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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
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
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Tags: Catholic Church : contraception : Obama health care : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
4 Responses to “Catholics and the Contraceptive Conscience”
.
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?
Reply
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:
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Quodlibet: Of Gay and Plural Marriage
by rjosephhoffmann
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Does the irreversible trend toward legalizing same-sex marriage augur good tidings for proponents of polygamy, especially the reconstruction Mormons (Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints) and other groups who support the practice?
An article in the July 20 New York Times raises the question, and another by Joanna Brooks, who was raised a conservative Mormon, hints at how lively this discussion is going to be---or already is.
Read more… 1,681 more words
I am almost alone (maybe Jeremy Irons is with me), but I am still not on board with gay marriage. This makes me a one eyed, probably dead pig. But please understand, I love an argument. Marriage has never been about love; and as divorce rates among gays show, it still isn't.
Published: May 16, 2013
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Quodlibet: Of Gay and Plural Marriage
by rjosephhoffmann
Does the irreversible trend toward legalizing same-sex marriage augur good tidings for proponents of polygamy, especially the reconstruction Mormons (Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints) and other groups who support the practice?
An article in the July 20 New York Times raises the question, and another by Joanna Brooks, who was raised a conservative Mormon, hints at how lively this discussion is going to be—or already is.
Or will the noise stop when the definition of marriage contained in the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which defines a legitimate marriage as a union of one man and one woman is repealed.
Until the twelfth century the Christian church was not very interested in marriage, and when it got interested in it it was mainly because there were financial implications for the Church.
Rome needed to ensure that estates and the financial holdings of lords and barons were legitimately passed on and that anything due to the church came to the church. Some of these dues (called benefices) were paid to bishop-princes under the feudal regime, so it was to the Church’s advantage to have a trusted priest or bishop as the church’s official “witness” (the term still used in the Catholic protocol for matrimony) on the scene to seal the deal.
“Holy wedlock” was a church-approved contract; whatever else being a bastard meant, it meant primarily that the church did not recognize a boy as the rightful heir of his father’s property, money, or titles.
As for the common people, the Church took on marriage as a sacrament somewhat grudgingly after centuries of being happy to let the peasants do it the way they had done it for ages, on the ruins of the Roman empire: at home, in bed, with relatives drinking and cheering the couple on.
The glamification of marriage is a relatively modern affair. Without the development of the “romantic theory” of matrimony, it’s hard to imagine anyone picketing for the right to take on the burden of a permanent opposite-sex relationship.
In Judaism and Christianity, and later in Islam, it had been primarily a contractual matter—easier to wriggle out of in Judaism and Islam than in Christianity because of some highly problematical words that were misappropriated to Jesus (Matt. 5:32 ; 19:9; Luke 16:18; Mark 10:2-12) about divorce in the Gospels. Paul has no use for marriage, and the church fathers regarded it as a necessary evil for people who didn’t have the spiritual stamina for celibacy and virginity. –If you were wondering about why the Catholic church has maintained its weird two-track system for ministers and ordinary folk, it goes back to the Church’s early contempt for the married state–a contempt that reaches exquisite spasms of intolerance in writers like Tertullian, the most hateful of all Christian writers, and Augustine.
Wives should be veiled but not pregnant
True, marriage was popular among protestants from the 16th century onward, but it wasn’t a sacrament. Luther defends it ( Estate of Marriage, 1522) as an “ordinance”—an arrangement—given by God for the production of families. In fact, Luther’s famous treatise on the subject reminds the Church that for most of its history it regarded marriage as a second class ritual, useful for relieving aches, pains and passion and primarily good for populating the world with new Christians. He also entertained three reasons for divorce: impotence, adultery, and refusal to fulfill conjugal duty. In other words, whatever doesn’t lead “naturally” from sex to legitimate offspring.
Which brings me to the point. A great deal of the same-sex marriage defense has been framed in romantic terms: Why should two people who love each other not be permitted the freedom to be together, sleep together, share lives and income and tragedies and life’s joys together?
The answer is (has to be in the modern, secular sense) No reason at all. The state has no reason and probably no justification for impeding the pursuit of happiness. To arrive at this answer, however, the state is obliged to redefine marriage in strictly secular terms, and to reject most of the symbolism and above all the “properties” that have been part of the popular understanding of marriage, an understanding heavily tinctured by theological canons and legal thought.
What has been going on in the legislatures of New England, New York and elsewhere is as much a process of rethinking as insisting, but rethinking the definition in historical context needs to be done if we want to avoid the impression that being pro-same sex marriage is simply being iconoclastic towards the “institution” itself. If something goes, does everything go?
The old, legalistic and Aristotelian thinking behind the “sacrament” of marriage dies hard. So does its biblical sanction, or justification. A lot of conservatives will point to the Adam and Eve story as a tale of the first marriage. That’s hogwash of course. God does not marry them, he just “makes” them (in two very different tales) and they do the rest, according to command (Gen 1.28).
But “the rest” is probably what matters most in the biblical context: they have children, lots of children. When God gets tired of their habits and floods the world, he starts out with a “good family”, Noah and company, whose proficiency at carpentry is only exceeded by a commitment to repopulating the devastated earth.
Noah’s Family: Time for multiplying
When the Hebrews first become aware of their minority status in a hostile environment, they looked to a patriarch whose preoccupation is with having descendants—the story of Abraham and Sarah and Haggar and Sarah, again, is all about developing the critical mass of Hebrews needed to make God’s name strong among his enemies (Genesis 26.4ff). Increase is everything in threatened or endangered groups. Ask any anthropologist.
The paradigms of reproductive success, however, are the kings: David with his wives and lovers, and Solomon with his international harem of 1000 women. No self-respecting Jew aspired to such bounty, but (like Tevye) he could admire it.
Reverence for large families as a symbol of doing your duty for “the people of Israel” emerges as the primary justification for marriage. It also explains why stories about barrenness and impotence feature so proiminently in Hebrew lore: what could be worse than a father who can’t do his bit for the tribe? What can be more humiliating (think Job) than losing your spawn? What is more disgraceful than a barren woman, like (at least temporarily) Rebecca or Sarah? The fear of childlessness even sneaks into the New Testament in the pilfered story of Elizabeth (Luke 1.36), mother of John the Baptist.
It’s well known that religious minorities, especially tribal minorities, have always followed similar logic, though not always in clear cut ways. If Jesus said anything about marriage it was probably forgotten in the eschatological fervor of the early community. That’s why Paul make so little (or inconsistent) sense when he talks about it.
But by the time the second century rolls around, a man writing in Paul’s name, and against the “heresy” of radical anti-marriage sects like the gnostics and Marcionites, is teaching that”a woman is saved by childbearing” (1 Timothy 2.15). Marriage becomes important, in other words, because the church recognized that its future (almost tribally construed) depended on a stable supply of cradle Christians— something the more puritanitical and perfectionist bishops didn’t provide. Interestingly, the non-celibate writer of 1 Timothy thinks bishops should be married–to one woman.
In every place where Christianity flourished centuries later, especially in colonial and missionary cultures, the ideal of a large family had everything to do with the “sanctity” of marriage: this was its primary definition. Love had nothing to do with it.
Which explains a great deal about Mormonism. As an old “new religion,” Mormonism could draw on its own desert and exodus experiences: Ohio, Missouri, Illinois (where Joseph Smith was killed), Utah. The myth of a persecuted remnant drove them on; they created their own class of martyrs ( just like the ancient Hebrews and early Christians) and took care of keeping the numbers up through “plural marriages.”
Before it was finally repudiated in 1904, the practice was an “open secret” in the denomination. But there was nothing un-Biblical about it. We have no idea whether all early Christians were monogamous and some reason to think some weren’t. What we do know is that when monogamy has become a norm in religion—as in most parts of Islam–it is attached to financial rather than moral considerations.
What we also know is that from Genesis onward, and from the religious traditions that correspond with it, marriage is a fertility covenant. Adam does not love Eve, and we have no idea how Solomon felt about his 700 wives and 300 concubines—in fact, only one, Naamah the Ammonite is given a name. David gets Bathsheva pregnant after arranging her husband’s death, and receives as punishment not forty lashes but this: “Before your very eyes I the Lord will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight (2 Samuel 2.10ff.).
Bathsheba
Personally, I think history tells us a lot about human nature but very little about how “institutions” and the definitions that describe them can be transformed. I doubt there is any logical argument within the current thinking about same-sex marriage that entitles us to think that what’s good for gays is good for Mormons, or others who espouse plural marriage.
The rationale for plural marriage belongs to the sociology of the practice at a time when threatened minorities considered procreation a method of survival. That rationale is no longer persuasive, no longer needed: religions that are losing members will end with a whimper and will almost certainly not be able to sustain themselves by reformulating their marriage codes.
Having said this, it is no accident that the religion that still extols marriage primarily as a fertility covenant (and has stressed this doctrine in its Gospel of Life theology) is also the one most viciously opposed to same-sex marriage.
The defense of gay marriage is something else: it reflects the development, over time, of love and emotional attachment as the primary criteria for the right [sic] of marriage and at least implicitly rules out fertility and procreation—the old biblical and ecclesiastic rationales—as defining properties or necessary ends. That is where we are in history.
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Published: July 22, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholic Church : gay marriage : Latter Days Saints : matrimony : Mormon Church : Plural Marriage : Polygamy : sacraments : same-sex marriage ..
11 Responses to “Quodlibet: Of Gay and Plural Marriage”
.
steph
July 22, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Veeery good post. Rights and rites… Today I think marriage is a ritual about declaration of love. Love between two human beings, and a ceremony which will entitle them to particular legal rights. And whatever Mark’s source (Mark probably being the source for Matthew and Luke) that ‘instruction’ has been inappropriately applied to modern contexts. A plausible reason for it being originally articulated in such a way, might be that it would ensure the protection of women and their children from being cast out with no means of financial support. Nothing endures but change – they all said it in different ways. Just as a woman and her children are protected by law in divorce now, marriage is no longer needed to increase the population. We have an overload crisis. Marriage is for love first. Between two people. How can you love more than one?
Many wives today, is like open and honest adultery, at best, adultery without deceit and lies. Some people stay together because of ‘the children’. Some people shouldn’t have children, particularly right wing American politicians. Some people just shouldn’t get married. Some priests should get married. Gay couples, should be allowed to get married if they want to because marriage is about love between two human beings. We all need love for spiritual, physical and intellectual fulfillment and companionship. And fun and a future. Love makes people happy. Let gay couples be happy. Let those many wives find one love each… But don’t let that man in a white robe kiss any more babies please.
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steph
July 23, 2011 at 10:44 am
Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. You can’t have one without the other, so let the gay and merry couple dance down the avenue and raise your glasses and drink to
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rjosephhoffmann
July 23, 2011 at 10:59 am
In the horse and carriage analogy, what sex is the horse?
Reply
steph
July 23, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Which sex is the carriage?
steph
July 23, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Whatever sex you like.
x
steph
July 25, 2011 at 3:53 pm
The horse will be a mare or a gelded stallion. Stallions are frisky and temperamental and liable to bolt and upset the carriage. I was employed as a groom and rider on an Appaloosa horse stud a while ago now, in Takapau, near Onga Onga where my sister’s farm was before they moved up to Te Pohue, near Napier. I looked after Bold Warrior, formerly a champion steeplechaser. He was nearly 19 hands tall and I sometimes used a fence to mount him but he never bolted because he was so collosal and overweight I almost did the splits to sit astride him and he was an elderly gentlemen anyway at 17 years old. He’d had his day with mares, poor soul, and had never pulled a carriage. He was incredibly fine and handsome though and had a beautiful sweet and gentle nature.
Mike Wilson
July 23, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Funny thing about groups wanting to get back to the Old Testament standards of marriage. Have seen an example of a happy polygamous marriage in it?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 23, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Good point. The beginning of marriage is the beginning of jealousy, and polygamy doesn’t seem to have reduced the risks.
Reply
steph
July 25, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Mum said some people are born jealous and other people don’t have a jealous bone in them. I think she was right. She wasn’t generally wrong about anything that mattered.
steph
July 23, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Marriage is only the beginning of jealousy if the marriage isn’t a consequence of a couple’s love for each other. Because love isn’t love without trust. But a marriage to a man with more than one wife can’t be a marriage of trust because it’s unbalanced and he can’t love all his wives simultaneously. Therefore it can’t be a marriage of love. I’ve witnessed many marriages without love. Often they end messily or happily in divorce. But I’ve also seen enough meaningful marriages, including in my own family, which are all about love and trust.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 16, 2013 at 6:15 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
I am almost alone (maybe Jeremy Irons is with me), but I am still not on board with gay marriage. This makes me a one eyed, probably dead pig. But please understand, I love an argument. Marriage has never been about love; and as divorce rates among gays show, it still isn’t.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
God and We the People
by rjosephhoffmann
At the end of the film Henry V, a single tenor voice intones , Non nobis, non nobis, Domine…
He is joined by a few others, until in the end a whole chorus (with orchestra) crescendos to complete the verse: Sed nomini tuo da gloriam. The passage is from Psalm 115, the bit of the Roman Easter liturgy where the priests, hearing the lines, would kneel in abasement: “Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your name give glory.”
The verse became a familiar song of the Knights Templar during the Crusades, but its most famous use was in 1415 when the English, against heavy odds and a superior army, defeated the French at Agincourt.
It was easy to see the battle in biblical terms–and the English never tired of attributing their unlikely victory to divine intervention. Except, of course: Henry V of England and Charles VI of France were Christian kings, fighting under the banner of the same God–not Israel’s armies ranged against idol-worshiping enemies whose gods “are silver and gold” (Ps 115.4-7). Invoking a God whose inscrutable will was never known until his competing worshipers lay scattered over the battlefields of Europe (and later America) and the score tallied was one of the reasons this God had to go.
I am beginning with that scenario because God has been the commander in chief for most of human history. The wars that were fought were fought in his name. The blood that was spilled was often considered a sacrifice to his glory–the blood of soldier-martyrs, blessed through violence. Even Lincoln, no war-lover, taught that the field at Gettysburg had been “consecrated ” by blood. It is one of the vulgarities of war that the bloodier the battle, the greater the sacrifice, the more hallowed the ground: “As they danced, they sang: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.’” (1 Samuel 18.7).
The Lord God of hosts was a war god in his youth: he protected his property and his family (like any dues-paying NRA member) and visited his wrath on the enemies of his people with stunning severity.
As he aged, God fought less and spoke more, but through men called prophets. As people listened less, they lost more–finally the whole game. By the time the Romans got to Palestine at the end of the second century BCE, the “kingdoms” of Israel and Judah were little more than a poetic reminiscence, tolerated by a succession of warring overlords who had ruled the area for hundreds of years:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. 2 There on the poplars we hung our harps, 3 for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
As an icon of his glorious past, God was reinvented by Christian armies, Muslim armies, and the armies of nations that considered themselves (by common descent or adoption) the rightful possessors of his earthly dominion. Abraham’s children have habitually behaved like children everywhere, throughout time, fighting over daddy’s estate. There’s still no end in sight–though daddy seems weirdly detached from the goings-on.
In the era of kingship, God was invoked as a kind of absent father, but of a distinctly no-nonsense, sovereign variety. There was an advantage to that. No matter how unjust or imbecilic the reigning monarch, God king over all creation, in an argument that reached back to biblical times, could always be invoked. God is king. The king is–well–the king. Long live the king! Naturally this theory ran afoul of the Church where beginning in the 11th century and ever after through the Middle ages the argument could run, The king is king, but the Pope is God’s representative on earth. Thus began the longest running battle for political ascendancy the world has ever known: the one between church and state, eventually won, more or less, by the state and abetted by a religious revolution called the Reformation and an intellectual one called the Renaissance. Oddly, in both of these movements–in art, literature, poetry and music–God seemed more robust and more down to earth than he had ever been.
But seems is not was. As theories of “divine right” faded and republican and constitutional forms of government replaced monarchial ones, he was invoked less frequently. Only in the early twentieth century was his fall as lord, king, judge and lawgiver fully confirmed, and the idea of the “secular” state–an idea that had been around in philosophy for at least two centuries prior–became the new model of political straight-thinking.
ii
Yet, I miss God. For my own reasons.
I fully accept in that “God does not exist,” if by that statement we mean the God of the Bible and the God of the Church. I am, however, not an atheist with respect to all possible formulations of the idea of God (not what Flew would call an impossibilist) and while I have a poor idea of how a credible formulation might run, I think the biblical one is historically valuable and culturally interesting. It is therefore literally false and culturally valuable, because it tells us the weakness of all such formulations, at least at a literary level. God is made in man’s image–just as, in an inverted way, the Bible tells us.
I often irritate my more militant atheist friends when they start their God-bashing binges by saying that people must have been as ignorant as geese to ever believe the things in the Bible.
But no: they were just people who believed what they believed. They believed it because there was little else to believe. They rose with the sun and went to bed when it disappeared beneath the horizon. They had no books. Why would they? They couldn’t read. The biblical world was not that different from the world they observed.
The physical and religious circumstances of the biblical writers and people of the European Middle Ages were remarkably similar, though they are separated by over a thousand years. Like the priests of biblical Jerusalem, the priests of the church (doing their job with the books they had) told people what to believe. God was God, now assisted by his only-begotten son, and he could save you or punish you, just as in olden days he had sometimes saved his people and sometimes punished them by cutting them off from his favor. Those two conditions–primarily political and territorial in the Old Testament–became something else in the Church: heaven and hell, with earth and the church, the dispenser of God’s grace, in between. The psychology of why such a God came into being, why he had to be periodically remodeled and saved from himself is disappointingly and thoroughly human and social.
At least since Feuerbach (d. 1872) the conclusion that God is what we made him has been inescapable. But it is also often ignored. It is obviously ignored by very religious people, who continue to believe that the God of the Bible exists “out there” somewhere and affects their lives and futures.
But the same kind of dyshistorical thinking also applies to atheists, who deny God exists, but need something to blame for all the outrages that have been committed in his name, and so often take the same sort of fundamentalist tack to the biblical story. They reify ignorance, ignore history and identify the problem as “religion,” an odd conclusion from people who purport also to champion the development of the species through evolution and adaptation.
Their mistake is and continues to be to meet the fundamentalist on his own ground, rather than on the field of history.
The most impressive example of this illogic is Richard Dawkins’s bumper sticker line, that “Most of us are atheists with respect to 99% of the gods who have ever existed; some of us just go one step further.” The presumed-to-be-self-evident point here is that if 99% of gods are false, there is a high probability that any god must be false.
This is shocking stuff, coming from a scientist who might be expected to know that it would take only 1 case of a “true god” to falsify 99 cases of false ones. The analogy of earth adrift in an otherwise unpopulated universe: Are we alone? There is of course a
“naturalist” argument against such possibilism (e.g. we know the conditions for life beyond earth because we know the conditions necessary for it to happen; we do not know such conditions for the existence of God); but it’s unnecessary to make it here since I agree with Dawkins’s conclusion if not with his way of reaching it.
What is true is that the God of the Judaeo Christian-Islamic tradition does not exist; we know this because we know how he developed, how his story was invented–and was changed.
Anyway, no one will miss the God of the philosophers, as dull, bloodless and expendable an entity as ever has been imagined, and very few will miss the God who soaks the world for all its evildoing in the time of Noah. (The sufficient disproof of the latter is that he hasn’t destroyed Las Vegas or went plagues on the Taliban, and if Hurricane Katrina or the multiple tsunamis of the past decade were really meant for Washington DC, he is obviously losing his grip on geography.)
iii
The God I miss is a God of lost causes and noble pursuits, a historical residue, an adaptation of what’s left when the God of the Bible has been forgiven for his crimes against humanity. –An idea, not a tangible reality, but something that is still separate from our better selves.
Feuerbach hits the nail head on when he writes in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion (XXX)
God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast.
Unfortunately this breast-rending sense of God has been replaced by a completely unworthy substitute, at least in the United States. The American People.
The mistake begins with the language of representative democracy, the United States Constitution being, I think, the first document in world history that doesn’t come from the top down–king or emperor and parliament to the people by edict. It goes bottom up: We the people. Never mind that it would have been impossible for “We the people” to write anything and that it took a committee of fairly learned men to produce the document, but one thing it doesn’t do is to drag God into the business of government.
In a famous clause of the First Amendment, it actually, if politely, excuses him from further service. No God reigns here. No monarch gloriously rules as his vicar. No act of parliament requires an act of allegiance to his Church. We the people are who we are, and who we are is The American people.
Most the people in the world know that the American people are mostly religious. So religious that they sometimes look skeptical when we boast that we are the first country ever founded on the principle of separation of church and state. Looking at the deals congressmen have to make to keep their pious Baptist and Jewish and Catholic clients happy, it is easy to forget that invoking the will of God in the way, say, a feudal king might have done, a medieval pope, or even a modern mullah, is not done here. At least not officially.
We the people have taken his place–rhetorically.
The American people will not be fooled by the President’s shenanigans. The American people will not tolerate congressional gridlock. The American people deserve answers/to know the truth/a full explanation. The American people will see this bill [insert name] for the bureaucratic pork it is. The American people will reject this bill because they respect human life. The American people want jobs not entitlements. The American people deserve to have both sides of this issue debated fully, and hence will not permit it to come to the floor for a vote. The American people….
Why do the American people deserve so much, when some of the American people can’t quote even the first line of the Preamble to the Constitution, and some (an alarming percentage as I recall) would like to see limits on freedom of speech and would be very happy to see separation of church and state relaxed, Christianity taught in schools, the Bible restored to its previous, revered status in public education, and old fashioned (family) values incorporated into everything from town council meetings to media censorship to senior proms.
Why do the American people deserve so much?
Because:
The American people are wise. They are innately good and great-hearted. Their wrath is great when you cross them–look at their armies and navies–but when you see eye to eye with them they are kind, and patient, and even (often) bountiful. They are financially shrewd and naturally prosperous. They are self-reliant, independent. They are just super.
They are therefore a useful substitute for the God who can’t be invoked. I am humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic as I write, the most flagrant hybrid of the secular and religious commitments ever penned.
The American people want to see a quick end to this conflict. The American people will not tolerate the idea that aggression can be rewarded. The American people do not want to see Gitmo a single day more, or the environment compromised by greedy men who are just interested in quick profit and development . The American people do not want their children to be saddled with debt. The American people think that everyone who is willing to work should be able to work.
There is nothing directly wrong with using this highly charged phrase as the secular equivalent for a God who has been relegated to the sidelines of history.
As long as we recognize that it takes us right back to the days of Henry V of England and Charles VI of France. It is the same schizophrenic approach to political life that characterized the primitivism of the Middle Ages and led to Endless War: one God, many purposes–none of them self-consistent, all of them subject to the whims and objectives of the invoker.
I am worried that a God who evolved through history and was then cast aside when he had developed humanitarian impulses can be replaced by The American People, whose sole interests seem to be war, taxes, profit, self-interest, and finding the right enemies of the state. Can it be the God who was cast aside was too inconvenient, and that the secular was less demanding, less judgmental, more convenient and accommodating to conscience? After all, the God of the Bible (Dawkins be screwed), evolved; the secular state is still an experiment in the process of proving itself.
When Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama, or lesser avatars, invoke the American People, they may have the Constitution and the good of the Republic in their line of sight, but I doubt it. They are simply invoking something bigger than they are–andwith the justification that (like God with kings) The American People put them where they are.
The wishful thinking is that the American people will not be able to resist appeals to their innate wisdom and honor and will not notice that their government is simply massaging them into thinking its bad (and sometimes horrible) decisions are what they wanted all along–symbolized by the magical liturgy of voting–the supreme power of the electoral process.
The American people demand an honorable end to this war. The American people stand for freedom and justice and cannot walk away from this struggle. The American people will fight as long as it takes to protest their interests. The American people want to see justice done to the poor and the homeless. But the American people know that the way to achieve this is not to raise the minimum wage. The American People will reject any attempt to raise taxes. The American People want to see their Constitutional freedoms protected. The American people want to see their borders secure….
Our ancestors enjoyed the luxury of projecting these contradictions outward, or upward, and thus externalizing them as forces they were not themselves able to control, except through prayer and wishing.
God had no obligation to respond favorably because, after all, his will was only known after the fact.
When I read the words of a Henry II, or a Thomas Becket or a Pope Urban II (the one who called the First Crusade) or even an Osama bin Laden, I am struck that the “externalizing” also created an important fiction–the idea that God, or God in history, will judge true and false actions. It is one of the principles that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one the three greatest thinkers America has produced, made a pillar of his “democratic” philosophy. I’ve discussed Niebuhr’s thoughts previously in these pages, but I think it’s worth mentioning something again.
The rejection of the Bible, and indeed of Christianity, is not the beginning of wisdom, political or philosophical. Not if that rejection does not include all forms of idolatry, as Niebuhr called it–false faith in non-existent saviours. I hate to say it, but there is no such thing as The American People.
The beauty of biblical thinking actually derives from the belief that the worship of the true God separates what is noble from what is false, what is worth “worshiping” from what must be rejected or even demonized. Beneath the materialism of the Biblical language are some important values that are lost if we simply substitute the people for God. History has seen lots of secular equivalents–Das Deutsche Volk und Reich, The Chinese People, the American People, even the growing use of the meme “Our Children” meaning our responsibility to the future.
But the crisis of this way of thinking–this use of The American People as a secular proxy for an absent God, becomes apparent as soon as we wonder, What thing of ultimately symbolic value, what coherent symbol of our aspirations and better selves, what criterion for justice, what instantiation of beauty or love, even of anger, can take the place the God?
If the God of Abraham, the God of Constantine, of Henry of England and Charles of France and the God of Lincoln (Abraham’s namesake) didn’t measure up, one thing is sure: The American People is a very poor substitute Non nobis, Domine!
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Published: May 19, 2013
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5 Responses to “God and We the People”
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jsegor23
May 19, 2013 at 7:52 pm
Your statistical criticism of Dawkins is unfair. Dawkins gives a one to seven scale. One being absolute belief and seven absolute disbelief. He puts himself at six, leaving room for falsification. Ninety five percent is an accepted statistical standard, so Dawkins’ ninety nine percent is quite good. Anyway, let’s not take one liners too seriously.
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steph
May 20, 2013 at 7:55 pm
Hi Joseph, I think the critique of Dawkins is entirely reasonable. If you don’t want to want to take one liners too seriously, why quibble over 4 percent? And it isn’t a one liner – it’s a slogan Dawkins has exploited and used to his advantage, and furthermore, expounded. His atheism hangs on his argument – a fundamentalist argument which doesn’t acknowledge the evolution of ideas.
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decourse
May 21, 2013 at 2:02 am
I don’t agree that Dawkins’ atheism hangs on that particular argument, even to the extent that it counts as an “argument”.
Having said that, I agree with you about argumentum ad sloganum.
steph
May 21, 2013 at 11:49 pm
Sorry I was unclear. ‘His atheism hangs on his argument’, his argument being that ‘God’ does not exist. But ‘its a fundamentalist argument which doesn’t acknowledge the history and evolution of ideas and god ideas’ which render his claim, plastered on bumpers, illogical.
scotteus
May 21, 2013 at 11:33 pm
Perhaps it’s the God of the Humanists that is missed the most. It’s not that that particular deity is dead, just that he’s almost always shouted down by the extremists on both side of the debate.
In our own backyard, there’s certainly fulsome praise for the lord of hosts whose prime motive consists of kicking names and taking ass whenever he wants.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Mrs Prufrock
by rjosephhoffmann
Mrs Prufrock
Well, I remember the hips,
from my station in the bed.
Your husband was long gone
not even a trace of cologne,
not the underwear that hemmed
him in while you played possum in bed.
Old strategies die hard:
what we were at twenty two,
what we are now, not ingenues.
I tried to lure you back
but roaches you said would
come if you did not do dishes
then and there, with soap.
Your husband came and went,
and years, and hips.
I lost a soul, you lost
your lips.
I used to run. Now I can
barely walk, and have to roll
my pants-legs up:
and you can run rings around me.
An aging woman’s but a
distant thing. Your mother’s
querulous voice, your fore-
knuckle growing large on
undistinguished hands,
like a walnut, the firm breasts
begging for more time and
fewer veins.
You might have been
an anchor, or a dock: but no–
a temporary storm on a black sea
where there is no harbour,
no light, no, nor rising sun.
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Published: May 26, 2013
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Canto II: Umm ul-Banin
by rjosephhoffmann
When Dante visited the moon
Beatrice explained about vows.
“A vow’s a pact,” she said “between man and God,
but moons come and go, so don’t swear by them.”
Maybe he laughed at that, because she was young,
and had no right lecturing him in his dreams,
a spirit torn from his side. What can a girl know about vows?
When he first saw her, she was trembling like a dove.
She said “You’ll have to go through strange gates and dark alleys
into cities wet with spilled excuses.
You’ve got to pass this way. there’s no short cut.
You’ll see whatever you want to see.
“On the other side, there is a mountain
and from the top ledge you can see God.
It’s worth it, though–the crossing: He is beautiful,
and the best thing is, no one who sees him remembers
anything they’ve seen before,
not the crying, not being stung by wasps.
Not the smell of the Florentine women–
‘Donne, ch’avete intelletto d’Amore’–
Ladies who know all about love.’
“You’ll forget having your eyelids pierced
and weighted with leaden pendants so that you can can’t see truth
staring you in the face. It’s rumour of course,
but God’s more beautiful than the moon.”
So they walked towards the river and for the first hundred yards
she held his hand. Then he stumbled.
It was dark when he climbed into the rotting boat
that smelled like all the sins he had committed as a child.
He wasn’t sure, in the dark, in the cloak,
But he thought it was her. He wanted it to be her.
He rode the yellow sadness of Acheron, filled with naked men,
eyes alight with flaming coals. He saw starved falcons overhead,
thick as mosquitoes over a dead lake.
He saw Charon lobbing his oar against bodies clutching the sides of the
boat, turning the way forward into a slow trawl.
He saw pale arms rising and falling back into the black torpor,
drowning in waltz time, in little circles.
“It’s too much.” he said: “Here’s an extra five dollars,
I don’t care how beautiful God is. Take me back.”
He turned to her, but he saw instead the shadow of a poet
who said, “I’ll take you farther. You must go farther, because, as
She said, there is a mountain you’re meant to climb.
She wants it for you.”
“I have no legs, for mountains,” he said, “I do not want
To be a poet. I do not want to drown.”
But by then the boat had forked upriver:
Charon grinned as the water widened.
She stood on the other side, a firelight on the shore
fading like the glow of the moon behind a broken cloud.
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Published: May 27, 2013
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One Response to “Canto II: Umm ul-Banin”
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steph
May 28, 2013 at 5:07 am
Reading this was magical, mystical, compelling – and it really was, thrilling.
Nothing is more beautiful than the moon though. I don’t want to forget.
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Villanelle Baneen
by rjosephhoffmann
f I’d sung songs that saw you through the night
and woke you with a smile at break of day,
and danced upon the moon and stunned the light–
You’d probably have said, “This is not right–
Because your words are words, and really they
Are not the ones that see me through the night.
“And there are others dancing, oh so bright,
I cannot count them–and you will not stay
Dancing on the moon to stun the light….
“So many boys who praised the moon in flight
And loved me, and saw me on my way:
Though you sung songs to see me through the night–
“Wild boys, full seeded, stirring for my sight,
Skin like leather, flesh like moulded clay
Dancing on the moon to stun the light.
“And you, my love, there on the mountain height–
What were you asking–and what trying to say?
If you’d sung songs that saw me through the night
and woke me with a smile at break of day?”
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Published: June 3, 2013
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One Response to “Villanelle Baneen”
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nicola
June 3, 2013 at 10:40 am
Ahhhh, how happy i’d be if you stayed with me through the night x
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The Cyber-Theodicy of Edward Snowden
by rjosephhoffmann
Edward Snowden is a 29 year-old American who landed a very good job after taking a computer science class at a junior college–for high school credit. Most of his life, it seems, was spent on the internet.
If an auto-didact is someone who teaches himself through reading books, Snowden is one of a growing number of cyber-didacts whose entire knowledge of the world is based on their interaction with screens and codes.
In a world dominated by video games like Dragon Warriors and The Portal II, (where, gratifyingly,”many years after “Portal” Chell reawakens in Aperture Science and tries to stop GLADoS once again with the help of Wheatley, who has his own plans for the historical facility”), Edward Snowden eats, breathes, and stays awake
The electronic Manichaeism of the age reduces everything to super-villains and superheroes who thwart their evil designs. Most of us who live in a more-real world have not crossed the line between playing games and inserting ourselves into them as avatars of the virtues or strategies they embody. But Edward Snowden did. He crossed the line between electronic appearance and political reality.
And for him it must have been an easy line to cross. He woke up and went to sleep each night within the matrix. No friends are coming forward to say “He was just a normal guy–a fun-loving kid in his twenties,” because he wasn’t. Even the girlfriend he chose for himself was a super-fit Laura Croft, ripped from the pages of a Marvel comic.
Edward Snowden may or may not be a villain, but he is certainly dangerous. He is dangerous because of what he does not know, what he cannot feel, and what he does not anticipate.
What he does not know is that he cannot possibly detest America as much as most countries do.
The price America has paid for free speech and openness is to wear its sins in public, often on its face, while other countries–including the former Soviet Union and China, but loads of others lead their political lives in private, rig elections, and rule media with an iron glove
Even the soul-searching and hand-wringing that is happening in public because of his folly would be unthinkable in the kind of country he fantasizes he is living in. But it is too obvious a point for either Snowden or his fans to take in.
He does not know this because as an avatar of an unreal hero he has no context, no reality, to refer to. He blips along controlled by impulses that come from a brain unaccustomed to reflection and critical thinking, unformed by the complexities of history and unaffected by intuition and compassion that makes life in the real world possible.
He also does not know history, a thing he shares with the caste of anti-Americans in Europe and around the world who equate power and corruption as a matter of simple truth and logic–the logic of the video game he is playing.
America was founded on distrust of government. That distrust still defines the political landscape, from Tea Party-ism to Libertarianism, to mainstream (if it still exists) politics. That distrust has its downside, because it means that voters are never happy with the status quo and always ready to believe that their government is lying to them. When recently Mr Obama called for a Marine to hold an umbrella over his head to prevent him and his guest from being soaked with rain while giving an outdoor press conference, the newspapers immediately depicted it as an act of an “imperial president.” -The real story elsewhere would be that he had to ask.
When the innate distrust of government is communicated in the media, in movies, and in political debate to the rest of the world, the image that America sends outward becomes the image of America that comes back at it. The fodder for anti-Americanism has been the raw material that American democracy has exported to the world–its insulting image of itself– for almost a century. That self-affirming image is the one Edward Snowden came to believe in: a cartoon frame of an evil, conspiratorial CIA master-club dominated by cyberites who want to control minds and drop bombs. Sure. Why not? Isn’t the fact that the United States is “eavesdropping” on millions of Americans proof that this conspiracy exists. Of course it is.
For a computer guy like Edward Snowden, the why question, the prior question, will never arise. Short of robbing them of their pensions, what use does American government have for so much information? In a land of shrinking interest in anything and dwindling attention spans, who would pay attention to such sludge- dull information?
The possibility that in defending a greater good, national security and constitutional democracy–freedom in short– it is necessary, sometimes, to do a modicum of unpleasant, even unusual things–that explanation is not nearly as sexy as life in the Portal.
His very life had become an affirmation of a comic reality in which an overreaching, awe-inspring government was out to control the lives, thoughts, and actions of the underlings
But, again: why? We are long past the point where people’s souls were thought to be valuable, so it can’t be a soul harvesting operation. And the idea that Americans can be turned into thought slaves would require a political establishment populated by men with brains, so it can’t be that either. Maybe vital organs? Maybe Edward Snowden knows. But more than likely, it is not a question he has ever thought about.
It’s a question I always want to ask. Not just Edward Snowden but everyone like him who seems to think that America cannot be sinned against and can only be an aggressor. Is it partly the residue of Bush era adventurism, the legacy of the Cold War, “unique” superpower status in the world, the effects of Viet Nam?
I don’t know when America “became” satan, only that if it were truly successful at being evil–I could name a country in this slot–the world would not know much about it. America changes drivers far too often for the “concentration of power” the founders (Google it Mr Snowden) feared to ever happen. That is why it is absurd to demonise the American government: just when you’ve got the demon in a corner, someone votes him out. But no one is under any illusion that the entity (a good computer game word) that replaces him is an angel. It was the eminently distrustful James Madison who said, “:If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But they aren’t he reckoned, and even though in normal circumstances the will of the people is all that’s necessary to keep the government under control, “experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Mr Snowden worked not in the matrix but within a calculus of “auxiliary precautions.” No one explained it to him. If they had, he would not have understood, because his matrix has no history; it is an eternal Now.
It chokes me to say it, but if freedom, openness, self-criticism, the cultivation of conscience and liberty are virtues in a nation, it seems to me that no country is as virtuous as America. If Americans really thought their civil liberties were being sold to the highest bidder in a data mining facility in Maryland, there would be another revolution. And interestingly, revolutions are bad material for video games because the stakes are uncertain and the principles are not modal.
Edward Snowden, after all is said and done, is a cipher on a screen. You can almost see the pale blue lights flickering across his lifeless, uncomprehending face as he came to believe that he understood the game he was playing.
He made his own rules, created his own matrix, declared himself the winner, based on his own score. Computers are simple for him, just like good and evil were simple for the Manicheans; it is hardwired into all of us, embedded in a syntax where operations are either legal or not.
If he is in China, he will find himself in a world much closer to the game he is playing and the rules he understands. But if he is in China, he won’t be permitted to play it.
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Published: June 12, 2013
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9 Responses to “The Cyber-Theodicy of Edward Snowden”
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dwightjones
June 12, 2013 at 10:28 pm
“If he is in China, he will find himself in a world much closer to the game he is playing and the rules he understands. But if he is in China, he won’t be permitted to play it.”
Hardly a downgrade in his score – China’s settings are patent, far less pretentious and readily familiar to his games skills.
A Hypocricy like the US is no government at all, even the legislative scraps left by lobbyists have been sullied by a President who became a Pentagon fanboy enamoured of model air planes.
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PeadarMacCionnaith
June 13, 2013 at 7:11 am
It is difficult to see (at least from the outside) any significant difference each time a ‘demon’ is ‘voted out’ (on the back of a billion dollars). There may be some domestic nuances, but one can be forgiven for having the notion that there may be elite interests at the heart of what an Algerian might call le Pouvoir Americain, a ‘government’ of big business that does not change any time its public face changes.
What you say of Edward Snowden in particular may or may not be true, but I fear you caricature computer science: as a discipline it deals primarily in abstraction, and study would not be based exclusively (or even primarily) on screen and on the internet. Cyber-culture is, but that’s something else – to which the caricature of binary/polarised unreflective thinking may be more suited.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 13, 2013 at 7:53 am
Really? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2340565/Edward-Snowden-I-like-girlish-figure-How-NSA-leaker-Snowden-bragged-physique-online-ability-attract-nubile-young-girls.html
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nmundie
June 14, 2013 at 12:04 am
You’re still sexy as hell Hoffmann
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rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2013 at 2:17 am
Thank you–I am hoping to get a job in NSA’s Charm Offensive department.
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jsegor23
June 14, 2013 at 1:30 am
Wow! I’m impressed. Such in depth knowledge of what Snowden knows and doesn’t know. What he thinks and doesn’t think. You have his phantasies completely nailed without even spending one fifty minute hour with him. The CIA could certainly use your talent. Perhaps you could do Putin for them. No. Putin is old hat, they must have all the analysis they need of him. Xi Jinping might be a better subject. He’s a new guy at the top. Give them a call. They contract out a lot of work and pay more than it would cost to do the work in house. In the meanwhile, whatever the nature of Mr. Snowden’s psyche may be, the rest of us have some hard constitutional and policy issues to ponder.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2013 at 2:19 am
Joe I commiserate with many of your ACLU values, but I don’t think this is about honesty and bravery or the exposure of fraud and secrecy. He knew the game and he signed on to play it. It’s absurd to turn him into a moral Galahad and as a martyr to conscience–so far no one has fingered him so his cries of persecution are ringing hollow in advance.
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steph
June 14, 2013 at 1:36 am
Yes he is sexy, Nicola, in mind, body and spirit. His wit, his laugh, his poetry, his wisdom, his ideas and the way they evolve, his velvet voice, his passions, his critical mind and willingness to change his mind his eyes and even his ears. And arms. The way he inspires me, his inspiration. I want to hear him sing. The happiness and satisfaction of realising I always share his opinions. I respect them. I find him irresistibly desirable because I love the way he thinks. I think like that too. It seems as if our ideas and opinions interweave and progress. The vision of ‘God’ is in him as it is in all that is true, good and beautiful. He is an artist. He writes. Never interrupt a flow.
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steph
June 14, 2013 at 3:43 am
Dear decourse,
How about ‘anti-hero’. Be honest and call things as they are. Assange is no hero and never was. You can’t turn ‘love’ into ‘hate’ or ‘yes’ into ‘no’. Teddy Snowden is not a ‘hero’. There are no heroes. Teddy Snowden lives in a lonely fantasy world and craves attention.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Edward Snowden is a Spy: The Nagging Questions
by rjosephhoffmann
At a certain point everything Edward Snowden says about his motives for revealing details of the secretive PRISM programme turn to mush. We are at that point.
1. Although widely depicted in media as a young idealist, Snowden was a high school and army flop who found validation as an IT worker with the NSA and subsidiary contractors. What did Mr Snowden, as David Brooks rightly asks, think NSA was—Catholic Relief Services?
2.If Mr Snowden did know that NSA is involved in surveillance among its other remits, why was he shocked to discover things about its activities that even the general public has known since 2005 when a NYT article revealed that the FISA court often acted as a rubber stamp for government operations? Court procedures have been extensively reviewed and amended since then, and dozens of requests have been rejected or modified before being granted: something else Mr Snowden must have known, or should have known.
3.Snowden claims that his outrage over the PRISM program “grew over time,” though there is no indication there was a corresponding intensification of NSA’s operations within the program over the time he was with NSA: what he was doing on day one he was doing on his last day. The sole reasonable explanation of his staying on was to continue to monitor the program and to gather information in a clandestine way—in short, to spy on the government with the intention of revealing information to third parties. By one definition this is espionage, but by an older definition it is treason—a violation of an oath he swore to uphold and protect the Constitution.
4.Why if Mr Snowden claims to care about free speech and privacy did he head for Hong Kong a few days before he was told by The Guardian and the Washington Post that the stories would be published? Why didn’t he stay in Hawaii and meet reporters on his front lawn? Even today, no warrant for his arrest or extradition order has been issued—which must be very disappointing to a wannabe martyr. Imagine Christianity without Nero and lions.
5. Even if he is naïve enough to think that the relatively mild constraints on Hong Kong’s press make it the “envy of the world,”, successive reporters have marveled that China itself represents everything Mr Snowden claims to abhor: the iron fist of the state over the private interests of its citizens, and where internet privacy is a faraway dream. As I sit at my computer, I cannot access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or my own rather innocent blog—the one you are reading—because with all other WordPress-based media it has come under fire as fueling anti-Chinese opinion. On most days it is impossible to access Google except through various backdoors or sister sites, Google NZ being the most reliable and the one almost all Chinese use.
6.Why did The Guardian choose for the date of the release of this information the window during which Mr Obama would be meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in California. If this target was chosen by The Guardian specifically, to cause maximum impact and damage, then its chief reporter on the case, Glenn Greenwald, a man whose appetite for outrage rivals a Hussar’s for raw goat, should be questioned about what he knows of Snowden’s connections to China.
7.Despite his claims that he is in the game to out corruption and not to avoid prosecution, he is chiefly successful at hiding and giving interviews on the lam, shouting “I am not trying to avoid prosecution” from undisclosed locations.
8.Mr Snowden has, by all accounts, lied about the degree of access he (or anyone else at his clearance level) had to private information, conversations, and classified “secrets.” Perhaps it is possible even he thought he had this access. He has now claimed provocatively that the PRISM program and NSA had hacked into Hong Kong and Chinese computer systems, with special reference to those of businessmen, universities, industry and students. None of these targets as targets makes any sense, unless the real point of this mini-bomb is to get opinion in those communities to shift in his direction. In short, Mr Snowden seems to be out of information and what he hasn’t already fabricated he is now making up on the run in order to create a protective smokescreen for himself. His quiver is empty and he is shooting imaginary arrows at everything and everyone.
It is a shame that words like “hero’ and “whistleblower” have been used of someone who is basically a tech-savvy social catastrophe. If there is a crime here, it is the fact that NSA hired him, trusted him, and trained him—that our security obsessed nation will scrape this low in the barrel to fill positions that require honesty, integrity and a commitment to the national interest.
In fact, “national interest” is not a concept he appears to understand. And it is true, the phrase can be used to disguise mischief. No government has ever claimed that what it was doing it was doing to abrogate the rights of its people. But to accept Edward Snowden as a hero is to say that his understanding of national interest is superior to that of the government, and many of us aren’t nearly ready to accept that calculus. Governments like the United States choose their leaders; tyrannies do not.
I find it depressing that sales of Orwell’s 1984 have skyrocketed because of this rather smarmy interruption in our national life, and that thousands of shoddy analogies will be made between NSA (or the American government) and Big Brother. Orwell was writing about the rise of the technical, unrepresentative state. He could not have anticipated (he died in 1950) the world of the real 1984 let alone the world beyond that. In fact, nothing is more democratic that the internet culture that makes an Edward Snowden and his noxious ideas possible. That is why real totalitarian states despise it and try to control it.
I happen to believe that in a representative democracy government operates within the rule of law to achieve the national interest. That is what people elect other people to do. It is not a blank check. There is a limit on the account. The people they elect are much like them—which, often, is not saying much for the quality of the parliaments we get, but we also get to move them in and out and remodel them in the long haul. I would be very interested in knowing whether Mr Snowden voted in the last election, as his idol, Ron Paul, was not on the national ticket.
When Snowden enters the real China from the slightly irreal Hong Kong, he will live in a country without elections. Where government watches the moves of every internet user. Where surfing is unheard of, and “Page not Available” on English language sites is the most familiar message he is likely to find–because censors work 24-7 to edit, remove and control any stories unfavorable to the Party. The commemoration of Tiananmen Square last week was outlawed. The relative of Nobel Laurate Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in prison on charges barely comprehensible—but endangering state security is the best translation. Uighurs (Chinese Muslims in the far west of the country) have been killed by the hundreds in the last few years as they campaign for their civil rights. Not hosed down, mind you: killed. Mr Snowden comes from a country firmly fixed on its navel; these stories do not regularly appear in American media. We are obsessed with the important things like tornadoes and Kim Kardashian’s fashion disasters. But he now lives in a world where they do happen, all the time.
Tech savvy and bright as he may be, Chinese is a hard language to learn, and I wish Ed Snowden every success in mastering it. Because now that his backpack and pockets are empty of saleable information, that’s the only way he will survive and he will be competing with millions of well-educated young Chinese men and women for jobs in his profession. The hardest one to land, and the most prestigious? 政府审查中宣部–Government Censor for the Ministry of Propaganda.
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Published: June 14, 2013
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19 Responses to “Edward Snowden is a Spy: The Nagging Questions”
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ROO BOOKAROO
June 14, 2013 at 2:01 am
Orwell died in 1950, way after the end of WWII, not in 1943. Animal farm came out in 1946, and 1984 in 1949. Where did this “1943″ date come from?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2013 at 2:15 am
Thanks–corrected. I think the point stays the same. however. 1984 came out the year of the Communist victory in Beijing.
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steph
June 14, 2013 at 2:08 am
Question 9 – People leak [information] all the time without going public. So why did he choose to go public when he claimed he didn’t want public attention on himself distracting attention from the information leaked? Answer – because he knew that the media would immortalise him. The would write his biography describing the ordinary kid turned super hero who had overcome the demon rulers of the world. The master sleuth. Just like in the video games… But just like Bush and his make believe WsMD (or ‘Weapons of Mass Tickling’ as we affectionately referred to them) some of us, and probably more of us the further down the globe you slide, never believed you, Teddy Snowden. There are no heros except those infallible heros in fiction.
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decourse
June 14, 2013 at 3:26 am
It’d be wonderful if Martin Luther King wasn’t a philanderer. It’d be fabulous if Dorothy Day wasn’t a weird anarchist. It’d be marvellous if Julian Assange wasn’t a paranoid self-important arsehole.
Unlike the Greeks, our heroes are real, not legendary. Real people have flaws and failings. Indeed, you probably need to have a few flaws to go against the machine.
We get the heroes we’re given. We should probably be grateful that we get any at all.
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dunnfjfrancis
June 14, 2013 at 5:09 am
….he will never be trustworthy again…..what a shame and such a waste
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Stevie
June 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm
NSA didn’t hire him. Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton-it’s just fired him- which is in turn majority owned by the Carlyle Group, which is an investment fund.
I appreciate that you know a great deal more than I do about many things, but when it comes to investment funds I am probably rather better equipped than you are. The purpose of an investment fund is exceedingly simple; it’s to make money wherever and whenever it can, in order to maximise returns to its investors, wherever and whoever those investors are. In Carlyle’s case that extends to numerous activities over six continents, and it defines its mission as ‘inspiring the confidence and loyalty of its investors’.
You will note the complete absence of any reference to any one privileged country on those six continents whose interests would override those of the fund’s investors.
Incidentally, Snowden does not appear to have been paid for spilling the beans, so you should add the fact that he has clearly failed to take on board the business ethos to your catalogue of his shortcomings. After that you could give some thought to the possibility that your country might be better served by people whose mission is to serve their country…
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steph
June 15, 2013 at 8:08 pm
Hi Stevie,
Regarding your inference to Snowden as a person whose ‘mission is to serve [his] country’, you might be interested in these two articles, one from the New Yorker, the other from the New York Times:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-is-no-hero.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/brooks-the-solitary-leaker.html?_r=0
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Stevie
June 15, 2013 at 11:39 pm
Steph,
No, I didn’t suggest that Snowden was someone whose mission was to serve his country; quite the reverse. Snowden was the employee of a company which requires its employees to serve it, for the benefit of the people who derive income from the investment fund which is the majority owner of the company, thus adhering to its mission statement. The master servant relationship which defines the status of an employee does not allow any loyalties beyond it; obviously so, since it would not then be a master servant relationship.
I should, perhaps, declare an interest here; before I retired, in order to spend more time with my doctors, I was a public servant. It’s pretty straightforward; public servants have one duty, which is to serve the public. In England that meant I was a servant of the Crown; my authority derived from the fact that, once I had spent five years passing exceedingly difficult exams, I held the Queen’s Warrant. I’ve still got it knocking around the place somewhere.
I was hired by the Crown, trained by the Crown and trusted by the Crown to fulfil my duties. I could, of course, have made a great deal of money by going to work for a large accountancy and/or legal firm, since my knowledge was, and I suppose still is, an extremely valuable commodity. I didn’t do so because I became a public servant in order to serve the public.
A couple of weeks back my former husband received an OBE for ‘Services to Tax Compliance’. He had spent years investigating a highly complex tax avoidance scheme, and further years litigating it through the Courts here, against what seemed to be very unfavourable odds. Nevertheless, he won 7-0 in the Supreme Court, and well over £1 billion came into the Exchequer as a result.
In the world of investment trusts an employee who brings in well over £1 billion is rewarded with a great deal of money. When a public servant does it here then the most s/he gets is a gong; sadly Buckingham Palace does not provide refreshments.
The USA has chosen to dispense with the concept of public service; it’s paying the price. I am merely pointing out that actions have consequences; Snowden’s behaviour is one of the consequences…
steph
June 16, 2013 at 12:05 am
Stevie,
Thank you for your clarification. I’m wasn’t sure what you were leading to at the end of your first comment but it makes perfect sense to me now. I’m sorry for misunderstanding (and reassured that it was a misunderstanding). Thank you also for your further valuable insight. It is very much appreciated here and I fully concur with your assessment.
decourse
June 16, 2013 at 8:14 pm
That first article says: “For this, some [...] are hailing him as a hero and a whistle-blower. He is neither. He is, rather, a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.”
I’m not sure why he can’t be all of the above. The Greek hero Jason (of Argonautica fame) was a narcissist, and a murderer, and a thief, and a traitor (certainly as far as Medea was concerned).
steph
June 17, 2013 at 1:31 am
I’m sure Teddy Snowden would be delighted with the extraordinary analogy you draw decourse although he might still prefer one with Jesus as martyr. Personally I see no similarities without stretching the imagination to snapping point, not to mention the fact that this is not myth but the real world despite Snowden’s own lack of sense of that reality. I agree with the article that he is neither a hero nor a whistle-blower.
decourse
June 17, 2013 at 2:55 am
My point, such that it is, is that neither grandiosity, nor narcissism, nor a martyr complex, nor having broken your employment contract, nor having broken the law are sufficient by themselves to prevent you from being a hero.
I don’t know if he’s a “hero” or not, but what I do know is that he’s done the American public (and the world at large) a great service. It would be nice if he’d had better motives, or done it in a slightly different way, or chosen a different country to abscond to, or any number of other things had been different.
It’s easy to pinpoint, after the event, everything he did wrong, apparently from the day he was born. But are we surprised that this is the sort of person who becomes a whistleblower?
Julian Assange spent most of his childhood on the run from his stepfather who was a member of a predatory cult. Bradley Manning was struggling with his sexual orientation in the environment of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Imperfect people are exactly the sort of people who can end up going against the system.
steph
June 17, 2013 at 5:49 am
There was no need to explain to me decourse. Disagreement doesn’t necessarily indicate misunderstanding. I disagreed with your point…. While those things don’t prevent someone being considered a hero, they don’t make Snowden a hero to me or to the authors of the articles. That was my point. I never suggested a hero should be perfect or obedient. What hero in mythology would fit that definition? As an egalitarian and as a typical Kiwi whose empathy sits more comfortably with the self critical underdog, I find the concept of hero slightly disgusting and the idea that Snowden did his country or anyone else other than himself, a great service, erroneous.
decourse
June 17, 2013 at 9:35 pm
Fair enough, steph. I understand your reluctance about the word “hero”; as I said, I don’t know if I’d call Snowden a hero or not.
But I guess we can agree to disagree on whether or not he performed a public service. I’m grateful for the leak, even if the motives for leaking were bad or mixed.
steph
June 18, 2013 at 1:59 am
I thought everybody knew. Bush was doing it – accumulating all information in a data bank, and he didn’t have to obtain a court order to investigate further. So now Obama is doing it but must obtain the court order etc etc. I think Snowden is probably extraordinarily naïve but anyway I thought this interesting, or amusing… for your entertainment: professional profilers evaluate his public statements for clues to his psyche. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/11/the-mind-of-leaker-edward-snowden-an-armchair-analysis.html
decourse
June 16, 2013 at 8:47 pm
Stevie, I spent six months as a public servant in Australia, doing something very similar to what your former husband did. I worked for federal prosecutors, and played a (very small) part in getting money back from those who had defrauded the government, and from those who were convicted of serious crimes but had hidden their assets well.
I am not going to say that my time was perfect. The culture of the agency I worked for was not a good fit for me (that’s why I only lasted six months), and I did see a lot of resources wasted in inefficient bureaucracy.
I did not see anything which violated the law as I understood it, or my conscience. Everything I saw was within the law and in the service of the public interest. It could possibly have been done more efficiently, but the job is important, and the job got done. The only people we went after were those we had good reason to believe had done something wrong, whether it was something small like defrauding the welfare system, or something huge like money laundering or trafficking drugs.
As one former public servant to another, I’d like to know what would you have done if you discovered something that was clearly illegal or clearly unconscionable. What if it detracted from the mission of the department? What if, in your opinion, it violated some fundamental precept of good government, or some basic expectation that the public has of their government in a democratic society?
As I noted elsewhere, I think you need to be a bit weird to go against the system, especially in a spectacular way. Well-adjusted, well-housetrained people don’t do that. They get out and find a different job, or they live with the banality of evil one way or another. Either way, they rarely change anything.
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Stevie
June 17, 2013 at 10:50 am
Well, following the trial of Clive Ponting for leaking information to the MP Tam Dalyel regarding the sinking of the Belgrano, a system was put into place whereby a civil servant could leapfrog his or her own department to consult the Cabinet Secretary where s/he believed s/he was being asked to do something contrary to good conscience and the public interest.
That’s the good bit. They also altered the Official Secrets legislation to define the public interest as more or less meaning whatever the government of the day said it was, though there is some doubt as to whether it would stick. The judge in Ponting’s trial had instructed the jury that it was already the legal position, and thus Ponting was guilty. Ponting himself had expected to be convicted, and the jury found him not guilty. The proceedings of jurors are secret so no one will ever know why Ponting was acquitted.
There is also the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998, enacted some 13 years later, which applies to Civil Servants (though not those in the security services) as well as employees of businesses etc.
No-one has ever suggested that a government could decide that breaking the law was in the public interest; after all, Parliament enacts the law and if a particular government doesn’t like that law then it must muster a majority in Parliament to change that law. The Cabinet Secretary is very well aware of that fact; it is the cornerstone of our unwritten Constitution.
This is why our government has fervently denied that any of our intelligence services are doing what the US is doing; we have not yet reached the point where our politicians can decide that the foundations of our civilisation must be destroyed in order to save it, and with luck we never will.
Of course, we have a rather longer history of getting stroppy with our rulers, people of modest means can become members of Parliament, and we have no President, all of which makes the situation here radically different to that in the USA.
But I must disappoint you as to the chances of my having to endure the banality of evil; I certainly came across it but it wasn’t, as it were, on my side….
decourse
June 17, 2013 at 9:34 pm
Oh, yes, I’m reminded of the verb coined (or possibly just reported) by Yes, Minister: “to pont”.
I’m not accusing you of anything, and especially not shirking your duty to the law and to the public. I am certainly glad that you had an institutional mechanism to handle wrongdoing should the unthinkable ever happen.
Mike Wilson
June 22, 2013 at 3:35 pm
What a sad time in western history. I think were victims of success. We have a cadre of youths that expect to be revolutionary heroes in comfort and style. All of our OWS, Tea Party, Libertarians, Anarchist,…blah-blah-blah, are engaging in this weird fantasy that they are fighting the secret evils of the “Matrix” as a way to give purpose to lives that seem pointless when compared to those that stormed the beaches of Normandy or marched on Washington with MLK. Not that our world doesn’t have real problems, but solving them would take sacrifice and travel beyond the comforts of home. I always cringe when these types try to draw a comparison between what they are doing and what the kids are doing in Turkey or Egypt.
Regarding Snowden, I think he may have errored in his choice of exiles. Since the Chinese don’t really care about whatever he imagines his cause to be, I suspect that once they get what information they want from him they will start haggling with the US over the price for returning him. Do we have any Chinese spies they might want back?
I think another question to ask is what is being done to keep obvious flakes like Snowden and Manning from having access to thousands of classified documents?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Omnia
by rjosephhoffmann
omnia
Your words scissored beneath the hum of the fan
you came and went with a wish, and with your name
and the whisper of your veil in the lifeless air.
Insha’allah she will come again. That is what I wished.
I sat still as a mouse cornered behind the stove,
in my tiny way aware it was my final moment,
quivering at the shrunken distance between us,
knowing one word from you would kill me–
knowing that no word from you would kill me.
Can other men look you in the eye?
You are a wish, you are also everything.
I give you the power to be everything.
I wish you breezes in orange evenings.
and the kisses that cannot be counted,
each one a jewel, each jewel a word.
I wish you years of tearless passion
and love when it comes, under a fan
or on the banks of the Nile, an undivided
beauty. That is what I wish.
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Published: June 28, 2013
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One Response to “Omnia”
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steph
June 29, 2013 at 1:53 am
Beautiful. You took my breath away.
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The Milkman of Khartoum
by rjosephhoffmann
It is evening and in the street
the donkey cart comes to the gate
of a mud house coloured light orange
in this fading light. I am in a high window;
No one sees me. I am an angel or a bird.
A small man unwraps his legs, hops down
and honks a rubber horn; it is like the sound
of horns clowns use in the circus.
He honks it just three times.
He does not come to the gate, but
quickly from inside, still arranging her veil
a young girl slips into the tiny courtyard,
cemented with glass and tile and pebbles,
a kingdom between the bricks and the road.
The little man has three big urns of thin copper.
They are brimming with fresh goat’s milk.
He ladels a portion into a cup and takes
the cup to the gate, pouring just so much
into the bowl the girl offers. She offers,
he pours just so, shway shway and saves a dribble
for the urn when he returns to the cart.
I am an angel or a bird, but I do not
see her disappear into the brick house.
The milkman takes his position askew
the cartbed, crosses this thin legs and flicks
the donkey into motion with a hiss.
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Published: June 30, 2013
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2 Responses to “The Milkman of Khartoum”
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steph
July 1, 2013 at 2:05 am
I feel as if I’m there watching from a high window – such a powerfully dramatic image you paint. I can hear or imagine the milk gurgling into the cup – but I do not see the girl with the veil disappear either.
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franklin perciva
July 3, 2013 at 4:43 pm
Has anybody, say you, Joe, got a postal address for Steffilou Pacifisat Fish McGuire please? I can’t afford the air-fare to wish her a happy birthday in person & the post to the far side of the world takes a little bit of time. Luv, f.
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Villanelle: The Book in General
by rjosephhoffmann
God was the source and center of this love.
You were the wish he wished in Babylon
I was the soul he lost within the grove.
Some say that Huwa drove the man to move
Beyond the garden walls. Some say that none
Thought God the source and center of this love.
And once cast out they found an obscure trove
Stock full of seeds. They sowed them one by one,
The souls that he had lost within the grove.
But it was beastly work, and though they strove
To finish it, the job was never done,
He was no more the center of their love.
They built a temple, built it high above
The ancient city wall where priests could shun
The souls that had been lost within the grove.
They made two silver gates in memory of
The garden God had planted neath the sun
When he was yet the center of their love,
Before the souls were lost within the grove.
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Ramadan
by rjosephhoffmann
It is the first evening in Ramadan
And one muezzin has outlasted the others.
He has a sweet voice filled with God: I wait
For him to become the only muezzin, the
Final singer. Because his voice is so sweet,
Like the dates and honey children will
Eat later, deep in the evening, by moonlight.
Long ago,in Anatolia, Christians got drunk on
The Sun; they made Jesus the sun the son of
God and ruler of the world. They worshiped him
As scorching heat and the power of salvation,
Who would come again as judge and burn the earth
God had created in a week of days.
They pounded grapes
And drank the hot red juice and called it his blood.
But in the desert God is not like that:
God is a palm, shade from the sun.
He is the water the Ethiopian girl offers you by
A dry roadside, the ripened mango you
Have all over your hands and can still smell
An hour after you devoured it, like a jackal.
He is the cool light of the moon in a black sky
when the sun Has disappeared,
the sun we mock with our fasting and thirst
in the moon’s good time..
We know the sun will not kill us,
that weakness will strengthen us.
That in the light of the moon we will eat
The sounds of our salvation and rise
As children until the last day, the last call
to hear the story sung again
By the sweet voice of the caller.
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2 Responses to “Ramadan”
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Matthew
July 10, 2013 at 2:27 am
Dr. Hoffmann, I hope you don’t mind an off-topic question: how is your book coming along?
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Edward Jones
July 14, 2013 at 11:12 pm
Christians got drunk on the son of God and ruler of the world.
They worshiped him – the power of salvation – who will come again as judge and burn the earth.
[The Christian Christ myth of the writings of the NT - the great historical mistake of human unknowing] .
But in the desert God is not like that – God is a palm – light of the moon
He is the cool light of the moon in a black sky
To hear the story sung again
By the sweet voice of the call\er.
[Our original and originating faith and witness of the apostles located in that very special text The Sermon on the Mount. Our most certain evidence for who Jesus was and what he was up to]
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A Further Wish
by rjosephhoffmann
Love is pushing the last thing
You loved out the window
Of your memory. Falling
And moving like blowing sand
On a dark day, it happens
Not to bodies but to souls
Looking for a way to sense
The world without tools
Or avatars. There’s no sadness
When souls fall, because we know
That’s how a soul fastens
Onto a world and how it goes
Back to heaven. So, no surprise
That the soul I saw in you
Was my soul once: In my eyes
You saw a veiled life as a new
Possibility. It took a touch, a laugh
a strange prophetic silence
to destroy the false book
I had been reading, in one glance.
We share this soul like the wind
Shares the earth: it breathes love
And moves us, until we find
Each other in it and can no longer move.
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3 Responses to “A Further Wish”
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Peter Smith
July 11, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Beautiful.
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Rob
August 3, 2013 at 4:53 am
Beautiful indeed – and hopefully not just a wish.
Reply
steph
August 7, 2013 at 5:36 am
Thrice beautiful. Omnia… wish for everything or nothing at all. Blessed Irish, blessed: ‘May the sun shine, all day long, everything go right, and nothing wrong. May those you love bring love back to you, and may all the wishes you wish come true’. Again, your wish is soulfully beautiful.
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Things You Don’t Know about Me and You
by rjosephhoffmann
When I play piano
children sing
like magpies
so loudly
I lose my place
I think the ukulele
is a real instrument
to be treated like a violin
and not like
the kazoo you found
in your father’s
handkerchief drawer
and I was a tenor
and high F# was
my last strong note
before dissolving
into a spastic
tremulous shriek.
and as dog persons go
I am a cat person
though of course
I know dogs
have hearts
of molten gold
and cats silver brains
that tell them to walk
across the piano keys
ruining everything
to get their head
under a moving hand.
and yes,
I like both Gregorian and
Mozarbic chants
because
they are two kinds
of passion
one is like
my passion
because it flows
evenly and solemnly
but at its worst
sounds like
the endless tapping of keys
on an old typewriter
but when sung right
say by Solemnes
at first vespers
like the voice
Augustine heard
the one that said
Lift me and read me!
I am familiar, familiar
like the dull hum
of the swirling fan
you have learned
to ignore, familiar.
But you are Africa,
you are Spain and Babylon
and the Tigris running
incense burning to
slice the hot days into
vapours of dizzy grace
the taste of ginger
coffee, cardamom,
crushed eucalyptus
for my dull dull soul
a voice lost between
weeping and rejoicing,
like the tears of sacrifice,
when Abraham thought
he heard God’s voice
say Stop,
like young lambs in spring
a sound of tentative praise
when you walked into my room
and looked into my eyes
and everyone
became a stranger.
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The Gates
by rjosephhoffmann
بوابات
Knowing that you are my first love
But not my only passion
Have thanks for giving
In a single moment the refreshment
Of a journey’s end, at Mecca or
Jerusalem, the cool water that
Staunches a man’s desire.
Knowing that you are my last passion,
My only love, I have praise
For your eyes and lips and for
The parts of you that move sensually
In my imagination, like the
Girls of Lahore on sweet July evenings
With the smell of jasmine in their hair
And breath tinted with ripe mango.
Knowing that love and passion
Flow together, I have songs
That flow from Allah who took
Dry earth from the desert
and purest water
From the springs near Jericho
And shaped you as a wish, أمنيا
A living soul seeking paradise
Through the gates of love and passion.
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The Flowers
by rjosephhoffmann
“per omnia saecula saeculorum…”
here are so many poems
I could send
To you, the words of other men
Who felt the ins and outs of love
And laughed at kisses, and in the end
Knew that kisses fade like tulips
After a day. Or I could send flowers.
Love isn’t flowers–God—what a
Symbol! beauty killed at its
eruption, plucked from living wood
To die by inches as we watch.
I was impressed with the vase
He gave you: my offering was
Poor by comparison, an internet
Special, “Only five days left
for guaranteed delivery
by February 14th” And why shouldn’t
Valentine’s Day be about hearts broken
As much as hearts whole?
Six months, a whole half year
Since then. No one remembers
The flowers or the poison. Well,
Not every detail, anyway. And
True love blossoms even when we try
To keep it at bay, like the thorny
Wild roses that break the trellis and
Rise endlessly upward, stretching
everywhere from root to anchor
with only instinct and a love for
the sun as their conscience.
My true love is like that:
Wild red roses rambling and winding
Around me until I can only say
Cover me with thorns until
I can see the droplets of my blood
Forming on the pale skin. Twine
Around me, legs and trunk
And torso until I can no
Longer move away from you
Until I am hidden within you
Until I can no longer breathe.
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Joseph’s Dream
by rjosephhoffmann
(Surah 12 / Genesis 39-41)
Pharaoh dreamed
That he was standing by the Nile.
He dreamed the river went
From white to red and
Out of the river came seven cows, sleek and fat,
and they fed in the reed grass.
Then seven other cows, gaunt and thin,
And the gaunt and thin cows
Devoured the seven sleek and fat cows.
And the king awoke crying for Joseph.
“By Aton, by the radiant sun, I will
Die tomorrow—Oh! my poor wives
And bakers and architects and priests.”
But Joseph was dreaming too:
Dreaming of goat-blood and wells and
The sons of Ishmael who brought him as a slave
To Potiphar–and the priest’s wife saying
“He does not know how to love a woman;
Take me and love me, Joseph ,or I
Will tell him you raped me. And he will
Believe me because I am his wife.
Lie back on the silk, arch your back
Over the cushion; I will do the rest.”
Joseph woke to the cries of Pharaoh
Reeling into the room, his robe twisted
Into a knot around his neck.
“What does it it mean: cows do not
Eat cows. Does it mean my death,
Zaph′enath-pane′ah?” No, Joseph said
Rubbing crust from his eyes and the memory
Of the woman’s perfume. “It means
Nothing like that–it means other men will
Starve: children, mothers and grandfathers
Mainly, Nothing to do with us. You are the sun
You cannot starve or be deprived of brightness.”
Pharaoh clapped his hands: “Praise god,
I was hoping it was something like that.
I am sorry about Potiphar’s wife–always the slag;
But I will give you As’enath—you’ll have sons
I’ll fill your grain stall and your belly will
Always be full of wine, your bed never empty;
I will kill the baker for you–
I will kill Potiphar and give you his head
as a token of my love for you–
Only please, never leave my side
Joseph, Joseph I need you at my side.”
The Hebrew looked closely at the king’s face;
There was the sort of practice that comes
From fright and superstition,
too many dreams, and too little rest.
“I will, my Lord: I will stay—for a while. Only
do this–wash your hands, and your feet
Bring beer and meat and bread, bring your sons
And I will summon my faithless brothers
and Benjamin from my father’s house,
and we will all sit together—recline together
We will eat together.”
“Ah! Joseph,” said the king—“You ask too much.”
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
New
by rjosephhoffmann
for osm
New
…wears off all things:
Shoes and cars,
Christmas stars,
kings and golden rings.
But love we’re told
If it is true
is always new
and never old.
I wonder if Odysseus
Half-heartedly
across the sea
divined the mess
he’d left behind:
a comely wife,
a married life,
love, of a kind.
Or did he mishap know
that temporality
is love’s infirmity
for us below?
We lack the angels’ plight,
their scope–
even a rope–
to scale their height.
And so we think
love is our portal
to the immortal
as down we sink.
No love’s not love
that alters when
the clock strikes ten
or fate plays rough.
Love’s the state whereby
we’re crazed to think
that passion’s blink
will never die.
* * *
I thought (the cheek!)
I’d found love true
In someone new,
and she was chic.
Her kisses fell like flakes
to ground–
She had me bound:
And Ah, the stakes!
She said, You are my only
heart’s desire–
Oh purple fire:
Make me unlonely.
And you, I said in trembling tone,
Are Chinese food
Not bad, not good,
–Was that my phone?
We sowed the field prodigiously
From summer’s call
Until the fall
religiously.
But what is new is never
Love and thus
this us
was not forever.
She packed her bag (the jerk)
and said
It’s dead
It didn’t work.
***
But Love’s not work, at least
the kind
that’s blind.
like the Cretan beast.
Love’s old at first hello,
Recognized,
not improvised
like Waldorf Jello.
Love says (the same) to each,
a simple word
barely heard,
touching without reach.
Love’s sad, right from the start
the rain
unexplained,
creation without art.
And love will find you hollow.
Thus, Jack and Jill
against their will
do leave the hill and follow.
***
The moral is beware the new
It’s shade
Will fade
For her, and you.
rjh/23/08 2013
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Published: August 23, 2013
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3 Responses to “New”
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nicola
August 23, 2013 at 3:09 pm
that’s sweet, hiding a little sadness
Reply
Edward Jones
August 25, 2013 at 10:58 am
That’s sweet human ‘love’ – how about divine love?
John Hick: “God purposes unconditionally to guarantee the highest good and blessedness to ever human”.
Reply
Edward Jones
August 25, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Correction: “ever human” should read “every human”.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Canto II: Umm ul-Banin
by rjosephhoffmann
Reprinted from R Joseph Hoffmann, A Writing Tablet (r)
http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2013/05/27/canto-ii-umm-ul-banin/
When Dante visited the moon
Beatrice explained about vows.
“A vow’s a pact,” she said “between man and God,
but moons come and go, so don’t swear by them.”
Maybe he laughed at that, because she was young,
and had no right lecturing him in his dreams,
a spirit torn from his side. What can a girl know about vows?
When he first saw her, she was trembling like a dove.
She said “You’ll have to go through strange gates and dark alleys
into cities wet with spilled excuses.
You’ve got to pass this way. There’s no short cut.
You’ll see whatever you want to see.
“On the other side, there is a mountain
and from the top ledge you can see God.
It’s worth it, though–the crossing: He is beautiful,
and the best thing is, no one who sees him remembers
anything they’ve seen before,
not the crying, not being stung by wasps.
Not the smell of the Florentine women–
‘Donne, ch’avete intelletto d’Amore’–
Ladies who know all about love.’
“You’ll forget having your eyelids pierced
and weighted with leaden pendants so that you can can’t see truth
staring you in the face. It’s rumour of course,
but God’s more beautiful than the moon.”
So they walked towards the river and for the first hundred yards
she held his hand. Then he stumbled.
It was dark when he climbed into the rotting boat
that smelled like all the sins he had committed as a child.
He wasn’t sure, in the dark, in the cloak,
But he thought it was her. He wanted it to be her.
He rode the yellow sadness of Acheron, filled with naked men,
eyes alight with flaming coals. He saw starved falcons overhead,
thick as mosquitoes over a dead lake.
He saw Charon lobbing his oar against bodies clutching the sides of the
boat, turning the way forward into a slow trawl.
He saw pale arms rising and falling back into the black torpor,
drowning in waltz time, in little circles.
“It’s too much.” he said: “Here’s an extra five dollars,
I don’t care how beautiful God is. Take me back.”
He turned to her, but he saw instead the shadow of a poet
who said, “I’ll take you farther. You must go farther, because, as
She said, there is a mountain you’re meant to climb.
She wants it for you.”
“I have no legs, for mountains,” he said, “I do not want
To be a poet. I do not want to drown.”
But by then the boat had forked upriver:
Charon grinned as the water widened.
She stood on the other side, a firelight on the shore
fading like the glow of the moon behind a broken cloud.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
On the Dignity of Humanism
by rjosephhoffmann
Joseph Hoffmann
As a humanist I have often done what humanists do: hide behind the great thoughts of significant men and women to give my own ideas heft and importance.
The possibility of doing that came to an end in 2009, when America’s oldest humanist society, the AHA, bestowed its “Humanist of the Year” award on a man named P Z Myers, someone whose simplistic views, bare-knuckle style towards his critics, and lack of literary depth embody everything I abhor about contemporary humanism and new atheism.
But I have written plenty about what I abhor. And I have written a fair bit about why organized humanism, infused and high-jacked by the “new” atheism, has been turned into a parody of serious humanist principles and ideals. Myers, blogger Jerry Coyne, and a few other swains who hang out at the Free Thought Ghetto, wasted no time trying to frame me as a pompous, old school, elitist, humanities-loving humanist, the sort who is soft on religion because (of course) he is (a) secretly religious himself (b) too dim to be Bright and (c) naïve enough to think that ‘humanism’ can still be separated from the religion-hating spew and tactics of Richard Dawkins and his cult. While not every voice was as repetitive and coarse as Myers’, 2009-2012 were rough years for people accused by the court of atheist opinion of being “accommodationists.” Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the new atheist/humanist defense of its position, given the role of Richard Dawkins in the movement, was its incipient anti-intellectualism, its impatience for words in preference for what it construed as “argument,” and its contempt for even mild dissent and criticism–characteristics we normally associate with religious apologetic.
It was only slightly amusing to watch these religion haters develop all of the essential symptoms and pathologies of a cult, traits which were less obvious to them because they had never studied religious behavior and the psychopathology of cults.
But all the markers were there: a book, or canon of four books; a savior and a few lesser avatars; the promise of intellectual salvation using a formula for separateness and difference; most of all, the certainty that they are on the straight path, the right road, that others are wrong, and its behavioral corollary: intolerance of contradiction and correction.
With a few of my friends, notably the persistently hopeful Nathan Bupp I have pleaded for the return of the remains of serious humanism from the exile into which its captors flung it in 2008– the year Paul Kurtz was dethroned from the chairmanship of CFI, and the year I stepped aside as its Vice President—to mainstream intellectual and social life. But the infiltration of the key outposts of humanism by religion-haters makes the job of reclaiming or “restoration” one for Atlas. Outside the halls of academe, the word humanism is today almost synonymous with the word atheism, and atheism synonymous with the lowbrow definitions of its loudest, pop science-worshiping groupies.
Paul Kurtz died in 2012 and with him disappeared one of the last links between humanism as a force grounded in history and humanism as a positive and democratic vision of the future. The coalition of pharisaic secularists, religion debunkers, political movementeers and full-frontal atheists (who had always been at the margins of Kurtz’s movement but never the core), quickly seeped in to make up the loss of ballast after his departure. And the effects are still being felt.
1.
While I am skeptical that a balanced and historically situated humanism can be recovered or reclaimed, let me try once again to say what I think humanism is and what it isn’t. I don’t do this to persuade anyone. I don’t offer these observations as yet another manifesto or creed. Partly I am doing it to hear myself think, to remind myself of what movement humanism encourages us to forget, ignore, or alter.
First, humanism is historically grounded: it is the view that as the creators of culture and civilization we are responsible for the kind of culture we create. The first stirrings of that belief can be traced to the Renaissance, and it is an important moment in history. Before that, people tended to believe that God loaded the world with sorrow and our species with intellectual limitations as a punishment for sin. The way out was not for us to help ourselves but for the church and the saints to help us out. Essentially, we were broken creatures, the sons and daughters of Eve wiling away our days in a vale of tears called the world. This world was a dark and dreary, foreign space for the bright (but dangerously lost) souls destined for heaven. The devil was there to goad and tempt us, the flesh to seduce and corrupt us further. But Renaissance humanism was that point in the history of our species when the lights went on; when the human form became delectable; when knowledge became power not arrogance, and when nature and the world became beautiful objects of study, representation and enjoyment.
Second humanism is a doctrine of responsibility. That means that we bear full responsibility for the quality and value of the things that make us human and sustain us as human beings: humanists believe in free speech but not that all speech is equally noble, or that all thoughts are really deserving of equal time. Humanism is the ability to imagine both better worlds and worse worlds, utopia and dystopia. But it always seeks the better, the good, and thus demands the ability to recognize that there is no political formula that brings these worlds into existence. Unlike true humanism, movement humanism is prone to sink into the quicksand of trend, fad, survey, and political ideology. It is the death of humanism when the responsibility of the individual person is collectivized as the will of a movement. That is why historically speaking the great humanist thinkers, religious and secular alike, have been individuals and apostates rather than group leaders.
The third aspect of humanism that needs to be emphasized is that humanism is aspirational. I don’t like that word very much, but it works in this context. The essence of humanism is to be intellectually restless and inquisitive; that is why, in practice, few humanists find a home in organized religion or conservative politics. They recognize that the way to test new ideas is not to invoke old ones; but they also know that a thing is not good merely because it is new. History is peppered with examples of new ideas that tuned out to be bad ideas, new technologies and discoveries that were subverted by selfishness and power to become destructive. There is nothing intrinsically “good” about science just as there is nothing intrinsically good about literature. Both are capable of pornography and degradation. Humanists aspire to refine the potential of the human mind and the human spirit. They believe that what Pico called the dignity of man must be reflected in speech, action, art and the sciences. The anti-humanism of organized humanism and atheism consists primarily in the loss of the sense of dignity and a penchant for degrading and abusing opposing ideas.
1.
Finally, humanism is not the opposite of religion. There are certainly things it opposes—injustice, oppression, poverty, enforced ignorance, the uglification of human life and predations on the environment or the freedoms we enjoy. But it opposes these things because they are attacks on our humanity—on the principle of the dignity of mankind. As a matter of fact, it does not matter too much whether one thinks this dignity comes from God or simply is: Both attributions are metaphors for the best that is in us, images of what we are when viewed in terms of our intelligence and ability. No one should be afraid to call herself a humanist simply because she believes in God, because belief in God is not self-evidently a denial of the dignity of man.
Serious humanism is not historically misinformed. It knows that religion has had a major role to play in the fight for justice, the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of education. It is easy enough for an atheist to see the building of schools and hospitals or the central role of the Exodus narrative in the Civil rights movement as the way religion self-promotes and propagandizes the ignorant masses.
But the simpler view, that religion reflects the gentler side of religion–the spirit of the man who said feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked–won’t be missed by any humanist worthy of the name. A serious humanism knows that religion is its grandfather: you can hate him, of course, or be embarrassed by him and keep him in his room. Or you can recognize that without the sometimes mistaken thoughts he thought you wouldn’t have much to build on. It is a cloying trait of modern humanism and atheism to blame religions and their books for being old, and to miss the dialectic whereby reflection on religious ideas—even religious excess– gave us newer ideas and better visions of the world.
Renaissance humanism knew this. The humanism of the age of reason respected it, even if more abstractly and more critically in its broadsides against credulity and superstition. Twentieth century humanism while more fretful in the guise of people like Sartre and Huxley and Russell, was nonetheless aware of the debt and the loss, the need not only for a moral but an emotional alternative to religion’s stubborn hold on the human imagination. That the God of the Bible does not exist ceased to be big news by the beginning of the twentieth century; what has been surprising is that so few twenty first century atheists got word of the vast post-mortem in art, literature and music.
“We have killed God” Nietzsche’s madman moans, “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder.”
Humanism, as the philosopher Paul Kurtz said, does not become desperate and pessimistic over the death of God, but feels certain exhilaration in the opportunities this new reality proposes to us.
And yet humanism is not always exuberant: it has the right to be pessimistic, critical, and skeptical because it knows that being a humanist is not a stopping point. In a BBC interview last year the composer Philip Glass was asked how he defined music. He answered by saying that “Music is a place, and you will know when you are there.” Perhaps the key problem with movement humanists is that they are in the wrong place and their leaders don’t mind. It is reckoned to be enough that you can carry a membership card “worth 10% off the price of admission to all scheduled events.” Become a donor, a subscriber a friend of the center. I have been to humanist gatherings where the bilking of a credulous audience would have put anything Tetzel offered German peasants to shame.
This modern indulgence-selling has the same purpose it had in the sixteenth century of course: to keep an organization afloat and pay the bills. But it is particularly noxious for what it really is—an offer of salvation and community to men and women seeking to escape the clutches of superstition and dogma by embracing an alternative system of superstition.
Serious humanism will be at odds with movement humanism, precisely because the latter leaves almost no room for the private conscience and individualism, for a critique of the critique, for the possibility of spiritual truth, for the existence of other systems of knowledge and discovery—ones within which even the idea of God might not be absurd.
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Published: August 30, 2013
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10 Responses to “On the Dignity of Humanism”
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The Follies of the New Atheists | The Areopagus says:
August 30, 2013 at 4:12 pm
[…] Related posts here ,here, and here. […]
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writtenbyafloridian
August 30, 2013 at 4:15 pm
New Atheists love dealing in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. Everybody, everything is either wholly good or wholly bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.
Cheers
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Matthew Green
August 30, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Dr. Hoffmann, thank you for writing a wonderful post! This elegantly describes what I have been thinking for some time and I am pleased that you chose to put it in words! Your post is incisive and thoughtful, as usual.
Reply
Matt Viney
August 30, 2013 at 5:47 pm
As an ordained Presbyterian minister, I find this blog much more thought-provoking than any of those by the hard-line atheists. I’ve had a link to this blog on my own (humble) blog for some time, because I think Christians could benefit from reading it.
Mr Hoffmann is a fine humanist.
Reply
tnt666
August 30, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Old school atheists were not really associated with Humanism. Indeed, to me, an old school atheist, it seems that the Humanist Manifesto (whether v.I, II, or III) has taken over the atheist movement, which used to have stronger opinions than today’s religious apologists of “moderation”. And that all these figureheads of the atheist movement are in fact figureheads of Humanism.
I find it a little discouraging that in your aspiration to discuss old school Humanism, you fail to discuss that those Renaissance Humanists were Christians, believers, who wished for a better ideology, and that Secular Humanism is only the most recent incarnation of Humanism. (Notice that isn’t even such a thing as atheist Humanism, and that secular in no way means atheist… only separation between faith and public life, which is why the word secular has also become grandly corrupted through recent decades). But that is the fate of language yes? That people use words out of historical context, and forget the origins of the terms.
As for Myers, to me, he does not at all represent Humanism, so in this I agree with you. But therein lies my only agreement on this matter. Myers is the only one of today’s atheist figureheads that I do not find ridiculous. Maybe it’s because he’s a biologist first, and a blogger second, as a biologist, I appreciate his no nonsense approach, whereas all other Humanist figureheads that have taken over the atheist movement are well trained in WASPness (like a secular Protestantism). The term WASP has mostly disappeared from our every day vocabulary, but for those who can remember old school criticisms we made of WASP ideologies, I can still make the very same criticisms of the likes of atheists’ “four horsemen”. (You’d think I’d feel like I do about Dawkins as I do about Myers, in the scientist sense, but though Dawkins adulators see Dawkins as a “great and revolutionary biologist”, the real life community of biologists do not hold the same scientific view of Dawkins. I think his main talent in life is not biology but self promotion. Myers does not have this degree of pompousness, he writes as a regular biologist, and a regular educated human.)
As a strong atheist, I’d love to see a better separation between the atheist movement and the Secular Humanists movement, I’d also like to see Secular Humanists stop using the term Humanism alone and specify Secular Humanism. It’s actually quite odd that you’d say god fearers who are Humanist are pushed out, because Humanism is by nature originally god fearing, so believers should feel quite comfortable in it.
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Edward Jones
September 7, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Your encouraging essay yet raises the issue of deficient Humanism: tnt666′s comment suggests a revisit to “Deficiently Humanistic” to read again Ogden’s extracts. Tnt666: “I find it a little discouraging that you fail to note that those Renaissance Humanist were Christian (Pico), believers who wished for a better ideology (recognizing Christianity’s historical deficient history); and that Secular Humanism is only the most recent incarnation of Humanism. Notice that there isn’t even such a thing as atheist Humanism, and that secular in no way means atheist.”
This suggests the following comments.
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Edward Jones
September 7, 2013 at 9:47 pm
Our most certain sufficient historical evidence for knowledge of Jesus, who he was and what he said, rests “solely on the basis of the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles’ (Schubert Ogden) Over against this basic fact of the history of religions, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions (taking account of the fact that this was before Christianity, before the word Christian was coined in Antioch in the 70’s), to create the “Jesus Puzzle”. During this period there were two distinctly different movements related to the Jesus event, standing in deepest adversarial relationship. The first, the Jerusalem Jewish Jesus Movement, which began (within the first weeks of post-Easter) with the key disciples returning to Jerusalem purposing to again take up the teachings of Jesus. It was from the Jesus Movement with its collections of sayings that we have our primary NT source containing this apostolic witness. This was soon followed by a Jewish Hellenist movement interpreting the Jesus event in terms of notions suggested by their traditions of dying and rising heroes or gods inventing concepts of the salvific effects of Jesus’ death and resurrection, suggesting royal titles like Messiah, Son of God, Savior. Paul, first as persecutor, then converting to this group, adopted its notions, which became the source of his Christ of faith myth, becoming the arch enemy of the Jesus movement. In taking his kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, it became Gentile Christianity in Antioch in 70 CE, as known above all from the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT, the scriptural source for orthodox Christianity. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, MISTAKENLY to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a full objective historical understanding of this mistake, not only to say none of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus, but to understand the how and the why of this fateful mistake. This is a human mistake, one of those ultimate mistakes related to humanities pervasive difficulty in coming to terms with Ultimate Reality, the issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s fateful propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which limit “vision” to sense perceived reality – to in effect oppose cognition of Ultimate Reality
steph
August 30, 2013 at 8:27 pm
Perfectly puffikt. Wonderfully written, thank you for your incisive clarity.
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Franklin Percival
August 31, 2013 at 10:48 am
You do cheer me up, Sir!
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scotteus
September 5, 2013 at 12:37 am
Humanism, then seems to have obvious roots in both the religious and secular worlds. I find it rather hard to explain to those with whom I associate other than to start with telling them that while I am not religiously Christian, I am culturally Christian.
The above is my starting point. With this latest essay of yours, Dr Hoffmann, I have some tools to better explain my position.
Good on ya!
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Faith, Practice and Religious Illiteracy
by rjosephhoffmann
“Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it.” Friedrich Schleiermacher (Addresses on Religion, 1799)
TWO THINGS caught my attention last week. One was the total lunar eclipse, which was magnificent to see. The other, not so nice, is a post by someone whose work I have often enjoyed, Julian Baggini, in an unfortunate piece in The Guardian that probably wouldn’t survive a fact-check in an American newspaper.
It concerns what even he says is an unscientific survey of “beliefs” held by British churchgoers in Bristol, UK, using the following procedure:
“The online version [of my survey] was taken by a self-selecting sample of 767 churchgoers, the majority of whom read Comment is Free [his Guardian blog] at least occasionally and who are mostly aged 18-35. This is not a representative sample of typical practising Christians. The paper version was completed by 141 churchgoers in Bristol, again not randomly sampled.”
And with this vote of self-confidence in the result:
“These apparent limitations in some ways make the results even more interesting, because you’d expect the sample group in both instances to be more educated and liberal than the average. We can then be fairly confident that the surveys would not overstate the extent to which people held conventional, some might say more simplistic, versions of Christian doctrine.”
Leaving aside the improbability of anyone taking (or bothering to take) an “I go to church”- survey in England being unrepresentative of an “I go to church”-sample, but more “liberal than the average,” the study is very strange at a number of levels, which already disqualifies it for global significance. It absolutely disqualifies it in America, where religious knowledge is at an all time low, but (predictably) constantly mapped and charted in more empirical ways.
But it also is, as Jonathan Chaplin says, a non-starter in England, a country of smart but lazy people who generally like Christmas but don’t generally like sermons. Chaplin notes the procedural and methodological shortcomings of Baggini’s survey, but focuses most of his attention on the “Four Articles” which the author proposes as a way forward in creating atheist-religious dialogue. Unfortunately, Julian seems intent on wanting religious people to come to the bargaining table naked, presuppositionally speaking. While I applaud his effort to get atheists talking to religious people who are open to a sane view of the world, I’m not at all sure that this survey helps the conversation along.
THE following ORB (1999) Poll tells the story of religion’s decline in the UK, and all subsequent polls show similar southward drift for all religions except, of course, Islam. (The Empire bites back).
About Jesus Christ:
14% do not know who he is.
Less than 50% “believe in Christ”. This probably means that they do not believe that he is the son of God; the exact meaning of the question was not defined.
22% believe that he is “just a story.”
Church affiliation:
49% identify themselves as affiliated with a religious group.
27% belong to the Church of England (Episcopalian, Anglican). This is a drop from 40% in 1990.
(The latest YouGov poll cited by the British Humanist Association notes that by 2015, the level of church attendance in the UK is predicted to fall to 3,081,500 people, or 5% of the population.)
9% are Roman Catholics, unchanged since 1990.
Church attendance:
3% of the population goes to church only at Easter and Christmas.
46% say that they have never gone to church at all.
Baggini’s upshot, if that is the word, is that he thinks that given the choice between Christianity being all about practice or belief, belief wins. He is writing as a philosopher of popular culture whose interest in the subject is correspondingly tentative:
So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.
Remember the silly game everyone played five years ago ending every sentence with the non-sequitur ”in bed,” and how much you wanted it to be funny but it almost never was? We need to finish that paragraph with, “In Bristol.” Actually, its parochialism doesn’t begin to suggest the problem with the survey: its problem is inherent to the very questions that the surveyor posed. But more on this later….
BAGGINI’S survey may play well with atheists who are looking for any reason, any at all, that church-going is eo ipso irrational, but it is embarrassing for those of us who pore over serious literature and surveys of the morphology of belief. Not that everyone needs to have read everything on the topic, but it beggars imagination that he does not bother to know any of the recent literature on faith and practice in its wider context: Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy (2008) and his American Jesus (2003) for starters, but even (the work of someone with whom I rarely agree) Rodney Stark’s What Americans Really Believe (2008) is statistically important, and University of Chicago sociologist of religion Alan Wolfe’s superb book The Transformation of American Religion (2005). If on the other hand he intended his survey to be limited to Bristol, why call the survey, grandly, ”The Myth that religion is more about practice than belief”? Them’s fightin’ words.
While the professional God-haters try to persuade us that religion is the same old bugaboo that it always was (All the better to melt your brain my dears) serious researchers like Wolfe have come up with a very different picture: American culture, he says, has come to dominate American religion to such a point that “We are all mainstream now.” The stereotype of religion as a fire-and-brimstone affair is obsolete. Gone is the language of sin and damnation, and forgotten are the clear delineations between denominations. They have been replaced with a multi-dimensional God and a trend towards sampling new creeds and doctrines. “American religion is less radical, less contentious, and less dangerous than it is generally perceived to be.”
I am not entirely convinced that every part of Wolfe’s assessment of the transformation of religion in America is dead-on accurate, especially in political terms, but the trends he discusses are real enough and the transformation of evangelical Protestantism shows that it has been as much affected by being “mainstreamed” as it was effective in influencing the mainstream. A part of this transformation has been doctrinal accommodation, the process first described by Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy and much revised in his 2008 study, Religious America. Berger was surprised that the process of secularization was not irreversible (i.e., does not lead to the eradication of religious belief) but transformative: religion learns to live within and to transform a culture. The prophetic version of the same idea was put forward in 1951 in H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.
The larger question is implied by Baggini’s verdict that religious practice is a discrete matter, separate from faith or at least from certain metaphysical propositions. As a philosopher he is undoubtedly thinking of the Kantian tradition where this bifurcation is normative. Practice is the realm of the senses, and usually means à la Schleiermacher and his successors, doing good or doing what duty (Pflicht) requires. If it can be shown that religion relies heavily on irrational propositions offered as “claims,” however, then the do-good part of religion might be rendered comparatively minor, which, of course, is where a certain kind of atheist might struggle to keep it–in the chambers of some discredited rule-ethics hell. But this approach, even in Bristol, would require us to turn the clock back on the understanding of faith and practice three hundred years, dig up Bishop Ussher (or Michael Wigglesworth if you prefer), parade him through the streets and say, “Scary, isn’t he?”
Most Christians experience faith and practice as two prongs of the same fork. More important perhaps, the terms “faith” and “practice” are theological conventions going back to the fifth century writer Prosper of Aquitaine, not scientific ones. Anthropology since the late nineteenth century has operated on the assumption that doctrine and to a lesser extent dogma are rationalizations of religious behaviour: practice precedes doctrine (belief in a systematic and codified form) and liturgy (codified behaviour) and also modifies it. The ritual (practice)-myth (story) relationship has been a topic since E. B Tylor first studied indigenous cultures in the late nineteenth century, though he thought ritual came second in the order of religious culture. The myth/belief- first and the ritual/praxis-first debate has been lively and inconclusive, but it is increasingly rare, as Melentinsky surveys the relationship over a number of decades, to think of belief and practice as separate domains. Proclaiming “faith” the winner over “practice” on the basis of what 700-plus Bristol Christians think about Jesus is fatally vulnerable to scientific critique and edges near to being a false dichotomy. The late archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie recounted a sermon he once gave at a Yorkshire parish on the divinity of Jesus. It was, he said, like the belief, a bit obscure. Following the service, an earnest old parishioner shook his hand vigorously and said to him, “You’ve convinced me sir, but then I never had a doubt, that Jesus were a very nice man.”
BP USSHER
In previous work Baggini has at least acknowledged that religion can be relatively benign. If Jews and Christians acted out their faith in ways that a troubling number of Muslims still do, Christianity would be a monstrosity. But (to parse Bultmann on why he didn’t believe in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus) it’s not in the newspaper. The Christian-right moral agenda is a monstrosity. American Christians meddling in politics and attempting to leverage political outcomes is a monstrosity. The attitudes and personalities and self-righteousness of extreme-right Christian organizations, not towards just unbelievers but towards other believers is a monstrosity. But, marvelous to note, these things, collectively, seldom add up to catastrophic outcomes. The stories of Waco and randy Mormon elders with fourteen year-old child-brides are only newsworthy because they are exceptional–and (I have to say it) not the kind of thing that happens in Bristol.
IT’S POSSIBLE, of course, to reduce Christian belief to the presumed “absurdities” that historical Christianity has embraced over the centuries–everything (one can argue) from the trinity to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy (which is not the same East to West) to the doctrine of the Real Presence for Catholics, which is not literally maintained outside the Roman tradition. It is also possible to embrace a more radical solution to the matter: since all of these beliefs have the same source, they differ only in degree of irrationality and can be dismissed tamquam idem.
But to equate the most absurd things Christian extremists in the Bible Belt [see postscript below] believe with what the vast majority of Christians believe is simply statistically false. Most Christians in Bristol (though fewer of them) are a lot like most Christians in Milwaukee. They go to church to worship God, it is true; but that their going to church expresses a robust commitment to the irrational isn’t true. They may well go to church, as William James would have calculated, because they regard churchgoing as a “live choice”– an action with an internal and subjective appeal, not a rational or forced appeal. Or as Schleiermacher wrote in 1799, out of intuition and feeling.
Most troubling of all is Baggini’s notion that asking questions about the divinity of Jesus is of the same order as asking about the weather–ripping a first century nomen out of context and asking a naive parishioner whether he “believes” it. Countless surveys in America show that religious knowledge is at an all time low. And assuming that there is some correlation between what I know (i.e., what I can define) and what I believe, “at face value,” to quote the Baggini criterion, it would appear that the real story is that many Christians act without direct reference to anything in the doctrinal treasure chest. Ubi ignorantia ibi nihil, as a Benedictine teacher of mine used to smile when I didn’t do my homework. All I can assume is that Julian’s teachers weren’t Benedictine, but I know they were Catholic.
DON’T KNOW how you can take anything at face value if you don’t know the face value: Catholics in America don’t know by 50% that their church teaches that the bread, in the Eucharist, is transformed into “the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ,” the central doctrine of the Real Presence. The corollary of that is that they don’t know much about the sacrament of ordination, which confers this mysterious power on a priest. This might imply similar gaps in their knowledge about even more esoteric things, like theImmaculate Conception, which their grandmother probably didn’t quite get. No wonder they don’t know whether to genuflect, pop gum or bow politely on entering the pew. When they did know, they bent their knees.
More startlingly, a number of studies have shown the reverse of Baggini’s conclusion: that believers throughout the Catholic world do not know or do not accept their Church’s teaching on abortion and contraception–the effect of years of disinformation and irrelevance, ignorance and indifference as to papal infallibility, and skepticism about the authority of the church in general in ethical matters. The Pew Forum Poll showed that only about half of those questioned could name the four gospels, and only 16% knew that Protestants, rather than Catholics, teach that salvation comes through faith alone. It is difficult to imagine, given this intellectual lassitude, that anyone in America can be trusted to define the larger doctrinal issues and warrants: trinity, the divinity of Jesus, salvation and atonement, and justification even at a depreciated value. Other polls have described the enormous elasticity not only of specific beliefs, but also the core beliefs of the Christian faith, including those associated with God and the divinity of Jesus. Belief in God is not a constant even among worshipers who have a strong belief in god, and definitions and ideas of God differ dramatically from denomination to denomination and region to region. Yet, many continue to “practice” their faith, perform works of kindness and mercy, and act charitably towards each other as Jesus commended.
MODEST PROPOSAL: Reactive and Non-reactive Beliefs
It is pretty clear to anyone who studies the nature of belief and doctrine historically that Christian teaching can be divided into two categories: Reactive belief and Nonreactive-belief. Think of reactive belief as radioactive: it has the potential to do harm because it invites defensive and aggressive behaviour from its proponents.
Nonreactive belief is the essentially harmless and deradiated form of beliefs that are harmful and toxic: it is the tribute money Christian faithful pay to the tradition, without being adamantly committed to any of them or especially knowledgeable about any of them to any significant degree. It is not that they are entirely negotiable, but they are subject to the form of negotiation called interpretation. Many Christians are not especially curious about them, though some are. Most reactive belief is dogmatic. Most nonreactive belief is intuitive, though sometimes it is expressed in doctrine.
In the Reactive category, I would put the following:
◾The plenary inspiration or uniqueness of a sacred text, whether the Bible or Qur’an
◾Any ethical or moral system derived from that doctrine
◾Doctrines and theories of war or social practice based on the theory of inspiration
◾A political system or theory of the state, church or mosque that took its guiding principles from a scriptural perspepctive, or understood that perspective as normative
◾Any claims that scriptural teaching possesses historical, humanistic or scientific authority over scientific inquiry, experiment, and investigation
◾Eschatology (a “lively” belief in the end of the world, punishment, reward); especially the doctrine of satisfaction, or the physical pleasures of the elect, as in Islam and some minor sects of Christianity
It would be interesting to see a survey in which only questions about these beliefs were asked. Anyone who holds such beliefs could not be expected to have a serious conversation with a non-believer; nor would he be likely to have a very long conversation with most Christian believers.
In the Nonreactive category, I would place all intra- and supra-biblical doctrines that (even if they claim scriptural warrant) have no practical implications and no clear relevance to ordinary life. These beliefs have largely been rendered harmless through millennia of development and, especially, interpretation. They are the core beliefs of Christianity in an “honorary” or traditional sense, and are therefore irrelevant to any discussion between atheists and Christian believers.
◾Belief in God and interpretations of that belief
◾The “divinity” of Jesus, including the story of his resurrection
◾Much of the non-apocalyptic teaching of Jesus (e.g., love of neighbour)
◾The doctrine of merit earned through human achievement
◾Belief in the special status of the human person
◾The mortal existence of the human soul as an expression of humanity
◾The worship of God as a communal expression of faith
◾Many parochial and specific doctrines of a largely devotional nature, e.g, the eucharist
I cannot help but notice that Julian Baggini’s survey largely focuses on questions about the non-reactive and “honorary” beliefs of the faith. (Respondents could hardly have been counted on to endorse the most reactive ones.) There are connections between the two lists, of course, and anyone not wont to make distinctions or explore the process of theological development can be forgiven for putting a pox on both lists. I understand categorical rejection of religious beliefs; I just do not support it.
But categorical rejection isn’t as easy as it looks. It is not as simple as saying, for example, “The divinity of Jesus is based on the doctrine of plenary inspiration” and is thus reactive. In fact that is not true. The divinity of Jesus is an interpretation that cannot rely on the “clear and obvious sense” of the Bible. It isn’t the case that the belief in revelation entails plenary inspiration, or that salvation entails doctrines of heaven and hell–not even in their biblical form. The resurrection of Jesus, like the account of the creation of the world in Genesis, are stories rather than beliefs or doctrines. Neither appears to be ‘reactive’ to me, though at a literal level they are false..
The disjunct between reactive and nonreactive doctrines is also clear from the practice of most Christians: the Christianity most critics of fundamentalism deplore consists of attempts to export and impose reactive beliefs. The essentially irrelevant Christianity that bothers almost no one and seems to interest fewer and fewer people, except hardshell atheists, is essentially nonreactive.
__________________________________________________________
POSCTSCRIPT: The Bible Belt
NATURALLY when it comes to religion, context matters. I once heard a “British evangelical” described as someone who still believes church services are held on Sunday. Pollsters have operated for decades now on the knowledge that Christianity is really “Christianities,” to remember Oxford religionist Peggy Morgan‘s famous caution about “religious ethics.” Christianity is stratified by doctrine, first of all, but then geographically as well. ”Geographically” moreover does not mean just London, Paris and New York, but sectorally across the United States. H. L. Mencken was the first person to use the term Bible Belt as a description, but he was simply being attentive to what later sociologists would graph as “audience” for religious radio (later TV), and core traditional-conservative protestant values and beliefs. BB-Christianity tended to be poor, white, southern or southwestern uneducated and defensive–almost isolationist–rather than aggressive. Core beliefs included the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, salvation by faith-experience (born againism), and of course the source of all of it: the inerrant authority of the Bible. Two early, and still readable, basic studies were George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (1980) and S.W. Tweedie’s seminal article “Viewing the Bible Belt” in the Journal of Popular Culture (11; 865-76). The worst study of the subject, alas, because he was a first-class biblical scholar in other ways, was Oxford’s James Barr’s crack at understanding it in his 1978 book Fundamentalism.
Since those studies, conservative Christianity has grown wildly, and the Bible Belt like the rest of America has become fat. In the map following, the areas usually associated with the Belt are shown in red, but by all accounts, even Tweedie’s study, it has both a northerly and westerly direction. Some studies identify it closely with the beliefs of about 24 conservative protestant groups; others see it more strongly and organizationally tied to the Southern Baptist Convention, which recently went on record as wanting to change its name because of “bad press” and misunderstanding of its goals.
To complicate things, there are export Bible belts as well as indigenous ones in Australia, Canada, and even the U.K. (for some reason, in Surrey, southwest of London). Moreover, the term is often applied outside the United States to areas which simply show a statisticaly higher than average degree of church- attendance, and which blend familiar anti-science rhetoric with socialist politics. The Free Churches in the United Kingdom, for example (for historical reasons) are associated with Unitarianism and have a very low doctrinal profile, but their belief would be completely out of line with the agenda of the Unitarian community in North America.
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Published: September 8, 2013
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3 Responses to “Faith, Practice and Religious Illiteracy”
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Faith, Practice and Religious Illiteracy | ChristianBookBarn.com says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:28 pm
[…] Recommended Article FROM http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/faith-practice-and-religious-illiteracy/ […]
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Miles R.
September 8, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Mr. Baggini might do well to consider the arguments of my eccentric acquaintance Mr. Nailuj Iniggab. Nailuj has taken a survey of hundreds of churchgoers and has found that nearly all of them wear shoes. He offers this finding as evidence that religion requires the wearing of shoes. “Those who defend the view that religion is really not about shoes at all and does not require the wearing of shoes,” he stoutly contends, “are merely advocating an ideal of what they think religion ought to be; they are not describing the reality on the ground.”
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ROO BOOKAROO
September 8, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Excellent, subtle discussion, way above the level of comprehension of the average church-goer, that of the average Christian, and above the understanding of ordinary priests and ministers.
George A. Wells, in “Belief and Make-Believe — Critical Reflections on the Sources of Credulity” (Open Court, Chicago, 1991), mentions that “Today…clergy are apt to evade the equally serious problems that have arisen as a result of the criticl study of the Bible that has developed since the 19th c…Although Anglican and other clergy will have been taught some biblical and historical criticism during their training, ‘many of them will never really have accepted it, and step easily into a sort of quasi-fundamentalism when it comes to preaching and teaching.’ Consequently, there is an ‘almost universal conspiracy to conceal the truth’ about the Bible.” (p. 77)
And further down: “…few Christians are aware of the facts to which [the Hanson brothers, authors of “The Bible Without Illusions” (1989)] are drawing attention because ‘intellectual courage is not…an outstanding quality of clergy in the 20th c. Our two authors here perhaps underestimate the difficulties which outspokenness would bring upon the average clergyman, fearing as he surely does that manyin his congregation have no wish to be told that what they believe, and what has been believed for hundreds of years, is untrue, and knowing that few of the faithful are intellectually and emotionally equipped to assimilate scholarly reappraisals.” (p. 79)
In this practical context, the inability or refusal to think is nearly made into a virtue by the average Christian, churchgoer or not.
The clergy prefers to fall back on the simple indoctrination of believers relying on simple, dogmatic affirmations that are repeated endlessly and mindlessly, targeting children from a young age. The goal is to produce closed minds. This was done by the early Christian Church on a massive scale. But any new ideology and religious system does the same. The charm of the ancient Greeks’ religion, by opposition to the ferociously dogmatic beliefs of ancient Judaism, is that they had no closed system, and never put a stop on the creativity of their thinkers
For, according to George A. Wells in “Religious Postures” (1988, p. 21.), this is what believers want above all: No disturbing disquisition about obscure points, but being reassured in their basic beliefs with simple confirmations. They do not want the scholars’ doubts, inquiries, or arguments, :
” ‘He that doubteth is like the surge of the sea, driven by the wind and tossed’ (Epistle of James 1:6). James knew — as many have known (they include Nietzsche and Hitler) — that emphatic assertion is often more effective than careful statement of pros and cons; that arguments suggest the possibility of dissenting views, and that to defend one’s opinions is to admit that they are open to attack.
What is called the old-time Bible faith , promulgated by well-organized groups with massive propaganda, gives certain and unhesitating answers, and is welcomed for that. The dogmatic moral guidance given by the Witnesses [of Jehovah], by Fundamentalists generally, and by conservative Christians spokesmen has a particularly strong appeal today.”
Which strengthens the political correctness of “faith”.
Religious people tend to use the word “faith” as a kind of magic shield against any intrusion in their belief system. “Faith” has become a sacrosanct word, under which all kinds of nonsense, crazy beliefs, absurd statements, are being allowed without examination or right of protest. It cannot be criticized or ridiculed, it has to be accepted as a “natural right of man”, untouchable by law. It is a fundamental principle of “political correctness.” Another effort to close the human mind.
As Luther intimated to Erasmus, faith nearly makes it a crime for the scholar to think and evaluate the Bible statements strictly on his own accord. Blind faith requests acceptance of pure irrationality. Which is what Lorenzo Valla had been the first to reject in the mid 15th c., strongly approved and endorsed by Erasmus.
Wells noted this thirst for reassurance by unsophisticated believers.
And in “Religious Postures” (p. 21). He relates the case of David Jenkins, a famous English liberal theologian who left his university chair to become Bishop of Durham. Jenkins expected his flock to be eager to tap his scholarly reputation for “exploration, critical re-assessment and discovery” of modern theology.
Jenkins was “disconcerted” to find that common believers were not interested in learning about the unsettled questions of modern controversies about the NT. They only wanted “assurance”, and “reinforcement in opinions and positions already held”.
Wells added that their distrust of advanced scholarly research reflected the fact, worth repeating, that “emphatic assertion is often more effective than careful statement of pros and cons.”
Rejecting critical examination is dogma in all aspects of religion, especially among fundamentalists, evangelicals, orthodox Jews. They will not like Wells’s explanations.
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