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Deja Vu: How Tone Deaf Atheists and Blockheaded Muslim Haters Cost Lives
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on September 15, 2012
In 2011, The Revd Terry Jones put the Koran on trial and torched it in his church in Lake City, Fl. He live-streamed the proceedings to ensure maximum effect abroad, and within 48 hours, eight UN guards had been killed.
I suggested then that in the cyber-age Justice Holmes’s comment about “falsely crying fire in a theatre” needed a new interpretation. It was no longer about a prank at the Roxie in Middletown, Ohio, where patrons might get jostled or knocked down in a stampede at the exits. Now it was about religion- haters in the Bible-belt trying to do harm without being harmed themselves. And nothing was clearer than that Mr. Jones wanted to cause harm.
My suggestion was that if he went forward with his plan, and if remonstrations to cease and desist (there were many) did not succeed, a restraining order should be issued to prevent Mr. Jones from carrying out his act of incitement. Such orders are issued for many lesser threats, ranging from domestically violent partners to annoying stalkers. And it was more certain that Jones’s actions presented a real threat (if not “a clear and present danger”) to Americans living abroad in the Muslim world.
But religion-haters come in different flavours these days. The Florida cracker flavour is matched by the piquant sophistication of new atheist Islam haters–even Christopher Hitchens was one. The atheist tack, of course, was that the “greater principle” of free speech was at stake in this struggle, and that no matter how obnoxious Jones is (very), his right to be obnoxious, even dangerously obnoxious, was absolute. Of course, the fact that Jones’s views about Islam happened to coincide directly with the views of the hate-mongers was of no consequence: it was ONLY about the sanctity of the First Amendment.
–The blockheaded response from atheist heavyweights like Jerry Coyne and P Z Myers was immediate: “Hoffmann coddles Muslim”. Eric MacDonald, in a singularly ill-informed piece, wondered out loud if I hadn’t paid attention to the “cartoons controversy,” evidently missing the fact that I had written extensively on the topic in 2008 and had conditionally defended the right of Free Inquiry magazine, where I was an associate editor, to publish the cartoons in the US.
Past is prologue and now we see how history can surprise us. The hyperactive Rev. Jones could not slumber forever, not when a man who likes a mirror thinks he can influence a presidential election–which is fact is what this trick is all about.
Jones promised he would do better, and he has: this time with deadlier consequences, through one of his more media savvy, Muslim-hating accomplices.
I have just one question for PZ: What are you thinking now? God save the First Amendment?
Arrest This Man
by rjosephhoffmann
First Published: September 8, 2010
And his little Dove, too. With predictable ghoulish clarity, the American media is goading the Reverend Terry Jones to follow through with his Koran bonfire on September 11th, while politicians (both kinds) and religious leaders of all stripes are urging him not to do it.
Of course, there is no story if he doesn’t do it–and media hate that. And if it’s called off he will be called a coward for capitulating to the “supporters” of a religion he has t-shirted as “of the Devil.” Jones has stated that if Jesus was alive he would light the first match. And he has said, as all cultic leaders do, that a gunfight with the police wouldn’t faze him and his followers: “We’re prepared to die for what we believe in.” Echoes of another Jones, another catastrophe.
Mr Jones is all the usual cultic suspects rolled into one. He is a gay-basher, a hate-monger, and a crusader for the old time religious value of intolerance.
He founded the Dove World Outreach Center as a front for his hate-inducing sermons and grandstanding.
He is a Christian Triumphalist with a clear millennial vision, which he saw previewed on Septmber 11, 2001: the first fiery signs that the Antichrist was entering the world. He considers the pastors and priests organizing “prayer” and loaves of bread protests around him “lily livered Christians” for failing to stand up to the the threat of Islam. –Although it is not clear why, if Islam betokens the end-time, Mr Jones would want to oppose it: in his theology anyway, it’s the last act in a very big plan wrought by God himself.
And what do Gainesville officials do? Besides praying and dissuading, they have denied Mr Jones a burn permit. Perhaps the next recourse might have been for him to order a hundred porta-potties to the parking lot of the Church?
But no, Jones says the burning will go ahead as planned. There’s something, as every Klansman knows, about a fire.
Meanwhile, we are all missing the point and the President of the United States is missing an opportunity. The same president who personally intervened in a squabble between a fumbling Harvard professor and a Cambridge cop when the former locked himself out of his house is staying away from this one.
Despite the fact that the country is in wars with Muslims all over ther world, both hot and cold, and that the burning of Korans is likely to be seen as the most vicious symbolic attack on the Islamic faith since Urban II called the First Crusade.
There will be riots, there will be murders and bombings, there will be dead Americans and others. All because one undereducated self-ordained cowpoke took refuge in the First Amendment’s free expression clause.
Loaves of bread, prayer marches and picket signs–”good religion” vigorously expressed–are not going to have an effect on this donkey of a man so deeply out of touch with modern religion that he may as well be Osama bin Laden’s cavemate.
Mr President: You are a lawyer. You know the Constitution. You know the difference between hate speech and incitement. You know the line is thin, but that once it is crossed the damage cannot be undone.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes. During my time in Pakistan, in 2009, the mere rumour that some Christians had “desecrated” pages of the Koran led to disaster.
Four women, a man and a child died as Muslim militants set fire to Christian houses in the town of Gojra. Two men died later of gunshot wounds. Houses were burned and streets strewn with debris as people fired at each other from rooftops. There were bloody riots throughout the country. Then it was “revealed” that the rumours which led to the unrest were false and probably started by some children.
But Mr Jones is real. He will use real matches and real (if doubtless inexpensive) copies of the Koran. This very dangerous man has publically announced his intention to flout the law and to cause riots, even gunfights. He has already cried fire–real fire–in the crowded theater of global religious tension.
Mr President: Arrest this man. Do not turn this discussion over to political theorists, Constitutional talking-heads and interfaith tweeps.
If the dignity of Henry Louis Gates was important to you and the chance to be seen defusing a “racial situation,” this is infinitely greater and a thousand times potentially more harmful.
Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church. Be seen to be doing something courageous in this instance.
Your top general, not known for emotionalism, has already announced the consequences on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. But it will spread–you should pardon the expresion–like wildfire. You will have let it happen.
You will be criticized, but your critics won’t prevail in this argument: you are trying to prevent loss of life. You are not trying to save Korans.
If you do not arrest this man, Christians in Pakistan, Lebanon, and corners of the Islamic world will be in jeopardy. Some will be killed; churches will be torched.
If you do not do this, American-Muslim relations, already lying in the dust will suffer an unimaginable blow. And Muslim Americans will consider you weak and treacherous.
Please, Mr President: show us this man in handcuffs and a U.S. marshall doing his sworn duty before Saturday.
Thank you.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Barack Obama : Burnakoranday : Dove World Outreach Center : First Amendment : Florida : Gainesville : hate speech : Terry Jones
Bloody Fools
by rjosephhoffmann
First published April 1, 2011
UPDATE:
It has been amazing and distressing to me that responses to this blog from a cadre of readers have focused only on the twin lunacies of Islamic extremism and Christian triumphalism. Some of them want to vindicate Terry Jones as a kind of litmus test for their belief that a butterfly is enough to ignite the Muslim world–so why worry about an ox? If there is logic there, it must be part of the initiation ritual.
Some have even taken the “What would you expect?” line, as though Mr Jones’s actions necessarily excited the “Muslim animals” and renders him, therefore, innocent. From what tank is that slimy conclusion fished? The further logic is that Islam is all about violence anyway, so a a little more (what’s the difference) can hardly be laid at the door of a Florida fundagelical.
Some respondents think that there is a moral equivalence, such that Terry Jones and the Afghan and Pakistani responders are cut from the same cloth. How that renders Jones innocent or raises the dead I am not sure. I find that kind of response both uninformed and worrying. Very worrying coming from nonbelievers, and maybe because it raises in my mind questions about whether a certain level of atheism isn’t also an impediment to moral reasoning–specifically that kind that finds all religions “naturally” guilty of atrocity and hence no one at fault and no one innocent of crimes.
Yet one wonders if Mr Myers–who also figures in this story–had been approached by NSS agents and told that his act of “desecration” would lead to the loss of life, would have gone through with it. Something tells me that the redoubtable Dr Myers would have relented. Because he knew his was a stunt.
Terry Jones’s acts were not a stunt: they were intended to light fires and kill innocent people. Indeed they were done to prove that innocent people would be killed. “For some of them,” he said, “it [the torching of the Qur'an] could be an awakening.”
…The world was reminded of the 30-person Christian congregation at Dove World Outreach Center on Friday, when a mob incited by the burning of the Koran attacked a U.N. compound in Mazar-e Sharif, killing seven U.N. employees. On Saturday, related protests in Kandahar left nine dead and more than 90 injured.
Jones, 59, had considered the possibility that burning the text might elicit a violent response and that innocent people might be killed. In his characteristic drawl — a slow-motion delivery that seems incongruous with the church’s fiery rhetoric — the pastor said the church also debated whether to shred the book, shoot it or dunk it in water instead of burning it. But in the end, his desire to shed light on what he calls a “dangerous book” won out. The Koran was burned in a spectacle streamed live on the Internet. To reach out to Muslims overseas, Jones included Arabic subtitles….”
As if we needed evidence. That, thankfully is the difference between an atheist Koran hater and a fundamentalist Koran hater: and if ever there were a clear bisection of the “rules” for blasphemy, this should be it–because people are dead as part of the definition. Jones now plans to move house so to speak and put Muhammad on trial next month.
To my atheist colleagues, I say: please, before you snipe, try to understand. We are not yet at the point where atheism is the “cure” for anything, least of all for the kinds of violence these acts have made manifest. I know that it’s tempting to think that unbelief is the silver bullet cure for all the atrocities of religion [Imagine], and that a world free of it would be world in which neither Terry Jones nor Afghan extremists would hold sway. Arguably that would be a more peaceful, reasonable, less violent world.
That is not the world we live in, so the question of what to do does not only involve the meager 1.6% of the population of America willing to identify as atheists, who have their answer and are sure it’s the right one, but the 1.66 billion Muslims in the world who want to differ. The choice, frankly isn’t about No God or Your God; it’s about moving beyond the short-sighted religion-bashing of some atheists to a realistic position where criticism of religion can be effective. That is the only business plan worth discussing.
Ultimately, the way forward is going to be a matter of tone and technique, not the outcome of the work of a few commando God-bashers writing from the safe haven of first world democracies telling the majority how foolish they are.
_______________________
What do Professor P.Z. Myers and the Revd Terry Jones have in common? Not very much, except both have desecrated the Koran. Is it important that they did what they did for different reasons, and with different results? Do such distinctions matter when we’re talking about a book that neither man finds particularly–attractive? Yes.
Terry Jones
As readers of this blog will know, I think the use of blasphemy to draw crowds and win followers is probably on a moral par with Jesus’exorcisms in the New Testament: you find something or someone that will grab people’s attention–a man possessed by 6000 demons will do– then you let fly, do the hocus pocus, and hope the nasties will go into the pigs (like the trick requires) and not into the audience. When the pigs go shrieking in agony over the cliff and the “demoniac” is still in one piece, the crowd applauds wildly and proclaims you the messiah. That is sort of what happened for both Myers and Jones. But with different results.
Myers, simply an atheist showman, wrote a pretty nifty article about blasphemy on his site in 2008. In it he documented the insidious reverence in which Catholics held to the doctrine of the “real presence of Jesus” in the eucharist in the Middle Ages and the violence shown to disbelievers, especially Jews, who were always getting on the wrong side of Catholics and always being accused of desecrating the communion host, or “cracker” as Myers snarkily likes to call the matzah used at Mass.
“That is the true power of the cracker, this silly symbol of superstition. Fortunately, Catholicism has mellowed with age — the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers.”
Had he performed his oblation a couple of years later after the results of the 2010 Pew Forum Poll on Religious Knowledge in America, he could also have added that 45% of Catholics do not know their Church’s teaching on the Eucharist, though they like the Spaghetti suppers on Friday night.
Never was there a “mellower” target then than Catholics, who in the main seemed not to care very much when Myers drove a rusty spike through the cracker, some garbage (a banana peel and coffee grounds) and–importantly–pages of the Koran. Of course, as soon as he did this, the eyes of the superstitious religious blind were opened, and the lame man leapt as an hart.
Crackers and Korans and peels, O My.
Myers’ antics made him the dark darling of full frontal atheists, those who hold to the curious view that the angrier you make people who believe in sacred books and objects, the likelier you are to win over people who hold a weak or no opinion on the subject.
Desecration, confrontation, Yo-mama style insult and blasphemy are tangible blows for reason, the commandos believe.
Though their training manual is being revised. The Center for Inquiry, in its regular confusion over what fund-raising gimmick to try on next, made 2009 its first international Blasphemy Day and invited people to send in cartoons, jokes, slogans, and anything else to show just how lucky we all are to live in a country that cherishes free expression and where Nothing and No-one is sacred. The small difference between an inside joke that like-minded people think is funny and real blasphemy, which can only occur among people who take religion pretty seriously, and which might get your head blown off, escaped the organizers who soon enough put Blasphemy Day in the bottom drawer and rolled out Blasphemy Rights Day.
But, predictably, no one died as a consequence of Mr Myers’ brainstormium. And an unclimaxed Myers was reduced to pasting letters from a few lost souls who wrote almost pathetically of their upset: ”As a Christian it is an insult for anyone to call my beliefs stupid shit. I have respected every religion and every idea for years.” To which Myers felt obliged to respond in derisive detail, defending himself against a volley of feathers by saying: “They [the pages of the Koran and the Bible] are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet.”
He observed that in addition to pages of the Koran he also used a few pages of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which as far as I know is not yet considered sacred scripture by any group, and whose spiking would not likely ignite a revolt–especially since it was well known that the sympathies of the spiker were pro-Dawkins anyway. The point was half-clever, but the whole incident was tasteless, and (as I’ve said before) cowardly: to be effective, try it again, only this time in downtown Lahore after you send the memo.
Tried, convicted, soaked in kerosense, ignited
Which brings us roundabout to Pakistan and the Reverend Jones. Jones is the intellectual Omega and pastor of the sixty member Dove World Outreach Center in Lake City, Florida, who threatened to burn the Qur’an in August 2010.
His reason for doing so was to bring the book to justice for the violence and murder “it [sic] had perpetrated.” Unlike Myers, who began with the view that no book is sacred, Jones is of the opinion that Islam’s holy book and Islam itself is “of the devil.”
A jittery National Association of Evangelicals disowned him, local Florida fundagelical groups (some of them militia) distanced themselves from him, and condemned his statements. In the War Zone, General David Petraeus explained that soldiers ”will be killed if this event happens.” Jones demured, hedged, tried to stretch out his fifteen minutes to thirty six hours of fame (longer than a news cycle), then “postponed ” the trial and burning of the book while he “negotiated with the planners of the Ground Zero Mosque.”
The media being a fickle lover, lost interest in the story and almost missed more recent developments when Jones announced that the trial and sentencing would take place on March 20, 2011. Funnily enough, the Interior Ministry in Pakistan was watching developments closely after a spate of incidents involving charges that Christians (about 3,000,000 in a country of 170,000,000) were secretly desecrating Korans and a spate of church-burnings and murders.
The trial was held, the sentence rendered by a Jury of 12 church elders, and a Dallas imam, according to reports, acted as a defense attorney. The book was soaked in kerosene for two hours,and was then ignited by Jones’s assistant pastor Wayne Sapp. Further events are planned for Good Friday (April 22, 2011) in Michigan. One thing that comes through clearly is that religious zealots know a thing or two about lighting fires. The Catholics Jones also despises are satisfied to light a Paschal candle on the night before Easter.
Reaction has been slow, because media attention has been erratic, but in Afghanistan, thousands of outraged protesters stormed a U.N. compound killing at least 20 people, including eight foreigners–this at a critical moment in the Afghan war when America is trying to “win hearts and minds.” The demonstration in Mazar-i-Sharif turned violent when some protesters grabbed weapons from the U.N. guards and opened fire, then mobbed buildings and set fires on the compound. Demonstrators were also massed in Kabul and the western city of Herat.
So far, three attempts to burn churches have been thwarted by Pakistani security forces, but it is just a matter of time before death and destruction, related to the imbecility of a small-time Christian publicity whore, rears its snake-maned head. Predictable but terrifying right-wing approval for Jones’s action is also beginning its viral crawl across the internet.
As to Myers, despite the development of a blasphemy fan club and admiration for the cowardly use of free expression rights in the safe haven of Morris, Minnesota, the only serious “threat” came from Catholic League president Bill Donahue. The League (like B’nai B’rith) was founded as an anti-defamation society at a time when discrimination against Catholic immigrants was on a par with discrimination against Jews. Donahue filed a complaint with the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, offering that Myers’ actions violated the University’s anti-discrimination policy: ‘Expressions of disrespectful bias, hate, harassment or hostility against an individual, group or their property because of the individual or group’s actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion…can be forms of discrimination. Expressions vary, and can be in the form of language, words, signs, symbols, threats, or actions that could potentially cause alarm, anger, fear, or resentment against others.”
It was a far-fetched complaint both in terms of accusation and in terms of consequences; Myers’ action only succeeded in cementing his hard-crafted persona as a jerk. And even as a one-off expression of jerkiness, the actions of 2008 did not rise to the standard of blasphemy, which is usually understood as an interreligious act designed to malign or humiliate a religious opposite. Secular “blasphemy” against religion is more problematical, and Myers’ showpiece proved it. That is because there was no real conviction behind the act. ”Religion is sooooooo stupid” is not an impressive bumper sticker. The defense of free speech is only relevant and brave when free speech is actually abridged, not when threats to its exercise are manufactured.
Jones is a different story. A more dangerous one. He is the ugly Id unchained from the soul of an America I’d hoped had died. It is moronic, armed, and dangerous. It does not question the ontological correctness of its religious and political views. It burns a book in Lake City, Florida, and Muslims (and others) die in Afghanistan and soon Pakistan and elsewhere. Jones does this knowing they will die, praying to his defective God that they will die, in order to prove his belief that the devil is with us. He is with us, and he needs to be charged with and convicted of murder. His name is Terry Jones.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Bible : Blasphemy : book burning : Dove Street Outreach : Institute for Science and Human Values : Koran : P Z Myers : Pakistan : Pew Forum : Qur’an : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : Terry Jones
The Devil in Mr Jones
by rjosephhoffmann
First Published: April 4, 2011
Codex Gigas (The Devil Codex)
Since I posted my commentary on the Terry Jones case I’ve received lots of feedback–mainly attempts to vindicate Jones and wondering why I am “coddling Muslims.” I like the term feedback because it doesn’t discriminate as to the quality of responses. Some were actually very insightful–the ones laying out, for example, the conditions for incitement and sedition; some less so–the ones that simply insist that we are citizens of a democracy that values free speech above everything else. I’ve received no recipes for coddled Muslims, but I’m sure they’ll be coming soon.
Often misquoted, in the United States v. Schenck case (1919: involving a man’s distribution of anti-draft flyers during World War I), Justice Holmes wrote that
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
“Falsely” is the word that is often omitted. What emerged was the “clear and present danger test,” since weakened and greatly modified.
I’m reliably informed by no fewer than three lawyer-respondents and my buddy Guido that its successor, the “imminent lawless action” criterion, cannot reasonably be applied in this case because the damage and the loss of human life, even though preventable, did not transpire on American soil and that under current law (Hess v. Indiana [1973], Brandenburg v. Ohio [1969]), Jones would likely be given a pass.
And even though Americans, according to groups claiming responsibility, including Afghani Taliban, were the target (United Nations workers were an easier and softer hit), so far (April 5th) American soldiers did not die as a result of this provocation. On the other hand, those who have replied that it was not Jones’s intention to do harm have not been following the story closely enough: he is quoted in the Washington Post as saying that after due consideration he felt he had no choice, and was only indecisive as to the method of execution (drowning, shredding, or shooting). Fire is always the first choice of southern Christian bigots. And there is the small matter of his careful plans to broadcast the events in English and Arabic.
But my guess is that Terry Jones will become a kind of hero. He already is to his congregation and thousands of well-wishing ultra-conservative Christians around the country. And much more cheaply than buying billboards, his gallon of kerosene has ignited his “Stand up for America” campaign.
But I hope he will not become a culture-hero to people who see his actions as brave and somehow correct–as a test case of the right to express hatred in equal measure to the religious population of a country where American lives are being lost each week in defense of democratic principles that the Afghan people, like the Iraqis before them, have shown no natural interest in pursuing on their own. I am highly distrustful of the respondents who say they “disagree” with Terry Jones, but approve of the principle. What principle? That Islam is evil and he is no more evil than it is? Or that his example serves as proof to the world (as if it cares) that America is the beacon for the unfettered right to speak even the most hateful and dwarfish ideas openly?
Terry Jones is not fighting for a principle. He’s merely hiding behind one. It seems plain tawdry to invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on behalf of a listless cracker who wants to see people killed seven thousand miles away from his sanctuary.
A weird undercurrent of responses has seen Jones as a symbol of the cowboy freedom to shoot the people who get on his nerves. It’s hardly a mariage de covenance (like the one between anti-abortion Catholics and fundamentalists), but Islam is regarded by right wing Christians, as well as by many atheists, as a toxic faith, so the symbol works for both constituencies in slightly different ways. When Jones sells the movie rights to his saga of upward struggle against the forces of Satan and his lonely coup de grace for freedom and democracy in this sin-loving land, the part should go to (no relation) Tommy Lee Jones.
There are two propositions that keep me away from reducing this episode to just another example of hate speech or civil disobedience, on the analogy of the Klan marching through Skokie in 2000 or burning draft cards in 1969 or the Haymarket riots of 1886. The difference may not be immediately obvious, or compelling, but it is a difference.
If Mr Jones had staged his execution of the Koran, “a work of the Devil,” in 1969, it would have been the shot heard round Lake City, Florida. No one would have cared; few people would have known. It would have the resonance of a wooden clapper. As a Florida boy myself, I can easily imagine a woman outside the Lake City Winn-Dixie store saying, “He burned the whut?” But it did not happen in 1969. It happened in the age of rapid information-transfer, and sudden celebrity–the age and space that Jones is counting on to raise him from evangelical crackerdom to national guru. I see Dancing with the Stars down the road for this guy and I pray that his partner will be someone named Aisha.
The Amendment we depend upon to protect us from slander while, at the same time, defending our right to blaspheme, criticize, oppose, peaceably assemble and demonstrate was carved at a time when America was relatively isolated from the foreign effects of domestic action. Even though the polemic was hot and strong throughout the pre-Revolutionary era (one of the reasons the First Amendment exists at all) reaction was slow because news traveled that way.
I think there is something qualitatively different about Jones and the way he does business, and it has to be acknowledged. There is something different about what constitutes “imminent and likely lawless action” in an age where cause and effect have been reduced to days, sometimes seconds. And one day the courts will have to deal with it–but not yet. Jones’s only miscalculation in this case was that the media wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, so he had to try doubly hard to get the word out. He was duly abetted by Hamid Karzai.
As to preserving free speech against the odds of too much sway in the direction of controlling it: As a Christian triumphalist, Jones would like nothing more than an America in which the very thing he was permited to do could not be done. A sheer increase of the Terry Joneses of this country–among people who now see his action as noble–would lead to a Christian state wherein it would, at a minimum, be illegal to burn a Bible or insult a man of the cloth, or more precisely, the evangelical cloth. Atheism in Jonestown, USA? As likely as a women’s right to education act under the Pakistani Taliban.
No one realistically thinks that this kind of America is coming, least of all me. But it is an interesting test of priorities that condemning Jones’s action as being fundamentally opposed to the cardinal American values of freedom and tolerance should be immediately seen as a complaint about hypothetical ”infringement” of Mr Jones’s rights, without any equivalent assessment of what he did and the way he did it. –I’m reluctant to mention the one muddled response that compared Jones’s burning of the Koran to the 1933 (fol.) book burnings in Nazi Germany because, frankly, I couldn’t understand the premise.
The way the Rev did it was to make sure that Muslims were paying attention. When he streamed the “trial” and execution of the book, with some hapless imam from Dallas acting as a defense atttorney, he dressed in judge’s robes. He streamed the proceedings with Arabic subtitles. Those are the facts; I am guessing, but cannot know for sure, that he was also trying to convey an impression of “authenticity” to the web-viewers, as though to suggest this was a real trial. Given the limited sophistication of the Arab street, this would not have been a difficult thing to do.
So, this was not an act confined to the churchyard; this was a belligerent act designed to do harm, to substantiate his weird metaphysic about Islamic violence, and he was right: harm was done. People are dead. or should I say, more people are dead. Now to search “Koran Burning” on Youtube will link you to dozens of copycat rituals going on all over the world. Congratulations, Mr Jones: you are a success because this is how we now measure success, the degree of lunacy that a single image can generate.
After further thought, however, I have decided that Mr Jones is really being judged by the wrong criteria. His case falls between free exercise and free speech, and so it falls between the stools. Holmes’s aphorism about “clear and present danger,” and all later refinements, are not going to help us with the Terry Jones case, unless he magically appears in Kandahar and starts shooting Muslims. Even then, alas, he would likely find supporters back home and die a hero.
I’ve asked a number of respondents if they think Jones is “guilty” of anything other than bad judgement. Law and ethics are not only two different areas but fields that often collide on principles. If law does not help us with this one, is there a moral position that can be condemned–or vindicated? Is Mr Jones “just a cracker” and his actions as predictable, and thus as unremarkable, as the predictable response of angry young men in Afghanistan? After all, we have become accustomed, to the point of dozing off, to images of angry, mainly young Muslim men all over the Islamic world.
I don’t fully understand the pathology of their anger, but I do know that the symbolic respository for what they are willing to die and to kill to defend is the Koran. I also think I know that lectures on God’s existence or their foolish and superstitious ways are not going to get their attention.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Dove Street Outreach : First Amendment : Florida : free exercise : free speech : hate speech : humanism : Islam : Koran : Lake City : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Terry Jones : Why Evolution is True
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Published: September 15, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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13 Responses to “Deja Vu: How Tone Deaf Atheists and Blockheaded Muslim Haters Cost Lives”
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Dwight Jones
September 15, 2012 at 7:49 am
The Pussy Riot affair involved desecrating a church, with outrage that Putin had them jailed.
Outrage in the press; but methinks that in the general population the opinion was that the kids should find another place to play.
Reply
Hoffmann loses the thread of the story all over again « Choice in Dying says:
September 15, 2012 at 8:05 am
[...] the trouble to bring himself to my attention once again, it would be impolite of me to ignore that R. Joseph Hoffmann has once again taken it upon himself to scold me for — now, how did he put it exactly — “a singularly ill-informed piece” [...]
Reply
steph
September 17, 2012 at 1:53 am
‘What is more important: people or books? … Evil prospers when good men do nothing.’ How ironic that this choice and claim and MacDonald’s grasp of each, demonstrate that he has lost, not that he ever had, the plot. It’s nothing to do with Islam being a so-called ‘religion of peace’ or not. It’s about people, historical politics and foreign policy. It’s about responsibility and consequences. ‘Muslims need thicker skins’? MacDonald ought to learn more about people. MacDonald ought to learn that atheists can be as dangerous as the minority that are Islamic extemists. Anyway what’s his point? It’s not about protecting religion. It’s about responsibility and consequences of actions for people’s lives.
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Beau Quilter
September 15, 2012 at 5:17 pm
The terrorists who perpetrated these crimes may hate the speech of muslim-haters and atheists . . .
But they LOVE articles like this!
The people responsible for terrorist deaths are those who plunge the knife or pull the trigger. When we blame the free speech that they cite as their reasons, the terrorists win.
The fringes of free speech have always been ugly. But far worse are the terrorists who commit violence to deny free speech.
You are naive and a fool if you think that terrorists commit their acts because of a few atheists and muslim-haters. Terrorists will always be able to dig up “reasons” for the atrocities they commit, until they have subjugated the world.
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Robert Wahler
September 17, 2012 at 4:21 pm
What’s that got to do with stopping inciters?
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Beau Quilter
September 17, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Have you read the polemics of islamic extremists against Americans? As far as they are concerned, we are ALL inciters! Burning a holy book may be as despicable as sleeping with your best friend’s girl. But neither act is illegal, and neither act causes middle east violence. Terrorists cause violence in the middle-east; they look for reasons to make us blame ourselves, but their violence is of their own making.
Steven Bollinger
September 16, 2012 at 11:01 am
You have much to say about Terry Jones that is very illuminating. And it was very tempting at first to go along with your suggestion of arresting him. But only at first, and the more I think about it the more opposed I am to it. You say “no one realistically” believes that a USA is coming where it would be a crime to burn Bibles. But because the law is a great stupid lumbering beast, and not an ethereal spirit with all of the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes, arresting Terry Jones for his hateful stunts would be a big lurching step in the direction of that USA. That’s how this beast works: crack down on expression you don’t like, and it makes it easier for them to crack down on yours. Sauce for both goose and gander. Blind justice, a stupid lumbering beast.
And if we’re going to arrest people for inciting Muslims, we really need to arrest W and many members of his administration before we get around to relatively small fry like Jones. They did much, much more damage than Jones, and holding them accountable for their crimes would do much, much more to show Muslims that we respect them.
Although it would involve chiming in to some degree with people we find quite ghastly — indeed, although it would involve to some degree chiming in with Terry Jones himself instead of arresting him as we would like to do — we need to address those mostly young men who are angry and falsely pious enough to kill for any real or perceived insult to their religion. Yes, Jones is inciting them. But it’s a problem which must be addressed that they are so easily incited that an empty-headed bumpkin like Jones, or the mention of a stupid YouTube video which I’m sure most of them have never seen — have you seen it? I haven’t — or the pronouncement of one of their leaders about a fine novel by an Indian-British-American which neither the leader nor they have read, will induce them to murder. Something needs to get their attention. Just as Western bumpkins need to be educated about crucial facts such as that the great majority of Muslims, even including the duly-elected heads of state of the Arab Spring, condemned with the usual ignorant haste by Western bumpkins great and small, really do condemn the actions of those mostly-young fanatics.
(Btw I know that my facebook picture is 22 years old and that I don’t look anything like I did in 1990. So why don’t I replace the photo from 1990? In part because when I look at more recent pictures, I get so depressed that it’s hard to do anything.)
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Marta
September 16, 2012 at 11:18 am
“My suggestion was that if he went forward with his plan, and if remonstrations to cease and desist (there were many) did not succeed, a restraining order should be issued to prevent Mr. Jones from carrying out his act of incitement.”
Yes, Dr. Hoffman. God save the First Amendment.
This is the amendment that allows you to write staggeringly stupid stuff, such as what I’m quoting, above. (A restraining order? Really? So it’s not even that you want to punish him for saying something YOU find heinous, but that you want to prevent him from saying it in the first place?)
Were you asleep in 6th grade Social Studies?
You want to use force to stop people from saying things that you find odious. How are you different from any extremist who wants to do the same thing?
It’s the First Amendment that keeps every damn one of you oppressors from silencing the rest of us. Please re-read a Social Studies book, only this time, read it for comprehension.
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steph
September 17, 2012 at 2:02 am
For some of the tone deaf comments above, actions have consequences. We’re not condoning the terrorists. Neither are we condoning people who are inciting terrorism with their irresponsible and ignorant actions. It’s just the same old thing over and over again and some people garbling repeated misunderstandings of an American consititution. Perhaps those tone deaf above, should read the following post, not that their ears will hear anything other than their own echoes.http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/the-evil-in-your-midst/
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Beau Quilter
September 17, 2012 at 3:36 pm
I see far more symptoms of tone deafness in hoffman’s articles.
This article and the one you cite may not condone terrorists, but they ignore the real culpability of terrorists for all practical purposes. There was a similar twisting of priorities in the media when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. How does writing a book critical of the scripture morally compare to the threat of literal assassination? And yet the international outcries against Rushdie’s writing far outweighed the outcries against the Ayatollah’s violence.
Hoffman is the one who is tone death to the atheists he cites, everyone of whom has strong critical words against idiots like Terry Jones. But they have far worse words for terrorists and those who enable terrorism by failing to denounce it.
steph
September 18, 2012 at 2:42 am
“They have strong critical words against idiots like Terry Jones”? So PZ writes on his blog,”Terry Jones is an intolerant ignoramus, but I don’t worry about him.” In other words perhaps, tell Terry he’s a naughty boy but he’s not the Messiah? PZ is more worried about those who riot and murder when offended (and PZ is terribly upset by his ‘comrade’ Professor R Joseph Hoffmann, who keeps criticising the ignorance of arrogant loud mouthed atheists like him). He doesn’t worry about those who deliberately offend knowing the consequences at all. The irony as always is that they don’t, can’t, won’t see the fact that Terry’s actions will provide a useful target for extremists to exploit in their efforts to gain support. We’re not comparing mandarins with tangerines, apples with oranges or elephants with tomatoes. Terry’s actions don’t help counter terrorism. They encourage more. PZ’s defence of Terry’s freedom encourages more. The film maker was not naive when he made the film. He deliberately provoked and incited the inevitable reaction of extremists. Terry Jones was not naive. He deliberately provoked and incited the violence which eventuated. Meanwhile, all PZ and fellows can do is whine and shout about their rights to free speech, something other cultures don’t have to respect. Yet. And efforts to encourage global recognition of human rights and freedoms are only compromised by the likes of idiotic nutbags like Jones, the film maker, PZ and his echoing blog buddies. To suggest that Professor Joe Hoffmann fails to denounce terrorism is imagined fantasy with no evidence at all.
stevenbollinger
September 16, 2012 at 2:32 pm
(Remembered how to log in with WordPress again. No, that’s not me in the picture, it’s a cat.)
All of the info above about P Z Myers was new to me: his stunt with the wafer and garbage and pages from books, and his unhinged reaction to your calling for legal action to stop Jones’ action. I’m gaining more sympathy for the view that New Atheists, some of them, are fundamentalists of a sort. And it’s clear to me now that I never was one of them. Stunts like Meyers’ don’t impress me, they seem to illustrate some of Freud’s views on infantile regression. Sometimes a banana peel is more than a banana peel, Anna. I’m with you, Myers can go try that kind of stuff in Lahore and then ask me if I’m impressed. I’m still anti-religious, I still believe that people’s continuing, at this late date, to believe in a deity or deities can, on the whole, only interfere with our well-being, but I don’t want to be associated with people like Myers. I hope I have more profound means of persuasion than his at my disposal. I destroyed a book once in my life, during a temper tantrum when I was four years old. I’m done. Indeed, I’m very much concerned with preserving books.
(On a somewhat related topic, having to do with you and Meyers’ fellow FreeThoughtBlogger Dr Carrier: I first began to notice people such as Carrier and you, and Myers, and Coyne, and Price, and Wells, and Morton Smith, and many others, both academics and non-, who speculate about the origins of Christianity, in March of this year, in the wake of the brouhaha over Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? I was led astray for a little while by Carrier, about you and about some other things, and read Carrier’s disingenuous, Oh-my-what-a-nasty-man response to this blog post of yours: http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/mythtic-pizza-and-cold-cocked-scholars/ without knowing anything of the history of how he had poked and poked at you until you quite understandably exploded just a bit. Knowing more of your history with Carrier, I now find your “little rant” thoroughly reasonable. Back in April, however, I included you in a snarky little rant of my own. I have no idea whether you’ve ever heard of it. For some reason it’s one of the more frequently-read posts on my blog. I haven’t altered my rant, because I know that reasonable readers can see changes in opinions as the result of learning, while the unreasonable will accuse you and me and Nietzsche and Kant and Marx and anyone else who hasn’t stopped learned when they achieved their full height of flip-flopping. But today I did add a PS to it: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2012/04/ive-figured-out-why-buddhists-are-so.html Mea culpa. I shall go and sin no more.)
Reply
Actually, It’s Not A Bad Idea For A Movie says:
September 16, 2012 at 2:49 pm
[...] some American religious studies professor thinks the film-maker, whoever he is, should be arrested. R. Joseph Hoffman recycles a similar suggestion with respect to Terry Jones, the Koran-burning pastor who is mixed up [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Evil in Your Midst
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on September 17, 2012
… So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear of it. (Deut 21.21)
As the smoke settles in Libya and Cairo, it seems to collect in the heads of people like Jerry Coyne, P Z Myers and Eric MacDonald.
All three cleave to the quaint 18th century assumption that the right of free speech is as sacred as the Bible, a book they reject as a compendium of intellectual rot. Odd, how the freethinkers are willing to be slaves of the right pope. Sacred writ is stupid and retardant. Secular writ, that’s something else again.
The First Amendment to the Constitution–like the Second, the favorite of gun-toters–was written at a time when people could be charged with treason and hanged for criticizing the King. Its scope is now so broad that it has become the rhetorical equivalent of carrying a Smith and Wesson SD9 VE (available online) to within one hundred yards of a presidential speech in New Hampshire. Live Free or Die–your choice.
If you begin with the doctrine that Islam is evil, as Coyne and company do, then I suppose your Manichaen instincts provoke you to want to stamp it out. It’s one of the reasons the formidably smart Christopher Hitchens supported Bush adventures in the Middle East, because in terms of stamping out religion, you have to bomb someone, and on average (at least recently) Muslims behave worse than Christians.
I agreed with Hitch about so much else: but not about that. It was a cyclopic, post-in-the-eye blind spot with him. But if you begin with a more sensible proposition: that men, and many women, in the Islamic world and especially in unstable zones like Libya, parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now Egypt (following the colossal failure of the Arab spring to yield flowers) are grossly undereducated, passionate, and often irrational, the question becomes whether the United States, in its national interest, needs to test the limits of its precious liberality abroad. Our vaunted attachment to free speech and bullets (and their odd convergences) is not something we have a right to expect the Islamic masses–mainly young, mainly bored–to “get.” They have the internet, with all the offending images to get their testosterone roiling, but they could never have created it: that, symbolically, is part of the problem.
This is not 1776 or 1789. It’s 2012. If Muslims had been buzzing hornets in 1776, news of an insult against their sacred book or holy prophet would have travelled so slowly that it would have died of attrition before it reached the target.
We are not talking about insult or the right to blaspheme (which has become a cardinal right and rite among the new atheists) but about restraint in the pursuit of moral objectives. Restraint? America? Not in Don’t Tread on Me Land, where cutting someone off in the next lane is enough to get you shot.
I know that when I call a Catholic priest a child molester, or the pope a moral fascist who manipulates doctrine to control people’s sexual lives, there will be those who take offense. I also know that I run almost no risk for doing this, because (to be blunt) Christianity has just about run its course, influence-wise. It is only in the fusty, historically challenged heads of some atheists that blasphemy continues to be interesting; dissident Catholics, Catskill comedians and liberal theology sucked the real life out of parody and insult decades ago (South Park did the rest)–leaving only the odoriferous vestiges of evangelical gas as a target.
Most sensible religious people in the United States don’t care how much you insult religion–even their own–as long as you don’t actually murder the priest or harass their pastor. But reality demands that we look at Islam in a different way. Not the way poofy religious inclusivists look at it–a good faith gone wrong, ruined by subverters–but as an unstable and insecure faith that commands the affection of almost 2 billion people worldwide. That is not a population you can enroll in American Values 101: where would they all sit?
The number of evangelical Christians in the United Sates is about 70,000,000. That is a big number–about 25% of the population (and shrinking)–but it is is not a very big number, and within that number there are lots of smaller numbers: fundamentalists, pre-millennialists, Pentecostals, dominionists old and new, sectarians, and low, low down on the food chain, people like the Rev. Terry Jones and his allies.
In the earliest stages of the Libyan crisis, the Obama administration tried to diminish the effects of the viral YouTube video by saying that Americans don’t really see the Prophet as a child molester, womanizer and murderer. That is probably true–they don’t. In fact most Americans are so ignorant of Islam that they don’t know the story of Aisha or the basis for the well-worn calumny. (It goes back to the Christian Middle Ages). An equivalent claim–that Mary the mother of Jesus was a prostitute or unwed mother, for example, is not only not scandalous to many Christians outside the evangelical and Catholic camp, but a theory that looks plausible to some very good scholars. That is how different the two traditions are at the “intellectual” level, and how much alike they are at the level of extremist yahoos. But a yahoo fringe aside, Christianity, slowly but surely, has moved on over the centuries, dragging its lunatic fringe along behind it. Islam has come into modernity without actually leaving its tent.
Hard as it is for me to say it, Obama and friends were wrong: You cannot put YouTube back in the tube anymore than you can toothpaste. When it’s out it’s out: nothing can be done. But the hard facts remain: a hack named “Sam Bacile,” with the express blessing and encouragement of the Rev. Terry Jones, conspired to beam his “film”-trailer around the world. He was able to do this because he is an American who can hide behind an Amendment designed to protect people from arbitrary punishment for their political opinions. It was not designed to protect cowardly long-distance assassins and provocateurs from scrutiny.
“Bacile” like Jones’s mock trial of the Koran in 2011, becomes a hero to a thousand fools. He is defended by mobs of men and women who are committed to their own kind of terrorism–people (as I’ve already said) who will turn their gaze on the next enemy (atheists?) as soon as they create Vesuvius in the Ummah.
And he is protected by religion-hating pundits like Jerry Coyne–who each time he opens his mouth on any topic but evolution proves yet again how badly we need other subjects than science taught in our universities. The secular-atheist absolutism of people who reject controlling the sources of violence at their inception, and prefer instead to look on a row of caskets as the “price” of free speech and liberty, using hackneyed, unmodern, and useless eighteenth century slogans, is frankly insidious and pathetic.
Not only pathetic but a study in bad analogies: If I were looking for a good one for what’s wrong with letting hatemongers stoke fear and resentment, I would say that just as we require parental and legal controls to keep the worst forms of pornography out of the hands of children, and children out of the clutches of unscrupulous men, we need to accept the infantile nature of some religious views and act accordingly. That is a mature thing–a reasonable thing to do.
The permissible boundaries of pornography as it affects vulnerable populations has been tested again and again in the courts and the pornographers seldom win. We need to see the crisis in Islam as a test case in the use of visual pornography intended to incite, not as a test case in the right to voice an “opinion” or engage in blasphemy as a parlour game. But I can hear the clamber already: if you believe, as the Coynes of this world seem to, that all religion is pornography, then it follows that all religion should be controlled–and we wouldn’t want that, would we? It’s a red herring, but let me throw it at my own argument.
The suggestion that (as Romney says of Obama) that I am capitulating, apologizing tiptoeing, coddling, or missing the point misses the point by an imperial mile. The coalition of Christian crackers, dissident Islam-hating ex-Muslims, and atheists now seems to be an established fact. –A bit like the one-issue coalition of anti-abortion fundamentalists and zygote-worshipping Catholics.
It is not an alliance that can last, because the hidden fractures will grow larger over time. It may seem counter-intuitive to say that liberty requires restraint. But that is what I’m saying. To insist on the right to blaspheme and insult, at this price, beggars the morality of the right. What calculus do we use to determine the value of any principle? The Constitution? The Constitution is not a calculus; it is a list of legal commandments based on political compromises–some of them theoretical, but many just practical. It is not a primer on ethical reasoning. Once it envisaged slavery, male only voting, and the prohibition of spirituous liquors. Its infallibility is for high school debaters, young Republicans and American Legion conventioneers to celebrate–not people with a good grasp of its history and interpretation.
There is nothing to be gained from giving the abusers of free speech and the perverters of freedom the right to shoot from a distance and then claim that they were just being good citizens. Every soldier killed in Iraq and Afghanistan sacrificed for a period of time his right to do as he pleased in order to do what he was told. In the interest of peace, there is a greater good, one that can only be pursued by using reason as a measure of action.
That has always been the real strength of the west, and what has largely guaranteed its political evolution. There’s nothing reasonable about tormenting a mentally-challenged woman just to show to others how stupid and preposterous she is. But for Myers, Coyne and MacDonald, there seems to be something reasonable–if the sacred writ of the Constitution is your guide–about throwing stones at the stone throwers to see how they will respond.
Far better, it seems to me, to seek out the real evil in our midst–the “occasions of sin”–and deal with them before they leave dead bodies on the ground for which, they can plausibly say, they are not responsible.
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Published: September 17, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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35 Responses to “The Evil in Your Midst”
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Franklin Percival
September 17, 2012 at 3:30 am
Nicely utilitarian – a good read for a Monday morning!
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vivi
September 17, 2012 at 9:22 am
!00% agree with you, Joe
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Dwight Jones
September 17, 2012 at 10:31 am
Modern nations have Hate laws and Inciting statutes. The US should get some too.
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allentheallen
September 19, 2012 at 10:29 am
I have to challenge you on that Dwight. You could be right but I’m skeptical.
Can you cite any “modern” nation’s law that would have prevented the making of a film that portrays a religious leader as [something bad]? Can you cite any “modern” nation’s law that would punish the makers of such a film, after it was produced?
I could be wrong but ‘inciting’ is when you say to a crowd, something like, “they insulted the Prophet, let’s get them!!!” I agree that these idiots poked the proverbial hornet’s nest–they did not ‘incite’ by my thinking of the legal meaning. Am I incorrect?
I’m assuming you’re not counting as “modern” the nation of Malaysia and some others where insulting the King is a punishable offense.
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steph
September 19, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Dwight is perfectly correct.
New Zealand prohibits hate speech under the Human Rights Act 1993. Section 61 (Racial Disharmony) makes it unlawful to publish or distribute “threatening, abusive, or insulting…matter or words likely to excite hostility against or bring into contempt any group of persons…on the ground of the colour, race, or ethnic or national or ethnic origins of that group of persons.” Section 131 (Inciting Racial Disharmony) lists offences for which “racial disharmony” creates liability.
Australia’s hate speech laws vary by jurisdiction, and seek especially to prevent victimisation on account of race.
In the United Kingdom, several statutes criminalize hate speech against several categories of persons. The statutes forbid communication which is hateful, threatening, abusive, or insulting and which targets a person on account of skin colour, race, disability, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation. The penalties for hate speech include fines, imprisonment, or both.
In Switzerland public discrimination or invoking to rancor against persons or a group of people because of their race, ethnicity, is getting penalized with a term of imprisonment until 3 years or a mulct. Sweden prohibits hate speech, and defines it as publicly making statements that threaten or express disrespect for an ethnic group or similar group regarding their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.
In the United States, hate speech is protected as a civil right (aside from usual exceptions to free speech, such as defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting words).
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allentheallen
September 20, 2012 at 10:23 am
Steph, Thank you. I see the distinction between the U.S. law and those other countries. Thank you for taking the time to list those.
Your and Dwight’s point (unless I misunderstand) is that those county’s laws would have kicked off some legal action, if the film was created their by one of their citizens.
Have any of those countries subsequently banned this film (sales or distribution or asked YouTube to shut it off for their countries) for violating those laws you cite? If not, I don’t see that you have a point. If they did, then point made.
steph
September 20, 2012 at 8:47 pm
There has been no suggestion the film will be shown and if it is shown there would no doubt be complaints and the anti hate laws in place will allow prosecution of certain people or the banning of screening.
stevenbollinger
September 17, 2012 at 1:39 pm
“It may seem counter-intuitive to say that liberty requires restraint.”
Only to people who haven’t thought about it very deeply. Unfortunately there are very many of those. But of course you are right, there are limits to freedom and we are debating about where to say the limits. Freedom, like morality, is relative. What’s good for someone limits other people’s freedom or downright hurts them or endangers their lives.
I disagree with some of your use of numbers. 70 million is, in my opinion, a very big number. Also, I don’t see such a bright clear line dividing evangelicals from other Christians as you seem to. Perhaps they seem particularly remote to scholars surrounded by people who insist that the socially-liberal varieties of Christianity are the most “authentic.” I put the word in quotation marks, because I don’t know what it has ever meant in Christianity other than the sort of Christianity with which one happens to sympathize. And when you say that you run almost no risk by offending the sensibilities of Christians, think of the people who work in women’s clinics who have been murdered by anti-choice Christians.
And you mention the figure of 2 billion Muslims almost as if to say that most of them are dangerously close to violence, and apt to be set off by the crass excesses of crude Islamophobes. Clearly, many Muslims denounce the actions of the enraged mobs, although the Islamophobes continue to be deaf to those denunciations and Western media often seem much more interested in the Muslim extremists than in the moderates.
You argue your case well, but the picture you’re presenting here leaves out both some moderate Muslims and some extremist Christians.
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J. Quinton
September 17, 2012 at 3:48 pm
My girlfriend was over in Afghanistan for a couple of months. I’m pretty sure if people who are (for lack of a better word) trolling Islam had someone they cared about over there they would be more prudent about their criticism. If something had happened to her due to some yahoo posting an inflammatory video from the comfort of his own home that caused a riot I certainly would not have just shrugged my shoulders and said “well, my gf died for Freedom Of Speech and Islam needs to get with the program”.
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Robert Wahler
September 17, 2012 at 4:15 pm
“Hornets” is a good analogy. What idiots to provoke.
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Patrick Hunt
September 18, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Your insightful presentation of the complexities of either Islamic or Christian politico-religious Weltanshauung illustrates part of the broader problem of Ummah versus those whom extremists call Kafir; how sad that moderates often appear so voiceless in these matters. I wish our Western laws had punitive teeth for those like Im-Bacile and Terror-Terrier Jones who are irresponsible with our freedom and seem to have little or no desire to understand temperance and historical grounding.
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Michael Wilson
September 19, 2012 at 2:41 pm
I have to disagree with you and the scary number of (any is to many) who want to repeal the first amendment by making it subject to the approval of the all wise good guy brigade. You are asking for nothing less than to take away peoples freedom or property (our friends in Egypt would like lives too) for expressing an opinion. The people we should fight are not the makers of back-alley F grade movies but those who are willing to kill to enslave us.
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steph
September 19, 2012 at 6:42 pm
I have to disagree with you Mike. It’s not just a simple matter of freely expressing opinion is it? It’s arrogant disregard of the fact that other countries aren’t obliged to obey your laws, and it’s insane and deliberate speaking freely in full awareness of the inevitable consequences. What is reasonable about that? It’s not about criticising ‘normal’ people. It’s about expressing opinions about people whose reactions will be devastating to other human beings. Surely it’s not too much to ask that educated American individuals living with the modern evolved advantages of a free society, utilise some intelligent self control.
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allentheallen
September 20, 2012 at 10:33 am
“Surely it’s not too much to ask that educated American individuals living with the modern evolved advantages of a free society, utilize some intelligent self control.”
You can ask. There are about 300 million people in the U.S. There will always be some idiot somewhere doing some unbelievably idiotic thing, won’t there?
What do you propose? I didn’t respond to the main article itself because there was no proposed solution or call to action in it. I agree that everyone should be ‘nice,’ for example. Can you enforce that? No.
steph
September 20, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Write laws so that people can complain and impose them and arrest stupidly dangerous morons like Gee Dubya Bush and Terry Jones and his lapdog the film maker.
Chris
September 19, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Your post, while thoughtful and humane, unfortunately doesn’t deal with the legal complexities or potential free speech ramifications of arresting/charging Bacile and Jones with a crime. But God (or the devil, take your pick) is in the details. It’s easy to assume the mantle of the Reasonable Person, and to tar your opponents as yahoos, but without addressing the legal issues, how can your post be regarding as anything more than noble sentiment? Fine enough, of course, but it won’t win the argument.
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Chris
September 19, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Erk – ‘be regarded as’…
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Rebecca
September 22, 2012 at 8:09 pm
I’ve been a faithful and silent lurker here at TNO but this particular comment thread has compelled me to state my opinion. In typical Yankee fashion, this time I simply can’t be bothered to shut up. ;)
Americans tend to cleave to the first amendment like white on rice. Rightly so, in my view. Full disclosure: I am personally so Jeffersonian in this respect that I ought to be squatting at Monticello.
Why is this so important to me? Because it means that I can stand in the center of Times Square and at the top of my lungs assert that Barack Obama is an extraterrestrial sent to utilize gay marriage and solar energy to poison our water supply. I can also stand there and recite Magna Carta, which is pretty nice. What I can’t do – and this is important – is stand there and say I want to HURT Barack Obama. I can’t say I intend to harm POTUS, or Joe, or other people, and reasonably expect not to end up in jail or in the psych ward. There do exist these most basic of laws to protect us.
In fact, there exists a number of incitement laws in the US. The language, the precedent-making court cases, and the documentation surrounding it all are incredibly nuanced and complicated. You could spend your entire life – and some have – dealing with these issues. By the very nature of its (deliberate) vagueness, the First Amendment and our methods of coping with it in the United States are forever in a state of flux. A cursory look at even the Wikipedia pages and their dependent discussions will give you some sense of just how gray the gray area gets.
Stephanie: perhaps you could clarify just what you think we should do, in a specific legislative capacity, to deal with content that you have determined is designed, intended, and certain to result in bloodshed. Where do you draw the line between fighting words, harassment, OR protected subversive speech? Underline that. Then bold it. Subversive speech. Subversive speech, “I am sure we can all agree”, (doesn’t that phrase taste a little funny in the mouth?) is easy to want to protect. But it’s not enough in a courtroom, or even in an honest intellectual space (as I would like to hope this space is) to say “obviously the line is here. Anybody can see that”. No, sorry, not everybody can see that. That’s nothing more than a completely unilluminating appeal to intuition. We must not forget that the pendulum swings both ways. For every Westboro Baptist or brain dead filmmaker, you will find 5 dissidents, radicals, whatever you’d like to label them. People in the right who not 100 years ago, perhaps not even 50 years ago, would have been hauled before a judge or a censorship board and harassed and harangued and possibly jailed or deported. Today they’re either ignored, or if they’re especially good, still harassed. I can’t take seriously anybody who seems to speak from some misguided sense of moral omniscience in this, or in just about anything. Would you like to immigrate, settle in, naturalize yourself, and assist us in sorting it all out? It certainly seems like you think we need the help.
Reply
steph
September 24, 2012 at 12:55 am
I have only personal values which I have formed during my life. I share these with others in my society. As American imperialism affects the entire globe, environmentally and socially, we have opinions on the way America behaves and its foreign policies too as these have an impact on all of us. I did take a couple of politics papers and a few on criminal and Maori land and water laws but I do not hold a law degree or practice law, and I am not a politician and do not write policies. Therefore I can only vote for those who I hope will govern in the best way and wish that American legislators would become less isolated from the rest of the developed world. I do not wish to leave the country to which I have returned and certainly don’t think America needs help from foreigners, but perhaps it might be helpful if there was more cooperation and less domination, in a more egalitarian environment. Just ideas.
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steph
September 24, 2012 at 1:21 am
Rebecca: It’s difficult, as foreigners, to express opinions about countries without causing offence to decent people. For that, I’m sorry.
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Rebecca
September 24, 2012 at 2:51 am
Stephanie: There’s no need to apologize for anything. I criticize other people; I have no cause to expect no criticism in return. I have no desire whatever for you to apologize for your opinions. They’re opinions, and I’m not going to do anything about them, except write back.
I do disagree with some of your statements. Very stridently (though I mean no personal offense) do I object to the sentiment that America should submit to some international tribunal in determining how her citizens should be allowed to express…anything. I don’t believe international law has any place governing freedom of expression in sovereign countries.
I also think it’s more than a tad naive to think that, say, the genuinely tragic assassination of Christopher Stevens in Libya was CAUSED by an obscure American film making fun of and slandering Islam. To my mind, the film was an excuse, and only an excuse, to do that violence. Any excuse could have been used because Americans (and other Westerners, let’s be fair) make fun of Muhammed and his importance to Muslims EVERY SINGLE DAY. It’s a big trend on the internet now to say something public and outrageous about Islam and pretend like you’re a freedom fighter and the death threats should be rolling in any minute now, etc.
Another central problem is that it confuses me when fellow liberals (I guess I’ll take that label, begrudgingly) are quick to say something along the lines of “well, what do you morons expect, when you don’t legally prevent people from saying those things. You need to arrest somebody. This needs to be censored”. How is the onus ever on me if I say something offensive and halfway across the world you blow up a building full of innocent people “because” I said it? I don’t think “I” I am the problem here. “You” are the problem for taking a life because what you can’t take is a joke, or an insult. Yes, more than space divides us all; it’s culture. I know that, I see that, and I recognize that something festering in the West is fomenting emotional outrage in the Islamic countries. All said and done though, in my stubbornness I refuse to see us all as anything but human beings, almost all of us with some capacity – large or small – to change.
Anyway, to wrap up another huge comment, I’d like not to leave the bigger picture neglected. The day after Christopher Stevens died, hundreds of Libyan Muslims, innocent as angels, gathered in front of the embassy to mourn him, to express their love and gratitude for his service, and – heartbreakingly – to apologize on behalf of the killers. I’d like to find a way to connect with THOSE people, to work across any great distance with them, in any way I can, to bring us together. Peace is a dream transcending everything. That said, I’ll never get behind anything that requires I tear my Constitution apart first. Maybe it’s futile idealism, but I’ll probably always take up the cause for having one’s cake and eating it too. ;)
steph
September 24, 2012 at 6:58 pm
I don’t think anyone suggests America tears up its Constitution. But as fundamentalist Christians claim that biblical texts are the inerrant word of God, modern evolved Christians understand the literature in its historical context and religious ideas evolve accordingly so as not to contradict new scientific evidence in an enlightened … and evolving world.
For what its worth (not much) Aotearoa NZ has a ‘constitution’ – a collection of statutes, Treaties, Orders in Council, letters patent, decisions of the Courts and unwritten constitutional conventions. As with the United Kingdom, there is no one supreme document; the New Zealand constitution is not codified or, with the exception of certain electoral law, formally entrenched. Nothing is sacred in this secular country.
Mike Wilson
September 24, 2012 at 3:07 am
Exactly, Rebecca. Those that want regulate offensive speech don’t seem to question whether the board of all wise censors they propose to tell us what messages are worthy of expression would never abuse their power.
Reply
steph
September 24, 2012 at 5:54 am
;-)
Second time caller
September 23, 2012 at 6:15 am
Steph
Are you proposing that the right of the americans to free expression should be subject to approval by the muslims in the arab world?
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steph
September 23, 2012 at 5:36 pm
No. I am suggesting that America conform to international laws set by other, particularly secular, countries.
Reply
allentheallen
September 24, 2012 at 10:49 am
Rebeca pointed out: “In fact, there exists a number of incitement laws in the US. ”
Steph and other point out that other modern democracies have more stringent laws on speech.
Where I feel we’re not having dialog is perhaps an example of how, say Australia’s laws would have treated THIS matter any differently than the U.S. DOJ.
In fact, I’ve pointed out that some not-so-modern countries have made Google and YouTube remove the trailer for the “movie.” YET there has been no such response of these countries that have–it is claimed by Steph–more stringent laws that would have avoided this particular mess.
Would their DOJ have arrested the idiots who made and promoted THIS film? They certainly have not demanded the halt of its dissemination in their respective countries.
Dialog is where one responds to points.
steph
September 24, 2012 at 6:39 pm
The countries which have more stringent anti hate laws did not make these trailers but neither do they prevent their citizens from knowing what is happening in the rest of the world. We can trust that our news sources are reliable and we are better able to critically evaluate them as to their impartiality. Trust is fundamental for a healthy society.
David Duffy
September 25, 2012 at 1:07 am
As others have pointed out, the racial hatred laws in most countries are not blasphemy laws
steph
September 25, 2012 at 1:44 am
No, that’s right. Nobody suggested anti hate laws (in secular countries, too, which have these laws) equate with blasphemy laws. Hate which is prosecuted and presented to the courts, comes in many forms and covers different things.
allentheallen
September 25, 2012 at 12:54 pm
So? Then I’m at a total loss as to what in the world that this blog post or Steph’s comments are asking for that would in any way either:
1) Prevent the production of such a video
2) Prevent the dissemination of such a video
3) Prosecute–after the fact–the makers of such a video.
What is being asked for except the simple exhortation to behave politely?
rjosephhoffmann
September 25, 2012 at 6:49 pm
I don’t think a request to behave politely has any more chance of succeeding than an incompetent teacher’s pleas for the students to stop trashing a classroom and return to their desks. The difference is, we have competent ways of dealing with a situation like this.
steph
September 23, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Of interest and lest you be in doubt STC:
Most Muslims reject extremism and most Muslim immigrants want to assimilate with West:http://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/muslim-americans-no-signs-of-growth-in-alienation-or-support-for-extremism/
http://www.pewglobal.org/2010/12/02/muslims-around-the-world-divided-on-hamas-and-hezbollah/
Few Muslims support Al Qaeda or the Taliban: http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/07/10/most-muslims-want-democracy-personal-freedoms-and-islam-in-political-life/
Unemployment, of most concern to non-Muslims is likewise of major concern to Muslims: http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/07/06/muslims-in-europe-economic-worries-top-concerns-about-religious-and-cultural-identity/
Reply
Rebecca
September 25, 2012 at 1:54 pm
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to try to draw comparisons between New Zealand and the United States. I live in Connecticut. The entire population of New Zealand is barely any larger than the population of my tiny state. My tiny state also has its OWN tiny constitution, sort of and kind-of-not-exactly subordinate to the federal constitution. We have Connecticut-specific laws, procedures, benefits, problems, etc. Just trying to get through the legal documentation on (only) Connecticut’s anti-defamation laws will melt your brain. It seems a hell of a lot easier to create anti-hate laws in a very prosperous and tiny country, such as New Zealand, with (last I understood) only two major ethnic groups. I’m probably too American to even muster the cognitive strength to comprehend ‘outlawing hatred’. There’s an entire spectrum of human emotions and forms of expression to take into account. There’s even an entire spectrum of hate. I don’t want to write an essay or make a cartoon and get dragged into court and charged with hate. “You’ve been going around hating too much. Here’s six months printing license plates for three cents an hour in Enfield Correctional so you can think about how to play nice. PS: try not to get shanked.”
To return to the points about America needing to conform to international laws determined by ‘other secular nations’, it’s all for the best to confront this reality: never in a trillion years will you see that happen. I’d be very happy though to talk about other ideas you might have to reduce what you see as negative American cultural influence in very vulnerable and unstable countries undergoing massive change. That’s a sincere, uncynical, and snarkless request because I can’t even bluff: I’ve got virtually nothing. I can more or less assert that with a continued Obama administration you may be pleasantly surprised about how we may reform our foreign policy. If you want to move mountains, you have to make peace with their progressing an inch or two at a time. Sadly, Christopher Stevens was a major asset in that process. I hope we’ll find the right person to fill what are some very big shoes.
Reply
steph
September 25, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Right. Completely inappropriate. I said fwiw, “not much”. New Zealand and the UK (or even Australia etc). America is much more prominent internationally, with real influence. I was more alluding to principles than intending to draw direct comparisons. I admit I quite like not having an audible or relevant voice in the wider world. Our insignificance and miniscularity gives some of us down under in Aotearoa NZ an ‘illusion’(? or perhaps not an illusion) of security, being unknown and hidden and not even important enough to feature on some world maps, on the bottom of the globe… Kia kaha ;-)
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
“And Jesus said My wife [is not like these]…”
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on September 24, 2012
The gnostic scrap preposterously labeled the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” (GosJesWife) and described in painstaking detail by Annemarie Luijendijk in an article by Karen King of Harvard Divinity School will be old news by the time this comment appears.
That is as it should be, because the “discovery” was old news before the article appeared. Ms. King along with an established succession of gnostiphiles has consistently been guilty of sensationalizing relatively minor corrections, rethinks and supplements to the gnostic corpus as breakthroughs, if not by self-promotion then by acquiescence in the kind of glassy optimism that sees everything as a headline.
Ms. King is known primarily for her work on the Gospel of Judas (with her protégé, Elaine Pagels) and thus belongs to that clan of constructivists who might suggest (today) that Jesus and Judas were more than friends and (tomorrow) that after a failed experiment in same-sex polyamoury with the twelve, he returned to the arms of his beloved wife Mary, where he settled down like a good Jewish soykher, made babies (or if a gnostic Jesus, emanations), and carved icons for the booming idol trade in Sepphoris.
Mind you, Ms. King doesn’t say any of this. She doesn’t have to. Her scholarship equates roughly to a Hungarian director’s reconceptualization of Hansel and Gretel from the perspective of an abused peri-menopausal stepmother: it uses the text merely as a backdrop for conclusions reached independently of chewable evidence. –The fantasy that the Gospel of Judas can be situated in a period of “Roman persecution,” for example, was never adequately challenged, despite the fact that (with the exception of the non-gnostic Marcionites, who get honorable mention by Eusebius as late as the fourth century) the gnostic communes are not known to have contributed fodder to either Roman nor later to Christian persecution of heretics.
Even “unequivocal” Christians had their “Don’t ask don’t tell” rubrics when things got hot; Gnostics were far more furtive than that. The very sober treatment of Judas by Nag Hammadi facilitator James Robinson and the assessment of Amy Jill Levine—that Judas “tell[s] us much about second century belief and practice, but very little if anything about the man from Nazareth himself” were quickly engulfed in the belief (evangelised by King and Pagels) that it represented a significant “alternative” to the orthodox story.
That view is what is also being promoted in the unfolding saga of Jesus’ wife.
The disinformative Pagels-revolution in gnostic studies was based on a fundamental, and to a certain extent deliberate, misunderstanding of gnostic thought. Thirty years later, its rootage in the liberation theologies of le fin de siècle looks more superficial than ever before. Conditioned by a 1970’s impatience with male-dominated church structures, it was a slap at the patriarchal systems that dominated the western religious traditions—especially the Roman Catholic Church—and was refracted in other institutional, glass-ceilinged hierarchies like the academic and corporate worlds.
The very fact that the inventors of this “apostolic” band-of-brothers tradition–bishops like Irenaeus (Pagels’s least favourite prelate)–hated Gnostics was in her view and the view of her acolytes, reason enough to turn them into oppressed heroes. The fact that the “heretics” (old form) were a band of theosophical predators whose writings can charitably be described as garble seemed to make no difference to the cause: what mattered was that they told a different story to the canonical one, and in the age of canon-bashing, through the end of the twentieth century, that was all that mattered. One of the few courageous voices at the peak of Gnostimania between 1975 and 2000 was that of New Testament scholar, and a former teacher of mine, Joseph Fitzmyer, who commented matter-of-factly that the gnostics were the crazies of the second century, and did not improve with time.
Like Pagels, King has devoted some time to (unsuccessfully) overturning the early twentieth century idea, associated with the church historian Adolph von Harnack that Gnosticism was a radical “Hellenization” (or Neoplatonizing) of Christianity. The idea that it was a social equality movement comes from spending too much time with the theosophist rabble and almost none with Numenius, Plotinus and Porphyry. (Why worry about where the crazies got their craziness?).
And of course, eschewing Irenaeus and his “brother” bishops as being out of the picture.
Yet everything we have discovered from Nag Hammadi bears out the idea that gnosticism, even in its stammering and repetitious diversity, was just that: a mythological substrate—a plot line, so to speak—that sees creation itself, and humanity’s role in it, as a fall from divine perfection into material corruption.
Salvation in this myth is all about waking up, or rather about a select few waking up, to the promises of a God so distant that a cipher named Jesus, and his female consort/hypostasis/mother/wife/Achamoth/Sophia/Mary is needed to telepathize the message of redemption (opposite to the diremption or unraveling of the sacred fullness) to the broken world made by a rascal equivalent to the platonic demiurge, often identified as the God of the Jews, but with fewer superpowers.
The universe of thought in which gnostic ideas swirl is so different to the “canonical world” that it can properly be called alien, and with few exceptions—the letter of a gnostic bishop named Ptolemy to a catechumen named Flora (Epiphanius [Hær. XXXIII, 3-7] is often cited) –incomprehensible. It is cited because its sentences parse. Nothing quite as sober was found among the Coptic papyri in Upper Egypt.
The problem with seeing the gnostic gospels as the “other side” of the Christian story is that they aren’t. They tell another story. It is the cultic iteration of Neoplatonic missionaries who used Christian ideas as window dressing—or as Irenaeus said, as bait. It is the nether side of cultic frenzy, an elitist fantasy that replaces the more democratic apocalyptic hope of the first Christian generation with a Jesus who is never born, whose feet never touch the ground, whose crucifixion is an illusion, and whose resurrection is unnecessary. This revelation happens in the minds of first century republicans, the 1% who deserve to be saved—not in the lives of sinners—and not in the biography of a flesh and blood, sexually-complex figure named Mary Magdalene.
This Jesus talks in runes, numbers, and aeons, even when the dialogue is framed (as it is for example in the Gospel of Judas), using superficial historical markers tacked on from the canonical narrative: In fact, the core of Judas (ll 47-53) is a non-Christian gnostic discourse that has been superficially resituated as a dialogue between a Jesus who comes, goes, morphs into a child, disappears from view, and spends the rest of his time laughing at the stupidity of his disciples for their worldly ways–Judas, unlucky man, being mysteriously counted as disciple thirteen:
Here, just for the flavor, is a sample:
Judas said to Jesus, “So what will those generations do?”
Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, for all of them the stars bring matters to completion.
When Saklas completes the span of time assigned for him, their first star will appear with
the generations, and they will finish what they said they would do. Then they will fornicate in my name and slay their children [55] and they will […] and [—about six and
[a half line is missing—] my name, and he will […] your star over the [thir]teenth aeon.”
After that Jesus [laughed].
Even in the strained dialogues of the Gospel of Thomas (which is somehow connected to this scrap) the gospel writers only succeed in making Jesus sound like a fourth rate Socrates—even though during my time at Harvard, a respected New Testament scholar could argue that Thomas was at least circumstantial “proof” of the existence of Q. (It was one of the reasons I absconded for Oxford.)
Given this as background, what should we make of the “marriage of Jesus”? The short answer is, Nothing at all.
It is intriguing to me that in all of the discussion so far, but in keeping with a new biblical orthodoxy that eschews calling texts “canonical” and “non-canonical,” this non-canonical passage is seldom called gnostic, as though to call it what it is “privileges” orthodox discourse.
This is absurd of course—a bit like saying that calling the plays of Thomas Greene wretched (they are) privileges the plays of William Shakespeare because they kept their audiences awake. Presumably this labeling discriminates against the full-bodied potential meanings (always plural) of the text, because (having dispensed with the category of heresy as a judgment of power-hungry male bishops of the second and third century) by classifying it we enable a distinction between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that postmodernism has decreed is not pertinent to the historical narrative. As a standard older book on the subject of the gnostic religion proves, spending too much time with the gnostics will eventually find you in the embrace of Jung or Derrida, secure in a cosmos ruled by the gods of deconstruction.
Odd, therefore, that in judging the value of the gnostic literature for its “revolutionary character,” constant reference has to be made to the canonical plotline, since not to do so would leave us swimming in the ether and aeons of cultic savants who did not care about history, marriage, groceries, or everyday life.
What is at stake here, to be blunt, is not whether Jesus was married. Nor is the issue (as King tunes it) whether there were groups of Christians who thought he was, at least allegorically–since at least allegorically the author of Ephesians 5.22 seems to think he was. What is at stake is how we deal with the intellectual parameters of evidence
The scholars who are arguing against this “gospel” on the basis of its “authenticity” are brutally confused and in fact are swallowing the premise that it causes us to “question” what we may have thought about Christian origins.
From everything I have read, I am prepared to think (with a significant reservation) that the fragment is authentic; that it dates from the third century; that the orthography is Sahidic, and that it is not the work of an antiquities forger. And I am equally prepared to believe that Professor King believes that it is genuine. While I deplore her interpretation, I think her skills in Coptic are self evident to someone, like me, who knows the field and knows the language.
The eighteen lines of the fragment as reproduced and described by King are these:
1) not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe] … ”
2) The disciples said to Jesus, “
3) deny. Mary is worthy of it
4) Jesus said to them, “My wife
5) she will be able to be my disciple
6) Let wicked people swell up
7) As for me, I dwell with her in order to…
The natural reaction to reading these lines simply as text is to say that we do not know more than we know.
Its connections with the Gospel of Thomas (114) will be evident to anyone who knows that gospel, where Mary queries Jesus about the identity of his followers (21). In the celebrated conclusion of Thomas, Peter suggests (114)
“Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”
To which Jesus responds,
“I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The purely symbolic and desexualized nature of Mary in the discourse is obvious: women were closely associated with the reproductive faculty that the gnostic telestai regarded as corrupt and (like the world) defiling. Jesus suggests, rather than exclusion, to redeem her through transforming her, perhaps baptismally within the cult, to a sexuality that is not associated with reproduction–the perpetuation of the “primoridial error.” Incultation is very much like a marriage: it is a union, it is transformative, and it is salvific. it is also asexual and sterile.
While the peri-verse “Mary is [?] worthy of it” raises suspicions as to the authenticity of the fragment, especially in apposition to the word “life” in [1], the editors prudentially note (35) that the verse may read “is not worthy of it,” which would in fact be in keeping with the extant verse in the Gospel of Thomas.
Furthermore, if this fragment is a periphrasis of Thomas 114, then the logical conclusion to the fragment, “As for me, I dwell with her in…” is “[in] order to make her male.”
The phrase, “Jesus said, my wife….” Or “my spouse” needs to be interpreted within this general framework, and within the gnostic system as a whole. King’s suggestion regarding [1] and the preceding lacuna seem at first glance reasonable:
A probable restoration for the lacuna prior to first line and in →1: ([“Whoever does not hate his father and his mother will] not [be able to become] my [disciple]. My mother gave me li[fe]”) can be suggested based on comparison with GosThom 101 (49:32-50:11); cp. also Luke 14:26 (Sahidic).
Internally however, this interpretation is unjustified: To complete the lacuna in this way contradicts the core belief that the “life giving mother” Mary is viewed negatively, and does not explain the transition between this and the assertion that Mary is (or is not) worthy of life. In Thomas Jesus does not say what King wants him to say, but this:
Whoever does not hate his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not love his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. For my mother [...], but my true mother gave me life.” [Lambdin trans.]
That is to say, the true mother is not the one associated with Jesus by the earthen disciples, but a revelation of a higher power.
In “classical” gnostic thought, this power is either the female emanation of the pleroma, or Sophia, though gnosticism played fast and loose with names from a variety of theosophical schools and religions, including Christianity.
King’s conclusions about [4] however are therefore even more insecure:
The meaning of “my wife” is unequivocal; the word can have only this meaning. Given that Jesus is the speaker, the possessive article indicates that he is speaking of his wife. Given the dialogue form, Jesus seems to be addressing his disciples (which does not precluding her presence among the other disciples, especially given the following line’s affirmation that “she is able to be my disciple”).
This assumes what is not “given” at all. As our closest analogy to this text distinguishes between the assumed and the true mother, in true gnostic Doppelganger fashion (a literary device used to enforce the Neoplatonic distinction between the real and the apparent) it would be far more reasonable to suggest that the verse can be completed as
“Jesus said, my wife is not like [her]
But the one who is saved,
She is worthy to be my disciple.
…And I dwell with her in order
to make her male.”
King has done an admirable job describing the fragment. Yet its tantalizing parallelism with a theme in Thomas that has often been seen as “anti-woman,” creates a troubling uncertainty about its provenance, and casts a reasonable doubt over its authenticity. Nonetheless, what is more troubling is the disconnect between Professor King’s meticulous description and her willingness to leap from that to a reconstruction and conclusions that do not comport with what we know about the context of gnostic thought.
The question inescapably becomes, What about this fragment would require us to see a valence for marriage higher than that which we normally associate with gnosticism? What in this piece of a piece requires us to see it, virtually, as a “correction” of Thomas? Anticipating this sort of criticism, and to avoid the most extreme view—that the fragment “proves” a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (who is never mentioned)–King says:
On the other hand, we can ask whether it might instead be Jesus’s wife whose worthiness is being denied, questioned, or defended by the disciples in →3 …especially because Jesus’s response in →4-5 deends her ability to be his disciple. If so, this means that GosJesWife is identifying Jesus’s wifes “Mary” in →3. It is highly likely that this Mary would have been understood to be Mary of Magdala, given the existence of early Christian traditions which identified a close relationship between Jesus and Mary, and some which questioned Mary’s worthiness.
“Worthiness” is an interesting betrayal of the entire modus operandi of this exercise. It is the membrane toward which all of the descriptive propellant has been directed, and falls totally outside the range of evidence, totally outside the range of gnostic thought. In gnosticism, flesh, the world, and all that serve to perpetuate them are unworthy.
It is this kind of speculation that sinks the ship, hybridizing King’s own interests in a gnosticism reformed and reconceived to reflect an interest in social ethics, and the actual evidence, the ciphers of which do not begin to justify this translation and fictional reconstruction.
For example, once it agreed that the gnostic Mary’s are not “canonical,” it is all but useless to use the canonical models as touchstones for the “historical” relationships the New Testament provides. What Gnosticism believed about birth and marriage (despite repeatedly ludicrous claims made about the Gospel of Philip, perhaps the most habitually abused of all the gnostic corpus) is that both were misfortunes of the creator’s world. Even the Marcionites prohibited marriage, cohabitation and the use of meat. What in this fragment would cause us to suppose that the “real” mother of Jesus or a putative “real” wife of Jesus would suddenly become prominent role-players in Christian tradition–different from the completely contrastive roles they play within the larger scheme of gnostic metaphysics?
In short, the mainstreaming of the idea that gnosticism should be taken seriously as part of the story of early Christianity (it should) has led here as in many other cases to a nugation of the fact that gnosticism was itself a rejection of the sorts of relationships modern interpreters press to find in these early texts. Professor King and her cohort seem unable to distinguish between accepting–as many of us since the time of Walter Bauer have done–the fact that early Christianity was a many splendored thing–from the fact that some of early Christianity was merely incoherent.
Does the fragment, small as it is, suggest a reformation of gnostic thought that would redefine the view of marriage and sexuality we find in other sources—especially Thomas? That is an interesting idea—Marcionisn underwent such a change under Apelles—but the evidence here is too scant to make it an argument. And the argument is not made: instead, we have the inconceivable notion that a flesh and blood Jesus is making the case for the “worthiness” of a flesh and blood Mary Magdalene to be his wife. Pray, what would be the religious reason for that appeal? What would be its location in history?
I am interested to know, as well, why Ms. King fleshes out other verses and fills gaps, but does not expand on “Jesus said, my wife….”:
“Given that Jesus is the speaker, the possessive article indicates that he is speaking of his wife.”
This tautology (because it is scarcely a grammatical point in Coptic) is true, but King’s further view that “The sentence should therefore be understood to mean that she [Mary?] will be able to perform the functions of, or have the characteristics of being (or becoming) a disciple” is simply wishful thinking.
My own suggestion, in keeping with Thomas’s and other gnostic use of what is called collusio oppositorum, is that Jesus contrasts Mary (if that is who is meant) with his true wife,” who is not like the women of this world. “Jesus said, my wife [is not like her].”
In the canonical gospels, a kiss is still a kiss. In gnosticism it is—complicated, as Irenaeus suggests in discussing the incestuous begetting of the savior—a passage I suggest King re-read before going any further with her speculation:
“When all the seed shall have come to perfection, they state that then their mother Achamoth shall pass from the intermediate place, and enter in within the Pleroma, and shall receive as her spouse the Saviour who sprang from all the Aeons, that thus a conjunction may be formed between the Saviour and Sophia, that is, Achamoth.” (AdvHaer 1.7.1))
Much more titillating to think that the verse refers to a “wife” than to a wife who is also a mother—but that is the way Gnostics often thought.
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Published: September 24, 2012
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12 Responses to ““And Jesus said My wife [is not like these]…””
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Is Sex the Reason Some Insist Jesus Wasn’t Married? says:
September 24, 2012 at 7:58 pm
[...] NBC News piece asking whether Jesus was “too holy for sex.”See also the recent posts by Joseph Hoffmann, Stanley Porter, David Gill, Tony Jones, Christian Piatt, and Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter.If there [...]
Reply
piccolino
September 25, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Actually, the whole verse is in the possession of a black market antiquarian, and it reads: “my wife is truly the one who will be with me in the eon”. End of mistery. Sorry to have spoiled that.
Reply
fuzzrabbit
October 9, 2012 at 7:29 pm
How do you know that? It is pure gnosticism.
Reply
steph
October 9, 2012 at 7:45 pm
Piccolino doesn’t. He made it up. Including his own mysterious spelling and tiny name.
fuzzrabbit
October 9, 2012 at 8:30 pm
“piccolino” > ‘tiny’? :)
stevenbollinger
September 25, 2012 at 2:33 pm
For some time now I had been wondering when I would finally see a fellow scholar mention Elaine Pagels with less than unreserved praise. This was a great relief.
Are you familiar with Steven Runciman’s book The Medieval Manichee, and if so, do you consider it to be a competent treatment of Gnosticism and later related heresies?
Reply
Papyrusfragment in zwaar weer | Γεγραμμένα says:
September 26, 2012 at 9:56 am
[...] “lijkt” had toegevoegd, want niets is wat het lijkt. Met name posts van Larry Hurtado, Joseph Hoffmann en een artikel van Michael Peppard (en schrijfsels van nog wel meer mensen natuurlijk) leiden tot [...]
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brettongarcia
September 27, 2012 at 6:29 pm
I see early Christianity as a contest between a more 1) physicalistic religion (demanding physical miracles and a physical “kingdom,” say); vs. 2) an proto-gnostic/Platonistic attempt to spiritualize, metaphoricalize all that. To suggest that it was all just metaphors, for spiritual things. In this biopolar scheme, I agree that the quoted fragment seems to fit the more gnostic end of the spectrum … and say, the Gospel of Thomas.
But just to play the devil’s advocate? You asked what could possibly be the historical source for the championing of a physical, material Mary. And in effect, if early Christianity was a conflict between the physical and the spiritual, there would likely be a physicalistic Mary after all. And indeed, there is a certain biblical emphasis on physical things, including biological inheritance.
Throughout the Old Testament and even parts of the New – as in the prevailing human cultures generally – there is always a tendency toward in effect, physically hereditary monarchy; toward the idea that our present leaders, kings, should always be biological “sons” descended biologically from earlier kings. In the OT usually, from King David. ( While some importance is also attached at times to finding the bio “brother” of Jesus, in James.) The idea always in the background, being that perhaps Christianity should be a sort of biologically hereditary monarchy; in which blood relatives only should apply.
In this case, of course, patriarchical succession is nominally more important than matriarchal. At the same time though, men being what they are, it is sometimes difficult to determine who the real father of a given “son” is; though the facts of birth always make it plainer who his mother is. So that biological succession from a mother/queen, practically speaking, acquires some importance. Though opposing arguments are also made in many cultures – and in other parts of the Bible to be sure – that our true successors are not our biological family, but are those who follow our thoughts and spirit, still, parts entertain the importance of biological succession.
Our present fragment then, might be situated in the historical “life situation” or context of this ancient debate: on the relative importance of physical vs. spiritual descendency. And while good arguments could be made – like yours – that this fragment best fits the more Gnostic/Platonistic side of it all, it’s worth considering that it MIGHT fit into the other side of the debate as well. FIt into the side which values biological descendency.
At times in fact, much later, various kings of France and so forth, claimed to be biologically descended from Mary; as a way of propping up their own hereditary monarchies. This fragment could fit into the middle of that longstanding question.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
September 27, 2012 at 9:30 pm
If it is genuine it is gnostic: considering its language, date, and plausible provenance there is almost no doubt. Considering its odd connection to Gnostic Thomas, there is no doubt.
Reply
brettongarcia
September 28, 2012 at 3:34 am
I tend to agree; looks like you’ve made an academically notable response to Dr. King in fact.
I also tend to agree with your generally negative assessment of gnosticism/Platonism and theosophy. And the related hazards of over-spirituality, to which a Coptic scholar particularly would be prone.
Reply
Stephen Goranson
October 9, 2012 at 7:05 am
On a minor point, though his friend Joseph Fitzmyer may have said the same thing, Raymond Brown ended his N Y Times review of Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels (Jan. 20, 1980) by saying that maybe “crusty old Irenaeus was right, after all, to regard the gnostics as the crazies of the second century.” And Pagels referred to the phrase in her long letter of response (17 Feb.).
Reply
Andrew
October 9, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Excellent article. Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity seems to have been taken as a declaration of independence to some scholars. These artificial categories could now be dissolved and “the other side” of the story could finally be told, via Nag Hammadi (properly interpreted). If their pretensions toward Neoplatonism had legs, Gnosticism should have produced an Irenaeus, Origen, or Eusebius.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on October 5, 2012
In case you need to hear it again. Mitt Romney will not raise taxes on the middle class, will not increase the deficit, will create 12,000,000 new jobs in the first three months, will protect small businesses, and will save Medicare and Social Security as we know it, while giving future “seniors” more choice about health care options. Everything’s comin’ up roses, and you heard it from his milk-drinking, alcohol-free, tobacco-eschewing lips.
A lot has been made about Romney’s lies, and his commitment to post-truth politics. But they are not really lies–at least not the sort of whoppers that Ben Franklin alluded to in Poor Richard’s when he said the truth stands on two legs, a lie on one.
In the image-is-everything world we live in, propagating your version of the reality you want the world to see is the real goal. Mitt Romney is good at it. But he is not good at it because he a a good lawyer, or a good businessman, or a good guy.
He is a good at is because he is a Mormon–and not just a Mormon but a really good Mormon. And really good Mormons are the best liars in the world.
In the recent debate, Mr Obama, a man still occasionally in touch with this weird and rare thing called truth, had a hard time understanding the scene unfolding adjacent to him.
He seemed to be a man reading for a part in the wrong play, using the wrong script–one that corresponded to a different plotline. If at times he seemed to be thinking, “I can’t believe this guy” what he was hoping is that no one else would believe this guy. But many did and many will. Meanwhile, Romney basked in the artificial light of the artificial scene with the artifical trees and shrubs and buildings that the President stumbled into. All that was missing was Jim Reeves singing “Welcome to My World” in the background. Obama was a guest in Mitt Romney’s head for an hour and a half.
Contrary to what the media said, this was not a weak performance by a man—the President–who needed to get in there and throw a few punches and challenge Romney’s “facts”. It was a scene out of Mars Attacks. It was the devil messing with Eve’s head, Satan in jeering voice taunting Job. In fact,Obama looked more Job- than Solomon-like, a man afflicted and confused.
No one expected the enemy to take this form. At one point, in reply to Romney’s third asseveration that he was not advocatng a three trillion dollar tax break and that the President’s statements were “simply inaccurate,” (“I don’t know where you’re getting this stuff”) Mr Obama simply looked disappointed and mildly shook his graying head. How many at that point wanted someone to say pointedly “I’m getting it from you, Governor–it’s what you’ve been saying for eighteen months.” Except we all know what Romney would have said, in that Jon Lovitz/Tommy Flannagan style he had adopted: “No I didn’t. You’re making that up, too.” Post-truthfulness, to be effective, must be pathologically coherent.
Accordingly it was Mitt Romney’s reality that won, and there was no room in that reality for challenge. In the myth Romney cunningly spun, lies became pillars in an unassailable argument. The response to that myth–the only appropriate one, and hence one this President could not make–would be “You’re full of shit, and everything you have said is shit. If people want to vote for shit, they will vote for you.” Short of that, nothing would have worked. But something tells me, that might have.
Peter, James, and John ordain Joseph Smith
Do we know any other area of life where factual challenges do not prevail over evidence and eyesight?
Of course we do. Religion. This debate was won by theological sleight of hand—by “the evidence of things not seen,” otherwise known as faith. The old Yiddish joke about a jewel thief caught in the act by a cop (“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”) also works if you change the culprit to a philandering husband. And it works if you make the perpetrator a contemporary Mormon politician. The Mormon tradition of “Lying for the Lord” has received a little attention (though not enough) recently, especially in an interview with Brigham Young’s descendant, Sue Emmet, in The Daily Beast. Mitt Romney may be the best of the breed in knowing how the game ius played and when to play it.
Although Christanity has had two thousand years to get its duplicitous act together and has more or less accepted standard distinctions between truth and falsehood, except in doctrinal matters, religion scholars know that religious minorities often have to survive by practicing duplicity in the interest of the higher cause: propagating their version of the truth.
They do this to make their converts (think: voters) believe that what they are signing onto is better than what they’ve got, if necessary by telling them that while their brief and mortal lives stink, their eternal one will be a bed of roses–a little like the lives of the 1% here on earth.
Celsus, an early critic of Christanity, sneers at the way Christians prey on unsuspecting “yokels,” then fade, hide or deny when their preachers are confronted by skeptical onlookers. In Islam, various sectarians, including the Druze of Lebanon and Syria, were famous liars—a reputation that put their militias at the service of the highest bidder during the long Lebanese civil war. The Alawites of Syria, like the ancient gnostics before them and other heterodox cults, spread in just the same way. Once upon a time, it variously benefited and hurt Christians to be confused with Jews. When it benefited them to be different and join ranks with pagan anti-Semitism, they joined ranks and took over the Empire and began acting like pagans. That’s the way religious lying works. You just have to have a cool head, a few zingers in your quiver, and know whom to appease and whom oppose.
Being sneaky and learning to lie has benefited every endangered sect since the Reformation, ranging from the Dunkards to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Moonies. The point is to get your foot in the door. Once you do that, you can get your ideas into your victim’s head.
But Mormons are the champions of all champion liars. Lying has made them not just survivors but rich and prosperous survivors.
Unlike some less mendacious groups, the Mormons were founded by a renowned snake oil salesman and accomplished untruth teller. Joseph Smith is the prototype, though with less carnage to his direct credit, for such successors as David Koresh and Jim Jones, of (respectively) Waco and Jonestown fame—religious leaders who begin on the tracks and then derail their congregants with promises of beachfront property in the Kingdom and a divine bank account that never goes overdraft.
Mormons are not just used car salesmen: they may have invented used car salesmen. If you don’t believe me, just replay any speech Mitt Romney has made in the last ten years, and you will see in his healthy glow the snake oil that his religion has been selling for 175 years. It takes us right back to the famous father of fork-tongued evangelists who once boasted that he had “become all things to all all men so that [he] could save all.” Translated from the Greek it means, Do what it takes.
Lying comes naturally to Romney, the young Mormon missionary to France, the young Mormon draft-averter, the Mormon bishop, the Mormon philanthropist. It has been a feature of his religion since its deranged founder set the Guinness record for religious lies.
Beginning in 1846, after their violent expulsion from Nauvoo, Illinois Mormon missionaries attempted to depict themselves in England as victims of persecution. The tales were engineered by Brigham Young himself and his closest associates, who then tried to win converts for the Utah trek by depicting the Salt Lake Valley as a veritable paradise. After the British Mormon John Edward Taylor became chief propagandist for the cult around 1852, and after failing to attract large numbers of takers with a “land grant” Ponzi-scheme that was designed to take the “saints” all the way to California, he lured them with this:
The way is now prepared; the roads, bridges, and
ferry-boats made; there are stopping places also on the way where they can rest, obtain vegetables and corn, and, when they arrive at the far end, instead
of finding a wild waste, they will meet with friends, provisions and a home, so that all that will be requisite for them to do will be to find sufficient teams
to draw their families, and to take along with them a few woollen or cotton goods, or other articles of merchandise which will be light, and which the
brethren will require until they can manufacture for themselves.
“How many a poor Englishman,” worried the Millennial Star Newspaper of the day, “ toiling over the plains in the next succeeding years, and, arriving in arid Utah to find himself in the clutches of an organization from which he could not escape, had reason to curse the man who drew this picture!”
One of the constant themes of women and men who have left the Mormon church has been the noble tradition of “lying for the Lord,” a habit that goes back to Joseph Smith himself and the peculiarities of his “discovery”
of the golden tablets (“being composed of thin metallic pages engraved on both sides and bound with three D-shaped rings”) that constituted the latterday revelation of the saints.
Smith’s reformed Egyptian letters: do not correspond to any ancient script or language
“The LDS church” says Ken Clark, a former Mormon bishop, “consistently describes in sermons and paintings, the visitation of an angel named Moroni to Joseph Smith on September 21, 1823. Moroni is pictured floating above Joseph or next to his bed, alone in his bedroom. The pictures do not portray Joseph’s five brothers who slept in the same room with him. A restored Smith house is used for LDS tours showing the small room and only two beds for six brothers. Nothing resembling the actual sleeping arrangement is hinted at in the church’s official literature and pictorial recreations of the scene.”
Following this initial deception, Mormonism entered into a long history of post-truthfulness—the sort of thing that runs deep in Romney DNA. The Kinderhook Plates Hoax (fake metal plates that Smith pronounced ancient Egyptian); the lie that Joseph Smith wrote the History of the Church, when it was not recorded until decades after his death; the great Rocky Mountain Prophecy, invented to convince believers that the Salt Lake Valley was the place ordained for them by God as a promised land; even the “name change” of the angel responsible for the revelation to Smith—from Nephi to Moroni, a change which would be analogous to saying that, on second thought, Jesus’ name was really Schlomo.
Some Mormon historians have labeled the phenomenon of Mormon lying and duplicity “theocratic ethics.” According to D. Michael Quinn, Smith lied to “protect himself or the church, which was an extension of himself. ” And Dan Vogel (Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet) describes Smith’s viewpoint even more succinctly: he was a pious deceiver.
Smith used deception if in his mind it resulted in a good outcome. Smith had Moroni, an ancient American prophet and custodian of the gold plates declare, “And whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do good is of me; for good cometh of none save it be of
me. ( Moroni 4:11-12). Translation: if deception was necessary to do good, or bring a soul to Christ, then it was worth it, as long as God approves. Smith
believed he knew when God approved of lying.
It’s odd to me that none of the political commentators have chosen—as far as I can tell—to dwell on the “Lying for the Lord” aspect of Mormon culture: its disregard for telling the truth in stressful situations, and its penchant for making up new truths as circumstances warrant. No wonder Paul Ryan, with his rather different Catholic approach to reality, looks bewildered and confused as Romney plows on, unhampered by the constraints of fact and detail. He is just doing his religious duty, surreptitiously as his religion requires him to do it.
Is this because the candidate himself, as a true Mormon, has succeeded in keeping the reverence for deceit below the radar–doing in effect what every good Mormon leader since Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Joseph Taylor has been doing for 175 years?
When Mitt Romney says he is not calling for 3 trillion dollars in tax cuts, not asking for austerity, not aiming to curtail entitlement programs, are we really just looking at a twenty-first century cultist’s version of the promises made by nineteenth century Mormon propagandists to reluctant converts who—when they arrived in Utah—discovered not the garden of Eden but a desert?
Mormonsim has been called the “uniquely American religion.” Mitt Romney, if he is elected, will be the first uniquely American Mormon president. As voters consider their choices, they need to know that Mormonism is and always has been a duplicitous, deceitful and lying cult whose movers and shakers were accustomed to living in a post-truth era long before there was a postmodern justification for it. Whenever things got tough–as they were for Mitt Romney before his debate with Barack Obama–there was always the fallback position: a new truth, a new reality, a new made-to-order revelation. People who like truth may regard Mormon ethics as a little slippery.
But if you like that kind of thing, as the President might say, Mitt is your man.
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Published: October 5, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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25 Responses to “Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High”
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ROO BOOKAROO
October 5, 2012 at 11:34 am
Wish you would send this as an opinion piece to the NY Times or even Huffington Post. Nobody else seems intent on highlighting those basic facts.
Reply
pithom
October 5, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Mr. Hoffman, I have to take my hat off to you. This post is, perhaps, the best analysis of the concept of pious fraud and the reasons for why it exists, spreads, and thrives I have seen in my lifetime. Perhaps this is the first time this year you have precisely hit the nail on the head on every single point you made in a blog post.
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Dean
October 5, 2012 at 7:42 pm
Thank you for the historic background to an practice I’ve witnessed numerous times living in Alberta. Sadly Canada’s current conservative government is overrun with an Evangelical/LDS coalition, including our Prime Minister. They appear to be quite comfortable with secrecy and deception while pursuing their own agendas. Canada has never been a truly secular country, what remains of secular government here may be marginalized if they win another election.
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Ed Jones
October 6, 2012 at 7:57 pm
A brillliant expose’. More than derserving of my return to you of your gracious Reply to my comment: A viable solution to the “Jesus Puzzle” to News from the Freethought Ghetto.
Joe, “Thank you for this – filled with wisdom and understaanding, like Job!”
Reply
julie assange
October 6, 2012 at 10:53 pm
I work at a school district which is half mormon in population, but nearly all mormon in control. This seems a pattern for mormons, as does their consistent pattern of lying when it benefits mormon goals. Beware putting romney in a position of power. Mormons use power only to benefit themselves and their church.
Reply
jsegor23
October 7, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Joe: Great article. I am normally against attacking candidates because of their religion, but your piece has so much explanatory power that I have made an exception and have shared it with my Facebook friends. Argie will do the same. I hope that others who read it will do the same. If it gets enough traction on Facebook, the press may pick it up. I don’t Tweet, but if I did, I would put it on Twitter as well.
Reply
Clarice O'Callaghan
October 8, 2012 at 8:54 am
Your article is a stunner, Joe. I’ve emailed the following media and perhaps if others do the same it will draw much needed attention before it’s too late.
“Ed@msnbc.com” ; “hardball@msnbc.com” ; “scoop@huffingtonpost.com” ; “scoop@motherjones.com” ; “wolfblitzer@CNN.com”
Reply
Clarice O'Callaghan
October 8, 2012 at 8:56 am
Oops, not all of the addresses appeared. Again,
“Ed@msnbc.com” ; “hardball@msnbc.com” ; “scoop@huffingtonpost.com” ; “scoop@motherjones.com” ; “wolfblitzer@CNN.com”
Reply
A few good links | eChurch Blog says:
October 8, 2012 at 9:08 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann – Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High [...]
Reply
packham33
October 8, 2012 at 10:54 am
For more specific examples of Mormon lying, see my article “Mormon Lying” at http://packham.n4m.org/lying.htm
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Yanquetino
October 9, 2012 at 10:26 am
Bullseye! It is so encouraging that someone has the integrity to look beneath the surface of the Mormon cult’s slick, osmondized image, and tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Readers who want to learn more about Romney’s persona might also consider my articles “Mormons’ Concept of Self –and of Others” http://bit.ly/SG9Gbs and “Why Political Candidates’ Religious Beliefs Are Important” http://bit.ly/KqNw9d
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vegasjessie
October 9, 2012 at 12:13 pm
As an ardent critic of the religion that charges a post-mortem afterlife insurance premium of 10% of its cult followers, I appreciate this blog. If you see parts referenced in my next post, take that as the highest form of flattery!
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Antonio Jerez
October 9, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Wonderful! We are in deep shit if Romney is elected president, which seems more probable after Obamas dreadful performance in the debate. It´s actually double shit if a lying mormon and a archconservative catholic (Ryan) who doesn´t know basic mathematics get elected. That both these loonies are taken seriously by almost half the american voters says quite a lot about the dreadful state of american politics at the moment.
Reply
Linda Singh
October 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
love the truth getting out,
I can hardly believe this presidenial rac is so close. I do blieve it is bigotry and nothing else, romney ryan ill taeus ples w don’t want to go, down. down, down!
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Glenn
October 21, 2012 at 8:54 am
Wow, excellent article. Please forward this the the N.Y. Times editorial board. That was the part of Romney I couldn’t understand. Being such a religious man but lying about everything. This explains everything.
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Sara Watson
October 21, 2012 at 11:38 am
I’m making it “my mission to get this facts @ the “Mormons Lying Tradition”..I’m seriously frightened of a Romney presidency, after reading this article & the comments; more than ever. I suggest all of yo
Reply
Clarice O'Callaghan
October 21, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Twitter reaches thousands and millions of people with very little effort. Before it’s too late.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
October 21, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Once more….
Reply
Dwight Jones
October 21, 2012 at 9:54 pm
If the Americans marry Romney to the Pentagon, it will be the end of them.
Sometimes you only get so many chances at decency, and the sands may have run out…
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Mike Wilson
November 1, 2012 at 12:08 pm
I worry about the tone of the article, which reminds me of those that tell us we shouldn’t be surprised by Bernnie Madoff’s actions because he’s Jewish after all or that seek to explain Bin Laden in terms of Islam’s deeply held commitment to murder. Sure we may all think Mormanism is silly, but that Romney is a liar hardly makes him an aberation in American politics. Should we go looking for the Quaker roots of Nixons misdeeds or why Presbyterians like Reagan are such fantastic liars?
Reply
steph
November 1, 2012 at 8:09 pm
An enquiry into the historical reasons behind Nixon’s and Reagan’s decisions, claims and actions, whether or not they have religious roots, would be very intriguing. That’s a good idea. Maybe after the election is over.
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Yanquetino
November 1, 2012 at 8:33 pm
@Mike:
The religious analogies you mention constitute a broad brush that misses the point.
Shall we assume that you would likewise have no problem voting for a candidate who is belongs to the Klu Klux Klan, or is a proponent of Scientology, or a Christian Scientist, or a member of the Flat Earth Society? There comes a time when a particular belief system crosses the line of rational thinking –an absolute prerequisite for the president of the most powerful nation on earth, in my humble opinion.
In the case of Romney’s Mormonism, we are talking about core, central beliefs that fly in the face of historical, scientific, and even biological DNA facts. To live in denial of reality is not just “faith,” it is blind faith:
http://bit.ly/OVbFgG
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Mike Wilson
November 12, 2012 at 4:41 pm
At this point Mormonism has been around well over 100 years and millions of individuals are born and raised in Mormon families. I would not expect them to abandon their family cult any more than I would expect Christians or Jews too once they realize, as they should that there was no parting of the Red Sea or that Genesis is not a factual account of the first people. No one ask traditional Christian candidates if they are really so credulous as to believe in the virgin birth or resurrection or what the future has in store for 7 headed dragons. I think most people understand that believing certain bizarre religious beliefs does not tend to cross into the daily habits of believers. For instance I would challenge anyone to find evidence in, evangelical and Billy Graham devotee, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy that suggest he was trying to usher in the end times
steph
November 12, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Why on earth would they? Bill Clinton’s foreign policy has nothing to do with end times. Clinton has an independent mind. Clinton doesn’t feel compelled to agree with Billy Graham and the two fall on opposite sides of the gay marriage debate. I think the argument in the essay still holds and can’t really see the point of your comment. The man lost. The man lied. The man is a Mormon. Mormonism is a cult. It stands still and doesn’t evolve. Christianity can and does and Clinton is a critical thinker with an independent mind, free from chains to particular biblical interpretations.
steph
November 13, 2012 at 12:19 am
What exactly is your definition of devotee? Rhetorical question. I suspect your label was an attempt to denigrate him. ;-) Clinton pays tribute to many people, one of whom has been Graham. Aren’t we all, as thinking human beings, capable of paying others respect for their achievements or inspiration, or contribution to the community, without falling into the fanatical idolisation hero-worship type role? Clinton says of the man: “he showed us that by following our faith we would move the rock up the hill…that faith is Billy Graham’s great gift to the world”. If anyone was a devotee perhaps it was Billy. Are you perchance a devotee of the subject of this essay? I forget his name. I scrolled up … Romney. Now he was a devotee…
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An Introduction to Probability Theory and Why Bayes’s Theorem is Unhelpful in History
by rjosephhoffmann
October 12, 2012
The following is a post written by Ian on his blog ”Irreducible Complexity” reposted here with his permission http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/probability-theory-introductio/
This post follows from the previous review of Richard Carrier’s “Proving History”, which attempts to use Bayes’s Theorem to prove Jesus didn’t exist. In my review I point out a selection of the mathematical problems with that book, even though I quite enjoyed it. This post is designed to explain what Bayes’s Theorem actually does, and show why it isn’t particularly useful outside of specific domains. It is a journey through basic probability theory, for folks who aren’t into math (though I’ll assume high-school math). It is designed to be simple, and therefore is rather long. I will update it and clarify it from time to time.
Let’s think about the birth of Christianity. How did it happen? We don’t know, which is to say there are a lot of different things that could have happened. Let’s use an illustration to picture this.
Complex diagram, eh? I want this rectangle to represent all possible histories: everything that could have happened. In math we call this rectangle the ‘universe‘, but meant metaphorically: the universe of possibilities. In the rectangle each point is one particular history. So there is one point which is the actual history, the one-true-past (OTP in the diagram below), but we don’t know which it is. In fact, we can surely agree we’ve no hope of ever finding it, right? To some extent there will always be things in history that are uncertain.
When we talk about something happening in history, we aren’t narrowing down history to a point. If we consider the claim “Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier”, there are a range of possible histories involving such a Jesus. Even if we knew 100% that were true, there would be a whole range of different histories including that fact.
Napolean moved his knife in a particular way during his meal on January 1st 1820, but he could have moved that knife in any way, or been without a knife, and the things we want to say about him wouldn’t change. His actual knife manipulation is part of the one-true-past, but totally irrelevant for Napoleonic history1.
So any claim about history represents a whole set of possible histories. We draw such sets as circles. And if you’re a child of the new math, you’ll recognize the above as a Venn diagram. But I want to stress what the diagram actually means, so try to forget most of your Venn diagram math for a while.
At this point we can talk about what a probability is.
There are essentially an infinite number of possible histories (the question of whether it is literally infinite is one for the philosophy of physics, but even if finite, it would be so large as to be practically infinite for the purpose of our task). So each specific history would be infinitely unlikely. We can’t possibly say anything useful about how likely any specific point is, we can’t talk about the probability of a particular history.
So again we turn to our sets. Each set has some likelihood of the one-true-past lying somewhere inside it. How likely is it that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? That’s another way of asking how likely it is that the one-true-past lies in the set of possible histories that we would label “Jesus Born in Bethlehem”. The individual possibilities in the set don’t have a meaningful likelihood, but our historical claims encompass many possibilities, and as a whole those claims do have meaningful likelihood. In other words, when we talk about how likely something was to have happened, we are always talking about a sets of possibilities that match our claim.
We can represent the likelihood on the diagram by drawing the set bigger or smaller. If we have two sets, one drawn double the size of the other, then the one-true-past is twice as likely to be in the one that is drawn larger.
So now we can define what a probability is for a historical claim. A probability is a ratio of the likelihood of a set, relative to the whole universe of possibilities. Or, in terms of the diagram, what fraction of the rectangle is taken up by the set of possibilities matching our claim?
If we can somehow turn likelihood into a number, (i.e. let’s say that the likelihood of a set S is a nmber written L(S)) and if the universe is represented by the set U, probability can be mathematically defined as:
But where do these ‘likelihood’ numbers come from? That’s a good question, and one that turns out to be very hard to give an answer for that works in all cases. But for our purpose, just think of them as a place-holder for any of a whole range of different things we could use to calculate a probability. For example: if we were to calculate the probability of rolling 6 on a die, the likelihood numbers would be the number of sides: the likelihood of rolling a 6 would be 1 side, the likelihood of rolling anything would be 6 sides, so the probability of rolling a six is 1/6. If we’re interested in the probability of a scanner diagnosing a disease, the likelihoods would be the numbers of scans: on top would be the number of successful scans, the number on the bottom would be the total number of scans. We use the abstraction as a way of saying “it doesn’t much matter what these things are, as long as they behave in a particular way, the result is a probability”.
Now we’ve got to probabilities, we’ve used these ‘likelihoods’ as a ladder, and we can move on. We only really worry about how the probability is calculated when we have to calculate one, and then we do need to figure out what goes on the top and bottom of the division.
Another diagram.
In this diagram we have two sets. These are two claims, or two sets of possible histories. The sets may overlap in any combination. If no possible history could match both claims (e.g. “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” and “Jesus was born in Nazereth”), then the two circles wouldn’t touch [kudos if you are thinking "maybe there are ways both could be kind-of true" - that's some math for another day]. Or it might be that the claims are concentric (“Jesus was born in Bethlehem”, “Jesus was born”), any possibility in one set, will always be in another. Or they may, as in this case, overlap (“Jesus was born in Nazereth”, “Jesus was born illegitimately”).
I’ve been giving examples of sets of historical claims, but there is another type of set that is important: the set of possible histories matching something that we know happened. Of all the possible histories, how many of them produce a New Testament record that is similar to the one we know?
This might seem odd. Why does our universe include things we know aren’t true? Why are there possibilities which lead to us never having a New Testament? Why are there histories where we have a surviving comprehensive set of writings by Jesus? Can’t we just reject those outright? The unhelpful answer is that we need them for the math to work. As we’ll see, Bayes’s Theorem requires us to deal with the probability that history turned out the way it did. I’ll give an example later of this kind of counter-factual reasoning.
So we have these two kinds of set. One kind which are historical claims, and the other which represent known facts. The latter are often called Evidence, abbreviated E, the former are Hypotheses, or H. So let’s draw another diagram.
where H∩E means the intersection of sets H and E – the set of possible histories where we both see the evidence and where our hypothesis is true (you can read the mathematical symbol ∩ as “and”).
Here is the basic historical problem. We have a universe of possible histories. Some of those histories could have given rise to the evidence we know, some might incorporate our hypothesis. We know the one true past lies in E, but we want to know how likely it is to be in the overlap, rather than the bit of E outside H. In other words, how likely is it that the Hypothesis true, given the Evidence we know?
Above, I said that probability is how likely a set is, relative to the whole universe. This is a simplification we have to revisit now. Probability is actually how likely one sets is, relative to some other set that completely encompasses it (a superset in math terms).
We’re not actually interested in how likely our Hypothesis is, relative to all histories that could possibly have been. We’re only interested in how likely our hypothesis is, given our evidence: given that the one-true-past is in E.
So the set we’re interested in is the overlap where we have the evidence and the hypothesis is true. And the superset we want to compare it to is E, because we know the one-true-past is in there (or at least we are willing to assume it is). This is what is known as a conditional probability. It says how likely is H, given that we know or assume E is true: we write it as P(H|E) (read as “the probability of H, given E”). And from the diagram it should be clear the answer is:
It is the ratio of the size of the overlap, relative to the size of the whole of E. This is the same as our previous definition of probability, only before we were comparing it to the whole universe U, now we’re comparing it to just the part of U where E is true2.
We could write all probabilities as conditional probabilities, because ultimately any probability is relative to something. We could write P(S|U) to say that we’re interested in the probability of S relative to the universe. We could, but it would be pointless, because that is what P(S) means. Put another way, P(S) is just a conveniently simplified way of writing P(S|U).
So what is a conditional probability doing? It is zooming in, so we’re no longer talking about probabilities relative to the whole universe of possibilities (most of which we know aren’t true anyway), we’re now zooming in, to probabilities relative to things we know are true, or we’re willing to assume are true. Conditional probabilities throw away the rest of the universe of possibilities and just focus on one area: for P(H|E), we zoom into the set E, and treat E as if it were the universe of possibilities. We’re throwing away all those counter-factuals, and concentrating on just the bits that match the evidence.
The equation for conditional probability is simple, but in many cases it is hard to find P(H∩E), so we can manipulate it a little, to remove P(H∩E) and replace it with something simpler to calculate.
Bayes’s Theorem is one of many such manipulations. We can use some basic high school math to derive it:
Step-by-step math explanation: The first line is just the formula for conditional probability again. If we multiply both sides by P(E) (and therefore move it from one side of the equation to the other) we get the first two parts on the second line. We then assume that P(H∩E) = P(E∩H) (in other words, the size of the overlap in our diagram is the same regardless of which order we write the two sets), which means that we can get the fourth term on the second line just by changing over E and H in the first term. Line three repeats these two terms on one line without the P(H∩E) and P(E∩H) in the middle. We then divide by P(E) again to get line four, which gives us an equation for P(H|E) again.
What is Bayes’s Theorem doing? Notice the denominator is the same as for conditional probability P(E), so what Bayes’s Theorem is doing is giving us a way to calculate P(H∩E) differently. It is saying that we can calculate P(H∩E) by looking at the proportion of H taken up by H∩E, multiplied by the total probability of H. If I want to find the amount of water in a cup, I could say “its half the cup, the cup holds half a pint, so I have one half times half a pint, which is a quarter of a pint”. That’s the same logic here. The numerator of Bayes’s theorem is just another way to calculate P(H∩E).
So what is Bayes’s Theorem for? It let’s us get to the value we’re interested in — P(H|E) — if we happen to know, or can calculate, the other three quantities: the probability of each set, P(H) and P(E) (relative to the universe of possibilities), and the probability of seeing the evidence if the hypothesis were true P(E|H). Notice that, unlike the previous formula, we’ve now got three things to find in order to use the equation. And either way, we still need to calculate the probability of the evidence, P(E).
Bayes’s Theorem can also be useful if we could calculate P(H∩E), but with much lower accuracy than we can calculate P(H) and P(E|H). Then we’d expect our result from Bayes’s Theorem to be a more accurate value for P(H|E). If, on the other hand we could measure P(H∩E), or we had a different way to calculate that, we wouldn’t need Bayes’s Theorem.
Bayes’s Theorem is not a magic bullet, it is just one way of calculating P(H|E). In particular it is the simplest formula for reversing the condition, if you know P(E|H), you use Bayes’s Theorem to give you P(H|E)3.
So the obvious question is: if we want to know P(H|E), what shall we use to calculate it? Either of the two formulae above need us to calculate P(E), in the universe of possible histories, how likely are we to have ended up with the evidence we have? Can we calculate that?
And here things start to get tricky. I’ve never seen any credible way of doing so. What would it mean to find the probability of the New Testament, say?
Even once we’ve done that, we’d only be justified in using Bayes’s Theorem if our calculations for P(H) and P(E|H) are much more accurate than we could manage for P(H∩E). Is that true?
I’m not sure I can imagine a way of calculating either P(H∩E) or P(E|H) for a historical event. How would we credibly calculate the probability of the New Testament, given the Historical Jesus? Or the probably of having both New Testament and Historical Jesus in some universe of possibilities? If you want to use this math, you need to justify how on earth you can put numbers on these quantities. And, as we’ll see when we talk about how these formulae magnify errors, you’ll need to do more than just guess.
But what of Carrier’s (and William Lane Craig’s) favoured version of Bayes’s Theorem? It is is derived from the normal version by observing:
in other words, the set E is just made up of the bit that overlaps with H and the bit that doesn’t (~H means “not in H”), so because
(which was the rearrangement of the conditional probability formula we used on line two of our derivation of Bayes’s Theorem), we can write Bayes’s Theorem as
Does that help?
I can’t see how. This is just a further manipulation. The bottom of this equation is still just P(E), we’ve just come up with a different way to calculate it, one involving more terms4. We’d be justified in doing so, only if these terms were obviously easier to calculate, or could be calculated with significantly lower error than P(E).
If these terms are estimates, then we’re just using more estimates that we haven’t justified. We’re still having to calculate P(E|H), and now P(E|~H) too. I cannot conceive of a way to do this that isn’t just unredeemable guesswork. And it is telling nobody I’ve seen advocate Bayes’s Theorem in history has actually worked through such a process with anything but estimates.
This is bad news, and it might seem that Bayes’s Theorem could never be any useful for anything. But there are cases when we do have the right data.
Let’s imagine that we’re trying a suspect for murder. The suspect has a DNA match at the scene (the Evidence). Our hypothesis is that the DNA came from the suspect. What is P(H|E) – the probability that the DNA is the suspect’s, given that it is a match? This is a historical question, right? We’re asked to find what happened in history, given the evidence before us. We can use Bayes here, because we can get all the different terms.
P(E|H) is simple – what is the probability our test would give a match, given the DNA was the suspect’s? This is the accuracy of the test, and is probably known. P(E) is the probability that we’d get a match regardless. We can use a figure for the probability that two random people would have matching DNA. P(H) is the probability that our suspect is the murderer, in the absence of evidence. This is the probability that any random person is the murderer (if we had no evidence, we’d have no reason to suspect any particular person). So the three terms we need can be convincingly provided, measured, and their errors calculated. And, crucially, these three terms are much easier to calculate, with lower errors, than if we used the P(H∩E) form. What could we measure to find the probability that the suspect is the murderer and their DNA matched? Probably nothing – Bayes’s Theorem really is the best tool to find the conditional probability we’re interested in.
While we’re thinking about this example, I want to return briefly to what I said about counter-factual reasoning. Remember I said that Bayes’s Theorem needs us to work with a universe of possibilities where things we know are true, might not be true? The trial example shows this. We are calculating the probability that the suspect’s DNA would match the sample at the crime scene – but this is counter-factual, because we know it did (otherwise we’d not be doing the calculation). We’re calculating the probability that the DNA would match, assuming the suspect were the murderer, but again, this is counter-factual, because the DNA did match, and we’re trying to figure out whether they are the murderer. This example shows that the universe of possibilities we must consider has to be bigger than the things we know are true. We have to work with counter-factuals, to get the right values.
So Bayes’s Theorem is useful when we have the right inputs. Is it useful in history? I don’t think so. What is the P(E) if the E we’re interested in is the New Testament? Or Jospehus? I simply don’t see how you can give a number that is rooted in anything but a random guess. I’ve not seen it argued with any kind of rational basis.
So ultimately we end up with this situation. Bayes’s Theorem is used in these kind of historical debates to feed in random guesses and pretend the output is meaningful. I hope if you’ve been patient enough to follow along, you’ll see that Bayes’s Theorem has a very specific meaning, and that when seen in the cold light of day for what it is actually doing, the idea that it can be numerically applied to general questions in history is obviously ludicrous.
—
But, you might say, in Carrier’s book he pretty much admits that numerical values are unreliable, and suggests that we can make broad estimates, erring on the side of caution and do what he calls an a fortiori argument – if a result comes from putting in unrealistically conservative estimates, then that result can only get stronger if we make the estimates more accurate. This isn’t true, unfortunately, but for that, we’ll have to delve into the way these formulas impact errors in the estimates. We can calculate the accuracy of the output, given the accuracy of each input, and it isn’t very helpful for a fortiori reasoning. That is a topic for another part.
As is the little teaser from earlier, where I mentioned that, in subjective historical work, sets that seem not to overlap can be imagined to overlap in some situations. This is another problem for historical use of probability theory, but to do it justice we’ll need to talk about philosophical vagueness and how we deal with that in mathematics.
Whether I get to those other posts or not, the summary is that both of them significantly reduce the accuracy of the conclusions that you can reach with these formula, if your inputs are uncertain. It doesn’t take much uncertainty on the input before you loose any plausibility for your output.
—
1 Of course, we can hypothesize some historical question for which it might not be irrelevant. Perhaps we’re interested in whether he was sick that day, or whether he was suffering a degenerating condition that left his hands compromised. Still, the point stands, even those claims still encompass a set of histories, they don’t refer to a single point.
2 Our definition of probability involved L(S) values, what happened to them? Why are we now dividing probabilities? Remember that a Likelihood, L(S), could be any number that represented how likely something was. So something twice as likely had double the L(S) value. I used examples like number of scans or number of sides of a die, but probability values also meet those criteria, so they can also be used as L(S) values. The opposite isn’t true, not every Likelihood value is a probability (e.g. we could have 2,000 scans, which would be a valid L(S) value, but 2,000 is not a valid probability).
3 Though Bayes’s Theorem is often quoted as being a way to reverse the condition P(H|E) from P(E|H), it does still rely on P(E) and P(H). You can do further algebraic manipulations to find these quantities, one of which we’ll see later to calculate P(E). Here the nomenclature is a bit complex. Though Bayes’s Theorem is a simple algebraic manipulation of conditional probability, further manipulation doesn’t necessarily mean a formula is no longer a statement of Bayes’s Theorem. The presence of P(E|H) in the numerator is normally good enough for folks to call it Bayes’s Theorem, even if the P(E) and P(H) terms are replaced by more complex calculations.
4 You’ll notice, however, that P(E|H)P(H) is on both the top and the bottom of the fraction now. So it may seem that we’re using the same estimate twice, cutting down the number of things to find. This is only partially helpful, though. If I write a follow up post on errors and accuracy, I’ll show why I think that errors on top and bottom can pull in different directions.
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Published: October 11, 2012
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6 Responses to “An Introduction to Probability Theory and Why Bayes’s Theorem is Unhelpful in History”
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veryrarelystable
October 11, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Can you correct the grammar of the end of the first paragraph –
“there are a lot of different things that could of happened.”
“Could of” is a deformation of the contraction “could’ve” which is a contraction of “could have”. This particular error gets teachers screaming from the rooftops!
Thanks.
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steph
October 11, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Sure… The post was reposted without any alterations. I’ve eliminated the provocative error with pleasure. :-)
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Matthew
October 12, 2012 at 2:15 am
Is it my imagination or does Richard Carrier want to be seen as some kind of modern day Copernicus with his attempts to apply Bayes’ Theorem to history? I got the impression that he thinks he’s revolutionizing ethics with his “Goal Theory”. In both cases, it seems that he thinks he’s really doing some revolutionary work. I am not saying this to be mean-spirited but I consider him to be something of a crank these days.
steph
October 12, 2012 at 5:24 am
Indeed you’re probably right. And, as he is quoted elsewhere, referring to himself, “no less a philosopher than Aristotle or Hume”… Extraordinary. Furthermore, on his blog he says he is the “renowned author …[with] avid fans span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He has also become a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and the epistemology of history.” Written of himself, all by himself.
scotteus
October 11, 2012 at 10:36 pm
I can’t add anything to this article other than praise. To date it’s the best explanation of B’s Theorem I’ve seen, I mean, I actually understood about 2/3 on just the first reading. Thanks for posting and giving another website to add to favorites.
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steph
October 11, 2012 at 11:40 pm
It’s a pleasure. It is superb: a vigorous critique, incisive and accurate. Take a look at his latest two posts on the Bayes’ nonsense as well.http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/say-what-i-want-to-hear/
http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-effect-of-error-in-bayess-theorem/
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
On Not Quite Believing in God
by rjosephhoffmann
A New Oxonian pebble from 2010: Reposted 14th October 2012.
Baruch Spinoza
We seem to be witnessing the rapid development of atheist orthodoxy.
I say that as someone who has fallen prey to zingers used about the heretics in the fourth century Empire: According to my disgruntled atheist readers, I am confused, angry, unsettled, provocative, hurtful and creating division, which in Greek is what heresy means.
No one has come right out and said what this might imply: that the New Atheists having written their four sacred books (a canon?) are not subject to correction. I haven’t been told that there is nothing further to study, or that the word of revelation came down in 2005 with the publication of The God Delusion. I have been told (several times) that I am mixing humanism and skepticism and doubt into the batch, when the batch, as in Moses’ day, just calls for batch. Or no batch. I have been reminded (and reminded) that atheism is nothing more than the simple profession of the belief that there is no God, or any gods. Credo non est deus.
When the first heretics were “proclaimed” (as opposed to pilloried by various disgruntled individual bishops) in 325–when the Council of Nicaea “defined” God as a trinity–a particular heretic named Arius was in the Church’s crosshairs. He believed that Jesus was the son of God, in an ordinary sense, if you can imagine it, and not eternal. The growing cadre of right-minded bishops, including his own boss, a man called Athanasius, was committed to the popular intellectual view that everything God was, Jesus was, so Jesus had to be eternal too.
Was Jesus always a son, Arius asked. Yes always, they replied. Was God always a father? Yes, always, they said: God does not change. Then what, asked Arius, is the meaning of terms like father and son? -You are irredeemable and anathema to us, they replied. And they wrote their creed and gave the West a god who lasted, more or less, for 1500 years.
To this day, the only bit of the Nicene creed Christians won’t find in their prayer books is the last clause: But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned to the fire by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.” It would spoil the family atmosphere to end the prayer on a rancorous note.
I have always felt that the more you know about the history of ideas, the less likely you are to be a true believer. Studying science can have the same effect, but not directly (since science does not deal with religious questions directly) and usually (for obvious reasons) in relation to questions like cosmology rather than questions about historical evolution.
But that “challenge” kept me interested in history and to a lesser degree in philosophy, rather than causing me to throw my hands up and say “What’s the point?” I did not become an historian in order to vindicate any sort of belief, religious or political. But by becoming a historian I learned to recognize that all ideas, including God, have histories, and that the ideas of god in their historical context leave almost no room for philosophical discussions, however framed, about his existence. In fact, even having taught philosophy of religion routinely for two decades, I find the philosophical discussion almost as dull and flat as the scientistic hubris of the new atheists and their disciples.
When I took up a position as a professor of religious studies in Ann Arbor in the 1980′s, students in the large-enrollment lectures immediately spotted me as a skeptic. When I touched on biblical subjects, bright-eyed students from western Michigan would often bring Bibles and try to trip me up on details. I would always say the same thing, after a few volleys: “We are not here to test your fidelity to the teaching of your church nor my fidelity to any greater cause. We’re here to study history. God can take it.” I wish I had a better message after twenty-eight years, but I don’t.
There are two chief problems with orthodoxy–any orthodoxy. Once it establishes itself, it kills its dissenters–if not physically, then by other means. It got Arius (not before he’d done commendable damage however); it got Hus, it got Galileo, and it might’ve gotten Descartes if he hadn’t been very clever in the Discourse on Method by creating a hypothetical pope-free universe.
Scientific orthodoxies had fared no better until the modern era, the advantage of modernity being that science learned the humility of error before it began to be right. It did not promote itself as timeless truth but as correctable knowledge. It would be remarkable if science, in its approach to religion, did not follow the same process, and I’m happy to say that in most cases it does.
For all the confusion about the new atheism attributed to me in the past few months, it seems to me that atheism is not science. It is an opinion (though I’d grant it higher status), grounded in history, to which some of the sciences, along with many other subjects, have something to contribute.
Almost everyone knows not only that the non-existence of God is not a “scientific outcome” but that it is not a philosophical outcome either. So, if it’s true that at its simplest, atheism is a position about God, and nothing else, then atheism will at least need to say why it is significant to hold such a position.
It can’t be significant just because atheists say so, so it must derive its significance from other ideas that attach to the belief in god, ideas that nonbelievers find objectionable and worth rejecting. The gods of Lucretius can’t be objectionable because like John Wisdom’s god they are not only invisible but indiscernible. Consequently, atheism can not simply be about the nonexistence of God; it must be about the implications of that belief for believers.
Some of those beliefs matter more than others. For example, the belief that God created the world. In terms of the number of people who believe this and the vigor with which they are willing to defend that belief, this has to be the most important idea attached to belief in God.
Atheists who care to argue their case philosophically, will maintain that evidence of an alternative physical mode of creation defeats demonstrations of the existence of God. In fact, however, the evidence is a disproof of explanations put forward in a creation myth; and that disproof comes from history long before it comes from philosophy and science. The evidence is nonetheless poignant. But it takes the question of God’s existence into fairly complex argumentation.
Atheists might also argue that belief in the goodness of God is contradicted by the existence of natural and moral evil (theodicy) or that belief in his benevolence and intelligence (design, teleology) is disproved by the fact that this is not the best of all possible universes. These quibbles are great fun in a classroom because they get people talking, thinking and arguing. But as you can see, we have already come a long way from the bare proposition that atheism is just about not believing in God–full stop, unless you have endowed that opinion with some authority outside the reasoning process you needed to get you there. That’s what fundamentalists do.
This recognition is unavoidable because you cannot disbelieve in something to which no attributes have been attached–unless like St Anselm you think that existence is a necessary predicate of divine (“necessary”) being. But that’s another story.
Frankly, some atheists are like instant oatmeal: quickly cooked and ready for consumption. No stove–no mental anguish, soul searching, philosophical dilemmas or affronts to ordinary morality–has cooked them. They are quick and, to belabor a term, EZ. When I use the term EZ atheists, I mean those atheists who short-cut propositions and adopt positions based on a less than careful examination of the positions they hold, or hold them based on authority rather than on strictly rational grounds–an atheist who holds a belief to be irrefragably true only because she or he has faith that it is true or a very important senior atheist, an atheist bishop, say, says so.
Most atheists, of course, do not establish their positions that way, e.g., Williams Hasker’s “The Case of the Intellectually Sophisticated Theist” (1986) and Michael Martin’s “Critique of Religious Experience” (1990) or the famous discussion between Basil Mitchell (a theist) and Antony Flew (an atheist) called “The Falsification Debate” (1955) provide important indicators about how the existence of God can be defeated propositionally. No atheist who now swims in shallow water should feel overwhelmed by reading these classic pieces. But something tells me, most haven’t.
Recent articles by Jacques Berlinerblau and Michael Ruse have raised the broad concern that the effects of the “New atheism” might actually be harmful. Why? Because it creates a class of followers who (like the early Christians) are less persuaded by argument than by the certainty of their position. It produces hundreds of disciples who see atheism as a self-authenticating philosophy, circumstantially supported by bits of science, and who, when challenged resort to arguments against their critics rather than arguments in favour of their position. They point to the wonders of science, the horrors of the Bible, the political overreaching of religious activists. They also point to a mythical history of prejudice and persecution against atheists that, they may honestly believe, locates them in a civil rights struggle: to be an atheist is like being gay, black, a woman, an abused child.
Atheist Pride is just around the corner–no sorry: I’ve just seen the t-shirt.
A common criticism of the new atheists is that their journey to unbelief did not provide them with the tools necessary for such defense, or that they have found polemical tactics against their critics more effective than standard argumentation: thus, a critic is uninformed or a closet believer. Criticism becomes “rant,” diatribe, hot air; critics are “arrogant” and elitist, or prone to over-intellectualize positions that are really quite simple: Up or down on the God thing?
Points of contention become “confusion,” “divisive”; motives are reduced to spite and jealousy rather than an honest concern for fair discussion–epithets that were used freely against people like Arius and Hus, especially in religious disputes but rarely in modern philosophical discussion. The intensity with which the EZ atheist position is held might be seen as a mark of its fragility, comparable to strategies we see in Christian apologetics.
A year ago, my position on this issue was less resolute: I would have said then that new atheism is just a shortcut to conclusions that older atheists reached by a variety of means, from having been Jesuits to having been disappointed in their church, or education, to reading too much, or staying awake during my lectures. (Even I want some small credit for changing minds).
It is a fact that few people become atheists either in foxholes or philosophy class. But having seen the minor outcry against criticism of the New Atheist position by their adherents, I have come to the conclusion that Ruse and Berlinerblau are right: the new atheism is a danger to American intellectual life, to the serious study of important questions, and to the atheist tradition itself.
I have reasons for saying this. Mostly, they have nothing to do with the canonical status of a few books and speakers who draw, like Jesus, multitudes of hungry listeners. At this level, emotion comes into play, celebrity and authority come into play. Perhaps even faith comes into play. The bright scarlet A of proud atheism as a symbol of nonbelief and denial becomes an icon in its own right: The not-the-cross and not-the-crescent. And again, as we reach beyond not believing into symbolism and the authority of speakers who can deliver you from the dark superstitions of religion, without having to die on a cross, we have come a long way from simply not believing. That is what Professors Ruse and Berlinerblau have been saying.
But the real disaster of the new atheism is one I am experiencing as a college teacher. Almost three decades back I faced opposition from students who denied that history had anything to teach them about their strong emotional commitment to a belief system or faith. Today I am often confronted with students who feel just the same way–except they are atheists, or rather many of them have adopted the name and the logo.
I say “atheist” with the same flatness that I might say, “evangelical,” but I know what it means pedgaogically when I say it. It is a diagnosis not of some intellectual malfunction, but a description of an attitude or perspective that might make historical learning more challenging than in needs to be. It means that the person has brought with her to the classroom a set of beliefs that need Socratic overhaul.
An atheism that has been inhaled at lectures given by significant thinkers is heady stuff. Its closest analogy is “getting saved,” and sometimes disciples of the New Atheists talk a language strangely like that of born agains. I hear the phrase “life changing experience” frequently from people who have been awakened at a Dawkins lecture, or even through watching videos on YouTube. It would be senseless to deny that the benefit is real. And it is futile to deny that leaving students in a state of incomplete transformation, without the resources to pursue unbelief–or its implications for a good and virtuous life beyond the purely selfish act of not believing–makes the task of education a bit harder for those of us left behind, in a non-apocalyptic sort of way.
I suspect this is pure fogeyism, but life-changing gurus have minimal responsibility after they have healed the blind. –Jesus didn’t do post-surgical care.
I could site dozens of examples of the challenges the new atheist position presents. Two from recent Facebook posts will do. In response to a Huffington Post blog by a certain Rabbi Adam Jacobs on March 24, one respondent wrote, “Thanks Rabbi. I think I will be good without god and eat a bacon cheeseburger and think of you cowering in fear of the cosmic sky fairy…” and another, “This crazy Rabbi is completely right. Atheism does imply a moral vacuum, whether we like it or not. But that doesn’t mean that we can just accept the manifestly false premises of religion just because it would create a cozy set of moral fictions for us, which is what the author seems to be saying.”
The cosmic sky fairy, a variation presumably on Bobby Henderson’s (pretty amusing) Flying Spaghetti Monster, doesn’t strike me as blasphemy. Almost nothing does. But it strikes me as trivial. A student who can dismiss a serious article about the relationship of science, morality and religion, asked, let’s say, to read Aquinas in a first year seminar would be at a serious disadvantage. A worshiper of Richard Dawkins who can’t deal with Aquinas because he is “religious” is not better than an evangelical Christian who won’t read it because he was “Catholic.” That is where we are.
The second comment suggests that atheism is “de-moralizing,” in the sense that it eliminates one of the conventional grounds for thinking morality exists. The writer doesn’t find this troubling as an atheist, because he see the post-Kantian discussion of morality as high-sounding but fruitless chatter: “There is no higher justification for any moral imperative beyond ‘because I think/feel it’s better.’” –I actually happen to agree with him. But I can’t begin a conversation at the conclusion. His honesty about the question is pinned to a view of atheism that, frankly, I cannot understand.
The essence of EZ atheism is this trivialization of questions that it regards as secondary to the entertainment value of being a non-believer, a status that some will defend simply through polemic or ridicule of anything “serious,” anything assumed to be “high culture” or too bookish.
I am not questioning the robustness of the movement, its popularity, or the sincerity of the followers. I am not trying to make new atheism rocket science or classical philology. I have never suggested it belongs to the academy and not to the village, because I know that nothing renders a worldview ineffective quite so thoroughly as keeping it locked in a university lecture hall.
The idea that there is no God, if it were left to me, would be discussed in public schools and from the pulpit. But it won’t be. For all the wrong reasons. When Harvard four years ago attempted to introduce a course in the critical study of religion into its core curriculum, its most distinguished professor of psychology, who happens also to be an atheist, lobbied (successfully) against it because it was to be taught as a “religion” course. Almost no one except a few humanists saw that atheism lost a great battle in that victory. And it lost it, I hate to say, because the professor responsible sensationalised the issue as “bringing the study of religion into the Yard” rather than keeping it safely sequestered in the Divinity School.
I want to suggest that the trivialization of culture (which includes religion and religious ideas), especially in America where trivial pursuits reign, is not especially helpful. And as I have said pretty often, that part of this trivialization is the use of slogans, billboards, out campaigns and fishing expeditions to put market share ahead of figuring things out.
Truth to tell, there is nothing to suggest that these campaigns have resulted in racheting up numbers, increasing public understanding of unbelief, or advancing a coherent political agenda. They have however potentially harmed atheism with tactics that simplify religious ideas to an alarming level (all the better to splay them) and by confirming in the minds of many “potential Brights” (Dennett) that their suspicions of atheism were well founded. Adherents of the New Atheists need to make a distinction between success as a corollary of profits to the authors and the benefit to the movement or, to be very old fashioned, the ideals of an atheist worldview.
After a long time as a teacher, I am surprised to find myself writing about this. I have often found myself thinking, “If only half my students were atheists. Then we could get somewhere. We could say what we like, just the way we like it. We could follow the evidence where it takes us–no more sidestepping ‘awkward issues’ so as not to injure religious feelings.”
If only it were that easy: I may spend the remainder of my time in the academy imploring the sky fairy to smile on my efforts and deliver me from orthodoxy of all kinds.
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Published: October 14, 2012
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10 Responses to “On Not Quite Believing in God”
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stevenbollinger
October 14, 2012 at 5:11 pm
“Recent articles by Jacques Berlinerblau and Michael Ruse have raised the broad concern that the effects of the ‘New atheism’ might actually be harmful. Why? Because it creates a class of followers who (like the early Christians) are less persuaded by argument than by the certainty of their position.”
It gives morons a place to belong, and, as long as they repeat a few moronic memes, it tells them they are bright. Imagine how long and desperately some of them must have been longing for someone to say that they were bright! And nevermind if someone tries to tell them that one of the memes is inaccurate. If someone tells a New Atheist that the Old Testament was not, in fact, written by illiterate [sic!] Bronze Age goatherds or that Constantine and the Pope didn’t write the New Testament at Nicea, it just means he or she is a Catholic (or a member of whatever other group happens to be the favorite enemy of the New Atheist in question) — as likely as not a Catholic who doesn’t even have the decency to admit that he or she is a Catholic.
Reply
Jack Tillamook
November 8, 2012 at 5:34 am
Steven, you seem to be fitting his description. Do you see the irony? Religious people are not morons. That assertion is bigotry. Having my roots in religious tradition, I know that the mind of a religious person can be just as critical and methodical concerning reason as a “non-believer.” Your reasoning that “if someone tells a New Atheist that …[grounds]… [assertion] it just means he or she is a Catholic (or…whatever…).” I do not know who you are, and if you wrote this flippantly, but I find it as evidence to Mr. Hoffman’s thesis. You are assuming a belief as fact, and an inerrant discovery, and those ‘opposed’ to the idea are ‘morons needing a place.’
Your response is not necessary, but it could be revealing.
Why state beliefs as if fact? Is not that the domain of doctrine?
Reply
stevenbollinger
November 9, 2012 at 9:31 am
I think perhaps you misunderstood my comment . I agree wholeheartedly with what Hoffmann is saying above. I wasn’t calling religious people morons, I was calling New Atheists morons. And naturally not all religious people are morons and not all New Atheists are morons. But neither demands very much from their adherents.
“If someone tells a New Atheist that the Old Testament was not, in fact, written by illiterate [sic!] Bronze Age goatherds or that Constantine and the Pope didn’t write the New Testament at Nicea, it just means he or she is a Catholic (or a member of whatever other group happens to be the favorite enemy of the New Atheist in question) — as likely as not a Catholic who doesn’t even have the decency to admit that he or she is a Catholic.”
Someone attempting to correct such errors is often assumed by the New Atheist committing the errors to be religious — not by me. I was describing the position often taken by some of the slower-witted among the New Atheists, not my own position. And the person erroneously assumed to belong to this or that religious group has been me.
All of that has happened to me, repeatedly. I wasn’t theorizing. I was relating some experience, and I wasn’t exaggerating any of it. Bits like “illiterate Bronze-age goatherds” are quite popular in some circles, repeated word-for-word like verses from the Rosary. Some New Atheists — again, certainly not all — have remarkably much to say about the history of religion, especially the big three Abrahamic religions, coupled with remarkably little actual curiosity about that history. And to get to the point where I would criticize New Atheists generally, and its leaders especially, and not just the ones endlessly repeating the memes about illiterate Bronze-Age goatherds: few if any of the New Atheists seem interested in correcting these gross historical errors. As long as someone hates religion, they’re in.
Jack Tillamook
November 9, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Steven, when I said, “Your response is not necessary, but it could be revealing,” I was right! Your response was most definitely revealing. Apologies for my misinterpretation. And thank you for your candor and clarification.
sailor1031
November 29, 2012 at 10:38 am
On the other hand you might just be taken for one who is priggishly, intellectually “superior” (which, to do you justice, you do not appear to be) and a nitpicker to boot. Now of course we all realise that that cannot be so but – just sayin’.
Reply
A few good links | eChurch Blog says:
October 15, 2012 at 5:01 am
[...] The New Oxonian – On Not Quite Believing in God [...]
Reply
jemm
October 24, 2012 at 6:18 am
This isn’t specifically relevant to the topic at hand, but I just wanted to let you know that I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog, especially your dissections of so-called “new” atheism.
Perhaps it’s mainly just an internet phenomenon, but hardline atheism and, more specifically, the scientism that pervades it has become somewhat disconcerting lately. I’ve begun to wonder what these unthinking idiots will want to eradicate after they’re finished with “unreasonable”, “unscientific” and “irrational” religion? Perhaps music? Or art? Philosophy? Love? After all, those things aren’t science, either. Love, for instance, does not follow science’s sacred precepts. And here I was thinking all this time that my atheism was just a simple, insignificant and insubstantial non-belief…
Where’s Feyerabend, or even Mumford, when you need him? Ellul would do, too. In fact you can join the three of ‘em and we’d have our own “four horsemen” of sorts!
But, yeah, thanks for being a breath of fresh air!
Reply
sailor1031
November 29, 2012 at 11:28 am
“I’ve begun to wonder what these unthinking idiots will want to eradicate after they’re finished with “unreasonable”, “unscientific” and “irrational” religion? Perhaps music? Or art? Philosophy? Love?”
I would suggest Non-catastrophic global-warming. In fact they’ve already begun at some sites where “denialists” fare no better than “accommodationists” and “religiots”.
Reply
Ed Jones
December 6, 2012 at 10:51 pm
Joe, your enlightening post suggests, as a critical theist, my take on the fateful history of post execution Jesus traditions. (Over against the misnomer and seriously misleading terms: “Christian Origins” – “Jewish Christianity”)
Our most certain sufficient historical evidence for knowledge of Jesus, who he was and what he said, rests “solely on the basis of the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles”. (Schubert M. Ogden). Over against this initial fact of the history of religion, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-execution Jesus traditions. This period was marked by two distinctly different movements in deep adversarial relationship. The first the Jerusalem Jesus Movement, from which we have our source which contains this apostolic witness. This soon followed by the Hellenists Christ myth movement (the rival enemy of the Jesus movement) which developed in the Gentile world, imaging the Pauline Christ of faith myth, severing Jesus from his message and his Jewish roots, meeting with ready success, to become Gentile Christianity, finally to become orthodox Christianity. Soon becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, Gentile Christianity was able to place this original Jesus Movement under a conspiracy of silence; to even at a later point, have it declared a heresy, to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, mistakenly to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top scholars under the force of our present historical methods and knowledge fully come to a real objective historical understanding of this mistake, not only to say none of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus, but to understand the how and the why of this fateful mistake. This is a human mistake, one of those ultimate mistakes related to that ultimate issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which restrict seeing beyond sense perceived reality. In Jesus’ words (Matt. 6:22=23):
“ The lamp of the body is the eye.
If, then your eye is healthy/good, your whole body is full of light.
If, however, your eye is sick/evil, then your whole body is dark.
If, therefore, the light which is in you is darkness – what darkness!”
A brief history of this fateful mistake: In this apostolic period, 30 CE – 65 CE, there were two movements each with its own interpretation of the significance of the Jesus event, placing them in the strongest adversarial relationship. Chronologically the first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began (within weeks) with the key disciples, having fled to their native Galilee, overcome with grief and utter disillusionment , emboldened by Peter’s and others vision (some form of extrasensory cognition), at high risk, returning to Jerusalem, purposing to again take up the teaching of their revered Master. This was soon followed by a group of Hellenist Jews hearing talk of Jesus rising from the dead (as the visions began to be so interpreted), with their traditions of dying and rising gods, together with Jewish animal sacrificial rites, took up the sense perceived (not revelation) notion that the significance of Jesus was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for temple authorities. The Acts story of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group, seems to reference a put-down by temple authorities of some kind of anti-Torah demonstration. Just here Paul is introduced, named as a participant holding the garments of those casting the stones. Next we have Paul telling of his “vision” on the road to Damascus, to where this Hellenist group fled, as persecutor, then converting to this group with their Christ myth beliefs. It was from this group that Paul received his Christ myth kerygma. In taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, becoming Gentile Christianity as known above all from the writings of the New Testament, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament, the source for orthodox Christianity. In becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, they were able to declare the Jerusalem Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Only because Matthew included the Q material, which contained the Sermon on the Mount, do we have an alternative source which contains our sole original and originating faith and witness of the apostles, our most certain source of knowledge of the real Jesus. (See “Essays on the Sermon on the Mount” by Hans Dieter Betz).
Joe, your enlightening post suggests, as a critical theist, my take on the fateful history of post execution Jesus traditions. (Over against the misnomer and seriously misleading terms: “Christian Origins” – “Jewish Christianity”)
Our most certain sufficient historical evidence for knowledge of Jesus, who he was and what he said, rests “solely on the basis of the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles”. (Schubert M. Ogden). Over against this initial fact of the history of religion, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-execution Jesus traditions. This period was marked by two distinctly different movements in deep adversarial relationship. The first the Jerusalem Jesus Movement, from which we have our source which contains this apostolic witness. This soon followed by the Hellenists Christ myth movement (the rival enemy of the Jesus movement) which developed in the Gentile world, imaging the Pauline Christ of faith myth, severing Jesus from his message and his Jewish roots, meeting with ready success, to become Gentile Christianity, finally to become orthodox Christianity. Soon becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, Gentile Christianity was able to place this original Jesus Movement under a conspiracy of silence; to even at a later point, have it declared a heresy, to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, mistakenly to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top scholars under the force of our present historical methods and knowledge fully come to a real objective historical understanding of this mistake, not only to say none of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus, but to understand the how and the why of this fateful mistake. This is a human mistake, one of those ultimate mistakes related to that ultimate issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which restrict seeing beyond sense perceived reality. In Jesus’ words (Matt. 6:22=23):
“ The lamp of the body is the eye.
If, then your eye is healthy/good, your whole body is full of light.
If, however, your eye is sick/evil, then your whole body is dark.
If, therefore, the light which is in you is darkness – what darkness!”
A brief history of this fateful mistake: In this apostolic period, 30 CE – 65 CE, there were two movements each with its own interpretation of the significance of the Jesus event, placing them in the strongest adversarial relationship. Chronologically the first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began (within weeks) with the key disciples, having fled to their native Galilee, overcome with grief and utter disillusionment , emboldened by Peter’s and others vision (some form of extrasensory cognition), at high risk, returning to Jerusalem, purposing to again take up the teaching of their revered Master. This was soon followed by a group of Hellenist Jews hearing talk of Jesus rising from the dead (as the visions began to be so interpreted), with their traditions of dying and rising gods, together with Jewish animal sacrificial rites, took up the sense perceived (not revelation) notion that the significance of Jesus was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for temple authorities. The Acts story of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group, seems to reference a put-down by temple authorities of some kind of anti-Torah demonstration. Just here Paul is introduced, named as a participant holding the garments of those casting the stones. Next we have Paul telling of his “vision” on the road to Damascus, to where this Hellenist group fled, as persecutor, then converting to this group with their Christ myth beliefs. It was from this group that Paul received his Christ myth kerygma. In taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, becoming Gentile Christianity as known above all from the writings of the New Testament, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament, the source for orthodox Christianity. In becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, they were able to declare the Jerusalem Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Only because Matthew included the Q material, which contained the Sermon on the Mount, do we have an alternative source which contains our sole original and originating faith and witness of the apostles, our most certain source of knowledge of the real Jesus. (See “Essays on the Sermon on the Mount” by Hans Dieter Betz).
Reply
Ed Jones
January 27, 2013 at 10:19 am
Apologies for the repetition. I have no explanation.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High
by rjosephhoffmann
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by admin Posted on October 5, 2012
In case you need to hear it again. Mitt Romney will not raise taxes on the middle class, will not increase the deficit, will create 12,000,000 new jobs in the first three months, will protect small businesses, and will save Medicare and Social Security as we know it, while giving future “seniors” more choice about health care options.
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Published: October 21, 2012
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Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on October 5, 2012
In case you need to hear it again. Mitt Romney will not raise taxes on the middle class, will not increase the deficit, will create 12,000,000 new jobs in the first three months, will protect small businesses, and will save Medicare and Social Security as we know it, while giving future “seniors” more choice about health care options. Everything’s comin’ up roses, and you heard it from his milk-drinking, alcohol-free, tobacco-eschewing lips.
A lot has been made about Romney’s lies, and his commitment to post-truth politics. But they are not really lies–at least not the sort of whoppers that Ben Franklin alluded to in Poor Richard’s when he said the truth stands on two legs, a lie on one.
In the image-is-everything world we live in, propagating your version of the reality you want the world to see is the real goal. Mitt Romney is good at it. But he is not good at it because he a a good lawyer, or a good businessman, or a good guy.
He is a good at is because he is a Mormon–and not just a Mormon but a really good Mormon. And really good Mormons are the best liars in the world.
In the recent debate, Mr Obama, a man still occasionally in touch with this weird and rare thing called truth, had a hard time understanding the scene unfolding adjacent to him.
He seemed to be a man reading for a part in the wrong play, using the wrong script–one that corresponded to a different plotline. If at times he seemed to be thinking, “I can’t believe this guy” what he was hoping is that no one else would believe this guy. But many did and many will. Meanwhile, Romney basked in the artificial light of the artificial scene with the artifical trees and shrubs and buildings that the President stumbled into. All that was missing was Jim Reeves singing “Welcome to My World” in the background. Obama was a guest in Mitt Romney’s head for an hour and a half.
Contrary to what the media said, this was not a weak performance by a man—the President–who needed to get in there and throw a few punches and challenge Romney’s “facts”. It was a scene out of Mars Attacks. It was the devil messing with Eve’s head, Satan in jeering voice taunting Job. In fact,Obama looked more Job- than Solomon-like, a man afflicted and confused.
No one expected the enemy to take this form. At one point, in reply to Romney’s third asseveration that he was not advocatng a three trillion dollar tax break and that the President’s statements were “simply inaccurate,” (“I don’t know where you’re getting this stuff”) Mr Obama simply looked disappointed and mildly shook his graying head. How many at that point wanted someone to say pointedly “I’m getting it from you, Governor–it’s what you’ve been saying for eighteen months.” Except we all know what Romney would have said, in that Jon Lovitz/Tommy Flannagan style he had adopted: “No I didn’t. You’re making that up, too.” Post-truthfulness, to be effective, must be pathologically coherent.
Accordingly it was Mitt Romney’s reality that won, and there was no room in that reality for challenge. In the myth Romney cunningly spun, lies became pillars in an unassailable argument. The response to that myth–the only appropriate one, and hence one this President could not make–would be “You’re full of shit, and everything you have said is shit. If people want to vote for shit, they will vote for you.” Short of that, nothing would have worked. But something tells me, that might have.
Peter, James, and John ordain Joseph Smith
Do we know any other area of life where factual challenges do not prevail over evidence and eyesight?
Of course we do. Religion. This debate was won by theological sleight of hand—by “the evidence of things not seen,” otherwise known as faith. The old Yiddish joke about a jewel thief caught in the act by a cop (“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”) also works if you change the culprit to a philandering husband. And it works if you make the perpetrator a contemporary Mormon politician. The Mormon tradition of “Lying for the Lord” has received a little attention (though not enough) recently, especially in an interview with Brigham Young’s descendant, Sue Emmet, in The Daily Beast. Mitt Romney may be the best of the breed in knowing how the game ius played and when to play it.
Although Christanity has had two thousand years to get its duplicitous act together and has more or less accepted standard distinctions between truth and falsehood, except in doctrinal matters, religion scholars know that religious minorities often have to survive by practicing duplicity in the interest of the higher cause: propagating their version of the truth.
They do this to make their converts (think: voters) believe that what they are signing onto is better than what they’ve got, if necessary by telling them that while their brief and mortal lives stink, their eternal one will be a bed of roses–a little like the lives of the 1% here on earth.
Celsus, an early critic of Christanity, sneers at the way Christians prey on unsuspecting “yokels,” then fade, hide or deny when their preachers are confronted by skeptical onlookers. In Islam, various sectarians, including the Druze of Lebanon and Syria, were famous liars—a reputation that put their militias at the service of the highest bidder during the long Lebanese civil war. The Alawites of Syria, like the ancient gnostics before them and other heterodox cults, spread in just the same way. Once upon a time, it variously benefited and hurt Christians to be confused with Jews. When it benefited them to be different and join ranks with pagan anti-Semitism, they joined ranks and took over the Empire and began acting like pagans. That’s the way religious lying works. You just have to have a cool head, a few zingers in your quiver, and know whom to appease and whom oppose.
Being sneaky and learning to lie has benefited every endangered sect since the Reformation, ranging from the Dunkards to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Moonies. The point is to get your foot in the door. Once you do that, you can get your ideas into your victim’s head.
But Mormons are the champions of all champion liars. Lying has made them not just survivors but rich and prosperous survivors.
Unlike some less mendacious groups, the Mormons were founded by a renowned snake oil salesman and accomplished untruth teller. Joseph Smith is the prototype, though with less carnage to his direct credit, for such successors as David Koresh and Jim Jones, of (respectively) Waco and Jonestown fame—religious leaders who begin on the tracks and then derail their congregants with promises of beachfront property in the Kingdom and a divine bank account that never goes overdraft.
Mormons are not just used car salesmen: they may have invented used car salesmen. If you don’t believe me, just replay any speech Mitt Romney has made in the last ten years, and you will see in his healthy glow the snake oil that his religion has been selling for 175 years. It takes us right back to the famous father of fork-tongued evangelists who once boasted that he had “become all things to all all men so that [he] could save all.” Translated from the Greek it means, Do what it takes.
Lying comes naturally to Romney, the young Mormon missionary to France, the young Mormon draft-averter, the Mormon bishop, the Mormon philanthropist. It has been a feature of his religion since its deranged founder set the Guinness record for religious lies.
Beginning in 1846, after their violent expulsion from Nauvoo, Illinois Mormon missionaries attempted to depict themselves in England as victims of persecution. The tales were engineered by Brigham Young himself and his closest associates, who then tried to win converts for the Utah trek by depicting the Salt Lake Valley as a veritable paradise. After the British Mormon John Edward Taylor became chief propagandist for the cult around 1852, and after failing to attract large numbers of takers with a “land grant” Ponzi-scheme that was designed to take the “saints” all the way to California, he lured them with this:
The way is now prepared; the roads, bridges, and
ferry-boats made; there are stopping places also on the way where they can rest, obtain vegetables and corn, and, when they arrive at the far end, instead
of finding a wild waste, they will meet with friends, provisions and a home, so that all that will be requisite for them to do will be to find sufficient teams
to draw their families, and to take along with them a few woollen or cotton goods, or other articles of merchandise which will be light, and which the
brethren will require until they can manufacture for themselves.
“How many a poor Englishman,” worried the Millennial Star Newspaper of the day, “ toiling over the plains in the next succeeding years, and, arriving in arid Utah to find himself in the clutches of an organization from which he could not escape, had reason to curse the man who drew this picture!”
One of the constant themes of women and men who have left the Mormon church has been the noble tradition of “lying for the Lord,” a habit that goes back to Joseph Smith himself and the peculiarities of his “discovery”
of the golden tablets (“being composed of thin metallic pages engraved on both sides and bound with three D-shaped rings”) that constituted the latterday revelation of the saints.
Smith’s reformed Egyptian letters: do not correspond to any ancient script or language
“The LDS church” says Ken Clark, a former Mormon bishop, “consistently describes in sermons and paintings, the visitation of an angel named Moroni to Joseph Smith on September 21, 1823. Moroni is pictured floating above Joseph or next to his bed, alone in his bedroom. The pictures do not portray Joseph’s five brothers who slept in the same room with him. A restored Smith house is used for LDS tours showing the small room and only two beds for six brothers. Nothing resembling the actual sleeping arrangement is hinted at in the church’s official literature and pictorial recreations of the scene.”
Following this initial deception, Mormonism entered into a long history of post-truthfulness—the sort of thing that runs deep in Romney DNA. The Kinderhook Plates Hoax (fake metal plates that Smith pronounced ancient Egyptian); the lie that Joseph Smith wrote the History of the Church, when it was not recorded until decades after his death; the great Rocky Mountain Prophecy, invented to convince believers that the Salt Lake Valley was the place ordained for them by God as a promised land; even the “name change” of the angel responsible for the revelation to Smith—from Nephi to Moroni, a change which would be analogous to saying that, on second thought, Jesus’ name was really Schlomo.
Some Mormon historians have labeled the phenomenon of Mormon lying and duplicity “theocratic ethics.” According to D. Michael Quinn, Smith lied to “protect himself or the church, which was an extension of himself. ” And Dan Vogel (Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet) describes Smith’s viewpoint even more succinctly: he was a pious deceiver.
Smith used deception if in his mind it resulted in a good outcome. Smith had Moroni, an ancient American prophet and custodian of the gold plates declare, “And whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do good is of me; for good cometh of none save it be of
me. ( Moroni 4:11-12). Translation: if deception was necessary to do good, or bring a soul to Christ, then it was worth it, as long as God approves. Smith
believed he knew when God approved of lying.
It’s odd to me that none of the political commentators have chosen—as far as I can tell—to dwell on the “Lying for the Lord” aspect of Mormon culture: its disregard for telling the truth in stressful situations, and its penchant for making up new truths as circumstances warrant. No wonder Paul Ryan, with his rather different Catholic approach to reality, looks bewildered and confused as Romney plows on, unhampered by the constraints of fact and detail. He is just doing his religious duty, surreptitiously as his religion requires him to do it.
Is this because the candidate himself, as a true Mormon, has succeeded in keeping the reverence for deceit below the radar–doing in effect what every good Mormon leader since Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Joseph Taylor has been doing for 175 years?
When Mitt Romney says he is not calling for 3 trillion dollars in tax cuts, not asking for austerity, not aiming to curtail entitlement programs, are we really just looking at a twenty-first century cultist’s version of the promises made by nineteenth century Mormon propagandists to reluctant converts who—when they arrived in Utah—discovered not the garden of Eden but a desert?
Mormonsim has been called the “uniquely American religion.” Mitt Romney, if he is elected, will be the first uniquely American Mormon president. As voters consider their choices, they need to know that Mormonism is and always has been a duplicitous, deceitful and lying cult whose movers and shakers were accustomed to living in a post-truth era long before there was a postmodern justification for it. Whenever things got tough–as they were for Mitt Romney before his debate with Barack Obama–there was always the fallback position: a new truth, a new reality, a new made-to-order revelation. People who like truth may regard Mormon ethics as a little slippery.
But if you like that kind of thing, as the President might say, Mitt is your man.
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Published: October 5, 2012
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25 Responses to “Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High”
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ROO BOOKAROO
October 5, 2012 at 11:34 am
Wish you would send this as an opinion piece to the NY Times or even Huffington Post. Nobody else seems intent on highlighting those basic facts.
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pithom
October 5, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Mr. Hoffman, I have to take my hat off to you. This post is, perhaps, the best analysis of the concept of pious fraud and the reasons for why it exists, spreads, and thrives I have seen in my lifetime. Perhaps this is the first time this year you have precisely hit the nail on the head on every single point you made in a blog post.
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Dean
October 5, 2012 at 7:42 pm
Thank you for the historic background to an practice I’ve witnessed numerous times living in Alberta. Sadly Canada’s current conservative government is overrun with an Evangelical/LDS coalition, including our Prime Minister. They appear to be quite comfortable with secrecy and deception while pursuing their own agendas. Canada has never been a truly secular country, what remains of secular government here may be marginalized if they win another election.
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Ed Jones
October 6, 2012 at 7:57 pm
A brillliant expose’. More than derserving of my return to you of your gracious Reply to my comment: A viable solution to the “Jesus Puzzle” to News from the Freethought Ghetto.
Joe, “Thank you for this – filled with wisdom and understaanding, like Job!”
Reply
julie assange
October 6, 2012 at 10:53 pm
I work at a school district which is half mormon in population, but nearly all mormon in control. This seems a pattern for mormons, as does their consistent pattern of lying when it benefits mormon goals. Beware putting romney in a position of power. Mormons use power only to benefit themselves and their church.
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jsegor23
October 7, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Joe: Great article. I am normally against attacking candidates because of their religion, but your piece has so much explanatory power that I have made an exception and have shared it with my Facebook friends. Argie will do the same. I hope that others who read it will do the same. If it gets enough traction on Facebook, the press may pick it up. I don’t Tweet, but if I did, I would put it on Twitter as well.
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Clarice O'Callaghan
October 8, 2012 at 8:54 am
Your article is a stunner, Joe. I’ve emailed the following media and perhaps if others do the same it will draw much needed attention before it’s too late.
“Ed@msnbc.com” ; “hardball@msnbc.com” ; “scoop@huffingtonpost.com” ; “scoop@motherjones.com” ; “wolfblitzer@CNN.com”
Reply
Clarice O'Callaghan
October 8, 2012 at 8:56 am
Oops, not all of the addresses appeared. Again,
“Ed@msnbc.com” ; “hardball@msnbc.com” ; “scoop@huffingtonpost.com” ; “scoop@motherjones.com” ; “wolfblitzer@CNN.com”
Reply
A few good links | eChurch Blog says:
October 8, 2012 at 9:08 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann – Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High [...]
Reply
packham33
October 8, 2012 at 10:54 am
For more specific examples of Mormon lying, see my article “Mormon Lying” at http://packham.n4m.org/lying.htm
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Yanquetino
October 9, 2012 at 10:26 am
Bullseye! It is so encouraging that someone has the integrity to look beneath the surface of the Mormon cult’s slick, osmondized image, and tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Readers who want to learn more about Romney’s persona might also consider my articles “Mormons’ Concept of Self –and of Others” http://bit.ly/SG9Gbs and “Why Political Candidates’ Religious Beliefs Are Important” http://bit.ly/KqNw9d
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vegasjessie
October 9, 2012 at 12:13 pm
As an ardent critic of the religion that charges a post-mortem afterlife insurance premium of 10% of its cult followers, I appreciate this blog. If you see parts referenced in my next post, take that as the highest form of flattery!
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Antonio Jerez
October 9, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Wonderful! We are in deep shit if Romney is elected president, which seems more probable after Obamas dreadful performance in the debate. It´s actually double shit if a lying mormon and a archconservative catholic (Ryan) who doesn´t know basic mathematics get elected. That both these loonies are taken seriously by almost half the american voters says quite a lot about the dreadful state of american politics at the moment.
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Linda Singh
October 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
love the truth getting out,
I can hardly believe this presidenial rac is so close. I do blieve it is bigotry and nothing else, romney ryan ill taeus ples w don’t want to go, down. down, down!
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Glenn
October 21, 2012 at 8:54 am
Wow, excellent article. Please forward this the the N.Y. Times editorial board. That was the part of Romney I couldn’t understand. Being such a religious man but lying about everything. This explains everything.
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Sara Watson
October 21, 2012 at 11:38 am
I’m making it “my mission to get this facts @ the “Mormons Lying Tradition”..I’m seriously frightened of a Romney presidency, after reading this article & the comments; more than ever. I suggest all of yo
Reply
Clarice O'Callaghan
October 21, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Twitter reaches thousands and millions of people with very little effort. Before it’s too late.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
October 21, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Once more….
Reply
Dwight Jones
October 21, 2012 at 9:54 pm
If the Americans marry Romney to the Pentagon, it will be the end of them.
Sometimes you only get so many chances at decency, and the sands may have run out…
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Mike Wilson
November 1, 2012 at 12:08 pm
I worry about the tone of the article, which reminds me of those that tell us we shouldn’t be surprised by Bernnie Madoff’s actions because he’s Jewish after all or that seek to explain Bin Laden in terms of Islam’s deeply held commitment to murder. Sure we may all think Mormanism is silly, but that Romney is a liar hardly makes him an aberation in American politics. Should we go looking for the Quaker roots of Nixons misdeeds or why Presbyterians like Reagan are such fantastic liars?
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steph
November 1, 2012 at 8:09 pm
An enquiry into the historical reasons behind Nixon’s and Reagan’s decisions, claims and actions, whether or not they have religious roots, would be very intriguing. That’s a good idea. Maybe after the election is over.
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Yanquetino
November 1, 2012 at 8:33 pm
@Mike:
The religious analogies you mention constitute a broad brush that misses the point.
Shall we assume that you would likewise have no problem voting for a candidate who is belongs to the Klu Klux Klan, or is a proponent of Scientology, or a Christian Scientist, or a member of the Flat Earth Society? There comes a time when a particular belief system crosses the line of rational thinking –an absolute prerequisite for the president of the most powerful nation on earth, in my humble opinion.
In the case of Romney’s Mormonism, we are talking about core, central beliefs that fly in the face of historical, scientific, and even biological DNA facts. To live in denial of reality is not just “faith,” it is blind faith:
http://bit.ly/OVbFgG
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Mike Wilson
November 12, 2012 at 4:41 pm
At this point Mormonism has been around well over 100 years and millions of individuals are born and raised in Mormon families. I would not expect them to abandon their family cult any more than I would expect Christians or Jews too once they realize, as they should that there was no parting of the Red Sea or that Genesis is not a factual account of the first people. No one ask traditional Christian candidates if they are really so credulous as to believe in the virgin birth or resurrection or what the future has in store for 7 headed dragons. I think most people understand that believing certain bizarre religious beliefs does not tend to cross into the daily habits of believers. For instance I would challenge anyone to find evidence in, evangelical and Billy Graham devotee, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy that suggest he was trying to usher in the end times
steph
November 12, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Why on earth would they? Bill Clinton’s foreign policy has nothing to do with end times. Clinton has an independent mind. Clinton doesn’t feel compelled to agree with Billy Graham and the two fall on opposite sides of the gay marriage debate. I think the argument in the essay still holds and can’t really see the point of your comment. The man lost. The man lied. The man is a Mormon. Mormonism is a cult. It stands still and doesn’t evolve. Christianity can and does and Clinton is a critical thinker with an independent mind, free from chains to particular biblical interpretations.
steph
November 13, 2012 at 12:19 am
What exactly is your definition of devotee? Rhetorical question. I suspect your label was an attempt to denigrate him. ;-) Clinton pays tribute to many people, one of whom has been Graham. Aren’t we all, as thinking human beings, capable of paying others respect for their achievements or inspiration, or contribution to the community, without falling into the fanatical idolisation hero-worship type role? Clinton says of the man: “he showed us that by following our faith we would move the rock up the hill…that faith is Billy Graham’s great gift to the world”. If anyone was a devotee perhaps it was Billy. Are you perchance a devotee of the subject of this essay? I forget his name. I scrolled up … Romney. Now he was a devotee…
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Paul Kurtz: December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012
by rjosephhoffmann
Like my relationship with my own father, my relationship with Paul Kurtz was complicated. My feelings about his death are equally complex. On the one hand, clichés must be spoken: Paul was one of the great secular leaders of the last century, and devoted more time and energy to the life-stance he called secular humanism—a humanism without gods—than almost anyone in the contemporary humanist world. His living monument, the Center for Inquiry (and its component organizations, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) will no doubt feel his loss intensely.
At the same time, truth must be told: at the end of his life, the secular vision is unfulfilled–through no fault of his own–and many of the ideas he espoused have been reformed or rejected by a simpler and more callous approach to secular humanism than Paul ever could have imagined.
It is, as they say of irreplaceable figures, unlikely that anyone will take his place. Paul himself was keenly aware of this: as he grew older he was very much concerned that the lessons he had taught had not been fully learned by his younger colleagues and proteges. For thirty years, I was privileged to be one of those. It is fortunate that another of his young colleagues, Nathan Bupp, has published in the last year a thoughtful collection of some of Kurtz’s most significant writings, a garland from the forty books that Paul wrote over his long career as a teacher, lecturer, activist, and theoretician. They show a mind consistent in objectives and sensitive to application. If secularism had a “great communicator”–someone who could make philosophy appealing to ordinary readers and listeners–it was Paul Kurtz. My guess is that in terms of others discovering the importance of his thought, his best days are ahead of him.
With death, wars end, hatchets are buried and clouds resolve into clear images of the future. I personally hope that this will happen at the CFI. One thing that can be said without contradiction about Paul: he lived for the future, and lived passionately with the optimistic and “exuberant” belief that the world can be made a better place through human effort. His entire humanist vision was rooted in that belief. When he underwent valve replacement surgery at Cleveland Hospital in 2007, he confidently looked forward to another decade of engagement with the causes and challenges that most engaged him.
When he wasn’t campaigning for reason and science, he liked hearing jokes, telling jokes, and chuckling over collections of Woody Allen monologues. He loved music. He couldn’t sing.
Paul Kurtz was never really comfortable with the “new atheist” doctrines that began to appear in the early twenty-first century. While cordial to everyone, he deplored direct frontal assaults on religion as being out of keeping with the “humanist” side of his philosophy. Authentic humanism, he believed, must be radically secular. It should expel the gods and eschew dogma and supernaturalism. It should embrace science, reason, and ethical praxis—a combination he named eupraxsophy, a recipe for the good life.
For Paul, this was not a new idea but a “stirring” that could be detected in the great philosophers going back to Plato and Aristotle. Virtue is as virtue does. Happiness is its consequence.
Some of his critics thought that Paul was too philosophical. Others, that he treated religion too politely. His final departure from the Center for Inquiry came from the organization’s decision to get tough on religion and sponsor cartoon and blasphemy contests—a contravention of the gentler approach to religion that he advocated.
He liked to boast that in the ecumenical spirit after Vatican II, he had attended two Vatican meetings as part of the Catholic Church’s colloquium on the Church’s relationship with unbelievers—a colloquium that indirectly and eventually resulted in the Vatican’s concordat on science and faith, endorsed by two of Paul’s heroes, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould. He had a special admiration for French Cardinal Paul Jean Poupard who headed the colloquium—and indeed, for smart people in general, theists or atheists. When I asked him once why he did not admire Billy Graham for the same reason he answered with a wry grin, “Because Billy Graham isn’t very smart.”
But Paul himself could be tough on religion: Beginning in the 1980’s he set out to subject religious truth claims to tests in the interest of exposing the flim flam of television evangelists and the religious right. From opposing Ronald Reagan’s “Year of the Bible” to the born-again George W. Bush’s “faith based initiatives,” he believed that religion had no place in national politics and that its abuse could only be corrected by exposing its hypocrisy. In 1982 he founded the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion to work in tandem with his Council for Secular Humanism as a quasi-scholarly watchdog commission. CSER was defunded by CFI in 2010, shortly after Paul Kurtz resigned from CFI.
But the difference between new atheism and Paul’s vision is crucial. First and foremost, Paul believed in education, in getting the word out to ordinary people. Like John Dewey, he believed that the liberal arts and sciences were transformative. He was not the kind of man who would divide audiences into brights and dims: for Paul, everyone who had the will to listen and learn was potentially bright and inherently humanistic in their aspirations. In literally hundreds of conferences and seminars and through the work of on-site meetings and the aegis of Prometheus Books (which he founded), he replicated the energy of the old tent revivals. In fact, some of his earliest editing work included anthologies of the puritan philosophers in American history, including the “father” of the Great Awakening Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’s goal was to deliver the saints from the devil and sin. Paul’s mission was to deliver them from religious hypocrisy.
His gospel was a gospel of freedom from superstition, a gospel of freedom through learning.
He was a professor until the end.
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Published: October 21, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Center for Inquiry : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
5 Responses to “Paul Kurtz: December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012”
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Franklin Percival
October 22, 2012 at 4:20 am
Thank you for this summary. It has taught me much.
Reply
David Chumney
October 22, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Franklin, my sentiments exactly! I also learned a lot; and, as is so often the case, that means wanting to learn more. Thanks, RJH, for starting us down that road!
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What is scepticism, why should we be sceptical, and how should we express it? « Choice in Dying says:
October 22, 2012 at 10:09 am
[...] to the cause of rational discourse at another time. R. Joseph Hoffmann has some thoughtful remarks here. While some of Kurtz’s last months were marked by contention with a new generation of [...]
Reply
Ed Jones
October 29, 2012 at 11:36 am
Theists can take consulation in the irrefutable fact of the history of knowledge: A significant number of the worlds finest, thinkers including some of our most notable scientists, of any age were and are confirmed theists. We theists stand in the highest levels of intellectual company.
Reply
Justin
October 30, 2012 at 8:49 am
A fascinating and important man – and very fair post. I am sure that you are right that ‘in terms of others discovering the importance of his thought, his best days are ahead of him.’
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An Introduction to Probability Theory and Why Bayes’s Theorem is Unhelpful in History
by rjosephhoffmann
October 12, 2012
The following is a post written by Ian on his blog ”Irreducible Complexity” reposted here with his permission http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/probability-theory-introductio/
This post follows from the previous review of Richard Carrier’s “Proving History”, which attempts to use Bayes’s Theorem to prove Jesus didn’t exist. In my review I point out a selection of the mathematical problems with that book, even though I quite enjoyed it. This post is designed to explain what Bayes’s Theorem actually does, and show why it isn’t particularly useful outside of specific domains. It is a journey through basic probability theory, for folks who aren’t into math (though I’ll assume high-school math). It is designed to be simple, and therefore is rather long. I will update it and clarify it from time to time.
Let’s think about the birth of Christianity. How did it happen? We don’t know, which is to say there are a lot of different things that could have happened. Let’s use an illustration to picture this.
Complex diagram, eh? I want this rectangle to represent all possible histories: everything that could have happened. In math we call this rectangle the ‘universe‘, but meant metaphorically: the universe of possibilities. In the rectangle each point is one particular history. So there is one point which is the actual history, the one-true-past (OTP in the diagram below), but we don’t know which it is. In fact, we can surely agree we’ve no hope of ever finding it, right? To some extent there will always be things in history that are uncertain.
When we talk about something happening in history, we aren’t narrowing down history to a point. If we consider the claim “Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier”, there are a range of possible histories involving such a Jesus. Even if we knew 100% that were true, there would be a whole range of different histories including that fact.
Napolean moved his knife in a particular way during his meal on January 1st 1820, but he could have moved that knife in any way, or been without a knife, and the things we want to say about him wouldn’t change. His actual knife manipulation is part of the one-true-past, but totally irrelevant for Napoleonic history1.
So any claim about history represents a whole set of possible histories. We draw such sets as circles. And if you’re a child of the new math, you’ll recognize the above as a Venn diagram. But I want to stress what the diagram actually means, so try to forget most of your Venn diagram math for a while.
At this point we can talk about what a probability is.
There are essentially an infinite number of possible histories (the question of whether it is literally infinite is one for the philosophy of physics, but even if finite, it would be so large as to be practically infinite for the purpose of our task). So each specific history would be infinitely unlikely. We can’t possibly say anything useful about how likely any specific point is, we can’t talk about the probability of a particular history.
So again we turn to our sets. Each set has some likelihood of the one-true-past lying somewhere inside it. How likely is it that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? That’s another way of asking how likely it is that the one-true-past lies in the set of possible histories that we would label “Jesus Born in Bethlehem”. The individual possibilities in the set don’t have a meaningful likelihood, but our historical claims encompass many possibilities, and as a whole those claims do have meaningful likelihood. In other words, when we talk about how likely something was to have happened, we are always talking about a sets of possibilities that match our claim.
We can represent the likelihood on the diagram by drawing the set bigger or smaller. If we have two sets, one drawn double the size of the other, then the one-true-past is twice as likely to be in the one that is drawn larger.
So now we can define what a probability is for a historical claim. A probability is a ratio of the likelihood of a set, relative to the whole universe of possibilities. Or, in terms of the diagram, what fraction of the rectangle is taken up by the set of possibilities matching our claim?
If we can somehow turn likelihood into a number, (i.e. let’s say that the likelihood of a set S is a nmber written L(S)) and if the universe is represented by the set U, probability can be mathematically defined as:
But where do these ‘likelihood’ numbers come from? That’s a good question, and one that turns out to be very hard to give an answer for that works in all cases. But for our purpose, just think of them as a place-holder for any of a whole range of different things we could use to calculate a probability. For example: if we were to calculate the probability of rolling 6 on a die, the likelihood numbers would be the number of sides: the likelihood of rolling a 6 would be 1 side, the likelihood of rolling anything would be 6 sides, so the probability of rolling a six is 1/6. If we’re interested in the probability of a scanner diagnosing a disease, the likelihoods would be the numbers of scans: on top would be the number of successful scans, the number on the bottom would be the total number of scans. We use the abstraction as a way of saying “it doesn’t much matter what these things are, as long as they behave in a particular way, the result is a probability”.
Now we’ve got to probabilities, we’ve used these ‘likelihoods’ as a ladder, and we can move on. We only really worry about how the probability is calculated when we have to calculate one, and then we do need to figure out what goes on the top and bottom of the division.
Another diagram.
In this diagram we have two sets. These are two claims, or two sets of possible histories. The sets may overlap in any combination. If no possible history could match both claims (e.g. “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” and “Jesus was born in Nazereth”), then the two circles wouldn’t touch [kudos if you are thinking "maybe there are ways both could be kind-of true" - that's some math for another day]. Or it might be that the claims are concentric (“Jesus was born in Bethlehem”, “Jesus was born”), any possibility in one set, will always be in another. Or they may, as in this case, overlap (“Jesus was born in Nazereth”, “Jesus was born illegitimately”).
I’ve been giving examples of sets of historical claims, but there is another type of set that is important: the set of possible histories matching something that we know happened. Of all the possible histories, how many of them produce a New Testament record that is similar to the one we know?
This might seem odd. Why does our universe include things we know aren’t true? Why are there possibilities which lead to us never having a New Testament? Why are there histories where we have a surviving comprehensive set of writings by Jesus? Can’t we just reject those outright? The unhelpful answer is that we need them for the math to work. As we’ll see, Bayes’s Theorem requires us to deal with the probability that history turned out the way it did. I’ll give an example later of this kind of counter-factual reasoning.
So we have these two kinds of set. One kind which are historical claims, and the other which represent known facts. The latter are often called Evidence, abbreviated E, the former are Hypotheses, or H. So let’s draw another diagram.
where H∩E means the intersection of sets H and E – the set of possible histories where we both see the evidence and where our hypothesis is true (you can read the mathematical symbol ∩ as “and”).
Here is the basic historical problem. We have a universe of possible histories. Some of those histories could have given rise to the evidence we know, some might incorporate our hypothesis. We know the one true past lies in E, but we want to know how likely it is to be in the overlap, rather than the bit of E outside H. In other words, how likely is it that the Hypothesis true, given the Evidence we know?
Above, I said that probability is how likely a set is, relative to the whole universe. This is a simplification we have to revisit now. Probability is actually how likely one sets is, relative to some other set that completely encompasses it (a superset in math terms).
We’re not actually interested in how likely our Hypothesis is, relative to all histories that could possibly have been. We’re only interested in how likely our hypothesis is, given our evidence: given that the one-true-past is in E.
So the set we’re interested in is the overlap where we have the evidence and the hypothesis is true. And the superset we want to compare it to is E, because we know the one-true-past is in there (or at least we are willing to assume it is). This is what is known as a conditional probability. It says how likely is H, given that we know or assume E is true: we write it as P(H|E) (read as “the probability of H, given E”). And from the diagram it should be clear the answer is:
It is the ratio of the size of the overlap, relative to the size of the whole of E. This is the same as our previous definition of probability, only before we were comparing it to the whole universe U, now we’re comparing it to just the part of U where E is true2.
We could write all probabilities as conditional probabilities, because ultimately any probability is relative to something. We could write P(S|U) to say that we’re interested in the probability of S relative to the universe. We could, but it would be pointless, because that is what P(S) means. Put another way, P(S) is just a conveniently simplified way of writing P(S|U).
So what is a conditional probability doing? It is zooming in, so we’re no longer talking about probabilities relative to the whole universe of possibilities (most of which we know aren’t true anyway), we’re now zooming in, to probabilities relative to things we know are true, or we’re willing to assume are true. Conditional probabilities throw away the rest of the universe of possibilities and just focus on one area: for P(H|E), we zoom into the set E, and treat E as if it were the universe of possibilities. We’re throwing away all those counter-factuals, and concentrating on just the bits that match the evidence.
The equation for conditional probability is simple, but in many cases it is hard to find P(H∩E), so we can manipulate it a little, to remove P(H∩E) and replace it with something simpler to calculate.
Bayes’s Theorem is one of many such manipulations. We can use some basic high school math to derive it:
Step-by-step math explanation: The first line is just the formula for conditional probability again. If we multiply both sides by P(E) (and therefore move it from one side of the equation to the other) we get the first two parts on the second line. We then assume that P(H∩E) = P(E∩H) (in other words, the size of the overlap in our diagram is the same regardless of which order we write the two sets), which means that we can get the fourth term on the second line just by changing over E and H in the first term. Line three repeats these two terms on one line without the P(H∩E) and P(E∩H) in the middle. We then divide by P(E) again to get line four, which gives us an equation for P(H|E) again.
What is Bayes’s Theorem doing? Notice the denominator is the same as for conditional probability P(E), so what Bayes’s Theorem is doing is giving us a way to calculate P(H∩E) differently. It is saying that we can calculate P(H∩E) by looking at the proportion of H taken up by H∩E, multiplied by the total probability of H. If I want to find the amount of water in a cup, I could say “its half the cup, the cup holds half a pint, so I have one half times half a pint, which is a quarter of a pint”. That’s the same logic here. The numerator of Bayes’s theorem is just another way to calculate P(H∩E).
So what is Bayes’s Theorem for? It let’s us get to the value we’re interested in — P(H|E) — if we happen to know, or can calculate, the other three quantities: the probability of each set, P(H) and P(E) (relative to the universe of possibilities), and the probability of seeing the evidence if the hypothesis were true P(E|H). Notice that, unlike the previous formula, we’ve now got three things to find in order to use the equation. And either way, we still need to calculate the probability of the evidence, P(E).
Bayes’s Theorem can also be useful if we could calculate P(H∩E), but with much lower accuracy than we can calculate P(H) and P(E|H). Then we’d expect our result from Bayes’s Theorem to be a more accurate value for P(H|E). If, on the other hand we could measure P(H∩E), or we had a different way to calculate that, we wouldn’t need Bayes’s Theorem.
Bayes’s Theorem is not a magic bullet, it is just one way of calculating P(H|E). In particular it is the simplest formula for reversing the condition, if you know P(E|H), you use Bayes’s Theorem to give you P(H|E)3.
So the obvious question is: if we want to know P(H|E), what shall we use to calculate it? Either of the two formulae above need us to calculate P(E), in the universe of possible histories, how likely are we to have ended up with the evidence we have? Can we calculate that?
And here things start to get tricky. I’ve never seen any credible way of doing so. What would it mean to find the probability of the New Testament, say?
Even once we’ve done that, we’d only be justified in using Bayes’s Theorem if our calculations for P(H) and P(E|H) are much more accurate than we could manage for P(H∩E). Is that true?
I’m not sure I can imagine a way of calculating either P(H∩E) or P(E|H) for a historical event. How would we credibly calculate the probability of the New Testament, given the Historical Jesus? Or the probably of having both New Testament and Historical Jesus in some universe of possibilities? If you want to use this math, you need to justify how on earth you can put numbers on these quantities. And, as we’ll see when we talk about how these formulae magnify errors, you’ll need to do more than just guess.
But what of Carrier’s (and William Lane Craig’s) favoured version of Bayes’s Theorem? It is is derived from the normal version by observing:
in other words, the set E is just made up of the bit that overlaps with H and the bit that doesn’t (~H means “not in H”), so because
(which was the rearrangement of the conditional probability formula we used on line two of our derivation of Bayes’s Theorem), we can write Bayes’s Theorem as
Does that help?
I can’t see how. This is just a further manipulation. The bottom of this equation is still just P(E), we’ve just come up with a different way to calculate it, one involving more terms4. We’d be justified in doing so, only if these terms were obviously easier to calculate, or could be calculated with significantly lower error than P(E).
If these terms are estimates, then we’re just using more estimates that we haven’t justified. We’re still having to calculate P(E|H), and now P(E|~H) too. I cannot conceive of a way to do this that isn’t just unredeemable guesswork. And it is telling nobody I’ve seen advocate Bayes’s Theorem in history has actually worked through such a process with anything but estimates.
This is bad news, and it might seem that Bayes’s Theorem could never be any useful for anything. But there are cases when we do have the right data.
Let’s imagine that we’re trying a suspect for murder. The suspect has a DNA match at the scene (the Evidence). Our hypothesis is that the DNA came from the suspect. What is P(H|E) – the probability that the DNA is the suspect’s, given that it is a match? This is a historical question, right? We’re asked to find what happened in history, given the evidence before us. We can use Bayes here, because we can get all the different terms.
P(E|H) is simple – what is the probability our test would give a match, given the DNA was the suspect’s? This is the accuracy of the test, and is probably known. P(E) is the probability that we’d get a match regardless. We can use a figure for the probability that two random people would have matching DNA. P(H) is the probability that our suspect is the murderer, in the absence of evidence. This is the probability that any random person is the murderer (if we had no evidence, we’d have no reason to suspect any particular person). So the three terms we need can be convincingly provided, measured, and their errors calculated. And, crucially, these three terms are much easier to calculate, with lower errors, than if we used the P(H∩E) form. What could we measure to find the probability that the suspect is the murderer and their DNA matched? Probably nothing – Bayes’s Theorem really is the best tool to find the conditional probability we’re interested in.
While we’re thinking about this example, I want to return briefly to what I said about counter-factual reasoning. Remember I said that Bayes’s Theorem needs us to work with a universe of possibilities where things we know are true, might not be true? The trial example shows this. We are calculating the probability that the suspect’s DNA would match the sample at the crime scene – but this is counter-factual, because we know it did (otherwise we’d not be doing the calculation). We’re calculating the probability that the DNA would match, assuming the suspect were the murderer, but again, this is counter-factual, because the DNA did match, and we’re trying to figure out whether they are the murderer. This example shows that the universe of possibilities we must consider has to be bigger than the things we know are true. We have to work with counter-factuals, to get the right values.
So Bayes’s Theorem is useful when we have the right inputs. Is it useful in history? I don’t think so. What is the P(E) if the E we’re interested in is the New Testament? Or Jospehus? I simply don’t see how you can give a number that is rooted in anything but a random guess. I’ve not seen it argued with any kind of rational basis.
So ultimately we end up with this situation. Bayes’s Theorem is used in these kind of historical debates to feed in random guesses and pretend the output is meaningful. I hope if you’ve been patient enough to follow along, you’ll see that Bayes’s Theorem has a very specific meaning, and that when seen in the cold light of day for what it is actually doing, the idea that it can be numerically applied to general questions in history is obviously ludicrous.
—
But, you might say, in Carrier’s book he pretty much admits that numerical values are unreliable, and suggests that we can make broad estimates, erring on the side of caution and do what he calls an a fortiori argument – if a result comes from putting in unrealistically conservative estimates, then that result can only get stronger if we make the estimates more accurate. This isn’t true, unfortunately, but for that, we’ll have to delve into the way these formulas impact errors in the estimates. We can calculate the accuracy of the output, given the accuracy of each input, and it isn’t very helpful for a fortiori reasoning. That is a topic for another part.
As is the little teaser from earlier, where I mentioned that, in subjective historical work, sets that seem not to overlap can be imagined to overlap in some situations. This is another problem for historical use of probability theory, but to do it justice we’ll need to talk about philosophical vagueness and how we deal with that in mathematics.
Whether I get to those other posts or not, the summary is that both of them significantly reduce the accuracy of the conclusions that you can reach with these formula, if your inputs are uncertain. It doesn’t take much uncertainty on the input before you loose any plausibility for your output.
—
1 Of course, we can hypothesize some historical question for which it might not be irrelevant. Perhaps we’re interested in whether he was sick that day, or whether he was suffering a degenerating condition that left his hands compromised. Still, the point stands, even those claims still encompass a set of histories, they don’t refer to a single point.
2 Our definition of probability involved L(S) values, what happened to them? Why are we now dividing probabilities? Remember that a Likelihood, L(S), could be any number that represented how likely something was. So something twice as likely had double the L(S) value. I used examples like number of scans or number of sides of a die, but probability values also meet those criteria, so they can also be used as L(S) values. The opposite isn’t true, not every Likelihood value is a probability (e.g. we could have 2,000 scans, which would be a valid L(S) value, but 2,000 is not a valid probability).
3 Though Bayes’s Theorem is often quoted as being a way to reverse the condition P(H|E) from P(E|H), it does still rely on P(E) and P(H). You can do further algebraic manipulations to find these quantities, one of which we’ll see later to calculate P(E). Here the nomenclature is a bit complex. Though Bayes’s Theorem is a simple algebraic manipulation of conditional probability, further manipulation doesn’t necessarily mean a formula is no longer a statement of Bayes’s Theorem. The presence of P(E|H) in the numerator is normally good enough for folks to call it Bayes’s Theorem, even if the P(E) and P(H) terms are replaced by more complex calculations.
4 You’ll notice, however, that P(E|H)P(H) is on both the top and the bottom of the fraction now. So it may seem that we’re using the same estimate twice, cutting down the number of things to find. This is only partially helpful, though. If I write a follow up post on errors and accuracy, I’ll show why I think that errors on top and bottom can pull in different directions.
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Published: October 11, 2012
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6 Responses to “An Introduction to Probability Theory and Why Bayes’s Theorem is Unhelpful in History”
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veryrarelystable
October 11, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Can you correct the grammar of the end of the first paragraph –
“there are a lot of different things that could of happened.”
“Could of” is a deformation of the contraction “could’ve” which is a contraction of “could have”. This particular error gets teachers screaming from the rooftops!
Thanks.
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steph
October 11, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Sure… The post was reposted without any alterations. I’ve eliminated the provocative error with pleasure. :-)
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Matthew
October 12, 2012 at 2:15 am
Is it my imagination or does Richard Carrier want to be seen as some kind of modern day Copernicus with his attempts to apply Bayes’ Theorem to history? I got the impression that he thinks he’s revolutionizing ethics with his “Goal Theory”. In both cases, it seems that he thinks he’s really doing some revolutionary work. I am not saying this to be mean-spirited but I consider him to be something of a crank these days.
steph
October 12, 2012 at 5:24 am
Indeed you’re probably right. And, as he is quoted elsewhere, referring to himself, “no less a philosopher than Aristotle or Hume”… Extraordinary. Furthermore, on his blog he says he is the “renowned author …[with] avid fans span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He has also become a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and the epistemology of history.” Written of himself, all by himself.
scotteus
October 11, 2012 at 10:36 pm
I can’t add anything to this article other than praise. To date it’s the best explanation of B’s Theorem I’ve seen, I mean, I actually understood about 2/3 on just the first reading. Thanks for posting and giving another website to add to favorites.
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steph
October 11, 2012 at 11:40 pm
It’s a pleasure. It is superb: a vigorous critique, incisive and accurate. Take a look at his latest two posts on the Bayes’ nonsense as well.http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/say-what-i-want-to-hear/
http://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-effect-of-error-in-bayess-theorem/
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