what my critics say, I do not believe everything the pope says is literally true.  For example, he might say “It look like rain” when it doesn’t.
6. Our Constitution gives people of the same sex all kinds of rights. And it gives people of different sexes different rights. Same – Different, is that too hard for you you socialist bloodsuckers.
9.  Marriage is not a right.  It is a privilege.  Except it can’t be taken away once you accept it.  It’s really complicated.

10.  Monogamous, heterosexual relationships are what make America “the shining city on a hill,” like St. Augustine John Kennedy Ronald Reagan so famously said.
11.  It hurts me to see so many Catholics turning their backs on the teaching of the bishops. I think we can all learn something important from the bishops about how to teach our children, family values, protecting the young so many things.
12.  I’m not saying I’m a perfect Catholic.  God didn’t make us perfect.  I’d only say that I am the only Catholic politican who can go to communion with a clean conscience.
13.  What a disaster John Kennedy was as the first Catholic president.  I’ll bet if abortion had been legal then he would have been for it.
14.  People ask me, “Why do you think you’ve got a direct line to the Almighty?”  I’ll tell you why, if you tell me why you’re so gay.
15. Do I believe in evolution?  Let me put it his way. I believe God has a right to change his mind.
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Published: February 8, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bishops : Catholic Church : election 2012 : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Rick Santorum : Rick Santorum on abortion : Santorum sayings ..
6 Responses to “Talking Points from Rick Santorum’s Ethics Playbook”

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 Dan Gillson 
 February 8, 2012 at 2:53 pm

Yeah, it’s a youtube link, but it’s good — I promise.
Reply
 
 Stevie 
 February 8, 2012 at 7:30 pm
We interrupt the theology to bring you a brief public service announcement from your local friendly neighbourhood obstetrician:
There are indeed life threatening conditions which can only be cured by ending a pregnancy, but uterine infection is not one of them.
If you have a temperature of almost 105 degrees please do not emulate Mrs Santorum’s behaviour; bacteria are notoriously resistant to the power of prayer, and you need hefty doses of industrial strength intravenous antibiotics together with skilled professional assistance in the intensive care unit, should you wish to survive.
We now return you to the theology unit which will, no doubt, be able to explain the miracle by which God cured Mrs Santorum when she terminated her pregnancy.
Reply
 
 Veronica Abbass 
 February 8, 2012 at 9:30 pm
O brave new world
 That has such people in’t!
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 February 8, 2012 at 9:34 pm
;)
Reply
 
 
 steph 
 February 9, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Life begins at 40. Santorum needs a nice white straitjacket and a sanatorium. I hope the youtube is dubbed and the post is satire. It just seems too far fetched to be true. But the saying goes, credo quia absurdum.
Reply
 
 steph 
 February 11, 2012 at 11:08 am
Santorum needs a nice white straitjacket and a sanatorium. I hope the youtube is dubbed and the post is satire. It just seems too far fetched to be true. But the saying goes, credo quia absurdum.
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Catholics and the Contraceptive Conscience
by rjosephhoffmann

The Catholic bishops think that they have a right to an opinion about contraception and abortion.  They do.  They also think that when they speak in the name of their Church, as custodians of its moral philosophy, to people who want to listen, they have a right to be heard.  They do.
Unfortunately they think as well  that when they are heard they deserve deference and to be obeyed.  They don’t.
The right of a church (or a religion) to teach is not the same as the obligation of the people to listen, especially when listening would mean setting aside one of the core principles of a constitutional democracy: the health and welfare of its population regardless of what any individual or group, religious or secular, considers sacred truth .
In the United States, among the 43 million fertile, sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant, 89% are practicing contraception.  Whatever else the bishops might want to preach about, contraception is the least likely to result in obeisant listening: the failure of Catholics to heed the absurd teaching of Paul VI’s panicked “birth control encyclical” (Humanae Vitae, 1968) is impressively documented in every survey done since 1970.
If abortion remains a controversial topic for some ethicists, the court of public opinion gave the verdict on birth control a long time ago.
But obedience is the trademark of the Roman church, as it was originally of the Roman Empire.  When the bishops of Rome first assumed the title pontifex maximus or supreme pontiff in the late fourth century, they did so using the imperial idea that the emperor was the bridge (pontus) between the gods and mankind.  Beginning with Augustus, Roman emperors were venerated as the sons of god: it’s one of the reasons Jesus gets the title in his christological role as “king of kings,” and why in their inspired mode, ex cathedra–from the throne of Peter–popes are thought to be infallible when teaching on “matters of faith and morals”–something no protestant, never mind an agnostic or a United States congressman, is required to believe.
Welcome to America, Land of the free and home of the politically vacuous. If anyone needs to be indignant about anything in the Obama administration’s effort to secure contraceptive protection for women as part of health care coverage by employers (including corporations owned by the Catholic Church), it should be the congressional leaders who are now screaming about the government’s “intrusion” into matters of conscience.  They should be telling the Church to calm down, hush up, and learn to be American.  Congress is entrusted with the legislative function of government, yet a significant majority of American legislators, or at least those who can read, are banefully ignorant of the secular character of the document that describes their job.
Whose conscience? What teaching? By what authority? This isn’t China,  or the Europe of the Middle Ages. It’s the world’s oldest (yes oldest) continuing republic.  It is supposed to be the place where the pretensions of hierarchical religion and monarchical rule were set aside in favor of a secular constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion but not its dominance over the welfare of its citizens.  The fact that a plenum of backward politicians, if that is not a tautology, happen to find that their antediluvian religious views and political needs coincide with the teaching of Rome on this matter should have no bearing on the discussion of contraception, health care, and reproductive rights.  None.

But naturally, in  hyper-religious America, any program that seems to challenge the unwritten catechism of the Christian right is construed as an assault on the freedom to worship, on religion itself.  The Sean Hannitys and Laura Ingrahams of this old world with their rabidly anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-science agenda and traditional-Catholic fear of sexual freedom dominate the discussion with a mixture of political illiteracy, brusque stupidity and the sort of dull sophistry that we usually associate with salesmen working on commission at Radio Shack.  But they have an audience, and they have homo Americanus’ natural gift for missing the point in their favour.
If John Kennedy were a candidate for the presidency in 2012, given what likely would have been his views on contraception and abortion, he would have been trashed by the Catholic media and the bishops for being a disloyal son of the Church.  In fact, that’s just what Rick Santorum, that most mule-faced and mulishly stupid of Catholic rightists, called him.
The Church as church has every right to its doctrine and its view. But religious doctrine should not stand (in countless cases has not stood) when a religious organisation (for example) advocates child marriage, or the abuse of children in the form of corporal punishment, or life-threatening health practices that would restrict emergency treatment to minors.  The Catholic Church has lost significant moral persuasiveness in recent years by preaching on stage its gospel of life and sermonizing about the rights of the unborn, while behind the curtain abusing the born, the vulnerable and the old as “human weaknesses” that the laity should learn to comprehend and forgive.  The denial of contraceptive rights to women as a fundamental part of health care is just another example of this malignant behavior.

Deciding women's futures
Because of its antiquity, the rules and pronouncments of the Catholic church are not often compared to those of other denominations; after all, in addition to being the  world’s largest owner of private hospitals it is the world’s most ancient monarchy.  To a large extent, its theology has defined both the institution of marriage, the nature of the family, and the conflicting duties individuals face in their religious life and as citizens.
The church has argued and will continue to argue that the City of Man is the imperfect representation of the City of God–to which the church stands nearer because of its privileged position as guardian of timeless truths.  Once again, the Church is free to believe this.  It is not anyone else’s duty to accept it as true.  The Church’s position on contraception and abortion is derived from particular traditions regarded as sacred by its teachers.  By their very nature, therefore, they are not binding on the conscience of those who regard those truths as damaging, irrational or destructive.  The secular state is under no more obligation to accept the Church’s teaching on reproductive issues than it is to accept the Church’s teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  If American legislators would howl at the latter example, why are they lined up behind the Church in opposing freedom of choice.  After all, the church is supposed to know more about eternal than temporal things, and nothing is more temporal then reproduction.
But the church as an owner of corporations is not acting in the same role as the Church as the avowed dispenser of God’s grace through teaching and the sacraments. Its ecclesiastical privileges cannot extend into its social involvements and projects.
What the Church claims to do for the salvation of souls is one thing: if you believe it, and it doesn’t hurt animals, by all means continue to do it.
But contaception is  matter of the flesh, for men and women who have presumably decided not to heed the jeremiads of two hundred aging celibate prelates who will never be pregnant, never suffer a miscarriage, never have to consider the risks of giving birth, or of giving birth to a child with a genetic disorder.
Most sickening of all of course is the bare teeth hypocrisy of the politicans who want to see the Obama administration’s decision about contraceptive care as a violation of the First Amendment, an infringement of the free exercise of religion.  It is the government “telling religion what to do,” they say, with the assured self-satisfaction of a high school debater who’s just scored a point against the team from the next county.
Well, exactly.  That is exactly the way our system works.  It tells religion when to climb down.  It says a Presbyterian can believe in God’s prevenient saving grace and a Catholic can believe in actual grace earned through merit and priestly offices.
It says the government couldn’t care less unless the two want to fight it out with guns (cf. Amendment II) at dawn. It says a woman can believe in a hundred gods or in no god at all and still run for elected office.  It says that a Church should not be licensed to be a hospital but might own hospitals that meet specific standards for health care. Those standards are not doctrinal but empirical, measurable, scientific.  That hospital is not required to perform abortions. It is required to provide the same standard of  care for its employees–not all of whom are Catholic–as they might expect from a hospital that was not subject to the Church’s magisterium.
If the bishops and the Christian Right and their Republican mouthpieces win this one, the Constitution loses.  But most Americans won’t know that and many won’t care.
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Published: February 13, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholic Church : contraception : Obama health care : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
4 Responses to “Catholics and the Contraceptive Conscience”

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 andom2000 
 February 14, 2012 at 8:21 am
“the court of public opinion gave the verdict”…
the appeal to the public opinion is an interesting topic.
 Should we also respect the public opinion expressed in a referendum in California that said no to gay marriage?
 Should we also respect the public opinion that in the USA in his majority is in favor of the capital punishment?
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 Charles Geoffrion 
 February 18, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Add to your cogent commentary the array of significant non-contraceptive medical benefits women receive from the use of this science-based technology. Is the Catholic Church to deny such health-related value to women (and the men, women and children in their lives) based on its inability to understand, appreciate and accept the importance of sex to all humans?
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 Steersman 
 February 20, 2012 at 2:59 am
Unfortunately they think as well that when they are heard they deserve deference and to be obeyed. They don’t.
Precisely and exactly right. And which underlines and amplifies, as you probably know, a sentence or two from Daniel Dennett’s recent tribute to  Christopher Hitchens:
Of all the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” Hitchens was clearly the least gentle, the angriest, the one most likely to insult his interlocutor. But in my experience, he only did it when rudeness was well deserved – which is actually quite often when religion is the topic. Most spokespeople for religion expect to be treated not just with respect but with a special deference that is supposedly their due because the cause they champion is so righteous.
An interesting topic and perspective though. For one thing it seems to manifest more than a few passing similarities with the Emperor and his new “clothes” who, along with his courtiers, tried to brazen things out with bare-faced lies by assuming the public’s limitless gullibility.
And for another, maybe more charitably, it may highlight the essence of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures. Seems the religious in particular really have very little comprehension that the essence of science is its reliance on the “hypothetico-deductive” model and attendant principles of tangible evidence and predictability – in which fields, of course, religion falls down badly.
But it seems to me that a salient feature if not the essence of all human thought, the rational kind anyway, is that same model, regardless of whether it occurs in theology, philosophy, the humanities, pseudoscience or the “hard” sciences like mathematics, physics and molecular biology. Just that theology in particular towards one extreme end of that spectrum seems to rest on the hypothesis leg and never makes the effort, disingenuously or fraudulently, to provide any evidence for its contentions. Although, regrettably, “science” itself is not immune to that failing which was illustrated by the well known biologist Richard Lewontin who has noted the prevalence of and reliance on “just-so” stories as the unexamined premises of various sciences, some more pseudo than others.
Also speaking to that dichotomy was the British scientist and Nobel laureate P.B. Medawar who, in his collection of essays The Art of the Soluble, made several comments on a “favorite conceit of eighteenth-century philosophizing”. That conceit and the resulting “Philosophick Romances” argued, in effect, that one hypothesis was as good as another – once one has connected all of the known dots together in some fashion, any fashion in spite of the myriads of other possibilities, then the job is done. But while Swedenborg may or may not have said that “There is nothing that cannot be confirmed, and falsity is confirmed more readily than truth”, that seems a rather questionable categorical statement. And, in addition, it seems quite easily disproved simply by considering the aphorism, “The proof is in the pudding” – the tangible consequences of one’s hypotheses and reasoning and recipes that one puts on the table. Or as Medawar phrased it:
As the very least we expect of a hypothesis is that it should account for the phenomena already before us, its ‘extra-mural’ implications, its predications about what is not yet known to be the case, are of special and perhaps crucial importance. [pg 147]
And since the religious in general, and the Catholic bishops in question in particular, seem to have absolutely diddly-squat in the way of tangible evidence and have been forever at each other’s throats like a pack of rabid dogs over ephemeral and picayune details of dogma, I would say that, far from being given any deference whatsoever, they should be laughed off the stage for being deluded if not ridden out of town on a rail for being a bunch of criminals and charlatans.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 May 16, 2013 at 6:11 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
A Reblog
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Wife Rape
by rjosephhoffmann

“O  the woman God said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Genesis 3.16)
“If a husband calls his wife to his bed and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” (Bukhari v.4, b.54, no.460).
“Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (St Paul, I Corinthians 11.3)

Marital or spousal rape is now illegal in most of the developed and much of the developing world.  But it is one of those subjects that came late in the discussion of women’s rights and criminal sexual abuse.
As the West tries to redefine “traditional” marriage in a way that respects the concept of a consensual relationship between equal partners of either sex,  it needs to acknowledge that its own view of traditional marriage has actually been an impediment to solving a problem enshrined in that understanding: the idea of contractual privilege–superiority–of the man over the woman.
Most of the confusion in law stems from unacknowledged theological beliefs that have been papered over by a slew of case law, but like mildew keeps seeping through to reveal the ancient conceptual rot underneath.
A lot of this is blamed ( maybe rightly) on Saint Paul, who commended women in Christian marriage not to refuse their husbands their conjugal “rights” (1 Corinthians 7.5; cf 1 Cor. 11.13), and a half-mad interpreter of Paul who saw pregnancy as the fast track to salvation for obedient wives (1 Timothy 2.15). Not that the church invented this model of nuptial happiness: it was already a part of the family law of ancient Rome, before the Church came along.  The paterfamilias–the pinnacle of patriarchal development in the West– had power of life and death over wife, children and slaves, with few legal constraints.  The Christian church made male authority canonical in the Church, where women were excluded from governance,  and in the family, and preserved the man-on-top philosophy for two millennia, with almost no one raising serious objections.
 
MATTHEW HALE: RAPE WITHIN MARRIAGE IS A LEGAL IMPOSSIBILITY
 
Christianity also went the Romans one step better: it declared that God wanted it this way.  In Book VI of his Confessions, Augustine recalls that he acquired a concubine, while waiting for his bride-in-waiting to become of marriageable age,  because “he was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust”–a view of woman’s functionality that he scarcely budged from at any point in his career: “[O God] Thou hast granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women (Conf. i)…. Woman who is simple and knoweth nothing (Conf. iii).”
Women’s consent in sexual matters was further compromised by the theological premise that they were lacking in reason, which only the male possessed in significant measure, and “nothing so casts down the manly mind from its heavenly heights as the fondling of woman and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.” The woman is the source of pain and guilt, the incitement to lust, by God’s decree,  a permissible distraction for the eminently reasonable man who sometimes must take his fist to to the woman’s face to release his passion.
Along the way, inevitably, the theology of men on top–the male as dominant partner–seeped into the Common Law that formed the basis for the legal systems of America and the British Commonwealth. A famous 17th century treatise by Sir Matthew Hale (not published until 1736) called marital rape “an impossibility in law” because by virtue of marriage “the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.” The chatteled staus of the woman in the partnership was simply assumed as a point that need not be argued.

A number of movements in the nineteenth century began to eat away at the logic of Hale’s commentary.  Letters and diary entries from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony illustrate the intensity of the struggle:

Stanton: “‘Woman’s degradation is in man’s idea of his sexual rights,’ Stanton wrote to Anthony. ‘How this marriage question grows on me. It lies at the very foundation of all progress.’”
Stone: “It is clear to me, that [the marriage] question underlies, this whole movement and all our little skirmishing for better laws, and the right to vote, will yet be swallowed up, in the real question, viz, has woman, as wife, a right to herself? It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property &c. if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right. Not one wife in a thousand can do that now, & so long as she suffers this bondage, all other rights will not help her to her true position.”
But after the nineteenth century there was real progress in understanding marrriage as a pact of equals–a fact not just reflected in the changing nature of marriage rituals (“love, honor and obey” becoming a rare form of the Anglican promise required of a bride after 1965) but the progressive criminalising of marital rape after 1970 and the United Nations declaration hat marital rape is a violation of human rights in 1993. In 2006, it was estimated that marital rape could be prosecuted in at least 104 countries, and since 2006 several other nations have outlawed spousal rape.  Surveys show that Islamic countries and most African countries have been the slowest to implement penalties for marital rape, and that even in those countries where the rape of a spouse has been criminalized, a category of exemptions and special considerations exists (for example, the notion that the marriage contract constitutes “implied consent”) that make prosecution of the crime a difficult matter.
HE question is at the center of the religion- and- state- issue that affects many countries around the world, but especially those trying to create a civil legal system against the backdrop of religious law and traditional attitudes about marriage.  Deference toward tradition affects not only couples living in the culture where the marriage conventions and laws were formed, but also dispersed populations, such as the Pakistani diaspora in the U.K., that embrace some but not all of the “western” values indigenous to liberal European democracies.
A recent article by Aneka Chohan highlights the problem in Islamic societies.  She puts the dilemma as starkly and forcefully as I have seen it:

When it comes to marital rape, women are often confused whether they have been raped or not. The scenario of a stranger raping a woman on the street is immediately identified as  rape, where as forceful acts by a husband upon a wife are considered acceptable. This is partly due to the cultural belief that is rooted in women’s minds that ‘submitting’ to their husband is a sign of a dutiful wife.
The West tends to feel terribly privileged and liberal in the discussion of marital rape, but the premises used by Islamic theologians and “experts” are hauntingly like the rationales used in Europe and America for centuries: it is based of a thelogy of opposites, discredited Aristotelian biology (which saw the male as “propagative” and the female as “nutritive”), and a system that was designed specifically to keep women in their place as help-meets to their masculine superiors.
Take for example the words of Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, the president of the Islamic Sharia Council of Britain–a Muslim cleric living in England–where any report of spousal rape would be treated as a crime:

“Clearly there cannot be any rape with the marriage. Maybe aggression, maybe indecent activity…because when they got married, the understanding was that sexual intercourse was part of the marriage, so there cannot be anything against sex in marriage. Of course, if it happened without her desire, that is no good, that is not desirable….In Islamic sharia, rape is adultery by force. So long as the woman is his wife, it cannot be termed as rape. It is reprehensible, but we do not call it rape.”
There may be a superficial logic to this preposterous claim, but it has no more bearing on the nature of rape than the seventeenth century notions of Sir Matthew Hale.   Add to this the lack of consensuality that precedes the marriage contract in much of Islamic society and the rape provision becomes even more invidious: a woman who did not marry a man of her choosing can be held accountable for not giving that man his conjugal “rights.” A girl taken by force and gang raped can be judicially executed (“honor killing”) for bringing shame on her family, as in the case of seventeen year old Kainrat Soomro who was declared a kiri(blackened woman) by a council of elders for losing her virginity outside marriage.   As Habibi Nosheen says in her superb Atlantic article from September 2011, “The most recent report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan noted that in 2009 roughly 46 percent of all female murders in Pakistan that year were in the name of ‘honor’. The report noted that a total of 647 incidences of ‘honor killings’ were reported by the Pakistani press. However, experts say that actual incidences of ‘honor killings’ in Pakistan are much higher and never get reported to the police because they are passed off by the families as suicides.”
pulitzer sep26 p.jpg
Underlying the judgments of the religious experts is more than two thousand years of male superstition, male insecurity, and male power.  Coercion and dominance within marriage is the last hurrah of a concept of marriage that keeps daddy on top and mother–as the writer of I Timothy advocates–barefoot and pregnant.
It keeps women ashamed to tell the truth about the thugs they married and daughters silent about the men who drugged them and bruised them and robbed them of the right to choose.
But it is not even that easy: Because in the first instance, spousal rape is not about choice. It is about power and the mythology that supports power.  The men who do such things are supported by a vicious theology that makes God, “the almighty father,” the “compassionate, the merciful,” the “hearer of prayers”– that God– the creator of a system that sees women as what the Catholic church used to call “occasions of sin”–visual enticements to lust and pleasure.  It’s all their fault; they earned their position by being the first to transgress God’s law, surrendering (as Augustine saw it) their natural rights to the man.
This theology has been chanted and sung and and said for two millennia by thousands of under-educated clerics in the book traditions who could not make an honest living if their lives depended on it, and hence prefer the easy road: tell people what God wants and what God the father expects of them. The God who told a virgin named Miriam not to tell anyone he’d got her pregnant.  The God who abused his only son and required him to be tortured to death. The God who teased Abraham with the promise of a son for a hundred years and drove his youngest wife into the desert. The God who told the Prophet that a nine year old wife would become the mother of believers. That God. Tell them that God wants it this way: your wives submissive and silent and your daughters obedient.  If that fails, there are always fists and knives.
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Published: February 20, 2012
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7 Responses to “Wife Rape”

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 Herb Van Fleet 
 February 20, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Excellent post, as usual. I’d just like underscore your thoughts with, uh, some other thoughts. First, I am probably more of a women’s libber than many women’s libbers. Something I’ve pondered for many years is the loss of a woman’s identity when she marries; she usually, but not always, transfers her ownership by her father to her husband, occasionally connecting both owners by a hyphen. (No puns on “hyphen,” please.) I say owners because, as you point out so brilliantly above, women, in the Judaic/Christian/Islamic tradition are merely pieces of property, subordinated to men, and made available from time to time to suit their pleasure. After all, marriage was, up until recent times, and still is in many parts of the world, a property transaction. There are doweries involved, maybe a couple of pigs or a buffalo or two. Now, I know that women love their fathers and their husbands, but taking on the surnames of males announces, or at least suggests, that they are somehow giving up their individuality, not to mention their equality, not to mention that.
In respect of that observation, I see it as Ironic, with a capital “I”, that the heathens, the indigenous peoples of the world, have no problem for the most part with women having their own identity. If you were to talk about Rebecca Rolfe, fo example, it would be meaningless until you said her maiden name was Pocahontas. Now, Sacagawea, (a.k.a., Sakakawea, a.k.a., Sacajawea) was apparently sold as a slave and then married a fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. However, one of her biographers, Bonnie “Spirit Wind-Walker” Butterfield, suggests that it’s unknown whether she went by the name, Sacagawea Charbonneau. On the other hand, I suppose naming your daughter “Screams and Cries All Night” might not be unique.
There are also the matriarchies of course. One of them in upstate New York is the League of the “Haudenosaunee,” a.k.a., the “Iroquois Confederacy.” As I wrote in an Op-Ed piece last year, “. . . much of the political power of the Confederacy was in the hands of the elder women. They could veto treaties or declarations of war, they appointed members of their clan to the Grand Council, and if any member failed to comply with the wishes of the women of his tribe and the Great Law, the mother could demote him. Iroquois women could also own and sell property and do so without the permission of any patriarch. This gender equality would later become an inspiration to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others in the Women’s Suffrage movement.” (Along with Iceland and Switzerland, the Iroquois Confederacy is one of the oldest continuing democracies in the world.)
It was Ted Tuner, founder of CNN, who once said that we should pass a law saying that only women can hold elective office for the next 100 years because that’s how long it will take to clean up the messes we men have created. Men, especially men of the cloth, need to get into the 21st century.
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 andom2000 
 February 21, 2012 at 3:14 am
I can’t understand the reference to the Iroquois.
 They were a matriarchial society but we know that Iroquois nations had infighting.
 So where is the advantage of the power to the women?
 The Iroquois Confederacy was formed in order to stop the squabbling Iroquoian nations and the infighting, and was formed through the efforts of two men.
Question: could you prove that the Iroquois were not a matriarchy before the constitution of the Confederacy when the nations warred ?
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 Herb Van Fleet 
 February 21, 2012 at 12:24 pm
As to the matriarchy issue, check out “The Iroquois: Matriarchy or Not?” (http://voices.yahoo.com/the-iroquois-matriarchy-not-8558375.html.) It concludes, “The Iroquois, while tipping the scales toward matriarchy, is actually a great example of an egalitarian society, in the sense of women’s and men’s social power and rights. Should the third marker (defined previously) ever be dismissed, there could be a good chance that the Iroquois would be ‘pushed over the line’ just enough to be a ‘matriarchy.’ But of course you are free to make your own judgement.
Furthermore, if you’re interested, here are some of the sources I used in writing my Op-Ed piece on the Iroquois Confederacy that may help answer your question:
“What is the Iroquois Confederacy?”http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/Our_Country_Vol_1/Learnabou_d.html
“Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy” http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/EoL/index.html#ToC
“A Basic Call to Consciousness – The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World,”
Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977 \http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/BasicCtC.html

 
 
 
 TerryB 
 February 27, 2012 at 2:32 pm
I do wish that you folk would not selectively quote St. Paul (among others).
 You know that saying :- “A lot of this is blamed ( maybe rightly) on Saint Paul, who commended women in Christian marriage not to refuse their husbands their conjugal “rights” (1 Corinthians 7.5); ” is a loaded quotation!
 In actual fact Paul goes on to say “likewise the husband does not rule over his own body but the wife does”!
That the Church (including St. Augustine) twisted things out of context says more about St. Augustine and other “teachers” than about Biblically based theology.
 Do try to read the whole text before quoting a small part; Remember “a text without a context is a pretext”.
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 TerryB 
 March 7, 2012 at 10:27 am
My daughter is an Oxford graduate (2:1 in Theology) and I always respected Oxford as a place where differing views could be expressed and questions asked. However things may now be different if you do not allow your interpretation of scripture to be questioned.
 I ask again, why do you not quote St Paul in full instead of cutting out the verse that supports your view? l Corinthians 7 verses 3 to 5 give a balanced view of the complimentarity of a wife and her husband.
 This is the second comment I have written – no doubt it will be “moderated” as was the last because it points out a different, and correct, reading of St. Paul.
Reply
 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 August 21, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
The case of the spiritually challenged Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri calls for more discussion of the issue of rape: what it is, what is is not, and what laws need to be framed to protect the victims.
Reply

 Stevie Gamble 
 August 23, 2012 at 1:19 pm
I live in England where we now have the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which replaced the hodgepodge of common law and statute; it’s quite easy to define rape if you wish to do so.
Of course, you have to wish to do so…
Reply
 
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

The Paltry Cause
by rjosephhoffmann

I will always write about religion because that is what I was trained to do.  My field is the study of religion.  It is an interesting and important field.  It deserves to be treated seriously because religion has been influential in shaping ideas and society since before there were alphabets and wedges to tell us its story.  Like science– like everything, as Nietzsche and common sense tell us–it is antinomous:  that means  it has opposition built into it– good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong.  The Persians may have been the first to see this, but I am not sure.  The Chinese saw it too, the Greeks certainly did, and the Manicheans of Augustine’s day–and Augustine himself.  The primal choice is a choice about the way in which something beautiful—a fruit, let’s say, symbolically—can be used for good or bad. When religion has talked about good and evil, it has sometimes failed to see itself in its own dichotomy, as though ‘religion’ was the cure and not the essence of the tension.  But in my opinion religion is the revelation of the tension between salvation and destruction.  It cannot escape from itself.  It cannot pretend to be all good since there is evil in it. It is not all good. And it is not all evil.  That has to be determined, like apples and atoms, by the way people use it.
But I have decided to stop writing about atheism. Because I believe that atheism is to religion what counting on your fingers is to mathematics. It works, to a point.  But it ends where the serious questions and complexities begin.
I suppose that some people will find this an odd statement.  Atheists sometimes like to see mathematics and science as particular ‘strengths’ in their war against religion.  But they are wrong. The scientific –ballistic-evolutionary argument against religion is not a reasoned assessment at all but an assault based on assumptions that have not changed much since the nineteenth century. It presupposes that science, adequately explicated, contains a knock down disproof of religious faith. I am not going to pronounce on the silliness of that assumption except to say that no one as yet can define what ‘adequately explicated’ can possibly mean, and until we can science offers at best scattered and tentative evidence against elements of religious faith that can just as easily be arrived at through common sense—or systematic theology.
The use of science by atheists has not really touched “religion” at all.  It has been a paltry, casuistic attack on particular cherry picked ideas taken largely from the Judaeo Christian corpus of beliefs–out of which atheism sprang.  And it sprang from this corpus because Christianity created the environment for doubt when it created the opportunity for faith. The narrowness of the atheist critique and its carping on ideas and doctrines that the modern world and shopping malls have rendered obsolete illustrates the poverty of its message.
Atheists in America especially want to think of themselves as plain-spoken, hard-headed, pragmatic, scientifically-inclined, reason-abiding savants who just want to let people know that they are right and religious folk are wrong.
But this shortcutting is almost always an example of ignorance or maybe evidence that they lack a passport and have not traveled much. Why be curious about what other people believe if all belief is rancid, simplistic, retardant nonsense?  Most of world history and the study of culture becomes optional, if not useless, when we make scientific sophistication the criterion for “real” knowledge of the world. Along with their claim to intellectual correctness, atheists, ironically, want people  (though what audience is not clear) to know that they are a persecuted minority engaged in a civil rights struggle against the superstitions and outrages of religion.
Coming out atheist only a few years ago was beginning to look a lot like a Billy Graham Crusade, where repentant whoremongers and alcoholics “accepted” Jesus in a public display of their born-again life in the spirit. When the “new” atheism (now being remaindered in second hand bookshops everywhere) has run its course, it will be remembered primarily for what it is: intellectually vacuous, analytically sloppy and humanistically absent.
But we do need to continue to think and write about religion—critically.  For almost thirty years, beinning as a graduate student, I was involved with the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, CSER, which has emerged as one of the greatest of many casualties of the collapse of the Center for Inquiry in 2008.
What CSER had just about right was the belief that an independent voice–neither academic nor ecclesiastical–was needed to deal with topics ranging from Quranic origins to religious violence to biblical misinterpretation in a—can I say this with a straight face—fair and blanced way.  The more strident, anti-religion and God-bashing stance of new atheists nailed the coffin shut on the enterprise, rendering any future work from any equivalent organization impossible and unreliable.  If religious parochialism was what CSER tried hard to avoid and challenge on the one hand, atheist parochialism was the pit that it didn’t see coming.
We need to care about religion because much of religion is plainly wrong and humanly injurious: arranged marriages, oppressive and Neolithic views of women, absurd philosophies of personhood, political systems, whether in America or Nigeria, unduly influenced by tribal loyalty, regimes that oppose scientific research because they contradict “revealed” religion.
Yet I can point—have pointed on this site– to a thousand areas where religious philosophies unprompted by secular motives or the condition of unbelief have changed life and culture, ranging from the university movements of the twelfth century to the abolition, women’s suffrage and civil rights movements of the nineteenth and twentieth.  It is no good saying that belief in god—a God of a certain disposition—is  not responsible for ‘incentivizing’ such activity.  The greater glory of God, to quote the old Jesuit motto, drove everything from the slaughter of South American indigenes to the founding of Georgetown, ideas of war and ideas of everlasting peace , “where the lion lay down with the lamb.” Like the modern nation-state, religion is capable of helping and hurting; and it is only the unhistorical presumption that it is designed only to help that causes confusion and misunderstanding among its critics.  A well-taught course in anthropology or the sociology of belief would put the critics straight, but as I am reminded again and again, that is asking too much when we can simply jump up and down and shout for religion to go away.
I seem to be coming back again and again to the same theme: what has atheism ever got us?  Professor Grayling’s laughable new “university” which is little more than a correspondence school with big names on the letterhead?  Hospitals? Charities?  You may want to say that atheism has been prevented from doing great works by religion.  But think about that for just a moment. I know there is a current trend of thought that asks us to think that the Church has been preoccupied with suppressing atheism, but it is nothing more than revisionist fantasy.  The real story of Christianity and to a certain extent Islam is the triumph of its heretics over the status quo, their battle for a better, more worthy, more human image of God.  I include among those critics many atheists—Sartre for example—who considered the image so discredited by war and suffering that simple honesty required sending it to the attic with other antiquities.
Most of all however, I have come to consider atheism unimportant.  At the beginning of any relationship, lovers love each other, the poet said; but in the end only love being in love. Many people were infatuated with the new atheism when it was new, but it’s ceased to be exciting to many thousands, or perhaps only hundreds, of people because it is repetitious and unproductive, like the phrase “I love you” said one too many times. There must be many people who take pride in being  unbelievers, but the simple truth is, their unbelief makes no difference if it is only based on a lust to be different from religious troglodytes who believe that every word of sacred scripture is literally true.  In a world of sameness such as the United States has become, a nation dominated by a religious discussion so barren of intellectual substance that I sometimes want to sell my passport, I can easily understand the temptation to atheism.  It has the appeal of shock value in a country where independent thinking is not especially valued.  –The same sort of shock value you would get if, in any city strip, you could insert a porn shop between MacDonald’s and Burger King, across the street from Arby’s and Wendy’s.
For me, atheism will always belong to the larger philosophical context of religious belief.  That is where it belongs, and not on a T-shirt. It is a position that has to be considered within that broader context.  It should be discussed, debated, and taken seriously.  But that seriousness is justified only when religious ideas and beliefs can be assessed in a systematic and historical way—not simply lampooned and pilloried as though they have not played the role they have played, good and bad, in our long, tortured, uphill climb toward civilization.
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Published: March 11, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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28 Responses to “The Paltry Cause”

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 Dwight Jones 
 March 11, 2012 at 5:51 pm
” I believe that atheism is to religion what counting on your fingers is to mathematics.” A seminal saying if I ever did see one.
As a humanist I have decided to stop discussing religion, just as you are curtailing writing about atheism. But I may have been too hasty – can I be allowed to peek into your good works now and then? :-)
Atheism is like sand in the engine oil, you can’t be a mechanic or engineer if you have to keep referencing it.
Humanism is like that – I like to think of the major religious figures as the great philosophers who have instructed our species on our emerging trading, agricultural and urban cultures. Eagles learning to be ants.
To contemplate and understand the social media of past eras; hyperbole being as compris and de rigeur as Facebook is today. A poet’s conceit writ large.
I’ll take your cue, look out the kitchen window, go look for the baby in the yard.
Reply
 
 Steersman 
 March 11, 2012 at 8:10 pm
… [atheism has] ceased to be exciting to many thousands, or perhaps only hundreds of people because it is repetitious and unproductive …
That I will tend to agree with. Seems to me that for many atheists atheism has become an end in itself – probably a central problem of all isms: maybe akin to your reference to “only love being in love”; a case of “purpose only to have a purpose” – rather than a means to one or simply a stage of human evolution. I believe you made some time ago, quite sensibly, some reference to “what ultimately matters” and, similarly, in an article on the philosopher of religion Keith Parson’s assertion that “the case for theism is a fraud” one comment stood out:
The question is whether or not god-talk is a useful — or even tolerable — way of framing what Tillich called our “ultimate concerns.” Tillich’s end-run definition was really a Trojan Horse. Once “God” has been defined as our ultimate concerns, the game is over.
Unfortunately far too many in the religious communities are so badly fixated on if not addicted to the supposedly literal truth and idolatry of their particular and contradictory dogmas that they are unable to see the “exquisite logic and profound psychology” – in the words of the American moralist Philip Wylie – that undergirds at least some of that dogma, more so in Christianity than Islam. And similarly, it seems that far too many in the atheist communities have thrown out that baby of logic and psychology in their haste to be rid, quite reasonably I think, of the bathwater and monster of literalism. A situation which is not particularly conducive to building the necessary bridges without which it will be impossible to define much less attain the goals implicit in those “ultimate concerns”.
I think that Dr. John Hartung in his essay Prospects for Existence: Morality and Genetic Engineering put the conundrum rather well and quite succinctly:
Ways and means are not the issue. The question remains, ways and means to what?
But, unfortunately and quite problematically, far too many exist – quite literally, hopelessly – outside of those two communities for whom the answer to that question is to pull out a Trivial Pursuit game of one sort or another. Although it would be decidedly disconcerting, to say the least, if it turned out that that was the only game in this or any other town.
Reply
 
 Persto 
 March 11, 2012 at 11:26 pm
I must admit I agree with you on four points about atheism: the ignorance of many atheists, the general misguided zest of atheists, the meandering nature of atheism-though maybe meandering is not, necessarily, a dreadful trait of atheism, and the necessity of disputing religion from different premises outside the scientific realm.
However, I do think you possess a narrow perspective when discussing the utilization of science in disproving god and religion. True, science cannot prove god doesn’t exist, but it does make him superfluous, inefficient, toilsome, and cruel–which destroys most theistic concepts of god. Additionally, science is not the only worldview doing the attacking–if promoting scientific facts can be considered attacking. Science is being attacked by religion, as well. This may explicate many scientists disdain for religion.
In the end, where the rubber meets the road, if you will, is science provides the preponderance of atheists the most efficacious ammunition in confronting religion and god. Atheists must employ it. The current state of atheism—while disheartening to some—is understandable and necessary.
BTW, the fact that secular and scientific ideas arose under the repressive influence of religion is entirely remarkable.
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 Stevie 
 March 16, 2012 at 11:57 am
“True, science cannot prove god doesn’t exist, but it does make him superfluous, inefficient, toilsome, and cruel–which destroys most theistic concepts of god.”
Untrue; science has done none of those things, and I am bemused by the breadth and depth of ignorance of human history which is the necessary prerequisite for someone to actually believe this to be true. Those points had been made and understood long before the emergence of ‘science’, and only someone wholly oblivious to both human history and the concept of evidence based reasoning could make this claim.
However, it certainly suggests that Professor Hoffmann’s decision to stop wasting his time on the irredeemably ignorant is a sound one…
Reply

 Persto 
 March 19, 2012 at 4:02 pm
So, are you saying that science doesn’t make a theistic god superfluous, inefficient, toilsome, and cruel?
As to whether these points had been made before the “emergence of science” is not germane to the point I was making. Perhaps, you should try reading my comment, again?
I am reminded of Eliot,”Imbecility that is not even meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious.”

 
 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 19, 2012 at 5:00 pm
What in the world is a ‘theistic god”–is it like a demonic devil? I also wonder why you lot always resort to name calling: I don’t think there is anything actually imbecilic in this piece, whatever its flaws. Please note that the eliot you are quoting is George, not TS and that the quote comes from The Portable Atheist, no doubt a handbook you keep handy for aspersions?

 
 Persto 
 March 19, 2012 at 6:23 pm
A theistic god is a god who created the universe, is mindful about his creation, and who,continually, intervenes—either by request or divine knowledge–to ensure the natural processes progress according to His nonpareil blueprint.
Why I resort to name calling? Stevie not only misconstrued what I said he then called me “irredeemably ignorant!”
Yes, I know her.
BTW, Stevie’s comment was not even germane to my comment. That was my point. He was calling me ignorant for saying something I never said. That is imbecilic.
Yes, I own and I have read the Portable Atheist. I do keep it handy, but not for aspersions. That quote, which I quoted from memory, just happened to be an apt description of Stevie’s comment.

 
 
 
Quote of the Day | eChurch Blog says:
 March 12, 2012 at 4:28 am
[...] SOURCE [...]
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 Persto 
 March 12, 2012 at 1:09 pm
I don’ think Dr. Hoffmann is saying what you think he is saying.
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 Scott 
 March 12, 2012 at 8:37 am
I think the main problem is too little dialogue between the two:(and I don’t see that improving any time soon) each seems more concerned with shouting the other side down. Both Atheism and Theism don’t seem to realiz that there is a dialogue going on and they, as well, are moving, living and breathing within this dialogue.
Reply
 
 steph 
 March 12, 2012 at 9:34 am
I empathise with this essay so much. I like the expression. “Atheism will always belong to the larger philosophical context of religious belief” with histories. I’ve always believed that independent personal philosophical belief should be personal, not branded and labelled and dressed up into a cause.
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 Scott 
 March 13, 2012 at 8:58 am
Agreed, Steph, but too many people want attention; for those folks, even negative attention is better than none at all.
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 Steersman 
 March 17, 2012 at 4:26 pm
I was more than a little surprised – if not actually a little shocked – to see you say that as it seems more than a little incongruous or inconsistent with your earlier support for “the critical spirit of rational inquiry”. Seems to me that a “philosophical belief” is not like tastes – for which, they say, there is no accounting – in art or music or food; seems that an essential element of philosophy is to determine – somewhat of a cause in itself – what is really true rather than what might appeal to our vanities or other entirely subjective criteria.
Although there are causes and then there are causes, some of which can turn into a case of the proverbial tail wagging the dog – which certainly seems to be the case for some atheists and which provides some justification for, at times, characterizing atheism, metaphorically anyway, as a religion: “A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.” However, some principles are obviously more credible than others, even if the definition of “credibility” is necessarily somewhat subjective, and one might argue that, in the former class, even Dr. Hoffman’s support for and promotion of “our long, tortured, uphill climb toward civilization” – for the greater glory of Humanity if not God – qualifies as both “philosophical belief” and “cause”.
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 steph 
 March 30, 2012 at 9:01 pm
Uh huh. Two enns.
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 Hunt 
 March 14, 2012 at 7:10 am
I see. AFTER this post, you’ll stop writing about atheism.
I, for one, can’t wait.
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