RJH July-December of 2012 Part 4

The New Oxonian
Books etc.
 Comments and Moderation
 Vita Brevis
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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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Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Missionary Rides High
by rjosephhoffmann

 Reblogged from The New Oxonian:

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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”

.
 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.
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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…
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply

 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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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
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Tags: Center for Inquiry : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
5 Responses to “Paul Kurtz: December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012”

.
 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!
Reply
 
 
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 [...]
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 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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Away Herrick, Shakespeare I’m Not Donne!
by rjosephhoffmann


Sonnet 18
(To My Mistress Thirty Years On)
Your ass is a couplet
Without any rhyme.
I’d make it a sonnet
But haven’t the time.
 
Your tits in their realm
Are as Scylla to Charybdis:
To come in between them
Requires preparedness.
 
I’d sing of things other–
E.g.,  your white thighs–
If only my mother
Hadn’t said Don’t tell lies.
 
In short this refrain
Is all about beauty;
Your brain is a drain
And you don’t have the booty.
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Published: November 23, 2012
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One Response to “Away Herrick, Shakespeare I’m Not Donne!”

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 sailor1031 
 November 29, 2012 at 9:14 am
Why am I not surprised? This is, after all, the age of the churl.
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The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953): A Prelude to The Humanist Forum
by rjosephhoffmann

The Humanist Forum is a new initiative devoted to the belief that humanism in the twentieth century has suffered insult and injury from simplification, special pleading, and Philistinism.
Ripped from the pages of classical letters and philosophy as though its origin and development were merely incidental,   humanism became variously and fashionably associated with naturalism, secularism, and more recently new atheism as a “reputable” synonym for ideas the humanists of history could not have imagined and almost certainly would have found repugnant.
This evolution has something to do with what I have called “movement humanism”–the agendas of organizations that grew up in the shadowy antithesis of democratic socialism and fascism and their aftermath between 1932 and 1950.  In the main, these organizations have failed, both politically and culturally, and today they attract an increasingly strident cadre of religion-haters with little sense of “real” history and even less understanding of the important role humanism must play as a critic not only of religious fundamentalism–the fascism of the spirit– but scientific reductivism–the fascism of the mind.
Humanism is not a quantifiable essence, a political position, a lifestance, or a “rejection” of supernaturalism.  It is an affirmation of the human in its towering and bewildering complexity.  It embraces the desirability of knowledge in the concrete sense: that we are knowing animals whose salvation seems to consist in knowing more about the world and shaping the world to our own  ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us to describe the world and provide context for our existence.   For that reason, humanism eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest.  Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while humanism may reasonably assert that the question has no bearing on how life is lived or what existence “means.”  Humanism can assert on its own terms, and as a part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert..
In 1953, Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), penned an essay entitled the Hedgehog and the Fox.  It is the clearest statement of Berlin’s belief that the “human sciences” (including philosophy) study the world that human beings create for themselves and inhabit, while the natural sciences study the physical world of nature. Why should this make a difference to the way they are studied? One answer is that the two worlds are fundamentally different in themselves. But this seems under-theorized. Berlin preferred the argument that the human and natural worlds must be studied differently because of the relationship between the observer or thinker and the object of study. We study nature from without, culture from within.
His essay is offered here to provoke discussion, but also as a starting point for an important initiative to return humanism to its rightful place as an entrepot between science and the humanities, which recognizes not only their role as separate expressions of the human imagination, but their commitment to self-understanding and self-criticism.
The Hedgehog and the Fox (excerpt) Sir Isaiah Berlin Simon & Schuster, New York, 1953.
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents Pushkin-an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century-as a being similar to Dostoevsky who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius. Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned by these gigantic figures-at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of the other Russian writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogol’, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads-or, at any rate, has lead-to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer. Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?
The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost than any other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any normal sense; his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more articulately and with greater force and sanity and articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox or a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question, since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing.
No one can complain that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: his views on this subject permeate all this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings-diaries, recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and public correspondents. But this conflict between what he was and what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.
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Published: November 30, 2012
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13 Responses to “The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953): A Prelude to The Humanist Forum”

.
 Ken Dunn 
 November 30, 2012 at 9:05 am
Thank you for, as ever, well reasoned and insightful commentary. I, too, bemoan the bludgeon simple mindedness of New Atheism, but most people, for most of their lives, live them unexamined. An unexamined embrace of New Atheism may simply substitute, for many, as a belief system (an accusation from many a religionist who mistakenly think the truth of such an allegation strengthens his or her claim to Truth).
Academics, “thought leaders,” and the simply inquisitive (that’d include yours truly) should know the truth and complexities of arguments for and against their positions. Unfortunately many “atheists” I know understand their “belief outlook” little more than the “Christians” who simply herd themselves to socially compulsory (hereabouts) weekly services.
I best like well informed, thoughtful compatriots who appreciate the social and historical tapestry of our religions, realizing that when all the layers are peeled away, religion was only layers anyway (no delicious divine core of Truth – sorry).
In the real world i live in, I’ll prefer mindless atheism over mindless (fill in locally dominant religion) any time. New Atheists are smug (occasionally insufferable), but the don’t commit the atrocities we see too often from the mindless faithful.
Reply

 davidjohnmills 
 December 2, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Atheism, in my opinion, isn’t, or isn’t very often anything like mindless, or indeed clinical and unfeeling, though it is often caricatured as such by those who don’t like straight, brave thinking. :)
Of course, an atheist can be a mindless person, but I think the percentage in this pigeon hole is a bit lower than for religion, which seems to me, no offense to any of the faithful reading, to involve the very essence of convenient thinking.
As for Humanists, or even humanists, they’re a nice bunch, though some seem a tad too keen for my liking to retain some of the trappings of religion.
Reply
 
 
 stevenbollinger 
 December 1, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Does Berlin’s distinction between hedgehog and fox add anything to the already well-known distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian? And how exactly does Berlin’s essay launch this Humanist Forum, besides exhibiting, in a decidedly non-New-Atheistic way, a great interest in and respect for the thinking of Tolstoy even though he happened at a rather late date not to have been an atheist?
Reply

 steph 
 December 2, 2012 at 3:41 am
Plato located universals in a realm that was separate from the world; Aristotle located them in the world itself. Archilochus the Greek poet used an analogy of a fox and a hedgehog to draw a dichotomy between those who know one big thing and those who know many things. Erasmus records it, but with a cat. Berlin takes it further. He has adapted the visual analysis and applied a possible dichotomy between the human sciences and the natural sciences, and then locates our greatest human writers and thinkers within one or another, and these thinkers are interesting for own discussions. Berlin’s acutely incisive Tolstoy analysis demonstrates a possible flaw in the simplicity of the analogy in its application and compacity cope with the complexities of human thinking. It is an example I think, of conflicts of Tolstoy’s own critical spirit as well as its brilliance and demonstrates the complexity of human ideas, clashing and blending with emotion and even the impact of the process of evolution of the emerging sciences on his struggle. Perhaps.
Joseph Hoffmann has introduced the idea as an analogy to demonstrate the difference between historical humanism versus it’s modern hijackers and explained: Humanism is not simply the reduction of things to their natural explanation, it is also the acknowledgement that what we accept as natural always exceeds the human. Berlin’s essay is his clearest statement of Berlin’s essay belief that the “human sciences” (including philosophy) study the world that human beings create for themselves and inhabit, while the natural sciences study the physical world of nature. Why should this make a difference to the way they are studied? One answer is that the two worlds are fundamentally different in themselves. But this seems under-theorized. Berlin preferred the argument that the human and natural worlds must be studied differently because of the relationship between the observer or thinker and the object of study. We study nature from without, culture from within.
Berlin’s essay, the inspiration, is offered here to provoke discussion, but also as a starting point for an important initiative to reclaim humanism for what it is: an entrepot between science and the humanities, which recognizes not only their role as separate expressions of the human imagination, but their commitment to self-understanding and self-criticism. Berlin himself declared he wrote the Fox and the Hedgehog he never meant it to be taken seriously – he wrote it as a kind of intellectual game. I think it was inevitable would become so popular given the fact that his idea is expressed with such clarity, and has been of benefit to and influenced further thinking.
Reply
 
 
 PL 
 December 12, 2012 at 11:01 am
I’m not sure if it’s the right place or right post to ask this question, but can anyone tell me the difference between freethinking and secular humanism?
Reply

 steph 
 December 13, 2012 at 4:35 am
Freethought humanism is secular humanism. “Movement humanism” is a term identifying modern organised groups and associations described as rationalist, irreligious, atheistic, “bright”, secular, and freethinking. They are committed to a view that human morality and ethics are based on an atheistic or naturalistic world view. I don’t think these groups and associations bear much resemblance to the atheism and freethought societies of the nineteenth century.
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 13, 2012 at 11:06 pm
I take Berlin’s essay, its heuristic theme, to be a parable (indirect language, meaning by implication) to set forth Tolstoy as the archetype standard of the human condition – the standard for making judgments about the human condition. Thus, Tolstoy’s interpretation of the idiom the Hedgehog and the Fox must be taken as the standard, as well as his attitude to history. I.e. “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commands derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life.”
By way of clarity another excerpt from Berlin’s essay: “Tolstoy (in his Fox period) perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round (all to one end, shaping his world to his ends), and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled.” But in his philosophy and theology (of his Hedgehog period), “he believed only one vast, unitary whole,” which he finally formulated as “a simple Christian ethic (derived above all from the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount) divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic …., the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, the very simple standard: say, what peasants (the oppressed) like or dislike, or what the gospels (above all the Sermon on the Mount) declare to be good,” two standards that were often the same for Tolstoy.”
By Tolstoy’s definition, Humanism can only be the Fox, however sympathetic to the “religion”, which suggests a Tolstoy paraphrase of the 4th paragraph of the essay: (The Hedgehog) “is an affirmation of (the divinity in) the human in its towering and bewildering complexity (obscurity from recognition). It embraces the (ultimate necessity) of knowledge in the (extrasensory) sense that we are knowing animals whose salvation – - consist (not simply) in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our own ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us describe the world and provide context for our (understanding of) existence. For that reason, (the Hedgehog) eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest. Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while (the Hedgehog is compelled to) assert that the question has (absolute) bearing on how life is lived and what existence means. (The Hedgehog) can assert on its own terms, and as part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert.” I find it to be of tantalizingly interest that almost the entire paragraph can be quoted with so little insertion.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 January 28, 2013 at 9:50 pm
For the record I repost the above comment revised.
I take Berlin’s essay, its heuristic theme to be a parable, setting forth Tolstoy as the archetype standard of the human condition – the standard for making judgments about human existence. Thus, Tolstoy can be taken as the standard interpretation of the idiom the Hedgehog and the Fox with his attitude to history: “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commands derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life.”
By way of clarity another excerpt from Berlin’s essay: “Tolstoy (in his Fox period) perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round (all to the purpose of shaping his world to his ends), and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled.” But in his philosophy and theology (of hiis Hedgehog period), “he believed only one vast, unitary whole,” which he finally formulated as “a simple Christian ethic (derived above all from the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount) divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic …., the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, the very simple standard: say, what peasants (the dispossed) like or dislike, or what the gospels (above all the Sermon on the Mount) declare to be good,” two standards that were often the same for Tolstoy.”
By Tolstoy’s definition, Humanism can only be the Fox, it can identify no one vast unitary whole in which one could believe. Which suggests a Tolstoy paraphrase of the 4th paragraph of the post: (The Hedgehog) “is an affirmation of (the divinity in) the human in its towering and bewildering complexity (yet its obscurity from recognition). It embraces the necessity of (extrasensory Ultimate) knowledge in the sense that we are knowing animals whose salvation – - consist (not simply) in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our own ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us describe the world and provide context for our (understanding of) existence. For that reason, (the Hedgehog) eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest. Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while (the Hedgehog is compelled to) assert that the question has (absolute) bearing on how life is lived and what existence means. (The Hedgehog) can assert on its own terms, and as part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert.” I find it to be of tantalizing interest that the paragraph can be quoted with so little insertion.
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 14, 2012 at 2:58 pm
The last statement of the essay: “In short, it is an attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason – for the light it shines on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.” To the contary Berlin’s parable, picturing Tolstoy as the arch-type for understanding the human condition, necessarily implies that Tolstoy’s attitude to history is the standard, the fate of all mankind, universal: “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life;” over against the attitude to history which “consist in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our ends”.
It is in a totally literal sense that Tolstoy’s perception of the human condition informs Berlin’s interpretation of the Hedgehog and the Fox: “But taken figuratively the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark the deepest difference which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For their exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing principal in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principal; these last lead lives, preform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Reply
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 16, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Comment continued.
“The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality – - “, but just here a huge ambiguity creeps in, one which Berlin seems to recognize: “Of course like all simple classifications of this type. the dichotony becomes, if not pressed, scholast, and ultimately absurd.” Indeed Tolstoy does make “a classification of this type” absurd. Again with his “sanity and penetration scarcely ever equaled” he goes to great length to avoid this aparent ambguity. Tolstoy tells us in his unmistakable detail that he was for the greater part of his life a personified Fox, which reflects his “natural” personality. It was only at the point of a distinct revelation, when he came to the conviction that the teachings of Jesus as contained in the Sermon on the Mount were intended to be taken literally, that he became a Hedgehog: “It is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life”. From this point on Tolstoy was the personified Hedgehog. The point here is the fact that all humans begin their lives as the Fox. Only and if, one comes to a life changing experience of some form of Ultimate Reality, can one unambiguously be designated a Hedgehog. The light which Tolstoy casts on the topic, in any sense as “on a single man of genius”, is the utterly unique fact that he stands as perhaps the single man, of any intelectual level, to personify the fullest extension in every aspect of the meaning of the human condition. Thus the light that Tolstoy casts on the topic is unmistakably “the fate of all mankind”.
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 Ed Jones 
 December 28, 2012 at 10:21 pm
Further comments by way of adding some clarity to my particular take on Berlin’s essay.
 Berlin’s treatment of Tolstoy in terms of the Hedgehog or the Fox was based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), written during his period as the Fox, in which he only expressed only disillusions over his period as the Fox. Before his dramatic conversion to his period as the Hedgehog, which began with his spiritual crisis at the end of the 1870’s. “The message of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) was that the teaching of Jesus was to be taken literally. The final chapter of the novel was a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount in which the protagonist pictured to himself ‘what this world might be like if people were taught to obey those commandments’. In that realization, the excitement and the ecstasy that came over him convinced him that ‘it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments, that in this lies the sole meaning of life.’ In that realization, it was as though, after long pining and suffering, he had suddenly found peace and liberation.” (Jaroslav Pelikan)
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 Ed Jones 
 December 17, 2012 at 11:06 am
In his letter to Mohandas Gandhi: “The whole of Christianity, so brilliant on the surface, grew up on an obvious, strange, sometimes conscious but for the most part unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction (of the authentic teachings of Jesus). For 19 centuries Christian mankind has lived this way . . . There is such an obvious contradiction that sooner or later, probably very soon, it will be exposed and will put an end either to the acceptance of the Christian religoion which is necessary to maintain power, or to the existence of an army and any violence supported by it, which is no less necessary to maintain power.”
Only since the 80′s have our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a clear conviction stated in the words of Schubert Ogden; “We now know that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus”. Thus not sources for knowledge of Jesus. This is a historical judgment from within the Guild of NT Studies.
 Then we have Eric Zuesse’s probe: “The religion of the New Testament actually has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus.” This is a scientific judgment from outside.
 Signnificiently, no evidence was raised to question the Guild’s conviction that we have a NT source which contains the original and originating witness to Jesus, namely the Sermon on the Mount.
 All to say Tolstoy stands as the unique standard for all judgments related to human existence.
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 Ed Jones 
 December 21, 2012 at 4:48 pm
I seem to have ended what was to have been an extended discussion.
 Tolstoy does so absolutly set the one identity over against the other beyond discussion. Like Athiest v/s Thiest.
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How Sandy Hook is Obama’s Fault
by rjosephhoffmann

“And it’s not surprising–then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them….” (Barack Obama, 2007)

It almost cost him the election, that comment. The rest of the damage issued from the Black Theology of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who goddamned America for, among other things, its love of guns and violence against people who are different.
Four years later, they–we–are still clinging. Not that I cling to either. But I think that all of us who live in a country that is famous for such lunacy deserve a share of the blame.
I am only a little interested in the Why? question. Maybe it is because the Why question is always answered with the sub-analytical question-begging that television journalists call analysis (“Do you think America is on the wrong track or the right track?”): America’s Love-affair with guns. The political power of the NRA, who have half the Senate and two-thirds of congressmen in their blood-stained camouflage pockets. Or the Second Amendment–you know, the one that the SCOTUS says gives every man and woman the right to carry a semi-automatic weapon for squirrel hunting. Come to think of it, if corporations are people, my friend, why don’t they have a Bushmaster?
The simple fact is, Obama had it just right. He spoke the truth that dare not be spoken. A lot of Americans see America disappearing into a gray cloud of moral relativism and negotiable truths. It leaves them stranded and sightless. Homosexuality used to be weird and funny, and if you called someone a queer they cried. Now they smile, flash their wedding ring at you and drive off with their partner in a Bugatti. Abortion was something God-fearing Christians did not do, not even if fourteen year-old Tiffany’s pregnancy was eighteen year-old Bubba’s fault. Now their pastors and (even a few priests) say that the position of their Church is evolving, or has totally changed. A sin has become a right. A Christian will know that people who talk this way aren’t Christian because God can’t change his mind. He wrote a book. He hasn’t written another one. And we wrote a Constitution. Now some people are trying to change that too, and we can’t let them.
America is not a theocracy, but it often behaves like one, and plenty of Americans would have no trouble saying that the law of God (as they construe it) is higher than the law of the land. America for them is only “good” when its representatives and judges and president make decisions that support their biblical view of reality. In that view, men and women are more separate than equal. God established difference as a basis for doing certain jobs, playing certain roles. Things have only been screwed up since we began ignoring those “natural” differences and letting women do what (real) men are naturally meant to do, like being breadwinners, wife-tamers, and heads of the household. Even many plaid-jacketed divorced AK-45-toting women survivalists believe this doctrine. It is an act of faith that America is in rebellion against the law of God.
One of the proofs of this is Barack Obama’s recent election. Who elected him? That’s right, No one. Black people, scroungers, welfare mothers. University-educated people. So-called “scientists” who have never done an honest days work, communists and atheists and anybody else who hates America. All your spicks in California or Florida or wherever. Christ, probably even your Indians and god-knows-what-else.
For people who think this way, the election of a well-educated black lawyer who thinks the world is about fourteen billion years old is the apocalypse. No act of violence is too violent when you think that the enemy is in the White House, lighting cigars with the Constitution, palling around with terrorists and Chinese tycoons who want to buy Fort Knox, and celebrating the rites of his native religion in a secret mosque behind the Oval Office. It is a perfect storm brewed from irrational fear and an insanely available stage on which to vent your frustration and rage for what’s being taken away. And if the guys in beaver fur are the touts in this scenario, they are being stage managed by guys who use deoderant, men like Donald Trump, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. They are the real muses behind the weakminded men who caused Sandy Hook to happen
Listen to the rhetoric: “What’s being taken away.” The Endangered Man–Homo periclitatur–who thinks and acts against society never thinks in terms of rights as something that have been given, or developed, or created, but almost always as something that are being taken away. The unique reference in the Declaration (not the Constitution) to being “endowed” with unalienable rights by a Creator assures them that rights come from above and beyond the courts; courts have no business messing around with what God has given. We call that “liberty,” and liberty means that every individual man is free to do as he chooses as long as no one gets hurt.
The Second Amendment has become an idol in this debate as the symbol of what is left when all these God-given rights are left in the dust. Take away our guns and you take away our ability to defend our liberty. Christ knows, the government can’t defend us anymore. We have to do it ourselves. Just like in 1776.
The low-point in this “discussion” was reached in the election of 2008 when Sarah “Grizzly” Palin donned her red dress and promised the slavering hunters who had almost given up hope for a messiah that she would sleep with them if they would just vote for her and her “rogue” companion. Her rogue companion, a useless non-hero from the VietNam war, was only a little less ardent in his defense of guns. And he sits in a body where the legislators of the most powerful country on earth are given report cards by a weapons-advocacy lobby.
In the dogmatic illiteracy of 2012 America, the nation was founded not by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin–who may have owned guns but probably didn’t use them much–but by Davy Crockett and Wyatt Earp. They were all good Christians. They didn’t get divorced or kill babies. Maybe they fooled around a little because God can forgive that, and besides, men are weak in that department. It says so in scripture. These “heroes” didn’t know much science because they knew what really mattered was getting on, getting by, keeping government small, and staying out of trouble with the law. If you did get in trouble with the law, well that’s okay too. Remember what I said about being weak: God needs his sinners, as long as they are committing the right sins.
A gun, after all, is an axiom. A bullet can decide right or wrong when a court can’t, and it takes a good bullet to kill someone who uses one for evil. What went wrong at Sandy Hook? The principal wasn’t gun-smart.
 p>
It astonishes the world outside America that this childish and insipid view of history and human nature carries so much weight. It can win elections, though it didn’t win this one, and that in itself is a provocation to further violence.
But it should astonish everyone inside America that our schools don’t teach real stuff, that state educational commissions cower before the propect of teaching that religions come in different shapes, sizes and valences, and have been a source of moral harm as well as of good; that they fail to teach that evolution is not a mere theory but the best explanation we have of how we became the creatures we are. The home-schooling “revolution” that began a generation ago has been all about protecting students from the truth of science and the beauty of literature, abetted by school boards–an entrenched nineteenth century abomination–who think parents know best, and that the most important thing you can learn in school are family values.
The source of our trouble is not that Americans are stupid, though many are, but that we have permitted stupidity and fear to become the dominant force in the national psyche. We are a Janus of country, one face a road-weary, government hating, truck-driving cowboy, the other a Nobel Laureate from MIT. For every one of us who tittered at Tina Fey’s send up of Sarah Palin in 2008, there was a hunter in Arkansas, cleaning his gun, ready to shoot the TV screen in disgust that a woman who spoke God’s truth was being ridiculed for not reading books and newspapers.
And there might have been a mother in Newtown, Connecticut who said to her twelve year-old son, Adam, “You see these guns: That’s all we’ve got when they come for us.”
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Published: December 19, 2012
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6 Responses to “How Sandy Hook is Obama’s Fault”

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 Dwight Jones 
 December 19, 2012 at 11:18 pm
All very fair points – one must wonder if there will ever be an inflection point around weapons within humanity.
Will they will ever be condemned for what they are – barbaric vestiges of an admittedly infant species, that could not read or write just 600 years ago, and fought then with bows and arrows? We do move on?
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 Pseudonym 
 December 20, 2012 at 12:15 am
This is just a suggestion, but I think that we should stop referring to the NRA as “the gun lobby”. We should call it what it is: the gun manufacturer lobby. The NRA has, throughout its history, predictably and consistently lobbied against the interests of responsible gun owners if it would conflict with the interests of gun manufacturers. They consistently and predictably lie about candidates, bills and policies if it furthers the goal of increasing gun sales. (Obama is going to take your guns away, so buy up big now!)
I would like to think that hunters, farmers, security guards, sporting shooters and everyone else who has a good reason to have a firearm should ditch the NRA and form a new group whose goal is to promote responsible gun ownership and use, keep guns with no legitimate civilian use out of the commuity, and keep all guns out of the hands of people who really shouldn’t have them. I don’t own any guns, but that’s an organisation that I could respect.
Hey, a guy can dream.
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 stevenbollinger 
 December 20, 2012 at 12:41 pm
In the UK security guards don’t usually carry firearms. Even the police aren’t strapped most of the time. They can strike terror into the heart of almost any suspicious character merely by shouting “Oy!” In extreme cases they may have to resort to a head-butt. Joseph lives over there and can attest to all this. I know it from TV and movies. Even Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, who battled the most very dangerous fiends in England, always kept their revolvers locked away in desk drawers until very late in the movie.
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Speaking Foolishly about God and Tragedy says:
 December 20, 2012 at 9:56 am
[...] also posts by Carson T. Clark, Jim Burklo, Joe Hoffmann, Frankie Schaffer, David Henson, Joel Watts, Amanda Mac, Tom Verenna, Bob Patterson, Libby Anne, [...]
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 theologyarchaeology 
 December 21, 2012 at 3:46 pm
When it comes to science, archaeology and religion people are demanding that objectivity be at the forefront of one’s work yet when it comes to things like gun ownership, smoking,and other hot topic issues that requirement/demand, is thrown out the window for biased commentary pushing a pet agenda.
Your inclusion of Jefferson, Franklin and Palin as good Christians shows that you do not apply God’s standards to their lives. Then you comment ‘protecting them from the truth of science’ shows that you do side with secularists not God. Homeschooling was not an attempt to avoid such things but to have their children educated in the truth and secular science does not contain much of that. In fact, public schools lack a lot of the truth as well and we should not subject our children to such bad content.
I am not one to advocate objectivity but I do support honesty yet your article contained little of that trait though it was quite manipulative. Since gun ownership doe snot negatively impact society like murder does, no one should force their anti-gun beliefs on others. If you do not want to own a gun then don’t but you haven no right to say that your neighbor is not allowed to own one.
If you do not want to smoke, then don’t but you have no right to tell your neighbor that he can’t smoke outside of your property. The problem with America is not the stupidity that prevails but that those stupid enough to think that they get to dictate to others what they can or cannot do.
You have freedom to not choose to own a gun or smoke thus you must allow that same freedom to be used by others to choose to smoke or own a gun. Your anti-gun stance is just attacking a strawman and avoids the real issue.
School shootings and other crimes do not come from owning a gun, it comes from choosing to reject Jesus and salvation and following evil. They come from wanting to do sin not what Jesus wants. if you want to make an impact on violence, then target the source not the symptom
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 steph 
 December 22, 2012 at 9:35 pm
The source is the group of people like you. Good Christians ‘side with secularists’ which is why Palin isn’t one and Jefferson was. Ideas evolve but you are stuck in a past when they used the sword. To shoot a gun you need a gun, and someone with a gun will, pull the trigger, and has pulled the trigger, believing like a ‘good’ Christian – the bullets come from a gun. You are an embarrassment to your nation. If you don’t smoke I hope you discover the ‘other side’ very soon from people exhaling over your fence, unless a gun knocks you off first. It’s what Jesus would want. In defending gun ownership you are defending the deaths of innocent American citizens. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
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Meng Zhi: On Government*
by rjosephhoffmann


Meng Zhi, known to the west as Mencius, was a Chinese philosopher of the fourth century B.C., whose influence on his intellectual tradition is roughly equivalent to the joint influence of St. Paul and Aristotle on Western thought. Better known to English speakers by the Latinization of his name, “Mencius,” Mengzi thought of himself as merely defending the teachings of Confucius against rival philosophical doctrines, especially the “egoism” of Yang Zhu and the universalistic consequentialism of Mozi. However, Mengzi was actually a very original thinker, whose doctrine of the goodness of human nature went far beyond anything Confucius had said. Long after his death, Mengzi’s interpretation of Confucianism became orthodoxy, meaning that generations of Chinese intellectuals literally memorized his work.
On Government
Mencius had an audience with King Hui of Liang. The king said, “Sir, you did not consider a thousand li too far to come You must have some ideas about how to benefit my state.” Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use the word ‘benefit” All I am concerned with are the benevolent and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I benefit my state?’ your officials will say, ‘How can I benefit my family,’ and officers and common people will say, ‘How can I benefit myself.’ Once superiors and inferiors are cornpeting for benefit, the state will be in danger. When the head of a state of ten thousand chariots is murdered, the assassin is invariably a noble with a fief of a thousand chariots, When the head of a fief of a thousand chariots is murdered, the assassin is invariably head of a subfief of a hundred chariots. Those with a thousand out of ten thousand, or a hundred out of a thousand, had quite a bit. But when benefit is put before what is right, they are not satisfied without snatching it all. By contrast there has never been a benevolent person who neglected his parents or a righteous person who put his lord last. Your Majesty perhaps will now also say, ‘All I am concerned with are the benevolent and the right. Why mention ‘benefit?’ ”
After seeing King Xiang of Liang, Mencius to someone, “When I saw him from a distance he did not look like a ruler, and when I got closer, I saw nothing to command respect. But he asked ‘How can the realm be settled?’ I answered, ‘It can be settled through unity.’ ‘Who can unify it?’ he asked. I answered, ‘Someone not fond of killing people.’ ‘Who could give it to him?’ I answered ‘Everyone in the world will give it to him. Your .Majesty knows what rice plants are? If therere is a drought in the seventh and eighth months, the plants wither, but if moisture collects in the sky and forms clouds and rain falls in torrents, plants suddenly revive. This is the way it is; no one can stop the process. In the world today there are no rulers disinclined toward killing. If there were a ruler who did not like to kill people, everyone in the world would crane their necks to catch sight of him. This is really true. The people would flow toward him the way water flows down. No one would be able to repress them.’ ”
King Xuan of Qi asked, “Is it true that King Wen’s park was seventy li square’,” Mencius answered, “That is what the records say.” The King said, “Isn’t that large?” Mencius responded, ‘The people considered it small.” “Why then do the people consider my park large when it is forty li square?” “In the forty square li of King Wen’s park, people could collect firewood and catch birds and rabbits. Since he shared it with the people, isn’t it fitting that they considered it small? When I arrived at the border, I asked about the main rules of the state before daring to enter. I learned that there was a forty-li park within the outskirts of the capital where killing a deer was punished like killing a person. Thus these forty li are a trap in the center of the state. Isn’t it apprpriiate that the people consider it too large?”
After an incident between Zou and Lu, Duke Mu asked, “Thirty-three of my officials died but no common people died. I could punish them, but I could not punish them all. I could refrain from punishing them but they did angrily watch their superiors die without saving them. What would be the best course for me to follow?” Mencius answered, “When the harvest failed, even though your granaries were full, nearly a thousand of your subjects were lost — the old and weak among them dying in the gutters, the able — bodied scatter ing in all directions. Your officials never reported the situation, a case of superiors callously inflicting suffering on their subordinates. Zengzi said, ‘Watch out, watch out! What you do will be done to you.’ This was the first chance the people had to pay them back. You should not resent them. If Your Highness practices benevolent government, the common people will love their superiors and die for those in charge of them.”
King Xuan of Qi asked, “Is it true that Tang banished Jie and King Wu took up arms against Zhou?” Mencius replied, “That is what the records say.” “Then is it permissible for a subject to assassinate his lord?” Mencius said, ”Someone who does violence to the good we call a villain; someone who does violence to the right we call a criminal. A person who is both a villain and a criminal we call a scoundrel I have heard that the scoundrel Zhou was killed, but have not heard that a lord was killed
King Xuan of Qi asked about ministers Mencius said, ”What sort of ministers does Your Majesty mean?” The king said ‘ Are there different kinds of ministers?” “There are. There are noble ministers related to the ruler and ministers of other surnames.” The king said, “I’d like to hear about noble ministers.” Mencius replied, “When the ruler makes a major error, they point it out. If he does not listen to their repeated remonstrations, then they put someone else on the throne.” The king blanched. Mencius continued, “Your Majesty should not be surprised at this. Since you asked me, I had to tell you truthfully.” After the king regained his composure, he asked about unrelated ministers. Mencius said, “When the king makes an error, they point it out. If he does not heed their repeated rernonstrations, they quit their posts.”
Bo Gui said, “I’d like a tax of one part in twenty What do you think?” Mencius said, “Your way is that of the northern tribes. Is one potter enough for a state with ten thousand households?” “No, there would not be enough wares.” The northern tribes do not grow all the five grains, only millet They have no cities or houses, no ritual sacrifices. They do not provide gifts or banquets for feudal lords, and do not have a full array of officials. Therefore, for them, one part in twenty is enough But we live in the central states How could we abolish social roles and do without gentlemen? If a state cannot do without potters, how much less can it do without gentlemen Those who want to make government lighter than it was under Yao and Shun are to some degree barbarians Those who wish to make government heavier than it was under Yao and Shun are to some degree [tyrants like] Jie.”
*from “China Confucius”, http://www.chinakongzi.com/2550/eng/mencius.htm
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Published: December 27, 2012
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2 Responses to “Meng Zhi: On Government*”

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 Ed Jones 
 January 1, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Joe, I see no means of commenting to “Jesus: The Outline”. But I am not computer savvy. Help!
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 steph 
 January 4, 2013 at 4:20 am
Dear Ed, it’s fixed now. The comment box is restored. :-)
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Jesus: The Outline
by rjosephhoffmann


After spending the greater part of my academic life trying to persuade people that the New Testament is chock full of myths, I’m at the point where it might be useful to say what I think isn’t one.
The Bultmann era was edged in the hypocrisy of subverting and redesigning myth to save the gospel. It was quickly supplanted by the pan-Gnostics who in turn got hijacked by a dozen different modes of discourse theory, and several ill-fated new quests that assured us that the footprints they were tracking were not, as it seemed, going around in a circle. Naturally, no “Jesus” emerged from any of this and understandably the fact that none did greatly encouraged the amateurs to speculate that there was nothing down the hole in the first place.
My semi-sincere New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to be nicer to the mythicists, because their conclusions are not their fault. After all, they are simply piecing together the stammering indecision, deconstruction, conspiracy-theories, and half-baked analogies of a hundred years of uncongealed scholarship. When a senior professor of New Testament studies at Harvard touts a shred of gnostic papyrus as showing that Jesus may have been married without so much as a nod to the weird provenance of the scrap, who can blame amateurs for coming to less absurd conclusions?
The problem with all of this isn’t that we don’t have ingredients for assessing the “Jesus Puzzle.” It’s that too many adventurous souls, using what we have, are calling their work a cake when it isn’t even a recipe.
I am going out on a limb, this last day of 2012, unprotected by footnotes, to offer a few paragraphs on what I think the gospels tell us that we can be relatively sure is “true.” I have been persuaded by a few friends to lay all of this out in a book at the end of this year, so I will. With any luck, it will be shorter and easier to read than any of the books I have read on the subject in the last two decades. Think of this as a preview; I’ll save persuasion, argument and evidence for later.
Jesus of Nazareth was born toward the beginning of the common era to a peasant woman named Miriam. He was from the region known as the Galilee (ha-Galel: Josh. 20.7), and according to an early but dubious tradition from “Nazareth.” But the tradition soon lost track of the ascription and seems to have used a place name for an imperfectly understood epithet based on the common Hebrew word נֵ֫צֶר or branch. No one knows what Jesus is supposed to have been a branch of, but the two likeliest prospects are of the sect associated with John the Baptist or the sect associated with Judas of Galilee.
The true identity of his father is unknown, and both the Joseph-tradition and the ben-Panthera (Jewish polemical) tradition are flimsy attempts, respectively, to provide cover and to attack the shadowy circumstances of his origin. Later elaborations of this tendency will be found in the efforts to insist on the virginity of Mary and an appeal to prophetic tradition.
By far, in making sense of the synoptic gospels, the likeliest scenario is that Jesus was taken by his mother to Jerusalem as a boy, a tradition preserved in the unlikely and legendary story of the journey to Jerusalem in Luke 2.42-51. While in no sense “liberal,” Jerusalem was populous and rustic scandals could be glossed over. As a teenager, he probably found work in the building projects associated with the reign of the Herodians. He listened to apocalyptic preaching and became an ardent opponent of the Roman occupation of Palestine.
He commenced his own preaching career in Jerusalem and retreated to the Galilee during the sporadic but increasingly intense crackdowns on tax revolts and anti-government agitation that extended from Judas the Galilean to Theudas. (6 CE-46CE) where he began to find followers and build a small movement.
That this movement was a crashing failure in the outposts of the province is hardly surprising, since the iron fist of Rome affected city-dwellers in ways hardly imagineable outside Jerusalem. In his “home town,” the message of Jesus was largely irrelevant.
In specific ways, the political message of Jesus seems identical to the person described by Josephus (Ant. 18.1) as Judas of Galilee, who opposed the tax structure imposed on the Jews following the census of Quirinius mentioned by both Luke and Josephus. The geographical coordinates of Jesus and Judas coincide in important and suggestive ways.
According to the synoptic gospels, the “journey” of Jesus to Jerusalem was a one-off event. According to the Fourth gospel, Jesus moved between the Galilee and Jerusalem, a more likely pattern for someone suspected of political agitation and holding reformist views about religion. The gospel writers, beginning with Mark, have substituted the conceit of a royal Davidic procession for the real scurrying between the villages of the Gaililee and the parlous environment of Jerusalem that seems to have characterized Jesus’ career. The journey saga, Mark’s invention, and the passion sequence following it are highly ritualized and the former is almost without historical merit, a fact inadvertently relayed even by Mark in his inability to explain the “crowds” waiting for Jesus on his arrival.
On one of his preaching ventures, accompanied by the followers who had come to believe he was a deliverer (perhaps believing it himself) Jesus was arrested, accused of fomenting rebellion against Roman rule, and (possibly) with the capitulation of Jewish leaders, executed.
Like Judas and “Theudas” (whose tradition is botched in the New Testament sources) Jesus used apocalyptic utterances and threats as political cover. The early Christians would do the same thing in the Book of Revelation, probably written before the end of the first century. The securest parts of the Jesus-tradition therefore are the apocalyptic sections of the gospels such as Mark 13, though these have been repeatedly altered to conform to the changing expectations and beliefs of the community Jesus left behind.
The “displaced tradition” of Jesus’ attack on the temple cult in John 2 (which violates the Markan chronology, if it knows it) comes closest to giving us an accurate picture of how Jesus was remembered by the earliest community, as a prophet, trouble-maker, and critic of the religious regime of the Pharisees and priests.
That community was unalterably changed by two events: the destruction of the Temple, which eviscerated apocalyptic of its historical power, and the preaching of Paul, which deprived Jesus of his historical context and turned him into a mixed-messianic figure. To the extent that Jesus used the apocalytic genre, he used it as a ritual curse and not as a prophecy of messianic return or redemption.
In Jerusalem, Jesus was remembered as a charismatic outlaw. A tradition, such as the Judas [Iscariot]-tradition, while partly legendary (including the name) is entirely plausible from the standpoint of Roman tactics. It was a snare, or a set-up, that tradition recasts as betrayal. The legal process against Jesus needed witnesses; the self-contradictory gospel insistence that “no one could be found” to testify against him suggests that the Romans conducted his trial with dispatch. It would have been handled by a magistrate and not by the governor of the province.
The Jewish trials, completely legendary, are based on the need to establish Jesus’ messianic credentials and (later) to point a finger away from the Roman process.
As to his teaching, certain elements seem secure. Rather than a raw political apocalypticism such as we find in the preaching of John the Baptist, known to be an enemy of the Herodians, Jesus seems to be a typical purist member of “the fourth sect,” the religious group Josephus associates with the final troubles leading to the wars of 66-70. The tradition of the destruction of Jerusalem (forecast in the crucifixion scene) may be a metaphorical way of associating Jesus with these troubles in an honorary way, though the more direct evidence comes in stray passages such as Mark 13.2 and its rationalizations. These “threats” are primarily “cosmopolitan” issues that were more intense in Jerusalem than the provinces, making a “Galilean” provenance for Jesus, or his inexperience (a one week acquaintance!) of the city, implausible.
This model unfortunately requires us to leave to one side features of Jesus’ message that are often regarded as essential–especially the injunction to “love” one’s enemies. Jesus does not display any of these characteristics in his remembered controversies with members of other sects, so there is no reason to suppose he would have encouraged others to display them to total strangers. In this respect, the controversy stories, though not in every detail, are the best indicators of what the “personality” of Jesus may have been like.
By the same token, certain elements of his teaching–the critical agenda that flows from a general distaste for ritual, the irrelevance of social caste, suspicion of priestcraft and law, the meaning of sin and the “power” of God–are fairly represented.
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Published: December 29, 2012
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9 Responses to “Jesus: The Outline”

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 Dwight Jones 
 December 29, 2012 at 9:52 pm
A lesson not just on Christ, but on scholarship. Should be interesting.
OTOH, I’d like to hear you riff on Times’ 10 Top Religions Stories of the year… ;-) These guys are eating your grass..!
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-news-lists/slide/are-you-there-god-its-me-pat-robertson/
Reply
 
 steph 
 December 29, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Excellent, I agree. Quite simple. The book won’t take too long and it shouldn’t. By the next full moon?
Reply
 
 BarabbasFreed 
 January 4, 2013 at 12:13 pm
As you know, developing a narrative, writing the story as it probably was, requires judgements and decisions. I find it difficult to accept judgments that say things like the apocalyptic is most likely authentic but we can’t take the teaching episodes as such. Others can equally argue that story vignettes (such as the prodigal son, the parable of the sower, etc.), are memorable and quite likely to quickly become part of an relatively stable and accurate oral history. One discredits these stories whilst the other credits them.
I can’t help but remember the adage that we all look down the well and see our own faces. I would be more impressed with someone who looked down the well and came up with a face that we wouldn’t have expected them to. Isn’t the face you see what you expect to see?
I say this as I have worked cross-culturally and I have come to realise that the personality of Jesus is different from what I (as a kiwi) could have ever envisaged, as he thinks and acts in a milieu that is remarkably foreign to mine. But I don’t think the actions that you speak of match up with the apocalyptic in the manner that you seem to infer. Socio-rhetorical criticism is beginning to explore this. I would recommend caution on talking about his personality out of cultural context
Reply
 
 Matthew 
 January 4, 2013 at 4:34 pm
I would love to see Dr. Hoffmann address the concepts of myths and legends in his new book if he doesn’t mind. I have seen Evangelicals appeal to the late classicist A.N. Sherwin-White in their attempts to prove that the gospels are myth-free and practically devoid of any legends. Further, what I have seen from the likes of radical scholars (Bob Price and Dick Carrier) in response is very unimpressive. Dr. Hoffmann writes that he has spent much of his academic life “trying to persuade people that the New Testament is chock full of myths”. That’s good but I am not sure what scholars mean by “myths” or “legends”. Is there a technical definition for “myth” that is agreed upon by the majority of anthropologists, classicists, historians, and other scholars? How about “legend”?
Other than this, I look forward to reading Dr. Hoffmann’s book! I encourage him to keep up the good work!
Matthew
Reply
 
 Ed Jones 
 January 4, 2013 at 9:50 pm
Joe: On the hopeful note set by your response to my comment: A viable solution to the “Jesus Puzzle”, plus your comment elsewhere: “I can see why Betz thinks as he does about the Sermon on the Mount”, I presume to offer the following which I feel is basic to a meaningful understanding of why we know so little about the real Jesus.
 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 basic fact of the history of religions, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions, thus creating the “Jesus Puzzle”. During this period there were two distinctly different movements standing in deepest adversarial relationship. The first the Jerusalem Jesus Movement from which is derived our primary source containing this apostolic witness. This was soon followed by a Hellenists Christ myth movement introducing the notions of messiah and salvific effects of Jesus’ death. Paul, first as persecutor, then converting to this group, adopted its notions, which became the source of his Christ of faith myth (the arch enemy of the Jesus movement). In taking his kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, it became Gentile Christianity in Antioch in 70 CE, as known above all from the writings of the NT, the scriptural source for orthodox Christianity. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, mistakenly to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a 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 humanities abiding difficulty with its ultimate issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s fateful propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which limit vision to sense perceived reality,
 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, marking 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, taking 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 (reading from a historical perspective over against authorial intent) 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, to become 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 taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world meeting with ready success, becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, they could 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: On the hopeful note set by your response to my comment: A viable solution to the “Jesus Puzzle”, plus your comment elsewhere: “I can see why Betz thinks as he does about the Sermon on the Mount”, I presume to offer the following which I feel is basic to a meaningful understanding of why we know so little about the real Jesus.
 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 basic fact of the history of religions, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions, thus creating the “Jesus Puzzle”. During this period there were two distinctly different movements standing in deepest adversarial relationship. The first the Jerusalem Jesus Movement from which is derived our primary source containing this apostolic witness. This was soon followed by a Hellenists Christ myth movement introducing the notions of messiah and salvific effects of Jesus’ death. Paul, first as persecutor, then converting to this group, adopted its notions, which became the source of his Christ of faith myth (the arch enemy of the Jesus movement). In taking his kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, it became Gentile Christianity in Antioch in 70 CE, as known above all from the writings of the NT, the scriptural source for orthodox Christianity. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, mistakenly to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a 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 humanities abiding difficulty with its ultimate issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s fateful propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which limit vision to sense perceived reality,
 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, marking 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, taking 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 (reading from a historical perspective over against authorial intent) 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, to become 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 taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world meeting with ready success, becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, they could 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 6, 2013 at 12:46 pm
Apologies for the repetition. I have no explanation. With no REPLY it is all mute in any case.
Reply
 
 
 Rocky Morrison 
 January 4, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Bultmann, by the way, live in Berlin all through World War Two.
He must have been serving a purpose.
Reply
 
 peadarmaccionaoith 
 January 5, 2013 at 8:16 am
You suggest that the gospels use Nazara/Nazaret/Nazareth “as a place name for an imperfectly understood epithet based on the common Hebrew word or branch”.
The place does seem to have been verbally based on the epithet (Nazoraios, Nazarenos); however, the origin (and meaning) of the latter is unclear.
Do you make this philological connection with ‘netser’ via Isaiah 11.1? (I’ve also seen Zechariah 6.12 used, but not explained.) And isn’t a correlation in the Greek with an ‘imperfectly understood’ ‘naziraion’ (LXX Judges 13:7) somewhat stronger than any with netser?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann 
 January 5, 2013 at 8:38 pm
I am not getting into the possibilities in this space, much as I’d like to, as it forms part of a larger treatment in the book. Sorry. But as a general comment: You can start with Matthew’s attempt to reconcile the two theories in Mt 2.23.
και ελθων κατωκησεν εις πολιν λεγομενην
 ναζαρετ οπως πληρωθη το ρηθεν δια των
 προφητων οτι ναζωραιος κληθησεται (Westcott & Hort edi.)
The problem is that the word play doesn’t really mean anything in Greek and Matthew may or may not be playing with LXX parallels. But why would Matthew want to examine puns on nazir and nasir when he doesn’t actually quote from a verse that uses either? Goulder (1974) makes the same point. There is an off chance that Matthew is responding to a term used derisively of Jesus, ממזר , mamzer, which means bastard. Matthew is certainly aware of such polemic on the Jewish side, but there are clear problems with seeing mamzer and nazir as homonyms. The older view–that Matthew is trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that Jesus was from a cow town in the boondocks is increasingly untenable, and recall that only Matthew sees the location as problematical (cf. Luke 2.4) and in need of explanation. There is a slim advantage in thinking that Matthew was denying the strict use of the word נזיר of Jesus since his followers, if they were ever vow-takers, increasingly strayed from that path. More to the point, the Nazareth “problem” has no bearing on the historicity question since its primary location is in the two birth stories, the details of which are in conflict, and which are widely agreed to be later legendary additions anyway. In one way or another, the word Nazarene probably has something to do with geneaology or lineage, or with legitimacy. Luke 24.5 says that Tertullus uses the term Nazarenes to mean Christians, but the later history is sketchy and eventually both the term Nazarenes, as in Hebrew notzrim is pejorative. The Roman practice (cf. Julian) was to refer to the cult as Galileans, not Nazarenes.
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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”

.
 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.
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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…
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply

 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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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
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Tags: Center for Inquiry : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
5 Responses to “Paul Kurtz: December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012”

.
 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!
Reply
 
 
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.
Reply

 steph 
 October 11, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Sure… The post was reposted without any alterations. I’ve eliminated the provocative error with pleasure. :-)
Reply

 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.
Reply

 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”

.
 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

 Reblogged from The New Oxonian:

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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.
Read more… 2,292 more words

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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”

.
 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.
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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!
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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…
Reply
 
 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.
Reply
 
 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
Reply

 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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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
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Tags: Center for Inquiry : humanism : Paul Kurtz : R. Joseph Hoffmann : secular humanism ..
5 Responses to “Paul Kurtz: December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012”

.
 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!
Reply
 
 
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.’
Reply
 

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Away Herrick, Shakespeare I’m Not Donne!
by rjosephhoffmann

Sonnet 18
(To My Mistress Thirty Years On)
Your ass is a couplet
Without any rhyme.
I’d make it a sonnet
But haven’t the time.
 
Your tits in their realm
Are as Scylla to Charybdis:
To come in between them
Requires preparedness.
 
I’d sing of things other–
E.g.,  your white thighs–
If only my mother
Hadn’t said Don’t tell lies.
 
In short this refrain
Is all about beauty;
Your brain is a drain
And you don’t have the booty.
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Published: November 23, 2012
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One Response to “Away Herrick, Shakespeare I’m Not Donne!”

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 sailor1031 
 November 29, 2012 at 9:14 am
Why am I not surprised? This is, after all, the age of the churl.
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The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953): A Prelude to The Humanist Forum
by rjosephhoffmann

The Humanist Forum is a new initiative devoted to the belief that humanism in the twentieth century has suffered insult and injury from simplification, special pleading, and Philistinism.
Ripped from the pages of classical letters and philosophy as though its origin and development were merely incidental,   humanism became variously and fashionably associated with naturalism, secularism, and more recently new atheism as a “reputable” synonym for ideas the humanists of history could not have imagined and almost certainly would have found repugnant.
This evolution has something to do with what I have called “movement humanism”–the agendas of organizations that grew up in the shadowy antithesis of democratic socialism and fascism and their aftermath between 1932 and 1950.  In the main, these organizations have failed, both politically and culturally, and today they attract an increasingly strident cadre of religion-haters with little sense of “real” history and even less understanding of the important role humanism must play as a critic not only of religious fundamentalism–the fascism of the spirit– but scientific reductivism–the fascism of the mind.
Humanism is not a quantifiable essence, a political position, a lifestance, or a “rejection” of supernaturalism.  It is an affirmation of the human in its towering and bewildering complexity.  It embraces the desirability of knowledge in the concrete sense: that we are knowing animals whose salvation seems to consist in knowing more about the world and shaping the world to our own  ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us to describe the world and provide context for our existence.   For that reason, humanism eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest.  Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while humanism may reasonably assert that the question has no bearing on how life is lived or what existence “means.”  Humanism can assert on its own terms, and as a part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert..
In 1953, Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), penned an essay entitled the Hedgehog and the Fox.  It is the clearest statement of Berlin’s belief that the “human sciences” (including philosophy) study the world that human beings create for themselves and inhabit, while the natural sciences study the physical world of nature. Why should this make a difference to the way they are studied? One answer is that the two worlds are fundamentally different in themselves. But this seems under-theorized. Berlin preferred the argument that the human and natural worlds must be studied differently because of the relationship between the observer or thinker and the object of study. We study nature from without, culture from within.
His essay is offered here to provoke discussion, but also as a starting point for an important initiative to return humanism to its rightful place as an entrepot between science and the humanities, which recognizes not only their role as separate expressions of the human imagination, but their commitment to self-understanding and self-criticism.
The Hedgehog and the Fox (excerpt) Sir Isaiah Berlin Simon & Schuster, New York, 1953.
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents Pushkin-an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century-as a being similar to Dostoevsky who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius. Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned by these gigantic figures-at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of the other Russian writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogol’, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads-or, at any rate, has lead-to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer. Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?
The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost than any other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any normal sense; his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more articulately and with greater force and sanity and articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox or a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question, since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing.
No one can complain that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: his views on this subject permeate all this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings-diaries, recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and public correspondents. But this conflict between what he was and what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.
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Published: November 30, 2012
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13 Responses to “The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953): A Prelude to The Humanist Forum”

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 Ken Dunn 
 November 30, 2012 at 9:05 am
Thank you for, as ever, well reasoned and insightful commentary. I, too, bemoan the bludgeon simple mindedness of New Atheism, but most people, for most of their lives, live them unexamined. An unexamined embrace of New Atheism may simply substitute, for many, as a belief system (an accusation from many a religionist who mistakenly think the truth of such an allegation strengthens his or her claim to Truth).
Academics, “thought leaders,” and the simply inquisitive (that’d include yours truly) should know the truth and complexities of arguments for and against their positions. Unfortunately many “atheists” I know understand their “belief outlook” little more than the “Christians” who simply herd themselves to socially compulsory (hereabouts) weekly services.
I best like well informed, thoughtful compatriots who appreciate the social and historical tapestry of our religions, realizing that when all the layers are peeled away, religion was only layers anyway (no delicious divine core of Truth – sorry).
In the real world i live in, I’ll prefer mindless atheism over mindless (fill in locally dominant religion) any time. New Atheists are smug (occasionally insufferable), but the don’t commit the atrocities we see too often from the mindless faithful.
Reply

 davidjohnmills 
 December 2, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Atheism, in my opinion, isn’t, or isn’t very often anything like mindless, or indeed clinical and unfeeling, though it is often caricatured as such by those who don’t like straight, brave thinking. :)
Of course, an atheist can be a mindless person, but I think the percentage in this pigeon hole is a bit lower than for religion, which seems to me, no offense to any of the faithful reading, to involve the very essence of convenient thinking.
As for Humanists, or even humanists, they’re a nice bunch, though some seem a tad too keen for my liking to retain some of the trappings of religion.
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 stevenbollinger 
 December 1, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Does Berlin’s distinction between hedgehog and fox add anything to the already well-known distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian? And how exactly does Berlin’s essay launch this Humanist Forum, besides exhibiting, in a decidedly non-New-Atheistic way, a great interest in and respect for the thinking of Tolstoy even though he happened at a rather late date not to have been an atheist?
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 steph 
 December 2, 2012 at 3:41 am
Plato located universals in a realm that was separate from the world; Aristotle located them in the world itself. Archilochus the Greek poet used an analogy of a fox and a hedgehog to draw a dichotomy between those who know one big thing and those who know many things. Erasmus records it, but with a cat. Berlin takes it further. He has adapted the visual analysis and applied a possible dichotomy between the human sciences and the natural sciences, and then locates our greatest human writers and thinkers within one or another, and these thinkers are interesting for own discussions. Berlin’s acutely incisive Tolstoy analysis demonstrates a possible flaw in the simplicity of the analogy in its application and compacity cope with the complexities of human thinking. It is an example I think, of conflicts of Tolstoy’s own critical spirit as well as its brilliance and demonstrates the complexity of human ideas, clashing and blending with emotion and even the impact of the process of evolution of the emerging sciences on his struggle. Perhaps.
Joseph Hoffmann has introduced the idea as an analogy to demonstrate the difference between historical humanism versus it’s modern hijackers and explained: Humanism is not simply the reduction of things to their natural explanation, it is also the acknowledgement that what we accept as natural always exceeds the human. Berlin’s essay is his clearest statement of Berlin’s essay belief that the “human sciences” (including philosophy) study the world that human beings create for themselves and inhabit, while the natural sciences study the physical world of nature. Why should this make a difference to the way they are studied? One answer is that the two worlds are fundamentally different in themselves. But this seems under-theorized. Berlin preferred the argument that the human and natural worlds must be studied differently because of the relationship between the observer or thinker and the object of study. We study nature from without, culture from within.
Berlin’s essay, the inspiration, is offered here to provoke discussion, but also as a starting point for an important initiative to reclaim humanism for what it is: an entrepot between science and the humanities, which recognizes not only their role as separate expressions of the human imagination, but their commitment to self-understanding and self-criticism. Berlin himself declared he wrote the Fox and the Hedgehog he never meant it to be taken seriously – he wrote it as a kind of intellectual game. I think it was inevitable would become so popular given the fact that his idea is expressed with such clarity, and has been of benefit to and influenced further thinking.
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 PL 
 December 12, 2012 at 11:01 am
I’m not sure if it’s the right place or right post to ask this question, but can anyone tell me the difference between freethinking and secular humanism?
Reply

 steph 
 December 13, 2012 at 4:35 am
Freethought humanism is secular humanism. “Movement humanism” is a term identifying modern organised groups and associations described as rationalist, irreligious, atheistic, “bright”, secular, and freethinking. They are committed to a view that human morality and ethics are based on an atheistic or naturalistic world view. I don’t think these groups and associations bear much resemblance to the atheism and freethought societies of the nineteenth century.
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 13, 2012 at 11:06 pm
I take Berlin’s essay, its heuristic theme, to be a parable (indirect language, meaning by implication) to set forth Tolstoy as the archetype standard of the human condition – the standard for making judgments about the human condition. Thus, Tolstoy’s interpretation of the idiom the Hedgehog and the Fox must be taken as the standard, as well as his attitude to history. I.e. “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commands derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life.”
By way of clarity another excerpt from Berlin’s essay: “Tolstoy (in his Fox period) perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round (all to one end, shaping his world to his ends), and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled.” But in his philosophy and theology (of his Hedgehog period), “he believed only one vast, unitary whole,” which he finally formulated as “a simple Christian ethic (derived above all from the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount) divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic …., the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, the very simple standard: say, what peasants (the oppressed) like or dislike, or what the gospels (above all the Sermon on the Mount) declare to be good,” two standards that were often the same for Tolstoy.”
By Tolstoy’s definition, Humanism can only be the Fox, however sympathetic to the “religion”, which suggests a Tolstoy paraphrase of the 4th paragraph of the essay: (The Hedgehog) “is an affirmation of (the divinity in) the human in its towering and bewildering complexity (obscurity from recognition). It embraces the (ultimate necessity) of knowledge in the (extrasensory) sense that we are knowing animals whose salvation – - consist (not simply) in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our own ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us describe the world and provide context for our (understanding of) existence. For that reason, (the Hedgehog) eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest. Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while (the Hedgehog is compelled to) assert that the question has (absolute) bearing on how life is lived and what existence means. (The Hedgehog) can assert on its own terms, and as part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert.” I find it to be of tantalizingly interest that almost the entire paragraph can be quoted with so little insertion.
Reply

 Ed Jones 
 January 28, 2013 at 9:50 pm
For the record I repost the above comment revised.
I take Berlin’s essay, its heuristic theme to be a parable, setting forth Tolstoy as the archetype standard of the human condition – the standard for making judgments about human existence. Thus, Tolstoy can be taken as the standard interpretation of the idiom the Hedgehog and the Fox with his attitude to history: “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commands derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life.”
By way of clarity another excerpt from Berlin’s essay: “Tolstoy (in his Fox period) perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round (all to the purpose of shaping his world to his ends), and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled.” But in his philosophy and theology (of hiis Hedgehog period), “he believed only one vast, unitary whole,” which he finally formulated as “a simple Christian ethic (derived above all from the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount) divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic …., the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, the very simple standard: say, what peasants (the dispossed) like or dislike, or what the gospels (above all the Sermon on the Mount) declare to be good,” two standards that were often the same for Tolstoy.”
By Tolstoy’s definition, Humanism can only be the Fox, it can identify no one vast unitary whole in which one could believe. Which suggests a Tolstoy paraphrase of the 4th paragraph of the post: (The Hedgehog) “is an affirmation of (the divinity in) the human in its towering and bewildering complexity (yet its obscurity from recognition). It embraces the necessity of (extrasensory Ultimate) knowledge in the sense that we are knowing animals whose salvation – - consist (not simply) in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our own ends. But it does not conclude that science and reason are the sufficient ends and definition of humanity. Rather, they are tools and ciphers that help us describe the world and provide context for our (understanding of) existence. For that reason, (the Hedgehog) eschews scientific hegemony over the human spirit when it disallows questions about the meaning and end of life, the question of being and becoming, and the role of art and religion as expressions of the human quest. Bluntly put, science has no capacity to decide the question of God, while (the Hedgehog is compelled to) assert that the question has (absolute) bearing on how life is lived and what existence means. (The Hedgehog) can assert on its own terms, and as part of its own distinctive history, what science has no special competence to assert.” I find it to be of tantalizing interest that the paragraph can be quoted with so little insertion.
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 14, 2012 at 2:58 pm
The last statement of the essay: “In short, it is an attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason – for the light it shines on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.” To the contary Berlin’s parable, picturing Tolstoy as the arch-type for understanding the human condition, necessarily implies that Tolstoy’s attitude to history is the standard, the fate of all mankind, universal: “it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments derived primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life;” over against the attitude to history which “consist in knowing more about the world and shaping it to our ends”.
It is in a totally literal sense that Tolstoy’s perception of the human condition informs Berlin’s interpretation of the Hedgehog and the Fox: “But taken figuratively the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark the deepest difference which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For their exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing principal in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principal; these last lead lives, preform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Reply
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 16, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Comment continued.
“The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality – - “, but just here a huge ambiguity creeps in, one which Berlin seems to recognize: “Of course like all simple classifications of this type. the dichotony becomes, if not pressed, scholast, and ultimately absurd.” Indeed Tolstoy does make “a classification of this type” absurd. Again with his “sanity and penetration scarcely ever equaled” he goes to great length to avoid this aparent ambguity. Tolstoy tells us in his unmistakable detail that he was for the greater part of his life a personified Fox, which reflects his “natural” personality. It was only at the point of a distinct revelation, when he came to the conviction that the teachings of Jesus as contained in the Sermon on the Mount were intended to be taken literally, that he became a Hedgehog: “It is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life”. From this point on Tolstoy was the personified Hedgehog. The point here is the fact that all humans begin their lives as the Fox. Only and if, one comes to a life changing experience of some form of Ultimate Reality, can one unambiguously be designated a Hedgehog. The light which Tolstoy casts on the topic, in any sense as “on a single man of genius”, is the utterly unique fact that he stands as perhaps the single man, of any intelectual level, to personify the fullest extension in every aspect of the meaning of the human condition. Thus the light that Tolstoy casts on the topic is unmistakably “the fate of all mankind”.
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 Ed Jones 
 December 28, 2012 at 10:21 pm
Further comments by way of adding some clarity to my particular take on Berlin’s essay.
 Berlin’s treatment of Tolstoy in terms of the Hedgehog or the Fox was based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), written during his period as the Fox, in which he only expressed only disillusions over his period as the Fox. Before his dramatic conversion to his period as the Hedgehog, which began with his spiritual crisis at the end of the 1870’s. “The message of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) was that the teaching of Jesus was to be taken literally. The final chapter of the novel was a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount in which the protagonist pictured to himself ‘what this world might be like if people were taught to obey those commandments’. In that realization, the excitement and the ecstasy that came over him convinced him that ‘it is man’s sole duty to fulfill these commandments, that in this lies the sole meaning of life.’ In that realization, it was as though, after long pining and suffering, he had suddenly found peace and liberation.” (Jaroslav Pelikan)
Reply
 
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 17, 2012 at 11:06 am
In his letter to Mohandas Gandhi: “The whole of Christianity, so brilliant on the surface, grew up on an obvious, strange, sometimes conscious but for the most part unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction (of the authentic teachings of Jesus). For 19 centuries Christian mankind has lived this way . . . There is such an obvious contradiction that sooner or later, probably very soon, it will be exposed and will put an end either to the acceptance of the Christian religoion which is necessary to maintain power, or to the existence of an army and any violence supported by it, which is no less necessary to maintain power.”
Only since the 80′s have our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a clear conviction stated in the words of Schubert Ogden; “We now know that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus”. Thus not sources for knowledge of Jesus. This is a historical judgment from within the Guild of NT Studies.
 Then we have Eric Zuesse’s probe: “The religion of the New Testament actually has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus.” This is a scientific judgment from outside.
 Signnificiently, no evidence was raised to question the Guild’s conviction that we have a NT source which contains the original and originating witness to Jesus, namely the Sermon on the Mount.
 All to say Tolstoy stands as the unique standard for all judgments related to human existence.
Reply
 
 Ed Jones 
 December 21, 2012 at 4:48 pm
I seem to have ended what was to have been an extended discussion.
 Tolstoy does so absolutly set the one identity over against the other beyond discussion. Like Athiest v/s Thiest.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

How Sandy Hook is Obama’s Fault
by rjosephhoffmann

“And it’s not surprising–then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them….” (Barack Obama, 2007)

It almost cost him the election, that comment. The rest of the damage issued from the Black Theology of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who goddamned America for, among other things, its love of guns and violence against people who are different.
Four years later, they–we–are still clinging. Not that I cling to either. But I think that all of us who live in a country that is famous for such lunacy deserve a share of the blame.
I am only a little interested in the Why? question. Maybe it is because the Why question is always answered with the sub-analytical question-begging that television journalists call analysis (“Do you think America is on the wrong track or the right track?”): America’s Love-affair with guns. The political power of the NRA, who have half the Senate and two-thirds of congressmen in their blood-stained camouflage pockets. Or the Second Amendment–you know, the one that the SCOTUS says gives every man and woman the right to carry a semi-automatic weapon for squirrel hunting. Come to think of it, if corporations are people, my friend, why don’t they have a Bushmaster?
The simple fact is, Obama had it just right. He spoke the truth that dare not be spoken. A lot of Americans see America disappearing into a gray cloud of moral relativism and negotiable truths. It leaves them stranded and sightless. Homosexuality used to be weird and funny, and if you called someone a queer they cried. Now they smile, flash their wedding ring at you and drive off with their partner in a Bugatti. Abortion was something God-fearing Christians did not do, not even if fourteen year-old Tiffany’s pregnancy was eighteen year-old Bubba’s fault. Now their pastors and (even a few priests) say that the position of their Church is evolving, or has totally changed. A sin has become a right. A Christian will know that people who talk this way aren’t Christian because God can’t change his mind. He wrote a book. He hasn’t written another one. And we wrote a Constitution. Now some people are trying to change that too, and we can’t let them.
America is not a theocracy, but it often behaves like one, and plenty of Americans would have no trouble saying that the law of God (as they construe it) is higher than the law of the land. America for them is only “good” when its representatives and judges and president make decisions that support their biblical view of reality. In that view, men and women are more separate than equal. God established difference as a basis for doing certain jobs, playing certain roles. Things have only been screwed up since we began ignoring those “natural” differences and letting women do what (real) men are naturally meant to do, like being breadwinners, wife-tamers, and heads of the household. Even many plaid-jacketed divorced AK-45-toting women survivalists believe this doctrine. It is an act of faith that America is in rebellion against the law of God.
One of the proofs of this is Barack Obama’s recent election. Who elected him? That’s right, No one. Black people, scroungers, welfare mothers. University-educated people. So-called “scientists” who have never done an honest days work, communists and atheists and anybody else who hates America. All your spicks in California or Florida or wherever. Christ, probably even your Indians and god-knows-what-else.
For people who think this way, the election of a well-educated black lawyer who thinks the world is about fourteen billion years old is the apocalypse. No act of violence is too violent when you think that the enemy is in the White House, lighting cigars with the Constitution, palling around with terrorists and Chinese tycoons who want to buy Fort Knox, and celebrating the rites of his native religion in a secret mosque behind the Oval Office. It is a perfect storm brewed from irrational fear and an insanely available stage on which to vent your frustration and rage for what’s being taken away. And if the guys in beaver fur are the touts in this scenario, they are being stage managed by guys who use deoderant, men like Donald Trump, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. They are the real muses behind the weakminded men who caused Sandy Hook to happen
Listen to the rhetoric: “What’s being taken away.” The Endangered Man–Homo periclitatur–who thinks and acts against society never thinks in terms of rights as something that have been given, or developed, or created, but almost always as something that are being taken away. The unique reference in the Declaration (not the Constitution) to being “endowed” with unalienable rights by a Creator assures them that rights come from above and beyond the courts; courts have no business messing around with what God has given. We call that “liberty,” and liberty means that every individual man is free to do as he chooses as long as no one gets hurt.
The Second Amendment has become an idol in this debate as the symbol of what is left when all these God-given rights are left in the dust. Take away our guns and you take away our ability to defend our liberty. Christ knows, the government can’t defend us anymore. We have to do it ourselves. Just like in 1776.
The low-point in this “discussion” was reached in the election of 2008 when Sarah “Grizzly” Palin donned her red dress and promised the slavering hunters who had almost given up hope for a messiah that she would sleep with them if they would just vote for her and her “rogue” companion. Her rogue companion, a useless non-hero from the VietNam war, was only a little less ardent in his defense of guns. And he sits in a body where the legislators of the most powerful country on earth are given report cards by a weapons-advocacy lobby.
In the dogmatic illiteracy of 2012 America, the nation was founded not by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin–who may have owned guns but probably didn’t use them much–but by Davy Crockett and Wyatt Earp. They were all good Christians. They didn’t get divorced or kill babies. Maybe they fooled around a little because God can forgive that, and besides, men are weak in that department. It says so in scripture. These “heroes” didn’t know much science because they knew what really mattered was getting on, getting by, keeping government small, and staying out of trouble with the law. If you did get in trouble with the law, well that’s okay too. Remember what I said about being weak: God needs his sinners, as long as they are committing the right sins.
A gun, after all, is an axiom. A bullet can decide right or wrong when a court can’t, and it takes a good bullet to kill someone who uses one for evil. What went wrong at Sandy Hook? The principal wasn’t gun-smart.
 p>
It astonishes the world outside America that this childish and insipid view of history and human nature carries so much weight. It can win elections, though it didn’t win this one, and that in itself is a provocation to further violence.
But it should astonish everyone inside America that our schools don’t teach real stuff, that state educational commissions cower before the propect of teaching that religions come in different shapes, sizes and valences, and have been a source of moral harm as well as of good; that they fail to teach that evolution is not a mere theory but the best explanation we have of how we became the creatures we are. The home-schooling “revolution” that began a generation ago has been all about protecting students from the truth of science and the beauty of literature, abetted by school boards–an entrenched nineteenth century abomination–who think parents know best, and that the most important thing you can learn in school are family values.
The source of our trouble is not that Americans are stupid, though many are, but that we have permitted stupidity and fear to become the dominant force in the national psyche. We are a Janus of country, one face a road-weary, government hating, truck-driving cowboy, the other a Nobel Laureate from MIT. For every one of us who tittered at Tina Fey’s send up of Sarah Palin in 2008, there was a hunter in Arkansas, cleaning his gun, ready to shoot the TV screen in disgust that a woman who spoke God’s truth was being ridiculed for not reading books and newspapers.
And there might have been a mother in Newtown, Connecticut who said to her twelve year-old son, Adam, “You see these guns: That’s all we’ve got when they come for us.”
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Published: December 19, 2012
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6 Responses to “How Sandy Hook is Obama’s Fault”

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 Dwight Jones 
 December 19, 2012 at 11:18 pm
All very fair points – one must wonder if there will ever be an inflection point around weapons within humanity.
Will they will ever be condemned for what they are – barbaric vestiges of an admittedly infant species, that could not read or write just 600 years ago, and fought then with bows and arrows? We do move on?
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 Pseudonym 
 December 20, 2012 at 12:15 am
This is just a suggestion, but I think that we should stop referring to the NRA as “the gun lobby”. We should call it what it is: the gun manufacturer lobby. The NRA has, throughout its history, predictably and consistently lobbied against the interests of responsible gun owners if it would conflict with the interests of gun manufacturers. They consistently and predictably lie about candidates, bills and policies if it furthers the goal of increasing gun sales. (Obama is going to take your guns away, so buy up big now!)
I would like to think that hunters, farmers, security guards, sporting shooters and everyone else who has a good reason to have a firearm should ditch the NRA and form a new group whose goal is to promote responsible gun ownership and use, keep guns with no legitimate civilian use out of the commuity, and keep all guns out of the hands of people who really shouldn’t have them. I don’t own any guns, but that’s an organisation that I could respect.
Hey, a guy can dream.
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 stevenbollinger 
 December 20, 2012 at 12:41 pm
In the UK security guards don’t usually carry firearms. Even the police aren’t strapped most of the time. They can strike terror into the heart of almost any suspicious character merely by shouting “Oy!” In extreme cases they may have to resort to a head-butt. Joseph lives over there and can attest to all this. I know it from TV and movies. Even Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, who battled the most very dangerous fiends in England, always kept their revolvers locked away in desk drawers until very late in the movie.
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Speaking Foolishly about God and Tragedy says:
 December 20, 2012 at 9:56 am
[...] also posts by Carson T. Clark, Jim Burklo, Joe Hoffmann, Frankie Schaffer, David Henson, Joel Watts, Amanda Mac, Tom Verenna, Bob Patterson, Libby Anne, [...]
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 theologyarchaeology 
 December 21, 2012 at 3:46 pm
When it comes to science, archaeology and religion people are demanding that objectivity be at the forefront of one’s work yet when it comes to things like gun ownership, smoking,and other hot topic issues that requirement/demand, is thrown out the window for biased commentary pushing a pet agenda.
Your inclusion of Jefferson, Franklin and Palin as good Christians shows that you do not apply God’s standards to their lives. Then you comment ‘protecting them from the truth of science’ shows that you do side with secularists not God. Homeschooling was not an attempt to avoid such things but to have their children educated in the truth and secular science does not contain much of that. In fact, public schools lack a lot of the truth as well and we should not subject our children to such bad content.
I am not one to advocate objectivity but I do support honesty yet your article contained little of that trait though it was quite manipulative. Since gun ownership doe snot negatively impact society like murder does, no one should force their anti-gun beliefs on others. If you do not want to own a gun then don’t but you haven no right to say that your neighbor is not allowed to own one.
If you do not want to smoke, then don’t but you have no right to tell your neighbor that he can’t smoke outside of your property. The problem with America is not the stupidity that prevails but that those stupid enough to think that they get to dictate to others what they can or cannot do.
You have freedom to not choose to own a gun or smoke thus you must allow that same freedom to be used by others to choose to smoke or own a gun. Your anti-gun stance is just attacking a strawman and avoids the real issue.
School shootings and other crimes do not come from owning a gun, it comes from choosing to reject Jesus and salvation and following evil. They come from wanting to do sin not what Jesus wants. if you want to make an impact on violence, then target the source not the symptom
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 steph 
 December 22, 2012 at 9:35 pm
The source is the group of people like you. Good Christians ‘side with secularists’ which is why Palin isn’t one and Jefferson was. Ideas evolve but you are stuck in a past when they used the sword. To shoot a gun you need a gun, and someone with a gun will, pull the trigger, and has pulled the trigger, believing like a ‘good’ Christian – the bullets come from a gun. You are an embarrassment to your nation. If you don’t smoke I hope you discover the ‘other side’ very soon from people exhaling over your fence, unless a gun knocks you off first. It’s what Jesus would want. In defending gun ownership you are defending the deaths of innocent American citizens. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

Meng Zhi: On Government*
by rjosephhoffmann

Meng Zhi, known to the west as Mencius, was a Chinese philosopher of the fourth century B.C., whose influence on his intellectual tradition is roughly equivalent to the joint influence of St. Paul and Aristotle on Western thought. Better known to English speakers by the Latinization of his name, “Mencius,” Mengzi thought of himself as merely defending the teachings of Confucius against rival philosophical doctrines, especially the “egoism” of Yang Zhu and the universalistic consequentialism of Mozi. However, Mengzi was actually a very original thinker, whose doctrine of the goodness of human nature went far beyond anything Confucius had said. Long after his death, Mengzi’s interpretation of Confucianism became orthodoxy, meaning that generations of Chinese intellectuals literally memorized his work.
On Government
Mencius had an audience with King Hui of Liang. The king said, “Sir, you did not consider a thousand li too far to come You must have some ideas about how to benefit my state.” Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use the word ‘benefit” All I am concerned with are the benevolent and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I benefit my state?’ your officials will say, ‘How can I benefit my family,’ and officers and common people will say, ‘How can I benefit myself.’ Once superiors and inferiors are cornpeting for benefit, the state will be in danger. When the head of a state of ten thousand chariots is murdered, the assassin is invariably a noble with a fief of a thousand chariots, When the head of a fief of a thousand chariots is murdered, the assassin is invariably head of a subfief of a hundred chariots. Those with a thousand out of ten thousand, or a hundred out of a thousand, had quite a bit. But when benefit is put before what is right, they are not satisfied without snatching it all. By contrast there has never been a benevolent person who neglected his parents or a righteous person who put his lord last. Your Majesty perhaps will now also say, ‘All I am concerned with are the benevolent and the right. Why mention ‘benefit?’ ”
After seeing King Xiang of Liang, Mencius to someone, “When I saw him from a distance he did not look like a ruler, and when I got closer, I saw nothing to command respect. But he asked ‘How can the realm be settled?’ I answered, ‘It can be settled through unity.’ ‘Who can unify it?’ he asked. I answered, ‘Someone not fond of killing people.’ ‘Who could give it to him?’ I answered ‘Everyone in the world will give it to him. Your .Majesty knows what rice plants are? If therere is a drought in the seventh and eighth months, the plants wither, but if moisture collects in the sky and forms clouds and rain falls in torrents, plants suddenly revive. This is the way it is; no one can stop the process. In the world today there are no rulers disinclined toward killing. If there were a ruler who did not like to kill people, everyone in the world would crane their necks to catch sight of him. This is really true. The people would flow toward him the way water flows down. No one would be able to repress them.’ ”
King Xuan of Qi asked, “Is it true that King Wen’s park was seventy li square’,” Mencius answered, “That is what the records say.” The King said, “Isn’t that large?” Mencius responded, ‘The people considered it small.” “Why then do the people consider my park large when it is forty li square?” “In the forty square li of King Wen’s park, people could collect firewood and catch birds and rabbits. Since he shared it with the people, isn’t it fitting that they considered it small? When I arrived at the border, I asked about the main rules of the state before daring to enter. I learned that there was a forty-li park within the outskirts of the capital where killing a deer was punished like killing a person. Thus these forty li are a trap in the center of the state. Isn’t it apprpriiate that the people consider it too large?”
After an incident between Zou and Lu, Duke Mu asked, “Thirty-three of my officials died but no common people died. I could punish them, but I could not punish them all. I could refrain from punishing them but they did angrily watch their superiors die without saving them. What would be the best course for me to follow?” Mencius answered, “When the harvest failed, even though your granaries were full, nearly a thousand of your subjects were lost — the old and weak among them dying in the gutters, the able — bodied scatter ing in all directions. Your officials never reported the situation, a case of superiors callously inflicting suffering on their subordinates. Zengzi said, ‘Watch out, watch out! What you do will be done to you.’ This was the first chance the people had to pay them back. You should not resent them. If Your Highness practices benevolent government, the common people will love their superiors and die for those in charge of them.”
King Xuan of Qi asked, “Is it true that Tang banished Jie and King Wu took up arms against Zhou?” Mencius replied, “That is what the records say.” “Then is it permissible for a subject to assassinate his lord?” Mencius said, ”Someone who does violence to the good we call a villain; someone who does violence to the right we call a criminal. A person who is both a villain and a criminal we call a scoundrel I have heard that the scoundrel Zhou was killed, but have not heard that a lord was killed
King Xuan of Qi asked about ministers Mencius said, ”What sort of ministers does Your Majesty mean?” The king said ‘ Are there different kinds of ministers?” “There are. There are noble ministers related to the ruler and ministers of other surnames.” The king said, “I’d like to hear about noble ministers.” Mencius replied, “When the ruler makes a major error, they point it out. If he does not listen to their repeated remonstrations, then they put someone else on the throne.” The king blanched. Mencius continued, “Your Majesty should not be surprised at this. Since you asked me, I had to tell you truthfully.” After the king regained his composure, he asked about unrelated ministers. Mencius said, “When the king makes an error, they point it out. If he does not heed their repeated rernonstrations, they quit their posts.”
Bo Gui said, “I’d like a tax of one part in twenty What do you think?” Mencius said, “Your way is that of the northern tribes. Is one potter enough for a state with ten thousand households?” “No, there would not be enough wares.” The northern tribes do not grow all the five grains, only millet They have no cities or houses, no ritual sacrifices. They do not provide gifts or banquets for feudal lords, and do not have a full array of officials. Therefore, for them, one part in twenty is enough But we live in the central states How could we abolish social roles and do without gentlemen? If a state cannot do without potters, how much less can it do without gentlemen Those who want to make government lighter than it was under Yao and Shun are to some degree barbarians Those who wish to make government heavier than it was under Yao and Shun are to some degree [tyrants like] Jie.”
*from “China Confucius”, http://www.chinakongzi.com/2550/eng/mencius.htm
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Published: December 27, 2012
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2 Responses to “Meng Zhi: On Government*”

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 Ed Jones 
 January 1, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Joe, I see no means of commenting to “Jesus: The Outline”. But I am not computer savvy. Help!
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 steph 
 January 4, 2013 at 4:20 am
Dear Ed, it’s fixed now. The comment box is restored. :-)
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