Sunday, September 8, 2013
RJH July-December of 2012 Part 1
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Processing the Project
by rjosephhoffmann
A reader named Reg writes,
1. Why the name change again – Project, Prospect, Process?
2. Line-up is a bit European/American. Could do with some post-colonial theologians who might have a different ‘spin’ on Jesus.
Agree with two. –As long as spin doesn’t mean that a postcolonial spin would be any different from a responsible non-postcolonial spin. Otherwise we are talking theology, and that has been the unseen barrier to unlocking some of the mysteries we are trying to solve.
As to the name: I am reposting here a blog from 2010 that announced the new project. Flatly put, the Center for Inquiry which funded, then defunded the Jesus Project in 2009 at the same time it suspended the operation of CSER, its “host” organization, is happy to let it lie dormant as though it were not dead. I have asked repeatedly that it be taken off life support and be permitted to die with dignity but it lingers still. The post following reflects that period.
The announcement of the defunding of TJP and discontinuation of CSER for financial reasons were announced in the ultimate volume of CAESAR: A Journal of Religion and Human Values (which I edited) by Ronald Lindsay in 2009.
As the refugees from the Project discussed a new name (the new president of CFI had written a rather stern warning about “infringement”), it was suggested that “prospect” was a poor substitute. As plans and enthusiasm grew, the word “process” seemed about right: After all, we were dealing with two things–the way in which the Jesus tradition developed inch by inch, the way it materialized in writings, canon and doctine in the second century (that sort of process), and also the methodology that we use to put the picture together. The emphasis on self-criticism and evidence, and the need to exclude both theology, apologetics, and extreme master-theories, such as “Christ Mythicism,” was the guidepost for choosing “process.” That’s the explanation, but…
Read on:
The Jesus Prospect
R Joseph Hoffmann
The indefinite suspension of the Jesus Project by its original sponsor, the Center for Inquiry, was a serious blow to an effort that had reached a critical point and was in need of an infusion of trust and money.
Funding such a project appears to have been a factor in its “relative” demise. It’s also true, however, that certain organizations suffer from a kind of chronic indecisiveness about the core premises of their existence and hence the causes they want to support. The Jesus Project in my view was simply an illustration of where a messy mission statement and messier programming gets you. The JP was naturally suspect in the press and among biblical professionals of having an axe to grind because its providing organization ground axes, usually for the purpose of cutting the heads off religious truth claims.
In the long run, no harm done. Groundbreaking (and who doesn’t hate that word) scholarship is actually more common without the razzmatazz of conferences and media hits–through the normal and often isolated networking habits we develop as scholars and critics. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Jesus Project was trending (like the Jesus Seminar before it) to produce not a conclusion but Jesus Vishnu, a god with multiple faces, disguises, incarnations and questionable plausibility.
I was once asked why the Jesus Seminar was so much more visible than the Project and my answer, which was halting, was that the Seminar, while Robert Funk lived, had a better press agent. A little like Paul was to Jesus.
As a matter of fact, online, offline, in a series of articles for the popular web-journal Bible and Interpretation, and in ordinary conversation, I spent more time defending the Project than developing it.
However Jesus would have come out of this inquisition, it would have been the equivalent of a new scourging and crowning with thorns, if not an outright crucifixion. The sensationalist clatter that greeted the announcement of the project in 2007-“What if the Most Significant Man in Human History Never Existed?“–was enough to send chills up the spines of thoughtful men and women who reasoned that scientific investigation began with an accumulation of evidence and not with conclusions in search of support. We have seen bibliosensationalism for decades now, and it seems to be getting worse each year. It’s about selling newspapers and the Christmas week edition of Time, not scholarship.
Felix culpa, then, that the suspension of the Project has worked out well for those of us who felt CFI was simply not “scholarly” enough, not academically credible enough, and not neutral enough to sponsor such an inquiry. This is not to say that what they do they do not do well. But biblical research and historical inquiry, even in their most radical, secular and revisionist forms belongs in a different circle. Ideally it begins in the seminar room, not a marketing session and is driven by the desire to know or discover something, not the opportunity to get flakes and nutters on the same platform with dues-paying scholars.
That is what most of those associated with the project thought before the freeze, what the freeze confirmed, and what set many of us looking for alternatives more suited to the currents and trends in New Testament studies. That is where the Jesus Prospect comes in.
The name reflects the state of the question that the Jesus Project was trying to address: it is an historical issue. It is not a question that was going to be answered by men and women whose minds were made up, some of them laying out new documentary hypotheses, some of them assuming the essential historicity of the gospel story, and some of them fundamentally committed to the doctrine of a mythical Jesus. Here there be monsters. Or more precisely, here there be three different games being played, each with its own set of rules, but using the same all-purpose ball.
I am happy to be working with New Testament scholar Stephanie Fisher in re-writing the script and continuing the work we had begun. We will be making an announcement of consultation members very soon. This space should be watched for who is in and who is not (Matthew 22.14). But unlike the Jesus Project, we want to avoid any impression that results are dictated by foregone (or are they forlorn?) conclusions or that an earth-shattering result is at hand.
D F Strauss, an original myther of sorts
At a speech in Berkeley given by Richard Dawkins last year, the papal atheist was asked why he didn’t debate creationists. He smiled like the cat who knows the canary cage is wide open and that a bird sits tremulously on its perch inside. “For the same reason a geneticist wouldn’t debate a believer in the stork theory,” he announced to the approval of the audience.
That is why the Jesus Prospect must be restated and restarted as an evaluation of evidence, not bullish hypotheses that have been held by their postulators with the same zeal Catholics propose local saints for the calendar.
In fact, there is a good prospect that Jesus of Nazareth existed. It is the most efficient explanation for the gospels, the writings of Paul and the formation of gospels and the church. There is a possibility he did not. The thin possibility cannot be supported by sweeping away the gospels like so much Palestinian debris that occludes a master-theory, anymore than the uncertainty of who the Scythians were proves that Herodotus made them up. I am of one mind with April DeConick when I assay the work of the “mythers”–the born again pre-committed–a term I don’t like very much, but in an odd way one that points to the hollowness of many of the non-historicity arguments.
Jesus Christ or a Jesus Impersonator?
And let me reiterate what I have said, and what’s been blogged about far too much. I don’t know what really happened, the Archimedean point at which Christianity “began.” I think I could construct a perfectly plausible if not indefeasible argument for the non-existence of Jesus. I can do this by ignoring the bare story of the gospels and concentrating instead on the political and literary needs and the quiver-ful of analogous myths of the early church, the door through which Christ entered as savior. But the savior the mythers begin with is not the historical Jesus, and perhaps the Jesus of the gospels has already achieved that status. Everyone (almost) agrees that most of Jesus is a myth of the church, and even the church trades on the mythical power of a name that is basically unhistorical. We don’t need to convince scholars of that. They know it already, and rather wonder why it’s such a big deal to mythers. It’s really a question of knowing where to begin.
Methodologically (if I can be brave) there are two problems. Despite considerable changes to this pattern in the last century (namely an awareness after Walter Bauer that Christianity was not one thing but many, virtually from its cultic origin) there are those scholars who focus too much on the New Testament as a self-authenticating corpus of evidence waiting to be explained through context and various forms of criticism. And there are those, although still a minority, who use context to explain almost everything, particularly the arousal of the religious interests that lead to the New Testament (and the literature of other groups, such as the gnostics). The Jesus assumed to exist as an historical figure exists in the canon of the former. The Jesus of the mythers and pangnosticists exists in penumbra of the latter.
The Jesus Prospect is essentially, in the French sense, an essay–a try–at developing a middle way where the obvious influence of Judaic and Hellenistic belief and the myths that enfold it do not totally suffocate the prospect of an historical Jesus, and the primacy of canon does not totally obliterate the prospect of a savior god who became historicized as a matter of religious evolution, from cult to church.
The headline “Jesus never existed” is not the end-game of this process. But an insistence on the importance of a hearing and verdict on the best available evidence is. And while you are keeping things in mind, keep this in mind: it is almost inevitably true that the result of such an investigation will not pay big dividends. No one will ever be able to render a “scientific” conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth was made up. It is waste of time to try. The proof of this axiom is its opposite: No one–at least no one interested in doing this kind of work or addressing this kind of question–has been convinced by the discovery of the “tombs” of the Jesus dynasty or the Nazareth domiciles. No reputable scholar feels that the Jesus of the Gospel of Judas is any more historical than the canonical Jesus (and perhaps vice versa) or the Jesus of Nag Hammadi.
Increasingly, scholars are returning to question whether the existence of “Q” is more a quest for the grail than a quest for a real document. I count among my friends many who have memorized two, four, and twelve source theories with the enthusiasm ordinarily reserved for a good bottle of wine. But in my opinion, the search for Q ended with Austin Farrer; its reconstructions have been fanciful. And they have been the greatest distraction in New Testament studies for almost a century.
Austin Farrer: Warden of Keble College and Biblical Studies Gadfly
Negative as these tendencies are, they are very healthy tendencies because they show that skepticism is not dead, that a will to find out more is still alive It shows that quick-fix radical, and quick-fix apologetic faith-engendering and overly speculative studies may not win the day, even in the study of the Bible. What hath Schweitzer wrought?
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Published: July 16, 2012
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38 Responses to “Processing the Project”
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davidjohnmills
July 16, 2012 at 12:54 pm
I might have liked to have seen someone like Rolf Torstendahl in the line up. Richard Carrier is too naughty, obviously, and as for Stephen Law, well, what could a philosopher possibly contribute (second time around) but hey…….’in house’ it is. :)
Is Robert Price not in this time either?
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 16, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Oh, and, I know it’s a long shot, but if you do happen to want to boost your credibility base by going ex-house, what better than a sympathetic atheist? The architectural sector being a bit flat at the moment, I could use the dough.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 16, 2012 at 12:57 pm
You don’t have to say no just straight away. Mull it over, with some pico picquante, on its own, with a nice chilled Sauvignon…:)
steph
July 16, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Sorry this is for scholarship, and no funds are anticipated. But you’re welcome to share your pico piquante, on its own, with a nice chilled Sauvignon (or Cabernet Sauvignon unchilled), with us…
davidjohnmills
July 16, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Okay. Just the opening night party it is then. I’ll even bring my own bottle. See you in Cana. :)
rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 5:12 pm
the fun starts at 10 when four urns are brought out, two for Jesus, two for Dionysus with the clock ticking and each challenged to produce a 1935 Montepulciano with an amusing bite and hint of blackberry in the finish.
rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 6:48 pm
@David: If by “in house” you mean the house of wisdom, I agree. It was certainly “in house” in a different way at CFI.
What we want are men and women who understand the field, are competent in the languages and methods of New Testament criticism, are not trying (or needing) to make a splash, are not arguing an agenda or committed to an outcome.
Carrier and Price do not fit that description. Obviously since I have been around the block on this, I could name names on either side who would not qualify. But the very fact that some people are wondering why we don’t impose a “poll tax” and appoint people who are “postcolonial” or “atheist” is a very sad commentary on the state of the question. If the evidence trends in the direction of Paul’s letters having been composed by Marcion in the second century, thus explaining the “sudden” shift from the Jesus of history to the divine Christ, I’m sure we will catch that drift. If it turns out to be more complicated, we will catch that too. And just a word of consolation: I understand the frustration many people feel about NT studies. I have felt it too. As some will know, when I proposed Marcion as the topic of my doctoral research it was very nearly turned down by a late twentieth century faculty at Oxford on the grounds he was a heretic! When the work was published, it was venomously attacked by both German and Dutch scholars for being too radical, when in fact its “radicalism” has since become mainstream and from the mythtic viewpoint conservative. Soon I will publish after almost 30 years away from him a new study of Marcion, which I also hesitate to do because it will immediately be ravaged–from both sides. Believe it or not, it has taken me that long to be sure–not that I am right–but that I need to publish it.
Reply
steph
July 16, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Casey’s work “From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God” (WJK, 1991) was “delayed” because a particular “highly distinguished” conservative British scholar wrote to a publisher and said they shouldn’t publish it because it was “anti-Christian”. Another similarly “highly distinguished” don prevented another publisher from publishing it, telling them they should be “promoting Christian knowledge”. This is also why “Is John’s Gospel True?” (Routledge 1996) was largely ignored. While the New Marcion is greatly anticipated and will be welcomed with relief, those who make us uncomfortable about N.T. studies are the same ‘those’ who will ravage it and leave it out as inconvenient to their preconceptions.
davidjohnmills
July 17, 2012 at 4:06 am
Marcion striles me as almost much more interesting than Jesus, so I think I would like to read a book about him. Maybe that’s unfair to Jesus, though he has been, er, overdone. :)
As for the J-man’s existence or not, I’m agnostic.
As for the ‘academy’, I do have my reservations (and you and steph have just reminded me why, since the 1990′s are not exactly the middle ages) but equally I don’t underestimate expertize and don’t assume that there aren’t at least several scholars at the very-open-minded end of the spectrum.
steph
July 16, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Torstendahl is not suitably qualified for this although respectable in his own fields, Carrier and Law are irrelevant, and Joe Hoffmann and Gerd Lüdemann were co chairs of the Jesus Project – Price was brought on by somebody else, Carrier was brought on by Price – they will not be invited.
Reply
Scott
July 16, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Maurice Casey? Or is he a forgone conclusion?
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steph
July 16, 2012 at 2:36 pm
The co-editors are Joseph Hoffmann and me and Maurice Casey, with James Crossley, Justin Meggitt, Roger Aus, David Trobisch, Bruce Chilton, Deane Galbraith, Philip Davies, and probably Gerd Lüdemann.
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Scott
July 16, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Thank you, Steph.
rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 5:14 pm
foregone is always better than pre-formed, doncha think?
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Scott
July 16, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Just good to know Casey is on the case for the project. perhaps I could have stated “an obvious choice”? Does Maurice Casey truly exist or is he just a pre-formed idea in our minds? :P
rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 6:23 pm
Steph tells me he is very much on the case. It is providential: The Jesus Myth, from Case to Casey!
Mike Wilson
July 16, 2012 at 5:07 pm
It will be interesting to see what comes up. I think my primary difficulties with Funk’s Jesus Seminar was to abandon the eschatological Jesus and thus break one of their own golden rules, “Beware of finding a Jesus that is entirely congenial to you”. The other was giving a spot to the guy that directed “Show Girls” and “Starship Troopers”
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rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 5:09 pm
Jevishnusus, and you don’t need to say god bless you when you say that.
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steph
July 16, 2012 at 7:47 pm
That joke cracking cynic philosopher guy of the Jesus Seminar, reconstructed on the assumption of the existence of a single written Greek document (they’ve got the text, just not the scroll and they’re still publishing stuff about it as ‘proof’), eliminating evidence from Mark and anything remotely apocalyptic or too Jewish on the results of voting, coloured balls and a commitment to concensus, looks a little like Dom Crossan, Burton Mack and a few others, none of whom are Jewish, surprisingly, let alone from the first century. Unless they’re zombies, which is [not] possible. What happened to the dead who rose in Matt 27:51-3? They’re still roaming the earth of course. N.T. Wright still hasn’t responded to that question raised at a conference so maybe he’s one of them. After all he wrote of the episode, “Some stories are so odd that they may just have happened”.
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Reg
July 17, 2012 at 2:27 am
NT Wright is such an odd scholar. He accepts the broad thrust of Schweitzer’s Jesus, yet thinks that his eschatology refers to the fall of Jeruslaem in 70 (which Jesus must have correctly predicted) and so makes the Jews responsible for his death because they obviously didn’t listen to his warnings in Mark 13//. He thus makes the Romans under Titus the agents of God’s wrath to destroy the Jews for not heeding Jesus’ advice! (nice bit of anti-semitism) God’s judgement would fall first and foremost on Israel because it failed to respond to the summons to be the light of the world. Crazy stuff but lots out there buy the books! Nice question about those who rose in Matthew. Just like: Where was Jesus in-between bodily resurrection appearances: Answer : the Jerusalem caravan park!
Reg
steph
July 17, 2012 at 9:52 am
We buy the overpriced books so we can keep up with both good and crazy scholarship. Incidentally my cat is an ‘avid reader’. She absorbs books by sitting on them. Sometimes she devours the ones -ironically discerning in her choice – that wouldn’t break my heart. She almost chewed the whole cover off NT Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God while I accidentally threw a cup of black coffee over it later to add to the damage. It’s a bit scrappy. It also has alot of crosses and exclamations in red pen on nearly every page as do all his books and many others.
rjosephhoffmann
July 17, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Poor Tom, and he was such a good chaplain.
steph
July 17, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Yes – he is very good at “people relationships”. He’s very charming and pleasant around conferences, has a tendency to blush when questioned pressingly, and I even know some who’ve known him a very long time, who despite abundant differences of ‘opinion’, are very fond of him.
Reg
July 16, 2012 at 8:14 pm
I think that you do Paul Verhoeven a huge disservice and your comments smack of academic arrogance. Verhoeven is an intelligent and accomplished New testmaent scholar, despite not having the formal. academic credentials. He does not toe the Jesus Seminar line about Jesus and his book, Jesus of Nazareth, is far removed from Crossan and Funk’s idea of Jesus. It is a testament to the openness of the Jesus Seminar that there are those within its ranks who are permitted to depart from the itinerant, parabolic, non-escahtological Jesus or even think taht Jesus didn’t exist (Price). You also forgot ‘RoboCop’, ‘Basic Instinct’, ‘Turkish Delight’ and ‘The Fourth Man’. Sometimes people in Hollywood are more discerning than those who hide in ivory towers. A modern folly is to idolise the Academy. Having taught in such institutions, some degrees that people are awarded are less than satisfactory; and those who hold such qualifications less than inspiring or erudite.
The Seminar did examine the eschatological Jesus. The majority of scholars following Funk, Crossan etc contested that he was non-eschatological. The consensus/voting model that they employed meant that the majority opinion won the day.
Reg
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 16, 2012 at 9:57 pm
You could be right Reg. what is clear is that not every Jesus who escaped the Jesus seminar could be right. The managers ran it like a Greek election. You might be interested in a very early review of the process I did in 1994; I think I was the third or fourth person Funk invited to come on board. My knowledge of the seminar is not second hand, but I left within a few weeks. Regardless it was a dog’s breakfast in terms of results, as Dom Crossan himself acknowledged.
Mike Wilson
July 16, 2012 at 9:44 pm
My truck with mythicist is that they think their idea is so radical thant NT scholars must give them the Galilio treatment, not that NT studies has a lot of people who’s scholarship is influenced by the need to have a Jesus we can worship. Crossan and Funk I think were motivated by this bias and while Fundies don’t mind a Jesus that was waiting for demons to feast on the entrails of the unfaithful, for tyhe more up to date Episcopaliens and Catholics this wont do. Of course I think in 1000 years school kids will giggle at how backwards and conservative Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King were. They don’t want to go down Scheitzer’s route and give up theology but i think even with his beleif in a comming apocalypse Jesus is as facinating as any thinker of the first century and the durability of the church was never based on the teachings of a late Jewish prophet, but on how a late Jewish prophet was presented in those Gospel books.
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Reg
July 17, 2012 at 2:09 am
Joseph wrote:
You might be interested in a very early review of the process I did in 1994
Yes I would – where do I find that?
Reg
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Andrew
July 22, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Do the texts give us enough confidence to believe that their authors were interested in documenting the life of an actual human being? Mark is a non-Jewish writer, addressing a non-Jewish audience, with a story about a prophetic god-man whom “the Jews” supposedly wanted to kill from his birth. That is raw polemics, not documentation of any kind. It’s very difficult to see how an authentic Jewish messianic movement would be of any interest to an anti-Jewish polemic of the kind Mark is writing.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 22, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Andrew: I wonder if you mean John perhaps? The anti-Judaic from birth thing is stronest there. I will re-read Mark however to see if Mark reads just the same way. You might try reading a gospel as well, rather than third class comic books about them.
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steph
July 22, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Mark is a non-Jewish writer? Addressing a non-Jewish audience? A prophetic god-man? Whom the Jews supposedly wanted to kill from his birth? Anti-Jewish polemic? Do you have evidence of these things? Why does ‘Mark’ assume things of his audience that a non Jewish person wouldn’t take for granted? Which Jews are opposed? How is Jesus is a ‘god-man’ in Mark and not a human being living in first century Jewish culture? And which gospel has a story of Herod wanting to kill him from his birth? I recommend perhaps James Crossley’s ‘Date of Mark’ (T&T Clark,1994) especially his chapter especially on Law and perhaps his ‘Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Orignis (26-50CE)’ (WJK 1996) which is an attempt to explain Christian origins, Maurice Casey’s ‘Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel’ (CUP, 1996), ‘From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God’ (WJK 1991) as well as ‘Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historican’s Account of his Life and Teachings’ (T&T Clark) for general readers.
In addition to Joe’s comment on John perhaps Maurice Casey’s ‘Is John’s Gospel True?’ (Routledge, 1996)). The answer is ‘no’ in case you’re wondering.
But watch especially for progress forthcoming from the Jesus Process as we examine new evidence with new argument.
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davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 8:47 am
Dear Doctor Joe,
I am planning to have my sex-change operation later this month, but I am getting cold feet. Amongst other things, I am worried that the outcome will adversely affect my (admittedly already slim) chances of getting picked for the Jesus Process panel. What should I do?
yours,
anxiously,
Worried Belfast male.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 26, 2012 at 10:17 am
Dear WBM:
It is a conspicuous dilemma, I know. I would suggest praying to the Blessed Mother. Our Lady knows best. In her wisdom, she decided to have a baby boy, and it turned out rather well. In case she does not return your call, talk to Stephanie.
Reply
Mother Mary
July 26, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Dear child,
An interested candidate who is no longer the same gender as the one they were born with, and is qualified with expertise in the area, would be considered as a member. However it is necessary for this person to have the qualified expertise and experience working with critical scholarship.
Blessed, Mother Mary.
rjosephhoffmann
July 26, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Hmmm. Snarky. Just like a Jewish mother. I hope your son is a myth!
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Myth Jesus. Hm. Maybe Mary had a lisp. Might explain a LOT.
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 5:05 pm
Seriously though, I would just sit at the back, and not cause any trouble.
Who knows, I might even offer to do what I believe is known in the trade as an ‘afff’ (‘Anthony Flew flip flop’). ‘Ex-rabid New Atheist accepts case for Historicity of God Man’. Think of the publicity value.
No rush. I’ll keep my phone switched on, just in case there’s an injury on the training ground.
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 4:43 pm
….such as, perhaps……(I’m in a good mood so I’ll give you this one)….Richard carrier’s alter ego:
http://mrmen-books.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Mr-Muddle.jpg
yup. You guessed it. He’s one of the Mythter Men.
Mother Mary
July 26, 2012 at 1:46 pm
No dear. He was quite a naughty boy but I heard he caused quite a stir and was killed.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Complacency and Excess
by rjosephhoffmann
Reblogged from The New Oxonian:
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January 6, 2012
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“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1959)
“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited (Chomsky 1994)
“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
Read more… 2,887 more words
Published: July 17, 2012
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One Response to “Complacency and Excess”
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Viv
July 17, 2012 at 8:43 pm
I know this is repetitive, but : brilliant as usual;-)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Complacency and Excess
by rjosephhoffmann
January 6, 2012
By admin
“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1959)
“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited (Chomsky 1994)
“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Chomsky 1988)
THOUGHTFUL response from a reader asked me why I had stopped commenting on the excesses of “religion” and turned my attention to damning the excesses of atheism.
I haven’t. But it’s a good question. I replied that it would be like asking Luther why he stopped momentarily condemning the abuses of the Roman Catholic church and turned his attention to the marauding protestants. For everything nasty Luther had to say about the pope being the anti-Christ and Rome the whore of Babylon, he had equally vicious things to say about the religious militants in a treatise eirenically titled “Against the Thieving and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.” Who were these “hordes”?
They were Luther’s supporters in the protestant cause, disillusioned that he haden’t taken his revolution far enough. So others, like Thomas Müntzer, took it for him. Similar (harder to prove) theories have suggested the same dynamic at work in the transition between Jesus and his followers, and a definite comparison can be made in the transition from earliest Christianity to the studious nastiness of some of the Church fathers, the founders of “orthodoxy.”
Polemic–rhetorical sling-shotting–wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before. It just spreads more quickly now.
I am not anti-atheist. I am anti-excess, and everything about the Dawkins revolution has spelled excess. No matter who tries to persuade me that I am making this excess up in my head, it’s excess. Fueled by the repeated assertion of its promoters that it is (secularly) providential, righteous and true (just as all zealotry convinces itself), it is excess.
Sometimes, as Caspar Melville (editor of the New Humanist) mildy suggested in a Guardian article in 2010, it’s useful to hit the right targets–namely, an aggressive religious fundamentalism–hard, and in that regard “irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.” (Funny, those adjectives remind me of a few things said recently about yours truly: how can it be?).
But I know Caspar to be a smart guy, someone who still sees the humanities in the word humanist, so in reponse to the famous Dawkins dictum (spoken to Laurie Taylor way back in 2007)–that there is no more reason to pay attention to theology than to fairyology– I wasn’t surprised to find Caspar saying this:
Entertainment value aside it is surely false, as well as politically unwise and, well, pretty impolite, to say that “all theology” is irrelevant (some of it is moral reasoning, isn’t it?), still worse to say that “religion poisons everything”, or that without religion there would be no war, or that bringing a child up within a faith is tantamount to child abuse, or that moderate religious believers are worse than fundamentalists because they prepare the ground for extremism, or that “all” religion is this, or that, or “all” faith is misguided, or to suggest that those who believe in God are basically stupid, or that science, and only science, can answer our questions….The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character.
ET me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.
No one with a semblance of a brain would ever suggest that science can’t do a lot, hasn’t done a lot, and that the world science has explained for us doesn’t leave a lot of room for traditional religious beliefs, stories, and explanations of physical reality. It is a leap into nowhere, however, to say that accepting this as a fair description of the current state of knowledge requires someone to say, “Look, somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all,” as Dawkins does to Taylor.
First of course, we need to find out what the speaker means by “theology.” Then we need to know what he thinks qualifies as “subject matter.” Presumably English literature qualifies because it exists. But so do the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Pali texts, the movements those texts have produced and the cultures and ideologies they have influenced. –Not to mention alphabets that were developed largely for the preservation of sacred writings.
What aspects of those topics, given the facile dismissal of theology, can be recognized as subject matter? Have the revolutionaries acquitted them of all responsibility to subject matter in the denial of the existence of God? Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist? If so, life is simple and the mortgage is paid.
But, if so, equally–if the texts and traditions of the world’s religions are really no different from stories about fairy tales and leprechauns–then attacking and ridiculing them is just as pointless as systematic exploration of their meaning–which is one of the things theology does. Is the ridicule justified because while nobody believes in the story of the Frog King or Thumbelina (does anyone even know those stories any more?) a few do believe that Jonah was swallowed by a ravenous fish and (a few more) that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee? I’d rather buy Plantinga’s argument for epistemic defeaters than that rationale for why ridicule is justified but explanation isn’t.
Or does “subject matter” mean a certain kind of theology?Or does it mean (I think it often does in new atheist harangues) apologetics–which is unknown in many religious traditions? The analogy to fairies and leprechauns makes it difficult to know. If you say the analogies are all wrong, remember: I didn’t make them.
God
Predictably, I am going to say that the best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”–are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time. Even many not very good theologians see things this way but pretend it’s none of their business.
The history of religion in the last two hundred years has been a history of religion redefining itself–a bit like Britain when it went from imperially great to little England. Yet religion has done a pretty good job of doing just that: the “war between science and religion” is treated in history-of-culture classes as a topic in nineteenth century studies, especially in the work of Cornell’s first hard-headed, science-first president, Andrew Dickson White. But if you look at the section headings of White’s famous book on the subject, you’ll see that he had a broad and humanistic definition of culture in which science played a magisterial, not an imperial role. He was as impressed with the results of the higher biblical criticism as he was with development in chemistry and medicine.
Andrew Dickson White, Yale ’53
Too many vaguely religious people aren’t aware of the “magisterium issue,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s linguistic stab at declaring a truce. Religion and science are compatible (to the extent it even occurs to ordinary people to wonder) because they don’t know much about either, and because they are encouraged in this superstition by dumb priests and ministers, the self-interest and reflexes of many churches, and the at-best tepid curiosity that characterizes their day to day life–whether in relation to politics, religion, world affairs, or national education policy. (And don’t mention vote-grubbing politicians who try to out-right-to-life their way into office by appealing to the worst instincts of NASCAR America. This may be the year that foetuses are declared citizens of the United States at seven months.)
What is the effect of this dumbness, this complacency? Loud, that’s what. Getting attention for your “message” by forcing people to pay attention to hate ads, grotesquery, libelous caricatures of ideas, and repeated falsehoods–all of it communicated in a kind of pidgin that can only be described as Dumbglish: these aren’t tactics that diminish and cheapen the American spirit. This is the language that American culture seems to require to wake it up. It flows like poison soup in the veins of the internet. This is where the American spirit is.
After some thought, I have to concede that maybe the shouting is necessary. Most people don’t pay attention to much of anything–not what politicians say, or what bishops teach, or what Atheists.org billboards shout at them along the highways.
The failure of the culture to inspire has led to the failure of people to be curious and a general acceptance of the status quo in most things–especially religion. Why should people want to know more about anything when they have a thousand bucks in the bank, an iPhone, and a new MacDonalds opening up down the street? Starbucks is for people with jobs.
American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.
AN indirect proof of that is an unbroken succession of wars, thousands of American dead, a broken Middle East, an Arab spring that looks like winter, and nary a protest movement to remind us that man is a moral animal [sic, or lol] who ought to oppose such things. Bishops made noises and a few liberal protestants and Jews occasionally marched. Atheists, as usual, weren’t quite sure what to do because while many hated George W. Bush they hated Islam more and so–like Christopher Hitchens–they backed the wars. They were, in a phrase, paralyzed and morally invisible. No William Sloane Coffin emerged, no John Howard Yoder, no Elie Wiesel. Complacency.
Rather than say Europe isn’t far behind in this, I’m going to say Europe is far ahead. Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.
The Christianity that Kierkegaard tried to resuscitate in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1843) became the Denmark where only 31% of the population believe in God but 82.1% are members of the Evangelical Lutheran (the State) Church.
How can this be? It can be, according to Richard Norman, because religion ”is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected….Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”
It follows as the night the day that Danish religion is not American religion. British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism. This cultural specularity has always been true, as when long ago German Christianity was not Roman Christianity.
HE opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter- argument is that excess has much, much less.
The classical aphorism, σπεῦδε βραδέως, “make haste slowly” is a good motto for what needs to be done in the conversation between science and religion. It was the motto of the Emperor Augustus who as a military commander deplored rashness. Suetonius says that he would often tell the generals, “Better a safe commander than a bold,” and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”
In the final tally, as long as rashness rules and shouting scores, the atheists worry me at least as much as people who believe in souls. Realizing that he is now a template for what I consider atheist rash, as in red and irritating, consider this of P Z Myers reviewing the conservative philosopher Alvin Plangtinga
I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing.
After a scissors and paste attack on the philosopher punctuated by non sequiturs and hooplah that makes no sense, Myers says simply that it is all “muddled lunacy.” As a matter of fact, I don’t like Plantinga much either. The summary Myers attacks (fortunately for him) appeared as a piece in a religious periodical. But Plantinga deserves much better, even if only because once upon a time academics who despised each other didn’t mistake emotionalism for argument. A vestige of this is that not once in his summary does Plantinga call the proponents of naturalism “stupid.” The legacy of the Dawkins revolution will be to make this completely emotional, unquantifiable term and all of its sisters and cousins and aunts permissible discourse in the defense of science. I know, I know: I have had my lapses in calling screed-writers screed-writers in screeds of my own.
SO let me revert to someone else. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his famous 1997 Natural History article a couple of paragraphs which would have caused his immediate expulsion from the atheist camp as an accommodationist or worse if he had written it in 2007. He died in 2002. With him at the Vatican meeting on NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) in 1984 was Carl Sagan, who had organized the event.
…I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)
Stephen Jay Gould
I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.
Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.
I stop what will be described as a tangent, a screed, a hateful assault, another outburst close to tears at Gould’s words. The year he wrote this article (1997) was also the year of Carl Sagan’s death. Sagan perhaps did more to make science magical than any other scientist of the twentieth century, though his primary celebrity was where it belonged and was most needed: in the United States. Gould commenting on Sagan’s death had this to say: “Carl shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship.”
That is the language we need.
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Published: January 6, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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52 Responses to “Complacency and Excess”
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Scott
January 6, 2012 at 5:50 pm
“Festina Lente” Hasten Slowly is the one I received from my days in college several moons ago. It’s the best way i’ve found to live.
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Dwight Jones
January 6, 2012 at 7:26 pm
The New Atheists are the infantry of humanism. Specialists in living Heller, they shanghaied themselves and are now growing weary of hardtack. Whose words will next be their rum?
Bravo on bringing the ship about.
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Complacency and Excess | saynotoiphone says:
January 7, 2012 at 8:04 am
[...] this article: Complacency and Excess This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged article, business, christianity, church, [...]
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steph
January 7, 2012 at 10:48 am
“The opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter-argument is that excess has much, much less.”
It couldn’t be clearer. What an excellent motto, and one history has proved to be true.
“[T]he best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”– are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time.”
That’s perfectly true too. It’s a shame about the not-so-goods. We’re all embarrassed to know a few. They don’t deserve their theology degrees…
Ursula Le Guin writes in ‘Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction’: “True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”
I appreciate the quotation of Noam Chomsky, “We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” As Somerset Maugham writes in ‘Cakes and Ale’, “…it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.” The novel is the genre which allows incisive expression of characters with unshackled freedom.
The wisdom of the past enriches the present.
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Dwight Jones
January 7, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Indeed. The atheists face a Sisyphean prospect, as befits them, with their projects to destroy myth. As Twain commented “A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”
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Stevie
January 7, 2012 at 2:57 pm
I was at the debate at the RSA which Caspar mentioned in the article you quote, and can thus personally attest that he had very good reason to worry that:
‘I have a more base reason for wanting to move beyond New Atheism. I’m bored, and I fear my readers are becoming so too.’
It was then that I discovered the intellectual level of the NAs had sunken so far that the NAs believed that asserting that one is an atheist deserves a round of applause. Asserting that one is a NA deserved a standing ovation, and ‘I believe in science’ would have brought down the rafters were it not for the fact that Robert Adam was rather good at designing buildings.
Unfortunately the NA’s language skills did not extend beyond simple declarative sentences, and thus they probably did not even know that they were abnegating reason, much less that they were doing so in one of the great temples of the Enlightenment itself.
Caspar’s hope that the debate might:
‘map out a new, specific, patient and subtle future for the God debate’
was, I fear, doomed at the outset. The vast majority of intelligent people know that they are intelligent; they do not need to shore up their egos by buying books which tell them they are intelligent.
The fact that so many do buy the books reflects the -at the best- intellectual insecurities and -at the worst- intellectual inadequacies of the purchasers. Neither group is capable of providing what Caspar seeks.
Unfortunately their shortcomings pose a rather more important problem than the declining readership of the New Humanist; we do not need people who ‘believe in science’. We need good scientists as well as good historians, and, since neither good scientists nor good historians spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, we need intelligent schoolchildren to conclude that doing science is just as worthwhile a way of spending their lives as doing history.
Unfortunately, if you want to persuade intelligent schoolchildren that science sucks then directing them to PZ Myers’ website is an excellent way of setting about it…
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steph
January 7, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Thanks for that Stevie. I enjoyed your incisive analysis. And so true, “we do not need people who ‘believe in science’. We need good scientists as well as good historians, and, since neither good scientists nor good historians spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, we need intelligent schoolchildren to conclude that doing science is just as worthwhile a way of spending their lives as doing history.” Sorry to quote you back at you, but … :-)
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Stevie
January 11, 2012 at 7:45 pm
steff
Thank you but we need to be cautious here; if we are not careful you and I will be categorised as Joe’s sockpuppets. After all, we share 3 first letters in our names and what better evidence could exist to prove that neither of us do exist? Bearing in mind, of course, that reasoned arguments and logic are not strong point in the NA’s mindset…
steph
January 12, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Probably a bit late, alea iacta est. I wasn’t familiar with the sort and didn’t anticipate their imaginations or the weaving of such myths, but the myths, if believed, are believed only by themselves. Life goes on. As Joshua Rosenau wrote yesterday “It’s odd, people are wrong on the internet, but somehow, I can’t work myself up over it. Maybe it’s because they’re just talking in circles and making things up.” Sensible man. He has his feet on the ground.
steph
January 13, 2012 at 7:33 pm
You’re right of course Stevie. I should have called myself Hohepa Kahu and posted a profile of George Nepia leading the Rugby All Blacks in a haka before the game.
Dwight Jones
January 13, 2012 at 10:29 pm
The haka in the World Cup final was something to see. I think we all went back to the chimpanzee stage and loved doing it.
skholiast
January 12, 2012 at 5:23 pm
I was extremely encouraged by this post. Articulate and apt. There is an element of hyperbole, perhaps, in the characterization of European Christianity’s “not giving damn about anything,” but the same diagnosis was made by Nietzsche, By Dostoevsky, by Baudelaire (“Ennui! …You know him reader! Hypocrite reader, my twin, my brother”). Excess and complacency tipping back and forth into one another seems a close description of the dialectic of our time: boredom tends to secrete excess, as an attempt at self-therapy (the most obvious example of this excess is fear, for excess usually has to excuse itself, and fear is the usual suspect named in these excuses –see here the panic over Islamicism which justifies the indignant gnu), and every excess in turn becomes boring. This is why I am most struck by the perspicuity with which you call the opposite of complacency “Moderation,” a stance with an ancient philosophical pedigree. In the interests of “keeping it brief” I have kept most of my remarks over at my blog. But thank you for this.
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Dwight Jones
January 13, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Joe sed: ” …if Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily.”
It may not be useful to characterize (malls et al ) as such. As a species we once were eagles, and are now learning to live like ants – the malls are happy anthills for families and ‘dreams are thunder, lightning is desire’ venue for teens and earnest house cows.
To denigrate ‘the wasteland’ may be to repeat the nothingness of the NA’s junior relationship with religion – this was tired with Eliot, Camus and Sartre when we were Childe Harold’s puppies – let’s lift up our eyes,
Intellectuals have plenty to contemplate, and it may be best to address issues directly. We don’t always have to grind the same blade, and faith takes many forms.
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rjosephhoffmann
January 13, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Eloquent dear Dwight!
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rjosephhoffmann
July 17, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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scotteus
July 17, 2012 at 8:48 pm
I second Dwights response, however, there now seem to be too many who wish to see faith as only being a religious manifestation rather than part of a deep seeded desire to understand, to penetrate the more complex aspects of human existence.
Socrates, if we’ve ever needed your measured, undogmatic approach it is now! Time to read “The Aplogy” and “Before And After Socrates” again.
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davidjohnmills
July 18, 2012 at 9:41 am
Wow. There is a a lot here to agree with, and a lot to disagree with. Where to start? I’ll pick one of each. Better to start with the former and finish benignly, I think. :)
From ‘The Poverty (sic) of the New Atheism.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/01/19/3116506.htm
‘….Rather, to be “dis-illusioned” is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one’s existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called “the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth”.’
Don’t share this gloomy prognosis myself. It’s a bit, er, unnecessarily gloomy. Perhaps the writer is speaking personally?
‘In Capital, Marx demonstrated that the advent of capitalism itself had the effect of denuding the world by ripping off the shroud of religion and dissolving the communal and familial ties that bind. But the mechanistic world laid bare by industrial capitalism induced madness among those that prospered from the wealth it generated and among those that found themselves dispossessed of the fruits of their labour.
Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its devotees. Walter Benjamin developed this further, suggesting that “capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement … A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind.”
And yet even the atonement for guilt comes within the purview of capitalism. This religion now has its own acts of penance for one’s economic debauchery in the form of tokenistic charity, delayed gratification and the production of “green” or “fair trade” commodities.
The great irony of capitalism is that its progress has seen the corruption and fragmentation of morality and the decimation of institutional religion, but in their place persists the menagerie of pseudo-moralities and plaintive spiritualities (often in the form of so-called Western Buddhism or what Martin Amis calls “an intensified reverence for the planet”) that somehow sustain, or perhaps lubricate, its global machinations.’
And what’s this? A smooth segue into conflating capitalism with atheism? Surely not?
Sadly, unless one can justify this segue, the bulk of the article is very suspect, IMO.
‘To paraphrase Marx, the abolition of these false moralities and neo-paganisms would constitute the demand for the rediscovery of authentic reason, integral morality and sustainable, virtuous forms of communal life. And here the “New Atheists” fall tragically short.
By failing to pursue the critique of religion into the sanctum of global capitalism itself, by reducing discussion of morality to a vapid form of well-being and personal security, and by failing to advocate alternate forms of virtuous community – all in the name of “reason” – they end up providing the pathologies of capitalism with a veneer of “commonsense” rationality.
However noble the goals of the “New Atheism” may be, armed with nought but an impoverished form of commonsense rationality (of which Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape and the rather unwieldy The Australian Book of Atheism are the most opprobrious examples I’ve yet seen – but more on these books in a later piece) it is simply not up to the task of confronting the idols and evils of our time. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has recognized as much and has thus proposed – though not unproblematically – an alliance between atheism and Catholic Christianity.’
To blame atheism for not tackling the evils of our time is a bit like blaming the London Symphony Orchestra for not tackling Osama Bin Laden. :)
In short, there is nothing ‘lite’ about New atheism, any more than there is anything ‘dim’ about theology. When Dawkins says that it is for him about as important as faeriology, he is correct, in the context in which he meant it, as he is, IMO, in rejecting NOMA.
Regarding agreement, I can understand what irks non-atheists about some of the New Atheism. Not sure how many New Atheists are culpable of the charges laid, not even sure the main protagonists are (did Dawkins actually say that he thought religion was the root of all evil?).
I do agree that the sentiment that ‘accommodating’ liberal (theists) gives cover to extremists is, IMO, unhelpful and mostly incorrect, and I have personally heard this one more than once, on atheist forums, and disagreed, though to be fair even at said forums it was probably a vocal minority saying it.
And, as I’ve said, Dennett’s ‘brights’ was lamentable and embarrassing.
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Dwight Jones
July 18, 2012 at 10:51 am
“Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its devotees.”
Superbly said. Somewhere in there, Henry Ford is one more fallen, anti-Semitic pope, and Detroit his ruined, satanic legacy.
Lest we chart only Caucasian pilgrims, it may be time to review the influence of Confucius over the past millennia, and whether his common sense admonitions of personal responsibility (of all things) might find appreciation, at last, among the white guys.
Somewhere in Asia, the next Karl Marx is likely among us, a kinder, gentler mentor who does not require grand sociological schema to explain anything.
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Scott
July 18, 2012 at 12:01 pm
“Somewhere in Asia, the next Karl Marx is likely among us, a kinder, gentler mentor who does not require grand sociological schema to explain anything.”
Well, if that’s the case lets hope this person is truly kindernot to mention gentler and will refrain from imposing anything upon us in a jackbooted fashion.
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Dwight Jones
July 18, 2012 at 1:04 pm
“Well, if that’s the case lets hope this person is truly kinder not to mention gentler and will refrain from imposing anything upon us in a jackbooted fashion.”
You mean compete with the Pentagon? That’s not the Asian way; in that culture a man’s character has value.
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Scott
July 18, 2012 at 1:35 pm
No Dwight, no competition with the Pentagon, just hoping the person is kinder and gentler. I do think that character is in the person and expands into the culture, provided it is a healthy culture.
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davidjohnmills
July 18, 2012 at 5:44 pm
@ joseph,
I gotta say this, I’m not with this guy Scott Stephens, who wrote the ‘Poverty of New Atheism’ piece. If I were to sum it/him up in one word, I’m afraid that word would have to be ‘floundering’. His problem, it seems to me, is this – what does religion (the supernatural variety) have to offer, as a role, now? And, rather than bite the bullet and admit ‘not a lot’, he has a go at atheism (as if it were to blame) and largely gets it confused with capitalism, or religion with anti-capitalism or whatever. And to cap it all off, he finishes with;
‘In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart has described the original Christian revolution in terms of the stripping bare of the pagan life-world with its pantheon of gods, demigods and spirits who guaranteed the proper order of things, established political authority and provided life with meaning.’
Er, no, the cult of Christianity displaced earlier cults with a slightly different version of superstious beliefs and explanations. This cult spread more than the others (up to now) for a variety of reasons. Which cult was ‘better’ is almost entirely up for grabs, as is the argument as to whether ‘western’ ‘civilization’ flourished because of christinaity or in spite of it (probably a mixture, as ever).
One of the big problems for Christianity is that it has tied itself to a bunch of writings from some ancient, superstitious middle eastern chaps who I have heard described (by one of the most perceptive people I have ever met online, and a devout Catholic) as ‘the Taliban of their day’.
Really, what could those goat-herding blokes have written that we can use (sans clumsy cherry picking, which is possible, I’m sure, even with any set of writings) to address the big issues of today, such as overpopulation, environmental issues, human rights, etc. Not much, IMO, and not surprisingly, since one can hardly blame the writers for not having 20-20 advance hindsight stretching over 2000 years.
As for your article………I would not use the word ‘floundering’……except perhaps to describe the way I feel when I try to understand the nub of what you are saying (repeatedly, here on this website, in various forms). The reason I wouldn’t say YOU were floundering is because I get the impression that you are far too intelligent and ‘properly cynical’ not to be able to handle uncertainty and confusion without casting about for something to cling to.
But, I am still left with this question. Are you (and some others here) really asking for atheists/atheism to be a bit nicer? :)
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davidjohnmills
July 18, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Oh, by the way, although I admire Chomsky a lot, and can go a long way with the idea that literature (as in fiction) can, in many ways, be richer, or as rich as, reason, and that almost everything may be said to boil down to language, and that there is no way, that i can see, to fully and truly escape subjectivity, I have to say I would contend his two statements you quoted.
Anyhows, I have had a bad day at the office and am probably just spoiling for an argument. I am going to go to bed now and count to 10 and remind myself that more comes from agreement than from disagreement, usually, at least in discussions. :)
Dwight Jones
July 18, 2012 at 6:17 pm
“But, I am still left with this question. Are you (and some others here) really asking for atheists/atheism to be a bit nicer?”
No, if atheists are ineluctably obsessed with religion; that’s your own cross to bear. For all I care, you might be against women’s make-up, or Rugby League, and how both are a huge waste of money.
My objection is solely that your aggressive non-religion gratuitously terms itself ‘humanism’ for its own aggrandizement. I’d much rather discuss bringing Confucius into humanism than kicking Christ out.
rjosephhoffmann
July 18, 2012 at 6:54 pm
@Dwight: Sublimely aphoristic. Though as you know, this is not the popular stance to take!
davidjohnmills
July 19, 2012 at 2:44 am
@ dwight,
‘My objection is solely that your aggressive non-religion gratuitously terms itself ‘humanism’ for its own aggrandizement.’
I honestly have no idea where you get that idea, but then, it’s not the first time I’m perplexed about what you write.
rjosephhoffmann
July 18, 2012 at 6:43 pm
@@David:
1. I don’t endorse what I link to. It is the average opinion, not only mine, that new atheism is characterized by not-niceness (that’s what makes it gnu) and I have been in the pincers since (with a few others: you might troll n’ scroll through NO) I suggested that it was strategically suicidal to make antipathy for religion in general the total message of atheism. (Think of saying that science in general is the cure for the world’s ills: we know the good part–maybe we can even be programmed for world peace! Ah, wait: that sounds complicated). That is why my unbelief is way down the list of what I am. I am a humanist.
So I plump for moderation of discourse, even though I know only ten people are listening. The internet makes moderation a quaint custom of the last century.
Carl Sagan was an atheist. Stephen Jay Gould was an atheist. I am an atheist. But the Gnus would probably say, have said, show us your papers. It is this ever-narrowing vision of unbelief that concerns me, and not only me. It is the fact that to criticize atheism, as I have done openly and often, will get you a degree of ridicule usually reserved for a southern Baptist creationist, abortion-hating yahoo. Hoffmann (check it) has become a problem. A faitheist. An accommodationist. The number one frenemy of “secular humanism.” And generally, when things become problems, they are problems in relation to an evolving orthodoxy.
There should be no such thing as atheist orthodoxy, at least not if dogmatism in religion is what you oppose. I am an advocate of the scientific method. The scientific method depends not on certainty but the nagging condition of uncertainty. I regard scientists who retain that uncertainty like Sagan and Gould–and Einstein (all Jews, oh my!)–exemplary. I regard scientists who regard it as a mere posture, a necessary posture in relation to the assumptions of Popperian falsifiability, arrogant and under-trained–and for me, Dawkins showed his true undertraining in The God Delusion. It was a travesty of a book that set into motion a fortunately dwindling “revolution” that is coming (I think) to an end. But harm was done. People are always looking for a messiah; and some thought they had found one.
But this is not a war; it is an “intellectual” conversation; and the new atheist conversation has been leaden-footed, hamfisted and frankly as embarassing as M. O’Hair was in her heyday: this is not the first time atheists have spoiled their chances to take an amorphous anti-church, anti-organized religion demographic and screw it up, making no difference in the long run. Think fishing (but perhaps you haven’t fished.)
2. I won’t comment on your comment about Christianity because to quote the great Durante, “Everybody wants to get into da act.” It looks easy from the outside, I admit. Much harder under the lights.
steph
July 18, 2012 at 7:45 pm
“British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism” and way down in the Pacific, Kiwi atheism is generally unindentified and apatheistic. It doesn’t believe in God but it’s not about pointlessly trying to prove there’s nothing, especially as alot of us grow up not believing. It’s not central to life and is irrelevant considering more pressing issues like the environment, with which we’re united in our concern. Mind you quite alot of Antipodean Christians don’t believe in God either. Religion is rightly seen as a human creation
Reply
steph
July 18, 2012 at 7:49 pm
PS God made the Pacific and his younger brother Fred did the Atlantic. It’s true. Someone told me. I believe him.
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Reg
July 19, 2012 at 1:58 am
Perhaps Don Cupitt has it right: ‘…the Church and the ancient supernatural theology are finished… we need to move on to build a kingdom (sic) theology for our own secular humanist culture (The Last Testament, 8)
The problem is that that there has been a conservative-turn withim secular humanism in the last few years – climate change deniers, refugees are queue jumpers, resurgence of capitalism etc. ‘God’ might be thought to have died in the 60s, but he (and it’s normally a he!) keeps returning
Reply
steph
July 19, 2012 at 2:43 pm
I’d agree with Don here but as with all good scholarship, humanism is critical, not secular. A secular society is not a society without personal beliefs. What’s wrong with kingdom? I’m not a royalist – it has a lower case ‘k’.
davidjohnmills
July 19, 2012 at 5:27 am
Joseph,
Pardon my harping on, I’m sure it’s possible I’ll be ejected at some stage, given that the word ‘troll’ has been deployed more than once already. I will quite understand if you see my posts that way, and I will not say nasty things about you afterwards. You are entitled to not have your particular brand of confusion, contaminated by the likes of mine. :)
Here’s what I imagine I’m ‘hearing’, in between the actual words, from you and steph and dwight and others: ‘We know god is (probably) dead but we still like having him around’. Fine. Even I like to visit the grave once in a while, put a few flowers there. He wasn’t such a bad old dude, really. He had his moments. Can’t see the point of digging up the corpse and trying to do CPR on it.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 19, 2012 at 5:50 am
“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.” Carl Sagan 1981
Ok. All is forgiven. If even the Great Carlness himself can get it completely and utterly wrong, I can’t really blame anyone here. :)
Reply
steph
July 19, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Nobody has compelling evidence that all ideas of ‘god’, conveniently termed, maybe for want of a better one, are wrong. We can demonstrate religious creations and stories of God intervening in history depicted in the Bible and Quaran as products of human imagination but we don’t know everything. Sagan got it right here, and he knew about humility. He wasn’t interested in denying people faith.
davidjohnmills
July 19, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Yes steph. I know that. I only said that it was incorrect to define an atheist as having certainty or compelling evidence. Oh I don’t doubt there are a few, but they’re not typical. Even Dawkins (spits) would say that he feels only that there is probably no God.
steph
July 19, 2012 at 8:06 pm
I’m so glad you know that. You missed the point. Do you think Carl Sagan doesn’t know too? We also know about Dawkins and his atheist slogan and other atheist slogans. We have seen it and talked about it here. Perhaps you ought to read Joe’s posts.http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/atheist-nation-celbrates-christmas/
and these http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/atheisms-little-idea-2/
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/the-big-idea-2/
davidjohnmills
July 20, 2012 at 3:07 am
I’m confused. What point am i missing?
To repeat, that is not an accurate description of atheism, any more than ‘fundie’ is an accurate description of ‘Christian’.
steph
July 20, 2012 at 11:00 am
It is a perfectly accurate definition of atheism. It is what atheism is. There are variations of atheism which could be defined as ‘unidentified atheism’ ‘soft-shell atheism’, ‘not central to life atheism’, ‘apatheism’, ‘silent atheism in which like many religious people, personal belief is personal’ and ‘agnostic atheism’ for example. Ideas evolve and language evolves and is used in different ways. There is no law, except in a fundamentist’s concept of language and logic, which restricts ideas from variation. And Carl Sagan’s definition is a strict definition and Carl Sagan demonstrated humility. That is the point. He wasn’t interested in denying people faith or ridiculing and misrepresenting religious people and religion, or eliminating religion from society – he was more interested in sharing ideas.
davidjohnmills
July 20, 2012 at 7:16 pm
Steph,
Unfortunately, not for the firstr time, I have to say I fundamentallly disagree with you on something. I have spent a lot of time during the last few yesrs on atheist forums, getting to know literally hundreds of actual athesists. Carl Sagan was not correct. I think we will have to agree to disagree.
steph
July 20, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Atheism isn’t just one thing and is defined according to perspective. It certainly has many variations and certainly isn’t the same as the atheism of greater men like Shelley and varies considerably around the world. Sagan wasn’t wrong. People define it according to their perspective. Atheisms are not the same as Australia, or America or Canada, or New Zealand where it’s more personal and not a personal definition. And atheists who spend time on internet forums aren’t the same as each other or atheists who would never bother with such a thing. Carl’s point is about humility and not denying people faith. While I had guessed you’ve spent years on atheist forums, it actually doesn’t matter that you don’t know of any atheists who fit his definition.
rjosephhoffmann
July 20, 2012 at 8:58 pm
“Carl Sagan was not correct.” So now we are choosing our science? That is quite a claim. I frankly don’t know any scientists who given the standard parameters of certainty make it. May I know the compelling evidence please? Your reply alas must exclude any reference to falisifiable gods.
davidjohnmills
July 24, 2012 at 4:04 am
There appears to be some misunderstanding. I’m not making the claim that there is compelling evidence against god (there isn’t), or that the concept is falsifiable (it isn’t), or that there is certainty, except among a small section of atheist ‘fundies’, perhaps.
What I’m saying is that to define an atheist as someone who would make those claims is to mistakenly misrepresent atheism.
And why this is important is because if one is going to have issues or objections to something, one should at least try to understand it as accurately as possible.
rjosephhoffmann
July 19, 2012 at 3:58 pm
@David, I meant “troll” as a verb. Go through the list of articles to see how often this topic has come up in the last three years.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 19, 2012 at 6:25 pm
@ Joseph,
Ah, ok. My mistake. Even as a verb, it is given a different meaning on some forums i have been on. :)
Scott
July 19, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Thank God I’m Agnostic?
Reply
Dwight Jones
July 20, 2012 at 11:24 am
If one’s religious tenets can fairly be said to be a personal and private matter for many, or most people, would that give you any insight into why some atheist initiatives are seen as boorish and obnoxious?
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steph
July 20, 2012 at 11:33 am
Yes, and to embrace a slightly wider view, if one’s philosophical perspectives and beliefs on life, religious or not, are a personal and private matter for many or most people, it does provide insight into why some atheists’ (and some fundamentalists’) initiatives are seen as boorish, obnoxious, and uninformed.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 20, 2012 at 7:31 pm
Yes Dwight (to butt in here) I do. I do see that anyone who deals with their religious beliefs as a personal and private matter will see certain atheist initiatives as boorish and obnoxious.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 20, 2012 at 7:35 pm
I might add that the vast majority of atheists have very few problems with religion as a personal and private matter, and even then, the majority of the minority who take a different view have issues with theism, not individual theists. You may find this hard to believe, but it is an important distinction, and the case.
steph
July 20, 2012 at 7:49 pm
Nobody denied it. Atheism isn’t just one thing. It certainly has many variations and certainly isn’t the same as the atheism of greater men like Shelley. Sagan wasn’t wrong. People define it according to their perspective. Atheisms are not the same as Australia, or America or Canada, or New Zealand where it’s more personal and not a personal definition. That was my point above, and Carl’s point is about humility and not denying people faith. I had guessed you’ve spent years on atheist forums. It shows. It actually doesn’t matter that you don’t know of any atheists who fit his definition.
Scott
July 20, 2012 at 11:58 am
I think that while it is important to define terms and have some general agreement, eventually we have to leave the realm of defining those terms and get on to to ideas part.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 24, 2012 at 5:54 am
Fair point. Indeed, I suspect that there is much we could be discussing, and even agreeing on, or if not agreeing then disagreeing on more fruitfully. :)
I’m sure we all here would like to see a fairer, more egalitarian, less polluted planet, where humans (and indeed other species) are as comfortable and happy as is reasonably possible.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Remembering Bertie
by rjosephhoffmann
Reprinted from rjosephhoffmann.com A Writing Tablet
Religious folk have the advantage– and I do think it’s an advantage–of hearing their sacred texts read out, as in a story, during a liturgical year. Unbelievers and humanists have no such advantage, because we believe that no story is so sacred that it demands endless repetition.
Bertrand Russell’s life as a philosopher, logician-mathematician and social reformer can be summarized in one biographical detail: In 1894 he married the American Quaker Alys Pearsall Smith, one of a generation of wealthy buccaneers who propped up British aristocracy through “economic” marriages from Kensington to Blenheim. ”Their marriage began to fall apart,” says Wallenchinsky matter of factly, “in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while he was cycling, that he no longer loved her.” What could be simpler?
A few texts of the atheist tradition deserve to be enshrined in memory if not in a tabernacle. As we approach January 2012, here is one of Russell’s best.
TO Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
“The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge germ springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death’s inexorable decree.
“And Man said: ‘There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.’ And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.
“But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.
“Yes,’ he murmured, ‘it was a good play; I will have it performed again.’”
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called — is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates, God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.
In this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false “recognition of facts” which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world — in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death — the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature.
HE more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy’s country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be — Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity — to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
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Published: July 19, 2012
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8 Responses to “Remembering Bertie”
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steph
July 19, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Sublimely uplifting. Dwight said something about this being one of the greatest humanist sermons of all time. I love Bertie’s raw honesty, sensitivity and humility through all his writing. He did have three wives but not at the same time. But in case anyone should try to mistakenly claim him, he happened to be agnostic.
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Dwight Jones
July 19, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Russell asks: “How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? …To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.”
Someone must answer.
The tortured discovery of the Higgs Boson shows how hard it is to perceive hard physical entities, using science, let alone categories we assign in frustration to the ‘preternatural’. Is there a route to ‘salvation’ less sundered than science and superstition?
Readers of this space know I have come to admire the Jesuits as the most together and dedicated human institution ever fielded by Man – and I view Catholicism as eternally fatuous, much as the robed rascals themselves no doubt doubted themselves. But they got their asses out of bed in the morning, and taught maths properly.
In my summer scribblings a very senior Jesuit, looking for a better horse chooses molecular genetics and humanism, and their wards entrust them with their DNA, as a sacred bond. Each brotherhood exists to support the other.
Cloning with surrogate mothers in Asia becomes a huge industry run by them, and the Jesuits thrive and relish, assembling something credible at long last. Although the predilection for fleecing widows persists, except this time they pay off after the last race, and yada…
I’m contemplating an ending in which one of humanism’s antagonists is giving everyone a tough time, until the old Irish priest explains to him just how what these New Jesuits can do with his genes, all the little purgatories…
Bertie would agree now, that our species may not be as powerless before death, indefinitely, as he here laments, and have concurred with the Jesuits being the ones to pull it together.
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steph
July 19, 2012 at 6:54 pm
Eloquent and erudite as always Dwight. It’s good to have you around.
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steph
July 19, 2012 at 7:25 pm
This isn’t a criticism of the Jesuits, but when will they come to terms with the fact that we live in an evolved world in which egalitarian societies provide equal opportunities to all human beings regardless of gender, origins or creed? I’m not a feminist. I’m just an egalitarian.
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Steersman
July 19, 2012 at 9:03 pm
Maybe the leopard has changed its spots – or maybe changed to an entirely different species – but I would say the birth of the Jesuits was highly suspect. Loyola helpfully provided some 18 “Rules for Thinking with the Church”, number 13 being:
That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.
Doesn’t look particularly “pro-Enlightenment” to me …
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steph
July 21, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Dwight: This was very intriguing – a perspective of Rowan Williams from the British Jesuits, today. http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20120720_1.htm
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steph
July 21, 2012 at 6:33 pm
While the Jesuit Mark Chapman seemed sympathetic towards Rowan Williams’ aims up to a point, he seemed to assume that Rowan should do all sorts of authoritative things which Rowan wouldn’t do because he is interested in agreement and harmony. I think the Church of England at least, has moved beyond those darker days of authoritarianism
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davidjohnmills
July 20, 2012 at 3:21 am
On the topic of ‘resignation’, I’ve always enjoyed Woody Allen’s answer to the question, a couple of years ago (I think he would have been about 72), ‘Woody, are you happy?’ and he said, ‘well, yes, pretty much, or at least, as happy as anyone can be…. given what’s going to happen’.
Granted, he was standing beside Scarlett johansson at the time.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Did Plato Invent Socrates?
by rjosephhoffmann
The Anachronisticon of Plato
by admin Posted on November 1, 2011
Bust Alcibiades Musei Capitolini MC1160.jpg
Being newly translated out of the original Dalmatian based on Cyrillic manuscripts thought to derive from Greek or perhaps Ethiopic sources. We’re not sure. By Alistair Mainly-Bluster, MA (Oxon.), CPA (Leeds)
Scene: Somewhere, not in the forest.
Characters: Socrates, Alcibiades, Glaucon, Xenophon and Simon the Shoemaker
Socrates: And so Glaucon, we have examined piety, the state, justice, beauty, and the good. Yet one thing remains.
Glaucon: I think we’ve covered it all Socrates, and I’m hungry.
Soc.: I don’t do loaves and fishes dear Glaucon; that motif will appear in later days.
Glau.: What yet remains Socrates?
Soc.: The question, What is humanism?
Alcibiades: We should put it to Diotima. I like her stories and she still possesses a certain sensual charm, for an old woman. Besides, if we settle it here everyone will say, Well, that’s just what a bunch of oversexed Greek men would say, isn’t it?
Simon: Pray, Socrates: What do you mean by “humanism”? Do you mean the craft of being human?
Xenophon: I think he will say it’s the art of being human, for art is only the higher form of a craft, that which responds to beauty and our animal soul is our human soul. It should be possible therefore to talk of dogism and cowism as the craft of being a dog or a cow.
Alc.: You are such a prat Xenophon: I predict you will write history and memoirs. He must mean that humanism is the practice [πράξη] of humanity, the realisation of what it is to be fully human. Besides, we have an absolutely terrific word for practice in Greek.
Xen.: I don’t think he’ll go there, Alcibiades. For one thing Aristotle is already working on the problem and he wants to call fully realized humanity ”happiness” [ευτυχία]. It sounds awful in English but brilliant in Greek.
Socrates: Dear friends: discord is the uninvited guest at the harmonious wedding of Beauty and Mankind. Let us begin, as always, with what seems clear to all of us and go from there. If we say inelegant or erroneous things, Plato can scratch it out later.
Glau.: As always, proceed Socrates with your lesson.
Soc.: Well then: Is humanity not a word like justice and beauty.
Simon: It is. Or maybe you are trying to trap us. I will therefore say, it isn’t.
Alc.: Simon, listen to his inflection. He expects us to say yes. Yes, Socrates. It is the name of a class or virtue. It is an abstract noun, a κατηγορηματικός as we say in our almost perfect language.
Soc.: And how does humanity [ανθρωπισμός] pertain to these things, I mean the ideas–as greater to lesser or lesser to greater.
Alc.: I think as greater to lesser since humanity is needed for the perception of beauty and the exercise of justice.
Soc.: So it might appear. But we have seen that beauty and justice, the good, and truth, exist quite apart from our apprehension dear Alcibiades. If this were not so, then how could we recognize them?
Alc.: That is not a question for us, Socrates. It is a question for cognitive science, and our survival and adaptation as a species has made these things necessary. I’m just guessing what others will say.
Glaucon: You speak like a mad man Alcibiades. Surely, the only question is whether “humanity” perdures in our souls or resides in the intellect alone.
Simon: I think the gods made us. That’s what I say. Of course, we can’t know for sure.
Soc.: Dear friends, remember that we are ancient Greeks, not modern Americans with deceptively impressive credentials in brain science, nor Bible-thumping fundamentalist Christians from Bethula, Georgia. Try to follow me.
Simon: I think he means he wants us to brainstorm this.
Alc.: Then Socrates: I say the relationship to the ideas is between lesser to greater–that humanity is fulfilled in trying to comprehend the ideas and humanism is nothing more than humanity trying to achieve this end in truth.
Xenophon: Too general. No wonder you never invite Democritus to our parties. He could explain–sorry, Socrates–propose–that the sole truth is the truth of nature, and only that: that which we see, measure, do the numbers on–that kind of thing. Only a truth that is true to human nature can be valuable for humanity.
Soc.: What is the value in that my dear friend? Is humanity a measuring rod, intellect a gauge, knowledge a scale?
Simon: Yet Socrates, justice herself is often shown as blind with a scale in her hand.
Alc.: Good god, Simon: it’s an image. We covered images last year when we wrote the Republic. Justice is nothing like that.
Simon: Is she not beautiful?
Alc.: Yes, Simon, very beautiful, but she is not a she, she is not blind, and there are no scales except the ones on your eyes.
Xen.: Would Socrates agree that a part of humanism is to teach the gods, I wonder?
Soc.: Teach them what? The poets say they have great knowledge. Some say they have all knowledge.
Xen.: Democritus says they are of no consequence.
Soc.: I have little to say on the matter as you know. We have said that some ideas are like dreams, and that with relation to knowledge they are false [ψεύτικος]–illusions or perforations of the sublime. It may be the gods are like that, and it would be the task of humanity to find the truth of the gods.
Xen.: It would then be the task of humanism as the practice of humanity to deny the gods as illusions?
Soc.: You seem to know my thoughts better than my words do: Tell me, Xenophon–or is it the daimon of Democritus I am speaking to now–tell me: have we seen the gods?
Xen.: No Socrates. Some seers claim to have visions, but in your philosophy dreams separate us from truth.
Soc.: Have we seen justice? Be still, Simon.
Xen.: Not as such, no Socrates.
Soc.: But having never seen justice and only seen the laws and penalties of corrupt men and legislators, you yet believe justice exists?
Xen.: Socrates, you yourself say so.
Soc.: Yet in seeing the world, apprehending beauty and seeking good amidst its many imperfections you find it necessary to deny the gods, who are said to crave these things as much as you?
Simon: Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.
Alc.: It’s a good poem, Simon: but pay attention.
Soc.: If it is possible to believe in justice in the shadow of corruption and in goodness in the face of so much evil, is it not also possible to believe in the gods in a world of imperfection?
Xen.: It would depend on how great their knowledge, Socrates, the degree of their goodness, their power to avert harm or change hearts. I would say that if such gods existed, then it would better to scorn and despise them than to affirm their inconsistencies.
Soc.: Precisely, and fortunately for us, Xenophon, no such god exists and thus it is not a matter for humanity.
Alc.: You are saying that the gods are of no concern to us Socrates; and that is also what Democritus says.
Soc.: I am saying that the gods are in the myths, like the scent of minthe is in the air. The myths carry them upward and they alight on our consciousness. They are sensed and felt, intimated if you will, but not perceived. They are not the objects of knowledge, and for that reason we cannot fear them, obey them, seek after them, or follow them. Their influence is subtle and our humanity knows them only in this way. Of course, lesser men read the myths, as Xenophon will know, as chronicle. Zeus is angry and killed legions of men. Hades tempts the daughters of men into his lair. Poseidon destroys the plans of navigators in his fickle way. But these are not the gods, Xenophon: these are monsters and illusions, the stories of our infancy.
Simon: Poseidon is always my favorite, especially where Homer says “He tossed his curly locks, his great head,” just before he swamps Odysseus. Pure magic. Can’t you just see it?
Xen.: You sound more like Democritus than Socrates, Socrates. But in my calculation a myth is the opposite of truth. The gods are real or not real. If only their stories exist, then they are not real. I do not smell them in the evening breeze.
Soc.: “Real” my dear Xenophon? What kind of word is that? Is it from the future? Does real mean valuable, or is it one of those things that your definition of humanity as a measuring machine requires? Our life as humans is lived between the real and the not real and between what we see and what we can imagine. I have said that the gods do not threaten, cajole, command, or punish. They do not create. The poets have said, the gods are immortal, and we have imagined them this way. It is entirely appropriate to forego any discussion of the gods in our study of humanity because humanity is the study of what is mortal. But it is more than the study of what, to use your word, is “real” [ πραγματικός]
Xen.: Socrates, I will not rest until you declare the gods false [ψευδής] for if they are unnecessary [περιττός], then they are false [πλαστός].
Soc.: What logic is this, dear Xenophon, when you change terms like horses running away from battle? There is much that we do not yet perceive [βλέπω] that will become necessary [αναγκαίος] when we perceive [αντιλαμβάνομαι] it. What you don’t perceive is hardly unnecessary [περιττός]; it is merely unperceived [άγνωστος]. Bring Democritus by all means. I will happily wait for his corrections. But the wound to your reality–shall we call it pragmatism?–is this: Is that which is real everything that we have discovered up to the present and everything we will have discovered in the future? What is the present reality of the undiscovered thing? If it is unreal because it has not yet been discovered how can we judge its necessity?
Alc.: That is a solipsism Socrates. You are good at them. You yourself would say, the gods do not help us explain nature, or the origins of the world, or the reasons for sickness and health, or the circulation of the planets.
Soc.: That is true, Alcibiades. Humanism needs to consider only those things that have a bearing on humanity. That is the object of our discussion–to discover what these things are.
Alc.: Then the irrelevance of the gods is included in the nature of our task. Humanism is the discovery of what is essential to our humanity and nothing else. It does not need to consider what is extraneous [εξωτερικός] to it, and that which has no influence over it is extraneous to it. And if by definition the gods are immortal [αθάνατος] and we are mortal [θνητός], to make them our object would be foolishness. Is that about it?
Soc.: Well said, as always, Alcibiades. Spoken like a true Alcmaeonid: Are you wise because you are an aristocrat or an aristocrat because you are wise? Humanity is our concern, not only what we can measure, not only what we consider real, and not the immortal gods. Still I say, these gods exist as surely as the memory of minthe in the evening breeze when we were boys.
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Published: July 23, 2012
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3 Responses to “Did Plato Invent Socrates?”
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scotteus
July 23, 2012 at 10:20 pm
I suspect Plato did invent rather substantial parts of Socrates, much like the church invented Christ. There’s still enough of a personality separate from Plato to make him stand out, therefore the Greek “trinity”(if I may use that word) of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle still stands.
It was F.M Cornford who argued that it was Socrates who invented the soul, and after all these years it still sound like a good argument
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Sanduleak Anandamath (@myoshin)
July 23, 2012 at 11:39 pm
You make it look easy. The sign of a true adept.
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Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Pray be merciful to an old man with a weak bladder! I read it as a mummer’s play, yet where was the Turkish Knight’s mother, and where is my understanding of philosophy?
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Jesus Minimus
by rjosephhoffmann
from rjosephhoffmann.com
by admin Posted on November 19, 2011
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 your grandmother taught you. You normally listened to her because in her day most people still could not read, and if families owned a book at all it was likely to be the Bible.
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, and 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.
Based on the bits you have read and heard preached about, 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 a nine 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. After all, the parson has said, we don’t see many pharisees on the streets of Bristol or Newport.
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 seventeenth, called “Christian Evidences.”
The phrase was introduced to make the supernatural elements of the Bible (and for Christians, the New Testament in particular) 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, as “Nature’s God,” could violate them at will, it seemed as though miracles had been given a new lease of life. No one much bothered to read the damning indictment by 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, and the idea of Christian “evidences,” and all those lovely stories about impudent wives being turned into pillars of salt, the ark holding 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 have seen all these tales 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, brutish and plague-besotted lives needed the assurance of a literal heaven more than you do in the eighteenth 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 almost certainly 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 prior to Hume, “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 1820s, while the British universities came through unscathed thanks to laws against nonconformists), 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 and the unusual.
By 1885, Amherst, Smith, Williams, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Dartmouth and Princeton colleges 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 his 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 this 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, Mississippi, 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 endeavours 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 SmithCollege, beginning in the 1920s, 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; and (3) 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.”
I need to remind the casual reader: I am speaking of nineteenth century America, not Tübingen and certainly not Oxford. The American theological establishment had been so radicalized by the transcendental revolution after Emerson’s 1835 Divinity School Address that miracles had been pronounced, in most of New England, and using Emerson’s own word, “a monster.”
Emerson
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 (what would become) the Bible belt or the faux-gothic seminaries of the Catholic Church. If anyone wants to know how superstition survived in this inauspicious climate, the answer would have to be sought in relative population statistics in the Back Bay and Arkansas.
Hume’s logic and the theological consequences of his logic barely penetrated the evangelical mindset. And if I were to comment, I would say that we are now involved in wars throughout the world because some people, in America, the Middle East and elsewhere, still believe they will rise from the dead and go on to lead a life in paradise, qualitatively better than the life they had led in this world. In other words, the failure not to believe in miracles has had consequences that are not merely theological or philosophical but political. America, the country where miracles were first to fall, is at war with its theological others over whose afterlife is true.
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in the early twentieth century, 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, forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social covenant based on concern for the “least among us.”
There is no doubt in the world that these words sparked the imaginations of a thousand social prophets reformers, and even revolutionaries.
In Germany and America, and belatedly in England, 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, and how it might have undergone change as those needs changed.
For example, the belief that 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 fact that the community was impoverished, illiterate, and a persecuted religious minority might have led the community to invent sayings like “blessed are the poor,” “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 based on their own cramped perspective and needs in a very small corner of the world at a particular time in history. How could this story have universal importance or timeless significance?
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 the Gospel writers to preserve Jesus’ teaching, although in a distorted and conflated form, more or less accurately. They added their words and ideas to his, but in their honest ignorance was honesty.
Arnold’s influence was minimal. The miraculous deeds were gone; now people were fighting over the words.
John Dominic Crossan
When the twentieth century hit, few people in the mainline Protestant churches and almost no one in the Catholic Church of 1905 were prepared for the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the eighteenth and nineteenth 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 in shifting sands, we get lost in contradiction. If Jesus 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, whoever he was and whatever he was trying to do, certainly knows nothing about ethics—just some interim rules to be followed before the second coming of a divine man named Jesus).
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.
He was not alone. 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). Harnack had 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, drawing on his gallic and Jesuit charms, “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 face.”
In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York 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 Theodore Dreiser in literature. Rauschenbusch thought that the churches had aligned themselves with robber barons, supported unfair labor practices, winked at income disparity and ignored the poor. 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 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 nineteenth century, biblical authority was invoked to defend buying and selling human beings. Once the historical Jesus was abandoned, Jesus could be made to say whatever his managers wanted him to say. Unfortunately, ignoring Schweitzer’s scholarly cautions, the progressives failed to demonstrate how the words of a first century Galilean prophet, apparently obsessed with the end of a corrupt social order, could be used to reform a morally bankrupt economic system.
For those 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 more the books that can be written.
In what must surely be the greatest historical irony of the late twentieth and early twenty-first 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 percent 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, and that he did not invent the Lord’s Prayer.
But they come to these conclusions in more than a hundred books of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus.
The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventors want 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 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 a former American president thought, 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. I think that is likely.
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 algebra, 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 the necessity of being 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, 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 quest for the historical Jesus is less a search for an historical artifact than a quest for ways to defend his continued relevance against the tides of irrelevance that erode the ancient image.
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 intellectual 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, much less resolve them, frees us from the more painful obligation to view the Bible as a moral constitution.
The most powerful image in the New Testament, for me, is the one that is probably today the one most Christians would be happy to see hidden away.
Its art-historical representations vary from merely pagan, to childish, to clearly outlandish. I cannot think of one that does what I would like to see done with the event–the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. It is simply too self-evidently mythological to appeal to liberal Christians, and not especially in favour among conservatives–though I have never understood why.
I see the Ascension as the ultimate symbol of the absence of God, the end of illusion. The consciousness of the never-resurrected Christ, the ultimately mortal man, dawning on the crowd. It is presented as glorification; but in reality it is perfectly human, perfectly natural: the way of all flesh: I am with you always, until the end of time. It is the unknown author’s “Goodnight sweet prince.” It is the metaphorical confirmation of what Schweitzer taught us: “He comes to us as one unknown.”
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Published: July 24, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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17 Responses to “Jesus Minimus”
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Dwight Jones
July 24, 2012 at 2:07 pm
“Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.” Indeed, via the resurrection, he was then available to all.
While you claim that Jesus was not a philosopher, and not an ethicist – from the perspective of our species, finding itself in the cauldron that was the Mediterranean world of trade and conflict two millennia ago – he was perhaps a tuning fork. Our species recognized his 33 tenets that you mention, somehow being the melody behind the inchoate noise and violence of his times. Urbanization and city life demanded more than Spartan morality, lest we become endless generations of vipers.
Many of his admonitions toward compassion and charity were already institutions in China, so he did not invent these concepts. But the species was ready for his humanism, for standards of behaviour, and his group of teachings was reiterated as the best set extant at the time – and given our continuing susceptibility to the cancer of war – to date.
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G
July 24, 2012 at 3:47 pm
The funny thing about first, the resurrection, is that it was so temporary. It lasted only 40 days. And then suddenly? Jesus disappeared. Ascending they say, up into heaven (Acts 1.3-9).
So that in the end, Jesus is no longer physically here on earth. He can’t be physically seen anywhere.
For all the world as if Jesus was actually, simply – dead.
The resurrection didn’t work; it was temporary at best.
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Daniel O
July 24, 2012 at 5:18 pm
“So that in the end, Jesus is no longer physically here on earth.” Isn’t that what the church is for? or have I missed something.
rjosephhoffmann
July 24, 2012 at 5:24 pm
A Catholic view?
steph
July 24, 2012 at 9:41 pm
“The Jesus of the Westar project is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.” Perfect analogy and now well known and loved quote since 1994, at least from the UK to the Antipodes. The non apocalyptic, ‘Jewish’ but not particularly Jewish, cynic-like philosopher, with sayings chosen as a result of round table discussion and voting with red, pink, grey and black beads.
Interesting because a certain mythicist author comments on the Westar Institute Jesus seminar, ‘Biblical Scholars outside the United States find the seminar’s conclusions consistently conservative.’ From the perspective of most New Testament scholars ‘outside the United States’, that seminar’s conclusions are radical to the extent of bordering on lunacy and this is clear from published work and discussions and even seminars during Jesus seminars at British and European New Testament conferences. ‘I work with I work with what is going in biblical scholarship’, he says. Regrettably he hasn’t a clue as to what is going in New Testament scholarship and has been for well over a decade.
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G
July 25, 2012 at 8:16 pm
A literarlly unanswerable point.
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steph
July 25, 2012 at 8:41 pm
What is.
G
July 25, 2012 at 5:35 am
Steph:
My understanding is that you have worked as a graduate student for or with Dr. Casey? And I appreciate your reports on the current status of Historical Jesus affirmations, as exemplified by Casey and others. Including the attempt to find say an authentic Jesus voice, in the hints of Aramaic in the New Testament. But at the same time as I appreciate some current efforts though, having worked in academe myself for 40 years, I know that often very, very current ideas, come and go. Historiography, the history of History, tells us that there are fashions in academic thinking. Ideas that were once very current and accepted in academe, have historically been overturned, decade after decade, for many centuries. So that, I’m not entirely confident that the very latest findings in HJ – Historical Jesus studies – will necessarily prove finally definitive.
In fact, for the matter, the very most recent trend I am seeing right now, today – as exemplified by one of the most current means of communictaion of all; the Internet and its blogs – is a kind of “New Mythicism.”
To be sure, the current Jesus Project here, seems to favor the Historicist thesis; that even if reports of a “miracle-working” Jesus say, were greatly exaggerated, still it is asserted that there is at least a minimal historical person back there somewhere. And yet? Over the years, scholars have found one element after another of the Bible, that they feel is not really entirely true. So that by now?
Increasingly, attempts to find the “real” Jesus, seem speculative at best.
Including even perhaps, the Historical Jesus?
Here it even seems in Joe’s account, as if even early Christians, rather gave up on – or were deprived of – an Historical Jesus. While they increasingly turned to a rather Platonic myth; of Jesus living on in “spirit” only.
Christianity in fact becomes so spiritual, and so actively anti-materialistic, that one increasingly wonders whether there was ever a real, historical, physical person there at all. Or if there ever was such a person, one wonders if his real existence was really all that important; to many spiritual Christians.
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steph
July 25, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Critical scholarship has not thrown everthing out each decade and started afresh. Critical scholarship has evolved over the last two centuries and there are particular things, increasingly, that are agreed upon. The Jesus Process does not ‘favor’ the ‘Historicist thesis’ (whatever that is). The Jesus Process is made up of critical scholars who specialise in the areas and favour the evidence and follow it where it leads.
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Jesus Minimus « The New Oxonian | Christian Dailys says:
July 25, 2012 at 1:12 pm
[...] be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical Christian religion. … See the original post: Jesus Minimus « The New Oxonian ← TGC Women's Recommended Reading | the Council on Biblical … Steadfast [...]
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Brettongarcia
July 25, 2012 at 11:39 pm
And it’s just coincidence that all the objective evidence happens to reaffirm a major article of faith? That “Jesus is real”?
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Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Mr Hoffmann,
May I thank you, once again, for sharing your knowledge?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 29, 2012 at 5:52 pm
Yes of course: If you didn’t who would?
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woodbridgegoodman
July 31, 2012 at 4:29 am
Well, I thank you for your work. And I remain particularly interested in the subject of your dissertation: the moment when Gnosticism appeared. My own thesis there is that in part, Gnosticism began to appear precisely, with the death of the physical Jesus. And his “ascention” – like a hot air balloon someone might suggest – into Heaven. And into the ‘spirit” world.
What happened when Jesus was physically killed; when the physical Jesus was clearly deceased; leaving moreover no actual physical, material “kingdom” in evidence? What happened, I suggest, was that apologists like Paul quickly brought into play, as an apologetic, a kind of hierarchial platonic dualism. To assert that such major failures in the material sphere … could however be triumphs in the world of “spirit.”
Jesus might have died on this material earth it was implied; but 1) his memory, his thoughts and alleged ethics, “live on” in a manner of speaking. The 2) “model” or “form” or “pattern” (“paradigm”) of his lifestyle, having survived in the spiritual “heaven,” from which they were assumed to have come. And/or in the minds of those who took on his thoughts and persona as their own; living “in” Christ.
So that when Jesus was physically killed? Apologists like Paul immediately appeared. Paul specifically seeing that a kind of Platonistic idealism, dualism, might save the reputation of a physically defeated Messiah. By claiming that what happened in the physical world, was illusory anyway. That the logic of this “world,” was wrong; and that even if Jesus was physically dead, fortunately, we live in a dualistic universe; we are only partially “flesh”ly or material beings; we also had an “immortal” and im”perishable” soul or spirit. Which could live on.
Paul (following Philo and others?), clearly borrowed his main idea from Plato’s dualism. For Paul Indeed, our bodies were only im”perfect,” “perish”able “copies,” or “shadows,” of the invisible spiritual “models” or “pattern”s in “heaven” (Heb. 8 and other Pauline texts, borrowing the Theory of Forms, from Plato’s Timaeus 27d – 29b). But even if our physical bodies die? Whatever part of our mind or spirit that corresponded to the ideal “forms” in our cosmic “heaven,” could live on, immortally.
So that, Paul concluded? Being killed physically on earth, did not matter as much as might have been thought. Since our mind or “spirit” could live on.
It has, incidentally, often been wondered out loud, why no really clear, unequivocal Gnosticism really appeared – until after Christianity. My own thesis here is that Gnosticism did not appear very clearly until after the death of Christ … because the Platonizing/spiritualizing apologetic by Christianity, for the death of Jesus, was itself, the major source or catylist for Gnosticism. For an idea borrowed in part to be sure from an earlier Platonic hierarchial dualism, but then further refined by early Christianity and Paul. The idea being that physical defeat, even physical death, is not final; since we have an “immortal spirit” that can live on, even after our deaths. In the spirit world, or heaven.
So when Jesus was physically killed? Paul and others turned to Platonic dualism, idealism, to try to generate an apologetic for this. Early ascetics began to assert that after all, physical life here on this physical “earth” that is important; the whole material “world” is even an “evil” thing, a shallow illusion created by an evil OT god. what matters, it came to be said, is Jesus, and the “spirit,” which is immortal.
So that Paul began to even idealize the usefulness of the crucifixion and physical death; but to emphasize the importance of “spiritual” things like “faith,” in future rewards and heaven. And? It was largely Gnosticism – as a heretical Marconian outshoot of the Christian experience, the crucifixion of the material life – that continued this intellectual denigration of the importance of physical things, the unimportance of physical death. Both Paul and then Gnosticism and monkish ascetics, speaking constantly now, not of material things, but of things of the “spirit.”
This I hypothesize, was the origin of most of Gnosticism; in part Gnosticism begins to really take form, out of Paul’s dualistic, Platonic, “spiritual” apologetic for the physical defeat and death of Jesus.
Though it remains to be seen, of course, whether Pauline and Gnostic ideas were correct.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 7:55 am
Thank you Garcia; love the new mask.
Reply
brettongarcia
July 31, 2012 at 5:24 pm
?? Thanks! Though I do have one area in my life that IS Platonic: professional exchanges : ).
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Ed Jones
March 6, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Then there is Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriolquist, the first historical science probe (Arch mythicist Dawkins ” – a very distinct ring of plausibility – Zuesse’s account of the origins of Christianity is provocatively interesting – clearly and forcefully written”.): “What’s known today as Christianity started with Paul, and was then developed by his followers, who wrote the canonical Gospels and the rest of the NT The religion of the NT actually has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus. The NT was written and assembled to fulfill Paul’s Roman agenda, not Jesus’ Jewish one. This is shown to explain the entire Christian myth”.
This happens to closely parallel the present understanding of certain of our top NT Studies scholars
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"The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger. -Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley)
++++++++++++
There's been a stir on the subject of misogyny within the atheist "community" lately, with predictable cracks and fissures between the male-guru caste of new atheism and their anointed bloggers, and a number of outspoken atheist women who say, in a nutshell,
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Published: July 25, 2012
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Does Atheism Hate Women?
by rjosephhoffmann
“The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger. -Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley)
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There’s been a stir on the subject of misogyny within the atheist “community” lately, with predictable cracks and fissures between the male-guru caste of new atheism and their anointed bloggers, and a number of outspoken atheist women who say, in a nutshell, Enough is enough.
Rebecca Watson
The origins of the latest tension are explored in an article by Julia Galef for Religion Dispatches. In it she examines an “incident” involving Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson and an unnamed man at a July Skeptics’ conference.
Watson produced a video on the episode which has become a point of reference in a larger discussion of the status of women in the atheist and skeptics movement.
New atheist hierarch Richard Dawkins and outspoken anti-religionist P Z Myers responded to Watson’s concerns, Myers with unusual tenderness, and Dawkins by suggesting that “zero harm” had come to her in the “elevator incident” (Watson was propositioned), suggesting that (a) her situation could not be compared to the indignities foisted on women in Islamic theocracies (small comfort if not irrelevant) and (b) the incident itself had no specific relevance to the atheist community, being part of much broader social patterns of marginalization (read: the genus of sexism is not atheism).
The remarks were interpreted as male thuggery and seemed to lend credence to Watson’s complaint: Even atheist men are Martians. Many of us back on earth were unaware that the simple profession of atheism had taken us to equality-heaven.
I knew this was coming. A-many years ago, when Madalyn “Murray” O’Hair was dubbed the most hated women in America by no less a cultural beacon than Life Magazine, atheism was closely identified with the ridicule of religion, a kind of cultural side-show that seemed strategically incapable of making itself sexy and appealing to large numbers of people. Those who watched her did so for the same reason they watched other freak TV sensations like Tiny Tim and the Loud Family.
There wasn’t much more to it: Try repeating the mantra “There is no God” fifty times, eyes shut. Feel better? Of course not. It’s like saying the rosary.
Madalyn O'Hair
Now try lighting in to some of the absurd beliefs that religious people want to perpetrate on non-religious people (some of them lost or dormant battles, but not forgotten): there’s a better life after this one, if you play your cards right; prayer and Bible readings in school, creation science, God on the currency, myths of the “Christian” founders, selective ignorance of the First Amendment, especially in political seasons, and a dozen or so social and even economic policy issues for which the engodded public think the Bible has the answer–beginning with the “right” to life, death with dignity, and harvesting stem cells in medical research (the last, not an issue in 1972).
Strictly speaking, these issues are independent of the God-question and in some cultures where spiritual traditions and ideas of the divine flourish these issues are irrelevant.
But this is America, and to the degree that domestic atheism is at least as much about how religion expresses itself in real time as it is about metaphysics, women until very recently have been under-represented in the fray.
It did not begin with Rebecca Watson’s video, or a proposition in an elevator that could have as easily happened at a real estate brokers’ convention. But the video has raised the spectre that big top modern atheism, as opposed to the atheism of the fringe solists like O’Hair, may have developed along hierarchical lines not altogether different from the religious structures it condemns: a community of bishops (like Dawkins), priests, and down-the-scale nuns with little to say about the agenda, the issues, or how the show is run.
It also raises the question of why God-denial requires or assumes any ethic at all, or at least one transcending what we expect of real estate brokers.
*****
About the same time as Madalyn was doing the talk-show circuit in the seventies, another formidable presence, this one in England, was speaking out about atheism, sexuality, and secular values: her name is Barbara Smoker (b. 1923), and she presided with magisterial importance over various British humanist groups, including the National Secular Society, and at the post-biblical age of eight-eight is a current Honorary Vice Presdient of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.
Smoker, with whom I was once associated through the Council for the Critical Study of Religion in Oxford, far outdistanced her male contemporaries as an advocate for euthanasia, non-religious marriage and naming ceremonies, and separation of religion and state (which, recall, are not officially separate in the United Kingdom).
Hardly any work being pursued in these areas today by secularist and humanist organizations does not owe something to Smoker. Equally outspoken humanist advocates followed in her footsteps–notably Jane Wynne Wilson in England and June Maxwell in Scotland. If their sex, in any sense, marginalized them in the movement it did nothing to impair their organizational abilities or distract them from their goals.
The difference between Smoker and O’Hair is, or was, a difference of cultural contexts and métier, as the French say. O’Hair’s battle–to the extent it was ever coherent–was uphill and almost hopeless in God-besotted America. What it gained in media coverage it lost in influence.
Smoker, with plenty of help from her intellectual consort Harold John Blackham (d. 2009) and dozens of friends within the British Humanist Association–many of them academics–worked at a distinct advantage. –Interestingly, both Smoker and O’Hair were army veterans, neither “highly” educated, but tactically smart and possessed of a certain battlefield savvy that made them both personally formidable and able to stand up for their unbelief.
Whether their Gibraltar-like advocacy excited onlookers or turned them off is anybody’s guess–the Church of England and the Catholic Church had at least one thing in common in 1970: their hatred of Barbara Smoker. And while atheist advocacy does not have a strong record of success in über-religious America, unbelief in Europe has been the result of cultural forces (collectively, “secularization”) which nourished humanist advocacy but are not explained by it. Smoker prided herself on a terse and effective literary style; O’Hair (who was five years Smoker’s senior and a dismal prose stylist) on stump speeches, “encounters,” and interviews. The clear impression is, however, where the atheism of the era was concerned, there be women.
Barbara Smoker
*****
And yet. The new atheism and even its weirdly named predecessor “secular humanism” has primarily been a man’s movement with female contributors, financial supporters, and fans.
I can point to a dozen names of personalities–Margaret Downey, Ophelia Benson, Greta Christina, and a range of younger women such as CFI’s Lauren Becker and Debbie Goddard, and Watson herself–who were energized for unbelief before the current wave of atheism washed onto the scene, beginning roughly, if not exactly, with the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2005.
As other literati joined ranks the fan club grew. That the team was half British (Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the British side, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, though Oxford-educated, on Yankee Doodle’s) and highly intellectual situated its influence within the ranks of the university educated–especially young secularists, the culturally disaffected, and those who were simply fed up with the nostrums of religion. Its intellectual base distinguished it from the rough n’ tumble atheism of the previous generation, the names of whose promoters were conspicuously absent from the New York Times best sellers’ list.
Humanist groups, skeptical groups, and secular groups–whose edges often blur–were equally affected. And I think it would be fair to say that while the horsemen were men, the base included women and men in surprisingly equal measure.
Ophelia Benson
There are also some key women independent thinkers, who would probably prefer to be judged by their work rather than their political allegiance to a movement: Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose work on Doubt is a thoughtful exploration of the integrity of skepticism as an act of faith in human reason; Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism), who is on record as deploring indiscriminate nastiness towards all religion; and, above all, Rebecca N. Goldstein, whose new work of fiction (36 Arguments for the Existence of God) is an ironic and deflationary account of philosophical atheism (and thus also of faith) quite unlike anything that has hit the market before now.
Not all women atheists were movement atheists, and some, just like their male counterparts, were squeamish about the requirement to self-identify with an atheism that was simply about hating religion.
There is, bluntly put, now as then, no shortage of women writing and speaking out on the subject of unbelief, though in my opinion the most eloquent and creative ones are not necessarily the ones that get the most attention, nor are they the ones who feel entirely comfortable with the intellectual constraints imposed by “movement atheism” and labels like new atheism. They are also the ones least likely to think that their nuanced approach to the topic is in any sense less deserving of credit than the flatfooted atheism of their activist contemporaries.
*****
At least some of the blame for the constraints felt by women involved closely in atheist advocacy has to be pinned on the movement itself and on organisations like the American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry (CFI) with their almost unpunctuated history of men on top.
Kurtz
The secular movements that were founded after World War II included theorists like Corliss Lamont and Paul Kurtz, who absconded from AHA to found the constituent bodies of the Center for Inquiry. Collectively, along with other groups, like O’Hair’s former bailiwick American Atheists, they laid much of the groundwork that made (an ungrateful) new atheism possible.
Secular sectarianism (seculatarianism?) emerged early on between these groups and became entrenched in the way the organizations competed with each other for supporters and did business.
While women’s and later gay and lesbian rights movements swirled outside the doors, for example, the humanist movement paid only glancing attention to them. The recipient of the 1975 Humanist of the Year Award and a contender for the title most influential feminist of her generation, Betty Friedan, went so far as to question whether humanism was suited to pursue the feminist agenda. Part of her concern, as expressed in a 1988 address to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, was that movement humanism did not seem fully engaged in the social and equality- battles of the generation–that secular humanism was theoretical while women’s equality and civil rights issues were practical.
Scores of atheist writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, musicians and others declined to self-identify as “atheist,” not because their unbelief was tepid, nor even because the position was politically unpopular and even, sometimes, economically risky, but because the whole style of American atheism–in particular its science worship, religion-bashing, and naive view of cultural intellectual history–made the option unappealing. In fact, the degree to which American atheism was marked by contrarian impulses and a odd kind of humanistic anti-intellectualism has yet to be fully explored–and won’t be here.
But turf was turf: Paul Kurtz, to take one example, was determined not to have secular humanism identified with the the bold, brash, ridicule-based (and gaffe-prone) atheism of Madalyn O’Hair, whom he more than once accused of giving atheism a bad name. Thus was born the “Let’s not call it atheism” form of atheism, a move that created further divisions between full-frontalists (“Atheist and Proud of It”) and fig-leafers (“Ethically Disposed Philosophical Naturalist”).
By the same token, even the erstwhile “Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism” (now the Council for Secular Humanism), wasn’t very “democratic” when it came to women. I can remember any number of all-male meetings where the principals around the table wondered why more women weren’t signing on, why more women didn’t accept invitations to speak at CFI conferences, or why, if they did accept, sometimes changed their mind late in the game. When, in 2004, I organized a conference on the topic of religious violence which included eight women, all experts on the subject, out of a dozen speakers, a senior CFI operant at the opening cocktail hour asked, in all earnestness and simplicity, when the scholars (already all present) were going to arrive. No one savoured the moment more than the women.
*****
And so, the question lingers, why have things not changed more quickly? Why is organized humanism more like the Catholic Church than a big tent?
I have two answers.
One is that the primary targets of movement humanism and atheism were, in the early days, men–and the battle, like all battles, was joined (mainly) by other men. It’s easy to forget that beginning with the unctuous born-againism of Billy Graham and the faith-healing Oral Roberts, America’s repetitive Great Awakenings in the latter part of the twentieth century were associated with protestant prophets: Graham himself, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, and spit on the floor and call it polish charismatics like Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, and countless others.
Some, like Bakker, were merely crooks; the majority of others a Crayola box of charlatans. The threat of extreme forms of evangelical protestantism in political terms (which was real then and real now) seemed to call for a response that was not “mere” atheism but mobilization of large numbers of smart people who (before the rise of the “Moral Majority” and its lineal descendant, the Tea Party) thought that protestant fundamentalism existed only on the fringes of American Christianity.
Evangelical Fright
To their credit, Kurtz’s organizations rejected that premise and actively sought to combine a critique of religious dogmatism with education in the democratic and secular values that the Christian Right regarded as un-American.
Women were certainly part of the demographics of the disaffected, the escapees, but ex-born-again protestant males formed a significant majority of converts to the secular humanist form of unbelief. Former Roman Catholics, adrift from the dogmatism of their church and its sexist politics (since unmasked as a pedophile paradise) were the second largest demographic, with secular Jews coming in at a healthy third–and increasing numbers of ex-Muslims at the dawn of the new millennium.
There were women within each group–talented, engaging, brilliant women. But the “authoritative” voices–the teachers–were still almost exclusively male.
The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of O’Hair and her family in 1995 and subsequent (2001) discovery of her chainsawed remains on a Texas ranch was the conclusion of a sordid chapter in the history of American atheism. O’Hair’s estranged son William testified that his mother had a tendency to hire “violent atheist criminals” because “She got a sense of power out of having men in her employ who had taken human life.” The net benefit to secular humanism, which had always seen her as a PR problem, may have been minimal, but the damage to atheism in America, and perhaps also to large-scale women’s involvement in movement atheism, courtesy its female prophet, was enormous.
Studies of religious cults in my own tendentious field are instructive: while women often form the backbone of support for the leaders of religious-social groups, the “authority structure” normally consists of a charismatic leader who achieves prophetic status and beta- and gamma- followers who perform secondary services, the value of which is determined by the prophet himself. (Think Jesus-disciples-women attendants.) It’s easy to overstate the relevance of this sociology, but what Rebecca Watson experienced was at least a vestigial form of secular tribalism.
In my opinion, it used to be far worse–though to the extent prophets remain males, the potential for abuse will always exist. If anything, the new atheism reasserted the primacy of male opinion about God, while at the same time elevating the discussion in a way that made the atheist “option” intellectually respectable, as it had not been under O’Hair. Doubtless the male leaders do not (cannot?) see it this way because their status depends on the willingness of women to acquiesce in their authority. It’s an old pattern.
The second reason for the implicit misogyny of the atheist community is more complicated, more directly explanatory, and might be instead a reason why women have often bypassed atheism in favour of other, more pragmatic, struggles.
As a graduate student at Harvard in the ‘seventies, there was never a time when I sensed that women were ”underrepresented” or voiceless. The professoriate, still largely male, was changing–but the student body of the Divinity School, where most Godtalk was analyzed, was equally or about equally divided between men and women.
Harvard moreover was a microcosm of the secularisation of liberal religion in America during that era, and also expressed the fact that in most Christian denominations the carriers of tradition and the demographic majority of adherents are women. And while male voices still tried to dominate the discussion professionally (as in published books and papers), women had seized the conversation.
While O’Hair did what she did, hundreds, if not thousands, of women were radicalized–in the positive sense of that word–in the liberal divinity schools of North America in the seventies and eighties, which were more closely in touch with radical trends in European universities and European feminist theology and philosophy than any equivalent groups in America. By contrast with the generation of women theologians concerned with questions of religion and secularization between 1970 and 2000, the contributions of women associated with movement atheism was, to be kind, unimpressive.
Judith Plaskow
With its visceral tendency to dismiss theology as intellectual chintz, both men and women atheists have habitually overlooked the fact that the best and the most scorching critiques of religion in the last third of the twentieth century were produced by theologians, many of them women. Furthermore, they did this not just against the odds but within structures, both ecclesiastical and academic, where male authority had predominated for centuries.
For many, the question of God’s existence was yesterday’s news; it had been soundly laid to rest in the nineteenth century. The burning questions were now about the social implications of that death for systems still governed by male privilege based (directly or indirectly) on metaphors of male sovereignty over women.
To name only three of dozens of these women: Mary Daly, who died in 2010, was one of the first Americans to bring the discussion of repressive patriarchal structures based on biblical and other religious images to English speaking readers. Trained in Europe, her first book, the Church and the Second Sex (1968) drew on the feminist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, and her more popular book, Beyond God the Father (1973), challenged the authority structure of the Catholic Church directly as being an antiquated system of privilege based on outdated images drawn from tribal societies where God is an alpha-male who dominates others through physical stength, abuse, sexual dominance, and the demand for obedience:
“Patriarchy is the homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents…. Women who are Pirates in a phallocentric society are involved in a complex operation. First, it is necessary to Plunder — that is, righteously rip off — gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must Smuggle back to other women our Plundered treasures. In order to invert strategies that will be big and bold enough for the next millennium, it is crucial that women share our experiences: the chances we have taken and the choices that have kept us alive. They are my Pirate’s battle cry and wake-up call for women who I want to hear….• The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic ‘civilization’ in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power.”
Rosemary Radford Ruether, who along with Daly (in Gyn-ecology, 1978) styled herself an eco-feminist, was one of the first women theologians to apply the Reformation idea of freedom of conscience to the early debate about abortion in the United States, challenged traditional ideas about God, and implicated the Church (in her 1974 book, Faith and Fratricide) in the pepetuation not only of anti-Semitism (which, she alleges, it virtually invented) but in the modern political plight of the Palestinian people.
As to Christianity’s record:
“Christianity is riddled by hierarchy and patriarchy… a social order in which chaste women on their wedding night were in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes. . . . Modern societies have sought to change this situation, allowing women education, legal autonomy, paid employment and personal freedom. But the sexual morality of traditional puritanical patriarchal Christianity has never been adequately rethought.”
The critique continues in the work of countless women theologians and religious studies scholars; Ursula King (Religion and Gender, 1995); Hedwig Myer-Wilmes (Rebellion on the Borders, 1995); Judith Plaskow (Standing again at Sinai), Luise Schotroff (Lydia’s Impatient Sisters, 2000), Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza (In Memory of Her, 1983, 1994), Phyliss Trible (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1978).
Almost every issue the religious right considered “pivotal” and defining for their understanding of Christianity is explored and deconstructed in these works, perhaps most memorably in the work of my former Harvard classmate Daphne Hampson who was one of the first writers to use the term “Post-Christian” to describe the critical work in religion that future generations of theologians needed to do:
“I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimise a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is. But for myself…I am not an atheist.”
For many observers of the current crisis about women’s voices, the question has to become, Where are you looking, and what are you hearing? Are you aware of these voices? Or is half a century of women’s thinking and writing about the very structures that atheist women are only beginning to consider irrelevant to your analysis of religion? Does the fact that their battles were fought with the Church or within the repressive institutions they tried to change nullify their critique or make it incomplete?
If the complaint against their writing is that they did not go far enough, the question then becomes How far is far enough? And since when is mere polemic a worthy substitute for profound analysis of religious belief and hardcore scholarship in history and anthropology? What additional weight is achieved by self-identifying as an atheist when the concept and images of the biblical and koranic god have already been carefully and systematically dismantled and when the conversation has, frankly, moved on to questions about values and ethics ?
That is what the atheology of the Dalys, the Hampsons, the Tribles and dozens of others has provided, with intellectual rigour and sophistication. Furthermore, there are virtually no male voices here to distract us from their project–no one to say, “Come up to my room and we can compare notes.”
I very much doubt that the paradigm for women in the atheist movement will be greatly enriched by simply accepting the bluff and underanalyzed paradigms of the male atheist polemicists–who, by the way, based on more than a glance at their bibliographies and footnotes, are equally unacquainted with this strand of feminist thinking about God. Why am I not surprised? Forgive us our debts.
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Published: August 20, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: american humanist association : atheism : atheist misogyny : atheology : Betty Friedan : Center for Inquiry : Daniel Dennett : Daphne Hampson : Harvard Divinity School : humanism : Jennifer Michael Hecht : liberal theology : Mary Daly : Ophelia Benson : Paul Kurtz : Phyliss Trible : Post-Christianity : PZ Myers : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Rebecca N. Goldstein : Rebecca Watson : religion : Religion Dispatches : Richard Dawkins : Rosemary Radford Ruether : Sam Harris : secular humanism : Skepchick ..
52 Responses to “Does Atheism Hate Women?”
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stevie
August 20, 2011 at 8:21 pm
I think I can add two points which may be worth considering; the first lies fairly and sqarely in the social history of science in England and goes some way to explain why Richard Dawkins is the way he is.
Back in the mists of time, when he was studying biology, it was a truth universally recognised that only cissies did biology.
Mathematicians were gods, and although manly men could aspire to real science like physics, or, possibly, chemistry if the physicists were in a good mood, biology was a ‘soft’ science, and we all know that soft does not cut the mustard.
Dawkins has spent his life trying to prove he’s not a cissie, and can cut the mustard; simple charity suggests we not dwell overly long on that.
Dawkins had the added disadvantage of being wholly incapable of the real science which had overtaken him in his chosen subject decades ago; he has been reduced to the pitiful level of a character in evolutionary biology bingo.
Once you grasp that point then you begin to understand the reasons behind his apparently random swipe at Rebecca…
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rjosephhoffmann
August 20, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Interesting Stevie: thanks for this. In the long run, it doesn’t say anything ultimately damning about RD and I think Rebecca deserves a lot of credit for calling attention to the incident.
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stevie
August 21, 2011 at 5:47 pm
As do I; Rebecca has been vilified and has responded with great courage and dignity. As she has noted she expects that RD will continue to make cartloads of money, and I am sure she is right.
There is, after all, a large market for people who believe that buying a particular book will demonstrate their intellectual superiority without ever having to do anything which requires intellectual ability. But that takes us back to the dumbing down of atheism, and I’m pretty sure you are bored by that.
I think the important question is whether playing evolutionary biology bingo is simply perpetuating Victorian stereotypes of male and female. Of course, I think the answer to that one is in the affirmative, but then I’ve spent too much of my life being told that I think like a man to have much confidence that those stereotypes are going to go away once the dinosaurs of RD’s generation fulfil their biological destiny by dying…
rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Oh my. But of the 4 so-called horsemen, stallions I mean, only 1 was under 60….
rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 6:04 pm
And no, I want atheism to be as sophisticated and global and sexless as we have a right to expect it to be.
steph
August 20, 2011 at 10:48 pm
It’s a very interesting, and very sad, post. I always preferred stairs to lifts. I like running up and down hills anyway and I always find small places and closed doors claustraphobic. I’ve only ever really belonged to protest ‘movements’ such as anti war, peace and greenie type things. Theatres and wineries have been the only ‘organisations’ that I’ve been employed by. Religion and sex has been irrelevant. In any case these movements and organisations were in a country where, during the last decade, the four most powerful positions in the country were held by women, and it was the first to give women the vote. In my opinion RD is deluded about many things, including the history of religions and what ‘god’ can mean. He seems very naive about these things, as do many atheist scientists. I have noticed ‘enough is enough’ being employed by atheists in America where they are a minority. It stands out to me, because it is the same mantra used by the patriarchal fundamentalist Destiny Church in New Zealand, which is an American import, but small and insignificant (unlike MacDonalds which is equally damaging and regrettably more influential). The male members, dressed in black, chanted ‘enough is enough’ indignantly, as they marched all the way to parliament a decade ago, in protest at our legalisation of civil unions and prostitution. Oddly I always associate that phrase with them – they shouted it so angrily and loudly.
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Ophelia Benson
August 21, 2011 at 1:03 pm
I’d love to add a random snippet of autobiography for you too, but I can’t think of anything relevant. I never can.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 21, 2011 at 1:06 pm
You have sharp elbows!
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Ophelia Benson
August 21, 2011 at 2:21 pm
True!
Dan Gillson
August 21, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Found it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia_Benson
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Sili
August 23, 2011 at 4:33 pm
It still doesn’t matter, but seeing your picture up there I want to repeat my claims that 1) you’re not ugly, 2) you should be on the Skepchick calendar.
Sorry.
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steph
August 21, 2011 at 3:10 pm
mine are spikier.
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stevie
August 22, 2011 at 11:15 am
Would I be pushing my luck too far by inviting you to include humanist in your specifications?
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 11:27 am
and humanism…of course
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Gene Smith
August 22, 2011 at 11:39 am
You know, it occurs to me as I read this, that one big reason why America is “God-besotted” is that religion fills a void left by the maniacal individualism constantly promoted as the real basis of the “American Way.” Curiously, the American version of religion strongly reinforces this “lone hero” approach to…well, everything. I suspect this is a strong component of its continued survival as a political and cultural force. I don’t know that it is intentional…I merely note it.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 11:42 am
Cowboys, rugged individualism, and God at your right side close to your trigger finger, it’s a powerful partnership.
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steph
August 22, 2011 at 8:03 pm
You might like this Gene:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/american-heroes/
“Belief in heroes and belief in the gods have been connected since the dawn of civilization. America’s obsession with heroes is just another part of its social pathology, the other side of which is religious lunacy.”
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Godless
August 22, 2011 at 2:13 pm
“For many, the question of God’s existence was yesterday’s news; it had been soundly laid to rest in the nineteenth century.”
I’ve heard this before, but I’m confused by it. Is this common among religious believers in America? Or is this only something that theologians and others involved in divinity schools know?
On the ground, belief in god seems to be strong. If god’s existence has been accepted since the 19th century, why does religion, particularly Christianity, still exist in America? The religion is based on a god, so I don’t see how it would have survived god’s death.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 22, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I could have been more clear, I think: I am arguing for an atheism that builds on what radical theology and feminist theology had explored in the last part of C XX. A lot of these theologians had no wish to bring religion down with God, and that may seem like a fatal inconsistency (though not all religions have gods). There are certainly points where feminist critique of patriarchal god language and concepts of God is useful to atheists, and others where it looks a little anemic. Yes, it is true that liberal theology, esp in the works of Strauss, Feuerbach, and even theologically trained Marxists like Bauer (who believed Cty was a myth) gave up thinking that the word God meant anything, and I still find their reasoning and historical work valuable.
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Godless
August 30, 2011 at 9:31 am
Interesting, thanks for the response. I’m going to check out the people you mentioned.
stevie
August 22, 2011 at 7:44 pm
‘There are certainly points where feminist critique of patriarchal god language and concepts of God is useful to atheists, and others where it looks a little anemic.’
One possible reason for the apparent anemia is that the feminist critique of the patriarchy finds it difficult to discover much in the way of any meaningful distinction between patriarchal god language and patriarchal atheist language.
As Rebecca has discovered, to her cost, criticising the latter leads to very direct threats to her physical safety; if you take a look at those screenshots of the people who think she should be raped and tortured and killed for, say, failing to denounce male circumcision, it is pretty obvious that there are quite a few guys out there whose notion of reasoned discourse falls a very long way short of anything involving a synapse or two.
And yet no-one is calling them on it,…
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Veronica
August 23, 2011 at 4:27 pm
The New Atheism seems to be very much invested in the idea that misogyny is largely the result of religion (which is why Dawkins jumped straight to be-burqa-ed Muslimas), and therefore, via rational self-interest, all women should be atheists.
Then, when women don’t show up in “the movement,” it’s seen as a sign that women must be irrational–and therefore deserving of the sort of ladder theory, ev psych, “nice guy” sexism you find all over the “skeptical” blogosphere.
They aren’t going to look in feminist circles for female atheists, despite the fact that MOST female atheists I know are feminists, because that might expose a sort of nasty truth–that the female atheist community avoids them.
Occasionally, you run across a male atheist that figures this out. Generally, it results in a conversation where women swear fealty more to feminism than movement atheism, are Part of The Problem. This never gets connected to the “rational self-interest” that atheist women aren’t supposed to be acting on.
They can’t see how weird it is that they totally feel entitled to state that a woman that is both an atheist and a feminist has a Holy Obligation to identify primarily as an atheist, or they’re harming the Glorious Cause. And, they can’t conceive of sexism as something that might be more a product of social structure than “irrationality” and religion.
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stevie
August 24, 2011 at 4:39 pm
This is very familiar; it seems strange that so few people can grasp that a woman’s rational self-interest would inevitably result in her strongly objecting to the presence of a guy who appears to be trying to put the moves on her in an otherwise deserted hotel lift at 4am…
It’s time for another weekly roundup of interesting links! « The House of Vines says:
August 22, 2011 at 11:53 pm
[...] this rabbit, atheists hate women: the video has raised the spectre that big top modern atheism, as opposed to the atheism of the [...]
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Franklin Percival
August 23, 2011 at 3:20 am
Seems to me that we buy ourselves a problem when we conflate the consideration of the religion hypothesis/es with gender relations. If I choose to accept the existence of a god, I may be deluded, but I am intellectually bound to accept that female and male persons are equally worthy of respect as human beings. If I am rational and reject the religion hypothesis, I am still bound to acknowledge sexual equality. There are two different narratives here, and bundling them together, particularly as one is an ethically neutral line of scientific enquiry,whereas the other involves real people and is intensely ethical.
The overt quasi-religiosity of ‘The New Atheism’ and ‘The Atheist Movement’ does not have any relevance for me, because if there is no god one does not need to bury her with enormous carbon footprints every few months. The energy and treasure expended on such activities would be more fruitfully applied to legally reducing religion’s influence, surely? This would not preclude our best efforts to improve the field of ethnic or gender equality.
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rjosephhoffmann
August 23, 2011 at 9:26 am
@Franklin: yes, I agree that the question of sexual equality and the question of the existence of God are two different narratives. They are bound together, however, in history, text and imagery, which are concrete expressions of the conception and in the “power structures” that such imagery supports. I think it is perfectly legitimate therefore for women, theologians and secularists, to conduct the discussion at that level. It is also interesting to consider whether any perfectly abstract philosophical construct of God (God minus attributes of power and authority) bears any meaning. The theologians perhaps erred in thinking that “God” could become gender neutral, and that thus/therefore the concept could be remodeled, spared and retrieved. I don’t think that that project is useful and some of their discussions look dated and naive.
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bubbarich
August 23, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Rebecca Watson made a very valid comment about “the incident.” Dawkins made a very ham-handed and stereotypically Oxbridge Male response to her. I agree completely with you about that.
However, during the later back-and-forth on the issue, Rebecca Watson herself, and much worse from some of her fans, stepped way beyond the bounds of rationality, and even beyond offended victim of sexism. Her attack on Stef McGraw (“ignorant of feminism”?) was at least heavy-handed. Worst was the insistence that SHE SAID SHE WAS SLEEPY was some sort of gospel message that should have eliminated any possibility that she would ever do anything else. And the people who are saying it are saying it so intensely that it almost sounds like stupidity, instead of the disingenuous crap I suspect it is.
It was a good issue to raise. It’s part of very, very complex social negotiations that we make all of the time, and a lot of people obviously need to learn and be able to communicate better, and especially not intentionally isolate a woman. The atheists in the world are still negotiating sexual mores in a way that’s completely unsettled right now. And there are many, many people among the “thought leaders” of the atheists right now who are VERY sexually active and VERY sexually aggressive, both men and women. This is going to make an already very complex social negotiation much more complex, even if you’re not one of the sexual butterflies of the movement.
This is what irritates me the most: Rebecca’s insults against anybody who would doubt that her intentions are always crystal clear to everyone. And ESPECIALLY when she actually seriously added “But I said I was tired and going to bed.” I can believe she would say that, as we often tend to prioritize things we say ourself, but the number of people who have repeated those words as gospel is a little disturbing.
At best this guy was a clueless nerd who felt threatening to Rebecca through the alcohol-4am haze. At worst he was a predator who makes a habit of isolating women like that. But some of Rebecca’s attacks after her initial comments have been more about bizarre personal power (“BUT I SAID”) that serve only to keep her fans inflamed and distract from the good point she was making.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
August 23, 2011 at 4:59 pm
The point Rich makes is interesting, above. I don’t think that there is an “atheist” context for this incident–at all–shoot me, but what you say is poignant: “The atheists in the world are still negotiating sexual mores in a way that’s completely unsettled right now. And there are many, many people among the “thought leaders” of the atheists right now who are VERY sexually active and VERY sexually aggressive, both men and women.” As a cultural subset, does this make the atheist community any different from say a secular society that is sexually confused between the mixed messages conveyed in media, music, you name it??
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stevie
August 24, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Shooting you would be too kind; I expect more of you than the ‘we are all confused’ gambit.
My daughter was an ardent fan of the Spice Girls, which certainly freaked me out at the time; I dealt with it by enrolling her in a martial arts class, on the principle that girl power has to be more than a marketing tool. She proved to be rather good at it, and in a fair fight I would back her against around 80% of the population, male and female.
In an unfair fight I would back her against around 95% of the population, male and female, since no one who wants to win fights fair. And they don’t give you the nice gold embroidery on your black belt if you haven’t grasped the point that you fight to win; if you are not going to win then you run.
So, anyone stupid enough to intrude upon her personal space would almost certainly regret it, but very few people do intrude on her personal space; people have to be pretty dumb not to realise that she is predator, not prey. Rebecca does not have those skills…
Franklin Percival
August 25, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Stevie,you would be more comprehensible if you could manage to write in English!
Reply
Scott
August 27, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Atheism doesn’t hate women. There are, however, certain atheist males who think the domain belongs to them. If atheism belongs to anyone, it belongs to the atheist.
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J. Quinton
August 30, 2011 at 3:11 pm
the incident itself had no specific relevance to the atheist community, being part of much broader social patterns of marginalization (read: the genus of sexism is not atheism).
I dated a couple of engineers while in undergrad. I’m not sure of the stats, and I’ve never been to an atheist/skeptic conference, but I would wager to guess that the male:female ratio is pretty heavily skewed towards the male at these conferences much like the classes that my engineering girlfriends attended. Especially since, across all societies, women seem to be more religious than men (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201009/why-are-women-more-religious-men-ii).
While not as blatant as the elevator guy incident, I did hear complaints from those girlfriends of mine about similar marginalization; mainly being oogled at unashamedly by potential male colleagues or clumsy propositions by classmates.
So I think the elevator incident had more to do with a sort of “sausage party” effect than some latent atheist sexism.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
August 30, 2011 at 4:28 pm
I think many of us want to think that atheism has an implicitly superior moral position because it rejects the gods patriarchy. But translating that assumption into practice isn’t all that easy. Dawkins’s comments were, at least, clumsy on this score but also suggest that the sources of sexism are more entrenched in behaviour than non-believing males might want to think. No one is surprised; even a free love advocate like Russell was egregiously sexist, though his atheist credentials were pretty impressive.
Reply
Grog
July 26, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Why should any of think anything of the sort? Atheism is the non-belief in deities. It has nothing to do with “superior moral position[s].” Why put such extra baggage on a very simple idea. You are talking about something else, give it a different name.
adamwho
July 24, 2012 at 2:17 pm
I would like to see some evidence that atheism/skepticism/secularism is more sexist than any other similar group/organization. I am certain if you polled the membership of such groups you would find near unanimous agreement on womens rights issues that surpass the US national average.
I would like to see some evidence that atheist/skeptic/secular conferences are more sexists than other conferences. It is not the possible for conference organizers to regulate member behavior after conference hours in bars, hotels, or online, such areas are the domain of the police, hotel/bar owners and online moderators.
The evidence I see paints a the opposite picture. Attempts at gender balance and actively recruiting female speakers, as well as extensive anti-harassment policies imply that atheist/skeptics/secular organizations are better than many (most?).
The suggestion, without evidence, that atheist/skeptic/secular conferences are unsafe for women is irresponsible and damaging to the movement.
To many, it seems like RW, with her various boycotts and free use of generalizations, has used her position in the atheist/secular community to promote a divisive form of feminism that blames men for all the problems of women. In this case skeptic/atheist men.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 24, 2012 at 4:20 pm
@Adam: I share most of your view of this, actually. Finally atheism, secularism, humanism, and the other ism will have to negotiate a solution, but the special needs and interests are very firmly entrenched.
Reply
Stevie Gamble
July 25, 2012 at 8:51 am
On the other hand, when I read women being criticised for behaving in a way which is “damaging to the movement” I wonder why a supposedly rational human being would do anything other than press the delete button.
It’s 2012, in case you hadn’t noticed, and believe it or not women are entitled to express their views without being lectured about their need not to damage any movement, regardless of what that particular movement is.
Equally I would expect some evidence beyond your personal belief and your pictures. Perhaps you could provide some evidence in support of them?
Reply
adamwho
July 25, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Making accusations against a whole movement without evidence, isn’t “expressing your views”, at best is irrational at worse it is lying.
Pointing that out, especially in the atheist/rationalist/skeptic movement, that such accusations are lies, certainly isn’t suppression of views nor is it sexist. Maybe some women claim an exception from dishonest accusations and wild generalizations.
Reply
Stevie Gamble
July 25, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Still no evidence; we are back to your conviction that there is a movement, sorry, a whole movement, which needs protecting from women expressing views you don’t like.
You appear incapable of grasping that reasoned discourse involves both evidence and reasoning; so far you have provided neither.
If you want to contend that someone is lying then you have to identify the lie in question and demonstrate, by citing evidence, that it is a lie.
Frankly, if you haven’t grasped the fundamentals of reasoned discourse by now you would be better off canning the conferences and going back to school to learn them. This is called rational self-interest and if you do it then someday you may be employable…
adamwho
July 25, 2012 at 4:14 pm
@Stevie Gamble
What a strange argument. The atheist/secular/skeptic movement is the collection of authors/scientists/speakers, the interested people in such subjects, and the many conferences and organizations associated within these subjects. Such a ‘movement’ obviously exists.
Second, concerning the damage being done. Specifically, accusations have been made that TAM (a major skeptic convention) is unsafe and unconcerned about women, this is patently false as shown by a complete lack of sexual harassment complaints at the conference. Additionally, TAM has gone to great lengths to maintain equal billing for men and women speakers and actively recruits women.
Third, the evidence that it is damaging to the movement (specifically to TAM in this example) is the drop in female attendance because of women citing these alarmist accusations. Additionally, there has been a year plus flame war across blogs and even in the media about these accusations.
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 3:28 am
Checking the TAM 2012 website, it seems that of 35 speakers listed, 15 are female.
http://www.amazingmeeting.com/TAM2012/
This is not to say that there isn’t an issue regarding sexism in atheism. Personally, I would say that there is, but that it’s somewhat overstated at times, IMO.
As in ‘implicit misogyny in the atheist community…’ for example. :)
rjosephhoffmann
July 25, 2012 at 11:20 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 25, 2012 at 11:49 am
Nice post. I wouldn’t want to say much, since nearly everything has been said in comments above. I’d be willing to take a punt that ‘atheist communities’ are a tad more egalitarian than, say, an ‘average community’, but nonetheless, this does not warrant a pat on the back, since any degree of sexism (personally I’m very careful about reserving terms like ‘mysogyny’ for actual women-hatred) is regrettable, and Dawkins was generally criticized by atheists generally for his ‘midlife/older man’s gaff’, albeit it may not have been as clear cut or the ensuing kerfuffle as one-sided as reported.
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steph
July 25, 2012 at 2:51 pm
This isn’t about ordinary atheists living peacefully in mixed societies with people of other mild faiths and origins, under secular egalitarian governments where society reflects egalitarianism, like Northern Ireland or New Zealand where, last decade, the five most powerful positions in the country were held (coincidentally not design) by women. The Prime Minister (happens to be a quiet atheist), leader of the opposition (liberal Christian), Leader of the House (probably agnostic), Governor General (not sure), Chief Justice (who knows), and Attorney-General (don’t know and obviously completely irrelevant as with all). It’s not even about ordinary quiet atheists living in America or Canada or anywhere. This post is about atheists in particular movements and ‘communities’ where atheism is central (and there are prophets, heroes and messiahs).
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 25, 2012 at 5:57 pm
I know that steph. When I said ‘atheist communities’, I meant just that, not ‘atheists living in wider communities’.
steph
July 26, 2012 at 9:30 am
Jolly good. Then you’ll realise that egalitarianism is a reflection of the standards of a secular society (whether or not the leaders and teachers are religious or not), and not the atheists in it. Taking punts and speculating about particular groups in social contexts other than yours, is not sufficient compared with experience
Stevie Gamble
July 26, 2012 at 7:03 am
Your entire first paragraph is a classic straw man argument; at no point did I suggest that ‘the whole movement’ does not exist. The fact that you are reduced to inventing non-existent statements to refute says a great deal about your inability to find something rational to contribute to the discussion.
The sun is shining, and I am therefore departing to the garden to enjoy the English summer while it lasts. In my absence you could try putting together a rational response, hard as that may be for you, which replies to what I did write.
As a general guide, however, strive to bear in mind for the future that kicking off anything with an obvious straw man means that nobody with an iq above 100 is going to bother to read any further…
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 26, 2012 at 8:40 am
On a tangental note, mentions of atheism being ‘quasi-religious’ and talk of it having messiahs and prophets generally raises a smile from me. :)
Oh, I get the analogy, but I think it’s more than a bit stretched.
Which political/social ‘movement’ is not at least somewhat like religion. Which religion is not at least somewhat somewhat like a political/social movement? What cheese isn’t at least somewhat chalkish? :)
Reply
steph
July 26, 2012 at 9:17 am
I don’t eat cheese, but no camembert or brie is the least bit chalkish. People are not consistent. People vary geographically according to social and political context. We are not talking about Belfast. It is not a ‘stretched’ analogy in view of the particular movements and ‘communities’ being discussed. Personal belief in atheism or a religion is certainly not ‘somewhat like’ a political movement or even necessarily a social one.
Reply
Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Religion/Politics/Atheism are the same three corners of a point, it appears to me – all about survival, power and agrandisment (we won’t argue spelling here, thank you).
My proposition is that once something becomes a ‘movement’, it ceases to have any rational base.
Care to argue?
Luv, f.
Reply
steph
July 29, 2012 at 8:26 pm
On the button Franklin.
Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 9:46 pm
I made a proposition. You are making assumptions. This will not get us anywhere.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Lesson I: What Mormons Believe about History – Native Americans
by rjosephhoffmann
Offered without annotation or change from the Encyclopaedia of Mormonism (Salt Lake, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1992), by Thomas Garrow and Bruce Chadwick. rjh
——————-
The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, addresses a major message to Native Americans. Its title page states that one reason it was written was so that Native Americans today might know “what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers.”
The Book of Mormon tells that a small band of Israelites under Lehi migrated from Jerusalem to the Western Hemisphere about 600 B.C. Upon Lehi’s death his family divided into two opposing factions, one under Lehi’s oldest son, laman (see Lamanites), and the other under a younger son, Nephi 1 (see Nephites).
Jesus preaches to the Nephites during his visit to America
During the thousand-year history narrated in the Book of Mormon, Lehi’s descendants went through several phases of splitting, warring, accommodating, merging, and splitting again. At first, just as God had prohibited the Israelites from intermarrying with the Canaanites in the ancient Promised Land (Ex. 34:16; Deut. 7:3), the Nephites were forbidden to marry the Lamanites with their dark skin (2 Ne. 5:23; Alma 3:8-9). But as large Lamanite populations accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ and were numbered among the Nephites in the first century B.C., skin color ceased to be a distinguishing characteristic. After the visitations of the resurrected Christ, there were no distinctions among any kind of “ites” for some two hundred years. But then unbelievers arose and called themselves Lamanites to distinguish themselves from the Nephites or believers (4 Ne. 1:20).
The concluding chapters of the Book of Mormon describe a calamitous war. About A.D. 231, old enmities reemerged and two hostile populations formed (4 Ne. 1:35-39), eventually resulting in the annihilation of the Nephites. The Lamanites, from whom many present-day Native Americans descend, remained to inhabit the American continent. Peoples of other extractions also migrated there.
The Book of Mormon contains many promises and prophecies about the future directed to these survivors. For example, Lehi’s grandson Enos prayed earnestly to God on behalf of his kinsmen, the Lamanites. He was promised by the Lord that Nephite records would be kept so that they could be “brought forth at some future day unto the Lamanites, that, perhaps, they might be brought unto salvation” (Enos 1:13).
The role of Native Americans in the events of the last days is noted by several Book of Mormon prophets. Nephi 1 prophesied that in the last days the Lamanites would accept the gospel and become a “pure and delightsome people” (2 Ne. 30:6). Likewise, it was revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith that the Lamanites will at some future time “blossom as the rose” (D&C 49:24).
Ancient Israelites in costume
After Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem, he appeared to the more righteous Lamanites and Nephites left after massive destruction and prophesied that their seed eventually “shall dwindle in unbelief because of iniquity” (3 Ne. 21:5). He also stated that if any people “will repent and hearken unto my words, and harden not their hearts, I will establish my church among them, and they shall come in unto the covenant and be numbered among this the remnant of Jacob [the descendants of the Book of Mormon peoples], unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance”; together with others of the house of Israel, they will build the New Jerusalem (3 Ne. 21:22-23). The Book of Mormon teaches that the descendants of Lehi are heirs to the blessings of Abraham (see Abrahamic Covenant) and will receive the blessings promised to the house of Israel.
THE LAMANITE MISSION (1830 - 1831). Doctrine and a commandment from the Lord motivated the Latter-day Saints to introduce the Book of Mormon to the Native Americans and teach them of their heritage and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just a few months after the organization of the Church, four elders were called to preach to Native Americans living on the frontier west of the Missouri River (see Lamanite Mission of 1830-1831).
The missionaries visited the Cattaraugus in New York, the Wyandots in Ohio, and the Shawnees and Delawares in the unorganized territories (now Kansas). Members of these tribes were receptive to the story of the Restoration. Unfortunately, federal Indian agents worrying about Indian unrest feared that the missionaries were inciting the tribes to resist the government and ordered the missionaries to leave, alleging that they were “disturbers of the peace” (Arrington and Bitton, p. 146). LDS pro-Native American beliefs continued to be a factor in the tensions between Latter-day Saints and their neighbors in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, which eventually led to persecution and expulsion of the Latter-day Saints from Missouri in 1838-1839 and from Illinois in 1846 (see Missouri Conflict).
RELATIONS IN THE GREAT BASIN. When the Latter-day Saints arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they found several Native American tribal groups there and in adjacent valleys. The Church members soon had to weigh their need to put the limited arable land into production for the establishment of Zion against their obligation to accommodate their Native American neighbors and bring them the unique message in the Book of Mormon.
Brigham Young taught that kindness and fairness were the best means to coexist with Native Americans and, like many other white Americans at the time, he hoped eventually to assimilate the Indians entirely into the mainstream culture. He admonished settlers to extend friendship, trade fairly, teach white man’s ways, and generously share what they had. Individuals and Church groups gave, where possible, from their limited supplies of food, clothing, and livestock. But the rapid expansion of LDS settlers along the Wasatch Range, their preoccupation with building Zion, and the spread of European diseases unfortunately contravened many of these conciliatory efforts.
A dominating factor leading to resentment and hostility was the extremely limited availability of life-sustaining resources in the Great Basin, which in the main was marginal desert and mountain terrain dotted with small valley oases of green. Although Native Americans had learned to survive, it was an extremely delicate balance that was destroyed by the arrival of the Latter-day Saints in 1847. The tribal chiefs who initially welcomed the Mormons soon found themselves and their people being dispossessed by what appeared to them to be a never-ending horde, and in time they responded by raiding LDS-owned stock and fields, which resources were all that remained in the oases which once supported plants and wildlife that were the staples of the Native American diet. The Latter-day Saints, like others invading the western frontier, concerned with survival in the wilderness, responded at times with force.
Native American Rabbis
An important factor in the conflict was the vast cultural gap between the two peoples. Native Americans in the Great Basin concentrated on scratching for survival in a barren land. Their uncanny survival skills could have been used by the Mormons in 1848, when drought and pestilence nearly destroyed the pioneers’ first crops and famine seriously threatened their survival.
The Utes, Shoshones, and other tribal groups in the basin had little interest in being farmers or cowherders, or living in stuffy sod or log houses. They preferred their hunter-gatherer way of life under the open sky and often resisted, sometimes even scoffed at, the acculturation proffered them. Nor did they have a concept of land ownership or the accumulation of property. They shared both the land and its bounty-a phenomenon that European Americans have never fully understood. The culture gap all but precluded any significant acculturation or accommodation.
Within a few years, LDS settlers inhabited most of the arable land in Utah. Native Americans, therefore, had few options: They could leave, they could give up their own culture and assimilate with the Mormons, they could beg, they could take what bounty they could get and pay the consequences, or they could fight. Conflict was inevitable. Conflict mixed with accommodation prevailed in Utah for many years. Violent clashes occurred between Mormons and Native Americans in 1849, 1850 (Chief Sowiette), 1853 (Chief Walkara), 1860, and 1865-1868 (Chief Black Hawk)-all for the same primary reasons and along similar lines. Conflict subsided, and finally disappeared, only when most of the surviving Native Americans were forced onto reservations by the United States government.
Still, the LDS hand of fellowship was continually extended. Leonard Arrington accurately comments that “the most prominent theme in Brigham’s Indian policy in the 1850s was patience and forbearance…. He continued to emphasize always being ready, using all possible means to conciliate the Indians, and acting only on the defensive” (Arrington, p. 217). Farms for the Native Americans were established as early as 1851, both to raise crops for their use and to teach them how to farm; but most of the “Indian farms” failed owing to a lack of commitment on both sides as well as to insufficient funding. LDS emissaries (such as Jacob Hamblin, Dudley Leavitt, and Dimmick Huntington) continued, however, to serve Native American needs, and missionaries continued to approach them in Utah and in bordering states. Small numbers of Utes, Shoshones, Paiutes, Gosiutes, and Navajos assimilated into the mainstream culture, and some of that number became Latter-day Saints. But overall, reciprocal contact and accommodation were minimal. By the turn of the century, contact was almost nil because most Native Americans lived on reservations far removed from LDS communities. Their contact with whites was mainly limited to government soldiers and agency officials and to non-Mormon Christian missionaries.
RELATIONS IN RECENT TIMES. Beginning in the 1940s, the Church reemphasized reaching out to Native Americans. The Navajo-Zuni Mission, later named the Southwest Indian Mission, was created in 1943. It was followed by the Northern Indian Mission, headquartered in South Dakota. Eventually, missionaries were placed on many Indian reservations. The missionaries not only proselytize, but also assist Native Americans with their farming, ranching, and community development. Other Lamanite missions, including several in Central and South America and in Polynesia, have also been opened. Large numbers of North American Indians have migrated off reservations, and today over half of all Indians live in cities. In response, some formerly all-Indian missions have merged with those serving members of all racial and ethnic groups living in a given geographical area.
An Indian seminary program was initiated to teach the gospel to Native American children on reservations, in their own languages if necessary (see Seminaries). Initially, Native American children of all ages were taught the principles of the gospel in schools adjacent to federal public schools on reservations and in remote Indian communities. The Indian seminary program has now been integrated within the regular seminary system, and Indian children in the ninth through twelfth grades attend seminary, just as non-Indian children do.
The Indian Student Placement Services (ISPS) seeks to improve the educational attainment of Native American children by placing member Indian children with LDS families during the school year. Foster families, selected because of their emotional, financial, and spiritual stability, pay all expenses of the Indian child, who lives with a foster family during the nine-month school year and spends the summer on the reservation with his or her natural family. Generally, the children enter the program at a fairly young age and return year after year to the same foster family until they graduate from high school.
From a small beginning in 1954, the program peaked in 1970 with an enrollment of nearly 5,000 students. The development of more adequate schools on reservations has since then reduced the need for the program and the number of participants has declined. In 1990, about 500 students participated. More than 70,000 Native American youngsters have participated in ISPS, and evaluations have shown that participation significantly increased their educational attainment.
In the 1950s, Elder Spencer W. Kimball, then an apostle, encouraged Brigham Young University to take an active interest in Native American education and to help solve economic and social problems. Scholarships were established, and a program to help Indian students adjust to university life was inaugurated. During the 1970s more than 500 Indian students, representing seventy-one tribes, were enrolled each year. But enrollment has declined, so a new program for Indian students is being developed that will increase the recruiting of Native American students to BYU and raise the percentage who receive a college degree. The Native American Educational Outreach Program at BYU presents educational seminars to tribal leaders and Indian youth across North America. It also offers scholarships. American Indian Services, another outreach program originally affiliated with BYU, provides adult education and technical and financial assistance to Indian communities. In 1989, American Indian Services was transferred from BYU to the Lehi Foundation, which continues this activity.
In 1975, George P. Lee, a full-blooded Navajo and an early ISPS participant, was appointed as a General Authority. He was the first Indian to achieve this status and served faithfully for more than ten years. Elder Lee became convinced that the Church was neglecting its mission to the Lamanites, and when he voiced strong disapproval of Church leaders, he was excommunicated in 1989.
The Church has always had a strong commitment to preaching the gospel to Native Americans and assisting individuals, families, communities, and tribes to improve their education, health, and religious well-being. Programs vary from time to time as conditions and needs change, but the underlying beliefs and goodwill of Latter-day Saints toward these people remain firm and vibrant.
Bibliography
Arrington, Leonard J. Brigham Young: American Moses. New York, 1985.
Arrington, Leonard J., and Davis Bitton. The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints. New York, 1979.
Barney, Ronald O. Review of Utah’s Black Hawk War, by John Alton Peterson. BYU Studies 38:4 (1999):189-191.
Chadwick, Bruce A., Stan L. Albrecht, and Howard M. Bahr. “Evaluation of an Indian Student Placement Program.” Social Casework 67, no. 9 (1986):515-24.
Christensen, Scott R. Review of Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887, by Scott R. Christensen. BYU Studies 39:3 (2000):188-189.
Livingstone, John P. “Establishing the Church Simply.” BYU Studies 39:4 (2000):127-160.
Thursby, Jacqueline S. Review of The Trial of Don Pedro Léon Luján: The Attack against Indian Slavery and Mexican Traders in Utah, by Sondra Jones. BYU Studies 42:3-4 (2003):107-109.
Walker, Ronald W. “Native Women on the Utah Frontier.” BYU Studies 32 (Fall 1992):87-124.
Walker, Ronald W. “Toward a Reconstruction of Mormon and Indian Relations, 1847-1877.” BYU Studies 29 (Fall 1989)23-42.
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Published: July 28, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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45 Responses to “Lesson I: What Mormons Believe about History – Native Americans”
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davidjohnmills
July 29, 2012 at 6:24 am
Another interesting article, and another reminder of why I like this site.
It’s certainly an engrossing topic, the ‘civilizing’/conquest of the world throughout history by certain expansionist cults and/or cultures (which two words have a shared etymology, I think). One wonders where we would be today if the, er, moccasin was on the other foot, and some of the Native American, or other ‘aboriginal’ religions around the world were as evangelical, but then, that’s an academic enquiry, because…they aren’t/weren’t ever going to be. :)
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Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Let me walk a mile in your shoes/moccasins, then I’ll be a mile away and you’ll be unshod.
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steph
July 29, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Many remember Henry Ford well. I don’t. He was a mass of contradictions. A pacifist but violently anti semitic. He was supposed to have a good work philosophy and pay his workers highly but he was anti unions and created a culture of mass production. He made too much filthy lucre and he wasn’t a philanthropist to my knowledge. He is credited with the extraordarily irresponsible words “History is more or less bunk.” – mind you, after having conceded “I don’t know much about history”
Now I realise he must have been talking about the repulsive Encyclopedia of Mormonism – “history”. Speech marks appropriately become scare quotes. However he neglected to add that it is vile and dangerous lies.
Mitt the twit threatens the world. He will NOT be elected.
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Ken Scaletta
July 29, 2012 at 9:04 pm
Is the Old Testament really any different, though? The Exodus, for instance, has no more historicity than any of Smith’s tales. Jacob and Esau are just as made up as Laman and Nephi. The NoM is patterned on the OT not just in style, but also in the very specific genre of invented history.
To me the Mormon movement is proof of concept for how a mythic history can not only be fabricated from whole cloth, but can be indoctrinated into large numbers of people in a short time.
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steph
July 29, 2012 at 9:28 pm
This reminds me of a modern historical assumption about a so-called ‘mythic mind’. It has no understanding of the complexity of texts or the nature of writing in ancient cultures or the history of how they were read and used through time. And it also misses the point and relevance of this post at this time in history, or how Mormons read things like fundamentalists. and the fact is in an “encyclopedia” which is more dangerous to the future of the world if a certain idiot gets elected. I’ve never met a liberal Mormon.
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Ken Scaletta
July 29, 2012 at 11:06 pm
I’m certainly not defending Romney, but it’s not like Reagan or GWB were any more informed about history. Reagan used astrologers.
I voted for Obama the last time and will vote for him again, but Romney’s religion is the least of my worries about him. I suspect that his faith is more accessory than conviction (and I think the same is true Obama. Maybe it’s atheist denial on my part, but I think he’s just too intelligent to actually believe that stuff), and I don’t think his actual policies would deviate much, if at all, from the bog standard set of Republican positions (e.g. “pro-family” posturing, pro-life, anti-gay, etc. as well as the usual pro-gun, anti-immigrant, American exceptionism stuff).
I’m actually comfortable with insincere religious affect when its worn as indifferently and cynically as it is by both Romney and Obama. It’s the fanatics who worry me. Sarah Palin is terrifying. Romney doesn’t give me the impression that he actually cares enough about his religion to be dangerous with it. He’s nothing but callow, philosophically empty, elitist entitlement. I think he would publicly molest the bones of Brigham Young if he thought it could win him the election.
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steph
July 30, 2012 at 11:08 am
The point is that Mormons believe all this is true, literally true, and furthermore what does it say about Native Americans.
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Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 1:02 pm
I know but, but Obama also thinks (or says he thinks) that a Jewish day laborer crawled out of a tomb 2000 years ago, flew up to the sky, waits there still and will one day descend from the clouds with an army of angels.
Let’s not even talk about the historical claims of Israel.
I guess I just don’t see any functional difference between taking the Bible literally and the Book of Mormon literally. It’s the difference between believing in Spiderman and Superman as far as I’m concerned. I think all magical beliefs are equal, and I think they’re all really the same belief.
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steph
July 30, 2012 at 3:10 pm
I’m glad you know. But Obama is not a biblical literalist Ken. Or perhaps you’re just being ‘rude’.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Gosh Ken, everyone knows he is a Muslim.
Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Obama claims to believe literally in the miracle claims of Christianity, including the literal divinity and resurrection of Jesus, so he’s already a little bit pregnant.
I actually doubt that Romney really believes everything in the Book of Mormon either.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 5:23 pm
@Ken: I cannot say this is not true; but I can say, as I am literally from Missouri (albeit from St Louis), Show me. I have no recollection of Obama pronouncing on any of these things. In print? Extensively? Specifically? Even the Jeremiah Wright Church he was criticized for attending in Chicago was a bastion of liberalism and (alleegd) “socialism” which don’t sit well with the kind of Christianity you’re describing. As for Romney: why would you doubt that a man who has been identified with Mormonism, has been a bishop and a missionary in his denomination, believed the tenets of his faith?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 5:26 pm
PS: What manual are taking phrases like “miracle claims of Christianity” out of–Is this what atheisst used to call ‘supernaturalism”-I’m out of the loop on fine tuning the rhetoric as it moves away from its anchorage in 1756.
steph
July 30, 2012 at 7:36 pm
Are you his personal confidant? How do you know Ken? Where is your evidence.
The United Church of Christ emphasizes the freedom of the individual conscience over adherence to creeds or hierarchical authority. This is similar to traditional Baptist Christianity and something that is honored more in theory than in practice when it comes to the Southern Baptist Convention. Several historical creeds and catechisms are used by the United Church of Christ as statements of what their faith, but none are used as “tests of faith” which a person must swear upon.
A 2001 study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research found the denomination’s churches are fairly evenly split between conservative and liberal/progressive beliefs. Official policy statements from the church leaders tend to be more liberal than conservative, but the denomination is organized in such a way that disagreements by individuals churches are allowed. For example, the United Church of Christ is the largest Christian denomination to come out in favor of “equal marriage rights for all,” which means full marriage rights for gay couples, but there are many individual churches which do not support this.
Barack Obama’s religious background is more diverse than that of most prominent politicians, but it may prove to be representative of future generations of Americans who grow up in an increasingly diverse America. His mother was raised by non-practicing Christians; his father was raised a Muslim but was an atheist by the time he had married Obama’s mother. Obama’s step-father was also Muslim, but of an eclectic kind who could make room for animist and Hindu beliefs. Neither Obama nor his mother were ever atheists, but she raised him in a relatively secular household where he learned about religion.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes:
I was not raised in a religious household. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.
On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.
As a child in Indonesia, Obama studied for two years at one Muslim school and then two years at a Catholic school. In both places he experienced religious indoctrination, but in neither case did the indoctrination take hold: during Quranic studies he made faces and during Catholic prayers he would look around the room. Eventually, Barack Obama abandoned this non-conformism and skepticism to be baptized as an adult in the Trinity United Church of Christ.
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Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 7:29 pm
I’m not aware of any manual. My words are my own. I don’t subscribe to any community or group. I am not “activist” in any way. I am not referencing any kind of argot. I haven’t seen this term “supernaturalism,” but then, I don’t read a lot of atheist literature, My interests are in Christian origins and New Testament scholarship, not in atheism as any kind of movement or standard. I admit that my issue with religion is specifically the supernatural claims and defrauding of history. I don’t share Hitckens’/Dawkins’ et al’s hostility towrads organized religion as an institution. I have a problem with magical thinking.
As for Obama and a literal belief in the Resurrection, he has expressed this belief publicly more than once. Here is a typical example from a prayer breakfast he spoke at in 2010:
“For even after the passage of 2,000 years, we can still picture the moment in our mind’s eye. The young man from Nazareth marched through Jerusalem; object of scorn and derision and abuse and torture by an empire.
The agony of crucifixion amid the cries of thieves. The discovery, just three days later, that would forever alter our world — that the Son of Man was not to be found in his tomb and that Jesus Christ had risen.
“We are awed by the grace he showed even to those who would have killed him. We are thankful for the sacrifice he gave for the sins of humanity. And we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection.”
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2010/04/obama_at_easter_prayer_breakfa.html
As for my belief that Romney might not believe every single thing in the BoM, well, I base that on what I perceive to be a decided religious incuriosity on his part. I don;t think he cares enough about the specific theology to believe it. He was a missionary, yes, but he was a Mormon kid, which means it wasn’t really a choice. I think (and this is completely subjective) that his religion to him is just a social and professional obligation. I don’t see any….contemplative nature in Romney.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Hahhha
Any liberal theologian would say it just this way:
“For even after the passage of 2,000 years, we can still picture the moment in our mind’s eye. The young man from Nazareth marched through Jerusalem; object of scorn and derision and abuse and torture by an empire.
The agony of crucifixion amid the cries of thieves. The discovery, just three days later, that would forever alter our world — that the Son of Man was not to be found in his tomb and that Jesus Christ had risen…”
And you call this “literal”? My goodness.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 3:13 am
If Obama said that, I can’t see how it’s not literal.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 3:13 am
Unless he doesn’t really believe it…..
steph
July 30, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Spreading false information you ‘made up in your head’ is malicious and irresponsible, Ken.
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steph
July 31, 2012 at 11:06 am
It is not true he said that at all. I’ve read the prayer breakfast. He told a story, a story of significance to many people, as a story, as any decent liberal theologian would.
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Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 9:15 pm
What’s the non-literal way to read that the tomb was empty three days later? What are you talking about? What did I “make up in my head?” Am I being punked here?
I highly resent the accusation of dishonesty. Disagree with me. Tell me my interpretation is out to lunch, but don’t call me a liar. That’s not nice.
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steph
July 30, 2012 at 9:39 pm
It’s a story Ken. Modern educated Christians know it is a story, written in the first century. Resurrection and God can be understood as metaphors, as symbols. Your interpretation is “out to lunch”, uninformed and irresponsible speculation. Like calling Obama a Muslim.
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Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Pointing out that Obama HIMSELF says he is a Christian who believes in the Resurrection is the same thing as calling him a Muslim?
I don’t think I’m the one whose interpretation is out to luck. This is America. When presidents talk about the Resurrection, it’s ALWAYS
literal. It’s a political code as much as anything else.
People really believe this stuff here. It’s not like Europe. Literal is the
default, especially when the President says it. It would be politically suicidal for a political candidate at that level to hint at anything but a literal belief in the Resurrection of Christ. The one possible excuse would be Jewishness, but only as long as he never talked about it.
rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 10:05 pm
There are two sorts of people who take it literally: Fundamnentalists who believe in the physical rescucitation of a corpse and atheists who refuse to believe there is any other way of taking it. No one is punking you, but you are hopelessly out of touch with the latest trends and surveys http://religions.pewforum.org/reports/ which show that America is still “religious” but is changing more rapidly than any other nation in that regard. Bluntly, you oversimplify. Don’t fight yesterday’s monsters; there is enough to worry about. Obama’s religion — tepid whatever it is — is not one of them.
rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 10:18 pm
FYI: http://www.albertmohler.com/2006/04/07/do-christians-still-believe-in-the-resurrection-of-the-body/
steph
July 31, 2012 at 10:52 am
Yes, Mohler. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in America with a statement of faith. He is a creationist too, writes ‘articles’ against evolution. He’s a fundamentalist and a Christian apologist. Undeniable and arrogant fundamentalism.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 3:55 am
Ken,
The ‘non-literal way’ is to believe in the immortality of the soul, but not necessarily the immortality of the actual kidneys, ear lobes, nipples, those little hairs on the palms of one’s hands, etc. Whether this is literally believed to be literal immortality or not is the part that is literally confusing to me. I suspect that some think it important to spend time subdividing the hairs. Why, I’m not entirely sure.
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Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 11:44 pm
I am well schooled in the varieties of Christian experience and allegory, by the way. I know that large numbers of Christians do not view the resurrection literally. My wife is one of them. Obama is not just an American Christian, though, he’s the President, and there is no room for nuance for a President to make those kinds of public religious affirmations. He got accused by Rush Limbaugh of being an atheist (or maybe it was a Muslim) because he once called Jesus “not just a son of God,” because he didn’t say “THE son of God,”
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steph
July 31, 2012 at 11:02 am
That’s simply not true Ken. I’ve read it. Obama did not say that at all. He told the story as a story as any decent liberal theologian would. He’s been accused of being atheist and Muslim because he’s simply not a fundamentalist biblical literalist Ken.
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Ken Scaletta
July 31, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Obama was not telling a story, he was referencing the story as fact. He does it every Easter.
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steph
July 31, 2012 at 9:02 pm
Of course he does it every Easter. “As fact”. Nonsense. Only a literalist couldn’t tell the difference. All you do is insist on contradicting with no concept of lateral thinking.
davidjohnmills
August 1, 2012 at 12:07 am
I tend to agree with ken. Obama is presenting it as fact. If he were to tell his audience that Prometheus was crucified or was resurrected, that would be different.
Of course, he’s not a bible literalist, but either there is something in there which he believes to be true, or there isn’t. And if he’s just agnostic and undecided about the whole thing, well, that’s fine. But hat’s not what he’s presenting.
Pardon me for thinking there is something fudged about this. :)
steph
August 1, 2012 at 9:31 am
Of course you agree with Ken, Mills. You have similar literal tools of interpretation. Obama delivered a speech in which a traditional story is presented. This is not a delivery of fact, regardless of how his audience, ie you and Ken and other like-minded people, received it. Read more speeches and monologues and compare the variety within them.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 12:13 pm
What, exactly, is the ‘point’ of believing in a metaphorical or allegorical resurrection?
It certainly must be confusing being a liberal Christian. Quite a lot of doublethink.
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steph
July 31, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Not at all. And not ‘double’. Just rational.
This is an example of liberal Christianity. It’s a large inclusive progressive Anglican church. It’s about people – all people – not about ‘God’. Beliefs are about people, not ‘God’.
http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?sid=512&id=1041
http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?id=982&sid=527
http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/index.php
I’ve become a acquainted with Clay Nelson, one of the priests at St Matthews in the City, and when I talk to him a can see the appeal. I’ve never believed in God even when I was little. In a secular society with many religions, I grew up without believing or taking on any religions. I’m not a Christian. I’m a historian. But I may as well be a ‘Christian’, talking to Clay. He said to me ‘You like us because we’re not very religious’ and I said ‘No, I like you precisely because you are’.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Steph,
I’m sure Clay and the other guys at St matthews are really nice, decent, caring, worthwhile humans. I’m sure I would like them too. As a matter of fact, my most favourite fellow forum members at the Dawkins site were a practicing Roman Catholic and an Anglican minister respectively. In my daily life in the real world, I make no distinctions when choosing or enjoying friendships. I’m assuming you’ll appreciate I’m not just saying that to gain some sort of credentials. :)
I have a lot of respect for liberal versions of Christianity.
I just happen to think it involves a delusion, and personally, I prefer to deal with my life on those terms, even if it isn’t, in many ways, as attractive a prospect.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 6:14 pm
I might add, to my preceding post, that another of my most favourite fellow forum members at Dawkins was the crankiest atheist you are ever likely to meet. He would make Dawkins et al look like the four horsemen of the apocawimps. :)
steph
July 31, 2012 at 8:26 pm
David – it’s not about liking him personally. It’s about liking and appreciating their worthwhile projects, efforts, community and common sense. There are many liberal churches and liberal Christians like this in the UK too. And metaphor and allegory aren’t confusing to them. Why on earth should it be with sensible people? When you deteroriate into silly summaries like “delusion” I realise you haven’t bothered to listen or try to understand or even investigated their website and articles. To suggest there is “delusion” involved in people who believe nothing that contradicts the evidence of science, accept evolution and big bang and probably know more about it than many atheists who claim to love science, and don’t believe in any human constructed being or one which created a heaven and earth, is quite frankly untrue and evidence of your unwillingness to understand.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 11:50 pm
Steph, I do wish you would stop telling those who take a different view from you that they don’t listen or are unwilling to uynderstand. I really do. It makes discourse very difficult. :)
To me,the two things, their admirable worth as people and their (IMO) likely delusion regarding the supernatural are two different things, two aspects of who they are and what they do. I was not ‘summarising’ everything about them as ‘deluded’, just their belief in the supernatural, which considering the lack of any decent evidence for, is not, as you suggest rational.
And of course, I could be wrong. :)
steph
August 1, 2012 at 9:23 am
The point is these liberal Christians do not believe in super-natural things Mills. God as a metaphor, or ‘God’ as a convenient term for the unknown, or nature etc is not belief is the super-natural. I might add that the definition of ‘liberal’ in some cultural environments seems to vary and some Christians living in predominantly conservative fundamentalist environments might understandably consider themselves liberal, when not all of them qualify with the truly liberal criteria. I do wish you’d stop adorning your comments so liberally with little smiling faces. They don’t reflect the nature of your comments with any veracity.
rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 4:07 pm
I don’t think your question is formed properly; you don’t believe “in” an allegorical resurrection; you believe “that” it is some sort of story, as that’s what an allegory is. Some sort of story. Anyone who has made that transition in interpretation is already one step ahead of the person who has just come to think it isn’t historically, factually true, unless you think that in religion the only opposite of true is false. I think that in most cases the opposite of not true is what then?I suspect most atheists are stuck in the light-switch mode. But the study of religion isn’t really helped along by applying modal logic to P. The resurrection of Jesus is not stated as a proposition; it exists as a story. It can be formulated as a proposition, just as God (G) created the world (W) can be, but that is already a conversion. Those of us who study religion are a litle amused at the fact that propositional truth and falsity is all that seems to interest some people –I think of Richard Carrier and his absuird Bayesian approach and the mythtics-about these texts, as if they exist for no other purpose than to be judged factual or or fantasy, and provide no other information.
Partly I suppose this “It’s all a load of rubbish approach” comes from the nature of the topic–Christianity has had a purchase on the western mind for a very long time, and it is probably necessary for many more people to go through the rubbishing stage. Even some fairly bright men like Dawkins seem to have got stuck in that mode. But I don’t think the best scholars in the field of religion can afford to say, e.g., We’ve squeezed the texts for their factuality and found out they weren’t true. We know that. Because that is not the question the texts answer, or more precisely not the questions that are put to them. As I feel a lecture coming on I will stop; but it is probably worth a blog, so thank you for an inspiring question.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 5:34 pm
No prob Joseph. Thank you for an answer which doesn\’t really answer anything.
I find the matter very confusing. I can\’t help but think that we are dodging around the central issue.
Where is Jesus now? Or his soul, or whatever.
If you think it’s anywhere, I think that’s unlikely. It hardly seems to matter in any significant way whether one thinks his actual body literally/actually survived, somewhere, or just his actual soul, is largely irrelevant. Either way, if nothing literally/actually survived, what’s the point in enjoying an allegory, on its own, as it were, without the literality/actuality beneath?
Look. If people want to be agnostic, that’s fine with me. I was one up until a few years ago, so I know how it goes (at least in my case). At some point, I decided I just wasn’t following through in my thinking.
rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 6:29 pm
@David: I did do my best to answer in some detail what I thought was your question. Your comment is that “It doesn’t answer anything.” I will not engage further on this, not because it is not an interesting topic but because you do not not acknowledge that the answer was substantive. I think it was. It may not be the answer you wanted: that is not the issue.
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 11:42 pm
@ joseph.
Apologies if that came across as rude. It wasn’t meant to, and it is hard (I find) sometimes to convey lighthearted via a keyboard, but it was badly worded. :)
Actually, I don’t think atheists, at least not all atheists (everyone, atheists and non atheists are on a sort of spectrum I think) are stuck in light switch mode, maybe they just move onto (or simply in the direction of) a different square on the board after ‘what then?’
Where do you go after that question, bearing in mind that ‘that bit not literally true’ preceded it? Do you go to a ‘this bit maybe true’ square? If so, which bit (do you think may be true)? Or are you undecided and open. Or more to the point (the off topic point, I suppose, what happened to Indians?) which bit does Obama, for example, think is true?
This is all very much off topic, I’m sure. I hadn’t intended to get into an atheism versus…..something else…discussion. :)
steph
August 1, 2012 at 10:26 am
What liberal Christianity is, ‘God’ and the ‘divine’ as metaphor.
“A Comprehensive Vision of God”, by Clay Nelson, a priest at St Matthews in the City Auckland Aotearoa. Liberal inclusive Christianity.
“I want to begin with Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician turned theologian. He argued that we cannot account for the creative process without an understanding of the role of the divine. His central insight is that everything becomes whatever it becomes by virtue of how it relates to everything else. Whether you are a Hobbs-Boson subatomic particle, a person or even God, your identity over time develops though a process of relating to everything else.
Whitehead spent a lot of time observing nature. His conclusion was that the mystery at the base of all that is, is not arbitrary. Our experience of that mystery through our relationships with everything else gives us the confidence to know the final worth of our existence. We matter.
So why does that matter? It matters because we have chosen to be part of a religion. The purpose of any religion is to seek a comprehensive understanding of the good. There is no aspect of life that religion’s vision of the good doesn’t include. When bad things happen in any aspect of life, including religion, we have become detached from a comprehensive understanding of the good.”
Read the whole thing. It’s very well expressed.
http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?sid=573&id=1277
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Genetics 101: “Please Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful”
by rjosephhoffmann
Genetics 101
by admin Posted on December 9, 2011
A recent response from a reader aptly named “Hunt” about atheist criticism and tactics quotes one of the mavens of the movement (now that new atheism is not new they seem to want the name back), Greta Christina, who runs a site called Greta Christina.
I am taking Hunt at his usually impolite word when he says she says,
“People don’t dislike atheists because of our tactics; they dislike atheists because of who we are”
I don’t have any idea of what that throwaway line means either (“I don’t like you because you’re a mean and nasty old bugger Uncle Crank. I dislike you because you’re an uncle”). But giving Ms Christina the benefit of a doubt, since I have occasionally smiled at her postings, let me just say that “Hunt” has ripped another page out of the Atheist Surefire Response Manual (send $750 to me for your free copy along with prayer request), while totally belying everything Ms Christina is vouching for–because Hunt’s tactics are a lot like Uncle Crank.
Uncle Crank
In the history of fighting for basic human rights, from which Hunt’s “rationale” is derived, there have certainly been instances where the genetic argument works: African-Americans were not disliked for their actions but for the colour of their skin (who they were). Women and gays were held in contempt by an unconscientized America as women and gays.
At a certain point, however, the dis-resemblance of victimized classes overrides resemblance and the genetic argument becomes a genetic fallacy. America’s first experience of this is when fat people wanted to be considered a civil rights cause: After all, they suffered workplace discrimination, weren’t happy that the racks at Walmart couldn’t accommodate XXX-L in sufficient quantity (though that has hugely changed) and weren’t popular on airplanes.
But whatever the merits of seeing fatness as a socially, genetically and psychologically determined condition rather than an outcome, people still think fat people are fat. And blacks, gays, women and Buddhist monks–probably even atheists–groan when they see a fatty waddling down the aisle toward the only remaining seat, next to them. Me, I’d prefer the fatty to the Buddhist monk. Monks are rude and don’t use deodorant.
my Space
That is what happens when you try to make atheists the same sort of “victims” that blacks, gays and women have historically and really been on the basis of suspicion and dislike. The difference of course is that the three latter classes are powerless to control or alter, except through extraordinary means, anything about who or what they are.
Changing your mind is not at all like changing your skin colour. I had a useful discussion about this with Paul Cliteur a few years back in Amsterdam while he was finishing his superb book The Secular Outlook. It should be required reading for every atheist. But don’t bother reading it if you want different information than I’m giving you here. Go on believing what you have believed because you read it on an atheist website.
“Believing” or disbelieving something is not the same sort of thing as being something, even though we use the verb ‘to be” to describe various kinds of conditions ranging from illness to sexuality. Anyone who claims a modicum of philosophical sophistication knows what a category mistake is, so you will know that you can’t shove everything into one box and call it sand when there are sea shells and dead animals and coins and syringes in it. Atheists have the power to change their mind–indeed once prided themselves on this ability.
Atheists have, theoretically, the ability to become believers. Believers have the power to become atheists. I know people who have gone in either direction and swing, like me, both ways. That’s the routine.
which is it
It’s precisely this intellectual motility combined with the methods that you use or choose to get there that define you as an atheist. But to say that people dislike you because you don’t believe in god surely has something to do with the way you externalize that belief. If that weren’t true, we wouldn’t be appalled at fundamentalism. If radically conservative Christian and Muslims were Quakers or non-voting Amish who would care about them? We care about them because they are vocal and in-your-face with their absurd moral agendas.
Consequently, like it or not, the basic reason people dislike atheists is not because of some hypogeal characteristic that makes atheism an essence but the observable things that atheists say or do. The same reason you don’t like uncle Crank.
And like it or not, that makes them (us) much more like the heretics and apostates of yore, our close cousins, than like the victimized members of twentieth century rights-struggles. If, in other words, you choose categories, be careful what you choose.
Never mind. I dealt with this issue a couple of years ago when people were sleeping. I don’t buy the fact that the word atheist is a scary word: that’s something atheists like to think because it feeds the victimization mentality now resurgent in the community.
Have a look:
Who Was You?
The Boston Lowells knew who they were. From their perch on Beacon Hill they enjoyed a perspective that encouraged them to believe in the Unitarian credo: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the neighborhood of Boston. When William Filene opened a discount store in the basement of his father’s store to sell overstock and closeout merchandise through his “automatic bargain basement” (off the rack, serve yourself), Beacon Hill was a swarm of indignation. The son of a (Jewish!) peddler would throw Boston society into disarray. Cheap clothes that looked like finery? Now even Irishwomen who worked as chambermaids could look respectable. That is, if you didn’t look too closely.
Never to be persuaded without a firsthand look, Anna Parker Lowell walked into Filene’s downtown store near Washington Street, coiffed and umbrellad, sought directions “to the so-called Basement” and took the steps with the polish of someone who was used to grand staircases. Once aground she saw women flipping through racks of dresses like playing cards–choosing, refusing, playing tug-a-war, even threatening bodily harm if a latecomer tried to prise her find away from someone with a prior claim. “Disgusting,” Mrs Lowell tsked to herself. “Just look at them.”
Just when she had satisfied herself that Edward Filene’s brainstorm would mean the end of high society in Boston her eyes lit on a beautiful taffeta gown that looked just the thing for the spring ball at Harvard. She moved closer for a better look. As she reached to collect her prize, a woman of questionable pedigree snapped it from the rack and headed for the till. “Not so fast my dear,” said Mrs Lowell. “I was about to have that dress.” “You was,” said the woman without slowing. “I don’t think you understand.” I had chosen that dress. I was just about to collect it.” “You was,” said the woman, unable to evade Mrs Lowell’s pursuit because of a crowded aisle. “Look here, madam. I didn’t want to tell you who I was, but I will if you persist.” The woman stopped, turned, looked Mrs Lowell in the eye, and said “Ok dearie: Who wasyou?”
I have always wondered what people mean when they say “That’s who I am,” but usually they mean something silly and parochial: I’m a Catholic, a democrat, a creationist, a car dealer, an ex-con, a neo-con. It’s the substitution of code for argument, a conversation stopper rather than an invitation to discuss a position or idea. Clearly identity matters, but the twentieth century was distinctive in breaking down the sorts of identities that isolated people from majority communities and power structures.
There are big identities and small identities, weak and strong. Part of this has to do with the nature of language and part with the nature of things. Being a democrat or a used car salesman are weak identities: you can change those things tomorrow if you change your mind or lose your job. Being an African-American or a male, despite the fact that we know a lot more about race and sexuality now than we did fifty years ago, still have a lot to do with properties and are much more difficult to change. To say, “I’m gay,” is not just to say “I’m not straight” but to challenge the idea of straight as normative and authoritative. That’s different from saying, “I’m Catholic,” if by that you mean you’re on your way to heaven and the guy you’re talking to is going the opposite way. Beware of anyone who says “That’s who/what I am” with a smile on his face.
Identities can be a great source of fun, as when Ambrose Bierce (the Devil’s Dictionary, 1925) defines a bride as “a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her” and “Brute” as husband, or a “minister as “An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility.” Too bad that in Bierce’s day the Vegan craze wasn’t what it is in the twenty first century, but he did have this to say about clairvoyants: “A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.”
The weakest identities of all are the ones that have to do with what we believe to be the meaning of life. I can remember in college three distinct phases of change: being a socialist at seventeen, a half-hearted anarchist at twenty, and an existentialist at twenty one.
I recovered from these infatuations by not permitting myself to stop reading and never reading Camus after thirty. With confusion intact, I went to Divinity School and emerged as confused and doubtful as ever. Voltaire (or maybe his aunt) said it was only his skepticism that prevented him from being an atheist. That was me, too.
I can’t doubt that there are “meaning-of-life” identities that one holds passionately and therefore appear to qualify for the “That’s who I am” category of identification. I have known people whose non-belief is as fervent as the belief of a twice born Baptist or Mormon elder, people who say “I am an atheist” as proudly as an evangelical says “I’m born again.” It’s tempting to say, isn’t it, that the difference between these two statements is that the atheist is smart and the Born again needs his intelligence quotient checked. But we all know that identity statements are code for a whole range of ideas that need to be unpacked and call for explanation. An atheist who felt his non-belief in God entitled him to murder children because of the absence of divine commands to the contrary would be no better than a cult member who believed that disobedient sons can be stoned because it says they can in the Bible.
I feel my Atheist Reader squirming, because while you liked the Bright-Dim difference, you don’t like equivalences. When Katherine Hepburn turns out to be an atheist people say, “I just knew it. Such a strong woman.” When Pol-Pot says God is bunk, we think “Well that’s different, isn’t it—and so far away?”
Personally, I don’t like people who say “That’s who I am,” or “That’s what weare,” or “We need to be honest about who we are.” At a crude level I want to say WTF? It’s eerily metaphysical when atheists do it—not only because it’s the language God uses when he introduces himself to Moses on Sinai. You remember, right?: Moses hasn’t been properly introduced and God says, “That’s who I am,” and when pressed after Moses accuses God of being slippery says “I am what I am.”
I reckon what he really means is, “You know—God—the one who does firmament, landscaping, Leviathan, floods, human beings God.” In fairness, however, the Hebrew Bible insisted that God was not just a proposition but an actor on the human stage. I don’t believe that God did any of the things ascribed to him in the Bible, but to believe in a doer and deeds is a perfectly legitimate way to establish an identity—even if it’s a fictional identity. That’s why Jewish atheists begin by denying the deeds and then the doer. None of this silly ontological stuff: too Christian, too mental.
But I find it a lot harder to know who I am or what we are on the basis of not believing something.
“We need to be honest about who we are” coming from an atheist doesn’t translate easily into the propertied descriptions of being black, gay, female or physically challenged–things over which people have no choice and no control.
It’s tempting, I know, to think the things we believe or don’t believe have the same status as the things that constitute us as persons or collectives of persons. But you would laugh at a used car salesman saying at dinner, “Dammit, Mother, I’m tired of hiding from who I am. Tomorrow I’m going right into the boss’s office and say to him, ‘Mr Jones: I am Bill Smith and I’m an atheist.” You would not laugh at someone who said, “Mr Jones: I haven’t had a raise in two years. Is it because I’m black?”
Atheists often complain when religious groups claim special treatment on the pretext that any speech against religion is defamatory while claiming equivalent protection for their own beliefs. But atheists need to be very careful about traveling the road of victimization and minority rights or simply adopting the legal definitions supplied under non-discrimination laws. Especially when racial, sexual orientation and gender provisions do not apply to atheism and the protection accorded to religious beliefs, if embraced by atheists, creates a stew of issues–not the least of which is that there is no settled definition of atheism and if there were a true freethinker would reject it.
Difference is deceptive, especially when it comes to self-definition. Is coming out atheist like coming out gay, an act of courage? On what basis–the fact that terms like “minority,” “unpopular” and “misunderstood” can be applied to both categories? But simply to embrace a minority position toward a “divine being” based on denying a premise is not an act of bravery. It doesn’t make you who you are or what you are. It’s neither race, profession nor party platform—not even a philosophical position or scientific theory. It’s not something to be ashamed of or proud of. It’s just about an idea—even if it’s a really Big idea.
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Published: July 29, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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15 Responses to “Genetics 101: “Please Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful””
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Franklin Percival
July 29, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Verb Sap.
Reply
Ken Scaletta
July 29, 2012 at 8:54 pm
I have no quarrel with any of this as far as it goes, but the fact still remains that the reason atheists are disliked by religionists is because of what they THINK, not because of their tone or their body language or any of that stuff. Is a belief (or lack one) not a genus? If someone hates Catholics, what do they hate?
Does it take courage to come out as an atheist? For some people it does, not because they are a persecuted minority, but because it can be an earthquake on a personal and familial level, especially if one is in an entrenched religious environment. it can split up marriages, cost people relationships with parents, etc.
I’m originally from the deep south, and I used to keep my atheism a secret because people reacted (quite literally) as if I said I worshiped the dark prince Satan (I was told more than once that atheism and Satan worship were somehow the same thing).
People ARE rude to atheists, and they do discriminate in employment and in other ways. There often IS a knee jerk reaction from religionists who insist on transforming what should be a trivial difference into a profound one.
Whatever irrational hostility some atheists seem to carry towards religion (and I think the angry ones tend to be the ones who have previously had an abusive relationship with religion) is reciprocated a thousandfold.
Incidentally, nobody hates religion more than religionists. They just hate everybody ELSE’S religion. Try listening to 15 minutes of Christian radio on the subject of Muslims (or Hindus or Buddhists or Scientologists) sometime.
I will be bothered by rude atheists whenever the rest of the world becomes bothered by rude religionists.
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steph
July 29, 2012 at 9:13 pm
You are correct as far as fundamentalist Christians pariticularly in a certain cultural context. But liberal Christians are not rude and hostile towards other religious faiths, and do constantly criticise fundamentalism, including addressing their hatred towards people who believe in a different worldview.
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Ken Scaletta
July 29, 2012 at 10:28 pm
That’s why I make an effort to use the word “religionist” instead of “religious” or generically Christian. I use the specific word “religionist” to refer to those who actively politicize and/or evangelize their religion. I believe Maureen Dowd uses the phrase, “arm band religion.” That’s what I’m talking about.
Pseudonym
July 29, 2012 at 11:10 pm
My experience as a liberal Christian is that this only partly true. On one hand, of course we constantly resent and criticise fundamentalism, for all the good it does. But on the other hand, we try very hard not to hate, even if we actually do hate. We avoid hate to the point of neurosis.
We know our history well enough that we know what happens when sects conflict. People get hurt. Moreover, sectarian conflict, even of the verbal variety, is bad PR. We want to get people to donate to our charities. If we make a point of putting our differences out there in the public sphere, it hurts us and those we are trying to help, because people won’t donate to an organisation involved in partisan squabbling.
The effect is that the liberal church has contributed to (as Chris Hedges put it) the failure of the liberal classes to adequately challenge counter-enlightenment thinking.
It’s a pretty tough bind we’re in, even if it’s partly of our own making. If anyone has any concrete suggestions, please let us know.
steph
July 30, 2012 at 10:22 am
Modern religious people are “bothered” by your “religionists” Ken. As soon as people start intruding on others and abusing their freedoms using religion, decent religious people are critical. The only people who aren’t “bothered” by “religionists” or fundamentalists, are themselves. So why aren’t you bothered about rude atheists.
steph
July 30, 2012 at 11:04 am
Pseudonym: I don’t think your experience as a liberal Christian, conflicts with my description of modern liberal Christian churches. In my experience and research, liberal Christians do not display hatred towards fundamentalists but are genuinely and publically critical. Modern liberal Christian churches are publically critical and generally achieve their message in an amusing or cynical, sometimes subtle, but always educational way.
For example St Matthew’s in the City Auckland, a big inclusive ‘progressive’ church open to all people of any faith and non believers, http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/index.php
is …. critical of dogmatic religion and fundamentalism in interesting and clever ways:http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?id=982&sid=527
including billboards on the church property which are picked up and heavily publicised and appreciated by all (except fundamentalists, generally internationally as NZ is a bit scarce on those)http://religiousfreaks.com/UserFiles/Image/mary.pregnancy.test.jpg
http://stmatthews.org.nz/images/UserFiles/File/petition-banner.jpg
http://www.cognitivedissident.org/images/20100406-easter1.jpg
http://adsoftheworld.com/files/images/stcatering.preview.jpg
etc….
St Matthews in the City, while being open to anyone, is involved in interfaith groups, social justice and education, community projects and activities: caring for the aged, tree planting etc. Many liberal churches are active such activities and interfaith groups around the world and in New Zealand the network was advocated and sponsored over a decade ago due to increased faiths immigrating, by our (atheist) Prime Minister who worked closely with religious groups and my home Study of Religion Department at Victoria University in Wellington.
Ken Scaletta
July 30, 2012 at 12:49 pm
“Modern religious people are “bothered” by your “religionists” Ken. As soon as people start intruding on others and abusing their freedoms using religion, decent religious people are critical.”
In my experience, this is simply not true, especially not in the US (I’ve lived and traveled in the UK, West Africa and South America, so i have some context for comparison). Most “liberal Christians” (and my wife is one of them) are quiet and non-confrontational about strident religionism. I am not just defining “religionism” as mundane bigotry, by the way, but also the oblivious pushiness and entitlement endemic to it. It’s always “rude” to say there’s no God, but never rude to say there is one. There’s a smug ubiquity of unconscious presumptions in the culture, each one too trivial, in each individual instance, to allow for polite objection, but which become cumulatively insufferable.
My wife is a liberal Catholic. Our kids are baptized Catholics. I was
raised in both Catholic and Southern Baptist traditions (mixed parentage), went to Catholic schools and took a BA in Religion at College. I, like most atheists, have been surrounded by religious people my whole life, including some highly compassionate ones interested in Social Justice. My wife is a pro-choice, pro-GBLT Catholic who works for a major religious charity at a high administrative level. She’s a much better person than I am (though I think it’s in spite of her religion, not on account of it), but she does not like confrontation, is not prone to challenge her own Church or congregants on issues I know she cares about (like the Church’s obstruction of condoms in Africa) just because she doesn’t want the unpleasantness of one-on-one direct confrontation with other people.
A lot of liberal Christians are passive by nature, not instinctively confrontational, but conciliatory, tolerant to a fault, appealing to impulses (such as empathy) that don’t exist (or at least are overridden by competing impulses and motivations) in religionists.
I actually don’t think religious liberals have any OBLIGATION to stifle their zealots. It’s all free speech to me. I think it is counterproductive for atheists to be gratuitously insulting. No one was ever persuaded to or away from a belief by being called stupid and/or crazy, but I also don’t feel any obligation, simply because I lack one of the same beliefs that rude atheists lack, to police them or object to them or protect theists from being annoyed or having their feelings hurt. Welcome to a slightly more level playing field.
davidjohnmills
July 30, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Ken,
On a more general note, as I’m sure you’re aware, there are polls in the USA which suggest that ‘atheist’ is one of the least attractive descriptors a person can have. If you want to be president, it is, apparently, better to be a gay muslim. :)
http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistbigotryprejudice/a/AtheistSurveys.htm
Furthermore, on a global scale, many countries are not as ‘enlightened’ as the USA. Apostasy is, in many, if not indeed most, muslim countries punishable by the death penalty. The fact that this is very rarely if ever carried through is, er, only slightly encouraging, I’m sure.
i myself am a very lucky, happy, non-whining atheist, with very little to complain about. True, my daughters are, I think, the only children in their school who have openly said they are secular, and to some extent have regretted this and now play it much more quietly (like good atheists of yore), although my eldest’s request to drop Religious education was refused on the grounds that it is a compulsory subject. When it was pointed out that this was not in fact the case, the head teacher resorted to telling her that alternative arrangements could not be arranged for her to timetable an alternative.
This is not really a big issue, though here in Northern Ireland, it is fair to say that we have more than our fair share of religious fundamentalists, including in high positionas in government, and that it is not the most comfortable place for an atheist, albeit it is not exactly dangerous or suffocating either.
I’m afraid I just don’t get the ‘why do atheists complain?’ objection. :)
rjosephhoffmann
July 30, 2012 at 3:36 pm
David et al.: So many books have been written on religion in America since, literally, de Tocqueville’s, that there is no easy way to take this on. The country was an uneven blend of Enlightenment, deist intellectuals like Jefferson and Franklin and cornpone roughnecks who reproduced in greater numbers than the Virginia and Boston elite and just wanted the Old Time Religion. The sociology is almost overpowering–you might start with Stephen Prothero’s book, though I think it’s not adequate. The standard dry survey is Yale historian Sidney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People, though there are at least a dozen others since he wrote it in the seventies. I have seen reputable analysts like OT schpolar James Barr crash and burn trying to take on the question of Fundamentalism: it is confounding, complex, maybe insoluble. Even the word “funadmentalism” was invented here in the US, but applied to a narrow range of born again biblical literalist sects at the time. Before that America had had three Great Awakenings of the Calvinist variety, and of very high intellectual caliber; Yale University in 1700 was founded in part by ministers who thought Harvard was going to hell, though Harvard had been founded in 1636 by the staunchest puritan refugees from England.
BUT: It isn’t at all far of the mark to say that religious liberalism of the sort we recognize today as “dominant” was also born here, from a different mother. While tent meetings were happening in Georgia, quietist Quakers ruled in Pennsylvania and led the anti-slavery movement. Mainstream protestantism in America is as liberal as one can imagine, though in steep decline, like religion generally. Presbyterians, Episcopalians (Anglicans) and even Methodists and Lutherans of certain stipes fight to keep their members. It is CERTAINLY true that the regressive, fundmentalist (and stranger) Christianity thrives in America as nowhere else, though there is now a strong liberal (and hence schismatic trend) in the evangelical churches as well.
My point here is not to write another book (though I could and have been tempted to) but to say that it is the sheer robustness of this kind of religion that drives unbelivers to be angrier here. It is true that “atheists” are not popular, but despite a certain uptick in their desire to claim victimization since new atheism (stupidly I think, given the numbers) began to advocate confrontation, they are simply unpopular, patronized, perhaps occasionally ridiculed. Unlike the UK and (even) Holland and Canada however, and this is the irony, America is officially, constitutionally secular–the first country in the world, I believe, to dictate strict separation of Church and State–the First Amendment. This is why the terms secular and religion (and atheist) are bound to collide. And while the framers of the Constitution made it that way to avoid the 500 years of religious warfare that had riddled the Europe they came from, the protracted culture wars that have arisen in the XXI century seem verbally just as bloody. The explanations for me are always historical: I am sorry for that. But to try to make sense of it only at the receiving end will just cause you tear your hair out. I think that if the First Amendment were put to a vote today, it would fail in this Congress and in the states. In fact, I’ve suggested more than once that the best way to make America truly secular is to repeal it and declare the country officially Baptist.
steph
July 30, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Ken, In certain social contexts as I implied above, fundamentalist and conservative religions are more prominent and saturate government and education too. This would imply America and West Africa as well. In the UK and the Antipodes the situation is entirely different. I have been living in the UK for six years researching religion and contemporary belief and practice too. Many Christians here and in the Antipodes are secular Christians, if not most here and all in the Antipodes, and many do not believe in ‘God’. It was coined as Secular Christianity or Christianity without God. There is simply not the prejudice against non believers that you suggest. For the UK, even Rowan Williams, stepping down as Bishop of a conservative English Church, has been outspoken on many matters of social justice. I have worked with many different types of religious groups, I work with religious colleagues as well as non believers, and never in my life have I been criticised here or in the Antipodes for my lack of belief and I know nobody who has. Yet Fundamentalism is publically vilified. Not even when I was a child and most of my schoolmates went to church or synagogue or mosque. It simply isn’t relevant. It’s about cultural context, secular government, secular justice system and secular education. It’s about personal worldviews being irrelevant to social and interactive life.http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199577873.do
For an example reflecting the Antipodean situation see my reply to Pseudonym, and have a look at Lloyd Geering, former minister, emeritus Professor and Christian theologian, who like many people and their leaders, do not believe in ‘God’. http://www.bookfinder.com/author/lloyd-geering/
davidjohnmills
July 30, 2012 at 7:16 pm
For what it’s worth, my prognosis regarding the cranky atheism which is the focus of so much objection here, and with which I do have some sympathy (though no doubt I would find more of it ‘permissible’ than some here) is that it will gradually subside. I don’t mean that it will disappear.
Atheism may have long roots historically, but they have been, until very recently, very thin and straggley, and (as is the norm with roots) somewhat buried. The world (generalizing disasterously here) is not used to atheism sprouting and flowering above ground, and to be fair atheism itself is not entirely familiar with the exotic new environment either.
davidjohnmills
July 30, 2012 at 7:00 pm
@ Joseph.
‘In fact, I’ve suggested more than once that the best way to make America truly secular is to repeal it and declare the country officially Baptist.’
Nice one. :)
@ steph,
yes, it is better when people are not bickering so much. The antipodes sound attractive in that sense.
On another note, I do think the question of whether atheism/atheists are (and I’m generalizing horribly here) unpopular is or isn’t linked to their behavior is an interesting one, and I must admit, I’m not tempted to agree that it’s because there are a number of cranky ones. With atheism (fairly consistently, though not always recently) ‘ranked’ below lesbian muslim in the USA and under threat of excecution (albeit only in principle) in large areas of the globe, I think that anyone making a case that most of them are cranky would have a bit of a task to be convincing.
Apologies for repeating the data set. :)
For the record, I think atheist is ranked above gay and vegetarian here. In fact, in certain parts of the country it wouldn’t matter if you were a black lesbian atheist psychpath vegetarian so long as you were a Protestant (or Roman catholic as appropriate to street context) black lesbian atheist psychpath vegetarian. It’s a question of priorities.
davidjohnmills
July 30, 2012 at 6:48 am
The (by now) familiar mixture of mousse and manure reheated and served up, with a slice of caricature on the side and a dash of inconsistency to top it all off. Yum yum. Ho hum.
Why am I slightly reminded of Marvin from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe?
“Reverse primary thrust, Marvin.” That’s what they say to me. “Open airlock number 3, Marvin.” “Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?” Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. ‘
Reply
davidjohnmills
July 30, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Joseph,
It seems that in a lot of your posts, the jumping off point is an objection to a particular atheist, or a particular type of New atheist, or somesuch understandable and arguably justifiable starting point, but that you very soon lapse into just talking about ‘atheism’. I need hardly point out, I’m sure that this segue from the particular to the general all but renders the latter pointless, and it is virtually impossible to address, being, er, straw.
To add, it seems to be there are at least a couple of other fallacies lurking in there. Were one to adopt your argument that atheism is not like being a woman, or black, or gay (ie something one can’t change) and is therefore a weak basis to bring up discrimination, I suggest you hop into your time machine and go back a few decades to McCarthyism.
Finally, I find your otherwize intelligent as usual discourse somewhat inconsistent with another recent post, since it sounds a bit like what Dawkins said to Rebecca Watson (‘you/they have nothing to ‘really’ complain about) and I’m sure you wouldn’t endorse that. :)
Luckily, atheism is not reliant on the New Oxonian for its survival.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate
by rjosephhoffmann
Reblogged from The New Oxonian:
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I was having dinner with friends before leaving the sweltering Lahore summer to return to Maine in June. Discussion turned to politics, as it often does in foreign parts. Having spent most of my professional life, by choice, outside the United States, I have learned to fine –tune my discourse, even to absorb comments that betray a woeful lack of information or historical perspective on America.
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Published: July 29, 2012
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate
by rjosephhoffmann
franklin2
I was having dinner with friends before leaving the sweltering Lahore summer to return to Maine in June. Discussion turned to politics, as it often does in foreign parts. Having spent most of my professional life, by choice, outside the United States, I have learned to fine –tune my discourse, even to absorb comments that betray a woeful lack of information or historical perspective on America.
The one that requires the deftest response is what I have come to call the “German question.” Every expat has heard it in one form or another: “How is it that America continues to be strong?” A rough translation is, “Given your Coca-Cola view of the world, your cave-dwelling masses who can’t find Europe on the map, a national legislature whose debates we run on our comedy channels, why hasn’t your country blown itself up?”
America, as we all know, is unavoidable. I have spent my whole life running from it. Probably because the various movements ranging from tepid socialism to anarchism to secular humanism that try to make a dent in its demeanor and overt sense of Exceptionalism are full of Americans, they quickly become homespun, dull and remind you of church. To avoid this curse of serial movementeering I joined the motley band of those who take exception to exceptionalism in the far corners of the world. Here we try to avoid each other by pretending we’re a lot more interesting than we really are. The common denominator among expatriates is that each of us privately thinks the reasons he is living abroad are terribly important and special whereas your countryman’s presence abroad marks him as a misfit or a political refugee. In the case of missionaries, this is usually true.
But the word “misfit” will do, especially for Americans. I have been a misfit in Australia, where my older daughter was born, in England, where my younger daughter was born, and with wife and them in tow developed graduate skills as a misfit in three African nations, in Beirut, in Wider Europe, in Pakistan.
I knew I was at an irredeemable point in my exile when, on her return to Oxford, a teacher asked my nine-year-old daughter if she had ever lived out of the country–in this case outside the UK—and when she began to rattle off for the benefit of a dazzled group of classmates the places she had lived the teacher said, “No dear, I didn’t ask where you have gone for holiday.”
Unfortunately, the condition of being a real misfit is probably an irreversible condition. You know this when you realize that the only place you feel really Not at Home is back in the USA. Odd, because I always considered myself a non-extremist politically. I do not seek the overthrow of the United States government nor predict with French hauteur that America’s ascendancy in the twentieth century was a drole act of Fate, serving as further disproof of the existence of a just God.
I do not believe America is evil. I do not think other countries, with the exception of Iceland, are “better,” or at least not much better. And I regard the idea that America is the “greatest nation on earth” as the kind of Barnumesqe mildew that grows on the brains of gun lobbyists, NASCAR addicts and people from Alabama generally. Like a pretty good novel, America has a pretty good story to tell. But as the hearings for judge Sonja Sotomayor just demonstrated, it can sound ugly in the mouths of dumb southern lawyers who get elected to the United States Senate.
My misfitedness has now reached a critical level. This visit home coincided with two epic events, or rather the aftermath of them: the election of Barack Obama and the (consequent) possibility that other countries would begin to see an aspect of “America” that corresponds to what Americans think about themselves—the “liberty and justice for all” bit.
As a believer in omens and appreciator of the British knack for getting ceremony right—especially occasions of state—I was a bit thrown off by the Inauguration—a Chief Justice who botched the only solemn component of the day, the Oath of Office, ah! and that dreadful flatulent praying and that worse poem (etc.). But I could defend these things by saying, “Hey: we’re a seriously democratic place that takes mediocrity seriously. Why shouldn’t awful liturgy be the appropriate paradigm for what we’re all about?”
But six months on, my return passage is booked. “Yes we can” has become, “Maybe not.”
Simple principles of justice, embedded in the reform of health care for this allegedly rich and powerful and compassionate nation, are turning into another fight about bogeymen—euthanizers, atheists with syringes visiting hospitals and hospices.
Arguments that would be risible in almost any other country on earth—the “birther” discussion, for example–are dealt with by “serious” newscasters as coming from a nutty fringe that they fertilize with every news story devoted to the nuts.
Billions of dollars are going to be spent not on giving people a break with their insurance plans but in advertising campaigns designed to convince old people that liberals are trying to send them to their grave. (“And crowned thy good with brotherhood.” ) Forgive my saying that a big, wide more interesting world that doesn’t give a camel’s fart about this idiocy beckons.
As the country eats more and learns less, its historical revolutionary spirit in politics has descended to the level of a football game where policy and real issues matter far less than popularity and the opportunity to change the team at half time. America’s brain seems to have gone to its trans-fatty butt.
Flash: The President is in Trouble. Poll numbers down.
Flash: Republicans are gaining ground, poised to take back the House in 2010.
Never mind that literally nothing has happened to cause these numbers to change. The point is, a game is being played. Half time is coming up. The paradigm for politics has been set by Wal-Mart, where store wide Thanksgiving comes in August and Christmas on Labor Day.
Is the point to get to the Apocalypse sooner? Just to vindicate the expectations of those southern Republicans?
Misfits of the expatriate variety have an acute awareness of what the citizens of other places hear when they listen to CNN International or the edgier-bordering-on cynical reports about America on the BBC and other international channels.
The average American sitting in his living room in Ropeadope, Iowa (if he listens to news at all) doesn’t give a flying fig about the giftie gie us. I’m sure there was a time when I didn’t care either, because like all Americans I thought the world was in orbit around American power and interests. It came as quite a shock when I discovered my cosmology was way off, that American mass and strength didn’t make America great except in the derogatory sense Freud meant when he said, “America–great, yes: a great mistake.”
I am old enough alas to remember Viet Nam era bumper stickers that read, “America: Love it or Leave It.” I was living in the American south in those days, and I tended to agree. Why would you stay if you could leave. It’s a free country. The doors are open. That’s how people including my ancestors got in.
But now I am a stranger in a strange land, where not the election but the assassination of JFK has become the seminal and defining element in a country that seems to have taken another giant step forward in advance of many bigger steps back.
I suppose America has always been an idea, more than a country. That is why it is hated around the world. It’s a theological dilemma isn’t it? Just like the God who is meant to be sublimely good and compassionate and merciful and fair can be the opposite, America turns out to be nothing but a disappointment, the negation of the ideal. You learn to doubt a God like that. You learn to be a political atheist about a country like that.
With its gaming politics, its weird sense of what racism is or isn’t, its refusal to rise above sensationalism to its better instincts, and its stubborn refusal to put its best face forward in times of international stress, it has become (to borrow a phrase) Hollywood’s suburb, and easy to hate.
But I do not hate it. I am merely a misfit, a prophet not at home in his own country.
So, I said to my friend in Lahore: “You’re going back to Paris, but will you come back—from Paris?” And she said, “Yes, I can only be French when I am out of France.”
And I said, “I know what you mean.”
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Published: July 30, 2009
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Tags: America : expatriate : patriot : R. Joseph Hoffmann ..
7 Responses to “Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate”
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steph
August 4, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Welcome to misfittidom. How can you possibly feel out of place as a misfit in the Antipodies? We all pride ourselves on being misfits among ourselves. The misfittier the better. At least that’s what I thought – it’s all about individualism and independence among ourselves. Not sameness and conforming to yer snooty little social sub groups.
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>However ungraceful, it was a fitting response. « Girl in Guadeloupe says:
May 25, 2011 at 8:47 am
[...] found a nice summary on expatriatism here:I especially like this excerpt:“I do not believe America is evil. I do not think other [...]
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Of Patriotism and Being an Expatriate (via The New Oxonian) « The New Oxonian says:
August 2, 2011 at 1:39 pm
[...] I was having dinner with friends before leaving the sweltering Lahore summer to return to Maine in June. Discussion turned to politics, as it often does in foreign parts. Having spent most of my professional life, by choice, outside the United States, I have learned to fine –tune my discourse, even to absorb comments that betray a woeful lack of information or historical perspective on America. The one that requires the deftest response is what … Read More [...]
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Mike Wilson
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Cool kids always think dad’s a square. When England was tops there were people who wanted to escape into Indian mysticism. America is willing to bear the cost of Europe’s compassion and enlightenment in exchange for keeping a vital market free from world war. the price is the compassion and enlightenment of all of America that isn’t New England and the West Coast. It is a win win, because anyone from middle America will tell you football and X-Box are way better than compassion and enlightenment, just don’t get sick until you’ve been with the company for at least five years.
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Scott
August 3, 2011 at 11:39 am
Welcome to the card-carrying club of terrible Americans, Dr H. I’ve been “terrible” for at least the last 20 years (and loving it).
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steph
August 3, 2011 at 3:59 pm
I like you just the way you are. But then I’m not anybody in particular, or anything at all. I don’t belong anywhere really. I just like what I like and I am who I am…. In fact as Emily wrote, and I recited on a stage when I was five: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you Nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise you know! How dreary to be somebody! How public like a Frog to tell one’s name, the livelong June, to an admiring Bog!
Not that you’re nobody of course, and I hope you become refreshed, energised, lifted, and at peace, abroad.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 29, 2012 at 6:32 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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Vita Brevis
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Secularism Isn’t Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann
Jacques Berlinerblau’s recent HuffPost religion column touches on a theme that is near and dear to the heart of this blog: the difference between atheism and its false equivalents.
In the past months (and years) I’ve occasionally commented on the highjacking of the term ‘humanism’ by atheists in search of an upmarket brand name.
As most readers will know, its combination with the term ‘secular’ to make the brew even weaker and more tasteless (e.g., by the so-called “Council for Secular Humanism,” a limb of the uniquely misnamed “Center for Inquiry”) continues to appeal to shrinking numbers of full-blooded atheists. Increasing numbers of atheists are happy to be known as atheists; and a few of those are just as pleased to be free of the moniker “secular humanism,” which never meant anything anyway.
But on the pretext that words and definitions matter, neither secularism nor humanism are explicitly irreligious, anti-religion, or atheistic.
Their core propositions, as Berlinerblau says, are agnostic. Moreover, their first dim stirrings were in the fight for religious tolerance and more this-wordly philosophies of life. Secularism has its roots in the writings of the 12th century Andalusian Muslim thinker Ibn Rushd, centuries before the notion occurred to thinkers in the Christian west.
t.
From The Huffington Post 7/28/12
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Secularism must be the most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms.
In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s.
More recently politicians such as Newt Gingrich have gleefully fostered this confusion. During his raucous, unforgettable 2012 presidential run, the former Speaker of the House fretted that his grandchildren were poised to live in “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Claiming that secularism and atheism are the same thing makes for good culture warrioring. The number
of nonbelievers in this country is quite small. Many Americans, unfortunately, harbor irrational prejudicestoward them. By intentionally blurring the distinction between atheism and secularism, the religious right succeeds in drowning both.
Yet it is not only foes, but friends of secularism, who sometimes make this mistake as well. Nowadays most major atheist groups describe themselves as “secular.” Many are in fact good secularists. But others, as we shall see, are beholden to assumptions that are strikingly at odds with the secular worldview.
Let’s start with some brief definitions. Atheism, put simply, is a term that covers a wide variety of schools of thought that ponder and/or posit the non-existence of God/s. Among scholars there is a fascinating debate about when precisely atheism arose. One compelling theory (see writers like Alan Kors and Michael Buckley) is that nonbelief as a coherent worldview developed within Christian theological speculation in early modernity.
Secularism, on the other hand, has nothing to do with metaphysics. It does not ask whether there is a divine realm. It is agnostic, if you will, on the question of God’s existence — a question that is way above its pay grade.
What secularism does concern itself with are relations between Church and State. It is a flexible doctrine that can embody a lot of policy positions. Strict separationism is one, but not the only, of those positions. At its core, secularism is deeply suspicious of any entanglement between government and religion.
Secularism needs to be disarticulated from atheism for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, these two isms are simply not synonyms. One concerns itself with primarily with politics, the other with (anti-) metaphysics. They have different concerns, intellectual moorings and histories (though, interestingly, it may be that both emanated from Christian theological inquiry).
Second, for secularism to reinvigorate itself it needs to reclaim its traditional base of religious people. As I noted in my forthcoming book, the secular vision was birthed by religious thinkers, such as Martin Luther, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (the last two, admittedly were idiosyncratic believers, but believers nonetheless).
Throughout American history it has been groups like Baptists, Jews, progressive Catholics as well as countless smaller religious minorities who have championed secular political ideas. But religious believers today, even moderate religious believers, will not sign on to secularism if they think it’s merely the advocacy arm of godlessness.
Finally, we need to distinguish secularism from atheism because some atheists, of late, have taken a regrettable anti-secular turn. True, secularism is a proponent of religious freedom and freedom from religion. It sees the “Church” as a legitimate component of the American polity. It doesn’t view religion as “poison” (to quote Christopher Hitchens) or hope for an “end of faith.” As noted earlier, secularism has no dog in that fight.
Most atheists, of course, are tolerant to a fault and simply wish for religious folks to reciprocate (and most do). Yet as long as some celebrities of nonbelief continue to espouse radical anti-theism (in the name of “secularism,” no less) the future of secularism is imperiled
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Published: July 30, 2012
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16 Responses to “Secularism Isn’t Atheism”
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Scott
July 30, 2012 at 2:09 pm
An excellent essay with necessary, clear cut distinctions made where they’re most needed. Dogmatic Atheists, follow along if you will.
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steph
July 30, 2012 at 3:16 pm
“[When he departs] we will weep — as one weeps when a cross-grained and rich stepmother has departed this life.”
(Huldrych Zwingli – tense transposed)
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tnt666
July 30, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Overall this is of course a necessary reminder, which is unfortunately needed a little too often. But I disagree with a couple of points…
For example you state: “the highjacking of the term ‘Humanism’ by atheists in search of an upmarket brand name”. I disagree with your perception, I have had political negotiations with Humanists for many years, to my eyes, it’s the Humanists, or rather the Soecular Humanists, which are highjacking the term atheist. We are ALL born atheist, we are all born without the notion of supernatural entities. Concepts like the supernatural need to be taught by deluded people, otherwise, realism is what older tribes display, tribes who have not been touched by modern civilisation. But Humanism is a religion unlike most others, in that it is celestially godless, but in most other regards, as with Buddhism, it behaves like a religion.
When you mention NG stated “secular atheists”, that was actually the opposite of lumping their definitions. I am the opposite of a ‘secular atheist’ for I do not think that ‘secularism’ is a viable strategy to run a nation of people. Most more stupidity tolerant atheists than I think that ‘secular atheist’ is the way to go… let the religious be, but separate Church and State…
You state: “atheism, put simply, is a term that covers a wide variety of schools of thought that ponder and/or posit the non-existence of God/s. Among scholars there is a fascinating debate about when precisely atheism arose.” That is simply false, one does not need to “ponder/posit” in order to be an atheist, we are all born atheist, just like the rest of the animal kingdom, until we are taught delusion. And there is no such thing as in “ism” for atheists. If you had stated: atheists live by a variety of schools of thought, that would have been a truer statement.
I am atheistic, I do not believe in the social validity of secularity, and I most certainly disagree with Humanism, secular or not, which is an offshoot of Christianity, both entirely anthropocentric, which is why ex-Christians find it so appealing, they get to change their denomination, be trendy, appear to be modern, without changing most of their values, bleah.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 7:53 am
I am not sure your idea “that we are all born atheist” has any more punch than Rousseau’s belief that we “are all born free.” I suppose if you mean cognitively not “religious” there is something to it. And I suppose if you mean that a specific doctrine is taught to many people from childhood, that seems clear enough. But it would be difficult to explain the emergence of religion if atheism is the “natural” condition of the human race: anthrolpology and archaeology aren’t with you on this. BTW, flattered as I am the passage you quote is from the essay by Jacques Berlinerblau. I can’t take credit, but I think he is right.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 6:31 pm
Theism may indeed be the ‘natural’ or default human condition. I’m not at all sure that it is, but it could be. Possibly depends on a definition of human. Was Homo erectus a theist? Or the version before him/her? I suppose we may never know, but my guess is theism arrived at some stage, as a concept.
It is of course largely irrelevant, as i’m sure you’ll agree, whether it’s the natural condition of the only living member of the genus or not, vis a vis accuracy.
And don’t start me on how atheism may just be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder, partly because I don’t think there is one (an evolutionary ladder, even a metaphorical one) and partly because you’ll be here all night reading my outpourings.
tnt666
December 21, 2012 at 3:11 pm
This little article only lists some non-religious primitive tribes, little article there are a few others. Religiosity is a modern (compared to the 60,000 years Homo sapiens have been in our modern configuration). The existence of primitive atheist tribes demonstrates that religiosity is not universal. We are taught how to be religious. To assume that because a concept is common it is necessarily universal is a great fallacy. I was never indoctrinated so I have been supernatural-free since birth. My parents do not consider themselves atheists (apathetic-agnostics at the most), it was never discussed at home. Nor was religiosity ever discussed at home I simply lived in a void as to woo concepts. I was taught critical thinking, on all matters equally. Ask all the other life-long atheists out there (there are few of us). We are also a demonstration that universal religiosity is a myth. Realism is innate, it is evolutionary, and tried and tested through millions of years. Religiosity is a cultural power grab which has no mystery to it. It is common because it makes narcissists powerful.
steph
December 23, 2012 at 5:34 am
Your little article is an unfortunate and eroneous source to depend on and not only do you misrepresent it, but the author is manipulatively misleading (and what’s with the superfluous epithet ‘secular’ for ‘atheists’?) and does not seem to have grasped his sources. There is no evidence of the existence of primitive atheist tribes and it contradicts the evolution of human ideas and developments in knowledge. Will Durant’s study of ‘primitive tribes’ is in the modern era. These tribes are not living in ancient times. We were not ‘born atheists’. We are born without ideas. We become curious, and curious about the meaning of life and death, and natural phenomena beyond their control.
The tribes studied in your article (or by Durant) are from the modern era. Their ancestors are ‘unavailable’ – long dead. The Zulu quoted demonstrates the evolution of ideas, and influence of modern ideas, evolved in the view of science. They are not the ideas of his ancestors as they sought answers to life and existence. But that he has not seen a god, does not support an argument that he might not believe in its existence, nor that he does not have any other ideas.
Contrary to the out of date simplistic ideas of Durant, the ideas of Pygmy tribes vary. Baka religion is animist. They revere a supreme god called Komba, who they believe to be the creator of all things. However, this supreme god does not play much of a part in daily life, and the Baka do not actively pray to or worship Komba. Jengi, the spirit of the forest, has a much more direct role in Baka life and ritual. The Baka view Jengi as a parental figure and guardian, who presides over the male rite of initiation. Jengi is considered an integral part of Baka life, and his role as protector reaffirms the structure of Baka society, where the forest protects the men and the men in turn protect the women. Everything in the Mbuti life is centered on the forest; they consider themselves “children of the forest,” and consider the forest to be a sacred place. An important part of Mbuti spiritual life is the molimo. The molimo is, in its most physical form, a musical instrument most often made from wood. To the Mbuti, the molimo is also the “Song of the Forest,” a festival, and a live thing when it is making sound. When not in use, the molimo is kept in a tree, and given food, water, and warmth. The Mbuti believe that the balance of “silence” or peacefulness, and “noise” is important; when the “noise” becomes out of balance, the youth of the tribe bring out the molimo. The molimo is also called upon whenever bad things happen to the tribe, in order to negotiate between the forest and the people.
Of course skepticism is not a modern phenomenon. With curiosity comes skepticism too. Human beings become skeptical about ideas and ideas evolve. Skepticism arising from the emerging evidence of the sciences in the Post enlightenment allowed the emergence of the earliest atheism in the nineteenth century. Christian ideas evolved in view of the emerging evidence of science so that many modern Christians do not hold beliefs which contradict the scientific evidence now available. Prior to the enlightenment, there was no atheism. The Greeks accused Christians of atheism because they rejected the Greek gods. Much more advanced research since Durant has produced evidence which contradicts your claim (which does not correspond with Durant’s ideas anyway) and is in accordance with the natural concept of evolution. Also despite Durant’s leading questions, he received answers which in no way support a claim that they were even ‘atheists’.
tnt666 sounds like the devil’s courier – or advocate. I wonder why people who hate religion so much always have it on their mind. Rhetorical question.
tnt666
December 23, 2012 at 2:56 pm
@steph Your rebuttal addresses fine details, but it does not debunk the fact that the most un-modernised of our peoples show high degrees of non-belief. The point that was made is that some of them were a form of agnostic “meh maybe some sort of god but doesn’t affect us” to outright straight-up realism. Scepticism not only existed before religion, but was much stronger before religious dictatorship of ideas came around. I stated no beef with a fallacious duality between a majority of modern Christianity and science. Most education in the sciences in Europe came from Christian universities. But the point is crazy-god-in-the-sky ideas do not arise spontaneously, they arose because lies became political, and people found they could control the actions of others through fear. This form of ridiculous needs to be taught, to young ones to stick, because human children learn so much from their parents, if we teach them falsities, they will think them true.
As for your point, why do atheists so often speak of religion? Because it is crammed down our throats every single day by the 95% of peers who are either religious or “spiritual”. So we can either be meek and accept all the lies or counter them. You yourself are speaking up here against that which you disagree, why on earth would you expect me to do less?? that’s the irrational part of your thinking really showing through.
steph
December 23, 2012 at 6:34 pm
No historian has ever suggested that any ‘god in the sky’ ideas developed spontaneously. On the contrary, these ideas developed relatively late. There is no “fallacious duality between a majority of modern Christianity and science”. Many modern Christians do not hold biblically literalistic beliefs and do not hold beliefs which contradict the evidence of science while other modern Christians ‘believe’ in both science and hold unevolved supernatural beliefs and regrettably try to reconcile them. There are still modern Christians, more likely the ones you know, who are hostile to and ignorant of science.
It is in fact false that “most un-modernised of our peoples show high degrees of non-belief.” Some of these people ‘observed’ by travellers and the philosopher Durant, did not express expected beliefs they expected – that is the beliefs that Durant thought they ought to hold with his limited view of religious definitions. The notion of self that was responsible for creation for the Zulu was not explored with the unsophisticated study by Durant. What was the Zulu’s understanding of reality? Durant did not investigate. He merely observed that the Zulu was skeptical of Durant’s idea of what a god should be. Present day anthropological and sociological studies have examined these ideas extensively.
Agnosticism is not an expression of non-belief or belief that there is no supernatural. It therefore is not representative of ‘atheism’. Skepticism towards beliefs expressed by others is not indicative of atheism either. The Zulu does in fact have religious or spiritual ideas as has been demonstrated by modern researchers. Are you blessed with the power of time travel? Your assumptions contradict logical processes such as the concept of evolution of historical thought and explanations. Some doubted explanations, but they had no explanation for human existence available such as we have today. The assumption that modern people’s ideas reflect ideas prior to the scientific enlightenment couldn’t even be argued for Christians today. How many religious ideas of Christians, existed in the first centuries? How many didn’t believe in resurrection? How many read the Bible as religious literature with a historical context? Not even Durant would support your irrational view. Shakespeare for example had caustic views of the Church and orthodox religion, but he was no atheist. His writing is full of religious imagery, satire and assumptions. There was no atheism in Endymion.
I suggest you let go of your indiscriminate hatred towards religion, and channel your enthusiasm to critiquing the biblically illiterate literalist fundamentalist forms of religion saturating your society, education and government. Living in a secular environment with secular religious people might help you be a little less hostile for I too grew up without ‘religion’ and received a secular education. I wasn’t properly introduced to religions until I chose to take subjects at university. I’m sorry you live with such people you describe.
Pseudonym
July 31, 2012 at 3:20 am
Every now and then I toy with the idea of “eternal humanism”, which is clearly the opposite of “secular humanism”.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 4:31 am
From the reviews of the Berlinerblau book:
‘I am not sure I have Berlinerblau’s case right, and to be honest, his negative case (of what secularism is not) is much clearer than his positive case as to what secularism is. In the end, he seems to come out in favor of some sort of accomodationism, where we can all (including governments) see the value of religion, but accept that it should have a very limited role in public life (with no preferential treatment).’
http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Secular-Religious-Freedom/dp/0547473346/
At the end of the day, I think most atheists would have very few problems with this sort of accomodationism, and many of those would have no problem at all. Similarly if we move from politics to education.
Sure, to some extent, the religious secularist and the atheist secularist are going to tend to disagree on a lot of things, and even be pulling in different directions at some fundamental level, but personally, I think that it is entirely possible for them both to pull in the same direction on enough issues for there to be grounds for a useful coalition.
Whether this will/can happen in the USA, the land of contradictions, where one slice of the country have a full set of whitened, straightened teeth and another slice have just one or two yellowy brown ones, is another matter. But it would be good.
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davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 8:43 am
‘…..It sees the “Church” as a legitimate component of the American polity’
Odd statement, on the face of it, in relation to secularism.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 8:48 am
I agree; that looks like a flub and makes no sense in the context of the larger argument. I can agree that secularism is not about metaphysics, but it is certainly about not letting the church into policy decisions precisely because the church is all about metaphysics. It is about defining limits.
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Scott
July 31, 2012 at 9:02 am
On this one can think back to Jefferson and his letter to Baptists of a certain circle in his day. Of course, I suppose we can also think of historical, secular attempts at moving away from the Church like “De Monarchia” Defensor Pacis” etc.
rjosephhoffmann
July 31, 2012 at 9:53 am
Exactly: early secularism–the sort that arose in the Investiture Controversy–was about “borders’ as well, separating the kingdom from the kingdom of Christ (Christendom).
davidjohnmills
July 31, 2012 at 6:01 pm
I note that someone in the comments section pulled him on it, said his bias was showing, or something like that. Well, maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it doesn’t, for me, detract from what nonetheless looks like a very interesting book (‘How to be Secular’ I mean) among a number of interesting books, by Berlierblau (interesting name. Blue Berliner?)
There is what seems like a decent case for atheists and secularists and agnostics and humanists and liberal theists to cooperate better. I for one am not against it. Obviously, I’m an out and out atheist, so……..there are bound to be points of friction and disagreement (some of them fairly fundamental), but in the main, I value liberal thinking as an umbrella term.
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