RJH- July-December of 2010 Part 2

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

The Little Humanist Lexicon
by rjosephhoffmann

Dr Johnson
Death: The point at which decision-making and its consequences cease, along with the opportunity to acquire virtue, act in conformity with reason or to invite blame for failing to do so. As a self-conscious and anticipated reality, death has a special purchase on human imagination because it gives rise to the concept of “mortality,” whose root mors defines humanity in a teleological way: being toward death.
Masquerade: (1) The celebration of the Eucharist by a faithless priest. (2) Neol., A performance of piety contrary to conscience and common sense, especially prevalent in political life.
Complacency: (1) The opposite of tranquility (qv), complacency is passivity in the face of choice rather than philosophical resignation to consequences over which we have no control. (2) A false sense of the security of the status quo, based on ignorance or willful misunderstanding of causes, situations and solutions. In this sense, especially applicable to fictional characters like Jay Gatsby and British royals in the twenty-first century.
Tranquility: (1) Philosophical satisfaction involving a balanced sense of the both the possibilities and limitations of existence.
 (2) The opposite of wealth.

Indifference: (1) One of the primary attributes of a discriminating mind, consisting in the belief that some things, ideas, people and movements are not worth caring about. For the true humanist, indifference is related to objects and not categories: for example, relative indifference to possessions does not entail a positive assessment of poverty. Indifference to particular ethical systems does not require complete cynicism towards morality. (2) Not many things are worth doing at all, let alone worth doing well.
Reverence: (1) An attitude of respect that entails personal, social and environmental (natural) objects and is rooted in the evolutionary and developmental history of the human race. Reverence does not necessarily entail respect for the supra-personal or supernatural except as “images” of natural things, misconstrued as objects of devotion (qv). (2) A fundamental summary of humanist ethics (Schweitzer: Reverence for Life) based on the belief that “good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.” Not to be confused with the Roman Catholic theological principle enunciated by Pope John Paul II in Evangelium vitae (the Gospel of Life).

Mystery: (1) The unexplained or unknown, not the misunderstood or hypothetical. (2) A natural sense of humility (qv) in the face of an intellectual horizon that can only be crossed, and then only imperfectly, by imagination. (3) A feeling that can range from elation to fear based on the quantum of discovery (fascinans: Otto), vastness (tremendum: Otto) or difficulty with which an event confronts us. (4) “Nostalgia for Paradise” (Eliade); “Choose Something Like a Star” (Frost).
Faith: In its non-theological sense, unsupported or provisional confidence in the reliability of unexamined propositions, states of affairs, or reports. In the epistemological sense, faith is a form of trust and as such not a step in a “reasoning process” grounded in the experimental world. It is different from “belief” in historical terms (e.g., Aquinas) as often being cited as a source of knowledge or wisdom and thus an alternative, or even superior, to such process.

Ethical Idealism: In the popular sense, the belief that we can construct noble and universally recognizable standards (norms) of behaviour based simply on rational principles. Modern discussion actually derives from ancient speculation, e.g., Cicero: “How are such virtues as generosity or love of country, or the desire to do good to your fellow man or gratuitude possible? All of them spring from the fact that we are by nature impelled to love one another.”
Altruism:  An idea invented by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century but anticipated in the ethical teaching of some religions, especially Christianity. Based on the belief that it is possible to intend to “do good” without promise of reward or fear of punishment, the concept properly belongs to evolutionary biology and behaviouralism rather than to theology. As an ethical ideal there is nothing in humanism that makes altruism an inappropriate symbol for personal conduct.

Revelation: (1) Metaphorically, the light of human reason: a capacity to know what is true. (2) Theol., The archaic doctrine that a divine being speaks through agents (prophets, seers, holy men, etc.) in order to communicate his will, laws, or intentions (“divine” or “particular” revelation); in this form, often associated with sacred books and practices.
Falsifiability: (1) A quality of statements of fact valued by reasonable women and men; (2) As a rule of thumb, a way of testing whether an event, entity or state of being existing in nature is generally true by limiting the domain of reference to what can be finitely observed to refute it. As an instance, the statement “God exists” is unfalsifiable (not false) because it cannot be refuted through finite observation or experimentation. (Cf. Verification)
Inspiration: That point in solving an equation, writing a sonnet, concluding an experiment, contemplating a difficult passage in philosophy, or listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral when the real purpose of being human becomes momentarily obvious.

Curiosity: (1) A healthy mental disposition towards discovery, satisfaction and understanding when accompanied by temperance (qv) but the source of uncertain consequences when pursued as mere experimentation. (2) Often used synonymously with “care” (worry) as a killer of cats.

Wit: (1) Knowing < wissen, archaically “having your wit(s) about you,” but more generally, exercising your intellectual powers. It can be found in wordplay, japes, quips, and off-the-cuff remarks. Never in a memorized joke, which is its opposite. (2) An intuitive perception that most apparently serious events, such as illness, stardom, pregnancy, or election to high office, are temporal and dull.
Ingenuity: (1) To create ethical or pragmatic solutions to situations that have arisen for an individual without a precedent in experience or learning. (2) Clever Clogs.

E.g., Theseus
Empathy: The ability to derive from the joy or suffering of another a lesson for the self that results in a passionate response.
Hope: A fantasy permitted the humanist when combined with realism (qv), but never to be allowed when defined as “faith” or “chance.” (2) An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733.
Hedonism: (1) Physical, intellectual and spiritual contentment pursued as harmonious ends in their own right; (2) A joyous utilitarianism: “An introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else.” (Michael Onfray)
Piety: (1) A completely secular term meaning loyalty or devout attention to responsibility, thus devotion to family, or to a vocation, or to the state. (2) As appropriated in philosophy and religion, doing what the gods desire (e.g., Euthyphro 12d, where it is defined as “a kind of justice.”)

Honesty: (1) Purity (qv) of intention as expressed in thought and action; the desire to do what love requires. (2) “Honesty has such scent; fresh-mown grass and rose perfume, fused with a warm Summer’s breeze.” (Fresh Cement, Dan Brown)
Indecision: (1) As a temporary state, the only defensible position for an intelligent woman or man confronted with the facticity of existence. It is not the same as “Choice” (qv) which is an action rather than a state of mind. It is not the same as “free will,” which applies to conditions rather to virtue itself. (2) As a chronic state of mind, a crippling inability to tell truth from fiction and to equate reality with physical options.

Hobbestulation
Exuberance: (1) An intense response to beauty in nature, and its reflection in art, music, literature, and, especially, conversation; (2) Wordsworth, Prelude (Book XI, ll. 258-278).
Pleasure: (1) Affirmation of the sublimely physical but not of the merely temporal, experimental, or casual. (2) A mental state; (3) Illusory happiness based on physical intensity.

Zeal: To desire what is good, to need what is good, and to be passionate about getting what is good: as such a determination to separate what is a true object of desire and what is not.

Cleansing; a desire for good
Heroism: A fiction invented by glorifiers of war, religion, and politics to ensure that practitioners of those professions would seem important to women and men of real accomplishment.
Education: (1) A formal route to learning in certain branches of knowledge, but not to wisdom. (2) The path that leads away from credulity.
Mindfulness: To be aware that you are not the steward of a world made by God or the gods; that stupidity always has consequences; and that the cure for stupidity is to learn all you can about the world.
Godliness: Acceptance of the principle that the responsibility for the choices you make cannot be appealed to a higher court.
Self-reliance: Learning to acquire in maturity a child’s outspokenness and indifference to criticism.
Gratitude: A sense of privilege, based on those moments when feeling the right way and doing the right thing coincide in action.
Apathy. The gift of being unmoved by stupidity, unneeded humour, or emotional excess.

Epicurus
Reticence: Practice in discerning those occasions when to act would mean to act unwisely.
Skepticism: (1)The intellectual tendency to regard all beliefs as provisional and all provisions as dubious. (2) A putative source of wisdom when not practiced to excess.
Concern: A virtue whose extreme form is piety and intrusiveness, but in its moderate form results in a desire to act toward the welfare of others, not only the self.
Pride: (1) The knowledge that fate is created in the image of free decisions and actions. (2) (Hist.) A theological vice thought to be an affront to the status of a divine being; formerly reserved for fallen angels and Greek tragic heroes.

Pride
Despair: The appropriate attitude toward the educational systems of the world as they relate to the acquisition of knowledge and the encouragement of curiosity.
Individualism: (1) The exhilaration of being certain for the first time that there are not now, and never have been, heroes. (2) Freedom from imitation.
Culture: (1) The opposite of what passes for political idealism, progress, innovation, entertainment, patriotism, and popular music. (2) A stirring of the soul (qv).

Reading: (1) The defining activity, together with writing, for which the human person is morally accountable to his soul. (2) Learning.
Manipulation: (1) Not to be confused with “teaching,” those strategies through which a wise man or woman persuades others that knowledge is superior to ignorance. (2) Republic 514A-520A.
Intolerance: (1) A position toward honesty, learning, and wisdom in which proponents of democracy and populism are exposed as Troglodytes and jackals. (2) Irascibility.

Cupid and Psyche
Soul: A mythical but iconic state of human personhood in which the self as a whole recognizes and reacts to the stimulation of excellence in any domain but the sexual.
Reason: Like the soul, a mythical but essential aspect of intelligence that points us toward truth and trains us to despise falsehood in every area of life.
Knowledge: (1) The only worthy object of gain because it cannot be commodified; (2) What happens to facts when they are understood.
Scientific Spirit: Used in moderation, a concern for fact and a desire for truth; used to excess, a narrowing of vision that excludes beauty, mystery and imagination.

Goodness: (1) A quality naturally present in most wolves, rarely evidenced in humans without adequate education in virtue. (2) Coll. Doing what you are told under fear of threat or punishment.
Solitude: The opposite of privacy, which is merely attitudinal; an ability to find pleasure in thinking without the distraction of conversation.
Happiness: (1) A temporary and inexplicable sensation of well-being; (2) (Arist.) The result of reflection and self-awareness, often associated with excellence in the arts, sciences or ethical practice; (3) (Cyn.) Delusion.

Betty Crocker

Simone de Beauvoir
Criticality: Contempt for what is not deserving of praise or attention, thus especially applicable to American political life, Roman Catholic religious reform, new fields of study and theory introduced to university curricula after 1949, and all attempts to restore society to an imaginary status quo ante pre-1949.
Savoir-faire: Every humanist should know how to do something without its seeming too much trouble, hence with a kind of effortlessness that takes hold only in the competent individual. Cases in point are: making a normal martini, starting a car in the Canadian winter, knowing by heart at least one monologue from Shakespeare, eating a boiled egg without demolishing the shell, and telling the Mormon missionary at the door that he needs to consider what he’ll be doing in thirty years.
Temperance: Giving the appearance that you are cool, steady and unaffected by a comment, injustice or an unfortunate event when you are secretly plotting your revenge on the perpetrator.
Conservatism: (1) A sense of history that reminds the educated woman and man that not everything has been wrong or we would still be marvelling that rock is harder than water. (2) Consideration of the ideas and values of the past which, while free of idolatry, does not lead us to believe that the future is the only reality.

Henry Adams
Liberalism: (1) Freedom from the inherited superstitions of the past, and at its best a willingness to take risks and accept truths that may have been falsehoods before they were subjected to scrutiny. (2) The ability to tolerate what is new without glorifying it as an end in itself.
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Published: July 2, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: dictionary : ethics : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : virtue ..
52 Responses to “The Little Humanist Lexicon”

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 steph 
 July 3, 2010 at 4:34 am
Despair indeed – from despair to the soul. I know it’s ‘little’ but what about honesty? ‘Honesty is generally less profitable than dishonesty’, but that profit is generally for the dishonest – where is their responsibility? And profit isn’t necessarily good and generally it’s bad … Other than a ‘noble lie’ (and not many are) a humanist virtue is honesty. Surely. Honesty in criticism (intolerance) and responsible honesty.
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 steph 
 July 3, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Lovely, progressive virtues always have an advantage over divine laws.
Knowledge is the only worthy object of gain and Despair sadly, is the appropriate attitude toward the educational systems of the world as they relate to the acquisition of knowledge and the encouragement of curiosity. Despair also for their failure to nurture individualism in a world that worships heros and desires to imitate.
However, Goodness is mythical, it only exists in animals, especially cats, dogs, as well as birds and dolphins.
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 steph 
 July 4, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Reticence: Practice in discerning those occasions when to act would mean to act unwisely.
Oh those fungi mentalitus. Yet sometimes this one is overindulged. Those occasions aren’t adequately discerned and failure to act at all sometimes, is both irresponsible, lacking in kind or wise. Reticence can be selfish as can failure to speak ones mind, when the humanist forgets the estimable virtue of ‘self reliance’, learning to acquire in maturity a child’s outspokenness and indifference to criticism… No words are like false ones and “not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil” so he said… and ‘what I say is true’ – without leading to the dissolving of beauty, mystery or imagination. Heaven forbid…
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 steph 
 July 4, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Happiness is permanent if one is permanently living simply, by the sea. Solitude is sublime but love is bliss when it’s real.
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 steph 
 July 7, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Temperance: it’s advantageous to appear to be apathetic… aloof.
Must one demolish the shell when eating a boiled egg or not demolish it ? (“with demolishing the shell”). One does not necessarily ever partake in demolishing an egg at all, boiled scrambled or fried (perish the fried!) … but one should know how to peel an orange without demolishing the skin.
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 steph 
 July 8, 2010 at 6:27 pm
“True is it that we have seen better days” As You Like it: 2.7
“They say miracles are past” All ‘s Well…: 2.3
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?” As You Like It: 4.1 (no)
“The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time” All’s Well…:5.3
“That ends this strange eventful history … sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”: As…: 2.7
we all know that old wine is better than new …. and thinking of eggs: ‘The ability to tolerate what is new without glorifying it as an end in itself’. The souffle what’s bin raisin in the oven will appear all fluffy and high but it’s doomed to sink. Especially the one so intended – the one made with chocolate and prunes soaked in cognac – and it never tastes like it seems – it’s full of air (or it was)…”The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”: As You Like It: 5.1
 :-p
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 Nathan 
 July 8, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Wonderfully elegant!
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 steph 
 July 9, 2010 at 3:42 am
…and continues to grow – Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful. -mm
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 steph 
 July 9, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Zelos and delos what’s in a letter? A Catholic? The Greek derivative of zeal is in fact zelos (with a zeta not a delta).
To desire the good is good and natural. To determine what is not good is natural. Isn’t zeal in the sense of desire for good, the same as passion? And can’t we have both lustful and loving passion as well as altruistic passion (as supposedly separated by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. I-II:28:4 who talks about amor concupiscentiae, which is self-regarding, and the amor amicitiae, which is altruistic) Zeal, passion enthusiasm for all things good, both necessary and desirable…. sorry your entry just has me kerfuddled. Too delphic.
I think ‘honesty’ and ‘clarity’ could be worthy of inclusion in this little progressive lexicon.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 9, 2010 at 8:00 pm
You mean Zelphic? Smooch.
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 steph 
 July 9, 2010 at 8:45 pm
I hope that means yes smoochamucha

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 9, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Even wif my enormouth, thympazy for da way de Griks uthed thetas, zetas and deltas I find that etymology frankly thilly (minbe zat ith), tho I have corrected it. Sank you. It ith humiliating to be bethted by a woman but thtrangely thatizfying at the thame time.

 steph 
 July 9, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Iz gotta ate inge zampane gluzz ta machyur enormouth. Uze buttabee a good humanist intell meven to fly across the ocean tya.

 
 

 steph 
 July 9, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Not far from where I’m lost here in Sherwood Forest, Shakespeare wrote his prose, in which dialect, ‘propose’ rhomed with ‘lose’. Out of context of a speech therefore, this rhyme reflects zeal, enthusiasm, for all that one does. Without such ‘passion’ all purpose is lost… ‘What to ourselvs in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose..’ saith the Player King (3.2)
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Pleasure: the ancipation, foreknowledge of : All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee to me. (Sonnet XLIII)
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 1:43 pm
oops – well you did it with the egg.
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 2:06 pm
What are words worth? Meanderings of a ramshackle rambler … A catholic? A Congregation of Faul Insolence? Whatever France had to do with it, we be now free, more bold (kia kaha)
Exhuberance: Def. (1) … oh yes yes, shivers down the spine and tears, no crocodile nears. Waikaremoana et la mer, Sistine Chapel to Impressionists to The Scream, Elgar to Nora, Pooh to Shakes, and especially – especially, honey…
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 2:06 pm
oops – that’s two eggs ‘exu’
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 4:42 pm
But to be frank, and give it thee again.
 And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
 My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
 My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
 The more I have, for both are infinite.
-juliet
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 5:13 pm
indecision: very accurate definitions – the second of course is not a rational state of being in which a sensible rationalist should find themselves except maybe extremely temporarily due to perhaps something so unique and wonderful happening it doesn’t seem real. Listen to Juliet. Juliet speaks for me.
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Indecision – consider Auden :
“When he looked the cave in the eye,
 Hercules
 Had a moment of doubt.”
Yet despite momentary apprehension, he entered and, with Iolaus, and Parentheses following, saved Melina, and the young writer, Parentheses, got the girl (and the kitten?)
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 steph 
 July 10, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Honesty, perfect.
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 steph 
 July 11, 2010 at 4:20 am
ahahaha Dan Brown – really? And honesty?! ha “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.”
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 11, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Gott sei Dank, a different Dan Brown. http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/44/katz_i.html
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 steph 
 July 11, 2010 at 12:58 pm
ah well I haven’t read the other one and his code anyway. I thought it was a nice little pom, and fitting, though with an ambiguous title – nothing is more honest than nature.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 11, 2010 at 4:48 pm
But I thought you Antipodeans believed there are no nice little poms?
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 steph 
 July 11, 2010 at 5:07 pm
The more it
 Snows-tiddley-pom
 The more it
 Goes-tiddley-pom
 The more it
 Goes-tiddley-pom
 on
 Snowing.
And Nobody
 Knows-tiddley-pom,
 How cold my
 Toes-tiddley-pom
 Are Growing.

 
 

 steph 
 July 11, 2010 at 5:01 pm
that’s not true – Winnie the Pooh was a pom and he wrote poms too. tiddley pom.
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 steph 
 July 12, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Oh Happy Hedonism: ‘Physical, intellectual and spiritual contentment pursued as harmonius (sic) ends in their own right’. Yes! Celebrate and pursue excellence, joie de vivre, bon vivant, without guilt or the impression it might be wrong – a positive virtue indeed, Onfray’s caution assumed of course. We can find pleasure and enjoy nature’s offerings like the sea and the seasons and the mountains too, music, art and literature, being useful to others, enjoying our work and pursuing goals, good eating, drinking and conversation, physical pursuits and love making too. Everything in moderation, not too excessive, nothing to hurt anyone or anything. Live today well and tomorrow will be good. ‘To everything there is a season’ .. ‘a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life’ (eccles).
It was very important to define piety, so well, in a secular way methinks.
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 steph 
 July 13, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Hope, from Pope – that was very interesting. He seems to be recognising our limited human knowledge and the fact we aren’t the centre of the universe … only part of the chain … therefore hope in Christian salvation would be bonkers and vain. But his meaning is all a bit elusive to me.
I think humanistic hope relies on rational faith in ourselves, eg the hope that the apple will taste good is based on one’s experience of previous indulgence in such fruit, the hope the wine will please the palate is based on one’s previous pleasures with similar vintages, and the hope a relationship will work, is based on knowledge of oneself, one’s own life experience and what one shares with the partner in past experience, passions and goals. Therefore humanistic hope is more foreknowledge. Anyway I like Emily:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
 That perches in the soul
 And sings the tune without the words
 And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
 And sore must be the storm
 That could abash the little bird
 That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land
 And on the strangest sea,
 Yet never, in extremity,
 It asked a crumb of me.
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 steph 
 July 14, 2010 at 5:19 am
I can’t memorise jokes. I always forget the punchline. Odd really. I can remember big long poms – especially when they rhyme. Anyway pre packed jokes can’t be funny otherwise I’d remember the point or more specifically, the punch. Looking forward to the next addition, I suppose it’s patience. That’ll learn me. What about kindness? The decent one as opposed to the overbearing one. But what really fascinates me is the origin of things -I didn’t know that ‘knowing’ was the origin of wit, or rather wissen. This of course reflects my own ‘unknowing’, something I wish I had less of.
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 steph 
 July 14, 2010 at 6:30 pm
‘pregnancy, or election to high office, are temporal and dull’ – deja vu – I’m confused! Was ‘wit’ rearranged in lexiconic order or was definition second snipped from something else and wedged into ‘wit’? Was definition second there last night when I read it? This confusion, this unknowing, is kerfuddlin’, like some ‘midsummer madness’
TN3.4
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 steph 
 July 15, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Well that inspired me to rush off and grab it – it’s now singing on the CD… I adore the Pastoral – definitely his best – from the flowing water in the cellos to the birdsong in the wind section. He even impresses the warmth in the sunlight and the fierceness in the storm. You can see the rolling countryside. I used to play it on my (old fashioned) walkman on my long cycling trips up country, down under. Couldn’t hear the trucks rolling up behind me though, carried away in my own little world. I also played it in the school orchestra, having the privilege of those glorious cello parts where we just sailed off into the clouds or indulged in the picky pizzicato. I love Beethoven’s 6th, it is passionate, romantic, and absolutely the essence of life.
and whenever did curiosity kill a cat? It’s killed many of us quite viciously at times. I love the blue eyed Siamese…
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 steph 
 July 15, 2010 at 6:59 pm
We’ve seen the environment destruction, the rape of nature, the disrespect for the planet on which we exist … and calamity of calamities, now the murder of Beethoven’s best. This boyish conductor was probably bottle fed – he thinks it’s the score of the bumblebee flying, and he’s bouncing up and down, pounding the life out of the Pastoral. Where Beethoven evoked the serenity of nature, this young gentle (?) man mutilates it, beating it dead with his baton. That’ll learn me for looking at youtube.

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 steph 
 July 16, 2010 at 6:10 am
Hobbestulation
 Hobbes’ best elation
 Hobbes’ best stew late
 roll-off-the-tongue neologism but what does it mean?!
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 steph 
 July 16, 2010 at 6:35 pm
‘[T]here is nothing in humanism that makes altruism an inappropriate symbol for personal conduct.’
But altruism is central to humanism!! ‘Vivre pour altrui.’ Whether or not it is a natural human instinct, we cannot be certain. It is suggested that selfishness is more advantageous to humanity in its struggle for survival. However while selfishness may reap temporary rewards the broader consequences lead to broken down human societies. Altruism leads to bonding and is a constructive method for societies. If we always desire reward for doing good deeds, we haven’t much hope. Universalist assumptions about human nature are probably wrong… As George Eliot humorously but realistically reflects society in Middlemarch, a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town, she depicts altruism, social reform, and romantic love struggling to survive against snobbery, economic oppression, and self-indulgence. Her enthusiasm for altruism, is expressed in a character such as Dorothea, and her zeal for humanity, permeates the novel as it is evident that trust/faith is never more true than when it makes us kinder, more humane and sympathetic. I love it – one of my favourite novels.
Albert Schweitzer’s compares his approach to life with the wave, which ‘cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.’ (Civilization and Ethics (1949), p. 321). And he says also, ‘A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help …. The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.’ (Out of My Life and Thought, An Autobiography (1933), 188).
And as altrusim is central to humanism and intricately related to trust in humanity, what is being human without faith in humanity? We are compelled to love each other, and what is love without trust? A human life not worth living. Juliet sharply rebukes the nurse for this speech: ‘There’s no trust, No faith, no honesty in men; all perjured, All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers. Ah, where’s my man? give me some aqua vitae: These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old. Shame come to Romeo!’ (RJ 3.2)
 but the Countess advises her son Bertram: ‘Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none (All’s Well that Ends Well 1.1).
If you don’t have faith in humanity, trust those whom you love, and desire to do good without reward, then life, quite frankly, is worthless.
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 steph 
 July 16, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Without mystery there is no inspiration for art, music or science. In the Albert Einstein sense, while he confessed he sometimes faced mystery with ‘great fear’, ‘The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious … He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.’ The World As I See It, (1949).
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 steph 
 July 17, 2010 at 1:03 am
‘Reverence’ I like very much. Reverence for the natural world as well as humanity, as reflected in Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life. ‘The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. (Out of My Life and Thought, An Autobiography, 1933, 188) And it is important to distinguish this Reverence from the Pope’s theological principle which is wrapped up in the ‘Gospel of Life’, in which ‘reverence’ for life is almost contemptuous of ordinary human lives. Restriction of scientific inquiry and prohibition of stem cell research, so called ‘pro-life’ stances on abortion and contraception and prevention of euthanasia, concepts which prolong and create lives that are not worth living, are included in the ‘Gospel of Life’. All this ‘reverence’ is in the name of ‘God’ whose greatness is revealed in the blood of his ‘son’. Nature is compromised and human life is sacrificed and both are held in contempt. This is not what Schweitzer had in mind when he wrote ‘The philosophy of Reverence for Life takes the world as it is. And the world means the horrible in the glorious, the meaningless in the fullness of meaning, the sorrowful in the joyful. … We are no longer obliged to derive our ethical worldview from knowledge of the universe. … It is not through knowledge, but through experience of the world that we are brought in to relationship with it. (Out of My Life and Thought).
Reply

 steph 
 July 25, 2010 at 4:15 am
Anything that’s worth doing, and that’s not much, must be worth doing well, otherwise it can’t be worth doing at all. But is anything worth doing anyway? When sadness descends, this question may arise. On the other hand sadness can inspire deeper reflection and creative ideas. And sometimes it just inspires and creates greater sadness…
The true humanist practises beneficence and endorses and values the ‘golden rule’. The true humanist does not treat others as they do not wish to be treated, they treat others as they wish to be treated themselves. The golden rule is attributed to historical thinkers and prophets from Confucius to Epictetus to Jesus. And naturally, Shakespeare echoes ‘Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.’ (AW1.1)
It’s interesting that the NZ Humanist Pamphlet suggests that while humanism isn’t religious, (unlike the British and American humanists), a humanist doesn’t have to be atheistic or agnostic. It doesn’t discuss atheism or agnosticism at all. Instead, it discusses things like the golden rule … how many of the world’s self identifying ‘humanists’, particularly atheist ones, actually behave like humanists to other humans? How many treat others as they wish to be treated – with honesty, not deception, kindness not cruelty… a humanist is not cynical about the golden rule.
 xx
Reply

 steph 
 July 25, 2010 at 11:57 am
Life is full of sadness, c’est la vie. We cannot avoid sadness, it’s a human natural experience, the bits in between happiness when other values are imbalanced. It is a time to absorb, a time of creativity or destruction. Literature is full of it, ‘Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow’s dark array, Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away (RJ2.2) and poor kind romantic and tragic Antonio pines ‘ ‘I hold the world but as a world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one’ (MoV1.1). However true humanists should be aware of and take responsibility for their actions and words. Human beings have the potential to cause others sadness, despair and hurt with our selfishness, dishonesty, unkindness, and the like… Humanists care for the well being and happiness of others. x
Reply

 steph 
 July 25, 2010 at 4:33 pm
This Lovely Little Living Lexicon of Humanist Values … to be indulged with plenty of cakes and overflowing ale… This is invaluable for living a good life well – or Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous : there shall be no more cakes and ale? (TN3.2) Not at all, this is the way of the good life, the only life, our one chance to be good, to cherish happiness and help others live life well and fully too. Drink, love and be merry. And not at all like a monk, to quote a Heffalump, (who was licking his jaws), “Very good honey this, I don’t know when I’ve tasted better’. Very good values these, the list grows like a rose.
On indifference again, especially indifference to noisy movements embarking on virtually immoral crusades, AA Milne’s reaction to the riff raff was to write, “Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” Just ignore the Crusading Fierce Insolents…
xx
Reply

 steph 
 July 26, 2010 at 7:57 pm
I think I consider my increasing complacency in some situations over which I am resigned to having really no control, to be realistic but not particularly virtuous, and I probably value it far too selfishly. It is, I think, slightly related to my own increasingly cynical indifference to some things. Such complacency avoids personal distress over what I consider to be worthless.
Very Poohish – tranquility, and recognising our own limitations and potential, means that we can decide what is important to ensure our lives are well lived (like eating honey) … and aversion to wealth – excess and superfluity and what we don’t need, is a much better recipe for peace. ‘A happy life consists of tranquility of mind’, said Cicero.
whoops: a balanced sense of the both the possibilities thethesicsicx
Reply

 steph 
 July 26, 2010 at 8:19 pm
… there are however times when I cannot be either complacent or tranquil despite the objects of my lack of complacency and tranquility being completely out of my control. Maybe this is unwise, and unrealistic, but it’s absolutely unavoidable logical emotional reaction to situations which I feel could perhaps be so easily resolved. In times like these I am desirous of, and so ready for, peaceful islands and meeting of souls.
x
Reply

 steph 
 August 1, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Serendipitously, Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, wrote, ‘There is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief’. The masquerader…
x
Reply

 steph 
 August 2, 2010 at 3:00 am
I liked it when it was just virtues, then values, and now the Loverly Living Little Lexicon has evolved and expanded into humanist words. It grows, like Pooh’s toes – do bears have toes?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 August 2, 2010 at 3:02 am
And Nobody
 Knows-tiddley-pom,
 How cold my
 Toes-tiddley-pom
 Are Growing.
Of course. Values is pretentious. Virtues, meh. Terms, too philosophical Words, that’s the ticker.
Reply

 steph 
 August 2, 2010 at 9:18 am
To kiss thy toes… Tiddley tsk – Pooh pommed that pom above, an ode to the snow, short and sweet like Piglet perhaps – Pooh says ‘It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?”‘
Values was a political party. When I was 8 years old and we had to state our ambitions I said I wanted to be a Values Party Politician – they changed their name long ago to Green. Short and sweet like lunch. And swim.
x
Reply
 

 steph 
 August 2, 2010 at 7:26 pm
p’haps the loverly little lexicon could supply a libretto for Felix’s wordless songs… Jacqui is just a girl here!

Reply

 steph 
 August 4, 2010 at 1:43 am
well yes, I suppose that’s nicely precise and concise with no unnecessary words. Later it can become the Longer Little Humanist Lexicon perhaps.
Reply

 steph 
 August 4, 2010 at 6:43 pm
eek how morbidly true is death. Live well, less to regret, to die well.
 And everyone knows:
 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
 To the last syllable of recorded time;
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
 Life’s but a walking shadow (Macbeth 5.5)
 The end, is the end. Make good for our children while we can…
But Winnie the Pooh lives on and on and on and on and on tiddley-ze-pon.
x
Reply

 steph 
 August 11, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Perhaps spirituality: along the lines of – the desire for, the imagination of, and the creation of the good, true and the beautiful, as well as the recognition of, and feeling of the good, true and the beautiful. Aspiring to the good, true and the beautiful and being inspired by it too.
 x
Reply

 steph 
 August 14, 2010 at 7:08 pm
In true Scipionic spirit, He departs … Could I but have the magic to rearrange the little lexicon’s words, methinks I would initial it with ‘zeal’ as so lusciously illuminated from thy zelphic soul, or play a poem as a prelude, an expression of the spirit:
… haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
 Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
 Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,
 Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
x
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Uncourtly Crusaders: The Atheist War on Religion
by rjosephhoffmann

Friar Edwin Kagin, Offering Debaptism
First you need some charismatic prophets, same as the Jews, Christians, and Muslims had. No one who quite fits the bill? Then get four angry magpies, train them to write books, wait to see what happens.
What happens first is the New Atheism. What happens next is a small army of craven unbelievers sworn to unseat the Powers of Fear and Superstition. Religion.
These are hard times for God, no doubt about it. His staunchest defenders are either inordinately stupid, like the Creationist klatch, or so liberally engaged and politically distracted by The Church that he is treated like a demented grandparent who can’t be trusted to run the business without misplacing the payroll.
Once upon a time there were hundreds of clever theologians to plead his case and keep the Unbelievers at bay or off guard. But today’s theology is navel gazing, not cosmic or philosophical: it’s all about priests, altar boys, canon vs. civil law, and of course whether women should be ordained. (Just a thought: why would they want to? Isn’t it a bit like signing on to the crew of the Titanic after the iceberg has been struck?)
Since Holy Religion seems unable to argue in its own defense, let me have a go.
ABC News reports that “At the annual American Atheists Convention, one of atheism’s premier provocateurs, Edwin Kagin, faced the crowd and raised high a hairdryer labeled “Reason and Truth.” The gesture was intended to offer newly minted Unbelievers a chance to renounce their baptismal vows, the dryer being a symbol of the purifying wind that cleanses the polluting water. Some attendees participating in the De-baptizing ceremony claimed that since they were subjected to the sacrament without their consent, baptism itself might be accounted a form of child abuse.
Well why not: everything these days is a form of abuse, isn’t it? Asking your teenage daughter to limit the sludge from her room to the hallway. Asking students (ever so politely) to find out for themselves (and not by email) whether they “missed anything in class today.” Telling the indifferent stewardess on the US Airways flight that you cannot endure a journey all the way to Los Angeles when the passenger next to you, at a weight of 275 pounds, is taking up more space than he paid for. Totus est probum. If you were baptized, dear reader, your civil rights were violated. Simple as that.
But this calculation is not why Edwin Kagin, “dressed in brown monk’s robe” (Franciscan unbaptism specifically?) is a silly old fart and why his message will only resonate with people as silly as he is. He is foolish because he is making atheism a sideshow, something not to be taken seriously by thoughtful women and men.
Fade to ABC: “Kagin, author of “Baubles of Blasphemy,” has a history of behaving in ways that elicit a rise from God-fearing people. He’s known to have asked female atheists to dress in burqas and perform a song, ‘Back in their Burquas Again,’ he’s referred to Mary Magdalene as a deranged hooker and he’s called the Holy Eucharist ‘Swallow the Leader.’”
Vanity published in 2005 and topping the Amazon charts today at number 2,457,000, give or take a million, Kagin’s literary work is a splendid harmony of woefully bad writing, false wit and wrongness suitable only for the sort of people who laugh at baptism. It comes from the same creative impulse as the mutterances of pirates out to make a lady blush or a proper officer wince.

My complaint? Bad religion needs better satire. Unbelief needs better spokesmen. The cultic aspects of the New Atheism become more evident every day. Because only in cults does everyone laugh at the same jokes, applaud at the same  cues, gasp at the same surprising revelation. Last time I looked, cultic unanimity was the opposite of freethought.
Some of us remember a point in the history of radical feminism where some very shrill advocates of extreme positions (e.g., all heterosexual sex is violent (or rape), Dworkin/McKinnon) accused men of inventing the shrillness. Men may well be jerks–maybe 75% in the last poll quoted by my daughter–but shrillness there was. Women are both reaping the benefits of the Women’s Movement and recovering from the extremism of the feminist sideshows attached to it.
The New Atheism by the same token has become both shrill, angry and ignorant of its target. It is uncourtly, a crusade without a call. As someone not known for his warm embrace of religious dogma, I am constantly embarrassed by the Kagins and PZ Myers and Hitchens’s–embarrassed not only by their militaristic attempts to squeeze all religious expression under the big top but especially at their shortsightedness in choosing objectives and strategies. In any case, atheism has had Shrill, Loud and Dumb before: Who remembers Madalyn Murray O’Hair (rip)? It didn’t work then.

O'Hair
The atheist crusaders may have the best of reasons for organizing their atheism as a campaign to belittle, insult and demean religion (they seem to be under the mistaken impression that atheism, as opposed to heresy, has suffered immeasurably at the hands of the Church for its failure to blossom), but they are driving reasonable men and women–wishers, seekers, explorers, and the merely confused–away in droves.
Worst of all, they have been willing to give atheism a bad name, as an extreme rather than a reasonable position based on a thoughtful discussion about God and religion. They have rejected dialogue: Kagin sees atheism and belief as the kindling for “a new American Civil War.” They have forgone educating themselves about religion and the history of ethics–probably because, when you get right down to it, men like Kagin are really rejectionists, victims of priests or some iteration of Calvinism themselves, rather than real thinkers. They’re really not into information. They’re into developing a following.
Whatever the outcome of this risible crusade, let’s hear it for Baptism. I am proud of mine, though I had nothing to say about it at all. If I screamed like a banshee when the water hit me (as a certain Cambridge Boxterman, a Kagin acolyte claims to have done in her Debaptism testimony) it is not because I was instinctively responding to the sacrament but because I am always grumpy when wakened out of a sound sleep, or when my nappy is dirty. Same effect. The Catholicism into which I was involuntarily cast was benign and helpful. And even though it was, alas!, not that way for everyone I shudder, given my deep South surroundings, to consider what the secular alternative might have been.

There is a final reason to be suspicious of this fool’s crusade against the devil Religion: It will backfire. Kagin culties and their allies will scare the bejeebers out of kindly and smart Catholics, Jews and Episcopalians, and send wavering Muslims right back to Friday Prayer.
And why not? Why should I feel at home among people who claim to be “over it” and regard those who aren’t as defective? In a weird kind of apposition, I have been told by converts to Catholicism that they liked everything about their decision until they attended their first pro-life rally and were handed a rosary.
Imagine being an “inquiring” atheist at friar Kagin’s church. Do they send Welcome Teams to your house with pies? Or given the nugatory nature of the cult, just empty pie plates? Do they play Ognib on Friday nights? Unfry fish? Enlightened as they are, they should at least offer unsubscribers a towel instead of the Conair–to reduce their carbon footprint.
Why trust a silly old fart dressed up like a monk, waving a hairdryer aloft more than the God who does not answer my prayers? Especially when he can’t do un-Circumcisions.

s
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Published: July 17, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: American Atheists : Debaptism : Edwin Kagin : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
38 Responses to “Uncourtly Crusaders: The Atheist War on Religion”

.
 steph 
 July 17, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Simply superb fantastically brilliant piece – hilariously funny and agreed with absolutely every single eloquent word … do they think I could blame every mishap in my life to child abuse perhaps? I can’t be certain but I think my parents might have put me through some anointing of the forehead ceremony in babyhood – was that molestation? My poor old ma and pa. They’d be devastated. Poor old God.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 1:31 am
Exactly.
Reply

 steph 
 July 18, 2010 at 2:34 am
It reminded me of this
A Question
 A voice said, Look me in the stars
 And tell me truly, men of earth,
 If all the soul-and-body scars
 Were not too much to pay for birth
 Robert Frost
Reply

 Vinny 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:18 am
I loved the fact that Kagin’s son became an evangelical Christian minister. I’d like to think it had something to do with having humorless narrow-minded intolerance modeled at home.
Reply

 steph 
 July 18, 2010 at 12:01 pm
exactly – how revealing of ‘absolute truth’…
Reply
 

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 2:06 pm
It’s a case of the fruitcake not falling far from the tree.
Reply

 MikeTheInfidel 
 July 18, 2010 at 2:29 pm
“The cultic aspects of the New Atheism become more evident every day. Because only in cults does everyone laugh at the same jokes, applaud at the same cues, gasp at the same surprising revelation. Last time I looked, cultic unanimity was the opposite of freethought.”
Ever think that maybe what you’re seeing is the group of people among the wide variety of freethinkers who happen to *agree*? Nothing cultic about it, any more than there is anything cultic about a national political party convention. This is just silly.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Agree on what? Whether the hairdrier should be on high, low or cool? As to silly…Really?
Reply

 Vinny 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:26 pm
I think it would have been more accurate to say “only in cults does everyone laugh at the same bad jokes. ” Back when I was in the altar boys in sixth grade, we made funnier jokes about religion. “Swallow the leader” might have gotten a laugh, but not much else.

 MikeTheInfidel 
 July 18, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Agree on what? How about… politics, or philosophy, or their sense of humor, or… anything?
Yes, it’s ridiculous to say that since a subset of the whole of atheists is behaving similarly, their behavior is cultic. It’s absolute nonsense. You may as well say that a trade union is a cult.

 
 

 steph 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:22 pm
There are alot of nuts in fruitcake. I would have thought a national political party convention was a little bit like a cultic meeting.
Reply

 Rob Fisher 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:32 pm
One of the central ideas in “At the Origins of Modern Atheism” is the idea that the content and form of any atheist expression is set by the religion to which it corresponds. I have long mulled on this. In your example, Kagan as stupid old fart is perhaps no more than the mirror of the stipid old farts in their corresponding peacock robes who have just declared women priests to be as ‘evil’ and sex abusers. Flippancy aside, perhaps the fact that atheism is resorting to comical indifference is the position it has been forced to adopt by an insipid Christianity with little by way of identity or public significance.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Can’t disagree. Maybe we should coin the term pontifical atheism to describe the absurdity on both sides.
Reply

 Vinny 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:36 pm
“Comical indifference” would be great. Kagin is way too serious.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 3:52 pm
The soft spots in religion have always been doctrine rather than liturgy. (Two business partners trying comfort each other in Hell: one says to his morose friend, “Sure it’s hot, but its a dry heat”)– things even religious people can laugh at. I would have thought Swallow the Leader was pretty funny when I was an altar boy, too. Maybe you put your finger on it: Kaginism is just too juvenile and its premises don’t rise above the antics.

 
 

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 18, 2010 at 4:27 pm
No a trade union is not a cult because a trade union has nothing to do with religion; an atheist klatch because it has everything to do with religion cannot escape the classification. It’s not just behavioral; it’s categorical.
Reply

 Mike 
 July 18, 2010 at 11:58 pm
This is less of a “thoughtful intellectual piece” and more of a “cool story, bro”.
There is absolutely no evidence backing up the belief that the New Atheists are turning people away from atheism or damaging the “reputation” of atheism among people who were otherwise neutral or in favor of it.
Perhaps some people dislike confrontation more than they value facing facts. Perhaps some people don’t want to engage in an argument about atheism because they don’t actually know why they claim that belief. Whatever the case, unless you have something to say other than “well, some dude I don’t know turned into a Christian and his parents are atheists, so it must be Dawkin’s fault”, why do you bother?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2010 at 1:48 am
Thanks. Who said it was meant to be intellectual and why is that quotes, bro? The evidence that militant atheists are turning people off is everywhere. Not sure that the coven aprroach has anything to do with dialogue. I am not blaming Richard Dawkins, or any one else: because they are engaged in a monologue, like you, against religion. Btw, do you read what I write, or just react to it? And do you really think a case can be made by turning atheism into a parody of religion? Anything else in your toy bag?
Reply
 

 Chris Stedman 
 July 19, 2010 at 4:35 am
This is so, so excellent – I’ll be sure to spread it around. I was actually at the convention and have blogged about it a few times at my blog, nonprophetstatus.com. And my mom made the same uncircumcision joke – but thanks to her I don’t have to worry about that!
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 July 19, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Aren’t you aiding and abetting the most extreme elements of the new atheism when you write, “I admit to being a bit prickly on the subject, having finally concluded that the sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus”?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2010 at 5:03 pm
How? Not sure I understand how Jesus’ historicity rides high on an atheist agenda.
Reply
 

 Barrett Pashak 
 July 19, 2010 at 5:12 pm
You mean that you work with people like Richard Carrier and you don’t see the importance of the historicity of Christ to him and his fellow travellers? How about Robert M. Price? Even Dawkins flirts with the subject in _The God Delusion_. As far as I can see, you are the only scholar currently asserting agnosticism as the only valid position on this question. This could well make you a darling among the new atheists.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2010 at 5:33 pm
But I don’t think it is the “only valid position”; it is simply my verdict on the evidence. I just need to know what’s new in Jesus studies that would make the historicity of Jesus irrefragable.
Reply
 

 steph 
 July 19, 2010 at 5:32 pm
That’s not true Barrett. The historicity of Jesus isn’t a feature exclusively atheistic. As an agnostic, I can’t be absolutely confident in the reliability of our sources even though my thesis explores arguably plausible options. So I am agnostic about Jesus at the end of the day. There are other agnostic scholars of religion who wouldn’t touch the historical Jesus because of such uncertainty.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Yeah, what Steph says….
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 July 19, 2010 at 6:01 pm
I’m just saying that this emerging nexus of all kinds of people who are agnostic or disbelieving in the historicity of Christ makes for some strange bedfellows, what with yourselves and at least some of the new atheists. Perhaps we shall see a counter-nexus of theists and atheists who do assert the historicity of Christ.
Reply

 steph 
 July 19, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I know ‘atheist’ scholars of the New Testament (not necessarily wearing their ‘atheism’ like badges, probably precisely because of the existence of the ‘new atheists’) who assert the historicity of Christ. What’s so bedfellowish anyway? I know plenty of atheists and theists who share similar ideas on all sorts of things.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 19, 2010 at 7:45 pm
I am confused, but it may be mere theology– which always confuses me. Is the major premise here, “Jesus is God,” rather than “Jesus exists”? I do not see how atheism touches the latter premise, and much of “classical” atheism does not touch the former. The denial of the historicity of Jesus is like denying the historical existence of Ned Ludd (an interesting article by Arthur Droge on jst that parallel, btw). The denial of the divinity of Jesus, even if it could be maintained that the writing of the gospels is fundamentally tied to asserting his divine nature, may or may not presuppose his historicity. It is much easier of course to assume the divinity of a non-historical being: God for example is not historical while his revelation is thought to be. Do you see the problem? Or perhaps this is a good excuse for another blog. What I do maintain is agnosticism as to the probative value of the sources as to an historical question. “Agnosticism” as to the divinity of Jesus is not a historical question.
Reply

 steph 
 July 19, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Just to clarify – I meant to say ‘historicity of Jesus’ because that is the question. I got distracted by the reference to ‘Christ’ in the comment by Barrett. Theology and supposed divinity of any historical figure are a different thing altogether.
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 July 19, 2010 at 9:01 pm
For the record, I am speaking of the historicity of the man, Christ. I use “Christ” as a title, just as I use “Buddha” rather than Lord Siddharta.
Reply

 steph 
 July 19, 2010 at 10:15 pm
The question of historicity is of a man called Jesus. Whether or not a historical Jesus called himself the messiah or ‘christ’ is a separate question. His divinity belongs to theological discussion.
Reply

 chenier1 
 July 21, 2010 at 3:09 pm
I can certainly agree that the Four Horsemen, plus assorted ostlers, have done a great deal of damage; one particularly pernicious aspect of it is that the web is knee-deep in people who profess to be so convinced of the virtues of the scientific method, and the value of evidence based reasoning, that they feel it is unnecessary to show any signs of actually practising it.
For example, Science-Based Medicine asserts on its website that it’s run by people:
‘alarmed at the manner in which unscientific and pseudoscientific health care ideas have increasingly infiltrated academic medicine and medicine at large’
Unfortunately, they are not so alarmed as to actually provide any evidence that unscientific and pseudoscientific health care ideas have increasingly infiltrated academic medicine and medicine at large, which is a rather serious flaw.
In these circumstances it is not terribly surprising that intelligent people notice the disconnect between reality and assertion; the deification of Science doesn’t look that different to the observer than the deification of Vespasian, who was at least capable of joking about it…
Reply

 ken 
 July 22, 2010 at 3:49 pm
You’re, right. He is a silly old fart.
 I always look forward to your posts, Mr. H.
 As a lapsed Catholic, and belonging to a freethought group, I am often struck by how unfamiliar “born-again” atheists are with any religious writing or interpretation outside their own limited background. All their arguments are directed to the old creed of Christianity and monotheism. As you have rightly pointed out time and again, they seem to know nothing about theology. Have they ever read the Dhammapada, or the Analects of Confucius, or the Tao te Ching? Let them try wrapping their heads around some of the Upanishads. They could at least read The Varieties of Religious Experience by James, or the Perennial Philosophy by Huxley.
 I’m not claiming any of these as legitimate, but I deem them worthy of attention.
Reply

 Steven Carr 
 July 23, 2010 at 10:11 am
‘The denial of the historicity of Jesus is like denying the historical existence of Ned Ludd ‘
Hoffman is right. After all, who claims that Ned Ludd really did exist?
Reply

 Martin 
 July 23, 2010 at 11:58 am
You see your inherited and cherished Catholicism as “benign” and “helpful.” I see my inherited and discarded Catholicism as a malevolent, ridiculous on-going waste of human effort. I see no reason to “study” theology, nor haruspiscence, nor astrology, nor Jesuit pottery, yet the accommodationist wing of the formerly deconverted persists in calling for priestly fascinations with religious ritual, religious philosophy. Just be a good boy, is the reigning thought of the Atinos, and you’ll get a cracker.
 Your writings here echo the blog Pat Boone maintained when the Beatles hit. He just couldn’t stand it. He just kept attacking John and Paul, and Ringo, especially, and yet the Beatles never, never once fought back in public to react to his defensive, frequently loony obsessions. Boone did, though, score when he blogged against Arthur Brown for his hit “Fire” -yeah, it was kind of Kaginesque, that song, the commenters said, but not everything about the British Invasion stood the test of time, nor the New Wave that followed it, nor Power Pop, nor…
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 Seymour Skinner 
 July 25, 2010 at 6:57 pm
rjosephhoffmann: Do you see a problem in trying to cast an intellectual conclusion (there’s likely no gods) as a social movement?
The way I see it, atheists need not agree on much of anything other than that gods or similar supernatural beings don’t exist. The best of atheists will try to educate themselves on science and history and life in general.
I’m not really sure if atheist organizations — at least when they function as mere social groups – are needed at all. I mean, I don’t go to monthly meetings of the local educated people’s party, even though I certainly want to be educated. Why should I look at my atheism any differently? If the goal is to mobilize atheists, what exactly are they being mobilized for?
I kind of agree with Sam Harris that the atheist label is really no more important than the “a-astrologist” label. It’s just that God-belief is a more widely held superstition, and so might warrant more attention as a consequence of that reality.
To me, it’s more important to get people thinking critically, and then the atheism will just follow naturally. That’s one reason I’ve liked organizations like the Center for Inquiry or Skeptics Society but none of the other organizations have appealed to me at all.
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Uncourtly Crusaders: The Atheist War on Religion says:
 August 17, 2010 at 10:46 pm
[...] rjosephhoffmann, 17 July [...]
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 Living Without Religion « The New Oxonian says:
 March 23, 2011 at 10:08 pm
[...] at all and others, who if they are believers, have a lot of explaining to do before they get their baptismal certificates [...]
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Is Atheism a Humanist Value?
by rjosephhoffmann

In a word, No.
There is nothing inherently “humanistic” about atheism, and some forms of militant atheism–the outwardly obnoxious, deliberately offensive kind now primarily associated with the Center for Inquiry and the minions of the new atheism–are unhumanistic.
I have been at work  pari passu  (meaning “when I feel like it,”) on a “Little Lexicon of Humanist Values.” It will never be the OED. It will never be Webster’s–maybe not even the Yellow Pages.
Instead it is a half-serious, occasionally flippant attempt to reflect on values that humanists might agree are important to the pursuit of a humanist worldview or life-stance. The definitions sometimes approach the famous discussion between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in chapter six of Through the Looking Glass, when Alice says to the Eggy creature (who has used the term “glory” in an unusual way),
`I don’t know what you mean by “glory”….’
“Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
“`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected….
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’
In any event, as my thinking on the subject unfolded–and as it continues to unfold–it occurred to me that terms like “beneficence,” and “godliness,” and “happiness,” “honesty” and even “virtue” all have assured places in a lexicon that a humanist might consult. So too, oppositionally, do words like “despair”, because a humanist needs to know what to feel desperate about, and “sadness” and “tragedy” and “heroism” (which I have defined in a completely negative sense, one to make classicists shudder).

But you will not find a definition of atheism in the lexicon, because it is not a value and carries no subordinate values with it. It is not a virtue, because virtue (when I get around to defining it) has to be grounded in human good and happiness.
Atheism does not make you good, in a practical sense, and by its very nature it does not make you wise. It may be a position against a certain kind of wisdom, traditionally associated with metaphysics, ontology and theology in favor of a strictly scientific, falsifiable understanding of human reality as squeezed through the grate of naturalism. That is to say, atheism may be a specific category of skepticism applied to a specific object (God). But in rejecting a very big idea like God, it must also reject a very big metaphysical idea like wisdom.
Moreover, if it is true that non-falsifiable statements are meaningless (Ayer v Popper–remember your “demarcation principles,” boys and girls) or senseless, then the most atheism will get you is to the point of being able to smile and say “You’re talking nonsense when you talk about God.” (I have fantasized such a conversation between Bertie Russell and Anselm of Canterbury to this effect in these pages….). The kind of atheism that limits itself, pretty dully, to the nature of propositions we can mark off as “statement atheism.” It has the same ontological status as a crossword puzzle.

Of course, most people when they say, a little proudly, that they are atheists are claiming a good deal more. They are claiming that “none of it is true,” meaning religion. “Whole-cloth atheism” assumes more than that God does not exist. It assumes that religion (nevermind theology) is untrue and positively and actually harmful.
Philosophers have argued this point since Hume, poets since Shelley, social theorists since Comte and later Freud, polemicists since Paine. Sometimes it leads to a hierarchy of Bad to Worst Religions, with the achievement laurel often going to Buddhism, Unitarianism, paganism, or Eco-feminism for being interesting if also terribly timid and incomplete approximations of unbelief–and Islam, at least in the twenty-first century, getting the prize for the most backward, hateful and generally obnoxious system of belief ever devised.
If you deny not just God but all  of his works, titles, all of the doctrines, all of the “ways to the center” that comparative religionists talk about in their introductory courses, and all of the arguments devised to support belief systems and caste systems and priestly hierarchies from India to Rome, you have a lot of work to do. Most atheists, even when they come from the academy (especially when they come from academy) do it very badly. (Refuting Thomas Aquinas alone could easily take you from graduate school to retirement without a breath along the way.) Wholecloth atheists would be better limiting themselves to statement-atheism unless they are willing to study theology. (For that matter, maybe all evangelical theologians who believe in a six-day creation should be sentenced to study physics at the University of Arkansas–assuming they would not be able to test into MIT.)
Wholecloth atheists are very good at short-cutting the philosophy and history of religion–like metaphysics, an embarrassing chapter in the history of philosophy?–and relying instead on the opinions of other atheists, especially ones with name value. –Just like, in the days when God still reigned, theologians (yes, even Aquinas) relied on the authority of other theologians. And when that failed, the authority of reason. And when that failed, the authority of scripture or a pentecostal inner light.
So “atheism” is not a natural ally of humanism. One thing humanism does not tolerate is intellectual short-cutting and appeals to authority, whether it comes from theology or anti-theology. Both Galileo and Luther were humanists because they appealed to the light of reason and rejected established authority. No atheist who appeals to the intelligence quotients of the people he reads is behaving like a humanist. He is behaving like a monk.
Appeals to the authority of atheist worthies also teaches the atheist faithful bad habits, as I observe when I see Richard Dawkins quoted with the same assurance of knock-down-argument rectitude, the same immunity from contradiction, as a Christian invokes when he cites the Bible. I mean “glory.”
Whether you are a mere statement atheist or a wholecloth atheist, you should not assume that atheism carries anything with it into the bargain of unbelief. How could it? I have just come from a silly pair of articles in the magazine Free Inquiry  where two people (whose names I here withhold) are debating about whether atheism incorporates or “teaches” certain ethics and values. One of the contributors assures us that kindness and consideration and a bunch of other commendable attitudes (perhaps gleaned from another lexicon?) come with the territory when you’re an atheist.
Nonsense. Atheism does not confer virtue; it cannot assume virtue. In fact the biggest challenge for the atheist remains,  per omnia saecula saeculorum, the defense of virtue in the absence of a ground of absolute value. These values have not been liberated for meaning anything you want them to mean just because you kill their father.
Or maybe atheists are just as good as Humpty Dumpty when they claim that the ground of value begins with the denial of God. Maybe beneficence can mean “Doing the good I want to do when I feel like it” (has a ring of truth about it, certainly) and “kindness” “a weird sort of energy that reasonable people will learn to subdue.”

 “Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’, says Humpty.
 `Would you tell me please,’ said Alice, `what that means?’
`Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased.
 `I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’
`That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
 `When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.’

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Published: July 22, 2010
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Tags: atheism : God : humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
2 Responses to “Is Atheism a Humanist Value?”

.
 steph 
 July 22, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Puffikt post, succinct and so very very comforting …. I have been more than a little disturbed by atheists adopting – pinching – the noun ‘humanism’, and applying it to themselves. I could no longer call myself a humanist until the delightful list of humanist values appeared on this blog. But still, I read an announcement the other day: the ‘Secular’ humanism’s 30th anniversary conference is looming – and it’s full of flaming raving atheist speakers. I have become increasingly reluctant to identify myself with the humanist label! The world’s leading atheists will appear at this celebration (but who is James the ‘Amazing’ Randi?). Recently, a ‘leading’ atheist, Stephen Law, published his ‘definitions’ of humanism which suggest a humanist must be atheist or at least agnostic… I would love to see a little published volume of the humanist values I have read here, appear on the shelves of every household, be it a religious or secular one. After all, I believe in Tangaroa and I still want to be a humanist too.
I love the Humpty Dumpty and Alice – funny – I think I’ve seen them somewhere before! I remember the wonderful conversation between Bertie and Anselm – perhaps you could link it?
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 Joel 
 July 23, 2010 at 8:33 pm
An absolutely great post.
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Cheap Grace… Plus Postscript
by rjosephhoffmann

Bonhoeffer
Having been accused of “faitheism” by more than one reader of this blog, let me offer the following:
I have been a fairly vigourous opponent of the new atheism, manifesto-atheism, organized secular humanism (if that is not an oxymoron) and the quaintness of the term “freethought.” (Send it to the attic, it doesn’t apply to anything on the contemporary scene).
But you need to know why I am critical, and to understand that, you need to understand a bit of history–especially the history of men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a victim of German-style National Socialism.
To my twenty-something readers who have just come out as atheist, or gay, or something, at Oberlin, or somewhere. Good for you: if you mean it. But please mean it. Because if this is just to irritate your parents, it’s hardly worth the trouble. It’s true that gays and blacks and resolute women have been a persecuted and marginalized class in American society.
But two things are not true: (a) That atheism is the last buttress against the know-nothings of American democracy (“A Mighty Fortress is No God”?) and (b) that there has been a consistent “persecution” of atheists in American history. Not getting elected to office because you do not believe in God is not, I am sad to report, persecution.

Camus
The fact is, atheists have seldom taken a moral stance about anything. Their core position–that religion is immoral and that they are therefore opposed to its influence and its effects–is not a moral position but a dog satisfied to have caught its own tail.
Perhaps that’s why years ago at Harvard I spent my spare time reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer. No atheist, clearly, but an ardent believer in the improvability of the human race, a race that for all intents and purposes God had deserted. Naturally critical, he floated between theological positions and even spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in 1930.
After studying with the best we had to offer– Reinhold Niebuhr–he concluded, “There is no theology in America.” He meant, of course, that there was no rigorous inquiry into the sources of belief nor any critical examination of Christian theology in general, the sort of thing the German faculties had developed as Wissenschaft –serious scholarship. In fairness to the softness of the American cultural landscape, however, we also had no Hitler.
For Bonhoeffer, “serious” theology had consequences, and these led him through an almost unimaginable circuit of events to being arrested, condemned and executed for his involvement in the Abwehr conspiracy.
Bonhoeffer was hanged at dawn on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. By decree of the SS and with Hitler’s explicit instructions, the execution was particularly brutal. He was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with piano wire. An odd fate for an academic, a poet, a pastor and someone who saw the Church’s mission as entirely compatible with humanist ends.
I am beginning to dislike atheism. I dislike it because it is historically illiterate, and because it sees its crusade against the “powers of darkness” as a crusade against a record that all the blasphemy and all the parody in the world cannot change. I mean those moments of sanctity, light and grace where for reasons beyond the normal course of political events men like Bonhoeffer stood down the real powers of darkness.
For reasons different from the philosophical messiness of religion, atheism is a mess.
In making religion its sworn enemy atheism–organized atheism and secularism especially–ignores the religionless elements that transfused both the Nazi and Soviet movements. When will atheism have the will and the confidence to admit that a world without God is no better than a world with God? If the twentieth century proved anything, it is that.
Bonhoeffer used the phrase “cheap grace” in his most eloquent meditation, The Cost of Discipleship, to describe the Christianity of his day–an idea he derived from Kierkegaard. In contrast to the energy and vision that had inspired the early Christians as a religious minority, European Christianity had become fat, lazy, and politically malleable. It required neither risk nor affirmation: to be German and Christian was equivalent to what it once was to be Roman and pagan. (The Jews got the short end of the equation in both cases).
His premise was simple: any intellectual position comes at some expense. At one extreme, it is worth lying for, conspiring for, and if all else fails, dying for. “Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing….”
Hitler’s enemies were not atheists. They were his co-religionists, Catholic priests and confessing protestants like Martin Niemoeller. They were his religious Others–the Jews, and had Europe then had a substantial Muslim population (I am sorry to disappoint my pro-Teutonic Muslim friends with this information) they would have joined the inmates at Buchenwald and Auschwitz as outsiders as well. The early anti-secular noises made by the Nazi party to pacify the churchly despisers of Adolph Hoffmann, whose picture appears in my family album, were decisively exposed as political by Hitler’s closest mentor, Martin Borman, in 1941:
When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest
Borman followed this with a 1942 memo to Gauleiters, that the Christian Churches “must absolutely and finally be broken,” as their views were fundamentally opposed to the total world view of democratic socialism.
Bonhoeffer’s reaction was not against proposals that (among others) would have banned the teaching of theology in the universities or removed the Old Testament from the Bible, or eliminated subsidies for churches and religious schools, or forbidden school prayer. The total menu of punitive actions against religion was much larger than this–and similar proposals have been the staple of democratic socialism in both Europe and America for more than a century.
Bonhoeffer’s nausea was evoked by the quasi-religious and spiritual trends of the Nazi inner circle: Germanic pagan imagery mixed with ancient Roman symbolism and emotion in propaganda for the German public, the naive acceptance of social Darwinism, a strong belief in the providential role of science, as Science, and a commitment to the idea of German intellectual supremacy. He saw forming behind the scenes a new myth, fashioned to replace the old one by summoning the tribalism of an ancient imperial past, and a Church so naive that it believed it could accommodate the “new ideas.”
Bonhoeffer died as a Christian, as someone opposed to the symbols and reality of the state-produced Man. If you want to see the most effective and still chilling visualization of this, watch the first fifteen minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film, Triumph of the Will–Hitler descending like Woden or Jesus (either is correct) as the expectant people (sitting in darkness, awaiting the light) clamour for the landing of his aircraft.

So the question arises, why in a world so allegedly hostile to their ideas have atheists never been held to account? Why are there no illustrious atheist martyrs, no equivalents to Socrates and Jesus–and Bonhoeffer? Given the insistence of the atheist and secular humanist movement that their position is heroic simply because it is (as yet) unusual in the world–perhaps especially in salvation-starved America–
what approaching army advances? What hideous penalties do they threaten? Do any involve being strung up at dawn by piano wire? And who will be the first to lay his life on the line for the glory of Unbelief.
In fact, modern atheism is the moral equivalent of what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Just as the comfortable Christian could count on the fact that the price of his sins had been paid for in advance by a God who operates as an endless source of moral credit, atheists know that the cost of their rage is slight. They count on the fact that the free speech they savor has been underwritten in constitutions and codes dating back two centuries–just as the Protestants of Bonhoeffer’s Germany counted on the fact that their greed had been atoned for in advance. They follow a narrow orthodoxy that punishes nuanced, critical and accommodationist views–just as the Churches of Bonhoeffer’s day embraced a gospel that perfectly reflected their social values and political lassitude.

Kishinew Pogrom
In other words, the cost of being an atheist is simply to proclaim being an atheist, with a wink to the atheist at your side. What, no applause? No police force, no secret agents are going to round you up for that. For that to happen, there would have to be something more to atheism than the purely negative impact of not believing in God or believing that religion is evil.
It would have to develop real ideas, agendas, and principles–preferably different from the ones that emanated from the first great organized wave of atheist ideology, Soviet communism.
And since atheists often adopt a Missouri posture in such matters: Show me your martyrs. Show me the principles for which they died. Show me the agenda that naturally flows from unbelief, and the positive consequences of taking that position. Show me the future of the world you believe in when the world no longer believes in God.
Otherwise, atheism is simply the additive inverse of cheap grace.
Postscript:
It’s hard to imagine that I managed to get through this whole piece without using the word “complacency” even once. One reader awoke me to the fact when he asked whether Jesus and Socrates had died for their religious opinions or were victims of political circumstance. The flippant response is that most people who die for religious reasons were victims of circumstance, including the heretics. Atheism as we use the term today is really an intellectual fashion of the seventeenth century when the Church in the west no longer had the power to roast people for their apostasy: Around 1650 an anonymous manuscript appeared (probably in France) entitled Theophrastus redivivus which appears to be the oldest extant atheistic document. But, of course, there was classical precedent for denial of the gods, as well as satire of their behavior and trivialization of their role.
The atheist “heresy” is in creating an apostolic succession of unbelievers (Socrates and Galileo are, somewhat ludicrously, often numbered among them) that never existed, but put forth on the premise that very bright people must (at least privately) have been unbelievers. The religious heresy is the complacent belief that unbelievers are beyond the help of the church and thus, as Anselm regarded atheism, a form of insanity or “foolishness” (Psalm 14.1).
But my real quibble with redivivus atheism is that it has taken a sideshow approach to a subject that ought to be viewed and debated seriously. Atheism, as such, is an intellectual position, not a moral philosophy. But sideshow atheism is neither. Blasphemy Days, sloganeering, bus campaigns, unbaptisms, video challenges, cartoon contests–whatever motivates this activity (bonding, boredom, or the lust to be noticed?), it is not of a kind nor quality that does atheists any good. If instead of arguing their case, the atheist strategy for growth was to build the world’s most repulsive bogeyman, they have done a good job.

I am not even certain why atheists feel they have the right to feel more agitated and annoyed by the noise of the religious right, which after all is simply a bigger and more influential sideshow, than liberally religious, studiously ethical, or indifferent men and women–where I think the real and growing numbers of “converts” are. Most absurd of all is the persistent effort of younger new atheists, the Dawkinsians and Flying Spaghetti Monstratarians, to see their “cause” as equivalent to the civil and sexual rights movements of the twentieth century.

For the sort of serious approach to the subject that American atheists (chiefly) might want to know about and would surely benefit from reading, Cambridge University’s “Investigating Atheism Project” will repay the effort of a little historical homework a thousand times over.
http://www.investigatingatheism.info/index.html
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Published: July 29, 2010
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Tags: atheism : Bible : Bonhoeffer : Cambridge University : Christianity : Investigating Atheism : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
12 Responses to “Cheap Grace… Plus Postscript”

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 Brian 
 July 29, 2010 at 3:49 am
Is supporting your position with this article cheap grace? If so, fine. If not, consider that most, bordering on all, articles you oppose are written in the same spirit.
“When will atheism have the will and the confidence to admit that a world without God is no better than a world with God?”
Umm…it’s clearly only one factor, but a factor. Is that so hard? Try this on for size: When will you have the will and the confidence to admit that a world without smoking is no better than a world with smoking? Look at all the evils done before smoking was invented! Alternatively, insert any problem that isn’t the only problem in the world…Just learn the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition and think about it for a few minutes and you should be fine.
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 steph 
 July 29, 2010 at 4:37 am
So precious, so persecuted, poor atheists. Yes exactly, the additive inverse of cheap grace. (and of course organised s. h. is an oxymoron but that’s obvious)
I don’t understand how you could be accused of being a ‘faitheist’… isn’t that the most extreme sort of fungusmentalist?
x
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 steph 
 July 29, 2010 at 5:28 am
I have absolutely no idea what ‘faitheism’ is and I’ve never heard of it before. I can only imagine that it is a more definitive noun applied to atheist’s faith, faith which they do have in themselves, because they ‘know’ with a ‘knowing’ like theists, that there are no gods.
x
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 29, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Brian, your comment is food for thought. You could also argue that most religion today is cheap grace, and maybe with the death of the communist movement there are no equivalent intellectual movements that would require “cost.” I don’t see fundamentalism as costly except for its extreme suicide fringes in Islam. But I still maintain that the value of Bonhoeffer was in calling attention to self-satisfaction and then naming that position Christianity. Surely a self-satisfied atheism with no vision beyond what your atheist comrades believe is the same sort of thing. And I think the smoking analogy does not work.
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 Qohelet 
 July 29, 2010 at 2:30 pm
steph, it’s a word coined to label atheists who are “soft on faith”. It’s actually a word chosen among several entries in a blog contest: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/we-have-a-winner/
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 Scott F 
 July 29, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Okay, I’ll admit that the world without God is no better than the world with God. Happy? In fact that is my default position, unlike the so-called New Atheists. I will also agree that atheism does not present any ideals worth dying for. That is not what it is for. That is why Secular Humanism has been trying to fill the void. I don;t know that they will succeed.
Cost of atheism? While my life is not in danger, I am forced to keep my own anti-faitheism largely a secret in order to live in my community and keep peace in my immediate family. It is a daily grinding away, especially as my children (raised by agreement in the church) become older and ask questions. A high price, maybe not, but real in the American South.
Okay, your guy, Bonhoeffer was a hero. This smells just a bit of testimonialism where just finding a former atheist to speak at your church is supposed to end the argument. How many heroic atheists do I have to find in order to match yours?
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 Scott F 
 July 29, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Oops. Misunderstood “Faitheism”. Thanks for the link Qohelet. Bad habit on my part to assume that atheist-critical means religous-nut. Conditioning I suppose.
That said, I assume that Mr Hoffmann may be carrying his argument too far and that martyrdom does not justify one’s beliefs. Furthermore, religious martyrdom is not always so clear cut, is it. Did Socrates and Jesus die for their religious beliefs or for the kind of socio-political reasons that would land your average democrat in trouble in China? After all, the Romans were not in the habit of crucifying the merely for being religious.
Of course, this all atheist-denialism, right. It is apparently not enough to be a decent, law-abiding, socially-aware atheist who is trying to raise his kids to be productive and wrthy citizens. If only I could get myself killed…
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 29, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Scott: I agree that religious martyrdom is never clear cut. And there must be millions of socially aware atheists out there who are just trying to do the right thing. And there are millions of religious families out there who are not very different.
The Romans were, actually disposed to punishing religious dissent: the Christian persecutions get the most notice among historians, after Diocletian declared that the simple fact of professing Christianity was a crime. The Jews were always victims: the Temple was burnt in 70 because it was a center of Jewish religious gravity–not because it was a parliament. And the Bacchae were outlawed at least thrice. So you need to do a bit of background reading on the subject of the nexus between ancient politics and religion–not just assume contemporary separatist standards prevailed in antiquity.

 steph 
 July 30, 2010 at 12:02 am
I like the postscript and I like that too. Just sensible and correct.

 
 

 steph 
 July 29, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Thanks Q – a neologism that’s just had its first birthday. A faithiest still has to identify themselves as an atheist though before they’re branded as a contradiction. Although what is no-Godism (as opp0sed to ‘not-Godism’) if it isn’t a faith?
Free thinking properly is independent thinking, independent from the masses controlled by religious or atheistic dogma. Mark Twain said something along the lines of ‘if you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.’ Free thinking comes at a cost, sometimes the cost is just having your readers getting cross and annoyed with you … sometimes it places one in the position of needing to extract oneself entirely from the masses and take oneself off to a desert island to live in isolation … which is a rather paradisical and worthwhile price to pay really. The position here is the result of free thinking, so I can’t see it as cheap grace. All arguments from analogy are false and smoking is always a cost. Nothing cheap there.
As for getting oneself killed for a ’cause’, perhaps it’s unwise to read Joe’s posts so literally like a fundamentalist would.
In Bonhoeffer’s words:
“cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
“costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (as my own Bonhoeffer trilogy – ie Letters, Ethics and, as quoted, The Cost of Discipleship – is on the other side of the world in a box, I cheated and wikied his words).
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 chenier1 
 August 1, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Thank you for the article, and thank you for the direction to “Investigating Atheism Project”.
It does seem to me to be deeply dangerous to elide the very clear distinction between lynching someone, and not voting for someone; not getting elected may be tough on the ego but at least the victim is still breathing.
As for the dangers of the cult of reason, with or without capital letters, the legal position in England asserts that:
“A mentally competent patient has an absolute right to refuse to consent to medical treatment for any reason, rational or irrational, or for no reason at all, even where that decision may lead to his or her own death”.
This is a fundamental right; it enables us to direct our own lives, it asserts that we are free, not slaves. It is the foundation stone of our right to our personal autonomy.
But should the glorious revolution ever come, when Sam Harris gets to practise what he preaches:
‘Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.’
I can’t see it lasting long.
It seems unlikely that we will be permitted to retain that right, since people convinced that they have Reason on their side wouldn’t put up with people who don’t do things which reasonable people think they should do…
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 Brian 
 August 12, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Basically, this: http://xkcd.com/774/
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/atheists.png
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Religion
by rjosephhoffmann

Hans Kueng
Recently, Scipio has been very hard on atheism. In a previous post he tried to distinguish between “Wholecloth Atheism” which is a position about religion in the broadest sense (and really the position of the new atheists) and “sentence atheism,” which is simply a position about the possibility of God. He still thinks this distinction is fundamental.
But the profession of wholecloth atheism makes the atheist’s job much tougher: there is more to deny, and hence more to define. I received this in response to a blog posted a few days ago, from a certain Mary Helena Basson, whose thinking on the subject deserves broader exposure than the “Comments” portion of this site permits.
She writes,

” I often think that this atheism verse religion ‘war’ is in large measure a result of a misunderstanding as to the nature of religion. Religion is not theology. Theology is only the superstructure, a replaceable superstructure, to a bedrock foundation that is part of our human existence. Sadly, once theology becomes synonymous, in people’s minds, with religion, it is religion that gets short-changed. Atheists can do battle with theology until kingdom come – but ‘god’ will simply move on…Knocking theology is playground stuff. In the the adult world we have to live with religion. But what is religion if it is not to be equated with theology?
I found this definition many years ago:
 Hans Küng: Christianity and the World Religions, vxi:
“Religion is a believing view of life, approach to life, way of life, and therefore a fundamental pattern embracing the individual and society, man and the world, through which a person …sees and experiences, thinks and feels, acts and suffers, everything. It is a transcendentally grounded and immanently operative system of coordinates, by which man orients himself intellectually, emotionally, and existentially”.
Alongside the tortured history of repression and dogmatism that theology has spawned, religion, in the above sense, has contributed much in the way of compassion for the human predicament. Unfortunately, life does have it’s dark side and it is here that atheism seems unable to put anything on the table. It’s all very well admiring the wonders of the world, looking with awe at the starry skies but when it comes to demonstrating compassion for the sick, the infirm, the handicapped, it has no ready made calling card, no on-tap reservoir of moral conduct. I’m not thinking of simply following rules but more of an inbuilt sense of proper conduct. Granted that such an inherent sense of right and wrong is part of our human nature – and thus we should all be so inclined to do good – it’s just that religions spell it out, spell some version of it out, thereby giving religious people an edge, so to speak, in the compassion department.
The argument that people can be doing good because of the prospect of a heavenly reward is possible – but bottom line is that for the one receiving the compassion, it is the compassion that matters not the possibility of an ulterior motive on the part of the one being compassionate. Quite frankly, to think that religious people are only compassionate because they are obeying some commandment is to knock not just religious people but all people. Working with the sick and dying, working with Aids sufferers, this work requires something that cannot be achieved by people who are only obeying the rule book. It is not religion that engenders such compassion, such empathy – religion can only enable it, give a voice to it and, naturally enough, to give such action a godlike accolade. And atheism? Too often it’s ‘men of the mind’ fail to look downwards, down to the depths of the human experience where the true measure of our humanity is displayed.
What atheists need is more of the attitude of “a deeply religious non-believer” (Dawkins) Such an attitude would do much for atheism! Keep the moral high ground – give no slack to theology – but don’t let go a basic part of our humanity by denying religion it’s right to function. Dawkins, in [The God Delusion], although he differentiates between Einsteinian religion and supernatural religion, good and bad religion?, he, sadly, in his desire to knock supernatural theology, missed the opportunity to give atheists a view of religion that would allow them to retain a measure of respect and acceptance of religion. But then, to be charitable, perhaps its the religious (in the above broad definition) that need to stand up and clearly state what it is they are trying to defend against the atheist hoards….
I agree. But then, who decides? I like Küng’s definition–even at times Küng’s theology–but his definition of religion is a theologian’s definition, designed, I think, to be as spongy as possible to facilitate an ecumenical and pluralistic agenda–spongy in the sense that it is contrived to absorb all competing definitions. It’s a definition almost every liberal theologian can get behind, and one which will leave every conservative Christian scholar and professor of Islamic “philosophy” scratching his (or her) head.

That is the problem with definition. The most specific ones are narrow, helpful and controvertible; the most spacious are embracing, inclusive and virtually useless. Christianity was easy to define when all Christians, more in theory than in fact, embraced the Nicene Creed and (in the west) the spiritual sovereignty of popes. –Less easy to define after the eruption of the protestant challenge that left pieces of doctrine scattered everywhere while new ones were being created. When definitions fail, for reasons ranging from loss of confidence to changes in belief and practice, we resort (a la John Hick) to typologies, because typologies are merely descriptive, not definitive.

John Hick: The Typologist
There is the added problem of who, and by virtue of what kind of training, is qualified to define religion. Richard Dawkins, because he is “scientifically minded,” but with no formal background in the study of religion (a training I am sure he would regard as a handicap, anyway)? Hans Küng, a theologian, with longstanding interest in the phenomenology of religion, but equally a faith-perspective that blindsides him to the undeniable wisdom of atheism?
If you don’t like these options, there is a whole supermarket of choices out there, ranging from the merely interesting to the downright nasty /1/: Religion is “a cultural system” (Geertz), belief in an “unseen order” (William James); “what [the individual] does with his own solitariness” (Whitehead); “a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence” (Bellah, and also Geertz).
If you’re addicted to Hegel, religion is (somewhat mystically) “the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as absolute mind.” If you are Fielding’s Parson Thwackum (and many still are), then when you say religion “[you] mean the Christian religion;
 and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion;
 and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”

Hogarth's Thwackum
Among skeptical intellectuals, after Marx (“Religion is the cry of the oppressed creature”) there is Mencken’s notion that the sole purpose of religion is to “give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny,…[and] to induce those powers to be friendly to him,” and Freud’s verdict that religions “are illusions, fulfillment of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind.”
Omitting argumentation completely, we have the flatfooted view of Thomas Edison that “Religion is bunk,” and of Mark Twain, who quipped that “Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.”
From the early twentieth century onward, perhaps climaxing in Bertrand Russell’s paraphrase of Santayana (“Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience”) –which looks like a paraphrase of Mark Twain–there is a consistent effort to key religion to the slightly earlier “anthropological” conviction that religion is nothing more than belief in gods, spirits, and ways of protecting yourself from things that go bump in the night: “Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

Russell as Puck
That is just the lunch menu. A full list of definitions would include the attempts of ethicists, cognitive neuroscientists and pagan priestesses to come to terms with the “nature” of religion. About all anyone can agree on is that religion is not about the ordinary, but it is–in a way still cognizant of James’s piercing and frustratingly maldeveloped assessment–related to the experiential: to the world as we interpret it.
The sheer volume of the menu should cause serious and reflective atheists to question whether short-cutting and categorical freebasing (theology is to religion what wet is to water) is the best way to approach the subject.
Ms. Basson is right when she implies that Richard Dawkins missed a golden opportunity to highlight the complexity of religion and to distinguish between the theological axioms that are really the target of modern atheist critique and the less cooperative subject matter called religion. They are not the same. For wholecloth atheism ever to be a garment someone can wear, it needs to be fashioned carefully, not just fashionable.

Thanks, Mary.
/1/ Props to Dr. Irving Hexham of the University of Calgary for his work in keeping track of definitions.
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Published: July 31, 2010
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Tags: atheism : Dawkins : Mark Twain : phenomenology : religion ..
12 Responses to “Religion”

.
 maryhelena 
 July 31, 2010 at 6:13 pm
I thought perhaps you might raise the question re the definition I quoted from Hans Kung. And, yes, it is very broadly based. But, surely, questions re what could be the ‘true’ definition of religion betray a lack of understanding re the whole phenomena. Whatever it is that drives the search for meaning, understanding, spirituality etc can no more be spelled out in precise language than the idea of love. Words are often inadequate vehicles to carry the sort of ‘spiritual’ load that we might want them to. So, in the case of a definition of religion – perhaps there never can be a ‘true’ definition. Perhaps all we need, perhaps at different stages in our lives, is a definition that works at that time. One cannot tie religion down to a neat, one size fits all, definition. A broader definition will, by its nature, allow for more diversity in our desire to comprehend the phenomenon. What is important re any attempt at a definition is that the definition clearly allows for a separation between religion and theology. That is why I found Kung’s definition meaningful at a time when I was questioning theological ideas.
How would I define religion today?
Our religious instinct, our need for spiritual values, is the driving force behind our evolutionary intellect. In effect it is the guarantee than we will remain rational thinking entities.
Only as we have, historically, perused our search for ‘god’, for depth and meaning to our life, only as we have given reflection to our need to worship, to value, has our spirit, our intellect, produced the knowledge enabling us to achieve visible, material, progress. Our religious need for spiritual values – however varied these values maybe – keeps our consciousness in focus, thereby enabling it to evolve, to yield its potential for intellectual growth.
In other words, the search for ‘god’, the search for values, is the spark-plug of our intellectual evolution. Or, again, the search for ‘god’ is the reference point, the North Star, that enables our consciousness to focus, thereby enabling our intellect to evolve, to yield its potential for intellectual growth.
Now, all that has no romance about it – it’s just a summation of the mechanics of intellectual evolution. I’ll still take Kung’s definition of religion – a definition that has striven to grasp the unfathomable mystery of it all …
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 steph 
 July 31, 2010 at 6:56 pm
I haven’t made the connection before, but Russell is delightfully elfish. He is cast perfectly as Puck, ‘that merry wanderer of the night’. Ironically today, I ordered Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream complete with Shakespeare’s (English) text. I like Hexham’s paintbox of definitions and I’d be interested in a more multi textured atheism. And I have always been particularly fond of Scipio…
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 31, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Yes, Russell was often mischievous. I am completely in love with his views on the mediocrity of John Dewey (and American philosophy in general) though the balance has shifted substantially since that debate. Ayer once chastised me brutally for “adopting” Russell’s views uncritically, and someone who tutored both me and Hitchens (!), Anthony Kenny said that Russell’s book on the history of philosophy is a text he will not let students read beyond first year. Snicker.
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 steph 
 July 31, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Snicker, scoff. I didn’t even read it in my first year I don’t think – I found it later and still read it. And now that I know he is really Puck, he’s that much more meaningful. Ayer, religious language is meaningless, didn’t know a good Puck. And Hitchens!? How entertaining – at the same time?
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 Ed Jones 
 August 5, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Extracts from “The Reality of God” by Schubert M. Ogden.pp 40, 41. He is one of the more significant interpreters of Process Thought in the works of Whitehead and Hartshorne.
The characteristic deficiency of all nonthestic moral theories is 6hat they leave the final depth of mprality itself utterly unillumined. Although they may well focus our moral action and the immanent standards by which it is governed, they fail to render at all intelligible the uderlying confidence and its transcendent ground in which our moral activity, as our life generally, actually has its roots.
 Often enough, this failure is not lacking in a certain irony. Proponents of nonthestic moral theories typically pride themselves on their right to give a fully rational account of man’s moral exprience. Nothing in this experiece, they contend, is to be left merely at the level of unexamined belief or tradition. but must be raised to the level of complete self-consciousness. Ironically, however, this demand for rationality is not extended to the basic confidence that all our moral experience necessarily presupposes. Hence, for all their vaulted “Humanism” such theories are, in truth, deficiently humanistic. While they may cast a bright light on the foreground of moralit y, they leave what Whitehead calls its “backgroubd” wholly obcsure. They allow the original faith in which all our action is finally based to remain a merely incompleteness, quasi-animal kind of faih.
 More later.
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 Ed Jones 
 August 8, 2010 at 5:59 pm
A correction, last part of last sentence should read:
“– a merely nonreflective, quasi-animal kind of faith”.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 August 5, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Very nice comment, thanks Ed.,
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 Ed Jones 
 August 6, 2010 at 2:32 am
TThanks Joe for the comment but you have jumped a bit ahead of me. That was the first of a two part comment. Writing online ties up my single phone line which restricts posting.
 I make note of the fact that The Reaslity of God is the Ogden prior to nhis change of mind about NT Scripture which occured in 1974. In his article Faith and Freedom (1980) he tell of his decision that he could no longer accept the neo-orthodox understanding of NT Scripture – he now recognizes that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to the HJ. We now must locate this norm not in the writings of the NT but in the earliest layer of the synoptic tradition In my letter to you dated March 24, 2009, I tried to identify this earliest layer, the real source of apostolic witness. I have no question but that Ogden stands today in even stronger conviction of this extract. But that is another discussion. Now I continue with the 2nd part of the extract.
But this inherent incompleteness is a minor failing compared with that of the second kind of moral outlook, where the rality of God is denied altogether. Hence the essential inadequacy of the position is nothing less than outriht antinomy or self-contradiction. If all our moral thought and action rest on an underlying confidence in the final meaning of life, then we are implicitily affirming such confidence together with its transcendent ground, in all that we think and do. Therefore, it is logically imposible utterly to deny this ground of confidence without explicitly contradicting the implication of morality itself. And so it is that all secularistic or athestic accounts of our moral existence are characteristically caught is an inescapable dilemma. Insofar as they do justice at all to the presuppositions of our moral questions and answers — that same course of action ought alweays to be chosen and that the right source is one meeting the greatest number of relevant needs — they are forced to make affirmations that conflict with their sweeping atheistic denials. On the other hand, to the extent that they press these denils – - deying, say, that there is any ground for the permanent signmificance of our choices or for the authority of moral standards — their accunts lose all touch with our actual moral experience and tend increasingly to become morally nihilistic.
 From this then, one can only conclude that faith in God as the ground of confidence in life’s ultimate meaning is the necessary condition of our existence as selves.
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 Ed Jones 
 August 9, 2010 at 2:15 am
One further extract fron The Reality of God (p59):
 On neoclassical premises God is now conceived as presicely the unique or in all ways perfect instance of creative becoming and so as the one reality which is eminently social and temporal. Instead of being Absolute, which by definition can be really related to nothing, God is in truth related to everything, and that through an immediate sympathetic participation of which our own relation tp our bodies is but an image. Similarily, God is no longer thought of as utterly unchangeable and empty of all temporal distinction ["in no sense personal, cannot be offended (or pleased or pacified), has no stake in the outcome of our decisions and could do nothing abou it if it did " (Post on Deficiently Humanistic)]. Rather, he, too, is understood to be continually is process of self-creation, synthesizing in each new moment of his experience the whole of achieved actuality with the plentitude of possibility as yet unrealized.
 (Preface X), The theme of the reality of God is “in the last analysis, the sole theme of all valid Christian theology, even asit is the one essential point to all authentic Christian faith and witnes In this connection, I would simply cite a statement of Charles Hartshorne’s which has seemed to me to attest this point with as much clarity as any theological statement I know: “In its early stags religion means certainty about many things. But we now see that he is most religious who is certain of but one thing, the world-embracing love of God Everything else we can take our chance on; everything else, including man’s relative significance in the world, is mere probability”.
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 Religion (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 December 28, 2010 at 2:52 pm
[...] Recently, Scipio has been very hard on atheism. In a previous post he tried to distinguish between "Wholecloth Atheism" which is a position about religion in the broadest sense (and really the position of the new atheists) and "sentence atheism," which is simply a position about the possibility of God. He still thinks this distinction is fundamental. But … Read More [...]
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Curiouser and Curiouser « Choice in Dying says:
 January 30, 2011 at 9:06 am
[...] reason for our having gone in this direction at all lies in the fact that Mary Helena brought up her contribution to an earlier post on R.J. Hoffman’s “New Oxonian” blog. That post was a [...]
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 Sabio Lantz 
 April 20, 2011 at 11:42 am
Ms. Basson is right when she implies that Richard Dawkins missed a golden opportunity to highlight the complexity of religion and to distinguish between the theological axioms that are really the target of modern atheist critique and the less cooperative subject matter called religion. They are not the same. For wholecloth atheism ever to be a garment someone can wear, it needs to be fashioned carefully, not just fashionable.
Well phrased ! I shall keep following. (we have both spent time in Lahore!)
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Deficiently Humanistic?
by rjosephhoffmann

This from Ed Jones, concerning the recent post on Religion. He cites Schubert Ogden, once one of my intellectual heroes, from The Reality of God, 1967: 40-41:

The characteristic deficiency of all nonthestic moral theories is that they leave the final depth of morality itself utterly unilluminated. Although they may well focus our moral action and the immanent standards by which it is governed, they fail to render at all intelligible the underlying confidence and its transcendent ground in which our moral activity, as our life generally, actually has its roots.
Often enough, this failure is not lacking in a certain irony. Proponents of nonthestic moral theories typically pride themselves on their right to give a fully rational account of man’s moral experience. Nothing in this experience, they contend, is to be left merely at the level of unexamined belief or tradition. but must be raised to the level of complete self-consciousness. Ironically, however, this demand for rationality is not extended to the basic confidence that all our moral experience necessarily presupposes. Hence, for all their vaunted “Humanism” such theories are, in truth, deficiently humanistic. While they may cast a bright light on the foreground of morality, they leave what Whitehead calls its “background” wholly obscure. They allow the original faith in which all our action is finally based to remain a merely incompleteness, quasi-animal kind of faith.
The basic point Ogden makes here, it seems to me, is unarguable. The demand for a totally rational morality must either be grounded in some theory of the human person–which takes us into the vaporous realm of metaphysics–or in some pragmatic view of consequences for the person and society in the absence of moral conditions.
If for example we are speaking of “law” in a secular and civil context, it is pretty easy to conclude that it is grounded in the latter of these conditions (“If men were angels,” Hamilton famously said, “no government would be necessary.”) The coercive and restraining power of law is therefore based on consequences imagined to arise if law did not exist. But this makes it virtually clear that law does not arise from a view of human action as innately (if that word means anything any longer) virtuous or placid. It arises from the idea that human action is brutish and mean. But hearken: Law has a problematic relationship to morality, and most theologians and philosophers have thought that its role is not to make a man moral but to make him pay his taxes or get him out of the ditch.

But by the same token, religion has never regarded humanity as innately virtuous either. Quite the reverse. A virtuous creature does not need saving from original sin, does not need the counsel and prods of the church, does not need commandments or pastoral care, does not need the promise of heaven or the threat of hell.
Ogden does not of course take such symbols literally: his God is much too “real” (meaning much too misunderstood) for that. But it has to be acknowledged that religion–in the broadest sense–but the book faiths in particular–virtually invented the language of legalistic morality and penal atonement. Its main difference from more mundane law is that the laws of religion are forecast in relation to a personified divine being, a sovereign king and judge, who can be personally offended by the violation of his rules and who has established specific ways of coping with transgressions. In theology, mankind is caught between heaven and earth; the best he can hope for is to be free from sin. In secular law, he is caught between the state and his own instincts; the most he can hope for is to stay out of trouble. There is no virtue and no morality in either scenario, though in traditional Christianity, the rewards for being good are infinitely greater.
Thus when Ogden says a secular morality “fails to render at all intelligible the underlying confidence and its transcendent ground in which our moral activity, as our life generally, actually has its roots,” he is trading in obscurity. It is the denuded theological doublespeak of an era that rewarded vacuity. Especially since this transcendent ground appears to be a not terribly clever circumlocution for God. Moreover, why should this transcendent ground be given any consideration in moral decision making if it is in no sense personal, cannot be offended (or pleased, or pacified), has no stake in the outcome of our decisions and actions, and could do nothing about it if it did?
Secular morality–Ogden is right–is greatly deficient because its instruments are not mathematically precise, its premises are negotiable and its outcomes approximate. Given its evolution as a rebellion against theological certainty, it could be nothing else. It is true that the absolute “standard”–or ground if you prefer–has been sacrificed to modern consciousness of real rather than transcendental ends and means.
But secular morality is not humanistically deficient, anymore than a religious morality is theologically perfect. It’s merely human. And its theological deficiency is nothing to apologize for.
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Published: August 5, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : Christianity : ethics : humanism : morality : Schubert Ogden : secular morality ..
9 Responses to “Deficiently Humanistic?”

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 steph 
 August 5, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Absolutely, it’s simply human.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 August 18, 2010 at 2:45 am
Steph, the August 9. 2010 Comment to the Post Religion is particularly pertinent to this Post essay.
Reply
 

 chenier1 
 August 6, 2010 at 9:26 pm
‘The coercive and restraining power of law is therefore based on consequences imagined to arise if law did not exist.’
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper; this is a very old way of conceptualising law.
Law is also something which can be, and is, marketed; for example, the law in England and Wales is used to govern contracts between entities which have no existence in England and Wales because it is old, and thus has precedent to cover almost any conceivable event.
Consider two American banks suing each other in the High Court; neither of them imagine that Her Majesty will dispatch the Coldstream Guards to enforce the Court’s judgement. What they want is to use a body of expertise to resolve differences.
This is not to say that judges do not consider morality in construing a contract; Lord Mansfield’s judgement in R v Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772) 20 State Tr 1 is clearly based on his moral view that:
‘The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.’
Of course, at the time people from a wide variety of religions viewed slavery as far from odious; do we attribute humanistic values to Lord Mansfield in his Parthian shot to counsel?
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall”
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 August 21, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Extract from “The Reality of God” p59:
“On neoclassical premises God is now conceived as precisely the unique or in all ways perfect instance of creative becoming, and so as the one reality which is eminently social and temporal. Instead of being the barren Absolute, which by definition can be really related to nothing, God is in truth related to everything, and that through an immediate sympathetic participation of which our own relation to our bodies is but an image. Similarly, God is no longer thought of as utterly unchangeable and empty of all temporal distinction ["in no sense personal, cannot be offended (or pleased or pacified), has no stake in the outcome of our decisions and could do nothing about it if he did". (Post on Deficiently Humanistic)]. Rather he too is understood to be contiually in process of self-creation, synthesizing in each new moment of his experience the whole of achieved actuality with the plentitude of possibiliy as yet unrealized.”
(Preface X) “The theme of the reality of God is in the last analysis, the sole theme of all valid Christian theology, even as it is the one essential point to all authentic Christian faith and witness. In this connection, I would simply cite a statement of Charles Hartshorne’s which has seemed to me to atest this point wth as much clarity as any theological statement I know. “In its early stages religion means certainty about many things. But we now see that he is most religious who is certain of but one thing, the world-embracing love of God. Everything else we can take our chances on, everything else, including man’s relative significance in the world, is merely probablity.”
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 August 23, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Steph,
 Of course this would be a reply to Schubert Ogden. Surely he has raised issues here that deserve some response. Simply by his scholarly status, omissions form judjments.
Reply
 

 Deficiently Humanistic? (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 December 1, 2010 at 4:59 pm
[...] This from Ed Jones, concerning the recent post on Religion. He cites Schubert Ogden, once one of my intellectual heroes, from The Reality of God, 1967: 40-41: The characteristic deficiency of all nonthestic moral theories is that they leave the final depth of morality itself utterly unilluminated. Although they may well focus our moral action and the immanent standards by which it is governed, they fail to render at all intelligible the underlyin … Read More [...]
Reply

 stevie gamble 
 December 1, 2010 at 7:41 pm
This reprised piece is timely; I write from my hospital bed to confess that I too am deficiently humanistic. Had I sufficiently absorbed the values of the Enlightenment I should be delighted at the extension of our knowledge to the discovery that, if one coughs sufficiently violently, one can rupture a disc in the cervical spine.
Instead I find myself wishing that if we had to discover it then it should have been someone else who was doing the coughing.
However I can now at least read a bit, and write a bit, and thus hope to rejoin the fray sometime before the next decade…
Reply

 Ric Jones 
 November 26, 2012 at 2:36 am
The picture above is not, in fact, of Schubert Ogden. It is Victor Furnish, Professor of New Testament Studies, both of whom I studied under while at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, TX in the late 70′s and early 80′s.
Reply

 steph 
 November 26, 2012 at 4:21 am
Although the image above in fact does not claim any identity, you are right – it is Victor Fenton, a respected and sensible Pauline scholar. I’ve just been reading his sensible discussions on same sex relationships (inspired to google him by your comment) in the NT (and Albert Mohler’s dismissal of them as irrelevant). Both Victor and Schubert though do have similar and very nice smiles. Here is Schubert and his wife Joyce, in a lovely snap. :-) http://www.nederlandcpc.org/ChristianEducation/SchubertOgden.dsp
Reply
 

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Pedantic Multiculturalism
by rjosephhoffmann

There is a post just up from the very good writer Susan Jacoby. In it she claims,

I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. And I find myself in a lonely place in relation to many liberals, political and religious, because I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of ‘tolerance,’ religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights.
When it comes to Susan’s “lonely place,” as my students often say to me, I feel her.
We both realize that most religious liberals know that they live in a secular world, do not confront their daily affairs, social or business, as though the rewards and outcomes are governed by an imaginary clock wound up by a God before time began.
Jacoby and I might also agree–though I am not sure–that there is such a thing as religious wisdom, that religion has made its fair share of contributions to ethics, not all of them in the domain of rule-based, reason-blinding commandments, and that religion has sometimes fueled the human imagination through art, poetry, music, human passion, human (dare I say it) logic. By dint of some (not all) of its theological metaphors–freedom and liberation come to mind–religions have also inspired weak men to stand against tyranny and oppressed women to stand against brutal men.

And though more famous in the minds of its critics, like Diderot, for instigating fear and priestcraft, religion has also been a source of consolation for tens of millions of ordinary souls, and like it or not, still is.
When it has not done this constructively, by producing its own class of intellectuals, scholars, skeptics, moral counselors and dissidents, it has by its very nature been an important touchstone for ideas opposed to it and destructive of it–by the sheer force of its motivating idea that there is something beyond the individual (explained by religion as God, by secularists as society, by humanists as the dignity of Humankind) that “calls forth” other ideas like virtue, grace, sanctity and purpose. I am not saying that these things are “called forth” in the same way or to the same effect or that all religions (or its Others) do this with efficiency.
In fact religion accomplishes its ends in an ancient and outmoded way that many people, myself included, regard as inferior to the non-religious modality. This is not a curiosity or accident: It is chronology. Religion is to science as a sundial is to the atomic clock. They are both fit for a purpose, but not exactly the same purpose. I am not defending the advantages of sundials (all those cloudy days–what a mess). But most of us can order our lives with the benefit of hall clock or a wristwatch without making the leap from the mechanical to the the atomic. A little ambiguity is always a healthy state to be in, give or take five minutes, a snooze alarm, a second drink before calling it a night.

But not ambiguities that involve centuries–millennia–of changes in human knowledge. Not discordant visions that require us to think (as the Romans thought) that “what is old is true,” and what is new inferior and (often enough) illegal. The Roman church was the providential heir of the Roman empire in its love of the past, tradition, and authority. Most historians now scoff at the idea of a “fall” of the Empire before the moral sovereignty of the kingdom of Christ. The Church did not transform the empire, it created itself in its image, a grim enough parody which the historian Gibbon believed was largely possible because of its intolerance for other points of view. The enforcement of orthodoxy has never been compatible with the virtue of tolerance.
A key difference I would have with very religious people is that they embrace a spiritual view of the world that is at odds with every other compartment of their rational life. They know that pet cats die and do not rise, but believe, often with the grotesque literalism of a child’s fantasy, that they will live forever. They know that hard work, education, and perseverance often pay off, but believe that prayers for health and wealth–and the destruction of enemies–are answered.

_____________
Some religious people live in a between-time in which reason itself is considered a liability to God’s saving power. And before we decide that I am talking about Muslims crouching in the backlands of Sindh, I am also talking about the Tea Party fundamentalists with their Let go and Let God view of the economy. I am talking about Jews who convince themselves that the preservation of the Jewish state is based on secular and political realities rather than a biblical mandate. I am talking about Christian parents who send their children to the equivalent of New Testament madrasahs to keep them out of the clutches of the public education system (itself nothing to brag about), and politicians who play the dumbth card with voters whom they count on to be passionate, distractable, underinformed, and…religious.
A very religious view of the world is not only a mixed blessing but an unnatural vision of reality that is based on metaphysical exceptionalism: pigs can’t fly, but Jesus did. Enemies prosper because we are evil (or at least not good enough). Education is useful, just insofar as it doesn’t interfere with faith and belief. What this kind of thinking gets you in Oklahoma and South Waziristan is a rationalized defense of ignorance which some religious people will deplore as being a feature of “other people’s” religion, but often not of their own.
When, as seems to be happening in our unredeemed world, religion gets painted into a corner by the acts of its most perfect adherents–the ones who take the premises of a specific revealed faith seriously–the argument of the imperfect, the moderates, the modernists, usually runs that perfection is aberration. “We used to do these things–stone adulteresses, sell daughters into slavery, punish heretics, beat our women into submissive ignorance by using truncheons, fists and battery acid (note how many of these expressions of frustration are directed at women) but we don’t do that any more. At least not the ‘best’ of us.” Ask Jacoby’s protagonist Ayaan Hirsi Ali what the worst do.

Because religion encourages feelings of exceptionalism, it is easy enough for Protestant and Catholic Christians and Jews to say that this long complaint really only applies to Islam, and not even to all Muslims.
But that is too facile. In the Catholic Church, not known for shy and retiring women, in and out of veils, there is an equally insidious slavery to the “culture of life” that regards pregnancy as a biological verdict imposed by a wonderfully mysterious but oddly inattentive God who regards abortion as murder and performs the equivalent of spriritual stonings every day in rejecting the poor, underinformed, pubescently curious, raped and molested daughters of Eve thought to be under his care. All of that, and he doesn’t pay the rent when the boyfriend leaves, and doesn’t want pro-choice Catholic politicians mocking his edicts by receiving communion. It is true of course: a zealous mullah and a zealous priest wear different tunics, but the intolerance that makes their lives happy have the same source.
So, when we hear pleas for religious tolerance based on the idea that the principle of tolerance is applicable to all religions equally, what kind of principle are we invoking? Where does it come from? Does it arise from God, the Father, whose intolerance for disobedience, homosexuality, and childlessness is well documented, or does it come from a process that involves rejecting this God, his pomps and works in the same way baptismal vows used to ask godparents, on behalf of their speechless wards, to reject the pomps and seductions of Satan. Is tolerance rooted, in other words, in something that has religion written all over it or in something else, something that has religion scratched out?
Does it come from the important recognition that common ancestry is no explanation of diversity when it comes to religion, or from the notion that sprang up at the end of the nineteenth century (not coincidentally the era of anthropological inquiry into recently “discovered” religions) that–really–religions are different ways of saying the same thing. This interfaith prayerwheel approach (that often uses Asian religion as the handle on the cylinder) takes us eventually to “religious inclusivism,” and allegedly a step beyond the old norms of religion based exclusivism (competing orthodoxies) and the namby-pambyism of religious pluralism (the mere recognition that faiths make similar demands on adherents and have to learn to cope with each other.)
So tolerance as religious protectionists use the term is nothing more than a didactic principle created from misreading nineteenth century social scientists. And it is a cozy principle at that, because the belief that all religions are saying the same thing leaves unanswered the question whether–just perhaps–one religion is saying it better than others and when the wheel spins again–just perhaps–all will be one, under Trinity, Allah, karma, or Divine Consciousness.
But tolerance is not a religious value in historical terms. It can’t be. It is the slow-won secular and political solution to the recognition that religions cannot be trusted to get along, that at base they are as likely to cause war and destruction as peace and harmony. The religious adherents, many but not all Islamic, who claim the “right” of toleration, often conflated with the word respect, and want to forbid insult to “religion,” often equated to the word Islam, are not really asking for toleration and are not really using the word insult or defamation in a consistent way.
They are asking that Islam be granted special and protected status, immunized from satire, lampoon, critical commentary, and more commonplace and spirited forms of evaluation. This “request” is not the effect of multiculturalism; it is the negation of certain core principles of multiculturalism–especially the post modern critique of special discourses. Islam has nothing at all to gain from a literal application of postmodern ideas to its value system. No religion does.
Jacoby’s resonant comments about “protectionism” as an outcropping of the multicultural bias of the last decade or two is a welcome pillar in the argument against the illicit use of the western view of tolerance to justify beliefs and behaviors that could no more have generated such a value than teach a turnip to fart. But what precisely is the connection between multiculturalism and protectionism?
Both in Islam and Christianity, toleration has been a dispensation given by an assured majority to an insecure minority to go on doing whatever religious things they were doing. Cyrus granted it to the Jews. The Romans did, too, but with crossed fingers behind their back. Constantine gave it to the Christians (and was then remembered as Christian himself). Henry IV granted it to French protestants after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, when the citizenry was sickened at how inhospitable denominationalism was becoming. The British Parliament granted it after years of struggle to Presbyterians and Methodists, and finally to Catholics, which they had been once upon a time. Muslims from Damascus to Cairo made it a conditional gift to the ahl al kitab–submissive Christians and Jews–in their midst. Chastened by their European history, the fathers of the American Constitution took toleration one step further: separation of church and state, a solution which took the amazing step of saying that toleration is an ineffective control over something as pugnacious as religion. Only disregard will do.
Does toleration spring from multicultural influences or from other sources? However tempting to blame that vaporous nothing-really-matters- does-it?-ideology for all the sins committed against the rational mind inhabiting a fact-based universe, I think the current trend has a much longer history. It’s true of course that many Muslim intellectuals have read their Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and Levinas.
I am also pretty sure that the swill generated by the worst “Postmodern” thinkers (yes, I think there are good ones: Richard Rorty is not to be doubted) is not the source of Islamic invocations of tolerance, which after all is a very specific value rather than a very vague one.
Above all, there is a semantic chasm between “tolerated behavior”– practices and ideas which while obnoxious to us may be tolerated as benign in social terms–and practices and ideas whose status is considered so irrefragably true by some that they are regarded as immune to critique by others, the basis of the belief that any comment about a religion that does not correspond to its own doctrinal self-understanding is an insult.
This latter kind of attitude is not so much postmodern as post-critical, keeping in mind postmodernism’s status as a critique of modernism.
Our current dilemma is the conflict between “religious” persons who are anchored to fewer and thinner doctrines (how many Catholics, I wonder, know what in Catholic doctrine, specifically, the practice of abortion contravenes?) and religious persons who take their doctrine lite, with a grain of salt, or with the right of line-item veto.
The western religious story following the reformation gave us the latter kind of religion. I once wrote, in the Introduction to Ibn Warraq’s Why I am not a Muslim, that the secularizing effect of religious reform is something the Protestants did not foresee and that the Muslims, by virtue of its increasing isolation under the Ottomans, could not have begun to imagine. The Muslims had had their renaissance in the twelfth century when Europe was plunged in darkness. It was the reformation they missed, or lacked a motive for.
But once a faith loses its doctrinal anchors–biblical authority, resurrections, miracles, virgin births, afterlife (to name just a few), it is hard to say that the faith of a Presbyterian is better than the faith of a rosary-praying Roman Catholic. Bigger ideas are at stake as the erosion of contingent doctrines progresses, ideas like God, revelation, sin, and salvation.
That’s where secularism and agnosticism came from. It is an outpouring of judgment, almost automatic in force, against the absurd notion that the doctrines discredited in one faith can still be valid in the other. It is also a judgment against the once-popular belief that different religions are merely different ways to a true center, a grand synthesis–as though the reassembly of the smashed icons into a grand scheme would give us a World Religion. Skepticism towards that “theory” has only intensified since the death of ecumenism and the serious illness of the project once called “interfaith dialogue.”
To a rather large extent, the collapse of religious denominationalism and pluralism and the near-collapse of attempts at religious synthesis and inclusivism is where Susan Jacoby’s atheism comes from–an atheism that is informed, self-critical, and culturally sensitive to religious origins.
A thoughtful atheist (I prefer the term unbeliever) is simply someone who knows that history does not change its mind, and that having made up its mind about Marduk, Zeus, Vishnu and Yahweh, it will be very hard to restore them to their thrones. This realization is made harder because we live in a world still populated by people who wish to think that their private gods really are immortal, and that the biblical and Quranic god has not been toppled. Whether or not they exist, they have their armies. But that is a jejune point: no army was ever assembled in the name of a god who existed.
 _________
“Multiculturalism” in its raw form is not controversial. It is the simplest description of a world that has outgrown isolation, discovery, colonialism, and cultural shrinkage through migration and economic change. But in its pedantic form, multiculturalism can become a world without goals, visions, criteria for excellence, differences of status, intellect, degree, conduct.
Religious inclusivism and protectionism often occupies that kind of world and often seeks its protective mediocrity, its pride of ignorance, its pushover-parent tolerance of bad behaviour. Many ordinary people are simply baffled by the over-intellectualized defenses of religious violence on the analogy of a good kid gone wrong. They want to know what caused the wrongness, and whether there is nothing in tradition, belief, scripture or practice that might more easily explain the behavior than the theory of anomaly applied by religion scholars.
Pedantic multiculturalism is the view that religion is entitled to special status because of its attempt to express universal truth. But rather like the case for God, no one is quite sure what a universal truth looks like, much less that the world religions have it in a cage. Is is plumed or scaled, blue or fiery red, does it fly or crawl? The critic of religion should not be afraid to say the cage is empty and should not be required to say it is full for fear of defaming the gatekeepers..
Tolerance is the effect of almost a millennium of religious warfare between Christians and Muslims and Jews, and hundreds of years of bloody territorial struggle between biblical inerrantists and papists. Contrary to parochial histories, no one won those wars; religion survived in a denuded form, more vigorous in a newly isolated Islamic world than in post-Christendom (the christian states after the Reformation).
In the west, trust, authority, and religious certainty were casualties of the conflict, though no one seemed to admit it, and the theologians would have done almost anything not to come to Nietzsche’s God is dead verdict on philosophy and morality. And Nietzsche, the first Unorthodox Man, is also sometimes called the first postmodernist.
Even though many postmodernists deny wanting to be called anything–humanists (Heidegger), secularists (Sartre), postmodernist (Rorty and Ricouer), what they were basically asserting is that the era of labels–specific univocal identity– had passed. It had probably passed long before anyone noticed.
Most fundamentalist Christians, orthodox Jews and radicalized Muslim youth do not know it has passed either. I am still waiting to read an article that confirms my belief that contemporary religious violence is the apocalyptic last chapter in the battle for an absent God fought by the defenders of the empty cage.
There is no protection available from the outcome of this struggle. Because while a part of the drama is being played out with real guns and in real marketplaces, its real location is cultural and to a large extent psychological.
We need to pause to consider, however, how far down the road to inconsequence religions have come since the glory days, not that long ago, when they could defend themselves, raise their own legitimate armies, decide theological truth by counting the number of enemy dead.
That some religions now require United Nations resolutions to protect themselves from ridicule is interesting enough, but so is the logic behind the demand: “Religious violence is caused by the defamation of religion” intones the UNHRC Resolution “Against the Defamation of Religion.” –Interesting because the obverse is not discussed: Religious ridicule(defamation being in the mind of the beholder) is the response of critical onlookers to religiously motivated violence. Nor is it acknowledged that to extend this special brand of toleration, based on a special form of pedantic multiculturalism actually negates the normal understanding of toleration and protection, which is based on the social reality of benign and harmless practices that may, in doctrinal or other terms, be repugnant to a majority.
I have written sympathetically from time to time of my days in Beirut and Pakistan where occasional outbreaks of violence won me, for some reason (mainly the intelligence and sensitivity of students who will form the backbone of a new Islam) assurances that what had just happened in Karachi or Lahore or the south of Lebanon was not “true Islam.” Exceptionalism. Subtext: These episodes, however frequent, widespread, popular in appeal, are extrinsic to the phenomenon we call Islam.
That is what we heard after 9-11, though doubtless in order to avoid attacks on Muslims rather than as an expression of deeply felt conviction. That is what we are still hearing: that women sentenced to death for adultery, denied education, forced to remain indoors, and terrorized by the patriarchy that is still essentially Islam–that this is just what “some Muslims” do, think, believe. It is not what the sons and daughters of Muslim intellectuals, aristocrats, sufis think, perhaps, and of course we in the west are greatly ignorant of the incredible ethnic, regional, caste, and linguistic differences among Muslims. Most Americans think they have a complete knowledge of the religion if they can pronounce Shi’a and Sunni, having no idea, incidentally, what the differences between the two are.
What western critics need to do is to learn more about Islam, since Islam is now a western religion as well as a Middle East and South Asian one–a world faith in the most comprehensive sense of the term. What Muslims need to do is to understand the genesis of the notion of tolerance does not come from the assumption that “religious truth” deserves protected speech status. True, even Americans are grossly ignorant about the rights and limits attached to free speech. A vast majority believe that the only reason Christianity was not enshrined as the national faith is because no one foresaw the day when it would be necesary to spell it out.
But the ignorance of Christians and Muslims is not an excuse to grant to any religion prerogatives, assumptions and protections that do not form part of the classical democratic tradition. The wall of separation between church and state is a uniquely American. liberal solution to an issue that still burned in Jefferson’s America, one that looked on from afar to the still smoldering religious wars of Europe. What they knew in common was that religious hatred made governance impossible–rather as political campaigning does today.
But the solution was not to build a wall around religion and try to keep it in place. it was to build a wall between the state and the church and require religion, at least notionally, to stay on one side of it. As realists, they probably knew it wouldn’t work–and the fact that much of modern American democracy is shaped by First Amendment “issues” is a grim tribute to their ineffective wisdom.
The kind of wall pedantic multiculturalism wants to erect is a fortress, one that rings itself around a beleaguered faith in such a way as to suggest that everything inside it is unassailable and sacred and everything outside it is corrupting and deceitful. That is the kind of multicultural game playing that both Ms Jacoby and can agree to deplore. I can tolerate all shades of religious opinion as long as they do not advocate harming me or my neighbor: “For it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Said Jefferson sagely. But I want his opinion out in the open, not behind a barrier that might grant his illusions legitimacy.
http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/susan-jacoby/multiculturalism-and-its-discontents
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Published: August 22, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Defamation of Religion : humanism : multiculturalism : postmodernism ..
4 Responses to “Pedantic Multiculturalism”

.
 steph 
 August 22, 2010 at 10:37 am
When I was first introduced to Islam in 1991, it came in a packaged course called Western Religions, wrapped up with Judaism and Christianity. I find it incomprehensible to separate religions between the east and west … I don’t … although the next year I arrived at a packaged wrap up of ‘Eastern Religions’ which included Hinduism, Buddhism and their offspring.
I don’t like the word tolerance. I agree with Jacoby in the piece you quoted (and I appreciate your post very very much). I think it’s more about educated and considered responses to particular situations, not unconditional tolerance.
x
Reply

 steph 
 August 22, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I didn’t like to point out a finger slip as finger slips are inevitable especially late at night or when one is fatigued, but I think you meant to say ‘Ms Jacoby and “I” can agree to deplore…’ – just slipped out the ‘I’. I do too, agree to deplore that kind of multi-cultural gameplaying.
Pigs can’t fly, but they can swim … although Piglet wasn’t so sure about that when he posted his ‘help’ note in a corked up bottle, out of his tree house, having discovered himself to be in ‘Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood’, and surrounded by water.
x
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 Ken Pidcock 
 August 25, 2010 at 7:00 pm
I think this is an exceptionally eloquent account of how we have progressed from our former superstitions, and how further progress is being hindered with the best of intentions.
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 Wes Wessells 
 August 26, 2010 at 12:29 am
I agree with most of what you’ve stated but you’re wrong about Rorty.
 He made some very basic mistakes in his pragmatic view of how things are.
 Dennett pointed a few out and and even got him to admit one or two.
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The Necessity of Atheism, The Indispensability of Doubt
by rjosephhoffmann

Sometimes old diseases require old cures. 1811. Shelley writes, in the essay that got him sent down from Oxford:

Lord Bacon says that atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men: hence atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear- sighted, since he sees nothing beyond the boundaries of the present life. — Bacon’s Moral Essays.
…Thelogy mde man first fear and adore the elements themselves, the gross and material objects of nature; he next paid homage to the agents controlling the elements, lower genies, heroes or men gifted with great qualities. By force of reflection he sought to simplify things by submitting all nature to a single agent, spirit, or universal soul, which, gave movement to nature and all its branches. Mounting from cause to cause, mortal man has ended by seeing nothing; and it is in this obscurity that he has placed his God; it is in this darksome abyss that his uneasy imagination has always labored to fabricate chimeras, which will continue to afflict him until his knowledge of nature chases these phantoms which he has always so adored.
If we wish to explain our ideas of the Divinity we shall be obliged to admit that, by the word God, man has never been able to designate but the most hidden, the most distant and the most unknown cause of the effects which he saw; he has made use of his word only when the play of natural and known causes ceased to be visible to him; as soon as he lost the thread of these causes, or when his mind could no longer follow the chain, he cut the difficulty and ended his researches by calling God the last of the causes, that is to say, that which is beyond all causes that he knew; thus he but assigned a vague denomination to an unknown cause, at which his laziness or the limits of his knowledge forced him to stop. Every time we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was able to operate by the aid of forces or causes that we know in nature. It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignorance, attributes to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has always respected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.
If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. In proportion as man taught himself, his strength and his resources augmented with his knowledge; science, the arts, industry, furnished him assistance; experience reassured him or procured for him means of resistance to the efforts of many causes which ceased to alarm as soon as they became understood. In a word, his terrors dissipated in the same proportion as his mind became enlightened. The educated man ceases to be superstitious.
And we talk about “new” atheism? What we need to stop pretending is that there is anything new about atheism and anything worth repeating. Anyone persuaded by the force of Shelley’s 1811 arguments will be persuaded by anything written in 1789, 1869, 2008.
It’s all the same.
Which is to say, there is nothing to add to the atheist case against God. Like the Baltimore Catechism used to say, “God always is, always was, and always remains the same.” How dull–especially for him–except so do the arguments against his being.
My advice to my fellow sceptics and unbelievers: Ignore the believers. Anyone who believes anything without a reason for doing so, as W.K. Clifford noted more than a century ago, deserves to have his ships sunk at sea. Especially the ones he strongly suspected weren’t seaworthy to begin with.
But I write for a different reason. I write to say that even if you don’t believe atheism is “necessary,” dear believer, how can you deny that doubt is indispensable?
I trace my own dilemma to one of Bultmann’s students, Gerhard Ebeling. In a nice little book called The Problem of Historicity in the Church and Its Proclamation (1967) (hideous title, typically German), Ebeling wondered how any faith–by which he meant Christian–could be authentic (ah! the sixties!) if the believer has not encountered doubt.
I was not fooled back then. For a lot of the hermeneutical indolents of the era, doubt was just another name for the devil You encountered it, you said “Go ‘way,” and then you embraced faith (or more precisely, the Christ event, which was more like embracing a beam of light), and stayed Christian–whatever that meant.
Essentially what it meant was to embrace everything doubt imposed on your belief that did not cause you to sacrifice your identity. No miracles. No resurrection, No sin, really. No guilt–especially. No supernatural salvation. A discounted Christianity without the sacrifice of the cross, the pain of good works, or the affront of conscience. The kind of thing anyone could get behind in 1967. Far out.
The difference between Shelley and Ebeling is not so great, except while the believer will reject out of hand Shelley’s undergraduate confidence that belief is absurd–so great his faith in Hume–Ebeling actually calls believers to a test that few are willing to perform. Doubt what is most important. Doubt God.
The religious significance of doubt is enormous. Unfortunately for Christians it is epitomied in two events that argue against its veracity.
Early Christians doubted that Jesus would come again. Paul (?) is clear on this point in the earliest of his letters, where he asserts that he will live, and the present generation will live to see it happen. It didn’t. The fundamental disproof of the second coming, a formative event in early Christian history, is actually enhrined in its literature.
The second is more problematical. Some early Christians doubted that Jesus had been crucified, or more exactly that he had been crucified and raised to see a new day.
The resurrection stories of the gospels offer contradictory evidence and (cumulatively) imply less that his resurrection happened than that it probably didn’t. The literary defenses of a community soon supplanted sober report about what “really” happned. It reaches a climax in the gospel of John, the story of Thomas, who grotesquely places his fingers in the wounds of the crucified and risen lord.
Christianity skewered itself on this standard of proof, because it could not be verified, could not be duplicated, and created in the person of Thomas the paradigm of every doubting Christian from his day to this.
Alas, we are either in Thomas’s position or the position of the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” There, an escaped serial killer is mowing down a family of errant travlers in the American south, last of all the Grandmother who tries to talk the killer out of his deed by reciting scripture and telling him that he is one of God’s own, a “good man.” The conversation turns to Jesus:

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
Oh, religion is hard. But doubt must be taken seriously. If Shelley and his successors seem too self-assured, too pompus, take into account Ebeling’s view that anyone who believes without doubting hasn’t really begun to believe anthing.
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.
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Published: August 27, 2010
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6 Responses to “The Necessity of Atheism, The Indispensability of Doubt”

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 steph 
 August 28, 2010 at 12:48 am
I like this unlifting article, I like the advice to ‘ignore’ and especially that to those who ought also to doubt… and that the earliest Christians doubted is undoubtable otherwise Matthew (?) wouldn’t have said ‘he appeared to the twelve but some doubted’ unless they did, and Luke (?) wouldn’t have blatantly left it out.
The illustration is appropriately nauseatingly repulsive…
Eeyore thought about and questioned things. Sometimes he thought “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?” and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about. Although specifically about pencils and what-not, he thought, ‘Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it … It gets you nowhere, particularly if the other person’s tail is only just in sight for the second half of the conversation.’ (it’s late)
 x
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 marf 
 August 30, 2010 at 10:13 am
This put me in mind of Leo Rosten’s story of the apostate rabbinical student who went to a senior rabbi to confess his doubts. The rabbi asked him how long he’d been studying. “10 years.” “10 years? 10 years? Only 10 years and you think you can doubt?!”
Okay, maybe that doesn’t translate so well.
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 steph 
 August 30, 2010 at 3:16 pm
I have begun to notice an unfortunate side effect of the good old fashioned skepticising doubt: while doubt may lead to the loss of indoctrinated beliefs, sometimes the feeling that one had been deceived, is transferred into resentment of having formerly believed such beliefs. However new belief emerges when one is told negative things about former faith and other religious faiths that fit their new perception of religion as bad. These negative things can be conspiratorial in nature but are accepted by former religious believers, unequivocably. The way to avoid this is to be persistently and CONSISTENTLY skeptical about EVERYTHING :-)
Pooh and Piglet believed in Hostile Animals and Woozles and Wizzles, so when Christopher Robin said carelessly that he had seen a Heffalump lumping along, they both believed they might each have actually seen one too. However when they tried to set a Very Great Trap for the supposedly Very Fierce Heffalump, Pooh had a Very Bad Accident and they got into a spot of Terrible Trouble… But there weren’t any Heffalumps in the first place. You see, Winnie the Pooh is very funny and we enter a world of belief in things (this is a secret so shush) that aren’t at all real. Luckily Pooh wasn’t fed any Terribly Malicious conspiracy theories by Christopher Robin because Malicious wasn’t a characteristic of that world.
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 Ed Jones 
 August 31, 2010 at 3:27 pm
The claim that the indispensablilty of doubt creates the necessity of the athestic case against God, without naming just what is being doubted, constitutes a non-sensical statement raising serious false implications. It is a fact that today scholars are faced with the indispensability of doubt – doubt about tradition’s ways of conceiving God on the one hand, and doubt about tradition’s claim that the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus. These two doubts, in stark contrast to any notion of creating the necessity of the athestic case against God, have in fact, for our most authoratative scholars, created a new and fully adequate way of conceiving God as well as identifying the real Scriptural source of the apostlic witness to Jesus.
 Yet my real concern is not to attempt a critique of the essay, rather my concern is to try to redeem Ebeling from serious missleading implications. Not having read his works, I lay claim to his thought on the basis of the following quote: “Gerhard Ebeling, to whom this volume is didicated, has been a friend and wise counslar during the years (1974 -1983) when the essays were being worked out”. (Preface xii) Thus what Betz writes Ebeling thinks.
 First, from the title: The Prblem of Historicity in the Church and its Proclamation, I paraphrase your statement to better reflect Ebeling’s thought: “Ebeiling wondered how the faith of anyone could be authentic if the believer has not encountered the indispensable doubt of tradition’s claim that the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus”. My letter of March 24, 2009 which CFI failed to pass on after two separate mailings, and in frustration, I posted as comments to your essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus, contains significant extracts from Betz’s Essays on the Sermon on the Mount which can unconditionally be taken as representative of Ebelings thought. In spite of poor editing and several expressions of mini panics it can be read. Thanks again for publishing the comments.
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 Ed Jones 
 September 1, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Since the believer Ebeling, against the advice “ignore the believer”, has not been ignored however negatively recognized, on the chance that someone may yet read his thought, I post some of Betz’s quotes as contained in the March 24. 2009 letter:
“This source (the Sermon on the Mount – the SM) presents us with an early form (deriving from the Jesus Movement) of the Christian faith as a whole, which had direct links to the teachng of the historical Jesus and thus constituted an alternative to Gentile Christianity as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels, as well as later writings of the New Testament – - If the SM represents a response to the teaching of Jesus, critical of that of Gentile Christianity, then it serves unmistakably to underline the well-known fact, frequently frogotten today, of how little we know of Jesus and his teaching. The reasons for our lack of knowledge are of a hermeneutical sort, and cannot be overcome by an excess of good will (apologetics). The Gentile-Christian authors of the Gospels transmitted to us only that part of the teaching of Jesus that they themselves understood, they handed on only that which they were able to translate into the thought categories of Gentile Christianity, and which they judged worthy of transmission. By contrast, the SM stands nearer to the Jewish thought of Jesus and manifests its characteristic affinity and distance over against later Christianity.
 A truly disturbing problem arises for the community only when they discover that there are other Christians who have drawn very different conclusions from the teachings of Jesus (the Gentile Pauline Christ Community). It is not only their task to maintain and defend the teachings of Jesus, but to establish, first of all, what Jesus taught and desired of others and what he did not teach and desire. The strange fact that such conflicting interpretations of the teaching of Jesus could arise so soon constitutes the profound dilemma of the SM in relation to the historical Jesus,- – (In the SM) on the whole, one can say that a form of Jewish Christianity comes to expression which, even if for want of sources, we must leave open the possibility, and even the probably of an image of Jesus which is completely different from that of the synoptic tradition and its Gentile-Christian redactors.”
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 Raff 
 July 15, 2011 at 10:17 am
Hello,
I’m presently working on Shelley’s work, and more particularly the presence of anarchist thought in his theories. I was searching for the origin of Lord Bacon’s quotation when I found your blog, and wanted to simply correct what you say in the opening lines of your articles: this reference to Lord Bacon was not used by Shelley in 1811, ” in the essay that got him sent down from Oxford”, that is to say “The Necessity of Atheism”, but in the notes to “Queen Mab. A Philosophical Poem”, published in 1813.
 Although Shelley didn’t really changed is mind in the meantime, the difference is important, for the first essay is in no way as provocative as the poem and its notes. The pamphlet only affirms that the only possible foundation for belief is a passive perception of God’s manifestation, while the poem says the same thing, but adds that atheism is the only way for man to be reasonable and free.
 Here are the editions of Shelley’s works that I use, if you want to check my correction: “The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, vol. 1, Edited by E. B. Murray, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 (p. 1 to 6 for “The Necessity of Atheism”); “The Poems of Shelley”, vol. 1, Edited by G. Matthews and K. Everest, Longman, New York, 1989 (p. 265 to 423 for “Queen Mab”).
With regards (and apologies for my linguistic clumsiness),
 Raphaël Rigal
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CFI Proves Idiom True!
by rjosephhoffmann

The Fine Art of Contradiction
The Center for Inquiry’s Statement on the Ground Zero Controversy

CFI fully supports the free exercise of religion; protecting the rights of believers and nonbelievers is central to CFI’s mission. Accordingly, CFI endorses President Obama’s recent statement reminding the country that Muslim Americans enjoy the same rights as other Americans and should not be treated as second-class citizens. There should be no legal impediment to the placement of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, just as there should be no legal impediment to the placement of a church, temple, or synagogue near Ground Zero.

Ground Zero Mosque, Winning Plan
Further, CFI laments the effort by some to turn the proposed Islamic center into a political issue. Government officials and candidates for office should not intervene in disputes over the alleged offensiveness of a place of worship. Such conduct violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Establishment Clause. Government officials should not be deciding who is a “moderate” Muslim any more than they should be deciding who is a “moderate” Christian or Jew.
A number of private individuals have protested the proposed Islamic center. The tone and substance of these protests covers a wide range. Some protesting the Islamic center have raised legitimate questions, but to the extent the objections to the Islamic center mistakenly equate all Muslims with Muslim extremists, CFI condemns them.
 CFI maintains that an Islamic center, including a mosque, near Ground Zero, in and of itself, is no different than a church, temple, or synagogue. It is undeniable that the 9/11 terrorists were inspired by their understanding of Islam, and that currently there are far more Islamic terrorists in the world than terrorists of other faiths, but those facts are not relevant to the location of the Islamic center, absent evidence that terrorists are involved in this endeavor, and there is no such evidence.
CFI’s unequivocal support for the legal right of Muslims to place a community center near Ground Zero does not imply that CFI views the new center as an event to be celebrated. To the contrary, CFI is committed to the position that reason and science, not faith, are needed to address and resolve humanity’s problems. All religions share a fundamental flaw: they reflect a mistaken understanding of reality. On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere.
This statement supersedes any prior statement issued by CFI regarding the Ground Zero controversy.
Unofficial Translation
The Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name) hubub is getting a lot of attention. CFI would like to get a lot of attention because frankly no one pays any attention to what we say anymore. This is the kind of issue we ought to say something about so, here we are.
A couple of days ago we said some silly things, or maybe said things that gave our readers the idea that we approved of religion.
So forget all that and let us try again. Number one, however: We do not like religion, or as we like to call it “theism.” Theism is evil, but that doesn’t mean you should not tolerate it. Just because your neighbor is a pervert doesn’t mean you should burn down his house, right? This is our core philosophy about such things. Violence doesn’t solve anything. Ridicule does.
As a free speech advocacy group, we support the right of anyone to say anything. We have even taken the lead in being offensive and insulting toward religion, just to make our point.
As a super-charged First Amendment Rights organization, we believe that everyone is entitled to practice their faith as they see fit. Or not to practice any faith. Commitment is the real issue. We also think the jury is out on Mormons,especially the sexual multitaskers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other annoying groups, but they’re not in the news right now, are they?
Some people think that because we spend most of our time ridiculing religion that we would oppose building the Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name). They have another think coming. We are full of surprises and this is just one of them. Politicians should butt out and not try to politicize this. That’s for groups like ours. This isn’t about who loves America most. It’s about who’s right.
Basically we believe that a mosque is like a porn shop. You may not like what it sells but a guy’s got a right to make a living. Or it is like your evil neighbor’s house. You choose the best analogy.
Like we said before, Islam is just another religion. You can’t really draw any conclusions from the fact that there are maybe a zillion times more extremists in Islam than in any other religion. If there were a zillion more porn shops in Lincoln, Nebraska than Peoria, Illinois, what would you conclude? Exactly. That reminds us of a joke: How many altar boys does it take for a bishop to change a lightbulb?
Another thing we think is that Muslims need exercise. Not just driver’s-ed, weight- training with heavy explosives, running, and diving but maybe pilates, tae kwon do, twenty minutes on a non-exploding treadmill, maybe a few laps in a warm pool with a Michael Bublé track playing in the background. We think the Community Center attached to the Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name) might be a good idea. Maybe a small side chapel, the way Catholics have their tabernacles or wtf nowadays, but all the rest of the space for exercise and International Menu Nights–focus on veg.
CFI looks forward to joining the residents of the Ground Zero Mosque at its groundbreaking along with people of faith, people of no faith, people with yellow teeth and people who are just passing by. Like all freedom-loving Americans, we celebrate our differences, along with people of colour and people of no colour.
We celebrate the fact that our Constitution gives us the right to paint our crappy house purple on a street of well-maintained Victorian clapboard whites. We believe we have the right to insult or not to insult and to be offended or not to be offended. We’re not too sure about carrying sidearms to public rallies. But we’re working on a position paper and you can bet it will be awesome.
The key thing is consistency.
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Published: August 29, 2010
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Tags: Center for Inquiry : CFI : First Amendment : Ground Zero Mosque ..
2 Responses to “CFI Proves Idiom True!”

.
 steph 
 August 29, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Very well written, brilliantly lucid, incisive and eloquent essay. Thank you, I appreciate this unofficial translation. That’s pretty much how I interpreted things. That’s a fantastikal mouth.
x
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 CFI Proves Idiom True! (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 November 12, 2010 at 10:58 am
[...] The Center for Inquiry’s Statement on the Ground Zero Controversy CFI fully supports the free exercise of religion; protecting the rights of believers and nonbelievers is central to CFI’s mission. Accordingly, CFI endorses President Obama’s recent statement reminding the country that Muslim Americans enjoy the same rights as other Americ … Read More [...]
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Patheos?
by rjosephhoffmann

When I first learned about Patheos just over a year ago, I thought the organization was just another attempt by spiritual seekers to find something to put in place of God’s throne. Something meaningful, spiritual, but not too prickly, because seekers have had it with prickly. Everybody wants religion to be like their favourite pillow, and if it isn’t like that it can just go to hell.
That’s where Patheos comes in.
The spiritual seekers who cobbled together this pastische of misinformation (yes, I went there) and parochial pieties are called Leo and Cathie Brunnick, “a husband-and-wife team,” who look a lot like those husband and wife teams that sell prayer-cards on the religion cable networks, or (cutting them some well-needed slack) turbo-food processors. What they serve up in their articles and forums is a lot like what you’d get at the spout- end of a Veg-o-Whirrl.
They do not list their credentials for such an undertaking. Leo professes [sic] to be a non-practicing Catholic, Carrie a Lutheran turned evangelical. They just say they were “curious” about religion when they got married (any other activities?) and were looking for a way to blend their families. There’s that blender image again.
They also mention that Patheos is a hybrid of the word path, meaning path, and the word theos, meaning God, and that it is pronounced PA-theos. I do not know what PATH-eos means, however, if I flip the hybrid the other way, nor can I really pronounce it. Somewhere I saw the term referred to as a portmanteau, and I adore the word portmanteau. And you should also know that in the OnLine Christian College’s list of the top fifty spirituality blogs, they are ranked at number 10.
They–Carrie and Leo– are a for-profit company, by the way, and I say more power to anyone who can still milk the gods for lucre. More mysteriously they say (without any attempt to prove themselves honest) that “Patheos.com is the premier online destination to explore and experience the world’s beliefs and to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality.” They get between 100,000 and 200,000 hits per week. Probably mainly from people who are Googling the word pathos.
To test the poignancy of their articles, I clicked Roman Catholicism. I braced myself in my chair, ready to engage in the global dialogue that awaited me.
But, alas! All I was able to find was an advertisement for Roman Catholicism, written by insiders, and so pukily uncritical it might have been printed on the side of a bus going to a Knights of Columbus Convention in Tampa.
If a camel is a horse designed by a commitee, the article I found was unquestionably written by a committee of camels. Let me simply illustrate with the following traffic wreck of conflated paragraphs:
Jesus’ first apostles handed authority down in an apostolic succession that developed into a system of bishops, but the specific jurisdiction of Rome’s bishop was initially unclear.
Fact: The doctrine of apostolic succession wasn’t clearly articulated until the very end of the second century, when it wasn’t called that, and was not tied to Rome until later. Perhaps the writer means to say, “According to devout Roman Catholic tradition…”?
But this inability to separate belief-based postulates from the required nuances and cautions of religious studies scholarship is the pit that all quick-fix sites like this one (and including BeliefNet) have struggled unsuccessfully to avoid. By the same token, Muslim eavesdroppers have begun to love Patheos for this very weakness: did I mention it was like your favourite pillow? In fact, it is like everyone’s favourite pillow, which is why, I suspect, the advertising revenue will continue to roll in.
A little more:
Roman Catholicism Historical Perspectives
 As she [sic] attempts to interpret and implement the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church is reexamining her relationship with the world, other faiths, and fellow Christians.
Fact: This statement might have been current in 1969 and may have had a lingering scent of authenticity in 1989. It is totally unclear why Vatican II is doing at this point in the article, or whether the writers have the foggiest inexpert notion what Vatican II did do and failed to do. I’ll bet whoever wrote this still goes to guitar masses.

Rock me!
<
Roman Catholicism Scriptures
 Several centuries passed before Church authorities weighed a variety of scriptural writings to establish a definitive canon of authoritative texts known as the New Testament.
Really? This isn’t the way is happened at all. Variety there certainly was, but the “canon” was really settled by the force of tradition and individual bishops. The writers seem to think that at some point, possibly at Reno, the bishops convened and one by one, like congressional amendments, the gospels were yead and nayed (“Reverendissimi: Omnes pro Marcum per ‘Sic’ significantur.”)  The matter is so complicated and so prone to cause disagreement between protestants, Catholics, Jews, and scholars who like plaid ties that it is best just left alone.
Roman Catholicism
 Roman Catholicism Early Developments
 Within 400 years after Jesus’ passion, Christianity developed from an illegal, persecuted, and underground religion into the official, only, and dominating faith of the Roman Empire.
Ah, finally early  developments. But no, it wasn’t Roman Catholicism that was persecuted. It was called Christianity, and early on not even that. “Within 400 years?” Again, no, paganism lingered well into the fifth century. “Only?” Where were the Jews and Zoroastrians and pagans of the Middle East? “Jesus’ passion,” using non-emotive language, do you mean his execution? Blinders pinching a little too tight around the eyes of the Roman Catholic scribe who penned this nionsense?
Roman Catholicism Schisms, Sects
 Catholicism experienced intermittent theological heresies and three major schisms – the Great Schism between east and west, the Great Western Schism of rival papacies, and the Protestant Reformation.
Yes it did. I would say ongoing rather than intermittent. I need to hear a bit more about these “rival papacies” (which were certainly to be reckoned with) to know why the writer would like to put them in this space, since early heresies have little in common with political schisms. And to include the Reformation, a fissure within western Christendom that affected the Catholic Church in both political and theological ways, in this category screams naivete.
Critiquing this sort of stuff is wearying. In addition to writing that can charitably be described as hasty pudding and most glommed from other internet sources, the authors did not avail themselves of fact-chekers or expert editors (that’s expensive) and permitted their errors and opinions to do what errors always do on the web: grow like mushrooms. I think BeliefNet does slightly better, and despite its reputation for slovenly scholarship, it is possible to red-flag a Wiki article on these subjects and alert unemployed professors everywhere to have their marking pencils handy.
Patheos on the other hand seems to have assigned the verisimilitude of articles to a range of denominational gatekeepers whose role is essentially to ensure that the articles reflect a kind of average piety toward their subject. Nothing too scholarly, nothing too critical, and thus nothing too right.
Yesterday we were treated to a series of fatuous articles about “Humanism,” with this tantalziing come-on from the editors

From a past infused with religious belief into a future where secularism and nontheistic morality can thrive, western nations everywhere are exploring Humanist alternatives to faith. How will Humanism interact with rising religious fundamentalisms? Where might Humanism be able to introduce new ways of dealing with the moral questions of our generation? Patheos investigates the future of Humanism as a vital tradition in its Future of Religion series
The writers chosen for this assignment seem to correspond to the website developer’s total misapprehension of what humanism is–two officials of the Center for Inquiry, one ex-official who now heads a group called American Atheists, another (a very nice chap, however) who runs a blog called “The Friendly Atheist,” and a perfectly vomitous piece by someone named Chris Highland that reads like the testimony of a spirit-struck pentecostal who was just shaken awake by the angel of Reason and Kindness.
If Patheos wanted to do something useful, it could have set about providing simple to read summaries of the world religions–and by all means, at some point in the future include humanism–because this isn’t. This is all about secularism, atheism, and the bits in between. High time to rescue the term humanism  from the clutches of people the the Patheos-crowd are playing to, the ones who want sloppy souls everywhere to equate humanism of all stripes with unbelief. And shame on the contributors to this segment for not seeing through the plan. And shame on Patheos for encouragiung such confusion.
Meantime, do your job: summarize and forum away, but do the job responsibly, responsibly enough so that your child’s seventh grade teacher doesn’t fail her for coughing up this stew of errors when she’s called upon to produce an essay on Hinduism.
Do I have a top ten religion sites list? Of course.
Religion Facts http://www.religionfacts.com/
 Beliefnet http://www.beliefnet.com/ (with caution)
 Adherents.com http://www.adherents.com/ (needs a new website)
 Tolerance.org http://www.religioustolerance.org/
 The Secular Web http://www.infidels.org/index.html (by far the best source for anything related to secularism)
 Biblical History http://www.besthistorysites.net/ancientbiblical.shtml
 Christianity http://www.christianitytoday.com/ (come away smiling)
 Bad Reigion http://www.badreligion.com/ (just because there needs to be such a site)
 Islam http://www.uga.edu/islam/ (consider the source, then enjoy it)
 New Oxonian http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/ (for when you’re fed up with the other sites)
Of Patheos and the the Patheostrians who live by Gaul, the less said and written the better.
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Published: August 31, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Patheos : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : religion blogs ..
6 Responses to “Patheos?”

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 steph 
 August 31, 2010 at 9:05 pm
What a beautifully brilliant analysis – accurate and absolutely hilarious. I really do love your style. I only came across Patheos for the first time a few days ago when I stumbled upon that so called ‘humanism’ thing with contributions from those you mention. I wasn’t googling suffering but I might as well have been. Thank you very much for your top ten, especially your favourite (I enjoyed the article by Jon Jermey) and most of all the last which I don’t have to be fed up to read at all…
x
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 Seth Strong 
 September 1, 2010 at 10:40 am
Did you deliberately stick a link to a punk band website in your list? I like Bad Religion just fine, but for people who might not know, it’s not a theology related website. Well, not directly. It’s a band.
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 steph 
 September 1, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Actually they’re religion related websites and what with ‘American Jesus’, and punk, religion and society, badreligion certainly is religion related. If you look at the list, which includes such contrasting sites as ‘christianitytoday’ and ‘beliefnet’ to the infidels, and the odd sounding religion ‘facts’ you might notice the list is variegated indeed. Badreligion, as it is written, it’s there ‘just because there needs to be such a site. It is very happily fitting for this particular list on this particular site. :-)
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 Seth Strong 
 September 1, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Right, but the inclusion of badreligion.com in the list is still imbalanced as anything other than a joke. The other sites are specifically about religion. Badreligion.com is specifically about a band. I don’t think we need to start looking at bands as examples of religions which is why that item sticks out. It is possible there is a site about what’s bad about religion that Mr Hoffman intended. It’s also possible he just likes the band. In this context, we don’t know, hence the comment I posted.

 

 steph 
 September 1, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Of course Dr Hoffmann knows it’s a blinking band! I thought it was rather funny, especially alongside the likes of ‘beliefnet’. I don’t think the audience need to be told and denied the pleasure of a giggle when they discover the funniness for themselves. I call the telling, a ‘wet blanket’.
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 Harlan Carpenter 
 February 9, 2012 at 1:39 am
I’m not really sure why the founders of this “patheos” thing chose that particular name, but it doesn’t have quite the right feel–certainly not what they think it should have. Yeah, “theos” is a Greek root meaning God. But when you try to morph “path” and “theos” into something extra special, it mis-fires. Actually “patheos” sounds more like its root is in “pathos”–meaning sadness. Anybody recognize words like, pathos, pathology, pathetic, etc…? I think the name Patheos is not a good choice for the purpose. Maye the founders should have invested in a little education in liguistics before going off on this sort of tangent.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Should Atheism be Studied?
by rjosephhoffmann

“Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man, than by this; that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it, within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened, by the consent of others….” (Francis Bacon, 1561-1626)
That is not a trick question. Atheism to have any intellectual standing in the world must be studied, like any other subject.
The stumbling block for doing this, most atheists will allege, are those pesky Christians whose pet cause is getting religion (or approved religion-substitutes, like “moments of quiet reflection” or post-school-day Bible study), back into the schools.
But that’s half the picture. The biggest obstacle to atheism being taught is that atheists have not claimed their subject matter, defined it adequately, or put it forward as anything other than being “not religion.”
It is difficult to teach “not”-subjects. Not-physics could be English, rollerblading or chiropractic services. It could be anything, as long as it’s not Physics. Defining a thing by its not-ness is not very helpful.
That is why the tired taunt against the unbeliever has been and still is, “So, what do you believe in then?” Stammer, cough.
Part of the issue is that atheists are too much foxhound and too little fox. They know when religious folk are trying to sneak religion into a conversation or a curriculum, under the guise of creation science or moral and spiritual development. But their lawsuits, protests, and cries of foul play and Unconstitutionality (whatever that hackneyed phrase may yet mean in this wretched age) seem as hollow as St. Peter’s dome. I mean the basilica.

But at least the Righteous majority, in America anyway, know exactly what they would like to see: stories about prophets and patriarchs, miracles and manna in the desert, Jesus speaking parables to the multitudes, and just a tiny, condescending nod to the millions of people who aren’t Christian yet but who have some interesting if basically wrong ideas–and (perhaps too much to hope) a nice nonsectarian prayer that ends, “In Jesus Name we pray, Amen.”
There is content there, even if the Constitution forbids its propagation as “learning.” And there is history. The religious rightists can also point to an imaginary golden age when Protestant America had no notions or plans to change its essentially doctrinal view of abortion, homosexuality, gender roles and the virtue of private wealth. So what if Johnny couldn’t read? At least he could pray and knew how to wash behind his unpierced heterosexual ears.

Nothing is more clear to the straight-thinking religious majority than that the obstruction of religion by people who don’t read the Bible leads to confusion, and confusion leads to–well, Barack Obama and terrorism.
It is true, of course, that the infinite jest of the religious right is enough to keep any self-respecting unbeliever busy with taunts, jabs, and protests.
In my view, that’s about all atheists have managed to do in the last hundred years.
That is because atheists have grown intellectually fat and lazy, enamored of the quaintness and minority rectitude of their opinion, careless about their targets and goals, gibberishical about their “values” and ideas, many of which are indistinguishable from anybody else’s liberal ideas. Except, perhaps the God part–the not-part.
In fact, the whole faith-versus-unbelief debate is askew.
The righteous and the right-minded have chosen to draw their battle-line on the map of myth. Yet both sides know that the trigger-question is not whether Genesis is “true” but whether the possibility of a being like God is true. The believer, if he is a profound Christian, says simply yes, because the story is true, it being validated by the power and authority whose story it is. This is not the time to drag out a logic primer or a copy of The God Delusion. Quantum physics? Forget about it.
It is time to be foxier than that. If the answer is yes, because the story says so, then the job of education (something atheists claim to care about) is to examine stories about gods. Not just the one in Genesis–all the stories.
And the job of education, and the goal of knowledge, is to find a real method–historical, scientific, critical, the same kind we use in other subjects–for sorting out true stories and false stories. In other words, Genesis can only be “true” to the extent it is certifiably different from, say, this:

Upon that desire arose in the beginning. This was the first discharge of thought. Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.
Their line [of vision] was extended across; what was below, what was above? There were impregnators, there were powers: inherent power below, impulses above.
Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being? (R’g Veda, ca. 2100BCE)
And since difference, on its own, is no hallmark of truth (think of a Rembrandt oil and a copy of a Rembrandt oil), there must be other methods for finding out what the real story is, and which story, if either, has a foundation in reality–reality as non-delusional people understand the term.
The story of God in Genesis is no more a proof of the existence of God than the existence of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter saga is proof of the existence of a master-wizard headmaster.
That is what people who study religion learn to do in classes in anthropology, history, linguistics, archaeology. They look at stories, and rocks, and language trees and other stuff; they sort things out. They know that the Rig Veda is older than the oldest bits of the Hebrew Bible.
They know that written Hebrew wasn’t around in second millennium BCE, though its ancestor-languages, like Canaanite dialects, and ancestor gods to YHWH (the one who set himself apart from his brother gods by making the cosmos in six days) were.

Early God: Yahweh on his chariot
So if we ignore the method-issue by continuing to debate questions of no real importance as though there were no real answers, or none the Constitution will permit us to pursue, we are enduring the ignorance not just of the kids in the classroom but of the teachers, the parents, and school-boards like Dover.
We are enshrining mystery when there is no mystery. We are saying “Who could possibly know something like that?” when there are plenty of people who know precisely what’s what.
We are endorsing the opinion that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing. Americans, among the tribes of the earth, excel in that view, and atheists should be doing what they can to combat it.
Atheists should not be patting themselves on the back for discovering that creation science isn’t real science. That’s a bit like discovering the two men inside the horse-costume. They should be ashamed for not insisting that there are better ways of approaching questions they consider critical.

Creation Science

If it is part of atheist wisdom that God does not exist, then this wisdom has to be included–reflected–in the school curriculum in specific ways, not subordinated to a subset of mainly trivial issues–and by the way, in a way that also trivializes imagination and its offspring, mythology and art.
If atheists are going to help to fight this battle, they need to acquire what Mathew Arnold described as “culture” themselves. I travel in tiny circles, but many of the atheists I encounter got no chat when it comes to many of the things that count for culture–art, music, history–alas, even ideas other than new techniques for life-prolongation. They are simply boring. They are one string harps.
If the pious know what they want–school prayer for instance–what should an atheist want that can be taught?
For one thing, atheists should insist on courses in moral development. In the UK, where the idea of church-state separation isn’t quite as sharp-edged as in the Great Republic, classes in “spiritual and physical development” are usual, though the phrase really just means “moral” and physical education–important add-ons to intellectual formation through the standard lens of liberal learning.
Atheists should insist on ethics- or values-education. They should be fighting battles for good textbooks on the subject, texts that do more than offer an unsuspecting sixth- grader the most uninspiring precis of lives lived and thoughts thought– “Plato was an Athenian philosopher of the fifth century bce who is famous for his idea of the ‘forms’. He was also the teacher of fourth-century thinker, Aristotle who was famous for something else….”
Atheists (I stress) need to be interested in the history and development of culture, not just the assumed predominance of science. Culture and science are not the same thing, but they share a story.
But we live in an era and, in the United States especially, a society that encourages disjunction and dumbness. We have one standard of knowledge for the schools, another for our universities. And unlike Plato, we do not expect the higher pattern to be reflected in the lower.
How odd. We don’t learn to play violin or piano by teaching one set of scales and fingering techniques to seven year olds and a different set to students at seventeen. We insist on parallelism–the analogy–between one experience and the other because we know that real progress is only possible because the course (“Curriculum” in Latin) is also a path from the relatively simple to the relatively complex.
Only in American education can the schools get by with the enormous disconnect between the way in which knowledge is encountered and distributed in the schools and the way it is disseminated in even a mediocre university. And unfortunately, it is because of America’s generally low esteem for the humanities that this ignorance of method can thrive.
And where are the atheists? Fighting yesterday’s wars. Ranged against the Lord God of Hosts on the fields of Canaan. Doing everything possible to make their contribution unacceptable and suspect.
Atheists need to get behind an effort to get Wrong out of the schools–not just God and the Bible. If they claim knowledge is on their side, they need to be more actively involved in the way the knowledge business is run.
Unbelief  as unbelief has no more business being taught than Unphysics.
But the body of accumulated wisdom–in ethics, the arts, the sciences and literature–is enormous, and much of it is by skeptics, humanists (in the post-renaissance sense) and atheists. Another lot is by “questioners” like Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, without whose inquiring intellects the Enlightenment could not have happened.
But where are the bibliographies, the suggestions, the lists, the lobbyists who are willing to challenge the Christocentric and still dominant view that culture’s greatest achievements were carved out in stone and marble and glass?
The distinctive thing about atheism is that it is intellectual architecture, the life of the mind in crisis and question. Not some self-satisfied conclusion growing warts over time. Cathedrals are no proof that their builders were right, and atheists have never built cathedrals.
Its themes can be traced as well, and they are there from the time of the Rig Veda, through the time of “Job,” through the time of William Langland, Bacon (“a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism,”) and the first stirrings against church doctrine, superstition and clerical abuse in the Reformation. Please: spare me the totally ignorant point that Luther and Spinoza were not “atheists.”
The atheist role is to insist that knowledge is not a grand and beautiful tapestry but the story of doubt and the role of doubt in the wider story of human achievement. Can we not teach that? Should we not teach that?
The question isn’t whether atheism “can” be studied, but when atheists are going to come down from the rooftops and begin making telescopes for the rest of us. That is hard work. That is the real challenge.
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Published: September 7, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: agnosticism : atheism. skepticism : Christianity : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secular humanism ..
29 Responses to “Should Atheism be Studied?”

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 steph 
 September 7, 2010 at 11:06 pm
Exactly – defining a thing by it’s not-ness is never very helpful, and it IS a hindrance to the advancement of knowledge … I love the reflection of agnosticism and expression of doubt in the Rig Veda: ‘…Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not’ ‘Who knows truly?’ Fantastically funny, incisive, astute, eloquent article by you. Absolutely, the story and the role of doubt in the story of human achievement should be taught. And I love the horsey creation science illustration. And Bacon’s supersilious sneer.
x
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 azizk 
 September 8, 2010 at 2:28 am
I have been reading your blog for the last 3 days and find so much interesting topics here. I’ve bookmarked your site hoping that I can take much more benefits from you. Thank you.
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 Seth Strong 
 September 8, 2010 at 8:39 am
Interesting. I was just taking a stab on this subject earlier this week and so your post has excellent timing.
However, there is wordplay as a potential problem in this post. I agree that people who identify as atheists need to fill the voids with a principle of ethics, culture and so on. But having that culture isn’t what atheism is. Atheism really is simply the reaction to the presence of a religion.
I identify as atheist. But my point diverges from yours that to ask me about my values I must answer with something else. And when I tell you what I think about my values, they have nothing to do with my lack of belief because it isn’t one unifying thing and it isn’t supposed to be.
I think it is very important that atheists promote the values that they have. I just think that when they do, you aren’t seeing it because those values are labeled humanist, or philanthropic or so on just like it would be if any other human of any other religious persuasion were doing the work. And so atheists become a little invisible in those departments.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 8, 2010 at 9:16 am
Good point Seth: ethics does seem to be more visible in the religious context,largely because what’s done from conscience alone is a private matter,not subject to verification by a community.
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 Pawiz 
 September 8, 2010 at 9:12 am
Atheism is the lack of belief in god or gods. End of story. There is no common or shared set of values of the atheist community. There are atheists who are anti-theist, and others who don’t care. There are atheists that support abortion, and others oppose. Atheists can be sexist, racist and many other -ists. Atheists do not gather at the altar to confirm their biases and dogmas. What can you study? What is there to study? You may as well study why people do not believe in Santa! Do those who lack a belief in faeries need to “claim their subject matter”?
Atheists do not need to specifically claim a position on values or morals. That begs the question – how can you be moral without God?
I am an atheist and I claim no subject matter. I simply lack any belief in any supernatural intent of creation. That’s it. Study that if you want.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 8, 2010 at 10:11 am
With all respect, it is precisely this point I was attacking. Do you have any reasons, ideas, arguments, ethical issues or compasses that point you to atheism? Are those worth consulting? I find this view the flip side of the Christian who says Christianity is not a religion.
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 Jon Moles 
 September 8, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Actually, it seems as though you are missing the point. The reasons, ideas, arguments, etc. that point to atheism all revolve around the fact that claims for the existence of a god or gods have no evidence to support them. Disbelief is the default position, so without evidence that can withstand scrutiny withholding belief is the only intellectually defensible position. Your article is a straw man argument, if a more subtle and nuanced one than most concerning atheists. I agree that atheists should stand up and support better education and secular morality, and many of them do, but atheism itself says nothing other than atheists disbelieve in god claims. Atheists should and do participate in movements to improve education, defend freedom and espouse secular morality, but it cannot derive from atheism. Rather, atheism in the context we are discussing it usually is the byproduct of skepticism and critical thinking, two things that are surely missing from our education system. Atheists are making telescopes, how would you suggest we convince others to look through them beyond current efforts?

 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 8, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Thanks John. Of course I disagree. If atheists are happy to be squeezed into Webster’s two line definition of who they are and what they disbelieve, that is fine and that is what you seem to endorse here. But you seem also to be endorsing the same kind of disconnect between unbelief and (e.g) its history, flow, context, and implications that causes religious folk to think atheism is shallow. And I cannot for the life of me see a straw man here: this is not “against” athiests.

 Mike Haubrich, FCD 
 September 9, 2010 at 8:18 am
Almost all atheists I know are also humanists; and if the ones you travel with are boring then perhaps you should expand your circle.
Granted, I know some “grunts” among atheists, but for the most part the atheists I know have a solid interest and grounding in arts, ethics, culture and fun.
You are painting with too broad of a brush.

 
 

 Mark Fournier 
 September 8, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Atheism isn’t much of a premise for something, but the point of view that leads to it is another matter. Most atheists get there through an inclination towards naturalism, so that is the view that they want to see taught. Others get there through philosophy or by religion; not just by rejecting religion, but by following it to its inevitable conclusions. Some of the most interesting discussions on theology I’ve ever had were with fellow atheists. In my experience the vast majority of believers are completely ignorant of the subject. Apparently you aren’t meeting the right atheists. You are not the first to suggest a more general approach to teaching atheism.
Dan Dennett made a similar suggestion: teach philosophy and history of religion in school. If you think Christians don’t like Darwin, you should see their reaction to that one. It not just that they do not want their children exposed to the mention of any other religion. The same people who support creationism also think we’re a bunch of commie homo satanist freaks who want to teach their children beastiality. And as they are already convinced that public education is itself a liberal plot to kidnap their children, it’s pretty much all we can do right now just to get our own kids taught real science–and that only because the other stuff is illegal.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 8, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Real science? Is there any other kind? But like a gteat many people, you sequester science from any other sort of knoweledge. Would you deny them the breadth of the humanities for fear of it containing elements of religion? I understand why we Americans are skittish about religion. I am too, but I advocate a different solution: science is not the “solution” to religion, and atheists need to move beyond that naive assumption.
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 Me 
 September 9, 2010 at 11:35 am
> science is not the “solution” to religion
Perhaps not science per se, but certainly the scientific approach: never accept anything based only on faith tradition or authority, and always ask for objective arguments supporting the assertion. No religion stand this test, and therefore the rational behaviour is not to believe. Believing in (any) god or is exactly just as unjustified as believing in Santa Claus…

 steph 
 September 9, 2010 at 1:50 pm
I always think the Father Christmas analogy is poor. We know all about the origins of Father Christmas, and it’s a fairly harmless story, whereas we don’t know all about the origins of the universe and do not fully understand all the reasons which make people believe in gods or the nature of the social sub groups which perpetuate these beliefs.

 Rich R 
 October 1, 2010 at 10:01 pm
The reason you think the Santa analogy is poor seems to be because you misunderstand what is and isn’t similar.. You completely miss what’s being compared. Santa is to god as being magical toy giver is to magical everything giver. known or unknown cosmology does not make the analogy any weaker. Knowing a lot about the history of the santa myth does not mean he is capable of magical time travel and gift giving. Similarly, what we know or don’t know about the making of the universe does not make pulling it all out of a magical hat any more likely.
But it’s even simpler than all that. They are both stories you absorb when young, trusting and gullible. But then when you really think about them, they both seem like elaborate fictions. At the very least, the first one should make you examine evidence a little closer in the future.

 steph 
 October 1, 2010 at 10:33 pm
The analogy is poor because all analogies are basically false. When I was very young, before I caught ‘him’ in the act, I believed in Father Christmas. He was indeed the filler of my stocking right down to the orange, he patiently listened to my wish which I whispered up the chimney every Christmas Eve and then generously granted it the next morning. And he spent the rest of the year helping poor people and making presents for the following Christmas. How could I not believe? But I never believed in God. He was horrid.
(My mother still believed in God in those days … before I converted her later … but I never believed because he was horrid and didn’t do any nice, among other things.)

 steph 
 October 2, 2010 at 10:16 am
Actually I forgot to include my 5 years old rational argument for my believing in Father Christmas. If I behaved, which I did, he rewarded me. But when I asked where the world came from and why were we here, there didn’t seem any satisfactory reason for this ‘God’ to create a world, in which so many people didn’t believe in him, in which he made it rain and the earth quake and people died, he let people kill each other, and possibly even tortured people in hell. And what did he do before… and all those stars at night, what was out there? No questions were answered in the same sensible way that Father Christmas questions were. There really didn’t seem a helluvalot of point to a ‘God’ and I remember the Jesus story as just being plain silly as God’s son – sent to be sacrificed in the end. No way. And fundamentally, there was no proof. Resurrection? Really? No presents, just a nasty old world – with some nice things in it of course.
So there is absolutely no similarity in believing in Father Christmas and believing in a ‘God’. God demands trusting despite no evidence, Father Christmas provides the evidence every Christmas until he blows it when I caugt my mum and my older siblings drinking his port and gobbling up all the gingernuts left out for him with my filled stocking spilled all over the table.

 
 

 Mark Fournier 
 September 8, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Actually, I don’t even think they’re addressing the “solution” to religion, just trying to get their kids a proper science education, and filling in the gaps in humanities at home. It’s an imperfect approach, well short of a solution, but according to the demographics of belief, I suspect that this is the best that most hope for–and even then, it’s an uphill struggle.
It isn’t that we dislike or don’t value the humanities, or are even skittish about religious education, but that any attempt to weigh in concerning the humanities will be seen as ideological warfare. Witness the historical revisionism that has just been introduced in Texas. It was strongly opposed, but we just don’t have the numbers. We fight where we must, we win where we can, but only in science do we have the force of the law, and even that is expensive. We do push for what you suggest. We just can’t win there at the moment.
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 Mark Fournier 
 September 8, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Sorry to post again so soon, but something I’ve been chewing on for a while suddenly raises itself as appropriate to the topic. I have become convinced that the majority of the populace–anywhere from 50 to 70%–simply does not care about religion at all, and avoids engagement by conforming to the majority view, or what they deem to be the majority view. Hence, the Christian majority in America, the atheist majority in Europe. Conformity simply follows the loudest voice. The 25% of enthusiastic believers in America are enough to swing the conformist populace, who pay lip service to religion out of a vague fear that God will get them if they don’t. The conformists resent atheists not because they challenge deeply held beliefs, but because atheists raise questions they have no desire to think about. This is actually good news, because atheists are not up against 90%, but about 25%. In light of this, the atheist bus ads, “There is probably no God, now stop worrying and get on with your life,” were not shallow and stupid at all, but brilliantly addressed the concerns of the conformists, who really just want to get on with their lives and don’t give a damn about theology. It also means that well meaning defenders of faith who think they are defending moderate believers are actually defending the extremist fringe that they are conforming to.
The relevance to this topic is that pushing for the teaching of humanities faces not one group of opponents, but two. The first is the extremist fringe who wants a monopoly on all such topics, but the second is the conformist majority who does not consider such topics worth their time. They just want their kids to get a job, and they don’t think the humanities will help them do that. How do you convince them?
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 Tristan D. Vick 
 September 13, 2010 at 9:54 am
Atheism is not an equivalent belief system to theism. It’s the natural state of realization after the failure of Christianity (or other failed God hypotheses); therefore is the rejection of such a “belief system.”
I don’t think you can claim to study the rejection of a system which arises from the failure of the system to begin with.
You may better phrase it to encompass the study of what else atheists may believe.
Atheists hold various beliefs systems and philosophical views, so it’s sort of weird to bunch these various perspectives into an orthodox categorization of “belief.”
We may be able to study what atheists commonly believe, but we can’t study atheism in any sense which would not be bordering on the confused. But ‘what atheists commonly believe’ could also be summed up nicely with the word ‘philosophy’.
So why not just stick with that?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 13, 2010 at 10:07 am
Thanks, Tristan. Of course I agree that atheism is not a “system,” but a perspective, or a variety of perspectives. But does its entire content stand or fall in relation to theism (or theisms, since I think theism is also a variety of perspectives). I don’t think it can be summed up in the word “philosophy,” since philosophy encompasses a great deal more than atheism and though many atheists would disagree the arguments for God’s existence, metaphysics, and “religious” philosophies would have to be included. I agree that Christianity is finished, but I suggest many people do not feel that atheism is a natural consequence of acknowledging that.
Reply

 steph 
 September 13, 2010 at 1:48 pm
“..Christianity is finished, but I suggest many people do not feel that atheism is a natural consequence of acknowledging that.” Exactly – atheism is a very broad variety of perspectives including those who have never consciously rejected any theistic beliefs as they have never been believers of anything in the first place. As these beliefs have been revealed to them they have just never chosen to adopt them. Additionally there are some atheists who have never actually necessarily pursued the nature of their nonbelief. For many self identifying atheists, there is no single philosophy or necessarily any rejection of belief.

 
 

 chenier1 
 September 22, 2010 at 6:08 pm
A little late, but I was moved to comment having attended the RSA event ‘After New Atheism: Where now for the God debate?’ here in London last night.
The audience had its fair share of those outraged by the very idea that it might be possible that the New Atheism project might not be A Good Thing, but the bit which depressed me most of all was the discovery that, in New Atheist circles, the mere statement ‘I am an atheist’ is in itself considered sufficient grounds to win a round of applause.
Admittedly, since they appear to believe that professing atheism is such certain proof of their intellectual stature, hence the round of applause, that they do not actually have to provide anything in the way of reasoned discourse, much less evidence to base their reasoned discourse on.
So they didn’t.
I suspect, unkindly, that they couldn’t even if they had spent decades attempting to acquire those skills; the people who drink the Koolade were not terribly bright in the first place. But it was still pretty scary to see such extraordinary ignorance being touted as knowledge; forcing myself to sit through the ‘questions’ section most definitely ranked as taking one for the team…
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 chenier1 
 September 28, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Coming back to my last post on this; on rereading it I realised that I had been so traumatised by the experience of taking one for the team that I actually omitted an entire clause from in an otherwise sensible statement.
I would be really grateful if you just recognised this as the normal workings of PTS
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 Should Atheism be Studied? (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 November 1, 2010 at 9:04 am
[...] "Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man, than by this; that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it, within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened, by the consent of others…." That is not a trick question. Atheism to have any intellectual standing in the world must be studied, like any other subject. The stumbling block for doing this, most atheists will allege, are those pesky Chr … Read More [...]
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 Should Atheism be Studied? « The New Oxonian says:
 March 22, 2011 at 8:57 pm
[...] "Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man, than by this; that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it, within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened, by the consent of others…." That is not a trick question. Atheism to have any intellectual standing in the world must be studied, like any other subject. The stumbling block for doing this, most atheists will allege, are those pesky Chr … Read More [...]
Reply

 Larry Moran 
 March 25, 2011 at 10:02 am
Lots of people don’t believe in the Hindu gods. Do you think we should study non-Hinduism in school? Do you think that you and I and our Buddhist friends will agree on the subject matter? (I am an atheist.)
Lots of people don’t believe in Jesus. Should we teach about non-Christianity? What is the culture of non-Christianity? What are its ethics and values? Do all non-Christians worship capitalism and read the Kama Sutra?
Do you see how silly this is?
Lots of people don’t believe in any of the gods. Why on Earth would you believe that all of us share the same ethics and values? Why would we share the same culture? Some of us live in Canada (me) and others live in South Vietnam or Nigeria.

The atheist role is to insist that knowledge is not a grand and beautiful tapestry but the story of doubt and the role of doubt in the wider story of human achievement. Can we not teach that? Should we not teach that?
The question isn’t whether atheism “can” be studied, but when atheists are going to come down from the rooftops and begin making telescopes for the rest of us. That is hard work. That is the real challenge.
You are confused about the difference between the lack of belief in gods (atheism) and other things like skepticism, humanism, scientism, materialism, etc. etc.
You arguments would make much more sense if you could focus on one of those positions rather than trying to cram all atheists into a single ethical, cultural, scientific, melting pot.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 25, 2011 at 11:20 am
If I agreed with your definition of atheism as an end in itself I would agree with the rest of what you write, Larry. But you reduce atheism to a matter of “not believing in the gods,” and then ask whether the study of “not x, y z,” are fit matters for study. The answer is that religions are never studied in terms of an acceptance of their propositional value (i.e., whether their gods exist) but as a matter of cultural forms. It doesn’t matter whether the Hindu gods exist, or anyone else’s gods from Zeus to Yahweh, all of whom I am happy to say do not exist. The point is, Hinduism exists, Greek and Roman religion exists, Christianity exists (even if Jesus didn’t) and these are the phenomena that serious scholars and students of religions study. I understand your argument: it derives from a Dawkinsism about most people being atheists about 99% of the gods who have existed and some going one god farther. That is a good attention grabber, but has nothing to do with my plea for greater attention to subject matter, unless as a kind of scientific apriorism you want to deny the validity of such study because you think its objects are expressly false. It also points to the fatal flaw in the Dawkins’ witticism: what is the value of atheism if its objects are expressly false? I have actually taken such a position in debates, but never thought it was a strong position. http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/hoffmann-v-swinburne-is-there-a-god/
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 March 25, 2011 at 1:53 pm
As much as I haven’t spent much time outside the religions I left, I think major religions and certainly families of beliefs are valuable things to study.
The Old and New Testaments are worth knowing word for word if you can when you’re living in America. Knowing the Quran and modern context might clarify some of my confusion about why Muslim nations are the way they are. As of now, I’m guessing that a fundy is a fundy is a fundy and that is just a guess.
If the historical perspective doesn’t do it for you, the literary perspective might. It’s history with window dressing but myths become public narratives become scripts Dr. Eric Bern style. People live out figurative narratives in their choices. People act on what we call heroic and noble and good and so forth. Also, it helps us identify characters we won’t recognize but are ubiquitous to the Hindu or Muslims so we can more appreciate their Shakespeares.
Lastly, I think religious education is the silver bullet for making atheists or at least more reasonable believers. Dr. Author is right that atheists need an education. Who doesn’t?
So ought we teach people every little thing? Yes we should. I can’t say we have time or resources though.
Reply
 

 religionandmore 
 April 6, 2011 at 4:35 pm
I haven’t got the time to read around on your site just now, but it appears very interesting. You may some posts on my blog of interests, and indeed my forthcoming article – “Consciousness Raising: The critique, agenda and inherent precariousness of contemporary Anglophone Atheism” – in the May 2011 edition of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions.
Looking forward to ploughing my way through this soon. Cheers, Chris
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Arrest This Man
by rjosephhoffmann

And his little Dove, too. With predictable ghoulish clarity, the American media is goading the Reverend Terry Jones to follow through with his Koran bonfire on September 11th, while politicians (both kinds) and religious leaders of all stripes are urging him not to do it.
Of course, there is no story if he doesn’t do it–and media hate that. And if it’s called off he will be called a coward for capitulating to the “supporters” of a religion he has t-shirted as “of the Devil.” Jones has stated that if Jesus was alive he would light the first match. And he has said, as all cultic leaders do, that a gunfight with the police wouldn’t faze him and his followers: “We’re prepared to die for what we believe in.” Echoes of another Jones, another catastrophe.
Mr Jones is all the usual cultic suspects rolled into one. He is a gay-basher, a hate-monger, and a crusader for the old time religious value of intolerance.
He founded the Dove World Outreach Center as a front for his hate-inducing sermons and grandstanding.
He is a Christian Triumphalist with a clear millennial vision, which he saw previewed on Septmber 11, 2001: the first fiery signs that the Antichrist was entering the world. He considers the pastors and priests organizing “prayer” and loaves of bread protests around him “lily livered Christians” for failing to stand up to the the threat of Islam. –Although it is not clear why, if Islam betokens the end-time, Mr Jones would want to oppose it: in his theology anyway, it’s the last act in a very big plan wrought by God himself.
And what do Gainesville officials do? Besides praying and dissuading, they have denied Mr Jones a burn permit. Perhaps the next recourse might have been for him to order a hundred porta-potties to the parking lot of the Church?
But no, Jones says the burning will go ahead as planned. There’s something, as every Klansman knows, about a fire.
Meanwhile, we are all missing the point and the President of the United States is missing an opportunity. The same president who personally intervened in a squabble between a fumbling Harvard professor and a Cambridge cop when the former locked himself out of his house is staying away from this one.
Despite the fact that the country is in wars with Muslims all over ther world, both hot and cold, and that the burning of Korans is likely to be seen as the most vicious symbolic attack on the Islamic faith since Urban II called the First Crusade.
There will be riots, there will be murders and bombings, there will be dead Americans and others. All because one undereducated self-ordained cowpoke took refuge in the First Amendment’s free expression clause.
Loaves of bread, prayer marches and picket signs–”good religion” vigorously expressed–are not going to have an effect on this donkey of a man so deeply out of touch with modern religion that he may as well be Osama bin Laden’s cavemate.
Mr President: You are a lawyer. You know the Constitution. You know the difference between hate speech and incitement. You know the line is thin, but that once it is crossed the damage cannot be undone.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes. During my time in Pakistan, in 2009, the mere rumour that some Christians had “desecrated” pages of the Koran led to disaster.
Four women, a man and a child died as Muslim militants set fire to Christian houses in the town of Gojra. Two men died later of gunshot wounds. Houses were burned and streets strewn with debris as people fired at each other from rooftops. There were bloody riots throughout the country. Then it was “revealed” that the rumours which led to the unrest were false and probably started by some children.
But Mr Jones is real. He will use real matches and real (if doubtless inexpensive) copies of the Koran. This very dangerous man has publically announced his intention to flout the law and to cause riots, even gunfights. He has already cried fire–real fire–in the crowded theater of global religious tension.
Mr President: Arrest this man. Do not turn this discussion over to political theorists, Constitutional talking-heads and interfaith tweeps.
If the dignity of Henry Louis Gates was important to you and the chance to be seen defusing a “racial situation,” this is infinitely greater and a thousand times potentially more harmful.
Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church. Be seen to be doing something courageous in this instance.
Your top general, not known for emotionalism, has already announced the consequences on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. But it will spread–you should pardon the expresion–like wildfire. You will have let it happen.
You will be criticized, but your critics won’t prevail in this argument: you are trying to prevent loss of life. You are not trying to save Korans.
If you do not arrest this man, Christians in Pakistan, Lebanon, and corners of the Islamic world will be in jeopardy. Some will be killed; churches will be torched.
If you do not do this, American-Muslim relations, already lying in the dust will suffer an unimaginable blow. And Muslim Americans will consider you weak and treacherous.
Please, Mr President: show us this man in handcuffs and a U.S. marshall doing his sworn duty before Saturday.
Thank you.
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Published: September 8, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Barack Obama : Burnakoranday : Dove World Outreach Center : First Amendment : Florida : Gainesville : hate speech : Terry Jones ..
8 Responses to “Arrest This Man”

.
 Rex 
 September 8, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Four women, a man and a child died as Muslim militants set fire to Christian houses in the town of Gojra. Two men died later of gunshot wounds. Houses were burned and streets strewn with debris as people fired at each other from rooftops. There were bloody riots throughout the country. Then it was “revealed” that the rumours which led to the unrest were false and probably started by some children.
So, would you say that the violent barbarians are at fault for failing to control themselves, or would you say that they are blameless (because they are not capable of being civilized), and instead it was the fault of the false rumors?
Don’t get me wrong, I detest the course of action that this delusional nutjob has undertaken, but as long as it is legal for Unites States flags to be burned as a symbol of free expression in a free country, then I would say that no mere book can be placed above that symbol.
I think that a more appropriate tactic would be to burn a copy of every major religious text as a demonstration against religious extremism of any kind. September 11 would be an appropriate day for such a demonstration.
It is not the provocative expression that must be stopped, but the violent reaction to it. If Muslims react with violence in this case, then they are demonstrably NOT a religion of peace.
Reply

 steph 
 September 8, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Very important and urgent, well said, and may it be heard. Please arrest this Islamophobic Pyromaniac, please Mr Obama! It’s his responsibility now isn’t it? And failing that, (time is short!) please America, make a citizens’ arrest. Before Saturday. That misinterpreted, abused ‘free expression’ clause ought to be taken out of the First Amendment. It’s been so badly applied and now its abuse is potentially cataclysmic.
Reply

 Rex 
 September 8, 2010 at 2:10 pm
I believe that this act is provocative, and it is very bad P.R. but to limit constitutionally guaranteed free speech as a response to terror is not the way to combat terror.
If constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression is suspended in this case, then terror and the fear of violence wins, and democracy and freedom of expression loses. As a nice side bonus, radical Islam exerts even more power over the world.
I know that this an extreme case, but it is the extreme case that make us take our values seriously.
Reply
 

 James F. McGrath 
 September 8, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Arresting him may be called for. For what it’s worth, I’m hoping that a lot of Christians and people in general can get behind the idea of having a “Read the Qur’an Day” as an alternative to “Burn the Qur’an Day.” This seems like it could be a good way to acknowledge the free speech of others with whom we disagree, while using our freedom to say something very different, and hopefully loudly enough that we too will be heard.
Even those who strongly disagree with things they read in the Qur’an can and should participate. It isn’t “Read and agree with everything you read” day but “Reading and disagreeing is better than burning” day.
I’ve also set up a Facebook event for this, to make it easier to spread the word.
But you may already have a competing “arrest this man” event that conflicts… :-)
Reply

 steph 
 September 8, 2010 at 2:41 pm
That’s a good plan James, but while I appreciate your good intentions, they won’t negate the effects of that man’s pyromaniac actions. I am very concerned that if he is allowed to carry out his plan, you can guarantee there will be a fatal backlash. That’s why I cannot understand why he has not already been arrested for being at the very least a public nuisance, and I sincerely hope that a responsible American citizen will take time out from reading the Qur’an, to arrest this man before he burns the rest on Saturday.
Reply
 

 MKR 
 September 8, 2010 at 2:34 pm
It looks as though y’all haven’t seen the television advertisement for this affair (WARNING: contains satire):
BURN A QURAN DAY (A Tragical Church Ad From DC Douglas)
Reply

 steph 
 September 8, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Great. That sort of ‘hilarious’ easy mockery has no benefits and has the potential to make things worse.
Reply
 

 Red Mann 
 September 16, 2012 at 1:29 pm
That’s right R. Joseph we should cave into terrorism and give them what they want; restricting our freedom of speech to things that don’t upset their precious feelings. Like it or not, you don’t get to decide what is or isn’t free speech, the courts do by interpreting the 1st amendment. Since the courts have ruled that the disgusting actions of the Phelps family are consider covered by the 1st amendment, then how is it that can you decide that actions of the disgusting “Rev” Jones is any less protected?
 Where would you draw the line and what criteria would you use?
 Religious beliefs run the gamut from mildly silly to life threatening. We should not allow any of them to have any control over us. What the hell are our freedoms worth if we are willing to give them up in the face of danger?
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. ” B. Franklin Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin (1818).
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“Greatest Theologian Since Aquinas”: Pope on Hawking
by rjosephhoffmann

September 7th proclaimed Feast Day; new book added to Bible

At a private conclave with key members of the Curia, Pope Benedict XVI praised the recent announcement by Professor Stephen Hawking that “God was not needed for the creation of the universe.” The conclusions are outlined in Hawking’s recently published book, The Grand Design

Benedict
Speaking in Italian, the pontiff announced that the full theological implications of Hawking’s judgement were still being reviewed, “But our first impression is that Professor Hawking continues in the tradition of his famous Cambridge predecessors, the Nominalists.”

Head of the Vatican Observatory, Father José Gabriel Funes, also praised Hawking’s discovery. “The early theologians spoke in a manner appropriate for their time,” He said,”but Professor Hawking has actually given a name to what—in traditional language—we have been calling God: Gravity. This now helps us solve the problems of universals and particulars that stretched from Plato to Roscellinus. What Professor Hawking has revealed (if that is not too strong a word) is that universals do exist and that we call these the laws of physics.”
There was no immediate response from senior protestant theologians on Hawking’s statement. The Reverend Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham, claimed never to have heard of Hawking or Roscellinus. “I’ll have our staffers look into it,” Graham is reported to have said.

Universals, only guessed at before
Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, reached for comment in his London office, said “Of course the Jews have known this for along time, the name-thing I mean, but we weren’t supposed to tell.”
“We have puzzled for centuries over why there is something rather than nothing,” Father Funes continued. “Now thanks to Professor Hawking, we know. Why am I not surprised that we’ve been standing on it all this time? That’s how God operates. Whether you say God is good  or Gravity is good amounts to the same thing. Keeps things from flying off in all directions. And I include morality in that”
In London, Lord Sacks agreed, “Funny: I just preached a sermon called “G-d doesn’t expect us to get it right all the time.”

Asked whether the discovery would have any impact on Catholic faith or teaching the head of the Vatican Congregation for the Faith, Bishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer said “I can’t imagine why it should. We may have to tweak a few translations, but key beliefs like “He came down from heaven,” or the Ascension will remain virtually untouched. We are also appointing a commission to investigate the relevance of Professor Hawking’s finding for doctrines such as the virgin birth and the salvation of mankind. These are small matters compared to the fact that we now know what God is,” he said.

Islamic reaction was cautious. Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i, Iran’s grand ayatollah, speaking through an interpreter, speculated that الجاذبية (gravity) might be an additional name of God, raising the traditional number of 99 to an even 100. “In this case. his revelation in falling buildings on September 11, 2001 was especially significant.” Khameni’s views were immediately rejected by Muslims around the world as “unrepresentative of what Muslims really think.”
In Rome, the pope ended the conclave with an announcement that Professor Hawking would receive the Vatican’s highest honor, “Doctor of the Church” a distinction normally reserved for saints, and that his book, The Grand Design, would be incorporated as the first book of a revised Bible, just ahead of Genesis.
In a final tribute, the Conclave agreed unanimously that September 7th, the official date of the book’s release, would be instituted as “The Feast of Holy Gravity” to commemorate the discovery of God’s name. “It places it nicely within proximity to a number of feasts where Gravity is commemorated, notably the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15,” Father Funes said.
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Published: September 11, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Grand Design : Physics : Pope Benedict : religion : Roman Catholicism : Stephen Hawking : Theology ..
17 Responses to ““Greatest Theologian Since Aquinas”: Pope on Hawking”

.
 Ophelia Benson 
 September 11, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I bet you had fun doing this one!
Reply

 Ron Krumpos 
 September 11, 2010 at 2:16 pm
In “The Grand Design” Stephen Hawking postulates that the M-theory may be the Holy Grail of physics…the Grand Unified Theory which Einstein had tried to formulate and later abandoned. It expands on quantum mechanics and string theories.
In my e-book on comparative mysticism is a quote by Albert Einstein: “…most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty – which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is probably the best known scientific equation. I revised it to help better understand the relationship between divine Essence (Spirit), matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and consciousness (fx raised to its greatest power). Unlike the speed of light, which is a constant, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. In this hypothetical formula, basic consciousness may be of insects, to the second power of animals and to the third power the rational mind of humans. The fourth power is suprarational consciousness of mystics, when they intuit the divine essence in perceived matter. This was a convenient analogy, but there cannot be a divine formula.
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 Ed Jones 
 September 13, 2010 at 10:38 pm
An extract from The Mind of God by Paul Davies, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The title was inspired by the last phrases of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time which reads in part: “If we discover a complete theory – - it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would truly know the mind of God.”
“All (complete theories) are founded on the assumption of human rationality: that we truly understand something only when it is “explained”. Yet it has to be admitted that our concept of rational explanation probably derives from our observations of the world and our evolutionary inheritance. Is it clear that this provides adequate guidance when we are tangling with ultimate questions? Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense? This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless, only that an explanation of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought. There will always be truth that lies beyond,that cannot be reached from a finite collection of axioms.
 Is their a route to knowledge — even “ultimate knowledge” — that lies outside the road of rational scientific inquiry and logical reasoning? Many people claim there is. It is called mysticism. Most scientists (and many theologians) have a deep mistrust of mysticism. This is not surprising as mystical thought lies at the opposite extreme to rational thought, which is the basis of the scientific method. In fact, many of the world’s finest thinkers, including some notable scientists such as Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Eddington,and Jeans, have espoused mysticism. Mysticism is no substitute for scientific inquiry and logical reasoning so long as this approachm can be consistently applied. It is only in dealing with ultimate questions that science and logic may fail us.” More later.
“
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 Ron Krumpos 
 September 13, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Ed, I agree with you. Theories and rational thought have many limitations. Direct experience and suprarational consciousness move beyond both. The latter are broader in scope, but are usually temporary. Living in constant awareness of the oneness of all life may be called “the greatest achievement in life.” But then…these are just words.

 Ed Jones 
 September 16, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Ron,
 This comes after your reply but here it is.
 No I have not but I welcome your contributions on this strange site. Your blog is superior.
 There is an interesting review of The Greand Design by Roger Penrose the Oxford mathematicism who adopts Platonism. He writes in the context of an experience at a dinner party in California in early 1970. He writes in part: “Sitting at the head of my table intent on getting a rise out of those present, Hawking made three remarkable (bold) assertertions” seeming to suggest unsettling behavior from a responsible scientiest. Penrose sees the M-theory as a “fundamentally incomplete development”- illustrating Hawking’s stange sounding philosophical standoint of theory-dependent realism.” Penrose’s concluding statement: “M-theory enjoys no observational support whatever”. The site is FT.com The Grand Design.

 Ron Krumpos 
 September 16, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Ed, I had previously read Penrose’s review. He and Hawking have been friendly adversaries for years.

 

 steph 
 September 16, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Ron – “when you assume you make an ass out of me” was made famous by Oscar Wilde, who although very witty, was strictly speaking Irish from Dublin, and not “a British comedian’”.
Reply

 Ron Krumpos 
 September 16, 2010 at 2:27 pm
You have read my book! Good. I first heard that on Benny Hill and he illustrated it on a blackboard: ass u me circling each. My apologies to Oscar Wilde.

 Ron Krumpos 
 September 16, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Oscar Wilde once said: “People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.”
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Nobel physicist, in 1959 invited me to the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory. He introduced me to mysticism and the universality of the Universe. Chandra once said “God is man’s greatest creation.” He wasn’t questioning God just people who shape God to their preferred image.

 
 

 steph 
 September 11, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Sensational satire, this is hilarious. If only it could be true – the Vatican embrace it!! Humilitation for Hawking (or rather Dr [St]Hawking of the Church- serve him right for being so hasty – ‘no need for God’ indeed. Nominalist? Ha! As you suggest elsewhere, let us be devoted to the ‘Great God Gravity (G3?, or in Catholic, Deo Gravitas)’. I’ve always wondered how to pronounce ‘G-d’ by the way. Whatever we call ‘God’ amounts to the same thing. Keeps things from flying off in all directions. They just go down. ‘We now know what God is’. G3. How on earth can G3 have anything to do with the virgin birth? The seed descends into Mary of course. Iran’s grand ayatollah’s response is ingenious – and wicked. Anyway I wonder if it is Hawking who is not needed. But then we wouldn’t have had this article. And surely that makes it all worthwhile…
…although from Tigger’s perspective, as the tree flew past him and he crashed to the ground, the tree fell up.
x
Reply

 Charles Stevens 
 September 11, 2010 at 3:25 pm
The simple fact is that Professor Hawking should return to the black hole that god made for him since he advances no argument beyond those offered many years ago by the fakers Laplace and Lagrange. For the uninformed mathematical physicists, those who don’t know up from down (and these are the vast majority), “god” is the nickname among mathematicians for one Kurt Gödel .
 (See discussion on “Is it possible that black holes do not exist? ” on Physics Forums
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=421491 for relevant citations.)
 In any case all rational scientific discourse has been effectively banned since the illegal shutdown of the first international scientific association and journal in 1837 by the Duke of Clarence, Ernest Augustus. See Percy Byssh Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy for a pertinent depiction of the Duke of Clarence, the face behind Castlereagh. A simple google search for “(“magnetic union” OR “Magnetischer Verein”) AND (“Göttingen Seven” OR “Göttinger Sieben”) gauss weber” shows that there has been no serious discussion of that action on the subsequent development of scientific practice.
 We must assume therefore that the concurrent and congruent Augustin-Louis Cauchy scientific method of theft, assassination, plagiarize at leisure remains hegemonic. Chuck Stevens 571-252-0451 stevens_c@yahoo.com
Reply

 steph 
 September 11, 2010 at 3:27 pm
…and now I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s Op. 49. Just seemed fitting. Although it might be the wrong war… Still stirring.
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 September 15, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Im take it that the “right war” is the one advising “ignore the believers” such as the likes of scientists Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Eddington and Jeans or am I missing something?
Reply

 steph 
 September 15, 2010 at 11:04 pm
there is never ever a ‘right’ war, and yes. :D

 
 

 Barrett Pashak 
 September 13, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Finally, something actually funny here. Nicely done.
Reply

 Ron Krumpos 
 September 15, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Ed,
Have you read “Quantum Questions / Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists,” edited by Ken Wilber (Shambhala 1984, 2001)? All of them were supporters of mysticism.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 September 18, 2010 at 3:31 pm
More of my September 13 comment:
“If we wish to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of “understanding” from that of rational explanation. Possibly the mystical path is a way to such understanding. I have never had a mystical experience myself, but I keep an open mind about the value of such exxperiencs. Maybe they provide the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosophy can take us, the only possible path to the Ultimate. We, who are chilldren of the same universe — animated stardust — can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules on which it runs. What does it mean? I cannot believe that our exoixtence in this universe ia a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvment is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the uiverse has generated self-consciousness. This can be no trival, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are tru;y meant to be here.”
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Pater Noster: The Very Ordinary of the Mass
by rjosephhoffmann

In the spirit of liturgical upgrade, I offer the Dad Prayer (“Hey Dad”) to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the adjournment of Vatican II (December 8, 1965).

Hey Dad!
You’re there and I’m here.
 It seems to turn out this way,
 I guess,
 You being so far away,
 and me so, well,
 Here.
I love you dad.
 I think you’re the greatest
 Dad ever.
 Wish you’d come home.
 Because I’ve only heard the stories,
 And I wish you were
 Here.
For one thing,
 we can’t afford groceries,
 Not even bread.
 We owe everybody money.
 The phone rings all the time,
 Those 800-PayMe numbers
 But we’ll be ok
 for a day or two.
Mom jokes that
 she could do tricks
 And I could hustle, brick mainly,
 But Mom says No,
 your father wouldn’t approve
 If he were
 Here.
 Really.
What can anyone say about the Council that Tom Lehrer didn’t say then? Its effects now extend from liturgical catastrophe, membership drift, doctrinal torpor, the end of ecumenism, to, metaphorically speaking “Belgium.” If it’s Tuesday, it must be pedophilia.
Occasionally the Vatican tries to get real again about the question of renewal, as it (hilariously but inadvertently) did in 2008 when it decided to “modernize” the Seven Deadly Sins. A few years earlier, the no doubt ill-advised John Paul II, proving the Church did not sit still, had added a few mysteries to the Rosary–perhaps the most numbing devotion ever created in the name of religion–and pasted a superfluous “fifteenth station” to the stations of the cross thereby corrupting the drama of the whole exercise. (I don’t like devotions mind you, but I like my metaphors unmixed and tragic endings unmachinated).

Old Mass
The “New Deadlies” were flat and pedestrian, fixed in the greasy nebula between things no one can disagree are “evil” (like poverty) and things that many people think are beneficial–like genetic research: To jog your memory:
1. genetic modification
2. carrying out experiments on humans
3. polluting the environment
4. causing social injustice
5. causing poverty
6. becoming obscenely wealthy
7. taking drugs
So far, no Dante has arisen to do them justice.
These were then followed by a forgettable (bet you already have) list of “Driver’s Commandments” of which the top five were:
1. You shall not kill.
2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.
5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.

Never mind the lack of parallelism, the change of what grammarians call “voice,” and the fact that the “commandments” sound as though they were pulled from a fortune cookie. The real question is what level of authority this putrid prose is claiming–since it looks, for all the world, like the nakkie-doodles of Dominican nuns at coffee rather than an amendment to the Sinai code. Presumably, Moses could not fire his writer, but the pope could have sacked this one.
One of the reasons I quit the Church was because its custodians had lost all sense of beauty and what used to be called the lex orandi–the parallelism between what was prayed (as in the Latin mass, which language was Latin because it conveyed, it was thought, the timelessness of its object) and what was believed (lex credendi). The expression could be summarized just as easily by saying, If you believe what you say, say it as well as you can.
My theological crisis was real enough as an intellectual event, but was driven by yawpish liturgy, priests in a hurry to get to lunch, infantalized nuns who grew into postmenopausal monsters, catechism quizzes over meaningless propositions, and doctrinal lassitude enforced by officiants who were (as we now know) seeking other outlets for their spiritual energy. Of course they preyed on the young. What did an altar boy know? His spiritual dissolution and religious disappointment was years away–an appetizing certainty for a randy man in a cassock who’d already concluded his life is a masquerade.
The life of a bad priest is a life lived in the hypocrisy of unacknowledged gracelessness disguised under starched surplices. But this not-being-what-you-seem, we learned as kids, is how the devil behaved. Real evil comes as an angel of light. The specifics of the problem, even its extent,were not surprising: the symbolism was profound and somehow natural.
We are now being told by the crisis managers that measures are afoot to repay, pay and atone for the “moral transgressions,” though the matter of the suicides in Belgium is harder to put right (and transgression is such a paltry word for rape, isn’t it?).
But the Church seems determined to squander the whole treasury and the remaining good will before it says goodbye. It does this in the deflective way religions have of pointing to the church as a river of truth, a pure and certain stream that a few sick souls have polluted over the years. Implicitly they raise the question of why the whole river isn’t streaming sewage, and expect the answer, Because the source is basically good, and it is a magic river–it has the means to purify itself.
The image goes back to the earliest days of Christianity when the heretics were the offenders and it was their pissing in the stream the bishops worried about. They invented “orthodoxy” (theological truth) as their standard of purity, and the magisterium (teaching authority) of the church as the means of purification. This theological conceit–the essential purity of Holy Mother Church–makes it possible for bishops to talk about child abuse and advocates for women priests and contraception in the same document, as though the issues were simply different streams of pollution. It makes the Church itself the victim of impurity, not its source and thereby locates the problem outside the institution–an ogre that afflicts men (and women) as men, not because they are priests.
And maybe that is how it has to be: The Church will end a victim of bad ideas and bad expression, the mansion emptied of all goods and chattel, including plumbing, before the estate can be settled against an age that considers its moral witness hypocritical, its ethical positions medieval, and its liturgical compensations ludicrous and ugly.
An institution that has preached itself as the solution to the Fall should be the first to know about its contaminating effects–that’s what original sin was supposed to be all about. Instead, it seems to want to perpetuate its errors in re-worded doctrines, parsed definitions, and liturgy that instead of soaring skits shakily along the ground like a wounded bird.
When the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley reviewed the aesthetic effects of the Second Vatican Council in 1970, he decreed that a proof of God’s goodness is that he would be in his casket the next time he set foot inside the Latin-starved Catholic Church of Sharon, Connecticut. To bide the time he spied out (what were then) traditional Latin parishes in hard to find places. He dithered with the title of a never-quite-published book, Why I am a Catholic after deciding Why I am Still a Catholic was a bit too aggressive. There were a few attempts at resistance early on–Garry Wills Bare Ruined Choirs (1974) and Thomas Day’s (superb, under-read) Why Catholics Can’t Sing (1992), which targeted “church-wide narcissism [as] a serious threat to individuals as well as to the institution.” It was Garry Wills, in 2003 who finally wrote Why I am a Catholic, which after reading raises the question all over again.

Some people have said that the great tragedy of Church renewal, especially liturgical renewal at the time of Vatican II–was that it was done by committees, translated by accountants, implemented by guitar-stroking seminarians at Maryknoll and Weston, and passed off as authentic to a generation of illiterati before anyone knew the harm was done. There was no Cranmer, as there had been for the Anglicans. No Luther, as there had been for the Germans. There was a Babel of languages, not only one to do justice to. These were the seventies, man. Lift up your hearts. And up yours, too.
A Church that used to talk about its musical treasures, from Gregorian chant to Palestrina to Mozart, now had to admit that they had been packed in trunks and sent to the crypt until further notice.
There were no poets or great prosodists. In fact, the underlying and horrific assumption of the most radical reformers was that the age of poetry had passed and that the future of the Church was in paraphrase and simplification. Vatican II would produce no Boethius, no Aquinas (not a bad poet), nor any Dante to bring the two together in an poetic liaison. “Catholic” poetry after V-II got us the Berrigans with trenchant feel like this

So I pray, under
 the sign of the world’s murder, the ruined son;
 why are you silent?
 feverish as lions
 hear us in the world,
 caged, devoid of hope

At the risk of diagnosing what went wrong, it is that when Vatican II happened the issue was really no longer “renewal” anyway. It was belief. What was not fully grasped, at least not very vocally, was the “reality of distance”: that the translation of tenth- century ideas into sixteenth-century language at the Council of Trent was a piece of sponge cake compared to translating tenth-century beliefs into a twentieth century dominated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. The new project was seen to be re-wording faith for an age of skepticism, relativism, and doubt, but doubt is hard to paraphrase and the lexicon had not yet been developed. It still hasn’t. The era of soft truth had arrived.
It was the notion, held by some of the younger theologians and consultants, that if you squeezed the core ideas out of their old clothes, tarted them up a bit, made the people talk out loud instead of “following” the mass in their prayer books, and teach them a few tuneful protestant hymns, the pews would be bursting with new and returning mass-goers. It didn’t happen.

JFK funeral mass 1963
When John Kennedy died in 1963, his Latin Requiem Mass televised nationally to a curious country, pews were full all across America. When Robert Kennedy died in 1968, his funeral mass was conducted almost entirely in English, and the pews across America were emptying out. No one was singing. (Just like today). Perhaps it’s a tribute to the natural stoicism of Catholics–the folks that gave us purgatory because earthly pain isn’t enough–that they have tolerated the New Order of Mass while refusing to conform to its demand that they actively participate in it.
The revisers and reformers were silly enough to think that by playing with words and gestures, by letting Catholics hold hands at the Our Father, by scrapping Latin (“Let the angels have it,” I remember a youngish priest saying to me one day when I lamented its passing out loud), and getting a pop-rainbow of sexes and colours around a squared altar table–belief would follow.

Where's Father Waldo?
All would be renewed. (Hands up all you Catholics who remember the “Renew” banners rustling in the April breeze when Catholics went briefly charismatic in the 1980′s? “The vibrant singing,” the brochure said, “radical surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all parts of life, a strong adherence to the Gospel and the teachings of the Catholic Church, and the pursuit of strong friendships centered on Christ.”
I was startled recently to hear a younger (and still-observant) friend of mine, when I mentioned the “old church,” begin to describe how great she had felt at the Renew meetings of her teenage years: For her, that is the “old church.” Post-Vatican II experimentation is now Catholic nostalgia. Totally, I said, so as not to appear out of touch with developments of only twenty-five years ago.
The post-ecumenical saga of post-Vatican II Catholicism is a sad story of other denominations, less encumbered by tradition and canon law, rushing across the apses to embrace each other, smooth over theological differences, change polity, admit women and gays to their ordained ranks, while Catholicism remains stuck using the already dated references from 1963 to “our separated brethren” and excoriating changes in doctrine and ministry as things Jesus wouldn’t have wanted.
The mainline liberal protestant churches that had presented the best opportunity for dialogue in 1969 were blending with the one philosophy that Catholicism could not bargain with: secularism and humanism. Rebuffed as a crooked dealer, when the Church turned to find other dance partners, there were (of all people) the evangelicals, the Pentecostals, the charismatics: theologically unformed, liturgically and often personally offensive, but morally as fixed in place as the rock of ages. This was Catholicism at its weakest and most pleading and it is no accident that the moral-political alliance on questions like abortion, genetic research and divorce was forged between these theologically hostile groups after it became clear that the liberal among the separated brethren wanted nothing to do with Rome.
[Part One of III]
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Published: September 15, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholic Church : ecumenism : Liturgy : Novus Ordo : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Reform : Renew! : the Mass : Vatican II ..
6 Responses to “Pater Noster: The Very Ordinary of the Mass”

.
 steph 
 September 15, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Incredibly elegant and funny article (it gives me the impression of agility), but appallingly true. Silly liturgical boards – “Hey Dad” is far more realistic and really, perhaps all prayers should end in ‘really’. I’m glad that Tom Lehrer got so significant a mention for his unforgettable and astute Vatican Rag. I wonder if Moses had sacked his writer if we might all be Buddhist. Or Taoist or Jain. Of all the irrelevantly modernised seven deadly sins, I quite like the designation “financial gluttony” which naturally I despise. William F Buckley looks terrifyingly formidable and terribly profound, or maybe just profound if you’re not concerned about his conservative influence. And Father Waldo would provide a good facelift if he changed his affiliation, and he’s musical too. The church might be more human and probably a little bit safer for small children if both the priests and nuns were free to marry. I’m looking forward very much to Part II.
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 January 7, 2011 at 5:33 pm
A general cmment.
 The Quest for the historical Jesus beginning with Riemarus’ challenge “Search the Scriptures and see if Christianity is not based on a mistake.” Today, given our historical methods and knowledge, one is faced with the fact that the writings of the NT can no longer be assumed to constitute a proper canon. i.e. none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus as the early church understood apostolicity – thus they are not reliable sources for HJ reconstruction.
 Thus for the historian the Quest is a tight rope walk subject to the habitual limitations of consciousness. At each step the historian must avoid the powerful tendencies of the determinative effects of the enormous counterweight Christianity to overbalance on the one side of being over critical while on the other side of being too credulous. on both extremes, we experience the habits of cosciousness to develop biasies, on the first side to become fixed on the notion that there is no reliable Scritural source for witness to Jesus, while on the other side one cannot let go the possibility of yet finding sufficient evidence within the writings of the NT. Thus for both extremes, it becmes impossible to recognize an alternative Scriptural apostolic witness.
I cite one example to illustrate the effects of being over critical. The article: Milestones on the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Robert Funk. The section headed: Distinguishing the Histroical Jesus from the first Disciples, has the following: “Riemarus was the firt to draw the absolute distinction between what the HJ did and taught and the teachings and aims of Jesus’ disciples – - the distinctin he drew between the figure of Jesus and the view of his followers as reflected in the gospels stands as a lighthouse warning aginst the shoals of harmonization – - he accuses the gospel writers of conscious fraud, fanaticism and nmumerus contradictions.” Riemarus was witing under traditions mistaken belief that the gospels were authored by disciples or those closely associated with disciples. Thus in denigrating the gospel authors he denigrates the first disciples. So Fumk with his over critical conviction of the relative insignificance of the HJ, naively literally reads Riemarus. I believe that this goes far toward explaining the JS’s fateful conclusion that there is no reliable Scriptural witnes to the HJ.
Schubert Ogden (once Joe’s ‘intellectural hero’) writes: ” – - all appropriate Christian faith and witness are and must be apostolic – - one believes and bears witness with the apostles, solely on the basis of their prior faith and witness. But this is to say there is nothing in the least wrong with the early church’s criterion of apostolicity, however mistaken its historical judgment in applying this criterion. On the contary, the witness of the apostles is still rightly taken to be the real Christian norm, even if we today have to locate this norm not in the writings of the New Testament but in the earliest stratum of Christian witness accessible to us – - “. Should there be interest, I will be pelased to discuss this apostolic witness further.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 May 17, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Yes, its
 Reimarus not
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 May 20, 2011 at 12:38 pm
With no interest I will say no more about apostolic witness. My understanding that we experience habits of consciousness forming biases resulting from states of being overr critical applies as well to one’s ability to recognize NT apostolic witness.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 May 21, 2011 at 1:58 pm
To say, all of this secular critical fun over the NT may be no more than oggling ove an historical mistake, blinded by its comsequemt biases making it impossible to recognize the Scriptural alternative, the real source of apostolic witness.

 
 

 s. wallerstein 
 May 17, 2011 at 8:10 pm
You know the joke about Coca Cola and the Lord’s Prayer?
Coca Cola gets the idea that changing the Lord’s Prayer to “Give us this day our daily Coca Cola” would be great publicity. So they send their sales manager to the local bishop who offers the Church one million dollars to change it. The bishop becomes indignant: how do you dare to profane a prayer that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ!
Ok. So Coca Cola nows sends their executive vice president to talk to the Cardenal and he offers 50 million dollars. The Cardenals pauses and explains that unfortunately, the prayer is a very old tradition of the Church and that it cannot be modified, but in any case, he blesses Coca Cola.
So the Coca Cola CEO goes directly to the Pope. Holy Father, he says, here are 500 million dollars in unmarked bills if you change the damned prayer.
The Pope picks on a phone, dials a number and asks: what was the bakers’ last offer?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Is Religion Good?
by rjosephhoffmann

The Library at Alexandria: Hours, M-Th 9 am - 4 pm
You can vote on the question today at the Center for Inquiry website. That’s right, the people who offered you Blasphemy day and the Cartoon Cavalcade and the Campaign for Free Expression now want you to “take” a quiz! It’s simple: don’t do any research. Go with your gut:

On balance, is religion beneficial for humanity?
* Yes, definitely.
 * Yes, probably.
 * Probably not.
 * Definitely not.
 * Don’t know/can’t answer
I avoid such surveys because like this one they are usually loaded dice, like the ones we will be treated to by CNN or MSNBC this week asking whether we think Christine O’Donnell is a good witch or a bad witch.

Christine O'Donnell
They create the illusion that Big Media care about what you think, when they don’t, or that you have something interesting to contribute to a controversial topic, when you haven’t.
As I read this little MCQ I recollected (or perhaps in Lockean terms “I associated it from”) my eleventh grade classroom, when a nun asked, sniffing the air, “Who farted?” There is something very funny about hearing a heavily habited woman say “fart.” So funny that six of us wanted to take credit. And there is something even funnier about six people wanting recognition for one small event, five eager boys and one dishonest girl flapping their hands just to be told to find a toilet.
It doesn’t matter a fart however whether you think religion is beneficial to humanity or not. It is like asking if Houyhnhnms are beneficial to Yahoos.
“Religion” (to use a term that has become categorical for superstition and stupidity in the CFI lexicon) and humanity are joined like horse and carriage. Beneficial, therefore, to the extent that you want to be driven forward in history

Can't have one without the other....
Most people would want to begin by saying that religions gave us, directly or indirectly, primitive science.
But that isn’t the only criterion for benefit: Whether we are talking about Sumer, Mohenjo Daro or the ancient Babylonians or Aztecs, early astronomy, calendars, mathematical notation, literacy in the form of liturgy and prayers, and myths–religion is there.

Mohenjo Daro, Sindh (Pakistan) 2600BCE
Religion gave us the primitive (“priestly”) elites that shaped and modified scrawls and pictures into more familiar writing systems. In the west, through the Scholae monasticae at Padua, Bologna, Oxford, and Paris, religious life was responsible for the first universities and the very development of what we now call scholarship: systematic study of individual subjects. Learning. From writing we developed a copyist tradition; that is how learning in all fields was mediated. It is true that monks prayed a lot. But it is also true that they copied everything. That is why we have it.
The forerunners of what would become the sciences, the arts, philosophy, serious astronomy, letters and music are grounded in ideas of mystery and dignity that came from religion and were mediated by its institutions–not by hermit atheists in the hills above Rome just waiting for their chance to be heard. We all moan (and should) at Galileo’s fate, but almost never recall his conviction that his “instrument” would be useful for biblical interpretation.
And it isn’t just the early and medieval west where religion was hitched to learning. In pre-Islamic India, Vedic culture raised the idea of reading and teaching to the highest rank among the Brahmins. Islamic culture took leaps ahead when it encountered their mathematics, art, political organization and architecture, beginning in the eighth century CE.
In the Islamic world, the original idea of the madrasah was similar: al Azhar (10th century), al-Qayrawan and Timbuktu produced seats of learning, where the idea of religious duty propelled the learning of secular subjects like botany, biology and medicine, not to mention technical subjects like engineering and hydraulics. The Qayrawan mosque held the most complete collection of treatises on botany in the ancient world–in four different languages.

In a positive way, religion fueled the renaissance with amazing works of psychology and devotion–Pico’s Oration, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Hobbes’sLeviathan, More’s Utopia. Bacon wrote his Novum Organum, on scientific method, in 1620. Erasmus had published the first critical Greek edition of the New Testament in 1516. Both were made possible because the century prior to Erasmus, printing had become available throughout most of Europe. Newspapers, broadsides and Bibles were everywhere, on street-corners and in parish churches by 1611; but most people who wanted to know how to read learned to read the Bible. That is what German peasants and American slaves have in common.

Page from Gutenberg Bible, 1455
In a negative way, the creation of the printing press fueled the most important theological debates of the Reformation. At the long side of those debates, and also because of a pressing religious dilemma, a small edifice to learning was founded on the eastern shores of New England in 1636:

After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly gentleman and a lover of learning, there living among us) to give the one-half of his estate (it being in all about £ 1,700) toward the erecting of a college, and all his library. After him, another gave £ 300; others after them cast in more; and the public hand of the state added the rest. The college was, by common consent, appointed to be at Cambridge (a place very pleasant and accommodate) and is called (according to the name of the first founder) Harvard College.
To be honest, I am flummoxed that any organization that thinks it has anything serious or interesting to say about religion or secularism can be so persistently ignorant, so unashamedly dumb about details. Is there a model of historical development that has been kept from us? One in which religion plays no “beneficial” role? Has the Spirit of Light been imprisoned by the forces of faith ere these many centuries?
Alas, that last question is not entirely facetious. A lot of atheists follow a strange line of historical progress:
Ancient stuff, whatever
 Plato and Aristotle (secular humanists)
 The Dark Ages (Library of Alexandria destroyed by drunken monks)
 The Crusades (jury out: kept Muslims in their place)
 The Inquisition (bloody horrible intolerant religion at work)
 The Renaissance (not bad, but too much religious art)
 The Reformation (the what?)
 The Enlightenment (prisoners of conscience set free; America founded)
 Darwin (messianic age begins)
 Everything later,
 Except 9/11 (more bloody horrible religion at work)
And, no, the library at Alexandria was not destroyed by drunken monks. You have three choices: (a) Julius Caesar in 48BC, who underestimated what the burning of the Egyptian fleet would mean to buildings close to the harbour of Alexandria; (b) the Christian bishop Theophilus, in the process of Christianizing a pagan temple to Serapis (the popular story told by Gibbon and ever after by everybody else); or (c) the Muslim caliph Omar in 640CE. Omar allegedly was provoked to to this when he said, “These [books at Alexandria] will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, whereby they are superfluous.” It comes as no surprise that the source of this information is the thoroughly despicable Christian bishop, Gregory bar Hebraeus, who spent most of his idle time making up nasty stories about Muslims.
It is not often you get a choice of religions to blame for the destruction of all the world’s learning, which, by the way, Alexandria certainly wasn’t.
My strong recommendation is that this be the topic of CFI’s next pop quiz:
 Who do you think burned the Library at Alexandria? The only rule is, don’t consult any sources. Go with your gut.
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Published: September 21, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Catholic Church : Center for Inquiry : humanism : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : surveys ..
2 Responses to “Is Religion Good?”

.
 steph 
 September 22, 2010 at 10:35 am
This is an extraordinarily eloquent and phenomenally learned, entertaining and broad article. The eleven point parody of atheists is absolutely justified, and probably abysmally less burlesque than we’d like to believe.
Is the world good? What an extraordinarily ignorant and ludicrous question for such an enormous human phenomenon – historically sensationally so significant – demanding similar ignorance and ludicrousy of their respondents. Who are their respondents – would not the majority be atheists? Aren’t we going to have a particularly biassed result? In any case, having used the convenience of market research interviewing as a means of survival during my first time as a student, and falling back on it thereafter to supplement irregular and meagre income from theatres, I have witnessed the fickle nature of human replies to such an array of possibilities. I’ve had respondents flip from ‘definitely’ liking chocolate icecream to ‘not particularly’ liking it (as much as strawberry). And that was only on Tuesday. What happened the next day? They ate the whole container and slid to not liking ice cream at all. Surveys might be interesting for discovering that as many Dutch Catholics used contraceptives as Protestants did in the 1960s, or discovering how many people would prefer wind power to coal, but this current question is perfectly pointlessly ridiculous. Perhaps the result will give the CFI the self assumed authority to be even more hostile towards religion. But the results will necessarily be based on gut ignorance, dumbness of detail…. “It is like asking if Houyhnhnms are beneficial to Yahoos.” It is as much fantasy as Gulliver.
Brilliantly funny, detailed, knowledgeable, worldly and wise as usual…
x
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 woofin 
 September 22, 2010 at 9:53 pm
I think the skeptic movement does a lot of good promoting specific causes such as teaching evolution in the schools and beating down hoaxes. It does a very poor job in carrying on the continuity of Western humanistic culture.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Five Good Things about Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann

It seems I cannot win.

Meself
When I chart the vague, occasional and ambiguous virtues of religion (mainly historical) I am accused of being intellectually soft. When I tell atheists they run the risk of turning their social solidarity into tent revivals or support groups I risk expulsion from the ranks of the Unbaptized and Wannabe Unbaptized.
It is a terrible position to be in, I can tell you, and I have no one to blame but myself.
To make amends and win back my disillusioned readers I am devoting this blog to the good things about atheism.
As far as I can tell, there are five:
1. Atheism is probably right: there is almost certainly no God. At least not the kind of pluriform god described by the world’s religions. If there were, we would know it in the way we know other things, like potholes and rainbows, and we would know it not because of syllogisms that begin “All things that exist were created,” or through the contradictory revelations of competing sects.
We would know it because we are hardwired to know.

The weakest argument of all, of course, is existence since existence raises the question of God; it does not answer it. The difference between a god who is hidden (invisible), or does not wish to be known (elusive), or cannot be demonstrated rationally is the same thing as a God who may as well not exist. Not to assign homework but have a look at John Wisdom’s famous parable recited in Antony Flew’s essay, “Theology and Falsification,” (1968).
2.  Atheism is courageous. Not valorous perhaps, not deserving of medals. But it takes a certain amount of courage not to believe what a vast majority of other people believe to be true. You learned that much as a kid, when a teacher said to you, after some minor tragedy in the playground, “Just because your best friend decides to jump over a fence onto a busy road doesn’t mean you need to do it too.”
The pressure to believe in God is enormous in twenty-first century society, and all but irresistible in certain sectors of America–the fundamental international base line for irrationality. Having to be religious or needing not to seem irreligious is the greatest tragedy of American public life and a sure recipe for the nation’s future mediocrity. It dominates political campaigns and the way kids learn history in Texas.

Texas edits textbooks
Theological differences aside, what Muslims and Christians and other godfearers have in common is an illusion that they are willing to defend aggressively–in certain cases murderously.
Even when it does not reach that level of viciousness, it can make the life of the uncommitted, unfaithed and unchurched miserable. Atheists deserve credit for having to put up with this stupidity. That is bravery, defined as forbearance.
Many atheists realize that the fervour displayed by religious extremists has deep psychological roots–that history has witnessed its bloodiest moments when causes were already lost. The legalization of Christianity (312?) came within three years of the final assault against Christians by the last “pagan” emperor. The greater number of the wars of religion (1562-1592) occurred after the Council of Trent (adj. 1563) had made Catholic doctrine unassailable–written in stone–for Catholics and completely unacceptable for Protestants. The Holocaust happened largely because Rassenhasse flowed naturally from two done deals: worldwide economic collapse and Germany’s humiliation in the Great War of 1914-1918. The Klan became most violent when its utility as an instrument of southern “justice” was finished.

Most of the available signs suggest that religion will not succumb to creeping irrelevance in the next six months. Religions become violent and aggressive as they struggle for breath. The substitution of emotion and blind, often illiterate, faith in support of threadbare dogmatic assertions is part of this struggle. So is an unwillingness to accept any alternative consensus to replace the old religious one.
Atheism symbolizes not just unbelief in God but the nature of that alternative consensus. That is why atheism is especially opprobrious to belief in an a era when most questions are settled by science and investigation.
Yet even without the security of dogma, religions usually provide for the emotional needs of their adherents in ways that science does not. They have had centuries, for example, to convince people that the miseries endured in this life are simply a preparation for a better one to come. A purposeless world acquires meaning as a “testing ground” for initiation into future glory. There is no art of consolation for the atheist, just the world as it is. Granny may have lost the power of speech after her third stroke, but she knows there is a wolf behind the door: religion knows this instinctively.

Being an atheist may be a bit lonely, but better “Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” (And Socrates was courageous, too.)
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space. Atheists know that the world we live in is dominated by religion: spires, minarets, ceremonial prayers, political rhetoric and posturing, ethical discussion. I am not convinced (alas) that atheists are “brighter” than anyone else, but they have to imagine ungiven alternatives and worlds of thought that have not been handed to them by tradition and custom.
Imagination however is that two-way street between vision and delusion. The given myths and symbols of a culture are imposed, not arrived at or deduced, and if not imposed then “imparted” by traditions. Jung was wrong.

Collective Unconscious?
Skeptics and unbelievers from Shelley and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) to Richard Feynman, John Ellis, Ljon Tichy and Einstein in the sciences, Sir Michael Tippet, Bartok, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovitch in music, Bukoswki, Camus, Somerset Maugham, Joyce Carol Oates, Vonnegut in literature, have been imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, mental adventurers.
Far too often, unfortunately, atheists are the worst advocates for imagination.
They rather nervously limit their interest to the scientific imagination. They don’t see a connection between Monod and Camus. They consider their unbelief a “scientific” and “rational” position, not an imaginative one. When confronted with photographs of the Taj Mahal or recordings of Bach’s B-minor Mass, they point to shots from the Hubble telescope or (my personal favorite) soundtracks of earth auroral kilometric radiation.
Instead of owning the arts, they play the part of intellectual bullies who think poetry is for mental sissies.

Joyce Carol Oates
I have come to the conclusion that this is because they equate the imagination with the imaginary and the imaginary with the supernatural. The imagination produced religion, of course, hence the gods, but that does not mean that it is governed by religion, because if it were we never would have got round to science. The poet Charles Bukowski summed it up nicely in a 1988 interview: “For those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
4. Atheism is an ethical position. That does not make being an atheist a “moral” stance, but it does raise a question about whether it is possible to be good with God. Only an individual free from the commandments of religion and the threat of heaven and hell deserves credit (or blame) for his decisions, actions, and omissions. Atheists are required to assume that responsibility fully. Religious people are not.
This is why anyone who teaches his children that the story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament is a “moral fable” is just as bad as the fundamentalist who teaches it as history. What would you say about a brutish dog-owner who told his naturally stupid dog to piss anywhere but in the flower garden, then hied him to a shelter the minute he did what he couldn’t help doing to begin with? That is the story of Adam, without the benefit of two millennia of theology to disguise its simplest elements.
Bad Dog
Modern Christian theology has attempted to emphasize the love, mercy and compassion of this God: he is a God of second chances–redemption–after all.
But mainly the Christian message is little more than an attempt to rehabilitate God under the guise of teaching that it’s the humans who needed rehabilitating. They had to be given one more chance at the flowers in order to to show that God, after his initial temper tantrum, is really full of kindness and patience. That’s basically what the “New” Testament tries to do, after all, though in a highly problematical way.
At a basic level, an atheist is likely to detect that there is no ethical content to the stories of religion. The prototypes are Adam, the disobedient, Job, the sufferer, Noah, the obedient, and Abraham, the faithful.
But these figures are not ethical paragons. They are examples of the types of behavior religion requires. Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice. That is not the kind of good any rational being would aspire to–and one of the reasons certain interpreters, like Augustine, thought that what was squandered in Eden was reason. But ethics is about reflection, discrimination, freedom, and decision. Religion, strictly and fairly speaking, does not provide for that; only unbelief does. If Augustine had understood things properly, he would have spit in God’s eye and said that Adam’s only rational choice was to do what he did, affirm who and what he was, and get on with his life without Yahweh. Instead, he creeps out of the garden, takes his punishment like a beaten spaniel, and lives in the hope that his master will throw him the occasional bone.

The expulsion from Eden
To the extent that modern liberal theologies try to say that religions have endorsed a policy of choice and reflection all along, the rebuttal is history.
5. Atheists are socially tolerant. By this, I mean that they do not have a history of violence against beliefs and practices they may privately abhor. They do not burn down churches, black or white. No matter how ardent their unbelief, they do not bomb mosques or blow themselves up at Sunday Mass to reduce the number of Catholics in the world. They are not responsible for the Arab-Israeli border wars. They have not created tens of thousands of displaced people in resettlement camps in Lebanon or torn whole African nations apart. In general, they do not mistake adventurism for preemptive wars.
They may support separation of church and state in sometimes strident ways, but not violent ways: you will not see gangs of secularists tearing down nativity scenes at Christmas or storming historic court houses to get icons of the ten commandments removed from public view. –Even if they think these public displays of devotion are inappropriate and teach people bad habits.

All of these things are pretty obvious, even to believers whose gurus talk incessantly about the secular humanist and atheist “threat” without ever being able (successfully) to put a face on it. But they need to be recorded because religious people often assume that tolerance can only be practised within a religious or inter-religious context, Catholic to Baptist, Christian to Jew and Muslim. But atheism stands outside this circle.
Atheism, as atheism, stands as the rejection of all religious beliefs: it is befuddling to believers how such a position deserves tolerating at all. If there has to be an enemy–something a majority can identify as uniformly despicable–atheism has to be it. That is why hoi polloi in the darkest days of the communist threat, especially those who had no idea what the social and economic program of the Soviet Union was, considered the worst sin of the “Reds” in Russia, China, and Europe their disbelief in God.
As with goodness, tolerance needs to be exhibited non-coercively. Not because Jesus said “Love your enemies,” or because Muhammad preached sparing unbelievers, provided they capitulated to Islam. Not even because John Paul II apologized to Galileo in absentia. What supports the suggestion that atheists are tolerant (and need to continue to be seen as being tolerant) is that the virtue of tolerance emerges naturally from the rational premises of unbelief. What atheism says is that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence, not by force of arms or the power of priests and mullahs.
While atheists will never experience mass conversions to their cause “like a mighty wind” after a speech by a pentecostal preacher, the individual changes of mind from belief to skepticism will depend as much on the tone as on the substance of their message. By the same token, what atheist would trust the unbelieving equivalent of a spiritual awakening? It doesn’t happen that way. It happens one by one. Slowly. Just ask an atheist about how he “became” an unbeliever, and I wager that you will hear a life story, or something about how things just didn’t add up–a process, not a sudden emotional shudder but often a painful change of heart and (especially) mind.
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Published: September 28, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Christianity : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secular humanism : skeptcism : the Bible ..
44 Responses to “Five Good Things about Atheism”

.
 steph 
 September 28, 2010 at 11:03 pm
This is a very interesting post, not least because it makes me wonder whether I would have had the courage to reject a religious belief if I had been born into it. Although American and Middle Eastern atheists are courageous for not believing, as also Socrates certainly was, not all of us can claim to be courageous for not believing when there was never any pressure or desire in the first place. Despite unanswered questions … like ‘So why are we here?’ The answer for me is usually something like ‘Don’t know, but don’t forget the picnic because I know the surf’s up today.’ And it was precisely because I knew so many other atheists, of different flavours (former believers, anti religious, or like me, interested in believers’ beliefs despite not wanting to believe) that I didn’t always admit until very recently that I probably was one too. Not courageous – just conforming! although I defend my ‘atheist butism’ maybe…
You’re not in a terrible position though. When people disagree with you they tend to speak louder than people who agree. Although the Irish Oscar Wilde was referring to the British public, he said as long as three quarters of people disagreed with you, it was a sign of your sanity. More importantly though it’s a reflection of an independent mind not bowing obediently to convention for the sake of it. Without the reflection and insight into atheism and religion you provide, progress and learning is poorer. Ogden Nash wrote in part of ‘Seeing Eye to Eye is Believing’, “I believe that people believe what they believe they believe. When people reject a truth or an untruth it is not because it is a truth or an untruth that they reject it. No, if it isn’t in accord with their beliefs in the first place they simply say, “Nothing doing,” and refuse to inspect it.”
A long winded way of saying, with Groucho Marx “I can’t say I disagree with you” regarding the five good things – even six – about atheism in this post, and you’re absolutely right. And as always entertaining and beautifully written.
x
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 Seth Strong 
 September 29, 2010 at 8:16 am
Although not in disagreement with the comment above by Steph, there is no winning on subjects like this. I get the impression that for every view into a subject you can find as an example writer, I can find another view that you haven’t incorporated or another way to look at the motivations of this type of people or that type of people. But I also think that’s a good place to include room for comments which can go further and onto tangents.
I totally endorse viewpoints that suggest atheism is not enough while simultaneously brandishing atheist as a priority description for people who might want to know things about me.
And also, if religion weren’t such a big deal to the extent that there are states acting to include creationism in science class, then I’d have a lot less incentive to investigate this subject. So for people in other countries and even other communities in America like maybe Oregon, their atheists might have less to say.
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 chenier1 
 September 29, 2010 at 6:14 pm
At some point you will no doubt explain the basis for categorising Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao as “socially tolerant”, but you’ve obviously been having a hard time of it recently, so not now.
We’re back to the bit about two nations divided by the same language and different cultures; it is difficult for someone like myself, educated at a school founded in 1875 by radical feminists, in which Creationism was known to be too ridiculous even to be laughed at, to envisage any teacher trying to claim that the story of Adam and Eve is a moral fable; certainly none of mine ever attempted to do so, presumably because they did not wish to be laughed out of the classroom.
That and the fact that as far as Miss Buss and Miss Beale were concerned the Jesuits were pikers; no girl educated at a GPDST school was allowed to believe something because someone, however eminent, had said so. Even if the eminent Being doing the saying was God; it would be an affront to the memory of the suffragettes, who are ranked considerably above any saints.
Equally, since Job was not Jewish no-one ever attempted to claim that the God he was conversing with was the one addressed as father by Jesus, in the event of there actually being a ‘historical Jesus’, that is. Improbable as it may seem, the question of whether there really was a Jesus at all was included in the curriculum; as I recall the school chaplain was a bit unhappy about it but he went on to become an admittedly rather bad bishop, so presumably the powers that be forgave him for knuckling down.
All in all, I was educated to believe that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence; since someone claiming to be an atheist is now considered to warrant a round of applause without that person providing any argument or evidence at all, I shall declare myself to be an atheist roughly around the time when Hell freezes over…
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 Seth Strong 
 September 30, 2010 at 9:03 am
Any chance you could summarize your opinion, chenier1. It appears you’re saying that you wouldn’t identify as atheist because of Stalin, Mao and two founders of the women’s college at Oxford. I admit I was extra confused when Job entered the conversation. The blog post’s treatment there struck me as rather benign.
I think it’s really swell that you found some evil fellows who identified as atheist. I’d like to know about nutjob atheists analogous to the abortion doctor snipers and the kidnappers of O’hare because dictators say a lot of things in order to control their masses and are rarely the epitome of the faiths or lack of faiths that they profess. At least, that’s my take on that. And yes, it is possible that people identifying as atheist can actually commit crimes. But I’m pretty sure I can dredge up statistics substantiating that people who identify as atheist are jailed proportionally less than their believer counterparts which would provide more support for the blog post claims (http://www.atheistempire.com/reference/stats/main.html under “Atheist Prison Population”).
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 Eliyahu 
 October 8, 2012 at 11:43 am
The believers vs non-believers in jail is a fallacious argument, there is substantially more believers than non-believers so surely there will be in the prisons as well. If I survey a Starbucks and find more theists than atheists 3:1 does that mean that theists in general love coffee more than atheists? No :)

 Seth Strong 
 October 9, 2012 at 4:35 pm
It would be a fallacious argument if the amount of believers in jail were proportional to the amount of believers at large. I haven’t put any recent effort into this topic (that comment you replied to is two years old) but I’m holding the stance that the amount of believers in jail is disproportionately larger and the amount of atheists disproportionately smaller than those populations are outside of jail. So more criminals claim faith.
It could be a conspiracy where all the atheists and associated non-believers get together and promise that when they go to jail, they check “Christian” or “Muslim” but I doubt that.
However, you might be saying that you know that the amount of believers in jail is proportional to the population outside of jail. Is that what you are saying?

 
 

 steph 
 September 29, 2010 at 11:43 pm
I love the photo – your hands appear to recreate the angels’ wings in William Blake’s Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels… http://www.william-blake.org/Christ-in-the-Sepulchre,-Guarded-by-Angels.html
x
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 September 30, 2010 at 11:30 am
I might want to distinguish the categories. Stalin and Mao were communists whose atheism was prescribed by the party, just as a thousand Christian rotters and not a few popes were Christian by default, not choice. That’s to say that they did not arrive at atheism as their fundamental intellectual position, but their “default” atheism gave the position in general a bad name–precisely because they symbolized pars pro toto what religious people in the west thought atheism is/was. I think we call this the fallacy of division.
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 Ophelia Benson 
 October 1, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I disavow any claim to courage. It takes no courage whatseover for me to be an atheist, and it never has. It does take courage for some people, but only some. As for me, I’m a coward.
Imagination…really? Atheists shy away from art and imagination? Not the ones I know.
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 Josh in California 
 October 1, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Didn’t you get the memo? All gnu atheists are emotionless Commander Datas–able to understand human art, literature, music, etc. intellectually but incapable of truly appreciating any of it.
(And every article about gnu atheism will include at least one off-the-wall generalization that only really applies to the small subset of atheists the author has actually interacted with.)
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 Eric MacDonald 
 March 28, 2011 at 9:29 am
Yes, that stood out for me. Reading poetry is one of my favourite pastimes, and seldom a day goes by when I do not read some of my favourite poets: Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Herbert, Larkin, Auden, Lawrence, Owen, Stevens, Hopkins, …
While I think this post makes up to a certain extent for the earlier one lambasting the new atheists, it seems to me important to remember that the forces of religion are exceedingly powerful. Criticism is vital, but indiscriminate condemnation is not helpful.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 1, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Now, now–I said too many do. You are being modest as well: I think anyone who calls for common sense in this society is brave. It takes nothing to be Christine O’Donnell except a good dentist.
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 Ophelia Benson 
 October 1, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I know, you did. I suppose I was just thinking about the atheists I know – who are more in the vein of Salman Rushdie (in a YouTube clip he posted on Facebook a couple of days ago) saying “they’re great stories, but they’re not true.” He’s a fan of great stories. Heh heh.
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 Ed Jones 
 October 2, 2010 at 4:20 pm
For goodness sake, common sense – be Bright not Dim, go to Quodlibet:Atheist Attitude – Comments 6. 7 & 8. Begin with 7 then to 8 – but engage!
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 Ed Jones 
 October 5, 2010 at 2:30 pm
steph,
 Apologies for seeming rude. I take refuge in that I comment as a believer over against blatently offensive labeling, “Religion is for Dims” – “Religion (saith RD with essay approval) is the default position for the scientifically challenged of the world” – further without comment response, the advise “Ignore the believer” seems to rule. All the while attempting to introduce the contradiction (the absolute, radical, irredeemable difference), the stark phenemon: why these the pioneering physicists, the world’s greatest, in droves, go beyond physics, the hardest of the sciences, to embrace the mea-physical, mysticism, the tenderest of religions!
 By pure happenstance, I have a peculiar interest in RJH essays which may be explained by the first 13 comments to the essay “The Importance of the Historical Jesus” which may suggest that orthodox Christianity does not represent true reilgion.
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Arrested moral development. | Open Parachute says:
 October 3, 2010 at 1:32 pm
[...] Five Good Things about Atheism where R. Joseph Hoffmann claims that atheism is an ethical position and raises the question of “whether it is possible to be good with God.” [...]
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 Herzen 
 October 5, 2010 at 3:02 am
Stalin also claimed that he ran a democratic party-hence the elections with 99.9 percent majorities. Should we be nervous of Democracy?
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 Seth Strong 
 October 5, 2010 at 8:54 am
Of course you should! As a citizen, you should always feel uneasy about the balance of your remaining liberties versus the concessions you make to the government.
It seems that you are pointing out that what someone labels themselves as isn’t necessarily what they are. Is there more to your point?
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 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 6:49 am
Re: courage
Surely being an atheist is not connected to courage. Coming out as one might be something else. A society that criminalises or stigmatises atheism is surely likely to have less open atheists than one that doesn’t, isn’t it?
Hope you saw my late addition to the B&W thread; it was posted before I had read this.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 6:59 am
We have much more evidence about societies that have persecuted Jews, heretics, and even Catholic or protestant disseneters than any that have actually persecuted atheists in the way, e.g., religion was discouraged under communist regimes. But your point is aggreable: there would be fewer atheists in a society that actually persecuted them.
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 Seth Strong 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:38 am
Being an atheist isn’t the only courageous thing but it can be. Most of my non believer friends are first generation atheists. We had to disappoint our parents before we could earn their respect. And some of us speak up louder because we have the privilege that our friends do not. I thing courageous is an adjective you can apply to atheism.
Reply
 

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 7:07 am
But are we not speaking about times in which being an atheist was far less acceptable than belonging to a faith that happened not to be dominant?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:03 am
You use the word “stigmatize,” and I’ll accept that. Actual persecutions of atheists have been pitifully infrequent and rare throughout history–no major purges or anything of the sort. i do notice a trend in some atheists circles to create such an era, but except for very minor incidents, like Shelley and Bradlaugh and the social “ostracism” often applied to atheist ideas, I can’t think of any real theatrical moments. Please tell me what you have in mind. Part of the issue is that atheism as we use the term today is a modern word without much pre-18th century history. it meant something very different in the ancient world, where even Jews and christians could be and were called atheists. I am now being told that some new atheists are receiving death threats; I have no reason to doubt this but I think the claim deserves investigation.
Reply

 Veronica 
 March 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
You include Shelly among the imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, [and] mental adventurers, but you fail to mention that Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism after publishing his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_ and that the British courts denied Shelley custody of his two children.

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 4:39 pm
I actually posted the whole of Shelley’s Necessity to this site, with that information; no one wants to deny that Shelley paid a price–in fact, he’s one of the few who suffered. http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/the-necessity-of-atheism/

 
 

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:12 am
To clarify, when you talk about religious minorities (persecuted or other), you are talking about communities of some kind, I assume. Which historical periods have seen atheists in sufficient numbers or concentration to qualify as a community? Is this not an outgrowth of how unacceptable it was? Are there not examples of philosophers in centuries past now assumed to have been atheists in all but name (because they were too attached to their lives and liberty to say so outright)?
Reply

 Ophelia Benson 
 March 28, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Anaxagoras and Socrates to name two.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Well, I don’t think Socrates was our kind of atheist–too wordy–but certainly not some people’s idea of a religious Athenian. But the charge certainly included not believing in the myths.
Reply

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 3:12 pm
By “atheist” I did mean it in our more contemporary sense of simply not believing in the existence of god/s. Certainly I did not have believing Jews and Christians in mind. If Christians of one sect or another were persecuted, I suppose it was usually as heretics, whereas Jews might have been “Christ-killers.” Did you intend, in your reply, to claim that if there was less persecution of atheists as a group, it was because atheism was looked upon more favourably than any brand of religious belief?

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Bit more complicated: the modern position we call atheism coincides with a period where many countries were moving away from medieval persecutionist tactics, which were fundamentally inter-religious, as you also say. When we talk about modern atheism as a “movement”–yes, there isn’t much of it in an organized way until the 19th century when places like Conway Hall move quickly from Unitarianism to essentially an atheist stance, and by then laws protecting even the most radical groups are in place. The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration and actually benefits from it–which is why pseudo atheists, if they were, like Paine and even deists like Jefferson could get by with saying as much as they did critical of religion. I’d even argue that from that standpoint, elected officials and intellectuals are probably worse off today than they were in the 16th and 17th century. I think atheism is unpopular enough without trying to create a history of persecution that just doesn’t exist–but not because there haven’ always been skeptics and atheists. The closest I think we might come is the persecution of Socinians, who were in Italy and had to fee to Poland: they denied the trinity in the 16th and 17th century, and found a home in Poland for a while. The history of atheism in an organized way is closely tid to the development of rational religious movements in the pre- and early enlightenment, especially unitarianism, which is the first step on the slope towards rejecting revelation.

 
 

 Bruce Gorton 
 March 28, 2011 at 10:32 am
On imagination I disagree – I write poetry (Not very good poetry, but it counts) and go in for photography basically because I can never quite draw what I see in my head fast enough.
We also have champions like Tim Minchin and the like. Atheists often make for great comedians, and comedy is to my mind the very highest form of creativity. It combines the best of poetry’s expression, with philosophy’s introspection.
I think it is one of those things that as a community we should highlight more – that we are not, as Steve Martin once claimed, lacking songs. That not only do we have art, but it is often great art.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 11:22 am
Hi Bruce: Are you disagreeing with this or some point made after it?
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space.
Reply
 

 Seth Strong 
 March 28, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Rebellions take courage. Christians who think they are oppressed can probably qualify for that label as well. I would define courage as the willingness to step outside your comfort zone and risk social penalties for stating your opinion. Being an atheist is easy, potentially. Saying that’s what you’re doing is not always so. In my house it’s not courageous. But out here on the internet where it can affect job prospects, in laws, and other folks opinion of me? It’s courage.
Reply

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:18 pm
“The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration…”
I take that as confirmation of what I was fishing for; while minority faiths could get by even if persecuted, atheists didn’t even dare stick their heads above the parapets till certain rights had been anchored in society.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:29 pm
This is close to right, except we need to be careful about assuming a coherent “atheist” position before the coherent position, which is evolutionary, had developed. There are scholars like John Hick for example who have suggested that something like what we are calling atheism was “psychologically impossible” before the modern era, meaning that we are not talking about repression but about rational development. I would completely reject any suggestion that there was an enormous “atheist underground” in the 12th century for example–it just wasn’t possible. But what there WAS is just as important. Have a look at http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c25.htm Gordon Stein was the expert on the subject of the evolutionary identity of atheism. He died tragically after he had edited the Enc of Unbelief. But you can get the basic outline there.
Reply

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Thanks for the link. Will give it my attention shortly. I also was not expecting a 12th century atheist underground, but “psychologically impossible” does sound far-fetched. There must have been people centuries before us who decided that what was being preached just didn’t add up, even if they were smart enough to keep it to themselves. “Socially almost impossible” I could buy.

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I agree, far fetched. I think there must have been atheists in neolithic times. Just trying to avoid the disparity between what they would not have believed and what we do not believe, which is culturally determined and this highly uncertain. Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science and theirs could not have been.

 
 

 Stewart 
 March 28, 2011 at 8:52 pm
The science point is well taken. Unless one is prepared to swallow a 100% rate of self-delusion among prehistoric shamans, yes, there must have been neolithic atheists.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 March 29, 2011 at 7:38 pm
What would really be useful, and very difficult to produce, is a history of atheism that respected the way in which belief has been related to particular objects over time. Modern atheism has been the story of the rejection of a particular set of beliefs, defined primarily in biblical terms, since the early Enlightenment. –I just don’t want to see atheism becoming superstitious about its past; the Christians created a totally, or largely false story of their own martyrdom and persecution–let’s not do that with unbelief.
Reply
 

 Ed Jones 
 March 29, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I am forced to restate the above March 5th challenge. Joe, you said March 28th:: “Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science – -” as a positive statement. I am forced to take it indisputably to be the exact opposite – a negative statment; based on the thought of those identified as the world’s greatest physicists of the 20th century. They all embraced mysticism. A conclusion not of emotion, not of itituition, not of faith, but of a sustained use of the critical intellect. This followed after concluding that the great differenc betweeen the old and the new physics, given that they both were dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality, the new physics was forced to be aware of the fact. “We (the old) thought we were dealing with the world itself”. (Sir James Jeans)
 Litte as they were in the position of simply living and thinking within the radition of one of the old religious traditions (e.g. Christianity), so equally little were they prepared to go over to a naive, rationalistically grounded atheism.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 March 29, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Our modern atheism is in fact greatly shaped by science. Our horseman are pretty unanimous about that. And I would say the evolution versus creationism stand off is a purely science versus a popular religion even more than it is an argument against faith. And yet, some of us atheists, consider it to be analogous to the kind of half hatched nonsense that leads the uneducated to think Scientology is nice because it’s got science in the name. Real science is a good cure for a lot of those crazy thoughts which ail many people.
Reply
 

 Five Good Things about Atheism (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
 June 8, 2011 at 5:32 am
[...] Five Good Things about Atheism (via The New Oxonian) Posted on June 8, 2011 by rjosephhoffmann It seems I cannot win. When I chart the vague, occasional and ambiguous virtues of religion (mainly historical) I am accused of being intellectually soft. When I tell atheists they run the risk of turning their social solidarity into tent revivals or support groups I risk expulsion from the ranks of the Unbaptized and Wannabe Unbaptized. It is a terrible posi … Read More [...]
Reply

 Tristan Vick 
 June 13, 2011 at 9:55 am
I appreciate this article.
I think this has compelled me to write a similar list of positive reasons in support of atheism.
However, just a small nitpick, but I would change your preface to your list of good things about atheism which states:
“As far as I can tell, there are five:”
to
“As far as I can tell, there are at least five:”
Because, as we all know, there could be more we haven’t thought of yet. ;) Now I am off to think more on the subject.
Reply

 Robert 
 July 15, 2011 at 8:46 am
You forgot the most important one.
Atheism is honest.
The rest are nice, but in reality, irrelevant.
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Three Fewer Things to Say About Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann

Mao and Stalin were atheists. This proves that atheists are not socially tolerant. I can probably think of a hundred names to add to the list to build a case. But it would be the wrong case because, surely, it was communism that supplied the evangelical intolerance of the social and economic movements we associate with Stalinism and Maoism. Atheism is simply a component of a larger picture. (As I mentioned to the reader who lodged the objection, this is a good example of the fallacy of division.)
Beyond this, we can’t deny that the ideologues of the communist movement understood atheism as a formative mind-set: Marx (and Engels) began as left-Hegelians, along with a half dozen theologians ranging from Strauss to the early myth-theorist Bruno Bauer. Their atheism flowed from a material view of the world and a rejection of the superstition that could be used to keep the workers of the world in their place, on the analogy of the laity in relation to church hierarchy at the time of the Reformation. The extent to which Reformation theology shaped all of the post-Hegelian social theorists, and especially Engels, has been clear to scholars for a century.
But the question of atheism as a catalyst for tolerance (my view) raises a whole range of subordinate questions about whether an intellectual rejection of God requires, and to what degree, practical rejection of religions, religious practice, and religious persons. And this is proof enough that unbelief is not mere rejectionism: it has social consequences. How do you behave when you have decided religion is plain wrong? Does it parallel the patterns we are used to in the history of religion, when one sect bloodies the other sects because only one can have the whole truth? Communism and other social movements have behaved religiously when they have had the power to punish and suppress.
The issue is, what sort of consequences do we recognize as flowing, more or less directly from atheism? I stick to my point that we can only know the answer to that from the newspapers, and atheists (as far as I know)  as atheists have no record of destroying religious shrines, or waging unholy war, or doing physical violence to believers in public places. Tolerance with a small “t”, if you will, but that’s about all we can get in this old world.

Veiled threat?
The eminently sensible Ophelia Benson (Butterflies and Wheels) says that she has never found it difficult to be an atheist; thus, courage should not (necessarily) be commended as an atheist virtue.
Permit me to disagree, but in a limited way. I am perhaps as close to being an atheist as any believer can be, so close that it pains me to self-identify as a “believer.” I certainly do not believe in any gods so far discovered, poesized, prayed to or reduced to scripture. If I liked the world “possibilism” I would use it. If I liked the word “agnostic,” you’d find it here.
But the real word for my position is cowardly. Not in a playing-Pascal’s-odds kind of way, but a pure and refined cowardice. I like to think of myself as a philosophical work in progress, trying to find the right descriptors for God–ones that will appeal to my robust atheist friends, always failing miserably in a rhetorical swamp. I know my project is a waste of time because my godless comrades have already reached the right conclusion. I have always liked to refer to myself as Sartre’s grandmother: “Only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist” (Les Mots, 1964). I resist settled positions because once you have arrived at one you have to unpack your suitcase and sit down. Some are born godless, some achieve godlessness, but unlike those communists we were just discussing, no “real” atheist has godlessness thrust upon them.
I call having and holding that position against the odds courageous.

Courageous not heroic.
Ophelia also calls me out for saying that atheism and the arts don’t always mix, though they should because atheism demands imagination. Just as not all atheists are humanists (and vice versa), atheists will differ about the role of the arts, and they will usually do so by asking a “utility” question: what are the arts good for? Does painting get you to the moon? Does poetry or theater improve life-expectancy? The answer to both questions is that a basketball scholarship will get you into Purdue, but not into Phi Beta Kappa.
In a 1973 article for Humanism Today, Paul Kurtz posed the question as whether the arts convey knowledge. He answered by saying yes and no–depending on the kind of art and on understanding that, say, a dramatist might convey very important information that can also be conveyed in “unaesthetic” and (implicitly) more precise ways. The arts and the imagination are important, Kurtz argued, because they provide an additum to human life, but are not at the core of the reasoning process:

Thus humanism needs to untap the poetic metaphors of the creative human imagination and to use these to dramatize humanist ideals in eloquent form. Art is not a subjective substitute of intuition for knowledge claims justified by reason and experiment; it is not a replacement for objective methods of inquiry. It simply adds an eloquent dimension to experience by rendering humanist truths and humanist values in aesthetic form. And as such it can help to inspire intensity of conviction and devotion to commitment. It is thus able to make humanism both intellectually true and aesthetically satisfying. As such, art has a powerful role to play in life. It is thus intrinsic to the fullest expression of humanist eupraxophy

Paul Kurtz
I don’t think the idea that the arts “simply add an eloquent dimension to experience by rendering humanist truths …and values in aesthetic forms” adequately comprehends the centrality of experience to both religious and non-religious people. The question of God–though not often understood in this way, thanks to the quibbles of theology and philosophy over centuries–is fundamentally a question about the imagination. And if this is so, then aesthetic questions–characterization, quality, representation (description) and effect–have to be taken into account in our answer.
Imagination is not peripheral or “modal” to the atheist experience anymore than it is to the religious experience. This has to be true because (as atheological writers like Feuerbach reminded us a long time back) that’s where gods are born. The statues and images and choral preludes come later. Classical atheism understood this–Democritus and Lucretius especially, and Xenophanes:

But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.
Most of us use informal aesthetics all the time without knowing it: every believer’s suggestion that the New Testament God is “nicer” than the Old Testament God, or that Allah condones terrorism, is an aesthetic judgement. Every unbeliever’s conclusion that God does not exist springs from some assessment of a literary God, rarely from Hobbes and Hume, except as philosophical dressing.
Not  imagining God is not the simple denial of the other man’s beliefs but a different and contrary evaluation of the world he sees. Once this aesthetic judgment is reduced to premises–mere information–all is lost.
The night sky over Australia is one of the most beautiful sights on earth. It makes me grateful for my eyes, but grateful to  nothing. What makes one man want to pray to an unseen infinitely great being located up or out there–this contemplation of immensity–makes another rejoice in his nearly infinite smallness. It is true, this is not knowledge, but there is no knowledge without the experience and its effects.
Atheism is all about imagination; it needs to be more about aesthetics.
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Published: October 1, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: arts : atheism : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Xenophanes ..
24 Responses to “Three Fewer Things to Say About Atheism”

.
 J. Quinton 
 October 1, 2010 at 3:50 pm
There were some church burnings in Norway in the early 90s by some [black] metal bands. I think it’s up for grabs whether they were atheists or not; but they definitely hated religion/Christianity (that’s what the “black” in black metal means).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_burnings#Church_burnings
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 1, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Yeah, hmmmm. I don’t think you find this compelling either.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 6, 2010 at 10:46 pm
A bright suggestion for your “philosophical work in progress”. AAFCPS science is for Brights. Hence, any fool will look to scientists for the right description of just about anything, even of no-thing.
The 8th and 9th comments to Quodlibet: Atheist Attitude contains the right descriptions of God – descriptions which will best appeal to your robust athiest friends, but even better, descriptions which will quarantee that your project is not a waste of time.
These are the right descriptions for the reason AAFCPS they are excerpts from “Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists” – the hardest of sciences.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 7, 2010 at 10:05 am
You should have your CTRL-V capability revoked. Not once in those comments did you even suggest a definition. You just hinted that some great minds suggested science wasn’t the right tool for answering metaphysical questions and you did so in a round about, wordy, and multi-post way.
As any fool can plainly see, you could put some effort into speaking clearly and maintaining the dialog that you initiated especially since you posted all over and haven’t bothered to respond to our comments on your earlier comments.

 
 

 Nathan Bupp 
 October 1, 2010 at 4:19 pm
“Atheism is all about imagination; it needs to be more about aesthetics.”
And John Dewey’s “Art as Experience” and Santayana’s “The Life of Reason” (itself being a work of art) and “The Sense of Beauty” are three great works we need to rediscover for this project to begin in earnest. Ah, to recover the days of real humanism.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 1, 2010 at 4:35 pm
J.Q., I think there is a premise we must accept in order to compare groups. The premise is that we can only include people within a label they adopt. I know it seems scientific to use a definition but there’s something tricky that goes on when we apply a label to someone who didn’t use the label themselves.
I’m an atheist. And yes, I totally can’t win in a debate because half of my friends thing “agnostic” is the only defensible position because it admit faults. I argue that not having information about a god puts me in the position of acting as if there is no god. Therefore, I act as an atheist and I may as well describe myself as one.
But there are lots of kinds of non-believers. An agnostic is a lot like an atheist and they know that. But an irreligious person should not be called an atheist without some evidence of their support of atheist groups, atheist people, or something. And then we can discuss the differences of what atheism meant to them versus what it means to me but that’s a much more sensible conversation to have I think.
So, look into that black metal band. If they called themselves atheists, I want to know. I could use the data. In return, I won’t go calling crazies religious unless they self define that way. I think that’s a good start to ensuring we’re talking about the same things and not just trying to come up with “You have label x. This guy acts as label x and is a nut. Therefore, you’re a nut” patterns.
RJH, this blog post is confirmation that you were right when you said you can’t win. I agree there needs to be more on the aesthetics, that’s a good way to frame the missing link as well, in my opinion.
Reply

 steph 
 October 1, 2010 at 4:46 pm
That’s just made me incredibly homesick. Your last paragraph threw me into a shock of reality. Atheism, whatever that means, and of an antipodean flavour, is all about aesthetics. Swimming in the sea under the full moon, the brilliantly lit starry night skies, the dense dripping wet textured multi layered and varied green bush, the songful soulful birds, the emotional sea. It’s not about not-believing. It’s all about believing in the absolute pure beauty around us – at what we see, hear, smell, feel and can even taste. I believe in so much – perhaps that’s why I’m not always comfortable with ‘atheist’ (which is only about gods) particularly in a culture which isn’t pervasively (or at all persuasively) religious. And when you’re alone without another human soul for miles, in the middle of the wild native bush beside the pristine waters of Waikaremoana, touching them, there is such an experience of trembling and awe that I cannot (always) call myself an atheist. Whatever that means.
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 2, 2010 at 11:43 am
Steph,
 Without explanation your comment urgently compels this request: Go to Quodlibet: Atheist Attitudes – Comments 6, 7, & 8, begin with comment 7 then go to 8. Engage!
Reply

 steph 
 October 3, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Please refrain from your rudeness and insistence I ‘engage’ with you when I read to ‘engage’ with Joe. For a couple of days I have been going through my art history books and rediscovered Pablo Picasso, bless his soul, who said of the moon landing, “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.” I have no wish to ‘engage’ with your lengthy lists of quotations and as Rabbit said, “I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit. “No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t…”

 
 

 steph 
 October 1, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Pooh: ‘it’s time for something sweet’…
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 8, 2010 at 10:46 am
Steph,
 I repeat a reply I miss-posted at a time when I momentarily lost your comment among all the essays.
 Apologies for seeming rude. I take refuge in the fact that I comment as a believer conscious of being in an athiest enviornment, seemingly ruled by the advice “Ignore the believer”, over against the attempt to introduce the absolute contradiction (even against athiests tendency to look to science as the source of data) the indisputable phenomena that the world’s greatest physicists in droves go beyond physics to embrace mystiscisim as the way to Reality, a way which admittidly physics proved unable to give. This is no trivial detail!
 By pure
 happenstance
 I have a peculiar iterest in RJH’s essays which may be explained by the first 13 comments to the essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus. It’s point: orthodox Christianity in less than true religion.
Reply
 

 chenier1 
 October 1, 2010 at 6:11 pm
‘This proves’
Well, no; it doesn’t.
Again, speaking from a different culture, and legal structure, proof requires a very high level of supporting evidence, and asking a question about the relevant evidence is not an assertion that there is no evidence, nor an assertion that the relevant evidence is insufficient to support the assertion. It’s merely a question.
In English law a criminal offence has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt; a civil case is decided on the balance of probabilities.
My expertise lies in the balance of probabilities in a very narrow field; usury ceased to be of general interest a few centuries ago. Nowadays the law of interest is relevant only to financial institutions; the rest of the world only notices when it dawns on people that financial institutions can destroy their lives, even if they have nothing to do with the financial institutions in question.
So, I was asking a question…
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 Ophelia Benson 
 October 2, 2010 at 12:26 pm
“Every unbeliever’s conclusion that God does not exist springs from some assessment of a literary God”
Yes…I frequently find myself pointing out that “God” really refers to a familiar literary character, another Hamlet or Lizzie Bennett, not the philosophical abstraction or possibility that tends to get substituted by educated theists defending their theism. It seems to me ridiculous to use the same nickname for the myriad of different deities that people try to defend, from the first cause to Terry Eagleton’s Tillichian “ground of all being,” which he pulls out with a flourish as if it were both “sophisticated” and self-evident.
Another aesthetic response is Kingsley Amis’s reply to Yevtushenko’s question “You atheist?”
“Well yes, but it’s more that I hate him.”
Reply

 G.M. Jackson 
 October 2, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Iyan Rand was an atheist and an anti-communist and was very tolerant.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 2, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Very nice, OB
Reply

Thought for the day - Butterflies and Wheels says:
 October 2, 2010 at 8:34 pm
[...] day Oct 2nd, 2010 | By Ophelia Benson Category: Notes and Comment Blog From Joe Hoffmann’s Three fewer things to say about atheism:Just as not all atheists are humanists (and vice versa), atheists will differ about the role of the [...]
Reply

 sailor1031 
 October 3, 2010 at 6:36 am
“atheists will differ about the role of the arts, and they will usually do so by asking a “utility” question: what are the arts good for? Does painting get you to the moon? Does poetry or theater improve life-expectancy? The answer to both questions is that a basketball scholarship will get you into Purdue, but not into Phi Beta Kappa.”
Ah yes. Build a straw man. Burn him. Case proved. Except that it isn’t and you know it full well. This argument sir, is pure unadulterated crap and I’m surprised you would even try it on. For shame! Call yourself intellectual? it is to laugh
Reply

 ernie keller 
 October 3, 2010 at 11:49 am
A couple of points: First, I don’t think we will all agree that atheism has to be about anything other than not having a religion. That is, it isn’t and I would say should not be about itself plus humanism, though most of us are a kind of humanist, nor is it about an aesthetic point of view, though I for one love music and literature in a way that is very much like that of theists.
I don’t think atheism must contain within itself everything that is supposed to come in a package deal with religious belief. I don’t think it does, or can, or needs to, because we have all of these things anyway. Or, at least, those of us who respond to life in these ways have them without a label that unites them.
Second, agnostics are atheists. It’s a quibble, I know, but agnosticism is not a way station between belief and unbelief. If I don’t know if there is a god I’m not half way between, it means I don’t think there is one. In principle an agnostic could be in equipoise between the two positions, but in practice you will not see this very often. All the agnostics I know about are unbelievers.
Reply

 steph 
 October 3, 2010 at 4:14 pm
A Methodist Minister friend of mine, said to me recently, that he is a Christian by faith and an agnostic by definition. In fact, all the way through history, some of the greatest religious thinkers have expressed doubt in many shapes and forms or had crises due to agnostic inclinations. I know alot of religious people who are agnostic in many aspects of their belief and some even who wish to believe in God but are agnostic about that too. They still wish to identify themselves as “Christians” or whatever. It’s just part of an honest self awareness.
I also know people like my father when he was alive, who have a very humanistic approach to life but may not even identify themselves in that way, and I know alot of people who call themselves humanist and behave in a totally contrary way. The British Humanist Association has hijacked the label but focuses on Atheist Bus Campaigns and religion bashing, and is basically an association of anti religious atheists rather like those who have taken over the CFI with their celebrations of blasphemy.
While I am not particularly agnostic about my supposed atheism, I think I am more of a believer (today I have decided) than an atheist. I don’t believe in gods but I believe in a helluvalota things. I don’t however believe in “hate” and mockery of religions and the religious. “I don’t see much sense in that” (said Rabbit).
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 4, 2010 at 9:30 am
Some people consider belief and knowing separately so that you can be an atheist at one extreme and a believer of a faith at the other. Separately, you can express full confidence, or declare yourself agnostic. It’s a mouthful to be an agnostic atheist but it would parallel the intellectual humility of your Methodist friend.

 steph 
 October 4, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Tony, my friend is just the tip of an iceberg. I only mentioned him because he’s a minister of a village parish here. Many Christians (in the Antipodean islands and here in the UK) I know are fairly agnostic. And I don’t consider agnostic atheism to be a ‘mouthful’ at all. It’s just qualifying a hardline position, and being flexible. It’s difficult (for me) to be entirely consistent and rigid about what I think when I’ll never stop learning and exploring and hopefully growing in some way.

 
 

 Robert 
 July 15, 2011 at 9:07 am
Atheism is all about….ready for this?
A lack of belief in gods.
That’s about it.
There are both tolerant and intolerant atheists, just like there are both tolerant and intolerant theists. There is even tolerant intolerance and intolerant tolerance.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 July 15, 2011 at 9:29 am
Proving your point, I cannot accept your view,
Reply

 Robert 
 July 15, 2011 at 11:42 am
Your acceptance is a bit besides the point, but I appreciate your understanding none-the-less. ;)

 
 

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Darkness, Doubt, and Dante
by rjosephhoffmann

Augustine: Having seen the light...
What do Augustine, Thomas de Quincey, Leo Tolstoy, and John Henry Newman (now Blessed) have in common? That’s right: confessions. Relatively speaking, Tolstoy might have chosen to blog about his plight rather than write through it in longhand, de Quincey would have done well on Salon.com, and Newman called his confession an apologia because he had been put in a defensive mode. But they all wrote about their spiritual troubles and how they solved them. To quote de Quincey in a somber moment:

“Christianity is that religion which most of all settles what is perilous in scepticism; and yet, also, it is that which most of all unsettles whatever may invite man’s intellectual activity. It is the sole religion which can give any deep anchorage for man’s hopes; and yet, also, in mysterious self-antagonism, it is the sole religion which opens a pathless ocean to man’s useful and blameless speculations.”
Historically, accounts of journeys from periods of doubt and anxiety (and addiction) to periods of what Newman called, at the time of his trade to the Catholic church, religious “certitude,” occupy considerably more space on library shelves than the journey in the other direction.
Religion has had the upper-hand in promoting itself as closure (isn’t that what “certainty” is?). Unbelief is saddled with images of confusion (isn’t that what doubt is?) and discontent–aimless searching.

“As the sentence [of the scripture I was reading] ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away….Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee (Augustine, Confessions, Book IX.29; I.1)
Naturally this irrational but culturally potent association between doubt and darkness drives unbelievers crazy. The question is, Why does it arise at all?

Holman Hunt, The Light of the World
Because of an ancient theft of images. Religion has had the advantage of being imagined as a light on a hill, the “radiance” (as in John 14.6) that overpowers the darkness. That is the way Augustine imagined the Church of his day when everything else was, in fact, pretty dark–Rome declining, unable to sustain its institutions, hounded by unwelcome tourists from the north.
Christianity was a kind of theological alternative to demoralization and decline, though as a populist movement it could do very little in the western empire to forestall the inevitable “fall,” which later generations of historians would falsely ascribe to pagan immorality and corruption. To accept Christ, the light of the world, meant different things to different people. But for the Church’s early intellectuals it meant moving out of the darkness towards knowledge, towards wisdom, towards God, love and grace. To move in the other direction was not an appealing option, not even very rational.
The Church has had its way: darkness, hatred, sin, death, and final destruction of the spirit lay like the turbid waters of the Acheron at the end of the atheist’s quest. Who would knowingly move from truth toward a lie, from splendor towards dullness, from Palestrina and Bach toward Janacek? Since long before Dante consigned atheists to the inferno, setting your face against God has been seen as a lonely journey, driven by pride and a corrupt will that puts self in place of the Good. But the Church also traded on its philosophical bounty, especially Platonism, which saw rejection of the Good, now equated to the Christian God, as a rejection of reason.

Jesus enthroned in the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom)
“Atheism” did not actually lose control over or forfeit the imagery of light and truth. It has never really owned it. The theft was evolutionary rather than revolutionary: No (orthodox) philosophers died as a result of the heist, no secret coven of atheists was rooted out by posses of churchmen with a license to kill unbelievers. That point will appear jejune until you recall that such posses were empowered by Rome and local bishops to deal with heretics, well into the sixteenth century. Such unbelief as there was had to exist within the Church because that is where poets and professors earned their meager living.
When atheism has been considered at all by Catholic Christianity, it has been linked with heresy and apostasy as a special category of error–yet (oddly) not as serious as the other kinds because while atheism (by Anselm and the medieval theologians, for instance) is seen as a form of mulish stupidity (Ps.14.1), it is not a threat to the unity of the Church, like heresy, or as willful rebellion against God and his Church, like apostasy. That is to say, atheism doesn’t rise to the same degree of malignancy in the theological calculus, because then as now atheists were a lonely crew of poets and intellectuals and could not organize themselves into parties or schools.
Augustine refutes a heretic: note the toppled Church
Even Dante does not consign atheists to the darker levels of hell–merely to the deficient form of heaven, Limbo. Here you can find all the right people anyway: Horace, Julius Caesar, Ovid, Socrates, Cato, Vergil, Avicenna, and Averroes–whose common flaw is that they were unbaptized.
What did atheism do to deserve this patronizing neglect?
In the power vacuum created by the decline of the western Church and in the battles waged against heretics by the more powerful theologians in the eastern empire (Byzantium, where the creeds would be written), the ecclesial victors stole the imagery of philosophy and decorated their God like a Christmas tree with attributes that had been, basically, speculative in Greek thought. It was all about light, truth, and wisdom–their own, primarily, metaphysically projected outward onto their new triune God.
The Christian church deserves some credit for this. Hardly a philosophical image is left unexploited: goodness, infinity and eternality, immutability, omniscience (a kind of cheat, but that’s complicated), beauty, love, symmetry and perfection. Their grab-bag of ornaments included smatterings, ripped out of context, from Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry and assorted other philosophers. While condemning “paganism” (and with it, in many cases–for example the second century writer Justin Martyr–their own classical educations), they found the biblicism of their own tradition intellectually weak and aesthetically defective. It would take another century or two to find cradle-Catholic theologians who could pass up the temptations of pagan philosophy because, by that time, the usable bits had been brought in under the roof of the church. There was hardly any light left outside.

At the other end of this transformation, let me be pretty blunt, the Bible was transformed from an uneven collection of stories, poems and prophecies into an icon–if not a relic–while “tradition”–a word that looks innocent enough but refers to the creation of doctrine (teaching) of biblical interpreters–won the day. The artifact of this process, by the way, is the popular “protestant” belief that Catholics don’t read (or know) the Bible. They didn’t need to: the Church knew it for them.
It took until the sixteenth century for a few adventurous spirits to take the book out of its jeweled casket to see if the Church was anything like the book said it should be. But by then the damage (if that’s what it was) had been done. Not only was the Church a lot more complicated, richer, and better dressed than the one in the New Testament, but its God didn’t look very much like the biblical God either. Frankly, however, the Reformers were not all that consistent: the God of the Bible had already been retired in creeds they defended from the fourth century–”God from God, light from light, true god from true god, one in substance with the Father”–when the bishops were speaking of a man named Jesus.
Cardinal in full dress regalia....
With so much light going to the orthodox, there wasn’t much left over for atheists. The creed I just quoted was barely thirty years old when Augustine was born, and even though he quotes massively from sacred scripture, the way he does it leaves no verse unturned, no verb unextrapolated and no simple noun standing in its rightful place. The church had begun to speak allegory, and that would remain its official idiom until nineteenth century protestant theologians added paradox to the tool kit.
Granted, it’s a bit late for atheists to worry about getting back the light that was stolen from philosophy: eleatics, Socratics, skeptics, stoics, epicureans and sophists, all with highly rationalistic if not (exactly) atheistic tendencies. The final nail in the crucifixion of this-worldly knowledge was the teaching that the wisdom of this world (that would include science) is darkness and folly, and that the “true light” is essentially a way beyond, a path to heaven charted by the church.
The word that would come to describe this light is faith (πίστις). And the key thing about faith is that the Church was thought to possess it and (along with grace) dispense it. It was the faith, not faith in a verbal sense as a kind of assent. Much later, the reformers would try to restore an older, and what they thought was a more biblical understanding of St Paul’s favorite word. But it was a quibble. Whoever or whatever possessed it, it was thought be superior to reason; whether you accessed it through a change of heart or through the sacraments, you did not access it in your head. You surrendered to it because you had no other choice.
This is a kind of final-strawism. Thomas Aquinas, as we all know, argued that God could be known through natural reason, to a point, and his five ways or arguments for God’s existence all seem superficially reasonable. But in the long run, the finer things about God–that he is all good, for example–can only be known by faith, because the world we live in is full of ugliness and sorrow and pain and seems to contradict the goodness of God, except as a sadist might define it. The light of truth comes shrouded in darkness. It is the duty of the church, he thought, to reveal it. “Ubi fides est, ratio fallitur.” Where reason fails, faith prevails.
The artistic culture of the west has been a prolonged illustration of religion’s monopoly on light, certainty, closure and truth. Think Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, Dante’s Paradise, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, Gretchen’s salvation in Faust. And beyond that, think of every Cinderella story, rags-to-riches-epic, chick-flick. These don’t have to be religious as long as the protagonists end up in love and at the castle.

Now think of Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the absurd and existentially restless genres of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the drama and music of the period tolled in the death of God and certainty, illustrated by atonality and abandonment of form and the unities of classical aesthetics. On the other hand, we already see this art as periodically limited to the discovery of psychology and the aftermath of nuclear confusion. In fifty years it will be unreadable except by literary professionals interested in last-century movements. If it means anything in the twenty first century, it underscores David Hart’s comment, “The world is dying of metaphysical boredom.” Atheism is hard pressed to be a solution to that situation, at any level.
Even if by some freak chance atheists in 2012 would grow to 20% of the American population they are still hamstrung by a tradition of seeing skepticism and doubt as a menu for spiritual starvation and human incompleteness. They do not seem to be helped by the attempt of a few aggressive atheists to monopolize the term “Brights” to reclaim their right to the image, or by public displays of blasphemy which seem to attack dogmas that an increasingly illiterate laity don’t know are sacred anyway. (45% of Catholics in a recent poll did not know their Church taught the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Imagine how they’d explain the virgin birth).
When atheists attack religion, it seems to many bystanders that they are attacking the solution to a problem, proposing doubt as a cure for certainty, or despair as a remedy for hope. When they do so in obnoxious ways, they just seem to be grousing about the fact Dante doesn’t give them the choicest rooms in his hell. It hardly seems fair that the unequivocal denial of God shouldn’t be the thing that God hates the most.
Is there a way to revive a debate that was really over before the fifth century of the modern era? To give atheists a chance to negotiate God out of his right to adjectives the Church won fair and square in a game of chance? I can’t answer that. Most atheists I know aren’t even interested in trying.
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Published: October 9, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholic Church : church fathers : Confessions : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Skepticism ..
32 Responses to “Darkness, Doubt, and Dante”

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 steph 
 October 9, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Simply lovely. So Superbly Written and Beautifully Funny … it’s delicious to read such a fabulously expressed analysis penetrating so many peculiar complexities and identifying things with such incisive clarity (as usual) … I’m sure you’ll be booed and excoriated by the same old people, and although that’s a shame, they always complain so it doesn’t matter, because you are right anyway. Atheism has never provided a substitute, as far as I’m aware, which is probably why it deserved to be ignored.
Of course like many other unbelievers, I am attracted to the writings of believers who struggle to express their faith and I would not dream of driving up the wall. Even Pooh, who although he was not aware of it, really was eminently sensible, would not be bothered by any seeming irrationality, so would not be driven up the wall, although he might wish they’d used short, easy words like “What about lunch?” (“Silly old Bear” says Christopher Robin).
[caps are intentional]
x
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 10, 2010 at 9:13 pm
I begin to think that all atheists are good at is denial. Maybe that is all that is required of them. But how dull they don’t respond to anything but each other. Wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have such dullards as members. How would the conversation begin over drinks? “So, when did you first realize you were an atheist?”
Reply

 steph 
 October 10, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Drinking with atheists is only potentially interesting if they’re diluted with believers, but so many blends of atheists are non dilutable. Which would you rather – wine with a believer or whine with an atheist?
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 11, 2010 at 1:34 pm
I don’t know about your dialog in the comment section but the post was excellent because it points to the suggestion that the next place for overthrowing, replacing, or otherwise maiming Christianity in the west needs to be done with respect to progress. And it needs to be done by splitting doubt from despair. Fair enough.
Disavowing the exact philosophical real estate upon which an atheist stands is fine since we’re still in the same vicinity and covering similar ground.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 11, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Seth, right: The theft was also an exchange–speculation and skepticism become sullied, when in classical philosophy they are the key elements to enlightenment. My point is that religion was successful in giving existential weight to these images–after all, how many philosophers did Plato think were capable of attaining wisdom? Almost none. And what about hoi polloi? No chance at all. But religion claimed that any goatherd could have it, just by being a good Catholic. And I agree that the project for atheists and agnostics is to suggest ways to re-enthrone doubt and skepticism as the handmaidens of knowledge. Problem is, the denialists I know do not think that atheism has any such obligation. Un-belief is a sufficient end. I don’t buy that.
Reply

 drdave 
 October 11, 2010 at 4:28 pm

the project for atheists and agnostics is to suggest ways to re-enthrone doubt and skepticism as the handmaidens of knowledge.
Now that is indeed the question. But I am not sure its the atheists that are needed to do the project. Atheists are folks who state a negative: no belief. That is not a program. Neither do I see theists volunteering to conduct the proposed project. So where do we turn for those of us who really want to see doubt and skepticism as the handmaidens of knowledge?
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 12, 2010 at 3:31 pm
dardave,
 To your question, where do we turn for those of us who really want to see doubt and skepticism as the handmaiden of knowledge? You question if atheist are needed for the project and that neither do we see thieists volunteering to conduct it. For just about any kind of knowledge we turn to science -more specifically, to the founders and grand theorists of modern pyhsics (quantum and relativity) physicists, the hardest of the sciences. It just so happens that this group has conducted this very project. So “turn here!”.
It also just happens that I have posted as comments to the essay Quidlibet: Atheist Attitude quotes by some of this group from their conduct of this project. Be prepared for surprissees! The comments are the 5th September 27, the 6th October 1, and the 7th .You can skip my poor words.
Reply

 steph 
 October 12, 2010 at 3:31 pm
“What’s in a name? That which we call an atheist by any other name would deny so much…” That’s the problem, Dave, which these articles by Professor Hoffmann has discussed. Atheism as it is presented in the public arena, and represented in ‘atheist’ type societies, and particularly in arenas where religion is so pronounced (eg America), appears to focus on it’s identity – ‘a-theism’ – and pronouncement of what it does not believe, and denouncement of those beliefs. Doubt for confessing atheists is all about deity denial and I think this article and previous recent articles on this website investigate positive aspects of unbelief as well as ways to apply doubt constructively towards progress and advancement of knowledge.
Reply

 drdave 
 October 13, 2010 at 2:58 am
Ed and Steph, as someone recent to the humanist movement (although an atheist for 50 years and indifferent to the situation until the radical right turned up the heat), I asked the question in all sincerity. I really appreciate the discussion here. As a Ph. D. chemist, programmer and data mining investigator, I know what the search for the best understanding we can get at the present time means. It takes a lot of time, energy, brains and perseverance to put up with the uncertainties engendered by nature. Atheism is not a religion, its a personal relationship with reality. And given today’s television culture, I wonder if it is possible to entice people with anything requiring more than four minutes of attention. Cheers.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 13, 2010 at 9:30 am
Is it possible to view atheism as one possible gene in a geneplex? For example, an atheist isn’t necessarily a humanist but isn’t a humanist likely to be an atheist by the fact that humanism is a godless pursuit?
I’ve been sort of imagining raw atheism as a counterculture which leads to the sort of critiques I see here. But we also need a label perpetuated that lumps folks that choose to be godless together. Some of the comments I make and that I read seem to be “I propose atheism simply says we’re godless.” and other people going “Look what atheists are doing to antagonize believers? Isn’t that atheism?”
Reply

 steph 
 October 13, 2010 at 10:39 am
Dr Dave, I don’t have television. It just doesn’t fit into the way I do things (and I’d rather listen to silence on a mountain top than screaming meemies on TV)… unfortunately my academic pursuits are not in the area of scientific inquiry that yours are but I accept limits of our (particularly my) abilities to ever achieve the answers to the universe. I doubt pretty much everything, except the existence of my toes, with little energy ;-) I think you’re right about attention spans of hoi polloi. I also think alot more than just television in this technology obsessed world is to blame.
Seth, I think geneplex is an unfortunate metaphor and while humanists, self identified, do tend to be represented by humanist societies whose members are in practice atheists, it is not an exclusively atheist approach to life. In previous posts, Joe has discussed the history and origins of humanism in detail, and I don’t think societies like the British Humanist Society today have much to do with Erasmus. There are many religious humanists who would rather identify themselves according to their religion than as humanists necessarily. I think not including belief in deities in our interpretation and inquiries into the universe, is far more complex than lumping people into a group called atheists. I’m not joining. I’m a believer… ;-)
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 13, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Dr. Dave and any interested.
 The full excerpt from Quantum Questions is found at:
 Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists . . . founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum . . . will be one of the central questions of the . . .
 www:ssshambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-57062-768-cfm?selected Text-EXCERPT-CHAPTER
 I include the entire site description since there are several sites with the book name., only this site seems to have the full excerpt.
 I appreciate the dialougue.
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 13, 2010 at 4:31 pm
What if someone were to say that atheism and radical skepticism are a necessary prelude to true understanding, that the Via negationis and the long dark night of the soul are necessary precursors to a full spiritual/intellectual life? What if it were argued that most atheists and skeptics don’t go far enough, that they hold on to something rather than taking the risk of denying everything? What if it were argued that all wisdom traditions point to this necessary step, and that there is no contradiction between Greek and Jewish insight, that they are just two different approaches to the same thing, the first being philosophical, and the second mystical? What if there was a modern midwife, someone who could help modern mass men navigate the dark paths toward inner light with scientific precision? Would anyone be interested, or would everyone prefer to remain in the twilight realm where certainty and uncertainty cannot be distinguished? Would they roll their eyes at the claims of yet another guru and his over-zealous disciples? Or would they take a chance, and dare to actually hope that someone could lead them to inner peace?
Reply

 drdave 
 October 13, 2010 at 5:32 pm
For those that bemoan the gnu atheists and their fervor, we can take a page from the politics of the radical right and employ the “Overton Window” to our advantage. A cause always needs an advocate for the radical position so that compromise can be made with a more moderate group. Thus, let the gnu atheists do their thing, while the humanists do the growing by assimilation (resistance is futile).
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 14, 2010 at 11:57 pm
To continue this promising diaglogue, hopefully not to end it.
The two most important midwives of history:
 The Greek – Plato- 400 BC – with his allegory the Cave.
 The Jewish Jesus – 30 CE – with his idiom the Kingdom of God
 Both were faced with an enormous problem: the need to proclaim their discovery of the solution to the human delimma, the solution being beyond normal sense perceived language, to the largely unresponsive masses.
 Thus Plato fashioned his Cave alegory: mankind was like men in a cave – seeming to be so restrained by chains so that they could only face the walls in front, unable to turn to face the entrance from which the light of an outsde fiire cast shadows on the walls. They came to believe that the shadows, all that they could see, was all that there was. One of the men discovered that the chains were an allusion of and turned to face the light.
 Some 400 years later Jesus proclaimed his discovery of the solution, fashioning his idiom the Kingdom of God. As a Jew he had the advantage of building on the Torah – containing the highest developed God knowledge of any culture of its time. To overcome the language problem he spoke of the Kingdom in indirectly – in prables. The Kingdom is like some everyday sense perceived experience, but with some stark twist overturning common sense understanding.
 Now I have opened a can of wormes. Without developing,, I dare name the crucial Christian problematic. As Reimarus (1770) – the father of the Quest for the historical Jesus (prsenting the challenge: the NT presents two images of Jesus, the person of history and the mythical Christ of fFaith,) said in effect: Search the Scriptures and see if Christianity was not based on a mistake. Indeed it was – Christianity was based on Pauline kerygma – rather than the so-called Jesus Kerygma.
 Just here I make reference to the first 13 comments to the RJH essay The Importance of the Historicl Jesus. The comments contain a reconstruction of the Jesus tradition in the form of a letter I mailed to Joe which CFI failed to pass on and which in frustration I posted (under some stress) as comments. It is largely excerpts from the works of three scholars whom I judge to be the most authorotative on NT critical historical scholars. Overlok the typos.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 15, 2010 at 12:13 pm
The full title of the site for the referenced RJH essay: The Importance of the Historical Jesus: A Jesus Project Quodlibet …
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 15, 2010 at 1:00 pm
It seems that the neo-humanists want to eliminate the Jewish strand from our culture, and just keep the Greek. Hence, the drive to eliminate Christ from history.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 15, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Barrett Pashak,
 Help me unerstand. Kindly say if your comment is in any way related to my October 14 comment.
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 15, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Certainly it was, Ed. I’m saying that the neo-humanists want to keep the cave, and throw away the Kingdom.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 15, 2010 at 2:13 pm
I would vote to throw away the Kingdom. It’s an unnecessarily complicated variation of the cave.
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 15, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Q.E.D.
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 15, 2010 at 2:30 pm
I’m not a humanist.
Reply
 

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 15, 2010 at 3:08 pm
You should be conscious of what you are throwing away. As Constantin Brunner puts it:
Greece and Rome thought nothing of the thirty thousand gods, and the mysteries, and all the art treasures and all the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome; Greece and Rome, and all humanity, regarded the whole of civilization as nothing, and the poor hanged Jew as everything, as their Lord, to whose service they gave everything they had not thrown away. And all this came through the Jewish am haaretz literature.–http://constantinbrunner.info/sbise/1/200503150938.htm
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 15, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Joe himself pretty much said anything I could say on the matter when he mentioned how the Bible is a book of its own time. He said “I have no quarrel with those who want to appreciate the Bible as a product of its own time and culture—with all the conditions that attach to appreciation of that kind. My quarrel is with people who want to make it a document for our time and culture.”
And what would have me do to be more conscious of this Jesus anyway? I’ve read the New Testament. When can I throw away the Kingdom in favor of the cave?
Reply
 

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 15, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Thus, to the end of days, all rational men will bow low before this Jesus of Nazareth; and the more self-knowledge they have, the more humbly they will acknowledge the superabundant glory of this great manifestation.–Fichte
Reply

 Darkness, Doubt, and Dante, One of a Series of Unfortunate Reposts | The New Oxonian says:
 January 30, 2011 at 6:54 pm
[...] Darkness, Doubt, and Dante, One of a Series of Unfortunate Reposts Posted on January 30, 2011 by rjosephhoffmann| Leave a comment What do Augustine, Thomas de Quincey, Leo Tolstoy, and John Henry Newman (now Blessed) have in common? That's right: confessions. Relatively speaking, Tolstoy might have chosen to blog about his plight rather than write through it in longhand, de Quincey would have done well on Salon.com, and Newman called his confession an apologi … Read More [...]
Reply

 Dwight Jones 
 January 30, 2011 at 9:15 pm
“When atheists attack religion, it seems to many bystanders that they are attacking the solution to a problem, proposing doubt as a cure for certainty, or despair as a remedy for hope.”
The best assessment I’ve seen to date of the US view of atheists. No sure the rest of the West is so judgmental.
Re: appropriating the “light” – men are moths who need not be led to the candle. They like bright lights all by themselves, especially the fire that throws no light – drugs.
If redacted Jesuits ever got hold of our personal DNA, and a contract to look after it, I’d be more content than I am now.
Reply

 James Croft 
 January 31, 2011 at 3:08 am
Joseph, it’s a MIRACLE – I fully and entirely agree with one of your posts! I’m actually presenting a paper on this topic at the AHA conference this year – “The Symbolic Poverty and Potential of Humanism”. In short, I argue that Humanists need to get over their allergy to symbolism and ritual and try to develop positive Humanist alternatives to religious symbols and narratives. There is much potential for this within Humanism, I’m sure – I think Sagan was a master at it, though some of your writing seems to suggest you disagree ;) .
Readers may enjoy the following, which I wrote when we started The New Humanism magazine:
http://goo.gl/F63bH
Reply

 drdave 
 January 31, 2011 at 12:41 pm
James, excellent article. The Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix is celebrating 12 February with its “Darwin Day Fish Dinner” at 11:30 AM at their Humanist Community Center (hsgp.org). Now that we have a physical facility, we are looking at how to enlarge the community. I think that most of us at HSGP, while skeptical in many ways, have decided that hyper-skepticism is counter productive in a community, and that we enjoy the community we find here.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 February 25, 2011 at 11:39 am
A question: When and just how did “Humanism” become transformed from its origins to loose its relgious identity? Pico della Mirandola associates with the origins of Humanism – one of the most read of the Renaissance philosophers. “Humanism” is not anti-Christian as it has come to mean in some quarters of modern discourse. Late medieval and Renaissance humanism was a response to the standard educational program that focussed on logic and linguistics and that animated the other great late medieval Christian philosophy, Scholarsticism. The Humanists, rather than focussing on what they considred futile questions of logic, semantics and proposition analysis, focussed on the relation of the human to the divine, seeing in human beings the summit and purpose of God’s creation. (They looked out of the cave to see the sole cause of the shadows). Their concern was to define the human place in God’s plan and the relation of the human to the divine; therefore, they centered all their thought on the “human” relation to the divine, and hence called themselves “humanists”. At no point do they ignore their religion; humanism is first and foremost a religious and educational movement, not a secular one (what we call “secular humanism” in modern political discourse- -(to return humanism back to the cave). Pico sought out nothing less than the reconciliation of every human philosophy and every human religion with Christianity.”

 
 

 Darkness, Doubt, and Dante (via The New Oxonian) | The New Oxonian says:
 February 24, 2011 at 11:39 am
[...] What do Augustine, Thomas de Quincey, Leo Tolstoy, and John Henry Newman (now Blessed) have in common? That's right: confessions. Relatively speaking, Tolstoy might have chosen to blog about his plight rather than write through it in longhand, de Quincey would have done well on Salon.com, and Newman called his confession an apologi … Read More [...]
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 February 25, 2011 at 12:10 pm
An after word: – - taking Humanism back within the cave – unable to recognize the sole cause of the shadows – hence loosing its status of being in the kingdom of God – thus removed from Reality,
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Let’s Talk About It: Of Intellectual Restlessness
by rjosephhoffmann

I am completely clueless why there is any discussion at all about whether believers and unbelievers should be talking to each other. Talking isn’t negotiation. It’s what, as Aristotle teaches, human beings do if they’re smart. Believers and unbelievers don’t form two groups with nothing to talk about. They represent options that relatively bright women and men have considered important for a very long time. They have everything to talk about.
It was bad enough when the term “atheism” could be used as a kind of patriotic lingo to get evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics to huddle together against the terrorist threat of yesterday, Nuclear Communism. Before that they regarded each other as cultural enemies, mingled in the marketplace unawares, socialized with suspicion, sought permission for “mixed marriages,” like hostile religious species forced to live on a planet where God saved some, but not others. Of course Presbyterians felt that way about Episcopalians, too, and Catholics thought it about everyone but Catholics.

But by 1960 John Kennedy had half-convinced an electorate still dominantly protestant, still fretting about what Paul Blanshard called “Catholic Power,” that they hated Communism more than they hated each other. Realpolitik required Protestants and Catholics to join hands. When they did, they promptly put scripture aside and worked ecumenically to create an agenda that included the antiabortion movement, abstinence-only education, opposition to stem cell and reproductive research, and assorted other sexual mysteries about which religion is officially ignorant. If she had had her wits about her in 2008, Sarah Palin (a Protestant) could have named Phyliss Schlafly (a Catholic) as her spiritual grandmother and favorite author.

Ms. Schlafly
What created the unlikely entente cordiale between backward-looking Catholics and navel-gazing Protestants was the Protestant discovery that “Every sperm in sacred,” not just the Irish, Italian, and Polish variety. This required some magnanimity on the part of the protestant faithful, whose favorite barbs and jokes (interchangeably used at the expense of those same Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants) pivoted on papa’s inability to keep his trousers zipped. It is a point of mere historical interest that the inventor of the condom, who defended its use as protection against syphilis in the sixteenth century, was a priest named Gabriele Fallopio, one of the most distinguished anatomists of his day in Padua where he taught. (He also gave his name to the “fallopian tubes.”)
I admit, getting Catholics and Protestants to talk to each other, share ideas, form alliances, separate out the things that divide from the things that unite them, ought to be a comparatively easy task. But it isn’t. As a matter of fact current trends suggest that it might be easier to get liberal Christians and humanists to sit down to a turkey dinner together than to get Tea-Party Christians to talk to liberals.
In a fit of boredom I picked up a copy of John Neuhaus’s Catholic Matters (2007) at the local library a few days ago. I do not say that sarcastically. I may not agree with Neuhaus’s conservative thought-trend, but he was, before his death in January 2009, a sly and articulate observer of what he called in another book the “Catholic movement today.” As a traditionalist in essential matters, like the supremacy of Catholic teaching (the magisterium, so-called) he welcomed the election of Joseph Ratzinzger as successor to John Paul II: Benedict XVI would be not just a custodian, he claimed from his vantage point in Rome in 2005, but the guardian of the Faith. That has turned out to be true.
But Neuhaus’s best moments in this hastily written book are on the subject that had occupied his attention since the 1987 publication of The Naked Public Square: secularization and its effect on the Churches, especially the mainline, liberal protestant churches. He identifies these with the “establishment” denominations of nineteenth-century America: the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church (Anglicanism’s worst if not only headache), the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ (UCC, aka in some northerly parts as Congregationalists) and the Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans, excepting the Missouri Synod variety (Neuhaus’s mother church before his conversion). I will omit mentioning the Unitarians for reasons that will be clear and acceptable to all Unitarians.

Neuhaus
The argument by now familiar, perhaps trite, is borne out by innumerable big and little surveys: the old mainline churches, in death-throes of membership decline and doctrinal indifference, are essentially secular clubs with aging parishioners, inadequately supplemented by members who expect to be talked to but not preached at about God’s love for all, regardless of race, class, age, sexual orientation or wardrobe choices. They assume the name “Christian,” but are really dedicated to progressive social and political causes–gay-rights, pro-choice and women’s issues, environmental ethics–and use religion more as a source of legitimation than as a system of belief. Their more traditional detractors usually (and somewhat tiresomely) say that they have traded the love of Christ for the love of self. Their conservative cousins summarize in a single self-explanatory phrase what the liberal churches don’t stand for, a phrase that has now been interpolated into conservative political discourse as well: Family Values. A core doctrinal difference between old and new mainline is the revised concept of sin: old style protestants believed in it. New style think it’s negotiable. A nineteenth century Methodist preacher offered God’s grace and forgiveness prior to judgment. But in the liberal churches, God is expected to dispense only grace and to accept people for what and who they are. It is a Christianity impregnated with the psychotheology of Carl Rogers: love is unconditional, so a perfect God really has no right to expect anything from us.

These are the churches that H. Richard Niebuhr worried about when he prophesied from the Battell Chapel at Yale in 1935 (published as The Kingdom of God in America, 1937) that religious tolerance and pluralism was implicit in the teaching of Jesus, but that the “social gospel” (a key idea of the formation of American secularism before there was a humanist secular movement) in its raw form preached, “A God without wrath [who brings] men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Niebuhr would have derived no satisfaction from knowing that his prophecy was right on the mark in sociological effect.
Neuhaus knew his Niebuhr, and he believed until his dying day that the fortress of Catholicism was the only protection against creeping secularity. Others have thought it too: G. K. Chesterton thought it. Graham Greene thought it. Simone Weil (Alsatian, Jewish, agnostic) and Thomas Merton (New Zealand-American, Quaker Anglican, spiritually confused) thought it, and then stopped thinking it.

Simone Weil
But Crossing the Tiber, or “Poping” as intellectual conversion is known in Britain, is not for everyone. And there are at least as many who take the ferry in the other direction and become ex- or “lapsed” Catholics as who join the True Church.
What I think we miss and need to get is that whichever direction you travel, there are thousands who have taken the ride. Conversion is a fancy word for changing your mind. The twentieth century biblical scholar Arthur Darby Nock, in a famous study of religious conversion, defined it as “a radical emotional experience or a quick turning to a new way of life and a complete reorientation in attitude, thought, and practice.” It comes, simply enough, from a sense that something is wrong with the way things are in our life and that we need to do something about it. Nock thought that the early Roman empire was rife with the conditions for such an experience, and he attributes the growth of the Christian movement in the first century to those conditions. The job he did not do was to trace the same restlessness, the same sense of “present wrongness” in the reforms of the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century and the averse reaction to the Church and religion (“supernaturalism”) in the Enlightenment and, at least in Europe, later. The conditions for conversion will always be located in the individual’s refusal to assent to the status quo –which may be emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually unendurable.
Atheists, it seems to me, stand in precisely the same relation to conditions prescribed by religion as religious persons do in relation to the loss (or perceived loss) of metaphysics. For that reason–while I don’t deny the existence of “cradle atheists” anymore than I deny the existence of cradle Catholics, the kind of atheist I think would want to talk to intellectually restless religious persons is one who has undergone a conversion.
“Conversion” to atheism (a term atheists deplore because of its religious associations) is a form of intellectual restlessness. Except for a very few people who say they realized they were atheists on the same day they lost their pacifier down the toilet, shattering forever their belief in an all-good providence, people become atheists because they can no longer accept what Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetically described as her “childhood faith…and lost saints.” Many of these feel they were lied to; some feel they are victims of a cultural conspiracy; others think that religion itself should be held accountable for the evils its has perpetrated on the species. All of these reasons have to be taken seriously because they point to the chasm between what is taught or acquired by tradition and the world as we come to know it. The question is, What are we prepared to accept as true? An atheist claims to answer this question on the basis of reason alone, or more precisely rational argument and inquiry. But there may be other factors involved, including (heaven help us!) emotional and maturational ones.
Religious conversion is also real, paradigmatically real, and ought to be regarded as a form of intellectual restlessness. Of course most people who travel toward religion don’t begin the journey as atheists. Some begin with nothing. Most are not ashamed to assign a role to emotion in the process, though they might want to insist that head and heart work together in a kind of harmony. A slim minority begin as  intellectuals who have a sober and sometimes critical view of religion, church and tradition. These are the ones who interest me the most for purposes of a Great Conversation–the ones who know what role doubt, skepticism, and even cynicism play in the intellectual life.
The British writer Malcolm Muggerdige, later in his life a figure of ridicule for his view of Britain’s “sexual revolution,” moved from a fashionable, youthful Cambridge atheism to Catholicism around the same time the Church was moving in the direction of tone-deaf folk-masses and accommodation to the swinging sixties. It was a cruel juxtaposition for someone whose most-quoted aphorism is “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.” His more stalwart New England contemporary and friend, William F. Buckley remained a Catholic, but just barely, because he believed his Church’s dogmatic stand on social and political issues was just about right, while he deplored its loss of “aesthetic rectitude.”

Muggeridge, urbane, caustic, clever, Catholic
Buckley’s son, Christopher, crossed over to an “unbelieving” posture of the most discreet and unassuming literary kind–where he joined a distinguished retinue of former Catholics-turned-Infidel including Theodore Dreiser, George Carlin, Steve Allen, Joyce Carol Oates, and Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy). Travelling the other direction on the Rome ferry were social activist Dorothy Day, writer Ford Maddox Ford, actor Alec Guinness, Robert Lowell, Gustav Mahler, and Siegfried Sassoon–a positive wave of spiritual malcontents that wanted more than cheaper goods and early retirement. Neuhaus comments in his last book that whilst a Lutheran who becomes a Presbyterian will almost never begin a sentence with “I used to be Lutheran, ” a lapsed, ex- or former Catholic will almost always say with some pride, “I used to be a Catholic.” It’s as though making the journey counts for something, or it may be only that irreverence is the flip side of reverence.
The point is, people who believe radically different things need to talk to each other because what people think and why they change their minds is inherently interesting in a way that mere “positions” are not. Settled positions, like Emerson’s foolish consistency, are the hobgoblin of little minds. Judges talk about “settled law” as a way of forfending discussion of hypothetical cases. They are really talking about dogmas promulgated by courts. The Church has used the term dogma in the same way, to refer to beliefs that have been settled by papal dictate. I do not know what “settled belief” is, but any settled belief becomes, if not fundamentalism, a kind of scholasticism. People should always be slightly uncomfortable about what they believe, whether they are atheists or (a dreadful non-word) “theists.”
Atheism can never be anything but a belief. In William Jamesian terms, it can be a strong belief, but it can never be certainty. Most atheists know this; many react to it with disdain and change the topic from God to Gravity–the law, not the theory–as a case of what is damned obvious. Even the idea (James’s) that many of our beliefs are based on “faith in someone else’s faith” isn’t a proof that all such beliefs are irrational.

James: Boston's greatest gift to Harvard
In the same way, “Religion,” never mind the religion, can never be anything but a belief or concatenation of beliefs. The claim that religion is a belief or “truth” of a higher order is completely specious and is rarely used by anyone with a reputable education. (Which truths, of whose religion, qualify for this status?) Whether religious belief is ever warranted by evidence or logic is uncertain to me, but the greater warrants for religion are customary morality, emotion, and authority, and the systematization of any faith as theology does not increase the likelihood of its propositions or truth value. I consider the reasons for holding such beliefs comparatively weak, but they are reasons that need to be assessed. And not every belief reaches the level of absurdity displayed by W.K. Clifford’s ship-master in his famous parable in The Ethics of Belief.

For intelligent believers and unbelievers to discuss what James called a “momentous option” is sensible, however. There is an eloquence of belief and an eloquence of unbelief. To treat contrary ways of expressing a commitment as private pastures divided between sheep and goats (laying aside which is which in this analogy) is intellectually indefensible. It is a page torn from modern geopolitical theory where irreconcilable differences have to do with national interests, not with intelligent discourse.
Of course, there is a difference between the fundamentalist Christian who says “I know that my Redeemer liveth” and the agnostic who says, “Show me,” or the atheist who says “No he doesn’t because there is no God.” But there is a vast middle ground (or pasture) where sheep and goats may safely graze. Conversation between those who hold to the existence of God not as a settled belief but as a living option, and those who hold a contrary view keeps both sides unsettled. That is a good outcome for both sides.
There are exceptions to this encounter between belief of an intellectual and restless kind, and unbelief of the unsettled kind. Let’s call them the four forms of modern scholasticism. Given the starting premises of these groups, I regard dialogue between the modern “scholastics” as improbable and potentially unproductive as dialogue between Dominicans and Jews in the Middle Ages.

Religious Secularism. For those who are happy with the social gospel of welcoming congregations and the agendas of the depleted liberal churches, what would be the point of conversation? Whether these churches are “right” or “wrong” in practice, the question they will have to answer is why they need the gospel at all. Liberal theology, liberation theology, feminist theology and even (yes) post-Christian theology are now historical theology. They belong, like guitar masses, to the seventies along with prayers to “Jesus, Our Brother” and “Our Mother-Father God, who art in every slum and every earthly visage.”
Dogmatic Catholicism. Catholics who are Catholics because they have never questioned the authority or reasonableness of the Church’s teaching, especially its pronouncements concerning sexual and social ethics. In a recent survey, 45% of Catholics surveyed did not know that their Church taught the “real presence” of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the traditional center of Catholic devotion and piety and a key factor in the Protestant Reformation. 95% knew the Church’s position on abortion. The implication of this result is that contemporary Catholics are badly educated about their own faith (it’s called in theological circles the “crisis of catechetics,” or training) but are willing to accept what they are told is true. At this level, religion means being a team player, knowing the rules, knowing the consequences of breaking them, knowing the score. But there is a caveat here: most of the Catholics who went on to become satirists, authors, comedians, novelists and social critics as well as most of those who traveled intellectually towards Rome knew their Church far better than the ones whose journey to atheism was one from not knowing very much to not believing very much.

George Carlin
Biblicism. Fundamentalism is defined as a belief in text without context. To religious fundamentalists who have a personal relationship with Jesus underwritten by divine revelation: there is probably nothing between the two sides worth exploring. Unbelief is a refusal of God’s gift of love and grace, though it is not necessarily considered the most heinous refusal. That belongs to those who have “heard” the message and not responded–the nominally Christian. The Islamic equivalent is described in a saying of Muhammad from the Sahih Bukhari, and is generally considered good practical advice for Muslims: “God hates for you…to ask too many questions in religious matters” (Vol. 3, Book 41, Number 591).
Dogmatic Unbelief: Those Atheists who regard their position as unassailable, the religious option as ridiculous, and the ridicule of religion and religious institutions as a social duty or a form of overdue payback may well be right about what they do not believe (phrased negatively) but quite unclear about what they do believe. What makes them “scholastic” is that like the medieval scholars, whose knowledge could be reduced to a set of stereotyped proofs or demonstrations, they have lost interest in the questions that made their rejection of God interesting, provocative and viable. In a phrase, they no longer think the question of God is intrinsically interesting and would have no reason to second-guess their position or entertain anyone else’s.

Thomas Merton
Let me conclude with an example of the kind of intellectual restlessness that could result in interesting conversation between believers and unbelievers: Thomas Merton, mentioned above.
While I detest conspiracy theories about the death of Merton, there is good reason to think he had left orthodox Catholicism behind at the end of his life in 1968. He had fallen in love with a nursing student two years earlier, and as part of his “recovery”
turned to Buddhism, which had intrigued him since his student days at Oxford and Columbia. He had met with the Dalai Lama, and was reading the works of D.T. Suzuki, with whom he had developed a literary friendship.
I do not believe the church arranged for his murder. I do not know whether he committed suicide. But I do know that he was intellectually unsettled and that vows of silence, perpetual contemplation (he was a Trappist monk, then an enclosed order), and finally Zen and poetry weren’t enough to resettle him. It seems, at the end, that he looked more to poetry as a cure for his despair than to anything else. As a student he had been sexually adventurous, a vagabond between America and England, and finally (in his own words), even when surrounded by devout Anglicans and Catholics from two sides of his family, “someone who did not believe anything.”
Merton died before journey’s end. Who knows how he would have ended up? A priest? An apostate? A husband? An agnostic? He was only 53 when he died. The “affair” with the girl he calls “M” lasted until a year before he died, and in his “Midsummer Diary for M” he writes,

Is she thinking of me? Loving me? Is her heart calling to mine in the dark? I don’t know. I can’t honestly say that I know. I can’t honestly say I know anything except that it is late, that I can’t sleep, that there are fireflies all over the place, and that there is not the remotest possibility of making any poetic statement on this. You don’t write poems about nothing.
And yet somehow this nothing seems to be everything. I look at the south sky, and for some ungodly reason, for which there is no reason, everything is complete. I think of going back to bed in peace without knowing why, a peace that cannot be justified by anything, by any reason, any proof, any argument, by any supposition. There are no suppositions left. Only fireflies.
–As complete a statement of affirmative disbelief and as far from Roman Catholic Christianity as one could imagine.
But the vision is scarcely unique:

….Between the cold
 and barren peaks of two eternities
 we strive in vain to look beyond the heights,
 we cry aloud: the only answer
 is the echo of our wailing cry….
Hope sees a star, and listening love can hear
 the rustle of a wing.
 These myths were born of hopes, and fears and tears
 and smiles, and they were touched and colored
 by all there is of joy and grief between
 the rosy dawn of birth and death’s sad night;
 they clothed even the stars with passion
 and gave to the gods the faults and frailties
 of the sons of men. In them the winds
 and waves were music, and all the lakes and streams,
 springs, mountains, woods, and perfumed dells
 were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. (Robert G. Ingersoll)

Ingersoll: Oratorical agnosticism?
Just to repeat: Atheists and their believing others have no moral obligation to negotiate their beliefs, not even to respect each other’s opinions. Why should they? The conversation I am advocating is not for everyone–not for the modern scholastics, of all stripes, who are stuck within the boundaries of private certitude.
This is an elitist position, I realize, but why should smart and interesting people waste their time talking to people who can only repeat slogans? Isn’t that what politics is for?
But at a particular level–where many born-again atheists and many true believers will never venture–the conversation goes on anyway, where the sons of men contemplate love and fireflies and find their peace. There is something worth talking about at that level.
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Published: October 18, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: accommodation : agnosticism : atheism : Church of England : dialogue : ecumenism : humanism : Malcom Muggeridge : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Roman Catholicism : Thomas Merton : William F. Buckley ..
20 Responses to “Let’s Talk About It: Of Intellectual Restlessness”

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 Ed Jones 
 October 18, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Joe,
 At this particular juncture, I find it to be of special interest to know your response to Barrett’s comment, a quote from Fichte, the last comment to Doubt and Darkness.
Reply

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 19, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Hi Ed:
I don’t know that there is much interest here in pursuing this particular discussion. If you want to see the Fichte quotation in context, it is in The way towards the blessed life; or, The doctrine of religion, p. 107.
I was raised an atheist, but also as a rationalist. I saw that much of the talk about Christ on the part of both atheists and religionists was irrational. Eventually, I did discover a satisfactory and rational account of Christ in the work of Constantin Brunner. It is now apparent to me that one can be both an atheist and a devotee of Christ. Of course, most atheists today want nothing at all to do with Christ, and therefore they throw up all kind of irrational speculation, particularly with regard to his historicity.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 19, 2010 at 1:47 pm
We talk because those who know are compelled to attempt to act as mid-wives to those who don’t know.
Belief and Unbelief are misleading terms, in fact they are misnomers. Belief is a Christian designation associated with the fundamental problematic of Christianity. Again as Fiemarus, the founder of the quest for the HJ, said in effect: Search the Scriptures and see if Chriatianity is not based on a mistake. Indeed it is, it is based on Pauline Kerygma rather than on the Jesus sayings kerygma
 The problematic: saved by another’s merits – the doctrine of faith which removes from the soul the need to do anything. Neither do you need to think out anything – there are the eternal rulings of Paul – you need only to believe in the saving death to be saved. to escape punishment and to enter eternal happiness after a short spell here. Such are the conditions which gave rise to the conflict between truth and goodness in Western religion, between what was actually known and experienced and what had to be believed, that conflict which has ever since weakened Christianity. Paul cosistently evidenced a complete lack of understanding of the psychology of the mechanics of God-man relationship, i.e. the experience of spirit as inspiration rather than sprit (The Holy Spirit) as a thing sent at baptism equal to all believers.
 We have opened the flood gates of the mystery of Ultimate Concern. Lao-tzu’s famous definition of the baffling paradox of this mystery. “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know”. The real division of humanity is the distinction between those who know and those who don’t know; raher than between believers and non-believers.
Again I make reference to a reconstruction of the Jesus tradition located in the first 13 comments to the essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus – A Jesus Project Quodblet.
Reply

 steph 
 October 19, 2010 at 5:33 pm
There is no distinction between those that know and those that don’t because nobody knows. Sure there are those that claim to know as believers and those that claim they know as unbelievers. But surely the point of this post is that rational and progressive conversation actually exists where it can only exist: between the sheep and goats in the vast middle ground where everyone knows. And what they know is that they don’t know whether or not God really exists and they do know that progress is made with doubt and inquiry. And it’s Reimarus Ed.

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 22, 2010 at 10:43 am
Thanks Ed, your comments are always useful, targeted and informative.

 
 

 steph 
 October 18, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Always superb, intellectually sophisticated, incisive and refreshingly true. It is so true that between the too often, loudly shouting, intellectually stagnant, opposing claimers to truth (as I see them), “there is a vast middle ground (or pasture) where sheep (and goats) may safely graze” and there the conversation goes on happily and restlessly anyway. As Voltaire said, “certainty is absurd” and of course Pooh wisely supposed that the evidence for Rabbit being clever and having Brain was that “he never understands anything”. At least Rabbit knows he isn’t certain. And so did Pooh.
I love Thomas Merton for his quiet whimsical mystical poetry and also for his love affair, but I was blissfully unaware of any revoulting conspiracy theories around his death. However although it may wish to, New Zealand can’t claim any ownership of him can it? I don’t think he ever trod there and even his father, Owen, who was born in New Zealand, painted all his rather nice wishwashy watercolours overseas and married an American. But it doesn’t really matter because I like to think of him now as a New Zealand-American, Quaker Anglican, spiritually confused poet. That’s beautiful, like the author.
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 20, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Thanks, was aware of it as I wrote – a quirk of age (1/25/19). Your comment: “There is no distinction between those who know and those that don’t know because nobody knows” seems dogmatic – end of discussion.
Reply

 steph 
 October 20, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Actually Ed, I was trying to summarise what the article on intellectual restlessness had argued and demonstrated. My mother Ed, is nearly 86, and she not only still expresses disgust when I let typos slip through in emails to her, she is meticulously thorough in proof reading and correcting her own. It makes them easy and such a pleasure to read.

 Barrett Pashak 
 October 20, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Your mother’s named Ed, steph? And it’s “proofreading” (no space).

 steph 
 October 20, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Haha that’s cute! ‘My mother, Ed..’ My mother, Barrett, would have a fit at me. She’s a pedant, quite properly, about punctuation, as well as pronunciation, which makes my own flavour of Kiwi twang, a little confused at times.

 Ed Jones 
 October 24, 2010 at 10:53 am
Thenks Joe,
 Your apparent sympathetic reading of my stuff gives rise to a certain hope.

 
 

 maryhelena 
 October 19, 2010 at 4:04 pm
“And yet somehow this nothing seems to be everything. I look at the south sky, and for some ungodly reason, for which there is no reason, everything is complete. I think of going back to bed in peace without knowing why, a peace that cannot be justified by anything, by any reason, any proof, any argument, by any supposition. There are no suppositions left. Only fireflies.”
“Only fireflies”. Indeed. When “nothing seems to be everything” light is truly shinning bright! It’s not the grasping, the clutching and safekeeping of ‘truth’ that brings peace – it’s the letting go of our assumption that we can be masters of it. It’s not the answers that ennoble us – it’s the fact that we can ask the questions.
Yes, restlessness is the beginning; our curiosity, our wanting to know, our need to know. But the time will come, and come it surely will, that restlessness will give way to either peace or frustration.
Perhaps keeping this quote in mind would enable us to watch those fireflies…
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
(Umberto Eco (b. 1932), Italian semiologist, novelist. Brother William, in The Name of the Rose, “Seventh Day: Night (2)” (1980; tr. 1983).)
The point the quote is highlighting does seem odd. But on reflection, at least to me, it struck a cord. When one is initially searching for ‘truth’ one is fired up with enthusiasm – then as the years pass, while the commitment remains, realization about the illusive nature of ones quest brings not despair but joy. One is happy with ones journey – one can laugh at ‘truth’s intransigence, laugh at the game it is playing – and laugh at oneself for ones past seriousness in thinking it could be caught. Laughter, they say, is the best medicine – and isn’t it a distinguishing mark of being human? So perhaps its not altogether unreasonable to expect ‘truth’ and laughter to join forces once in a while!
When the evening of life is upon us
 Our smile must be there at it’s close
 Did we spend our days frustrated
 Or in contentment’s rare delight
Too often our minds have betrayed us
 Our heart picking up the tears
 But deep down in our being we know
 That life is a gift that is priceless and pure
Life comes to us full of promise
 It’s ours to accept with pride
 It’s ours to color with beauty
 It’s ours to dance with joy
Did we look beyond life’s sorrows
 To the life that’s free from pain
 Did we see life in it’s greatness
 As energy sublime
Ideas, debates, arguments, while intellectually stimulating, don’t have the wherewithal to make us friendly associates. Don’t give my another goddamn idea, my late husband used to tell me – I just need a hug…..
Reply

 steph 
 October 19, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Hugging, kissing and laughter are essential ingredients in the recipe for a beating human heart, but I disagree that conversation cannot make friendly associates when the conversation is conducted between those who share the primary human concession to doubt, and it is necessary to make progress. And conversation with wit and creativity brings laughter. And then, as we first take Manhatten and next Berlin, we’ll end up and hugging and kissing anyway ;-)
Reply

 maryhelena 
 October 19, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Sure, doubt has it’s place – but as a meeting place for friendly companionship – I have my doubts…..
The most rewarding experience within friendly association is affirmation not negation.
There is nothing wrong with believers – of any stripe – its the dogmatism that is the problem, not the belief. It’s those who doubt that are the minority. And if doubt really is our prize possession – then believers should be welcome as friendly associates! After all, we do need our doubt to be validated…

 steph 
 October 19, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Yes, indeed, but I’m not suggesting negation but finding common values, appreciation of moderate differences and negotiation. And not just about God. What this post correctly identifies I think is that there is a vast middle ground that already exists, where conversation does run along merrily between believers and unbelievers who are intelligent enough to recognise doubt. Where dogmatism lingers conversation is pointless and doesn’t stop boring cartoons, Tshirts and street corner preachers and creationism in schools. The vast majority of people I have grown up with, worked with and socialised with, might define themselves as atheists, believers or agnostics, but claim agnosticism of faith. And while people are generally more protective of their personal space in the northern hemisphere, down in the southern hemisphere we’re quite a huggy mixture of skeptics. Your claim that ‘those who doubt that are the minority’ does not reflect my own experience or that of those I have studied with. While I have not lived in America, I am beginning to realise, that although the extremes are very very loud and pronounced, there is a much larger group of thinkers and doubters in between than I previously believed.

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 22, 2010 at 10:43 am
Amen (forgive the associations)

 
 

 maryhelena 
 October 20, 2010 at 4:18 am
Quite – context matters. Specific areas and cultures will produce different ratios of believers and those who doubt. I’m living in Africa – and here the dice rolls more towards the believers than towards those who doubt….
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 21, 2010 at 10:42 pm
On the chance that someone may still be “talking about it”, I offer extracts from The Mind Of God by Paul Davies, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adilaide in Australia – an expert on the New Physics. The book won him the Templeton Prize. He holds that science offers a surer oath to God than religion. (Christianity)
 Mystical Knowledge
“All arrangements to explain everything are founded on the assumption of human rationality that it is legitimate to seek “explanation” for things, and that we truly understand something only when it is “explained”. Yet it has to be admitted that our concept of rational explanation probably derives from our observation of the world and our evolutionary inheritance. Is it clear that this provides adequate quidance when we are tangling with ultimate questions? Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense?- that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational thought.
 Can we make sense of the universe without rational problems? Is there a route to knowledge – even “Ultimate knowledge” – that lie outside the road of rationality? Many people claim there is. It is called mysticism. Most scientists (and Christian theologians) have a deep mistrust of mysticism. This is not surprising as mystical thought lies at the opposite extreme to rational thought, which is the basis of the scientific method. In fact many of the world’s finest thinkers, including some notable scientiests (see site for abstracts of Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists) have embraced mysticism. I am not saying that science and logic are likely to provide wrong answers, but they may be incapable of addressing the sort of “why” (as opposed to “”how”) questions we want to ask.
 The expression “mystical experience” is often used by those who practice meditation. These experiences, which are undoubtedly real enough for the person who experiences them, are said to be hard to convey in words. Mystics fequently speak of an overwelming sense of being at one with God, of glimpsing a holistic vision of Reality, or of being in the presence of a powerful and loving influence. Most important, mystics(physicists) claim that they can grasp Ultimate Reality in a single experience, in contrast to the long and tortuous deductive sequence (petering out in rational troubles) of the logical-scientific method of inquiry.”
One further extract:
“The central theme that I have explored in this book is that, through sciences, we human beings are able to grasp at least some of nature’s secrets. We have cracked part of the cosmic code. Why this should be, just why Homo spiens should carry the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma. We. who are chldren of the universe – animated stardust – can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules on which it runs. How we have become linked into this cosmic dimension is a mystery. Yet the linkage cannot be denied.
 What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such provilege? I cannot believve that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intmate. The physical species Homo may count for nothng, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the uiverse has generated self-awareness. This can be no trival, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 22, 2010 at 12:58 pm
The only issue is the possibility of coming to recognize the fact of Ultimate Reality, all else is simply open ended agrument from inside the Cave. My above comment is the testimony of the brightest of our scientists -
 Chritianiy and the writings if the NT are off the table.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 22, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Ooops! –its writings of the NT – - Yall know my problem.
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Of Atheist Tribes
by rjosephhoffmann

First of all, I refrain from mentioning any names or organizations that can properly be called atheistically thick-headed. They know who they are. I’ve named them before, without salvific effect. They are proud of who they are. They like their atheism short, sweet, rude, and raw. If they get on people’s nerves, that’s okay because religion gets on their nerves.
Who can disagree? The standard cable network service, before they cut you off entirely when you haven’t paid the bill, leaves you with what for your viewing pleasure? At the mercy of 24-7 infomercial stations and Mother Angelica, in a loop with her Ninety Nasal Nuns, saying the rosary. You have a choice between a guy who wants to sell you a pulverizer for fruits and veg for $19.98 with six special blades not available in stores order now!, and Jimmy Swaggart (still here after all these years) offering his four-volume study series on the Cross of Christ usually $40 a volume but purchase today for only $60 for all four order now! Tell me the truth, if you can’t pay to see movies on HBO, are you really going to make yourself feel better by buying a pulverizer from an aging fitness freak or a set of books from a self-ordained, perpetually repentant Louisiana preacherman?

No, clearly, the Time Warners and Road Runners of this great nation keep these things on to punish us. They know that nothing will get you to fork over that extra $75 bucks or run your new low-limit credit card right up to the brink like having to listen to that 100th Hail Mary or hear the guy selling the snake oil for osteoarthritis mispronouncing the word osteoarthritis.
I don’t blame the atheist tribe for hating this stuff. I hate it. Everyone I know hates it. My European friends when they visit cannot believe that America is not a suburb of the Philippines, so pure is our devotion to crap products and crappy religion.
But therein lies the problem. Too many atheists assume two false things. First, that their sense of outrage is unique, a more refined version of contempt than a “religious” believer is likely to have when they look at the obnoxious underbelly of American religion. Second, they assume that the best way to deal with the problem is to harpoon all religion, because religion is a ROBOT: Really One Big Offensive Thing.
Stereotyping is a part of being human, of course. A Canadian friend of mine (who meant well) once said, over a third pint at a Cowley pub, “I really hate Americans, but you’re ok.” We were sitting among British friends, and they nodded in agreement. I was pleased, kind of, with the verdict on my amiability, but I was obliged to say, “Well, you might be surprised to know that I’m not really fond of Americans either–but there are one or two others besides me you might like.” An Australian law student sitting across the table, on his fourth said, “You’re all fuckin’ septics as far as I can tell.” (For any readers not familiar with this patois, it’s short for septic tank.) Short, sweet, rude, and raw.

I think the atheist dickhead phenomenon is about at this level of discussion right now. It’s no longer about God, it’s about “others.” It’s about the purity of your unbelief, measured not against any philosophical standard or line of argument but about finding religious believers septic and converting polite unbelievers to the more radical view that religion runs from noxious to poisonous, not from good to bad. It’s also about your solidarity with others who share your radical unbelief and how you measure the attitudes and intentions of other members of the tribe.
Religion (the custom of the group provides) is the first resort of dimwits and moral weaklings, helped along its mossy path by bad science, superstition, and useless doctrines, practices, and social customs.
I suggested a few months ago that this level of full-frontal atheism needs to be assessed by an empirical standard–by how many things you don’tbelieve about God. Jewish atheists and ex-Muslims would come out relatively badly, as not believing anything about only one God; ex-Catholics slightly better as not believing anything ever taught about the Trinity; and Hindus would be way out in front with their rejection of 330 million gods and avatars.
What some people, even me, occasionally, are calling “atheist fundamentalists” really ought to be called atheist tribalists. And just like people from small countries find it irresistible to think that all citizens of big countries are obnoxious, atheists being a small clutch of people sharing a common intellectual position, more or less, find the sheer size of the world’s religious population an argument against it. It springs from a natural sense (by the way, one I don’t entirely reject) that this many people can’t be right. –The flipside of a standard argument that would be persuasive if the world’s faiths used one number for all beliefs: that so many right-headed people can’t be wrong.
But it ignores the fact that many of the groups and subgroups that constitute this highly artificial category called religion don’t agree with each other, and are just as miserable as atheists when they see religions behaving badly.
Anyone who has ever lived in a “foreign” country and tried to seem a “little less foreign” will know what I mean about the semiotics of embarrassment: Nothing embarrasses a British-educated Pakistani more than his cousin who wasn’t. Nothing embarrassed the third generation of acculturated Americans more than their first-generation Slovak grandparents. Nothing embarrasses a clever, well-spoken, moderately-religious woman more than the excesses of her own faith. Atheists have the luxury of using hasty generalization as a mode of analysis rather than calling it out as a fallacy. Smart religious people are forced to be discriminate in their approach to religion. Perhaps that’s why atheists can afford to be irresponsible and so rude to believers: they don’t have to pick up after themselves.

Having God is really like having a lot of money and a grating accent. When American soldiers first arrived in great numbers in England in 1942, the famous quip about them was that they were “Over-paid, oversexed and over here.” They could “afford” things, had better teeth, but talked too loud and laughed too easily. The idea that there were millions and millions more just like them across the wide sea was not cheering to sober people in villages like Upper Heyford and Mildenhall, who had never seen an example of the species before.
In fact, most of the atheist tribalists are reacting to religion at the same, village level, as something that is “foreign,” unacceptable, and so big that it has to be bad. The beliefs they know about (and reject) are not derived from studying anything about the history and doctrine of particular religions, but from a whole range of indirect encounters: with their tv set, with news stories about creation science and prayer in school, with tales of disorderly Mormon elders and their six wives and thirty children, violent Muslims declaring jihad against members of their own faith as well as on the “West,” with reports of (yet another) pedophile priest being arrested or another bishop covering up priestly crimes, or with another know-nothing politician who thinks America was founded as a Christian nation. Who can disagree that these encounters are typical of what more and more people are beginning to see as what “being religious” means–as the whole of religion? Is there a difference between Big and Big and Ugly
But prevalence is not totality. Religion doesn’t only consist of externalization, and there are plenty of believing critics out there who would consider every one of these externals unacceptable, or ignorant, or attributable to causes that aren’t necessarily religious at all. It strikes me as curious that their criticism might need to be discounted because it comes from the wrong quarter. If radical unbelief becomes the license for informed critique, does simple belief disqualify someone as a critic?
To be an atheist tribalist means that you answered Yes to that question: But to be honest, if the laundry list above is what the atheist sees as the entirety of religious experience or religious ideology, he is really no better off than my friend in the pub who, out of pious ignorance I came to realize, sees America as a great cesspool where annoying, nasal, uncynical nabobs swim around in the muck of mental gloom. Of course, anyone who knows a little history, a little geography, a little anything about anything, knows that this is a caricature designed to make Europeans feel less bad about the eighteenth century cesspools from which American immigrants escaped and evolved, and that we have no monopoly on loud, nasal, or annoying. Atheists in rejecting religion–most anyhow–have a similar evolution to recount.

The philosophy that the tribe is better than the nation persisted in human civilization for a long time, and then reemerged as paternalism and petty nationalism in the colonial period. Colonies, in turn, began to feel better than their masters. It’s especially troubling to see atheists, who claim the intellectual upper hand in debates about God and his people, behaving in a way that simply mimics the self-protective instincts of threatened minorities through insult, provocation, and belligerence. It’s all part of the dance, the same old story.
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Published: October 22, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Center for Inquiry : freethought : God : humanism : new atheism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secularism : the Great Debate : tribalism ..
30 Responses to “Of Atheist Tribes”

.
 John 
 October 22, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Thats awesome post i like that.
http://toolplace.wordpress.com/
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 22, 2010 at 3:30 pm
I added one, perhaps the final, comment to Lets Talk About It. Christianity and New Testament are off the table – its only about outside of the “Cave” thoughts on Ultimate Reality by some of our best scientific minds -at any level of consciousness it should be of interest.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 29, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I must add a crucial conditional statement to the Oct. 12 comment which is also in the character of a quote I elsewhere made of Paul Davies: “Science offers a surer path to God than reilgion”. This is said in the light of Christianity’s problematic – the term religion has been crrupted by this association.
 What I rant to say is, for many science is their most certain quide to knowledge, the fact that for most of the world’s greatest scientists the failure of phusics to reveal reality has turned them away from science to embrace the mystical as the path to Reality – God.
 however, beyond recoginitiion of the fact, they find no scientific basis for this knowledge – this is in the realm of meta-physics – true religion – mysticism.
Reply
 

 steph 
 October 22, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Brilliantly analysed state of affairs. Purely hilarious, angelic springs to mind…
I had to google Mother Angelica to see if she was real and to my horror she was, quoted as ‘fun quote of the day’ on a catholic blog, saying “If you’re not a thorn in somebody’s side, you aren’t doing Christianity right.” Sometimes I think I can’t blame that homogenous lot of atheist tribalists for treating all religions as a ROBOT. Living in the Bible Belt, or just surrounded by all that vile fundamentalism, one would be included to go a little ‘fungusmentalist’ about it all. And woe betide the atheist who betrays the tribalist code. Atheist tribes are basically becoming another ROBOT.
It is a bit tempting, and difficult not to call all Americans obnoxious (and too rich) when the ones that make their presence felt among us, mere islanders, are. Like the couple who came and bought a beautiful hunk of coastal paradise, effectively kidnapped Cape Kidnappers, restricted all public access to the beach and built a blinking golf course, sticking an ugly great hotel on it. Or the ill prepared ‘trampers’ trampling the sacred ground at Lake Waikaremoana. Or the couple that hijacked the conversation with booming volume, in a peaceful local country orchard store, proudly and loudly wearing blazing american flag T shirts, topped off with Texan cowboy hats, the week following the Bush reelection… But I had access to a television then, and Frasier, to remind me that not all Americans are like that and that there were rather alot of Americans I had never met. And as God willed I’ve met more now.
x
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 October 30, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Steph,
 This is off topic – I simply note that I have added a comment to Letting go of Jesus to your comment about “Beginning From Jerusalem” on the chance there is yet interest.
Reply
 

grrrl meets world » Blog Archive » What he said: says:
 October 22, 2010 at 11:37 pm
[...] Of Atheist Tribes R. Joseph Hoffman [...]
Reply

 rebekah 
 October 23, 2010 at 8:42 pm
I hope no one thinks I quoted this particular excerpt in an attempt to brand all atheists with a broad ‘tribalist’ brush. I picked the paragraph I did because it was my personal favorite. :)
As a fellow godless wanderer (albeit one with a religious past), I’m weary of other atheists accusing me of having a less than “pure” pedigree of unbelief.
Thanks for your post, Dr. Hoffmann.
Reply
 

 Randy 
 October 23, 2010 at 3:49 am
“The beliefs they know about (and reject) are not derived from studying anything about the history and doctrine of particular religions, but from a whole range of indirect encounters”
If you really believe this, then you’re guilty of something similar, regarding the atheist “tribalists”. Most such people I know got that way because they left a religion after growing up being deeply involved in it, knowing it inside and out. And many of them went on to independently learn about other religions, and not from the TV, but the library, or actually trying it out. They made their conclusions based on evidence, and decided to speak out loudly. I see nothing wrong with that. The sheer shock value of being plain, quick, and direct is educational in this case, because in order to access people’s minds, you have to first grab their attention, countering the authority and charisma that religious leaders and even plain believers get almost automatically. In a real sense, that IS the message, in shorthand: The emperor has no clothes. Religious leaders and believers know no more about things than anybody else, and yet they wield great power over everyone, based on their claims. This is therefore an unfair situation at best, a dangerous situation at worst, and must be addressed.
If you’re going to throw around the word “dickhead”, do make sure you’re not being one yourself. (But notice that it worked… I read your article).
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 23, 2010 at 9:29 am
Thanks Randy, but I think the process you are describing describes a lot of thoughtful atheists. This isn’t about that breed.
Reply

 steph 
 October 23, 2010 at 12:09 pm
It’s a shame to see extracts of this post taken out of context. They misrepresent the point of the post which is to highlight a small fringe of atheism, as represented by particular previously mentioned groups, as the post points out. The post does not accuse all atheists of tribalism – only those who, for example, answer ‘yes’ to the question: ‘If radical unbelief becomes the license for informed critique, does simple belief disqualify someone as a critic?’ … as above.
Reply
 

 chenier1 
 October 23, 2010 at 4:08 pm
England does not possess a Bible Belt, notwithstanding the ongoing missionary efforts to bring to us the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but we certainly have our fair share of atheist tribalists; it seems an almost inevitable consequence now that reasoned argument has been deemed otiose by Richard Dawkins et al.
Unfortunately the rise of this breed has all but destroyed the humanist project when we have, arguably, never needed it more. The end of the antibiotic era, brought about largely by the overuse of antibiotics, coupled with anthropogenic global warming, inevitably means vastly increased human death rates; a fact which has failed to penetrate the skulls of the atheist tribalists over here currently endeavouring to ban homeopathic medicine. Homeopaths do not use antibiotics; any rational person would be striving to encourage them. Instead they are regarded as heretics who must be extirpated at all costs, even if that cost is mortality on a scale last seen in Europe in the fourteenth century.
Of course atheist dickheads do not accept that bad things are going to happen to them; they have absolute faith that Science will find an answer, even when the scientists – microbiologists, infectious disease specialists, pharmacologists etc.- who actually have expertise in the area are telling them that not only do they not have an answer, but that there is no answer due to an unfortunate fact of life called evolution.
One possible explanation for the unwillingness of ADs to accept the reality of evolution is that they are not atheists at all, but people who have replaced one omnipotent and infallible entity with another one going by a different name; they have adapted the bit about God moving in mysterious ways so that Science can mysteriously provide an answer which scientists can’t.
The belief that, whilst nasty things will happen to other people, principally poor people in poor countries, they won’t happen to enlightened acolytes of Science, is remarkably similar to the conviction of RDs [Religious Dickheads] that, come the day of Armageddon, they will be ensconced on a comfortable cloud watching the exploding eyeballs and unravelling intestines from a safe distance; the two events have roughly the same probability of occurring.
Humanism should be about humans, surely; over at the American Humanist Association website a search on antibiotics pulls up 4 references, none of which even begins to acknowledge scientific reality, and the website for the Center for Inquiry appears not to have a search function at all, which seems oxymoronic for an organisation seeking to promote ‘freedom of inquiry’.
And the band played on…
Reply

 steph 
 October 23, 2010 at 5:24 pm
I wasn’t aware of this, thank you chenier. I just had a quick google, as you do, and your accusations were quickly confirmed. Dawkins the dickhead takes a massive swipe at homeopathy, as well as the so called ‘friendly’ atheist, and the rest of the flock / tribe have a go as well. These atheists are promoting false myths that homeopathy never works, that it is all about ‘faith’ and that it is only made of water. Makes me sick – but nothing a liquorice tea or whiskey won’t fix.
Heaven knows what their faith perspective is (most likely skeptic as the majority of us are), but general practitioners of medicine back home (New Zealand) are pretty clued up about homeopathy these days. It is even an aspect included in medical training. Far from over prescribing for the profit of (notoriously unreliable, profit driven, not completely honest and frankly quite dishonest) pharmaceutical companies, more than the benefit and health of patients, they will sometimes suggest more natural homeopathic remedies as an alternative. And these inevitably work. Water, they are not that so far. Faith? I’m always a skeptic especially where health is concerned. Demonising homeopathy as something fundamentally flawed, is fungusmentally evil. Even a naturopath will recommend antibiotics when bacterial infections are severe or antibiotics as the last resort. Most sicknesses and diseases can be safely and effectively treated through prevention (nutrition, lifestyle) and natural remedies (sleep, beneficial herbs) rather than through the nuclear option of over-perscribed anti-bacterial medications.
Doctors here in England whom I have visited are very efficient, and are ameniable to homeopathy generally – or perhaps I have just been lucky so far. I do happen to know that my English GP, an “atheist” in inverted commas, doesn’t like Dawkins so that might be the vital clue.
And as for your comment that there is no Bible Belt in England, that’s dead right, and therefore there is no excuse for Dawkinian tribalists. I feel slightly sorry for American atheist tribalists though – their life experience is so much different. But then I stop feeling sorry when they whine, sniffle and bicker so incessantly. So a toast to trampling grapes and making wine and ignoring them. And long live homeopathy.
Reply

 chenier1 
 October 24, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Steph,
I’m glad to hear that New Zealand has adopted a rational drug policy; as for the ADs at Richard Dawkins’ website I think you need to bear in mind that they are quite remarkably ignorant about medicine.
They genuinely believe that proper doctors acting properly have available to them a range of effective remedies, developed and tested scientifically under gold standard conditions; this being the case all other therapies must therefore be crap peddled by charlatans.
That belief cannot survive if the individual who holds it does even the most minimal of background reading; unfortunately, ADs don’t do background reading.
Many of them don’t do reading at all, since they already know the answer to life, the universe and everything, and it’s not 42.
I’m rather fond of directing ADs to John P. A. Ioannidis’ papers:
‘Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research’
and
‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’.
I don’t delude myself that they will actually read them- see above- but it’s fun watching them trying to convince the world that JAMA and PLOS are hotbeds of anti-science prejudice, and probably staffed by pink unicorn believers to boot…

 
 

Progressive Atheism « Seth's World says:
 October 25, 2010 at 5:05 pm
[...] read Of Atheist Tribes and then I spent some time here and there thinking about thinking about it. That’s typically [...]
Reply

 harebell 
 October 26, 2010 at 6:04 pm
‘If radical unbelief becomes the license for informed critique, does simple belief disqualify someone as a critic?’
What is radical unbelief? Being an atheist means disregarding the supernatural as an explanation for anything. The only radical thing about this position is the fact that so many hold the opposing view. The holding of the majority view is the opposing view to that of the atheist and that means you must be critical of atheists. Who’s going to disqualify you from that position? It’s a fact of the position you hold. Some atheists might decry that you hold such a position in a loud and blunt manner, but that doesn’t disqualify you and doesn’t make them radical in any way.
 The only thing each atheist has in common with other atheists is their atheism. It’s not a movement. I might and do disagree with other atheists on their economic and social views.
 I also understand that theology and religions have formulated some very sophisticated apologetics over the centuries, but a large number if not a majority of the politically active religious folk do not. They espouse their beliefs in an all-knowing manner and they push politicians to set these beliefs as untouchable. They also want to ensure that the rest of us live by the tenets of their faith and try and sneak them into government at every opportunity. They do this with the help of huge amounts of resources and influence. While I would love the discussion to be about the more ethereal arguments of the apologists, I’m afraid that the life changing demands come from the more viscerally committed religious types. They are a threat to life and liberty and the bold, brash and direct atheists responding to them, belittling their ignorance and double standards at every turn; are probably the best ones to do it.
Homeopathy
 Evidence based medicine is the standard by which all treatments should be measured. Repeated testing of homeopathic remedies have found them wanting. At best they have the same effect as the placebo effect.
 Insisting that public money be made available for remedies that have not been shown to work is chucking that money literally down the drain.
Reply

 Rosita 
 October 28, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Well said!
Reply

 Of Atheist Tribes (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 October 29, 2010 at 11:38 am
[...] First of all, I refrain from mentioning any names or organizations that can properly be called atheistically thick-headed. They know who they are. I've named them before, without salvific effect. They are proud of who they are. They like their atheism short, sweet, rude, and raw. If they get on people's nerves, that's okay because religion gets on their nerves. Who can disagree? The standard cable network service, before they cut you off entirely … Read More [...]
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 October 29, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Homeopathy doesn’t work. At least it isn’t shown to have a better than placebo effect when administered in a double blind test. Of course atheists are going to be against what appears to be a new form of woo.
The world is full of charlatans and how are we supposed to eliminate them if we don’t hold our medicine to a high standard. As for antibiotics, talk to your doctor, those are the people putting the most effort into figuring out what works. You can’t stand outside the community and take shots beyond rallying the political.
The world needs right answers. Those answers should stand up to tests. If you have better tests by all means bring them. I would care to know one way or the other if antibiotics are good or if homeopathy ever worked. But I need to be more certain and it’s got to pass tests.
Reply

 steph 
 October 29, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Of course there are many charlatans. I have never been to a homeopath – they’re expensive. But I have been prescribed homeopathic solutions by qualified doctors, ie natural alternatives and advice, and these have never been unsuccessful. I could refer you do my general practitioner here in the UK (including other doctors in the same practice) as well as several GPs I have been a patient with in New Zealand. I’m grateful not to be dependent entirely on untrustworthy pharmaceuticals, test ‘results’ of which are often ‘doctored’. I think the “new agers’” adoption of homeopathy which is based on ancient methods, and the illusion of ‘faith’, frightens some atheists, who effectively however, treat pharmaceuticals as a bit godlike… :-D Antibiotics are running into trouble because they are over prescribed and things are becoming immune to them.
Reply

 theburningheart 
 August 24, 2012 at 11:30 pm
Have you heard we live in a postmodern worldview were there is no absolute truth, not even science, that by no means is a panacea for everything, I worked for the pharmaceutical industry for a few years, to know better, it is just a business to make money, not an idealistic search for solutions to health problems, true, it may prolong and enhance your life if well used, but you will have to pay a price for it, that not all can afford, either in money, or in health, contraindications, secondary effects etc. In fact it may end your life! Look at the astronomical malpractice lawsuits. In the end we are mortals, and one day will die, regardless, you may be a happy, and macho type of guy who is capable of facing the end as nonexistence, some people don’t look forward to it, and therefore look for consolation on Religion, and an afterlife, you may think of that as Homeopathy, but still is a personal choice, just like others look at their personal belief as a way of life, that enrich the individual subjective experience in a mystical way, you can discard that as well, but is their choice, and their experience, is for them to choose, and live, just like alternative medicines, it is known many people would use any methodology to regain health when given no hope by our scientific Allopathic methodology (mainstream medicine), even Shamanism, as a last resort, there is a lot to say for Cosmological different views, look at the Chinese with a three thousand year old system, they embrace science, but they are not going to discard their ancient Cosmology, on the contrary, they are exporting it all over the world very successfully, despite the scientific naysayers! Rationalism for us in the West it is our Cosmology, and we want to export it all over, despite the triumphs of science, the future of the World is kind of bleak, mainly by the disaster brought by the unwise use of technology a byproduct of science. I hold no hope for a scientific Utopia. Maybe they should come with a drug to make people wise…I doubt it, wisdom is entirely a subjective experience, but with clear results in the empirical realm.
Reply
 

 Seth Strong 
 October 29, 2010 at 1:54 pm
If you’re GP is prescribing it, generally speaking you’re doing the right thing assuming as I am that you aren’t in the medical field yourself. I’m not opposed to finding new ways to cure ailments and also it would be pretty easy to expose my ignorance of various things related to health.
My core argument is that in the U.S. we get a lot of advertisements one way and the other without any real idea what the people with the relevant expertise think. It’s very frustrating and I think it motivates people like me to come across as more stubborn types of skeptics.
You’ve seen Christie O’Donnell, Palin, and you may have heard of the Louisiana Science Education Act. That’s the kind of stuff I’m afraid of. You tell me how to play a part to build a better informed tomorrow and I’m totally willing to adjust my gameplan to meet those objectives. Know what I mean?
Reply

 chenier1 
 October 29, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Seth said:
‘You tell me how to play a part to build a better informed tomorrow and I’m totally willing to adjust my gameplan to meet those objectives. Know what I mean?’
Well, you could start by reading the papers I cited above; it is difficult to see how you can play a part in creating a better informed tomorrow if you are not prepared to inform yourself today.
And having read those papers you could then take a look at an excellent article by Hans-Joachim Schmoll and Dirk Arnold:
‘When Wishful Thinking Leads to a Misty-Eyed Appraisal: The Story of the Adjuvant Colon Cancer Trials With Edrecolomab’
All three papers are available on the net, in full, and free; all you have to do is run a google search on the the titles and then read them. I haven’t provided the URLs because I don’t know our host’s view on hotlinking, and WordPress has been known to throw its toys out of the pram if there are too many links in a post.
Having read those papers you will be in a somewhat better position to understand why your comments about homeopathy and ‘a double blind test’ are met with derision by anyone who has bothered to inform themselves about clinical trials, and you will also have learned that the word plausible is not a synonym for the word true, just as the word implausible is not a synonym for the word false…
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 November 1, 2010 at 10:31 am
Sorry, having read the articles I’m simply left thinking Edrecolomab is something useful, what is the intervention referred to in “Contradicted and initially stronger effects in highly cited clinical research”, and what is the link between that to homeopathy.
What I understand homeopathy to be is the process of highly diluting active agents to the point that too little of the active agent actually remains. If homeopathy is something else to you or in general, then it is possible it exists in a functional way.
Secondly, I know there’s a lot of misinformation out there, I’m beginning to think there’s room for more specialized kinds of reporters to help the average person sort through facts and fictions that get published. The fact that fiction gets published in journals is a problem and it’s a problem that we need to fix. But that’s no data to suggest leaving medical advice to the medical experts is the wrong way to go. It just means finding the experts is more challenging.

 
 

 steph 
 October 29, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Seth, I don’t know what medical treatment and trips to the doctor is like in the US. I have never studied medicine – I made a bit of a scene at high school when my science teacher cut up a pregnant rabbit and vowed never to take science further … However I do read journals and articles, including those helpful ones Chenier has pointed out, to help stay informed and always my doctors and those of my family and friends, take a good deal of time to discuss and describe options with benefits and disadvantages. I value the degree that our medical profession go to in order to keep patients informed and I have generally tried to keep up with informed opinion and reviews. Homeopathy is regulated and controlled at home and most ‘homeopaths’ I know of at home have medical degrees. If I can ignore the dorky Dawkins, you can ignore your illiterate politicians, and I haven’t heard of the Louisianna Science thing – do they do science in the Bible Belt?
Reply

 Seth Strong 
 November 1, 2010 at 10:34 am
Shoot, somehow the bible belt stretches to Alaska now. :(
All I want is good, testable, repeatable data given honestly AND an effort by the medical experts to weed out erroneous information. Fortunately, I haven’t had need of much medicine one way or the other.
Reply

 steph 
 November 1, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I thought Louisiana was in the belt. Doesn’t that Palin creature live in Alaska? Perhaps you’re right and that silly old belt wraps round that as well. I am sorry I don’t know where you live… Alaska? Can you see Russia from your house too?
I have found various studies from medical journals down under which rate the benefits and disadvantages of homeopathic treatments on line.

 Seth Strong 
 November 1, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Louisiana is in the Belt. I was joking about Alaska because of Palin.
I might be taking a closer look at homeopathy soon because it’s probably a fun subject to blog about and that would encourage me to research. But first, I’ve committed to a series on evolution.

 
 

 Of Atheist Tribes: A Repost and Riposte in Honor of David Silverman’s Foolery | The New Oxonian says:
 January 8, 2011 at 6:47 pm
[...] First of all, I refrain from mentioning any names or organizations that can properly be called atheistically thick-headed. They know who they are. I've named them before, without salvific effect. They are proud of who they are. They like their atheism short, sweet, rude, and raw. If they get on people's nerves, that's okay because religion gets on their nerves. Who can disagree? The standard cable network service, before they cut you off entirely … Read More [...]
Reply

 Of Atheist Tribes (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
 April 11, 2011 at 10:32 pm
[...] Of Atheist Tribes (via The New Oxonian) By rjosephhoffmann   First of all, I refrain from mentioning any names or organizations that can properly be called atheistically thick-headed. They know who they are. I’ve named them before, without salvific effect. They are proud of who they are. They like their atheism short, sweet, rude, and raw. If they get on people’s nerves, that’s okay because religion gets on their nerves. Who can disagree? The standard cable network service, before they cut you off entirely … Read More [...]
Reply

 Dean 
 August 28, 2012 at 7:51 pm
Quackwatch.org might be worth browsing if “alternative” treatments are of interest.
I personally have a very difficult time with accepting that water molecules have specific memory for substances they have come in contact with, or that a memory of such interactions can be re-activated by agitation.
Just have to nip down to the healer and get these rocks out of my head again!
Cheers
Reply

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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Letting Go of Jesus: Reprise
by rjosephhoffmann

ascension

“But I tell you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer also the other; and from him who takes away your cloak, don’t withhold your coat also. Give to everyone who asks you, and don’t ask him who takes away your goods to give them back again.” (Luke 6.27f)

Let’s pretend the year is 1757 and you have just come away from reading a new treatise by David Hume called an “Enquiry concerning Miracles.” Let’s assume you are a believing Christian who reads the Bible daily, as grandmother taught you; or perhaps a priest, a vicar, a Methodist minister. Part of the reason you believe in God, and all of the reason you believe that Jesus was his son, is tied to the supernatural authority of scripture. You have been taught that it is inspired—perhaps the very word of God, free from error and contradiction–passed down in purity and integrity from generation to generation. –A reliable witness to the origins of the world, humankind and other biological species.
You know many verses by heart: Honor your father and your mother. Blessed are the poor. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The love of money is the root of all evil. Lots of stuff about disobedient children and the value of being poor, confirmed in your own experience: there are many more poor than rich people, and children often don’t listen to their parents. You think the Bible is a wise and useful book. If you are a member of an emerging middle or merchant class—whether you live in Boston or London or Edinburgh—you haven’t read enough history to wonder if the historical facts of the Bible are true, and archeology and evolutionary biology haven’t arisen to prove them false.
The story of creation, mysterious as it may seem, is a pretty good story: it will do. As to the deeper truths of the faith, if you are Catholic, your church assures you that the trinity is a mystery, so you don’t need to bother with looking for the word in the Bible, where it doesn’t occur.
If you are a churchgoing enthusiast who can’t wait for Sunday mornings to wear your new frock or your new vest, it doesn’t bother you that there’s no reference to an 11 o clock sermon in the New Testament. If you are a Baptist and you like singing and praying loud, your church discipline and tradition tells you to ignore that part where Jesus told his followers to pray in silence, and not like the Pharisees who parade their piety and pile phrase upon phrase.
But what really convinces you that what you do as a Christian of any denomination is the right thing to do is what theologians in the eighteenth century, the great period after the Newtonian revolution of the 17th, called Christian Evidences.
The phrase was introduced to make the supernatural elements of the Bible, and especially for Christians the New Testament, more up to date, more in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Reasonable men and women who thought the medieval approach to religion was fiddle faddle—something only the Catholics still believed, especially the Irish and Spanish—had begun to equate reason with the progress of Protestant Christianity. Newton had given this position a heads up when he suggested that his entire project in Physics was to prove that the laws of nature were entirely conformable to belief in a clockwork God, the divine mechanic.
Taking their cue, or miscue, from Newton’s belief in an all powerful being who both established the laws of nature and could violate them at will, as “Nature’s God,” it seemed as though miracles had been given a new lease of life. No one much bothered to read the damning indictment of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, twelve years Newton’s junior, who had argued that belief in a god whose perfection was based on the laws of nature could not be proved by exceptions to his own rules. –You can play basketball on a tennis court, but it doesn’t explain the rules of tennis very well.
Anyway, you’re comfortable with Newton, the idea of Christian “evidences”, and all those lovely stories about impudent wives being turned into pillars of salt, the ark holding good old Noah and his family teetering atop mount Ararat (wherever it was) those vile Egyptians being swept up in the waters of the red sea, and the miraculous acts of kindness and healing and bread and fishes recounted in the New Testament. As a Christian, you would have seen all these stories as a kind of prelude to the really big story, the one about a Jewish peasant (except you don’t really think of him that way) getting himself crucified for no reason at all, and surprising everyone by rising from the dead.
True, your medieval Catholic ancestors with their short and brutish and plague-besotted lives needed the assurance of a literal heaven more than you do in the 18th century. But in general, you like the idea of resurrection, or at least of eternal life, and you agree with Luther—
“The sacred Book foretold it all:
 How death by death should come to fall.”
In other words, you believe in the Bible because it’s one of the only books you have ever read–and perhaps not even it, cover to cover. And in a vague, unquestioning, socially proper kind of way, you believe the book carries, to use the language of Hume’s contemporary Dr Tillotson—the attestation of divine authorship, and in the circularity that defines this discussion before Hume, the divine attestation is based on the miracles.
Divinity schools in England and America which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1850’s) required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences. The fortress of belief in an age of explanation became, ironically, the unexplained.
By 1885, Amherst, Smith, Williams, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Dartmouth and Princeton mandated the study of the evidences for Christian belief, on the assumption that the study of the Bible was an important ingredient of a well-rounded moral education.
Sophia Smith, the foundress of Smith College, stated in the third article of her will that [because] “all education should be for the glory of God and the good of man, I direct that the Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and studied in said college, and that all the discipline shall be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical Christian religion.”
But all was not well, even in 1885. Hume’s “On Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
Within the treatise, Hume, like a good Scotsman, appealed to common sense: You have never seen a brick suspended in the air. Wood will burn and fire will be extinguished by water. Food does not multiply by itself with a snap of my fingers. Water does not turn into wine. And in a deceptive opening sentence, he says, “And what is more probable than that all men shall die.”
In fact, “nothing I call a miracle has ever happened in the ordinary course of events.” It’s not a miracle if a man who seems to be in good health drops dead. It is a miracle if a dead man comes back to life—because it has never been witnessed by any of us. We only have reports. And even these can be challenged by the ordinary laws of evidence. How old are these reports? What is the reliability of the reporter? Under what circumstances were they written? Within what social, cultural and intellectual conditions did these reports originate? Hume’s conclusion is so simple and so elegant that I sometimes wish it, and not the ten commandments, were what Americans in Pascagoula were asking to be posted on classroom walls: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….”
–So what is more likely, that a report about a brick being suspended in air is true, or that a report about a brick being suspended in air is based on a misapprehension? That a report about a man rising from the dead is true, or that a report about a man rising from the dead is more easily explained as a case of mistaken identity, or fantasy—or outright fiction.
The so-called “natural supernaturalism” of the Unitarians and eventually other protestant groups took its gradual toll in the colleges I have mentioned. At Smith College, beginning in the 1920’s, Henry Elmer Barnes taught his students:
“We must construct the framework of religion on a tenable superstructure. To do so is to surrender these essential characteristics of the older religion: (1) the reality and deity of the biblical God; (2) the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus and His special relevance for contemporary religion; (3) and the belief in immortality.” Sophia Smith’s college had taken a new turn.”
At Williams, John Bissett Pratt began his course in philosophy by telling his students, “Gentlemen, learn to get by without the Bible.” At Yale, the Dwight Professor of theology in 1933 repudiated all the miracles of the Bible and announced to his students that the Jesus Christ of the Christian tradition must die, so that he can live.”
Perhaps I should add that when I got to Harvard Divinity School in the 1970’s I was told by the reigning professor of theology who out of deference will remain anonymous, that my way of speaking about God was too literal—almost as though I “believed the metaphor was a real thing.”
This little reflection on Hume and how his commentary on miracles changed forever the way people looked at the gospels is really designed to indicate that in educated twentieth century America, between roughly 1905 and 1933, the battle for the miraculous, Christian evidences, and the supernatural was all but lost—or rather, it had been won by enlightened, commonsensical teachers in our best universities and colleges.
Of course it was not won in the churches and backwoods meeting houses of what we sometimes call the American heartland, let alone in preacher-colleges of the Bible belt, or the faux-gothic seminaries of the Catholic Church.
Hume’s logic and the theological consequences of his logic barely penetrated the evangelical mindset
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in twentieth century America the “social gospel.” He wasn’t new—actually he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, and forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social order based on concern for the least among us.
In Germany and England and finally in America where ideas, especially religious ideas, came home to roost more slowly, something called the “higher criticism” was catching on. Its basic premise was that the tradition about Jesus was formed slowly and in particular social conditions not equivalent to those in Victorian England or Bismarck’s Germany. Questions had to be asked about why a certain tradition about Jesus arose; what need it might have fulfilled within a community of followers; how it might have undergone change as those needs changed—for example—the belief he was the Jewish messiah, after an unexpected crucifixion, might have led to the belief that he was the son of God who had prophesied his own untimely death.
The social reality that the community was an impoverished, illiterate, persecuted religious minority might have led the community to invent sayings like “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are you who are persecuted,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” But if this is so, then the gospels really weren’t the biography of Jesus at all. They were the biography of what the community believed about him.
The Victorian church was as immune to the German school of thought as Bishop Wilberforce was to Darwin’s theories—in some ways even more so. Even knowledgeable followers of the German school of higher criticism tried to find ways around its conclusions: Matthew Arnold for example thought the gospels were based on the misunderstanding of Jesus by his own followers, which led them to misrepresent him; but then Arnold went on to say that this misunderstanding led them to preserve his teaching, although in a distorted and conflated form. They added their words and ideas to his, but in their honest ignorance was honesty. Arnold’s influence was minimal.
The deeds were gone; now people were fighting over the words.
 When the twentieth century hit, few people in the mainline Protestant churches and almost no one in the Catholic Church of 1905 was prepared for the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the 18th and 19th century attempts to piece together a coherent picture of the hero of the gospels. Schweitzer pronounced the quests a failure, because none of them dealt with the data within the appropriate historical framework. No final conclusions were possible.
We can know, because of what we know about ancient literature and ancient Roman Palestine, what Jesus might have been like—we can know the contours of an existence. But not enough for a New York Times obituary.
Beyond tracing this line we get lost in contradiction. If he taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations. His teaching, if we were to hear it, Schweitzer said, would sound mad to us. He might have preached the end of the world. If he did, he would not have spent his time developing a social agenda or an ethics textbook for his soon-to-be-raptured followers. (Paul certainly knows nothing about ethics—just some interim rules to be followed before the second coming of Christ.)
Schweitzer flirts most with the possibility that Jesus was an eschatological prophet in an era of political and social gloom for the Jews. But Schweitzer’s shocking verdict is that the Jesus of the church, and the Jesus of popular piety—equally–never existed.
Whatever sketch you come up with will be a sketch based on the image you have already formed: The agnostic former Jesuit Alfred Loisy (d. 1940) after his excommunication wrote a book called The Gospel and the Church, in which he lampooned the writings of the reigning German theologian Adolph von Harnack (d. 1930) who had published a book called The Essence of Christianity.
In the book Harnack argued that the Gospel had permanent ethical value given to it by someone who possessed (what he called) God-consciousness: Jesus was the ethical teacher par excellence. Loisy responded, “Professor Harnack has looked deep into the well for the face of the historical Jesus, but what he has seen is his own liberal protestant reflection.”
In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York City around 1917 a young graduate of the Colgate Divinity School named Walter Rauschenbusch was looking at the same miserable social conditions that were being described by everyone from Jane Addams to Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in literature.
Rauschenbusch thought that the churches had aligned themselves with robber barons, supported unfair labor practices, and winked at income disparity. So, for Rauschenbusch, the gospel was all about a first century revolutionary movement opposed to privilege and injustice. In his most famous book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, he writes, “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”
Like Harnack before and dozens of social gospel writers later, the facts hardly mattered. Whether Jesus actually said the things he is supposed to have said or they were said for him hardly mattered. Whether he was understood or misrepresented hardly mattered. Liberal religion had made Jesus a cipher for whatever social agenda it wanted to pursue, just as in the slavery debates of the 19th century, biblical authority was invoked to defend buying and selling human beings. Having given up on the historical Jesus, Jesus could now be made to say whatever his managers wanted him to say.
Unfortunately, ignoring Schweitzer’s scholarly cautions, they failed to demonstrate how the words of a first century Galilean prophet, fixated on the end of a corrupt social order, could be used to reform a morally bankrupt economic system.
For many of us who follow the Jesus quest wherever it goes, it’s impressive that the less we know about Jesus–the less we know for sure–the longer and many the books that can be written. In what will surely be the greatest historical irony of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example, members of the Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to “just the real ones,” came to the conclusion that 82% of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title Messiah, that he did not share a final meal with his disciples (there goes the Mass), and that he did not invent the Lord’s prayer.
They come to these conclusions however in more than a hundred books by Seminar members, of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus. The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventor wants him to be: prophet, wise man, magician, sage, bandit, revolutionary, gay, French, Southern Baptist or Cajun. As I wrote in a contribution to George Wells’s 1996 book The Jesus Legend, the competing theories about who Jesus really was, based on a shrinking body of reliable information, makes the theory that he never existed a welcome relief. In a Free Inquiry article from 1993, I offended the seminar by saying that the Jesus of their labors was a “talking doll with a repertoire of 33 genuine sayings; pull his string and he blesses the poor.”
But all is not lost that seems lost. When we look at the history of this case, we can draw some conclusions. We don’t know much about Jesus. What we do know however, and have known since the serious investigation of the biblical text, based on sound critical principles, became possible, is that there are things we can exclude.
Jesus was not Aristotle. Despite what George Bush thinks, he wasn’t a philosopher. He did not write a book on ethics. If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.
We don’t know what he thought about the messiah or himself. The gospels are cagey on the subject and can yield almost any answer you want.
He was neither a social conservative nor a liberal democrat. The change he (or his inventors) advocated was regressive rather than progressive. But it’s also possible that we don’t even know enough to say that much.
He doesn’t seem to have had much of a work ethic; he tells his followers to beg from door to door, go barefoot (or not), and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. He might have been a magician; the law (Ex. xxii. 17 [A. V. 18]) which punishes sorcery with death speaks of the witch and not of the wizard, and exorcism was prevalent in the time of Jesus, as were magical amulets, tricks, healings, love potions and charms—like phylacteries.
But we can’t be sure. If he was a magician, he was certainly not interested in ethics. After a point, the plural Jesuses available to us in the gospels become self-negating, and even the conclusion that the gospels are biographies of communities becomes unhelpful: they are the biographies of different perspectives often arising within the same community.
Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.
What we need to be mindful of, however, is the danger of using greatly reduced, demythologized and under-impressive sources as though no matter what we do, or what we discover, the source—the Gospel–retains its authority.
It is obviously true that somehow the less certain we can be about whether x is true, the more possibilities there are for x. But when I took math, we seldom defined certainty as the increase in a variable’s domain. The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.
We need to be mindful that history is a corrective science: when we know more than we did last week, we have to correct last week’s story. The old story loses its authority. Biblical scholars and theologians often show the immaturity of their historical skills by playing with history. They have shown, throughout the twentieth century, a remarkable immunity to the results of historical criticism, as though relieving Jesus of his obligation to be a man of his time and culture–however that might have been–entitles him to be someone who is free to live in our time, and rule on our problems, and lend godly authority to our ethical dilemmas.
No other historical figure or legendary hero can be abused in quite the same way. We leave Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Cleopatra in Hellenistic Egypt, and Churchill buried at the family plot in Bladon near Oxford.
The use of Jesus as an ethical teacher has to go the way of his divinity and miracles, in the long run. And when I say this, I’m not speaking as an atheist. I am simply saying what I think is historically true, or true in terms of the way history deals with its own.
It is an act of courage, an act of moral bravery, to let go of God, and his only begotten Son, the second person of the blessed trinity whose legend locates him in Nazareth during the Roman occupation. It’s (at least) an act of honesty to say that what we would like to believe to be the case about him might not have been the case at all.
To recognize that Jesus—whoever he was–did not have answers for our time, could not have foreseen our problems and moral dilemmas, much less rule on them with godly authority, frees us from the more painful obligation to view the Bible as a moral constitution.
The history of Jesus-scholarship is a progression of narratives about what might have been the case, but probably wasn’t.
If men and women in the New Testament business wish to pursue the construction of counter-legends as though they were doing history, there is no one to stop them. If they announce to an unsuspecting and credulous public that they have found “new historical materials,” better “gospels,” the “real story,” or the bone-boxes of Jesus and his wife and family, they simply prove the axiom: Jesus may not save, but he sells.
It has been a long time since theology’s dirty little secret was first whispered: “The quest for the historical Jesus leads to the door of the church.” But that is still where it leads. We leave him there, as Schweitzer lamented, “as one unknown.”

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Published: October 24, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : historical jesus : Jesus : Jesus Project : Modernism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion ..
17 Responses to “Letting Go of Jesus: Reprise”

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 steph 
 October 24, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Beautiful. Titillating, tantilizing, delightfully detailed history leading to a twentieth century catastrophic mess, superbly and wittily told, precise and accurate historically, particularly in emphasising the messing up by american rebels, such as the jesus seminar. From ex fundies like Funk to desperate Christians like Witherington, the stirring pot of jesuses is a cynic’s delight. But ever doubting as I am, I hope we can learn to recognise the mistakes, as you clarify so eloquently, and there’s always room for improvement, as they say. The American Jesus seminar was as bad as you say it was, and its members, many of them former American fundamentalists, produced pictures of the “real Jesus” who was “almost anything his inventor wants him to be”. I think consequently some of the work of Sanders and Vermes and even Dale Allison can be built on. Sanders, though born in Texas, spent much of his life outside the USA, with significant periods in Oxford and in Israel, and Vermes is a Hungarian Jew who joined the Christian faith and left it again later. Even Allison (who worked very closely with W.D. Davies, who had a more profound understanding of Judaism than most at the time) has contributed positively, and on the peripherals we can see Matthew Black and Jeremias being helpful in other ways. So while Schweitzer was eminently and correctly reflecting the current state of affairs, and while the jesus seminar rebels and evangelical reaction have made a mockery of scholarship, I think there might be room for removing oneself completely and working independently. But not all the work done ‘leads to the door of the church’, and if we will only build on all the best work done so far, I don’t see why it should end up there at all. I don’t go there, and neither do my non religious colleagues. I don’t wish to perpetuate false beliefs about that Jewish figure of the past. However the area is beyond my expertise. It’s so chaotic I prefer playing pooh sticks with Pooh, climbing mountains, swimming and hunting heffalumps in the forest … and of course drinking wine, listening to Honey, reading beautiful poms and pursuing less frightening things.
x
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 Ed Jones 
 October 27, 2010 at 2:19 pm
I am encouraged that you have read some of the NT scholars. However, all you have named are still fixed to the writings of the NT stuck with Christianity’s problematic – like still being fixed in the Cave seeing only the shadows.
 RJH’s essays come too frequent – the shift from the God question to the Jesus question is a bit too much. I feel compelled to attempt comments but just can’t keep up.
 I can’t resist naming a highly significant online article “Beginning From Jerusalem” by Merrill Miller. He takes a number of NT scholars to task for following the cannonical lead on unitary origins. In fact to do this he has chosen to follow the argument of the book by Sanders, “Jesus and Judaism”. should you find the interest just enter the name and author. A comment would be of much interest.
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 steph 
 October 27, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I have read Miller’s 1996 article from the JHC. I think he correctly notices as many of us have before, that conventional scholarship has not offered anything like a convincing explanation of why Christianity originated. However, in publications by himself, Ron Cameron (who celebrates the ‘existence’ of “Q” as a single written Greek document on the basis of the IQP reconstruction, saying ‘we do have a text of Q; what we do not have is a manuscript’ (1996)) and other members of the American Jesus seminar, he has not offered a reasonable hypothesis in place of conventional Christian work. Consequently, I do not see that, in terms of genuine critical scholarship which might advance knowledge, it is a particularly significant article at all.

 steph 
 October 27, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Miller’s JHC article is 1995 and Cameron’s claim comes from “The Sayings Gospel Q and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Response to John S. Kloppenborg” in the Harvard Theological Review, (1996) 89:352.

 steph 
 October 27, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I apologise for again moving away from the subject of this post, but responding to Ed, if you’re interested in hypotheses of Christian origins, James G Crossley’s “Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26-50CE)” WJK 2006, I think is a significant contribution to the discussion, which has many positive aspects to be built upon, especially his discussions regarding the Law and identity.

 
 

 steph 
 October 26, 2010 at 11:47 am
Actually I’m not happy with my flattery of Dale Allison … although the big Matthew commentary is obviously written by Christians it still manages to produce some critical commentary in part especially when its not discussing so called ‘Q’ passages. Also his ‘Resurrecting Jesus’ contains a few insightful aspects when he lets go of the Christian interpretation of ‘resurrection’ and investigates reports of grief and post death experiences and visions – which are not real. However his recent work is disappointing.
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 Ed Jones 
 October 30, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Steph.
 Your distinction between “conventional scholarship” and “genuine critical scholarship” which readily fits Crossley in the latter while Milller with his Beginning From Jerusalem, im terms of the latter, “where it might advance knowledge’, is not a particularly segnificant article at all”. forms the sense that we read from starkly differet states of sensibilities. After posting my March 24, 2009 letter to Joe as a comment to his essay “The Importance of the Historical Jesus”, I posted as a follow up comment, a quote from the section “Re-examining the Conception of Unitary Origins”. which I took as comfirmation of my reconstruction of origins of the Jesus traditions. To illustrate, I repeat several Miller statements and how I read them in terms of my reconstruction.
“Recent studies on the genre and literary history of Q, on apocryphical Gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas, and on pre-Markan gospel traditions have shown that there are early Jesus traditions that cannot be accommodated within the Easter kerygma and which do not evidence an apocalyptic context of persuasion. An alternative picture of Christian origins has alrleady been argued on the basis of it. namely that Christian communities were at first formed in the name of Jesus as a founder-teacher, on this view, the resurrection of Jesus is not the common concept of all expressions of early Christianity. Moreover, the communities whose foundation myth was the kerygma of Jesus saving death and resurrection do not represent the dominant basis of association from the beginning and arose in circumstances different from those of the Jesus movement. These are the pre-Pauline and Pauline congregations of the Christ located at first in northern Syria and Asia Minor”. I read this as a reasonable confirmation of my reconstruction of origins. To illustrate I offer a paraphrase I made of a quote by Joe: “the project is aiming at a historical reonstruction of the events that explain the beginning of two movements both purporting to explain the significance of a man named Jesus. Chronologically the first movement: a man named Jesus from the province of Gallee whose life, defined by his words, served as the basis for the beginning of the Jesus Movement, the other movement which soon followed: a sequence of events that led to the man Jesus becoming transformed into “a god become man” the Christ Movement story being propagated throught the Mediterranean”.
This effectively takes Orthodox Christianity with its Scriptural sources, the letters of Paul, the writings of the Gospels as well as the later writings of the NT off the table. An entirely different alternative picture of origins emerges which is stated largely in the words of scholars representative of indisputably “genuine critical scholarship”.
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 Barrett Pashak 
 October 26, 2010 at 1:56 pm
There are many who are not “letting go of Jesus,” including many Jews:

In the teaching of Jesus it [Liberal Judaism] began to recognize the ethics of the old prophets. The liberal Jews were the more captivated by Jesus when the adherents of anti-Semitism began to deny His Jewish descent, or, admitting it, to reject Him totally as belonging to an ‘inferior race.’ To-day it is generally observed that Jews, liberal and even orthodox, claim Jesus as one of their own.–”The religious development of Judaism” / Hans Kosmala. In Studies, Essays and Reviews Volume Three: Jews and Judaism, p. 139.
For those who do not wish to follow the post-Christians and new atheists in “letting go of Jesus,” there is plenty of support among the very best Jewish thinkers.
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 October 26, 2010 at 2:01 pm
I’m sure that this is true; I hope I didn’t imply that this “wave” is irresistible. I myself cannot let go in the sense of leaving history behind, and I am certainly not on the new atheist side–and find that for most of them the question of Jesus is rather dull (having given up God, of what possible relevance can Jesus be?). I do think however that the sacrifices that have been made to scholarship require some adjustment in the matter of ethical importance, which became a refuge for many scholars running from the acids of historical discovery in the last century and still seem to characterize a lot of NT scholarship–of the theological genre.
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 Barrett Pashak 
 October 26, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Atheists can find a solution to the problem of God in the thought of the great Jewish (and some Christian) thinkers:

Know that the whole of being is one individual and nothing else.–Maimonides
Under this name we adore God as Eternal and Infinite Existence, as the source of all being.–Adolph Moses
Hear, O Israel! Being is our God, Being is one!–Rabbi Arthur Green
Radical monotheism dethrones all absolutes short of the principle of being itself. At the same time it reverences every relative existent.–Helmut Richard Niebuhr
Atheists can find a home in pure Judaism, where only Being itself is hallowed.
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 chenier1 
 October 28, 2010 at 7:03 pm
‘If he taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations.’
It is deeply unfashionable to suggest that there may be some way of reaching through time to communicate with our ancestors, and/or our descendants; the past was in another country, and besides the wench is dead. Nevertheless, some four centuries later people still find:
‘To be, or not to be; that is the question.
 Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
 And, by opposing, end them.
 To die, to sleep
 No more – and by a sleep to say we end
 The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
 That flesh is heir to – ‘tis a consummation
 Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep
 To sleep, perchance to dream.’
both relevant and comprehensible.
Though if all we had was the bad quarto then generations of playgoers would probably not have asked themselves:
‘To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
 To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all;
 No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes’.
Shakespeare seems to have spent much of 1599 writing and revising Hamlet; Christopher Marlowe was, of course, dead by then, though this has never discouraged those who think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, but he was the glittering genius that Shakespeare was, in some ways, still measuring himself against. English playwrights in the sixteenth century competed against, and collaborated with, each other; perhaps the same was true of those people contributing to the Jesus text business in the first centuries after his presumed death; I say presumed because if he did not exist in the first place he cannot have died.
But I would counsel caution in the desire to characterise Bishop Wilberforce’s beliefs as the polar opposite of Darwin’s theories; I know that’s how the legend is portrayed, but it’s still a legend. Creationism and Darwinism were the two sides of the same coin; they differed violently on how man had got there, but they were in absolute agreement on what man was. And that was the lord of creation, the most perfect of all species; as Darwin put it in On the Origin of Species, having denied the possibility of any mass extinctions:
‘The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s
 history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, insofar, higher in the scale of nature….
If … the eocene inhabitants … were put into competition with the existing inhabitants, … the eocene fauna or flora would certainly be beaten and exterminated; as would a secondary [Mesozoic] fauna by an eocene, and a palaeozoic fauna by a secondary fauna…
The extinction of species and of whole groups of species,
 which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of the organic world, almost inevitably follows on the principle of natural selection; for old forms will be supplanted by new and improved forms.’
Darwin was, of course, wrong, though many millions died before we got the ‘beaten and exterminated’ bit out of our evolutionary models, but the overarching conviction of modern industrial man’s innate superiority to every other species, and to our own ancestors, still festers on in our collective consciousness…
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 steph 
 April 21, 2011 at 12:02 pm
I offended the seminar by saying that the Jesus of their labors was a “talking doll with a repertoire of 33 genuine sayings; pull his string and he blesses the poor.”
I’ve been looking for this! I thought it was you who first used the puppet analogy. It’s wonderfully fitting!
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 rjosephhoffmann 
 April 21, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Yeah, I used first in a 1993 (!) article on the seminar and many times since.
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 steph 
 April 21, 2011 at 3:32 pm
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=hoffmann_27_3
 yes – it’s caught on too. Just ensuring you get credit. It is quite perfect. Analogies are not often as useful as this one.

 steph 
 April 21, 2011 at 4:09 pm
It took me ages to find. Dean Galbraith used the analogy with ‘puppet’ – I messaged him last night saying I was sure it was you but googled and googled using ‘puppet’ with your name, and New Oxonian, and couldn’t find it. I’m not very good at internet searches. James C found the original article today so I could google ‘doll’ and find this post too. I think I read it on your blog before I read the original article you refer to. It’s so memorable because it is so wittily fitting, just how an analogy ought to be.

 rjosephhoffmann 
 April 21, 2011 at 6:44 pm
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/chilton1.shtml

 steph 
 April 21, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Thank you very much for this. It’s frustrating that the Jesus Project has been held up. This is a good argument by Chilton I think, for a renewed and more professional approach to Jesus research with a new project.

 
 

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