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The Real Origins of Christianity
by rjosephhoffmann
I’m moved to write this short piece by two disconnected and discordant events: one an advertisement, the other a death.
First the ad. I occasionally receive promotional stuff from the Center for Inquiry in Buffalo, New York. The Center was founded by Paul Kurtz, a long-term friend of mine, and until 2009 the chair of the CFI and its affiliate organizations. Recently I received news of a short course entitled ”The Real Origins of Christianity,” ($60, including t-shirt) to be taught by a librarian who blogs and self-publishes on New Testament studies, Richard Carrier, and an employee of CFI who specializes in American philosophy, John Shook. Apparently while walking through the markets of East Jerusalem, someone sold them a magic key.
I worked for a short time within the Center and for a longer time alongside it as Chair of its Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER).
While it lasted–for almost thirty years–CSER was a successful entrepot between professional, critical investigations into religion and biblical history and a general public that had understandably come to believe that religion was either what people did when the golf course was soggy (the benign version) or a variety of obnoxious television godhawkers in bad fitting suits, begging for money to pay their bills (the toxic version).
CSER sponsored a wide variety of conferences in its day, ranging from a groundbreaking one at the University of Michigan in 1984 (Jesus in History and Myth) which can fairly be said to have spurred a new generation of interest in the non-confessional study of the historical Jesus-question, to a 2004 conference at Cornell (Just War and Jihad), focusing on the sources of violence in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Its last academic conference was at the University of California at Davis in 2007, an investigation into the methods used by biblical and koranic scholars in analysing the origins of their sacred writings and traditions.
During its heyday, CSER attracted some very significant voices: Morton Smith of Columbia, the controversial “discoverer” of the Secret Gospel of Mark; Van Harvey of Stanford, America’s leading historian of religion; David Noel Freedman of UC San Diego, editor of the Anchor Bible; James Robinson of Claremont, the compiler of the first English translation of the Gnostic gospels.. In addition to its stalwarts and recidivist contributors, it attracted a wide variety of younger scholars and international supporters as well and was growing rapidly in outreach and prestige when CFI, without Kurtz at the helm, decided to suspend it as a cost-cutting measure.
At its last significant meeting in Davis, California, the aged and the young sages had multiple chances to interact–sometimes, as in a particularly lively and dramatic exchange between James Robinson and Arthur Droge of Toronto–to risk correction and possible embarrassment. Nothing is more energizing than watching lions defend their legacies while challengers try to gain ground. It is a spectacle that few of the “laity” ever get to witness: scholarship in action. Smart people correcting each other, egos exposed to the elements.
Morton Smith
And let me stop at that word. Scholarship is fundamentally about correction, not the display of extreme or private theories in public. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, it has been a “dialectic”– ideas getting tangled up with other ideas. It is surgery, not sculpture, scalpels not chisels. It requires knowing what to throw away and what to replace it with, and whether the new is any better than the old. The word publication defines its purpose in its root: work designed for public scrutiny.
Without dialectic, which operates on the foundation of suspicion and skepticism, just as in the sciences, religious studies and biblical scholarship would still be a mere translation of texts assumed to be inviolable. Much of an older generation of biblical scholarship was just that: translation (often good translation), theological paraphrase, and noble efforts at establishing dates and points of origin based on (often spurious) reports and traditions.
Yet the danger of evading the dialectic is not just a “conservative” problem. At another and equally dangerous extreme, private, non-dialectical theories might hold that eccentric views are inviolable because the opinions of experts only exist to be demolished–a kind of textual iconoclasm that thinks it can bypass “traditional” methods of investigation completely, even if it doesn’t fully comprehend them. To trivialize this view ever so slightly, it is one often held by self-trained amateurs who think the greatest service they can perform for scholarship is to line all existing theories up against a wall and shoot them (and their perpetrators, if still alive) dead. Theoretically, this greatly accelerates the forward march of new opinion.
The New Trend
This is a fancy way of saying that the real origins of Christianity is not the subject for a monologue, certainly not one by amateur dialectic-avoiders. It’s a subject for argument and interpretation. It is closer to being a dog fight–of a genteel kind–than a dog show.
At the risk of offending amateurs and enthusiasts everywhere, biblical scholarship is not for amateurs and enthusiasts. Is is arduous and often dull work. It means learning Greek and Coptic and Hebrew and Aramaic not just well but very well, and Latin just for fun. It means knowing how books were produced in the ancient world, what literary genres were available. –What scribes ate for breakfast that might have spilled onto their paper and what copyists (editors) were thinking that might have caused them to scratch something out.
If you were not taught this in graduate school, then you were not taught properly–or at all. It is not the da Vinci Code. It is not normally fraught with exciting new discoveries or ingenious hoaxes, and when it is–as in the case of the Qumran (Dead Sea) scrolls or Nag Hammadi (Gnostic) documents, the discovery soon turns to the drudgery of translation and piecing cultural puzzles together. In putting that puzzle together, it helps to have in your head an image of what the picture, in its totality, might plausibly look like. That is where the drudgery pays off.
It is primarily a story of watching extravagant claims about “startling new information” fade into the reality of prosaic results. The (shameful) fifty years that elapsed between the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and their complete publication was a bitter period for scholars who were interested in “putting it out there”; the thirty years that intervened between the discovery and translation of a version of the Nag Hammadi material was a little better. True, even reputable scholars have made preposterous claims before, during, and since the process of translation and editing.
But if your interest in New Testament studies (or if any of the conspiracy- or fabrication- theories you now hold) is based on any of this work, my earnest advice to you is: Don’t quit your day job. If you think that such work is best fueled by two-hour debates on the resurrection of Jesus with fundamentalist know-nothings rather than subjecting your ideas to peer review and criticism, think again about pursuing it as a vocation. (Twenty eight years after the publication of my “controversial” study of Marcion and the New Testament, I am still patiently defending my suppositions).
P69: Marcion’s?
Having learned and taught the subject for more than thirty years, I can honestly say, I have no idea how Christianity began. Having also read, however, most of the theories put forward by mythtics and Jesus-skeptics, I can also say, in a friendly kind of way: you’re not close to an answer.
Which brings me to the death. I learned yesterday of the death of C. K. Barrett, who is described in his obituary, written as it happens by one of my PhD examiners, this way:
“Charles Kingsley Barrett, who has died aged 94, stood alongside CH Dodd as the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century. Barrett regarded commentary on the texts as the primary task of the biblical scholar, and his meticulous commentaries have provided solid foundations for students and clergy for more than 50 years. He was a Methodist minister for nearly 70 years and, during his time as lecturer and professor of divinity at Durham University (1945-82), and in retirement there, he preached most Sundays in the city or a nearby village. His opposition to the scheme for Anglican-Methodist reunion in the 1960s brought him into contact with a wider public as a church leader, as well as a renowned teacher.”
Barrett was ancient, or considered so, even when I was a graduate student, and what Robert Morgan calls “meticulous” in his article many of us would have called unacceptably conservative. In his time, he was considered anti-Semitic by some and stubbornly refused to revise some of his commentaries that seemed to duplicate some of the worst instincts of German theologians and scholars.
Yet in other ways, he was fair-minded and most of us had devised ways to read around his incipient Calvinism for the jewels of insight that were embedded in books like The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (1956) and The Gospel of John and Judaism (published in German in 1970, and English in 1975). As Morgan notes, “The learned and judicious historian of Christian origins did not in his writing and lecturing allow more than glimpses of the fire in his belly.”
A year after the appearance of Marcion, and eager to have his opinion, he wrote– in response to me–a single cordial sentence: ”Very experimental, very tentative of course. We shall have to see.” Because his judgment mattered, it was a more important comment than “Good job” or “I might disagree with your premise if only I could find it.” I was especially hopeful for Barrett’s verdict because of a traditional opinion that Marcion, who, I had come to believe, is actually the author of the first written gospel, was anti-Jewish, a view I tried hard to disassemble.
Yet there it is: “Charles Kingsley Barrett, who has died aged 94, stood alongside CH Dodd as the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century…” A man who did not know the Real Origins of Christianity though he knew practically everything about it. And worse, a man with no listing in Wikipedia.
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Published: November 5, 2011
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9 Responses to “The Real Origins of Christianity”
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Erlend
November 5, 2011 at 11:35 am
Carrier (as you know) isn’t an amateur. He is trained Classicist, which is probably the one of the best types of training needed to tackle this subject. Why the heck Shook is involved I have no idea… The idea that this students get credit for this course is unsettling.
In trying to counter Christian apologetics, so many atheists don’t seem to realize they are depending on scholarship that is the equivalent of what they want to attack- shoddy, overreaching amateur nonsense. Most wouldn’t pass as a freshman essay let alone become a study of importance for historians like those of your late PhD examiner. If you have a chance buy David Fitzgerald’s “Nailed”. It will (depending of how you take the abuse of historical analysis or method) have you either laughing out loud or pounding the table in frustration Yet it is vaulted merely because it reaches a conclusion that so many in the atheist community want to agree with. Its this blind ignorance to soberly assess evidence that really puts me off so much of what is falsely called freethinking movement. They have the character of that which they seek to attack- a position in search of arguments.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 5, 2011 at 9:50 pm
I am afraid I cannot agree that being a classicist is “the best preparation” for this sort of thing, though ideally it should help. Michael Grant who died in 2004 was a professor of Classics at Cambridge, a tireless author and interpreter of the ancient world writing on everything from myth to the Jews and numismatics. His knowledge was truly massive in the field and he trained a whole generation of ancient historians, though obviously not in bibical studies. In 1977 however he wrote a book called Jesus: An Historian’s View of the Gospels, in which he wanted to show that his insights and training would shed new light on the New Testament. The book was an embarrassing failure, not least because he uncritically and without looking at two hundred years of biblical scholarship, applied what he knew about classical texts to biblical ones and came up with, among many startling announcements, the story of Jesus tracing a letter on the ground with his finger “as though he heard them not”, in John 8.6, as “the very kind of detail that permits an historian to say a text is irrefragably true.” It does have the air of authenticity, like any good dramatic set piece. The only difficulty is, the author is thinking of the stubborn disbelief of the Jews when Moses presented them the letters of the law “written by the finger of God” (Exodus 31.18; Deut. 9.10). There is probably not a less historical tidbit in the whole of the Fourth Gospel and is the very kind of thing a classicist is predisposed to miss because of the way we’re trained to sift sources. It is also true that Grant was a soft believer, just a Carrier is a hardcore atheist. Methodology seems to fall by the wayside in either case. But take my word for it, there is nothing being taught in classics departments (and I’ve chaired and taught in a few!) that would make anyone especially adept in the biblical field, and indeed scholarly apartheid guarantees the opposite result for the most part.
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Ed Jones
November 6, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Joe, you have evidenced your apprecation of your fellow scholars Schubert Ogden, James Robinson and Hans Dieter Betz as being credible critical Historical NT scholars.
They each share the conviction that they understand The Real Origins Of Christianity.
They each share the conviction that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness, thus not reliable sources for reconsruction.
They each identify the Scriptural source which can be taken to be our most certain apostolic witness to the HJ, presenting an entirely different image of Jesus from that pictured by the writings of the NT.
I again dare to repeat the claim that the reconstructin contained in the first 13 comments to your essay The Importance of the Historical Jesus, based largely on extracts from works of these three, constitutes a viable picture of The Real Origins of Christianity
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Michael Wilson
November 7, 2011 at 12:09 pm
Is there more than one librarian who blogs and self-publishes on New Testament studies or is someone actually going to have Steph’s favorite armchair historian teach Christian origins? Should be great fun for all attendees who still possess the faculty of reason.
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steph
November 7, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Mike:
Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
This golden youth long since was past,
Its silver manhood went as fast,
An iron age drew on at last;
‘Tis vain its character to tell,
The several fates which it befell,
What year it died, when ’twill arise,
We only know that here it lies.
Henry David Thoreau: Epitaph on the World
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Scott
November 9, 2011 at 8:51 am
Can anyone tell me how I can get one of those magic keys? If so, how much are they? ;)
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Ed Jones
November 13, 2011 at 10:31 am
Thee magic key is the ability to read the NT in its historical context to identify the realapostolic witness to the HJ. First to get beyond the very same bias which dominates the Fundamentalist: the conviction that the writings of the NT authors is the sole source of Scriptural knowledge about the HJ. Of course the secular skeptic reaches an entirely differet conclusion from this poin.
The key is the ability to come to recognize the historical fact that we hae an apostolic Scriptural Witness source.
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Scott
November 11, 2011 at 4:13 pm
After re-reading, it seems from your comments that Barrett was a man who saw far greater importance in his work than in having his name in lights or on Wikepedia. Maybe it didn’t matter to him if his name was ever emblazoned on the door of a library or lecture hall.
Nonetheless, thank you for bringing his name to our attention.
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Edward T. Babinski
November 23, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Hi Professor Hoffman, I’ve read several of the books you wrote/edited for Prometheus Books. Wonderful reading. I also took the course that Carrier is teaching on Christianity’s Origins (it is being offered a second time due to high demand). It’s not all Carrier’s writing, Ehrman and Ludemann’s views were also discussed. It’s an “apocalyptic Jesus” point of view that is emphasized and defended.
On the views of different scholars I would love to see someone edit a book featuring the religious/intellectual journeys of major scholars, including those who became Christians, and those whose Christianity grew more liberal and those who left it entirely — as their knowledge of the NT increased throughout their scholarly careers. I imagine that most people drawn to study the Bible probably came from some sort of religious background to begin with. But I also imagine that studying the Bible intensely in college tends to raise questions that lead to more moderate views if not major questions over time. Even N.T. Wright, and his neo-Evangelical non-inerrantist approach to the NT and Christianity apparently went through some trials in which he had to rethink what he believed. Though I doubt we’ll be able to squeeze more out of him concerning such upheavels other than the paragraph below:
WRIGHT ON THE “HUGE UPHEAVELS” HE’S EXPERIENCED
“The Jesus I have discovered through historical research is . . . not the Jesus I expected or wanted to find when I began this work nearly twenty years ago. Studying Jesus has been the occasion for huge upheavals in my personal life, my spirituality, my theology, and my psyche. . . . Second, the Jesus I have discovered is clearly of enormous relevance to the contemporary world and Church. I know that others with very different Jesuses would say this as well, so you may find the point irrelevant. . . . Let me put it like this. After fifteen years of serious historical Jesus study, I still say the creed ex animo; but I now mean something very different by it, not least by the word ‘god’ itself.”
SOURCE: N. Thomas Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God” (Originally published in Ex Auditu 1998, 14, 42–56.)
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Books etc.
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Vita Brevis
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Robert Ingersoll: God and Man in Peoria
by rjosephhoffmann
‘The public’ is a very strange animal, and although a good knowledge of human nature will generally lead a caterer of amusement to hit the people right, they are fickle and ofttimes perverse.” P. T. Barnum
Robert Green Ingersoll was born in Dresden, New York, the son of a liberal Congregational (Presbyterian) father who had a knack of offending his godfearing parishioners with his unparishionable views.
Ingersoll’s father, when his son was nine years old, had succeeded in calling himself to the attention of the presbytery and landing himself and his family in Ohio, then in Wisconsin, and then in Illinois where he died with a cloudy charge of “unministerial conduct” hanging over his head. Such charges were not uncommon in the hypersensitive religious climate of the nineteenth century and the polity of the Congregational protestant system encouraged them.
It’s hard to determine whether Ingersoll’s dismal view of Calvinist Christianity was spun off his empathy for his father’s treatment by the church, but the fact that the elder Ingersoll found himself in dutch with the denomination so often may have had a disposing influence.
“Bob,” as he grew older, seemed to channel his father’s view of hell (“all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable”) and the church (“[it] has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down on earth”). His creed was floridly this-worldly: ”Happiness is the only good; reason the only torch; justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.” He was not an atheist, quite, and did not entirely hate religion–only the existing forms of it and its narrow-minded bosses, the clergy. The term “agnostic” was gaining currency even in nineteenth century America, and he adopted it, with the following modification:
The Agnostic … occupies himself with this world, with things that can be ascertained and understood. He turns his attention to the sciences, to the solutions of questions that touch the well-being of man. He wishes to prevent and cure disease; to lengthen life; to provide homes and raiment and food for man; to supply the wants of the body. He also cultivates the arts. He believes in painting and sculpture, in music and the drama — the needs of the soul. The Agnostic believes in developing the brain, in cultivating the affections, the tastes, the conscience, the judgment, to the end that man may be happy in this world. … The Agnostic does not simply say, “I do not know.” He goes another step and says with great emphasis that you do not know.
A man of his era, Ingersoll was also a man adrift in a country weirdly poised between superstition and progress, electric lights and religious gloom and where the native gods of puritan New England had migrated westward to combine with the strange gods of the prairie leaving religious isobars that to this day have not been adequately interpreted.
Forced once to distinguish between the Catholic and the protestant faiths, Ingersoll, who was not prone to making unimportant distinctions, acknowledged, “the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement… the Pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.”
It was an interesting statement coming from an agnostic, and oddly similar to an argument being made at precisely the same time, but for very different ends, by his English contemporary, John Henry Newman, on the development of Christian doctrine.
The further details of his life show that he liked reading, though he scorned formal education (“Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed”), an attitude that sat well with the commonsense public who often formed his audiences and has remained an ingredient in American anti-intellectualism to this day.
Ingersoll read law in the apprenticeship-style typical of his day (in Illinois, where Lincoln, for whom he had unfettered admiration, also studied for the bar), fought in the Civil war, achieving the rank of regimental colonel, and like many Republicans of his era, championed progressive political causes such as abolition and women’s suffrage.
He was admired for his language by Walt Whitman (“a fiery blast for new virtues, which are only old virtues done over for honest use again”) and for his “incipient poetry” by an overwrought Edgar Lee Masters (“He stripped off the armor of institutional friendships/To dedicate his soul/To the terrible deities of Truth and Beauty”). Mark Twain, with whom he competed for crowds on the lecturing circuit, called him a “master of human speech.” He died in 1899.
On the hustings, Ingersoll drew crowds at a-buck-a-pop county fair and local theatrical events and normally packed the house with his scandalous aspersions toward the mother religion (then, protestantism) of the great Midwest where his oratory had the biggest appeal. He was a draw comparable only to General Tom Thumb and “The Siamese Twins” Chang and Eng on the P.T. Barnum circuit. It was an age of flim flam and credulity–imposters and their exposers–hence a great era for both the snake-oil salesmen and the commonsense multitudes who, eyes opened by a sensible man, might run them out of town on a rail. All of this would become Zenith, Winnemac, by 1922 and mawkishly sentimentalized by Meredith Willson in 1952.
But Ingersoll was as successful on Broadway and in Boston as he was on the circuit: An 1892 appearance in New York not only packed the theatre, said a New York Times review of his “lecture” (on Voltaire), but required three hundred seats to be added to the stage!
Ingersoll added to the standard fare for these appearances a series of lectures on religion, which he had come to believe was the root of all evil in its Calvinist form and hocus pocus in its Catholic form.
With his limited resources and access to book collections and libraries, he made do with the anti-Christian propaganda of his day, supplemented, mainly, by a few classic American texts (Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason being the cornerstone) and a little Voltaire–the two personalities being favorite topics for speechifying. Like many of the freethinkers of his day, Ingersoll had taught himself religion–which is both the source of his originality and the reason for his limitations as a thinker and a writer.
Before I go a crucial step farther, let me say I have always enjoyed reading Robert Ingersoll, mainly for the honesty he brought to America’s first ‘real century”–the period between the Revolution with its unassailably golden Enlightenment origins and the Civil War with its dark and brutal acknowledgement that the country was not, after all, a Jeffersonian democracy on Greek model but a fractious compromise between inherently hateful factions. Ita sit semper.
Ingersoll understood that at the heart of the earliest stirrings of American disintegration was the unresolved question of religion, which the founders thought they had laid to rest, or at least contained, in the First Amendment to the Constitution. When he is moved by the phantom of despair, as he was on the death of Lincoln in 1865, there is no finer craftsman on either side of the Atlantic, largely because he possessed what was then the famous American control of language–the spare style–that had been sacrificed in Victorian England for aureate mannerism.
…People separated only by distance are much nearer together, than those divided by the walls of caste. It is no advantage to live in a great city, where poverty degrades and failure brings despair. The fields are lovelier than paved streets, and the great forests than walls of brick. Oaks and elms are more poetic than steeples and chimneys. In the country is the idea of home. There you see the rising and setting sun; you become acquainted with the stars and clouds. The constellations are your friends. You hear the rain on the roof and listen to the rhythmic sighing of the winds. You are thrilled by the resurrection called Spring, touched and saddened by Autumn — the grace and poetry of death. Every field is a picture, a landscape; every landscape a poem; every flower a tender thought, and every forest a fairy-land. In the country you preserve your identity — your personality. There you are an aggregation of atoms, but in the city you are only an atom of an aggregation. In the country you keep your cheek close to the breast of Nature. You are calmed and ennobled by the space, the amplitude and scope of earth and sky — by the constancy of the stars. Lincoln never finished his education. To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.
Many of his quotes–the precursors of soundbites–are immortal: “An honest god is the noblest work of man”; and some of his intuitions about religions in general and the separation of church and state in particular are priceless.
An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment.
I once presided over a same-sex marriage in Rochester, New York, using only Ingersoll’s words, which were beautiful and profound. He would have made a great preacher, a monumental one, and, in most respects, was. There is no new atheist who has his rhetorical power and probably, therefore, no challenger equal to him who will reach and persuade as many people.
Love is the only bow on Life’s dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
His mission, as he announced it in lectures resulting (in 1879) in a transcript called Some Mistakes of Moses, was to free the clergy, the schools and the politicians from a dishonesty that they are duty-bound to propagate:
Even the publicans and sinners believe reasonable things. To believe without evidence, or in spite of it, is accounted as righteousness to the sincere and humble Christian. The ministers are in duty bound to denounce all intellectual pride, and show that we are never quite so dear to God as when we admit that we are poor, corrupt and idiotic worms; that we never should have been born; that we ought to be damned without the least delay; that we are so infamous that we like to enjoy ourselves; that we love our wives and children better than our God; that we are generous only because we are vile; that we are honest from the meanest motives.
And who would deny the prescience of these words:
It probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political as upon theological questions; and when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this government will be destroyed.
###
And yet, Robert Green Ingersoll, like any pope not half so gifted with eloquence and rhetoric, was a mortal, and even free thought cannot be “afflicted with the same [man] forever.”
It is precisely the voltage of Ingersoll’s rhetorical gifts that makes him a poor prophet, someone whose clear and lucid contempt for religion, in its biblical form especially, is overpowered by a passionate disregard for the rapidly developing scholarship of his day. The combination of spite for the Calvinism and Methodism of the circuit and the conviction (held in common with self-made poets like Masters and Whitman) that education sullies creativity was a fatal flaw in Ingersoll’s ability to see to the core of America’s religiosity. If facts mattered however, the men of his circle–Edison, Carnegie, Ford, even Alexander Graham Bell–were men of ingenuity rather than science. Only Bell had been near a university, and then only for a month.
As a self-professed “honest man” Ingersoll could only parse the literature and customs of ancient people as contradictions, as “preserved abominations” that he assessed from his own vantage point in the slightly schizophrenic show-me and sideshow era. He wasn’t the first freethinker who held the biblical writers accountable to standards of performance and consistency totally alien to their time and culture, but he was the most passionate:
For many years I have regarded the Pentateuch simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of the ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands of ideas inconsistent with known and demonstrated facts. To me it seemed almost a crime to teach that this record was written by inspired men; that slavery, polygamy, wars of conquest and extermination were right, and that there was a time when men could win the approbation of infinite Intelligence, Justice, and Mercy, by violating maidens and by butchering babes.
It’s been guessed that Ingersoll approached the Bible as a prosecutor: If so, he could not have had an easier fish to fry. The texts, because of their complex history are full of contradictions, errors of fact and chronology, and instances of practices that later readers of the vernacular translations would be horrified to discover. Ingersoll was bolstered by an active tractarian movement in the atheist cause, especially a popular booklet called Self Contradictions of the Bible (1860) by William Henry Burr–a working class pamphlet designed for use in actual debates with religious folk. The assumption of the debaters was that the Bible was a “cure” for itself: simply focus the attention of believers on the actual verses and they will retreat in terror from the implications of the doctrines they held to be true. As a prosecutor who stood, as he saw himself, “unwaveringly on the side of truth and justice,” Ingersoll felt honor bound to show the guilt of the text and its promoters, “to point out the errors, contradictions and impossibilities contained in the Pentateuch.”
Unlike some of the deist critics of the century before, Paine especially, Ingersoll is unable to locate any redeeming qualities in the Bible: it is a consistent picture of human savagery. He does not bother to separate Jesus out from the pack of unworthies, though the greater part of his contempt is reserved for “Christianity” as an institutionalisation of superstition. He finds a stark contrast between the pagan myths, which he extolls as beautiful and enriching fables that “reflect the face and form of Nature’s very self,” and the pure barbarism of the Bible, a history of violence, banality and human wickedness, fueled by power-grubbing priests, ineffectual prophets, and duped country bumpkins similar to those he encountered at Midwestern sideshows. For Ingersoll, Jesus may as well have been a travelling magician and the apostles his pitch-men.
When it came to scripture, Ingersoll was single-minded and usually wrong. Here he was on the origin of the Bible:
A few wandering families — poor, wretched, without education, art or power, descendants of those who had been enslaved for four hundred years, ignorant as the inhabitants of Central Africa, had just escaped from the desert of Sinai…
At that time these wanderers had no commerce with other nations, they had no written language, they could neither read nor write. They had no means by which they could make this revelation known to other nations, and so it remained buried in the jargon of a few ignorant, impoverished and unknown tribes for more than two thousand years.
The men who did the selecting [of the Bible] were ignorant and superstitious. They were firm believers in the miraculous. They thought that diseases had been cured by aprons and handkerchiefs of the apostles, by the bones of the dead. They believed in the fable of the Phoenix, and that the hyenas changed their sex every year.
The technical errors he propagates are the standard stuff he gleaned from the atheist tracts, an agglomeration of free thought views that bolstered his literal reading of the text as being “true” or “false,” and if false, as he saw it, then a hoax comparable to those foisted on people by carnival owners. He takes his cue from his inability to resolve what was leading many scholars to conclude that the Bible was not the work of pastoralists–who could not have written it anyway–but city boys, many centuries later. What scholarship was already using as significant clues to dating, Ingersoll treated as a pack of lies:
How, in the desert of Sinai, did the Jews obtain curtains of fine linen? How did these absconding slaves make cherubs of gold? Where did they get the skins of badgers, and how did they dye them red? How did they make wreathed chains and spoons, basins and tongs? Where did they get the blue cloth and their purple? Where did they get the sockets of brass? How did they coin the shekel of the sanctuary? How did they overlay boards with gold? Where did they get the numberless instruments and tools necessary to accomplish all these things? Where did they get the fine flour and the oil? Were all these found in the desert of Sinai? Is it a sin to ask these questions?
But even by the meager intellectual standards of nineteenth century America Ingersoll’s credulity towards the tracts is painfully obvious, an ignorance that extends not just to the biblical scholarship of his time which was bursting with new discoveries and theories but even the “Harvard scholarship” that had emerged before the turn of the century through the energetic promotion of president Charles Eliot who sent packs of timid young lecturers off to Germany starting in 1869 to soak in the New Criticism at Tuebingen and Heidelberg..
The fundamental error which remains a fixture of free-thought and atheist belief well into the twentieth century is that the Bible was produced by “savages”–wandering nomads and agriculturalists whose laws and ideas were vastly inferior to their cultural “opposites”–the Greeks. In European scholarship, the complex relationship between these two strands of thought was being charted by literary men like S T Coleridge, Matthew Arnold (who dubbed the two traditions somewhat over-generously sweetness and light), writer-translators like George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and biblical scholars like Benjamin Jowett, drawing on a robust boom in archaeology and text-studies in Germany.
George Eliot
Jerusalem was not an “agrarian society” in the first century CE or in the sixth century BC; it was a thriving Hellenistic trading center at a crossroads with Persia, Babylon, Syria, and Rome. Its violent history and pattern of foreign exploitation made it both unruly and cosmopolitan, but fundamentally it was a city of merchants, scholars, priests and foreigners. It has a relatively uncontested history between the seventh century BCE and the period of the bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE, the period during which most of the classic texts of the Hebrew Bible as well as the books of the New Testament came together. Nomads and agriculturalists don’t write books, compose poems like the psalms, or produce even worthless histories like the ones Ingersoll mocks in the Old Testament. While he accepted the emerging “modern” view that Moses was not the actual author of the books assigned to him (and generally buys wholesale the then radical view that the authorship of every biblical book is concocted), he finds it convenient to use him as a literary conceit to drive home his point that the books were written by nomads on the run from a higher civilization, Moses being the biggest flim-flammer of them all:
For the purpose of controlling his followers (Moses) pretended that he was instructed and assisted by Jehovah, the god of these wanderers….
We know that Solomon did not write the Proverbs or the Song, that Isaiah was not the author of the book that bears his name, that no one knows the author Job, Ecclesiastes, or Esther or of any book in the Old Testament, with the exception of Ezra.
These notions, all of them available in the tracts, are actually quite important: not many laymen of his generation would have known them, or if they had would not have given them any credit. Ingersoll however did not see them as historically interesting–puzzles to be solved in pursuit of a complete picture of the biblical era. He saw them as part of a Great Deception, in the way a mind trained in the generation of carnival barkers and fakery would have seen them.
He would impart this way of doing history to a whole century of atheists and secularists after him: the Bible is the rude product of barbarian peoples. A deliberate work of deception formulated by priest-craft and supported by the superstition of the masses. It has propagated only misery and violence and discouraged education, ethics, and scientific progress. The only release from its clutches is to denounce it as the greatest hoax on earth using the commonsense that no god gave us:
Let us admit what we know to be true; that Moses was mistaken about a thousand things; that the story of creation is not true; that the Garden of Eden is a myth; that the serpent and the tree of knowledge, and the fall of man are but fragments of old mythologies lost and dead; that woman was not made out of a rib; that serpents never had the power of speech; that the sons of God did not marry the daughters of men; that the story of the flood and ark is not exactly true; that the tower of Babel is a mistake; that the confusion of tongues is a childish thing; that the origin of the rainbow is a foolish fancy; that Methuselah did not live nine hundred and sixty-nine years; that Enoch did not leave this world, taking with him his flesh and bones; that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is somewhat improbable; that burning brimstone never fell like rain; that Lot’s wife was not changed into chloride of sodium; that Jacob did not, in fact, put his hip out of joint wrestling with God; that the history of Tamar might just as well have been left out; that a belief in Pharaoh’s dreams is not essential to salvation; that it makes but little difference whether the rod of Aaron was changed to a serpent or not; that of all the wonders said to have been performed in Egypt, the greatest is, that anybody ever believed the absurd account; that God did not torment the innocent cattle on account of the sins of their owners; that he did not kill the first born of the poor maid behind the mill because of Pharaoh’s crimes; that flies and frogs were not ministers of God’s wrath; that lice and locusts were not the executors of his will; that seventy people did not, in two hundred and fifteen years, increase to three million; that three priests could not eat six hundred pigeons in a day; that gazing at a brass serpent could not extract poison from the blood; that God did not go in partnership with hornets; that he did not murder people simply because they asked for something to eat; that he did not declare the making of hair oil and ointment an offence to be punished with death; that he did not miraculously preserve cloth and leather; that he was not afraid of wild beasts; that he did not punish heresy with sword and fire; that he was not jealous, revengeful, and unjust; that he knew all about the sun, moon, and stars; that he did not threaten to kill people for eating the fat of an ox.
Ingersoll’s god is no god for his time. But his intolerance of myth and his energy for itemizing contradiction betrays an even more alarming blandness and indifference to patterns of civilization, story-telling, government, learning, ideas of justice, and even ideas of progress. Commonsense, practical, “honest” men are often not history- of- ideas men, and perhaps that is why my enjoyment of Ingersoll does not translate into admiration. He is a second rate mind in a century of towering intellectuals, and is at his worst when he implies that he is an agnostic messiah, as he does in the first chapter of Mistakes of Moses, addressed to the clergy.
Perhaps it is the fate of all autodidacts to know only about 75% of a picture, when the 25% that might have been taught by teachers could provide an understanding of the whole truth. That was Ingersoll’s fate–to be partial, and in being partial to be loudly unfair. He loves Shakespeare, but Shakespeare loved the Bible. He believes in truth and justice, and yet never imagines that ideas of both–even more malleable than those in ancient Greek philosophers–are described in the prophets and proverbs. He is a great contradiction–someone who takes delight in the beauty of language but insists on a bloody literalism in the pages of the Bible, whose authors loved poetry, ideas, story and language as much as the Greeks. He detests supernaturalism among the Hebrews but does not seem to detect, or doesn’t care, that it suffuses Greek and Latin thought as well. Even the exhortations that form a part of his greatest speeches cannot be accepted as “true” or “false,” but only with the spirit of judgement and wisdom that the author of Ecclesiastes (perhaps his favourite book, if he had one) asks his reader to apply.
Ingersoll is never “wrong” at an emotional level; his light in the darkness was the only light many people saw, even if they paid money to see it because it was the only show in town–legitimate verbal scandal in the calico and gingham emporiums of smalltown America. It is hard to imagine anyone surviving an engagement like that in the current American political and religious climate without causing a riot, a thing that would sadden almost any of the great progressives of the nineteenth century, and Republicans at that.
Among later freethinkers and humanists in America–I have no doubt at all–Ingersoll has been read more often than Hume or Voltaire. Partly this is a matter of style: even in transcribed form, Ingersoll is a good read. He was the apostle who transmitted the plain but often plainly wrong message of the tracts to thousands of unbelievers using a showman’s method that would inspire later shapers of the secular movement. Of his influence there can be no doubt. But giving him the same stomping room he gave the great god of the savages, Jehovah, Robert Ingersoll was a man of his time.
__________________
There are two full-length studies of Ingersoll, both with extensive bibliographies: Clarence H. Cramer, Royal Bob: The Life of Robert Ingersoll (1952), is the best of the earlier studies, although not as good as Orvin Prentiss Larson, American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll (1962). A good account of the intellectual movement to which Ingersoll belonged is in Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (1943; 3d ed. 1964). Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers (Metropolitan, 2004) is a valuable resource for the history of American secular thought and contains valuable information on Ingersoll and his time. Many of the works of the Dresden collection are available online at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingermm1.htm, from which quotations used here are taken.
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Published: November 13, 2011
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15 Responses to “Robert Ingersoll: God and Man in Peoria”
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Demonax
November 19, 2011 at 3:08 pm
You write “Shakespeare loved the Bible”. Where is this found ?. Did he say so? Do we know anything much about Shakespeare beyond what is written in his plays and can we interpret plays to such an extent as to declare the authors feelings for items not of his text?
Ingersoll might have felt you like myths too much.
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Andrew
November 20, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Thanks. Very well written. Ingersoll was a brave man, but, like you say, a limited thinker who could only see myths as deceptions of “primitive” peoples. A very, very simplistic view which is completely at odds with history.
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Miscellanea « The House of Vines says:
November 21, 2011 at 8:11 pm
[...] Joseph Hoffmann provides a biographical sketch of Robert Ingersoll: He was admired for his language by Walt Whitman (“a fiery blast for new [...]
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Andrew
November 23, 2011 at 7:41 pm
“You write “Shakespeare loved the Bible”. Where is this found ?”
He made massive use of Biblical allusions. This may not be a sign of “love” in the technical sense, but the author wasn’t using it in that sense.
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steph
November 24, 2011 at 10:35 am
Read Shakespeare… it’s saturated in biblical story, symbols, images and ideas. It’s a common mistake of the irreligious to assume Shakespeare was an atheist – like them. As is written by the author of this essay, ‘he’s been a Roman Catholic, a puritan, a whoremonger, a pedophile, and a myth. Let him be an atheist this week. Except he wasn’t. And the Bible he loved, alas, wasn’t the one that was around for most of his halycon, I mean salad, days.’ He was immersed in Bible story and like all smart Elizabethans, he had the right jaundiced view of the Church. It was part of being Elizabethan. But he was no atheist – no atheism existed in his world. The accusation arose in the nineteenth century by atheists who wanted to identify themselves with the world’s greatest cultural masters.
“The language, symbolism, and content of the Bible infuse all writing in the period, Shakespeare’s no less. There is a whole school of criticism that tries to show that the plays are deeply, even primarily, structured by theological concepts.
In this context, Hamlet is shown to be divided not only between thought and action, but between Old and New Testament teachings on justice and revenge: the Ghost expects life for life, eye for eye (Exodus 21:23), whereas Christian teaching starts with Saint Luke, “But I say unto you which hear, love your enemies, do good to them which hate you . . . and unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other” (Luke 6: 27), and Saint Paul, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12: 19). Humans* were to be patient; it was for God to exact vengeance.
Justice and mercy
These same passages urge that humans exercise mercy when judging one another. That Shakespeare was acutely aware of them is shown by the fact that the title of the one play that is taken from the Bible, Measure for Measure, is taken from the same chapter of Luke that is quoted above:
Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned; forgive and ye shall be forgiven . . . for with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again. (Luke 6: 36-38)
The Old Testament has a passage on mercy that is echoed by Portia. Her famous speech on the quality of mercy that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” (4.1.182-200) closely follows Ecclesiasticus 25:19 (“O how faire a thyng is mercy in the tyme of anguish and trouble: it is like a cloud of rayne that commeth in the tyme of drought”).”
http://www.montreat.edu/dking/Shakespeare/SHAKESPEAREANDTHEBIBLE.htm
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steph
November 24, 2011 at 7:22 pm
I didn’t really answer your ‘love’ question – but the connection between Shakespeare’s use of biblical literature and love of it, is logical. To read Shakespeare is to appreciate the emotion with which he has absorbed the biblical imagery and concepts to express and enhance his own visual perceptions of humanity and reality and myth. One couldn’t not love the literature of the Bible, to write what Shakespeare wrote.
While the Bible was central to Shakespeare, he was not uncritical of it. I suspect however, any ‘love’ Ingersoll had for Shakespeare, was more pretention than appreciation. He appears to have failed to acknowledge the heart and soul of Shakespeare’s use of his environment and language, and lacks appreciation of Shakespeare’s value and passion for biblical literature.
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Andrew
November 24, 2011 at 9:41 pm
“But he was no atheist – no atheism existed in his world.”
Atheism certainly did exist in Shakespeare’s world. Two of his contemporaries, Marlowe and Greene, were probably atheists.
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steph
November 25, 2011 at 12:08 am
http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/culture/
None of them were ‘atheists’. Atheism didn’t exist in Elizabethan times any more than it did in Aristotle’s. He was baptised Roman Catholic and any controversy was over the accusation of his supposed closet Anglicanism. That is how leap to an assumption of atheism arose in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century atheists attempted to claim smart, witty, insightful masters of literary history as their own. All intelligent Elizabethans were critical of the Church but that is not ‘atheism’.
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Andrew
November 25, 2011 at 6:39 pm
“The realm is divided into three parties, the Papists, the Atheists, and the Protestants.” – George Carleton to Sir William Cecil, 1572
“There is no sect now in England so scattered as Atheism.” – Thomas Nashe, 1590s
“There is no heresy which strives with more zeal to spread and sow and multiply itself than atheism.” – Francis Bacon, Meditations Sacrae, 1597
“Atheism in England is more to be feared than Popery.” – Richard Greenham, late 1500s
“As Iodelle, a French tragical poet, being an epicure and an atheist, made a pitifull end; so our tragical poet Marlow for his Epicurisme and Atheisme had a tragical death.” – Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598
“Considering then that there is no nation under the sun so barbarous (nor ever was) but aimed at the worship of God … it appeareth to be a most vain and foolish conceit, which Atheists sometimes utter, namely, that religion is nothing else but a matter of policy, or a politic device of human invention…” – Henry Smith, God’s Arrow Against Atheists, 1637
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steph
November 25, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Accusations of ‘atheism’ in Elizabethan times are not evidence of a rejection of the god idea. They’re evidence of the accused criticising the orthodoxy and power or the Church. Post Reformation in the religious turmoil, of course there were accusations of loss of religion when people crossed to the other side. Not atheism. It wasn’t there. There were deists and pantheists and others with healthy jaundiced views of their Church, but no atheists. The evidence of science hadn’t provided alternatives. The first denial of the existence of ‘God’ didn’t occur until the mid 18th century.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 25, 2011 at 9:30 pm
@ Andrew: You are guilty of anachronism most foul. Since ancient times the word for not believing in the established gods has been atheists, literally “without” (not denial of), as educated Elizabethans were well aware. One of your quotations actually preserves the other favourite charge against dissenters: Epicureanism (pickers and choosers who cater for their own taste in religious matters, a charge leveled at the Christian heertics by orthodox bishops). Even the early Christians were maligned with the word atheist since they denied the Roman pantheon. The habit stuck, well into post Reformation times. But Stephanie is most certainly correct, that the “atheists” are those who don’t slot into the already complex divide between papists (Catholics) and the newly established National Church (later, the CofE). Provision would later be made for nonconformists, within limits, but not everyone could be assimilated. Those who dissented, especially Unitarians and free church folk, and after the 18th century deists, were thus atheists, in that sense and were rejecting specific doctrines of the two fundamental divisions, Catholic and English Protestant. I am sorry to disappoint you, but it is just this kind of sloppy sourcing that creates confusion. You need to read a lot more history and not just the quotations page of Secular websites. Words have contexts: where did you think the word atheist came from? Did you suppose that it has always meant the same thing it meant after 1914? Language doesn’t work that way.
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Andrew
November 26, 2011 at 8:44 am
Strange reactions. First, the assumption that I haven’t read history or know what I’m talking about, and must be simply plucking quotes from “secular websites” without any knowledge or understanding of their context; second, that the quotes cited don’t actually mean what they appear to mean, and 16th Century “atheism” wasn’t atheism in the modern sense but merely “criticism” of the church.
The quotes are sourced from the following books:
Buckley, George. Atheism in the English Renaissance. (1932)
Riggs, Christopher. The World of Christopher Marlowe. (2004)
Levy. L.W. Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy. (1981)
Many more quotes similar to the ones I posted, plus context, can be provided from these books.
It is quite clear that Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Atheism” (1597) is indeed referring to our modern conception of atheism, not merely “those who don’t slot into the already complex divide between papists (Catholics) and the newly established National Church (later, the CofE).” The essential arguments from the essay are found here:
http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Bacon_Atheism.html
It is also quite clear from all of the documentation surrounding Christopher Marlowe that the allegations of atheism lodged at him are atheism in the modern sense of the word. The witnesses stress that Marlowe was irreverent toward Christian doctrine itself, not just the established churches, and showed “sound reasons” for a doctrine of atheism. Whether these charges were “trumped up” or not, the testimonies show that the witnesses understood what we still conceive of as atheism.
Remembraunces of wordes & matters against Ric Cholmeley.
That he saieth & verely beleveth that one Marlowe is able to showe more
sounde reasons for Atheisme then any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie & that Marloe tolde him that hee hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir walter Raliegh & others.
The Baines Note
Marlow … almost into every Company he Cometh he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue both by mine oth and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Cristianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped, he saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of Contrarieties oute of the Scripture which he hath giuen to some great men who in Convenient time shal be named. When these thinges shal be Called in question the witnes shal be produced.”
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steph
November 26, 2011 at 3:38 pm
@Andrew
Crass anachronistic accusations and accusations by Marlowe’s contemporaries who were affiliates and leaders of the church Marlowe was accused of defecting from, the Church of the monarchy, are not evidence of a modern sense of atheism and rejection of god ideas. And what is clear about Francis Bacon’s essay, speaking of ‘our religion’, rejection of which is atheism and denial of God, is that he wrote it in the 16th century. The modern sense has been established in relation chiefly to science, which was, to say the least, frugal in any matter that would have touched belief.
You are guilty of gullibility and anachronism for believing the charges of his contemporary accusers and interpreting ‘atheism’ in the modern context and perpetuating an anachronism in out of date scholarship (which does not agree with modern critical scholarship). Reports of charges of ‘atheism’ are not evidence of guilt of atheism in the modern sense.
All charges of atheism must rely on questionable hearsay, brittle anecdotal evidence, and dubitable secondary sources (such as confessions extracted through torture), unavoidable reliance on fraudulent, controvertible documents, to incompletely reconstruct his life.
Marlowe’s disappearances were attributed to the idea that he was most likely working as a spy for the understandably paranoid Queen Elizabeth. Chris Rigg goes into great detail about the emerging Jesuit mission to England, the mounting threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots, and the war with Spain breaking out in 1585, resulting in the need for spies. The Cambridge administration was alerted that Marlowe might be one of the crooked double agents who planned to defect to a Catholic seminary at Rheims in northern France. All types of conspiracy theories about Marlowe’s life and end have been floated, even that he was a follower and friend of Raleigh’s, there is no evidence that such a notoriously proud man, had an ongoing relationship with the poor scholar and popular playwright.
All ideas have histories and evolutions, the idea of atheism is no different.
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Andrew
November 26, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Have you actually read The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs (2004)? Not that would actually change your mind about anything, but there is a lot more to the story than merely “crass anachronistic accusations and accusations by Marlowe’s contemporaries who were affiliates and leaders of the church Marlowe was accused of defecting from.” Robert Greene openly admits that he and “the famous gracier of tragedians” (Marlowe) are/were atheists in “Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit” — not that that apparently matters to you.
So Bacon’s essay “Of Atheism” is not actually about atheism at all then? Just a defense of the Church of England from defectors? Boy, do I feel stupid. Can you point me to some Bacon scholars who agree with you?
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steph
November 27, 2011 at 7:27 am
@Andrew
Bacon scholars who agree with me? Yes, Classical and Patristic Philologist and Historian of Religions, Distinguished Professor R Joseph Hoffmann and other respectable literary critical historians. Atheism is the denial of doctrine and there is nothing ‘clear’ about it being used in the modern sense at all. It would be a miracle indeed for an Elizabethan use a word like that in its modern sense since the modern sense has been established in relation chiefly to science, which was, to say the least, frugal in any matter that would have touched belief. It continues to be more proof of the historical malformation of atheists that they are so amazingly historically gullible.
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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
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: November 25, 2011
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2 Responses to “On Not Quite Believing in God”
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montag46
November 26, 2011 at 4:54 am
“This crazy Rabbi is completely right. Atheism does imply a moral vacuum, whether we like it or not…”
Great article, and I shall brood over it for at least a week longer.
Even though you mentioned the flying spaghetti monster, you did forget to mention that the expression “crazy Rabbi” comes from he antiquarian joke with the punch line:
“Crazy Rabbi, Kicks are for Trids!”
Reply
Scott
November 28, 2011 at 10:48 pm
@montag46,
Exactly, it impies a moral vacuum that the serious atheists are concerned will filling. The questions is with what.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Letting Go of Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann
Let’s pretend the year is 1748 and you have just come away from reading a new treatise by David Hume called an “Enquiry concerning Miracles.” Let’s assume you are a believing Christian who reads the Bible daily, as your grandmother taught you. You normally listened to her because in her day most people still could not read, and if families owned a book at all it was likely to be the Bible.
Part of the reason you believe in God, and all of the reason you believe that Jesus was his son, is tied to the supernatural authority of scripture. You have been taught that it is inspired—perhaps the very word of God, free from error and contradiction—passed down in purity and integrity from generation to generation, and a reliable witness to the origins of the world, humankind and other biological species.
You know many verses by heart: Honor your father and your mother. Blessed are the poor. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The love of money is the root of all evil. –Lots of stuff about disobedient children and the value of being poor, confirmed in your own experience: there are many more poor than rich people, and children often don’t listen to their parents.
Based on the bits you have read and heard preached about, you think the Bible is a wise and useful book. If you are a member of an emerging middle or merchant class—whether you live in Boston or London or Edinburgh—you haven’t read enough history to wonder if the historical facts of the Bible are true, and archeology and evolutionary biology haven’t arisen to prove them false.
The story of creation, mysterious as it may seem, is a pretty good story: It will do. As to the deeper truths of the faith, if you are Catholic, your church assures you that the trinity is a mystery, so you don’t need to bother with looking for the word in the Bible, where it doesn’t occur. If you are a churchgoing enthusiast who can’t wait for Sunday mornings to wear your new frock or your new vest, it doesn’t bother you that there’s no reference to a nine o’clock sermon in the New Testament. If you are a Baptist and you like singing and praying loud, your church discipline and tradition tells you to ignore that part where Jesus told his followers to pray in silence and not like the Pharisees who parade their piety and pile phrase upon phrase. After all, the parson has said, we don’t see many pharisees on the streets of Bristol or Newport.
But what really convinces you that what you do as a Christian of any denomination is the right thing to do is what theologians in the eighteenth century, the great period after the Newtonian revolution of the seventeenth, called “Christian Evidences.”
The phrase was introduced to make the supernatural elements of the Bible (and for Christians, the New Testament in particular) more up to date, more in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Reasonable men and women who thought the medieval approach to religion was fiddle faddle—something only the Catholics still believed, especially the Irish and Spanish—had begun to equate reason with the progress of Protestant Christianity. Newton had given this position a heads up when he suggested that his entire project in physics was to prove that the laws of nature were entirely conformable to belief in a clockwork God, the “divine mechanic.”
Taking their cue, or miscue, from Newton’s belief in an all-powerful being who both established the laws of nature and, as “Nature’s God,” could violate them at will, it seemed as though miracles had been given a new lease of life. No one much bothered to read the damning indictment by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, twelve years Newton’s junior, who had argued that belief in a God whose perfection was based on the laws of nature could not be proved by exceptions to his own rules. —You can play basketball on a tennis court, but it doesn’t explain the rules of tennis very well.
Anyway, you’re comfortable with Newton, and the idea of Christian “evidences,” and all those lovely stories about impudent wives being turned into pillars of salt, the ark holding Noah and his family teetering atop mount Ararat (wherever it was), those vile Egyptians being swept up in the waters of the Red Sea, and the miraculous acts of kindness and healing, and bread and fishes recounted in the New Testament.
As a Christian, you have seen all these tales as a kind of prelude to the really big story, the one about a Jewish peasant (except you don’t really think of him that way) getting himself crucified for no reason at all, and surprising everyone by rising from the dead. True, your medieval Catholic ancestors with their short, brutish and plague-besotted lives needed the assurance of a literal heaven more than you do in the eighteenth century. But in general, you like the idea of resurrection, or at least of eternal life, and you agree with Luther—
“The sacred Book foretold it all: How death by death should come to fall.”
In other words, you believe in the Bible because it’s one of the only books you have ever read—and almost certainly not even it, cover to cover. And in a vague, unquestioning, socially proper kind of way, you believe the book carries, (to use the language of Hume’s contemporary Dr Tillotson) the attestation of divine authorship, and in the circularity that defines this discussion prior to Hume, “divine attestation” is based on the miracles.
Divinity schools in England and America, which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1820s, while the British universities came through unscathed thanks to laws against nonconformists), required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences.
The fortress of belief in an age of explanation became, ironically, the unexplained and the unusual.
By 1885, Amherst, Smith, Williams, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Dartmouth and Princeton colleges mandated the study of the evidences for Christian belief, on the assumption that the study of the Bible was an important ingredient of a well-rounded moral education.
Sophia Smith, the foundress of Smith College, stated in the third article of her will that “[because] all education should be for the glory of God and the good of man, I direct that the Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and studied in said college, and that all the discipline shall be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical Christian religion.”
But all was not well, even in 1885. Hume’s “On Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
Within his treatise, Hume, like a good Scotsman, appealed to common sense: You have never seen a brick suspended in the air. Wood will burn and fire will be extinguished by water. Food does not multiply by itself with a snap of my fingers. Water does not turn into wine. And in a deceptive opening sentence, he says, “…and what is more probable than that all men shall die.”
In fact, “nothing I call a miracle has ever happened in the ordinary course of events.” It’s not a miracle if a man who seems to be in good health drops dead. It is a miracle if a dead man comes back to life—because this has never been witnessed by any of us. We only have reports, and even these can be challenged by the ordinary laws of evidence: How old are these reports? What is the reliability of the reporter? Under what circumstances were they written? Within what social, cultural and intellectual conditions did these reports originate?
Hume’s conclusion is so simple and so elegant that I sometimes wish it, and not the Ten Commandments, were what Americans in Pascagoula, Mississippi, were asking to be posted on classroom walls:
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish…
—So what is more likely, that a report about a brick being suspended in air is true, or that a report about a brick being suspended in air is based on a misapprehension? That a report about a man rising from the dead is true, or that a report about a man rising from the dead is more easily explained as a case of mistaken identity or fantasy—or outright fiction.
The so-called “natural supernaturalism” of the Unitarians and eventually other Protestant groups took its gradual toll in the colleges I have mentioned. At SmithCollege, beginning in the 1920s, Henry Elmer Barnes taught his students:
We must construct the framework of religion on a tenable superstructure. To do so is to surrender these essential characteristics of the older religion: (1) the reality and deity of the biblical God; (2) the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus and His special relevance for contemporary religion; and (3) the belief in immortality.
Sophia Smith’s college had taken a new turn. At Williams, James Bissett Pratt began his course in philosophy by telling his students, “Gentlemen, learn to get by without the Bible.”
At Yale, the Dwight Professor of theology in 1933 repudiated all the miracles of the Bible and announced to his students that
“The Jesus Christ of the Christian tradition must die, so that he can live.”
I need to remind the casual reader: I am speaking of nineteenth century America, not Tübingen and certainly not Oxford. The American theological establishment had been so radicalized by the transcendental revolution after Emerson’s 1835 Divinity School Address that miracles had been pronounced, in most of New England, and using Emerson’s own word, “a monster.”
Emerson
This little reflection on Hume and how his commentary on miracles changed forever the way people looked at the Gospels is really designed to indicate that in educated twentieth century America, between roughly 1905 and 1933, the battle for the miraculous, Christian evidences, and the supernatural was all but lost—or rather, it had been won by enlightened, commonsensical teachers in our best universities and colleges.
Of course it was not won in the churches and backwoods meeting houses of what we sometimes call the American heartland, let alone in preacher-colleges of (what would become) the Bible belt or the faux-gothic seminaries of the Catholic Church. If anyone wants to know how superstition survived in this inauspicious climate, the answer would have to be sought in relative population statistics in the Back Bay and Arkansas.
Hume’s logic and the theological consequences of his logic barely penetrated the evangelical mindset. And if I were to comment, I would say that we are now involved in wars throughout the world because some people, in America, the Middle East and elsewhere, still believe they will rise from the dead and go on to lead a life in paradise, qualitatively better than the life they had led in this world. In other words, the failure not to believe in miracles has had consequences that are not merely theological or philosophical but political. America, the country where miracles were first to fall, is at war with its theological others over whose afterlife is true.
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in the early twentieth century, the “social gospel.”
He wasn’t new—actually, he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social covenant based on concern for the “least among us.”
There is no doubt in the world that these words sparked the imaginations of a thousand social prophets reformers, and even revolutionaries.
In Germany and America, and belatedly in England, something called the “higher criticism” was catching on.
Its basic premise was that the tradition about Jesus was formed slowly and in particular social conditions not equivalent to those in Victorian England or Bismarck’s Germany.
Questions had to be asked about why a certain tradition about Jesus arose, what need it might have fulfilled within a community of followers, and how it might have undergone change as those needs changed.
For example, the belief that he was the Jewish messiah, after an unexpected crucifixion, might have led to the belief that he was the son of God who had prophesied his own untimely death. The fact that the community was impoverished, illiterate, and a persecuted religious minority might have led the community to invent sayings like “blessed are the poor,” “blessed are you who are persecuted,” and “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.”
But if this is so, then the Gospels really weren’t the biography of Jesus at all. They were the biography of what the community believed about him based on their own cramped perspective and needs in a very small corner of the world at a particular time in history. How could this story have universal importance or timeless significance?
The Victorian church was as immune to the German school of thought as Bishop Wilberforce was to Darwin’s theories—in some ways even more so. Even knowledgeable followers of the German school of higher criticism tried to find ways around its conclusions.
Matthew Arnold, for example, thought the Gospels were based on the misunderstanding of Jesus by his own followers, which led them to misrepresent him. But then Arnold went on to say that this misunderstanding led the Gospel writers to preserve Jesus’ teaching, although in a distorted and conflated form, more or less accurately. They added their words and ideas to his, but in their honest ignorance was honesty.
Arnold’s influence was minimal. The miraculous deeds were gone; now people were fighting over the words.
John Dominic Crossan
When the twentieth century hit, few people in the mainline Protestant churches and almost no one in the Catholic Church of 1905 were prepared for the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the eighteenth and nineteenth century attempts to piece together a coherent picture of the hero of the Gospels.
Schweitzer pronounced the quests a failure, because none of them dealt with the data within the appropriate historical framework. No final conclusions were possible. We can know, because of what we know about ancient literature and ancient Roman Palestine, what Jesus might have been like—we can know the contours of an existence. But not enough for a New York Times obituary.
Beyond tracing this line in shifting sands, we get lost in contradiction. If Jesus taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations. His teaching, if we were to hear it, Schweitzer said, would sound mad to us. He might have preached the end of the world. If he did, he would not have spent his time developing a social agenda or an ethics textbook for his soon-to-be-raptured followers. (Paul, whoever he was and whatever he was trying to do, certainly knows nothing about ethics—just some interim rules to be followed before the second coming of a divine man named Jesus).
Schweitzer flirts most with the possibility that Jesus was an eschatological prophet in an era of political and social gloom for the Jews. But Schweitzer’s shocking verdict is that the Jesus of the church and the Jesus of popular piety—equally—never existed. Whatever sketch you come up with will be a sketch based on the image you have already formed.
He was not alone. The Catholic priest Alfred Loisy (d. 1940), before his excommunication in 1908, wrote a book called The Gospel and the Church (1903), in which he lampooned the writings of the reigning German theologian Adolph von Harnack (d. 1930). Harnack had argued that the Gospel had permanent ethical value given to it by someone who possessed (what he called) God-consciousness: Jesus was the ethical teacher par excellence.
Loisy responded, drawing on his gallic charms, “Professor Harnack has looked deep into the well for the face of the historical Jesus, but what he has seen is his own liberal Protestant face.”
In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York 1917, a young graduate of the Colgate Divinity School named Walter Rauschenbusch was looking at the same miserable social conditions that were being described by everyone from Jane Addams to Theodore Dreiser in literature. Rauschenbusch thought that the churches had aligned themselves with robber barons, supported unfair labor practices, winked at income disparity and ignored the poor. So, for Rauschenbusch, the Gospel was all about a first century revolutionary movement opposed to privilege and injustice. In his most famous book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, he writes, “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”
Like Harnack before and dozens of social gospel writers later, the facts hardly mattered. Whether Jesus actually said the things he is supposed to have said or they were said for him hardly mattered. Whether he was understood or misrepresented hardly mattered.
Liberal religion had made Jesus a cipher for whatever social agenda it wanted to pursue, just as in the slavery debates of the nineteenth century, biblical authority was invoked to defend buying and selling human beings. Once the historical Jesus was abandoned, Jesus could be made to say whatever his managers wanted him to say. Unfortunately, ignoring Schweitzer’s scholarly cautions, the progressives failed to demonstrate how the words of a first century Galilean prophet, apparently obsessed with the end of a corrupt social order, could be used to reform a morally bankrupt economic system.
For those of us who follow the Jesus quest wherever it goes, it’s impressive that the less we know about Jesus—the less we know for sure—the more the books that can be written.
In what must surely be the greatest historical irony of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, for example, members of the “Jesus Seminar,” founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to “just the real ones,” came to the conclusion that 82 percent of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title “Messiah,” that he did not share a final meal with his disciples, and that he did not invent the Lord’s Prayer.
But they come to these conclusions in more than a hundred books of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus.
The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventors want him to be: prophet, wise man, magician, sage, bandit, revolutionary, gay, French, Southern Baptist or Cajun. As I wrote in a contribution to George Wells’s 1996 The Jesus Legend, the competing theories about who Jesus really was, based on a shrinking body of reliable information, makes the theory that he never existed a welcome relief.
In a Free Inquiry article from 1993, I offended the Seminar by saying that the Jesus of their labors was a “talking doll with a repertoire of 33 genuine sayings; pull his string and he blesses the poor.”
But all is not lost that seems lost. When we look at the history of this case, we can draw some conclusions.
We don’t know much about Jesus. What we do know, however, and have known since the serious investigation of the biblical text based on sound critical principles became possible is that there are things we can exclude.
Jesus was not Aristotle. Despite what a former American president thought, he wasn’t a philosopher. He did not write a book on ethics. If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood. I think that is likely.
We don’t know what he thought about the messiah or himself. The Gospels are cagey on the subject and can yield almost any answer you want. He was neither a social conservative nor a liberal democrat. The change he (or his inventors) advocated was regressive rather than progressive. But it’s also possible that we don’t even know enough to say that much.
He doesn’t seem to have had much of a work ethic; he tells his followers to beg from door to door, go barefoot (or not), and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. He might have been a magician; the law (Ex. xxii. 17 [A. V. 18]) which punishes sorcery with death speaks of the witch and not of the wizard, and exorcism was prevalent in the time of Jesus, as were magical amulets, tricks, healings, love potions and charms—like phylacteries. But we can’t be sure. If he was a magician, he was certainly not interested in ethics.
After a point, the plural Jesuses available to us in the Gospels become self-negating, and even the conclusion that the Gospels are biographies of communities becomes unhelpful: they are the biographies of different perspectives often arising within the same community. Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.
What we need to be mindful of, however, is the danger of using greatly reduced, demythologized and under-impressive sources as though no matter what we do, or what we discover, the source—the Gospel—retains its authority. It is obviously true that somehow the less certain we can be about whether x is true, the more possibilities there are for x. But when I took algebra, we seldom defined certainty as the increase in a variable’s domain. The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable.
We need to be mindful that history is a corrective science: when we know more than we did last week, we have to correct last week’s story. The old story loses its authority. Biblical scholars and theologians often show the immaturity of their historical skills by playing with history. They have shown, throughout the twentieth century, a remarkable immunity to the results of historical criticism, as though relieving Jesus of the necessity of being a man of his time and culture—however that might have been—entitles him to be someone who is free to live in our time, rule on our problems, and lend godly authority to our ethical dilemmas.
No other historical figure or legendary hero can be abused in quite the same way. We leave Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Cleopatra in Hellenistic Egypt, and Churchill buried at the family plot in Bladon near Oxford. The quest for the historical Jesus is less a search for an historical artifact than a quest for ways to defend his continued relevance against the tides of irrelevance that erode the ancient image.
The use of Jesus as an ethical teacher has to go the way of his divinity and miracles, in the long run. And when I say this, I’m not speaking as an atheist. I am simply saying what I think is historically true, or true in terms of the way history deals with its own.
It is an act of courage, an act of moral bravery, to let go of God, and his only begotten Son, the second person of the blessed Trinity whose legend locates him in Nazareth during the Roman occupation. It’s (at least) an act of intellectual honesty to say that what we would like to believe to be the case about him might not have been the case at all. To recognize that Jesus—whoever he was–did not have answers for our time, could not have foreseen our problems, much less resolve them, frees us from the more painful obligation to view the Bible as a moral constitution.
The most powerful image in the New Testament, for me, is the one that is probably today the one most Christians would be happy to see hidden away.
Its art-historical representations vary from merely pagan, to childish, to clearly outlandish. I cannot think of one that does what I would like to see done with the event–the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. It is simply too self-evidently mythological to appeal to liberal Christians, and not especially in favour among conservatives–though I have never understood why.
I see the Ascension as the ultimate symbol of the absence of God, the end of illusion. The consciousness of the never-resurrected Christ, the ultimately mortal man, dawning on the crowd. It is presented as glorification; but in reality it is perfectly human, perfectly natural: the way of all flesh: I am with you always, until the end of time. It is the unknown author’s “Goodnight sweet prince.” It is the metaphorical confirmation of what Schweitzer taught us: “He comes to us as one unknown.”
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Published: November 25, 2011
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12 Responses to “Letting Go of Jesus”
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subayaitori
November 25, 2011 at 9:53 pm
Joe, this was beautifully written.
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Letting Go of Jesus « CHRISTIAN PARENT HUB- CHRISTIAN PARENT NEWS AGGREGATOR says:
November 26, 2011 at 12:13 am
[...] Article FROM http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/letting-go-of-jesus-2/ SPONSOR- Christian Games for kids-fun and faith based curriculum GET YOUR FREE PASS [...]
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John Anngeister
November 27, 2011 at 12:16 am
Joseph, good point about the inverse proportion existing between the certainty a scholar allows in regard to Jesus and the resemblance of his ‘scholarly’ portrayal to himself. You mention Loisy’s call-out of Harnack, but even Crossan’s own autobiography, for example, portrays a creative irish peasant who was quite the rebel.
But don’t you think it odd that the one silver thread flowing through these free-hand modern self-portraits is that all of them (with the possible exception of Harnack’s) have a certain similarity to the view of Jesus which must have been held by Caiaphas and his father-in-law Annas?
No surprise to me that the external ‘winners’ of history’s religious episodes get to call the shots about who and what they defeated and for what reason and what really went down in getting the new man out of the way.
Nor should it surprise that so much critical historical scholarship seems to be still playing into Caiaphas’ hand – our bedrock in this kind of writing is nothing more fancy than the obvious fact that Jesus was a Jew living under Caiaphas. If this constitutes profundity de jure and de rigour, it stands to reason that the broad outlline of every view of Jesus by a non-believer must portray a man who was perhaps very good and decent but who after all got carried away with himself and endangered the nation.
Harnack was guilty of constructing a Jesus so sweet that he could never have been crucified. I’m thinking it would make a worthy study in this century to disover a portrait of Jesus which is strikingly different than what we might expect from a busy and wealthy high priest with blook in his eye, or any other human judge and accuser among his contemporaries.
Your writing is almost impossible to criticize – did your old teachers ever tell you that? But two material corrections: (1) I think Hume’s treatise on Miracles was first published in 1747 not 1757 (my authority is Richard Wollheim,1963). It was included in his Philosophical Essays on Human Understanding (first version of the Enquiry). (2) You write ‘John Bissett Pratt’ but I’m sure you are referring to James Bissett Pratt.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 27, 2011 at 8:25 am
Thank you John for the corrections. :-)
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John Anngeister
November 27, 2011 at 11:54 am
You’re welcome. And I’ll take this opportunity to correct myself as well … I meant the historian’s Jewish Jesus to be a profundity of a class that’s not ‘de jure’ but (I hope) ‘de jour.’ And I woke up this morning realizing I had gaffed ‘de rigueur.’
And what I imply the high priest to have in his eye (though not on his hands) is not blook but ‘blood.’
Sorry I have to be so tedious.
John Anngeister
November 27, 2011 at 3:50 pm
You’re going to hate this.
Wollheim writes that Hume gave the go ahead for publishing the Miracles essay among the other ‘Philosophical Essays’ in 1747, but a look down the paragraph shows that the book was not published until April, 1748. So sorry (I checked too hasty last night, but double-checked this morning).
rjosephhoffmann
November 27, 2011 at 4:08 pm
No problem – thank you!
Roger Parvus
November 28, 2011 at 3:23 am
As always, very interesting. But two minor material corrections: 1. Alfred Loisy was a Catholic priest but was never a Jesuit 2. He wrote “The Gospel and the Church” before — not after — his excommunicaton. The book was published in 1903. He was excommunicated in 1908.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 28, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Thanks for the correction: it is true that Loisy was not a Jesuit, a mistake made unforgivable by the fact that the standard reprint of the Gospel and the Church is my own. Tyrell, the English Jesuit was probably meant; but Loisy slipped in, as he always does. Thanks also because I always accept material corrections with immense gratitude.
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barrettpashak
November 28, 2011 at 1:02 pm
As usual among Christians and post-Christians, you completely ignore Jewish scholarship on this subject. It has been said that the Higher Criticism is the Higher Antisemitism. It seems to me that it is getting harder and harder for non-Jews to see anything at all of themselves in Christ, and so they conclude that he is of no importance.
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steph
December 9, 2011 at 1:43 pm
This is quite some presumption you make barrett. It is also completely inaccurate. This is an essay on a website with other essays. It is not a monograph. The author is not obliged to provide a bibliography giving details of all the scholarship read and taken into account. The author will not have ignored the fine scholarship of Amy-Jill Levine, Jacob Neusner and Geza Vermes (once again a liberal Jew) among others. But with any biblical scholarship that is ‘good’, it is critical, not ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ or even ‘secular’.
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franklinpercival
December 3, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Good thing I wasn’t hoping to use this as light bed-time reading. Thanks, f.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Atheism’s Little Idea
by rjosephhoffmann
Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig. Ihre Gottheit steht außer Zweifel. Ihr, Faust.
I do apologize. It seems that everything I write these days is anti-atheist. And who can blame my unbelieving brethren for assuming I am fighting for the other side. Perhaps I should be, since modern atheism is hardly worth defending.
To be brutal, I cannot imagine a time in the history of unbelief when atheism has appeared more hamfisted, puling, ignorant or unappealing.
Is this because its savants are also described by those adjectives, or because their fans are just being fans, merchandising the cause: t-shirts, coffee mugs, quick fixes, blasphemy competitions, and billboard campaigns? (Axial tilt is the reason for the season: Honest Jethro, I thought I’d never stop laughing). I mean, who are we unless someone is offended by who we are? What good is blasphemy if no one is getting their knickers in a knot anymore, for Christ’s sake. How can we “come out” when there’s no one standing outside the closet to yell “Surprise!” at? And, by the way you churchy jerks: we are victims.
Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important. And that is a shame, because God was a big idea, and the rejection of the existence of God was also a big idea, once upon a time.
There was nothing “mistaken” about belief in God, and the fact that there is probably no god does not lessen his significance. No distant galaxy of more intelligent beings has sent us an error message about the God thing. God is no more “wrong” than a carriage is wrong in relation to a JAG XKR-S. Expensive strokes for modern folks, but as carriage is to sleek design and comfortable travel, so god is to modern understanding. Notice: I did not say science. I said modern understanding, because only a portion of modern understanding is shaped by science and god is not an object of scientific thought. If the question of God could be reduced to a simple scientific verdict, the eminently nasal Richard Dawkins could shut his repetitive trap. As it is he has to keep talking.
Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus. These people tend to think that there are two kinds of questions: the questions we have already answered and the questions we will answer tomorrow. When they were even smaller than they are now, their father asked them every six weeks, “Whadja get in math and science?” When they had children of their own, they asked them, “Whadja get in science and math?” Which goes to show, people can change.
They eschew mystery, unless it’s connected to a telescopic lens or an electron microscope or a neutrinometer at the Hadron Collider at CERN. “Mystery” is not a state to be enjoyed or celebrated like a good wine or a raven-haired woman with haunting and troubled eyes: it is a temporary state of befuddlement, an unknown sum, an uncharted particle, a glimpse of a distant galaxy, the possibility that Mars supported microbial life.
I get excited by all of these things, incidentally. They are the sorts of things that put the sapiens (twice) in the name of our species. Our ability to figure things out is almost mysterious, but not at all miraculous. In fact, a crucial part of modern humanism is the celebration of our continued and accelerating ability to make sense of the universe and where we are in it.
Strictly speaking we do not need to know as much as we already do to survive and there is no guarantee that knowing more will guarantee our survival. So it’s wondrous indeed that we care enough to put knowledge at the top of the human agenda. The same mysterious attitude it was that pricked us into turning the vast and starry skies into the creation of a divine being who loved us, cared for us, and saved us from oblivion.
We have gradually concluded that this is probably not true: there is no such being–yet the vast and starry skies remain. But we have not yet learned to love the universe as much as we once loved God because, as Stephen Crane once said, we know the universe does not love us back.
We lived before there was science, and we may live at some distant point–come hell, high water, nuclear catatsrophe, plague, and asteroids that don’t miss–after it. I do not regard an umimaginable future unlikely because nothing is more unlikely than that we should understand the world as well as we do now.
Atheism has been of practically no use in formulating this world view. It is certainly true that a majority of scientists are either unbelievers (of some sort) or unconventional believers. But being an atheist was never a prerequisite to good science. Understanding the natural world makes good science, a world in which the mysterious exists but the miraculous does not.
Science reified (with its consort, Reason) has become the convenient alternative deity of small atheists. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of the greatest advances in science were made by “believers.” Without getting into the mud over Einstein (who whether a believer or not was not an atheist), Newton, Mendel, Galileo, Kelvin, Darwin, Faraday, Boyle, Planck, and on and on. But the score at the end of this risky game is not to stack theists against atheists. Most smart people, some of whom are scientists, are not religious in the way religious people want them to be religious or irreligious in the way atheists want them to be atheists.
Max Planck
When did atheism cease to be a big idea? When atheists made God a little idea. When its idea of god shriveled to become a postulate of a new intellectual Darwinism. When they began to identify unbelief with being a woman, a gay, a lesbian, or some other victimized cadre. When they decided that religion is best described as a malicious and retardant cultural force that connives to prevent us being the Alpha Race of super-intelligences and wholly equal beings that nature has in store for us. When they elevated naturalism, already an outmoded view of the universe, to a cause, at the expense of authentic imagination.
Atheism has become a little idea because it is based on the hobgoblin theory of religion: its god is a green elf with a stick, not the master of the universe who controls it with his omniscient will. –Let alone a God so powerful that this will could evolve into Nature’s God–the god of Jefferson and Paine–and then into the laws of nature, as it did before the end of the eighteenth century in learned discussion and debate.
Atheism until fairly recently has been about a disappointing search for god that ends in failure, disillusionment, despair, and finally a new affirmation of human ingenuity that is entirely compatible with both science and art.
That’s the way Sartre thought of it. –A conclusion forced upon us by the dawning recognition that we are both the source and solution to our despair. That is what Walter Lippmann thought in 1929, when he described the erosion of belief by the acids of modernity. This atheism was respectful of the fact that God is a very big idea, a sublime idea, and that abandoning such an idea could not take place as a mere reckoning at one moment in time; it had to happen as a process that included hatred, alienation and what Whitehead saw as “reconciliation” with the idea of God. That is what Leo Strauss meant in 1955 when he wrote in Natural Right and History that the classical virtues would save the modern world from the negative trinity of pragmatism, scientism and relativism, what Irving Babbitt (Lippmann’s teacher at Harvard) meant in declaring war on modernity and science in favour of the “inner check” of classical humanism.
In 1914, on the eve of World War I, a very young Lippmann surveyed the situation in America: “The sanctity of property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste, the dogma of sin, obedience to authority–the rock of ages, in brief, has been blasted for us.” A disllusioned soldier on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen asked poetically in the same year, “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” Ortega y Gasset observed that the goals that furnished yesterday’s landscape with “so definite an architecture” have lost their hold. Those that are to replace them have not yet taken shape, and so the landscape “seems to break up, vacillate, and quake in all directions.” And Yeats, elaborating on the kind of apocalyptic imagery he used in “The Second Coming” recalled: “Nature, steel-bound or stone-built in the nineteenth century, became a flux where man drowned or swam.” We all know the verdict: “Things fall apart,” because the god at the centre could not hold. The image was highly appropriate because it was atomic and prophetic.
My current Angst, to use that hackneyed word correctly, is that most contemporary humanists don’t know what classical humanism is, and most modern atheists won’t even have read the books mentioned in the last paragraph, and what’s more will not care. Their atheism is an uneven mixture of basic physics, evolutionary biology, half cooked theories from the greasy kitchen of cognitive science, assorted political opinions, and what they regard as common sense. They fell into atheism; they did not come to it.
That’s the way recent atheism has been, an old fiddle with one string and one tune to play: We are the world. Get over God. If the almighty being and his raggedy book are relevant at all, it’s simply as a record of all the stupid things human beings can think of: superstitious sorghum, toxic drivel that stopped being relevant in the century its superstitious, toxic tropes were composed.
Was it only ten years ago that relatively dumb people were saying “Duh” to obtuse comments that they were afraid equally dumb people might miss without the exclamation, usually prefaced with, “I mean like.…” The fad was almost as annoying as the similarly valenced interjection “Hello?” which had to be said with the speaker four inches from your face, head tilted. Modern culture, this is to say, has survived the tyranny of not very bright bright-lovers, the opinionated, the anti-obtusity of the obtuse. That’s what the atheist militia, the campaigners, the billboard mongers are: people who just say “Duh” when they are asked about the existence of God.
“In all philosophic theory,” said Whitehead, with Russell the author of Principia Mathematica and thus no slouch when it came to close reasoning and logic., “there is an ultimate which is capable of characterization only through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.” Hello?
Atheist Meeting?
As I completed this blog, a friend forwarded to me an appreciation of a recent meeting of a group called Skepticon, a confederation of compatible atheist groups.
The piece reminds me of nothing so much as the scene in Roald Dahl’s The Witches where the hags come together, disguised under itchy wigs as ordinary housewives, to exchange ”recipes.”
We are assured that skepticism is “a humanism” by one of the keynoters, whatever that is supposed to mean; P Z Myers and Greta Christina justified their rancid approaches to belief by saying that religion “hurts human beings” (well, that’s something to suppose, which is better than nothing to suppose), and a writer named James Croft praised the meeting’s “profoundly humanist…no cop-out approach” while David Silverman, the head of the American Atheists warned that calling yourself a humanist is, in fact, a cop out.
I mention Skepticon because to my mind the meeting is further evidence of the crisis that besets atheism. It cannot quite embrace humanism at the margins, the solution to which for certain ecumenical atheists is to fiddle with the definition of humanism by rolling out the dough ever thinner. It cannot represent skepticism in a methodological way because science and philosophy and even theology have been there and do it. It cannot lay claim to helping people in a direct and positive (as opposed to a merely rhetorical way) because it isn’t, after all, a social welfare movement.
It wants like Pirandello’s lost characters, a cause, an author, something that defines it and sets it apart: science, reason, empathy, concern for human health, but ends up sounding like a nightmare version of a Miss America contestant prompted to give her world peace response.
What atheism and humanism have needed for a long time and once came close to having was a think tank to deal with the theoretical issues of these different movements. It may say worlds about the nature of atheism that this project failed, under the name of secular humanism. Think, O ye of little faith and proud of it, how many temples of learning religion has built. No don’t: you’ll get it wrong.
But for a think tank, you need thinkers. What the atheists are left with is a stage and a microphone.
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Published: November 26, 2011
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77 Responses to “Atheism’s Little Idea”
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The Self-defeating Nature of New Atheism | eChurch Blog says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:37 am
[...] he has written a blog post entitled: Atheism’s Little Idea within which he raises a fascinating [...]
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Vrye Denker
November 26, 2011 at 9:43 am
What a wonderful essay. I must warn you though, you seem to be walking the same path C.S. Lewis did.
Reply
steph
November 26, 2011 at 11:25 am
You jest? I grew up in a secular little world without labels, aware of different faiths around me. I never needed to believe and reading history and evolution of these faiths in my cosy environment, probably ensured prevention of believing any of them anyway. I’m aware of what I know and what I don’t. However when I criticise new atheists and ‘movement humanists’, it gives them the impression that I’m batting for the other team. I always think it’s naively sweet of them to ‘accuse’ me of being ‘religious’, or often, identify me as a ‘Christian’ (whatever that means – sometimes nothing at all, just a label). I couldn’t have anything further from my mind. I’m aware of agnosticism in Christians around me and I’ll defend them for it. But I have no spiritual bone in my body (really bad metaphor). I could never believe. I’m just not ‘anti-religious’ – that’s all. I love tradition and ritual and talking to people about their ideas. Get a bit sick of the atheists though. They’re dull and boring and monotonous and their vocabulary isn’t very broad. And they don’t seem to understand the histories of their own ideas.
As the author says: “[W]ho can blame my unbelieving brethren for assuming I am fighting for the other side”…
Critical thinking and independent minds are anomalies in simplistic worldviews. “Everyone has observed how much more dogs are animated when they hunt in a pack, than when they pursue their game apart. We might, perhaps, be at a loss to explain this phenomenon, if we had not experience of a similar in ourselves.” David Hume, clearly pondering the new atheist phenomenon. “You are either with us or you are against us” (George W Bush). “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt 12.30). Sweet of the new atheists and atheist movement ‘humanists’, to suggest he’s ‘fighting for the other side’ or suggest that he’s on the way to conversion and apologetics. But he’s not defending Church dogma, he’s opposing atheist and ideological simpletons, drama queens, whiners, screamers, appleheads, historically illiterate village idiots and tribalists. I wish they’d all shut their repetitive proverbial traps.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
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chairman bill
November 26, 2011 at 11:29 am
Could someone please explain to me how ‘modern atheism’ & ‘New Atheists’ differ from good old fashioned atheism & old atheists? Do the modern variety lack belief in a different way?
Moving on, I wonder in what way ‘God’ (I presume this refers to the god of Abraham & his ilk, rather than the God of Spinoza et al) is as you suggest, a big, sublime idea. Certainly, I fail to see how it is anymore of these things than any other god or pantheon thereof.
As an aside, serif fonts, like Times New Roman, and justified text (introducing anomalous spacing), conspire to make reading even more difficult for those of us with dyslexia.
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Pseudonym
November 27, 2011 at 6:15 pm
The term “New Atheism” does not refer, and never has referred, to people living in the 21st century who merely lack belief or profess nonbelief in deities. It refers to a specific political and social movement which, like other similar notions such as “religion”, are hard to boil down to a few simple features.
Nonetheless, here’s one early attempt to clarify the difference.
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steph
November 27, 2011 at 6:34 pm
I don’t think Chairman Bill suggested New Atheism was a cloak term for all modern atheists. He makes a distinction between ‘modern atheism’ & ‘New Atheists’ and I make a distinction between New Atheists and softer atheists who are not aggressive like New Atheists, the followers of the four horsemen, Myers, Coyne and co. We both made the distinction. There are different flavours in atheism today just as there always have been. However, Andrew Brown’s Guardian articles was good and still is.
steph
November 26, 2011 at 4:04 pm
@Chairman Bill
There is no ‘good old fashioned atheism’. Atheism is an idea, God is an idea, and all ideas have histories and evolutions. Charges of atheism were brought against people in ancient times who rejected the religion of the state and charges of atheism were brought against people in the Reformation who dissented from the denomination of the monarchy. As the emerging sciences evolved, so did skepticism and the idea of the rejection of the idea of God, and educated people reasoned upon things. In the last century, rejection of religion outright became more popular and tangled with ideologies and fundamentalist religion expanded and conflict eventuated. New atheists came on the scene post 2001 accompanied by a more robust and destructive anti religious historically ill informed rhetoric. But even today there is soft atheism as well which does not simplify faiths of religious people and mock it as new atheists do
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chairman bill
November 27, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Actually, atheism is a lack of an idea – the absence of a belief in god(s).
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steph
November 27, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Atheism is an idea that theism is probably wrong, an idea that the Greek gods aren’t real, that the Church got it wrong
David
November 26, 2011 at 6:55 pm
I know you’re not one for putting The Message on billboards, but, honestly: put this on a billboard — everyone needs to read this! Thank you for this terrific post and the numerous excellent points you made; there is wisdom here for both believers and non-believers.
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The Reason for the Season (A Scientific Perspective) « Exploring Our Matrix says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:04 am
[...] Reason for the Season (A Scientific Perspective)Nov 27th, 2011 by James F. McGrath TweetHT Joe Hoffmann Tags: Advent, axial, axis, Christmas, earth, humor, planet, reason, science, season, tiltPosted in [...]
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James Parsons
November 27, 2011 at 8:38 am
Thoroughly enjoyed this piece, and found myself agreeing with almost everything, even though some parts made me feel uncomfortable.
But has atheism itself really become a very little idea, or is it that brand of ‘neo-atheism promoted by some outspoken people? I happen to agree that their behaviour is not useful, and creates more heat than light. But if they have stolen the name ‘Atheist’ what are we to do? Should we reclaim the name, or call ourselves something else? I rather like the name ‘humean’ to describe a particular form of Atheist Humanism. Pity it has apparently been claimed already by those studying David Hume.
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steph
November 27, 2011 at 3:15 pm
You could try ‘unbeliever’ if you want a label. I know quite a few people, who if pressed, will say ‘yes, I’m an atheist’ but would not normally think about labels. I know more who just say ‘I don’t believe in God’. Most are probably ‘soft’ atheists or apatheistic. I don’t choose any label according to belief or unbelief. I never have, and I’ve never believed. I’m a humanist, but ‘atheist humanist’ is confusing because humanism doesn’t have anything to do with religion or non religion. Humanism has been hijacked by twentieth century political causes, ideological positions and social movements. But humanism, which comes out of the renaissance, is a cultural spirit and quest for knowledge and meaning through the works of human beings rather than God, and atheism is not a sufficient description of what it is. It doesn’t exclude believers whose beliefs don’t contradict the evidence of science but who also celebrate human achievement in all spheres of learning, art, craft, and ethics. So maybe you’re just a ‘humanist’ too (who doesn’t believe in an idea of God). :-)
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The religious dilemma | riotthill.wordpress.com says:
November 27, 2011 at 2:47 pm
[...] And here is a recent post which argues quite differently than Godless Girl. It’s from one of my favourite bloggers: http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/atheisms-little-idea-2/ [...]
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Pseudonym
November 27, 2011 at 6:26 pm
I think that the main strawman in this piece is in identifying New Atheism as an intellectual movement. It isn’t. It’s a political and social movement. This is not a criticism of it. The anti-slavery movement or suffragette movement weren’t really intellectual movements either.
It is hard for middle-class people living in the developed world outside the United States to understand why it’s an important social movement. You have to understand that for all the rhetoric of freedom and equality, the United States is a deeply prejudiced nation, and always has been. (You may recall that the US didn’t have universal suffrage until 1965, for example.)
So while they may not be the most disadvantaged group, Atheists in the United States do need a civil rights movement, and theists should offer them any support (moral or otherwise) that we can.
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steph
November 27, 2011 at 7:05 pm
The New Atheist heros, the four horsemen, Myers and co, perceive themselves as an intellectual movement, with Ph.Ds, not in history of religions or literature maybe, but in the sciences. Science and scientific evidence has effectively become the end goal or objective, (or the new ‘god’). I don’t think the author is suggesting that they actually are an intellectual movement. “Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus.”
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Dan Gillson
November 28, 2011 at 12:25 am
1. I found no strawman in Prof Hoffmann’s piece. In fact, I found his characterization of the situation of modern atheism quite fitting. Just because there was a pejorative spin on Prof Hoffmann’s conception of modern atheism doesn’t mean that he was mischaracterizing it.
2. I don’t know how you think that the differences between ‘intellectual,’ ‘political,’ and ‘social’ can be so crystalline or how you can treat them as composite.
3. I am realizing more and more that people don’t know how to talk about rights. Talk of political rights is talk of the ways that the state is obliged to its citizens. So in what way is the state not living up to its obligation to atheists?
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steph
November 28, 2011 at 7:27 am
You’re right Dan, and at the same time while ‘intellectual Darwinism’ is perjorative, it’s fitting, and he is not describing the movement as an exclusively intellectual movement. Simplistic characterisations of religion and narrow focus, do not constitute an ‘intellectual’ approach. Of course neither does the term ‘intellectual Darwinism’ exclude the political and social implications of the movement.
Political rights of citizens include the right to vote and protest to the government. The web becomes more tangled with the American ‘democratic’ system and I’m not in a geographical position to comment as I’m a citizen with voting rights in countries outside America where I am free to express myself and have had the privilege of secular education and secular state… ;-)
Stevie
November 27, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Well, as an example of the level of intellectual insights on this side of the pond to these questions try Stephen Law’s contribution:
http://www.4thought.tv/themes/should-creationism-be-taught-in-schools/stephen-law
There was a time when the diagnosis of mental illness was thought to be the province of doctors, who might be expected to know something about it. That would, of course, require them to spend many years actually learning things.
I should declare a personal interest here; my only child is a doctor who has spent many years learning things and who expects to spend many more years learning things.
Stephen Law has shortcut this process; he claimed on his blog a couple of years back that he had spoken briefly to a psychiatrist who agreed with him, though naturally the psychiatrist who allegedly did so was unidentified. This may, or may not, be because the Royal College of Psychiatrists takes a dim view of its members diagnosing people they have never examined; on the other hand it is equally possible that Stephen Law hallucinated the entire incident.
These are possibilities; I can, however, offer one certainty: the Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a Position Statement on ‘Recommendations for psychiatrists on spirituality and religion’ in August 2011.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/PS03_2011.pdf
Nowhere in that Position Statement is there any comment which could even remotely support Stephen Law’s claims.
Admittedly there isn’t a snowball in hell’s chance of him actually having read it, since that would have required him to do some work, so we cannot fairly conclude that he is deliberately misrepresenting it. It’s just straightforward ignorance on his part of the Statement.
There was a time when we could identify the creationists pretty easily; they were the frothing-at-the-mouth nut jobs, against whom we would woman the barricades with a smile on our lips and a song in our hearts.
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Michael Fugate
November 29, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Stevie, you know that position statement was written by a Christian who teaches in a theology department, don’t you? How is his view any less biased than Stephen Law’s? Why would he even bother to read something that is meaningless?
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steph
December 1, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Chris Cook is a Professorial Research Fellow at Durham BSc, MB, BS, MD, MA, PhD, FRCPsych. He trained first in medicine, at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, qualifying in1981, and then specialised as a postgraduate in psychiatry at the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guys and St Thomas’s, also in London. Following this, his clinical and academic interests in psychiatry have been largely in the field of addictive behaviour, and especially alcohol misuse. He held positions as Lecturer at University College, London (1987 to 1990) and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (1994 to 1997) as well as being Professor of the Psychiatry of Alcohol Misuse at the University of Kent from 1997 to 2003.
His academic work in psychiatry has been broad in scope. His doctoral thesis was on genetic effects upon the predisposition to alcohol misuse and dependence and was very biologically based. However, I have always also been interested in treatment approaches, including those based in the mutual help movement (of Alcoholics Anonymous and affiliated organisations) and those with religious roots, as well as those that are more medically based.
He is Director of the Project for Spirituality, Theology & Health. This project is collaborative between the Department of Theology & Religion and the School for Medicine & Health. It has collaborative links with health service delivery and spiritual/pastoral care.
It appears he is well qualified to make a recommendations for psychiatrists on spirituality and religion.
Stevie
December 2, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Michael
Steph has already humiliated you, and being a humanist I am reluctant to add to that burden, but I really must ask you if it even occurred to you to wonder whether the Royal College of Psychiatrists would put out a Position Statement which did not command the general support of the most senior members of the College, who are of all faiths and none. Actually, now I come to think about it, that’s mostly none.
And yes, the Position Statement could be described as an argument from authority, but if you are making claims about mental illness then logically the people who have spent their adult lives studying mental illness are more likely to know about it than people who have not.
Stephen Law himself claims that he derives support for his views from an un-named psychiatrist, thus invoking authority as his justification.
He was offered the opportunity to put the boot into creationism on a national tv channel, and instead of doing so by citing the overwhelming abundance of evidence for evolution he instead provided frothing-at-the-mouth footage about mental illness which is already provoking, and will continue to provoke, hilarity on creationist websites.
Admittedly, Stephen Law is a good example of the new atheist who doesn’t actually believe in evolution, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain…
robertb
November 28, 2011 at 10:42 am
Interesting, but perhaps you should create a new moniker for those you are describing in this piece. Atheism is simply the lack of belief in deities and yes, simply a little idea. I suppose that one could hold all, or none, of the characteristics you ascribed to atheists in this article without effecting their lack of belief in any way.
Face it, as a philosophy, the lack of belief in deities doesn’t even fill a paragraph. Of course, atheism isn’t a philosophy, nor does it need a think tank to determine what it means.
My suggestion would be to keep this piece away from heat sources, or perhaps, change the title.
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rjosephhoffmann
November 28, 2011 at 7:41 pm
To RobertB: Your comment about atheism actually being a little idea is interesting because atheists can’t seem to get together on just how little or how big. But your comment suggests you only read the title to the essay. What you are really saying is that God is a little idea so atheism corresponds to it. I think I’d invoke Robert Frost:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself.
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Is Atheism Ever Not Boring? | Unequally Yoked says:
November 28, 2011 at 12:10 pm
[...] and blogger at The New Oxonian has some harsh words for the New Atheists in a recent essay “Atheism’s Little Idea.”I mention Skepticon because to my mind the meeting is further evidence of the crisis that [...]
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Veronica Abbass
November 28, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Prof. Hoffmann
You say, “most modern atheists won’t even have read the books mentioned in the last paragraph, and what’s more will not care.”
You do not mention any books in the paragraph to which you refer; you merely include lines from poems and books.
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steph
November 28, 2011 at 8:31 pm
“most modern atheists won’t even have read the books mentioned in the last paragraph…”
They were ‘mentioned’ Veronica. This does not mean they were spelled out with full bibliographic references. You could include the previous one, two and maybe three paragraphs, back to and including, Thomas Paine who wrote among other things, ‘The Age of Reason’. You will see mentioned, Jean-Paul Satre, Walter Lippmann in 1929, Leo Strauss, in ‘Naural Right and History’ in 1955, Irving Babbitt, Ortega y Gasset in Revolt of the Masses perhaps, as well as allusions to the poetry of Wilfred Owen and W.B. Yeats….
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Veronica Abbass
November 28, 2011 at 8:47 pm
steph
Thank you for attempting to reply to my question addressed to Hoffmann. However, you are trying too hard. I will not “include the previous one, two and maybe three paragraphs.” I can read, and I am addressing what Hoffmann wrote: the books mentioned in the last paragraph.” Writers were mentioned in the paragraph that preceded the one where Hoffmann suggested that modern atheists may not have read. Writers are not books, nor are poems books.
rjosephhoffmann
November 29, 2011 at 10:33 am
Veronica, I think you are quite right that I do not spell out books when I say books, except for Leo Strauss, and he is two paragraphs back. So, assuming this is not a mere quibble but a request for pertinent reading: Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History; Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York, 1914), xvii ; Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems but this one (“Move him gently into the sun”) is reprinted everywhere; Ortega y Gasset is a bit from an essay “Signs of the Times” in The Modern Themes [1921-22; rpt. New York, 1961], 79. Yeats is from his “Introduction,” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse [New York, 1936], xxviii, and Babbitt from a selection I posted on my site recently, called “What is Humanism” and which you can read here: http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/the-smart-set/ I hope this clears things up and answers your concern. On the other hand, if I had only said “ideas.”
steph
December 3, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Veronica – if you try to pay more careful attention to what you read you will notice the link at the top of the post following this, the Atheist Rapid Response Manual, doesn’t link back to this post. It links to Atheism’s Little Idea on another website. You appear to have become confused. Even the comments are not the same but it seems that you can at least still count.
James Croft
November 29, 2011 at 3:09 pm
It is with great trepidation I enter these febrile waters to say that you have entirely misunderstood (perhaps willfully) my post regarding Skepticon. It was not one of the keynoters at this conference who averred that Skepticism is a Humanism, but D J Grothe at a different conference who did so.
He did not just assert that this is so, but gave a cogent and convincing argument. I recommend viewing the speech he gave on the topic.
You are right that our movement needs a think tank. We are seeking to build one. If you would like to be a part of that positive, progressive attempt to shape a better world, by all means be in touch. If you would prefer to complain from the margins, keep writing confused posts like this one.
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steph
December 1, 2011 at 6:06 am
D.J. Grothe, in his dull, repetitive, inaccurate and opinionated NECSSON lecture, claims Skepticism is a movement for which there is evidence and he claims that Skepticism is a Humanism. He claims the word comes from a Greek word ‘skeptikos’ meaning ‘to inquire or find out’, but he defines it as “saying no to nonsense beliefs… saying no, to others’ beliefs that you find nonsense.” Then he says that this definition is not sufficient, therefore “it’s just ‘ordinary common sense.” His ‘minimal’ definition of humanism is “a naturalist as opposed to supernatural ethics, focused on human wellbeing”. He claims that it is ‘presocratic’.
You claim that Skepticon had a profoundly Humanist series of speakers (speakers at Skepticon included Dan Barker, Richard Carrier, Greta Christina – who gave a “fantastic talk, “Why Are Atheists So Angry?””, blasting religious practices – J.T. Eberhard, David Fitzgerald, Julia Galef, Spencer Greenberg, Jen McCreight, Hemant Mehta, PZ Myers, Joe Nickell, Darrel Ray, David Silverman, Sam Singleton, Rebecca Watson, Eliezer Yudkowsky), speakers who on no account “copped-out” of their responsibility to skeptically scrutinize beliefs and actions, and who had their eyes firmly on the use of skeptical tools to promote human welfare.
Is this what humanism is about to you? You say that, as Grothe avers, Skepticism is a Humanism and call it a ‘truth’. You say that P.Z. Myers is absolutely right to say that religious practices and beliefs are a proper target of the skeptical movement and link to his post “Atheism is an essential part of skepticism.” You say the fourth Skepticon was a huge success, and contributed much of value to the Humanist movement. It’s irrelevant that Grothe, whose claim that Skepticism is a Humanism, wasn’t there. You assume that the Skepticon conference confirms his claim. Professor Hoffmann has understood your messy writing entirely sufficiently and your celebration of Skepticon perfectly accurately. His critique comes from the heart of humanism – your pretentions and pride creep round the margins, James.
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James Croft
December 1, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Wow – you showed me! Your summary and reiteration of, errr, my own argument (?) really convinced me that everything you say is true!
steph
December 2, 2011 at 4:40 am
Of course you made no coherent argument James. You made various claims and value judgements on the basis of your inflated effusive praises of the speakers at Skepticon as “profoundly Humanist” and of Grothe’s and P.Z Myer’s opinions. I repeated your claims. You claimed Skepticon was a huge success, and contributed much of value to the Humanist movement because you think Grothe’s opinion that Skepticism is “a Humanism” is a “truth” – but that idea makes a nonsense of the word humanism. You made bold claims, not “arguments”.
Your ideas about humanism correspond to the so-called humanisms of the late twentieth century with their entanglements in political causes, ideological positions and social movements. In its historical evolution as a mind-set, the humanist spirit contributed to the development of science, but science is not its end or goal. As a cultural spirit, it focuses the quest for knowledge and meaning on the works of human beings but atheism is not a sufficient description of its content and the association of humanism with secularism has eroded the positive meaning of the term even further. Equating humanism with special ideologies and interests is a corruption of the humanist spirit. You are naive enough to equate critique with complaining and you are conceited enough to assume that Professor Hoffmann would even entertain the idea of getting in ‘touch’ with your ‘movement’.
But you’re screaming again James. Over indulgence in exclamation marks and many things is characteristic, isn’t it.
Ed Jones
November 29, 2011 at 4:05 pm
The need for a think tank at least emphasises the kudgmen that atheism and humanism have not gotten it right. (“it”) being the the soution to the human condition. “It says worlds about the nature of atheism that this (its?) project failed under the name of secular humanism”.I take this to say because atheism and humanism deny theism. Might not the real issue be the nature of science and religion? (True religion is mysticism – a quaification necessary because religion is so corrupted by its association with institutional church).
“But for a think tank you need thinkers” even the worlds best thinkers. One can safely say the worlds greatest physicist, the founder and grand theorists of modern (quantium and relativity) physicis qualify as the worlds best thinkers: Einstein, Scchroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Brogue, Jeans, and Plank.
Thus in the midst of these different movements “dealing with the theoretical issues” it seems a good idea to consult with them on what they thought about the nature of science and religion. The significant fact is that a very general commonality emerges in the world view of these philosopher- scientists: certain strong and common conclusios were reached by everyone of these theroists
Eddington speaaking for the group: “It is generally recogized, and the scheme of physics is now formulated in such a way as to make it almost self-evident that it is a partial aspect of “something wider”. However about this “something wider” physics tells us – am can tell us – nothing whatsover. It is exactly this failure of physics, and not its supposed similarities to mysticism, that paradoxically led so many physics to a mystical view of the world.”
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Ed Jones
November 29, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Correction: “kudgmen” should read judgment.
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Residual respect for an enduring institution | Butterflies and Wheels says:
November 30, 2011 at 9:32 pm
[...] has a post about yet another example of that kind of thing, just today. The yet another example is yet another by Joseph Hoffmann, yet again in the same style – loose generalities about atheists, with no specifics to [...]
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Stevie
December 1, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I concluded a while back that the elephant in the room with the new atheists is that they do not actually believe in evolution. They certainly say they do, and they almost certainly believe that they do, but they don’t. What they believe is a mishmash of Darwin at his most melodramatic mixed with an ample supply of Spenser’s creed of science.
Having concluded, along with Darwin and Spenser, that human beings are the top species because we deserve to be, the new atheists apparently find it impossible to believe that something might go wrong. They find it impossible to believe it even when scientists are telling them so, hence the total absence of any meaningful comment on any of the new atheist websites on the impending end of -at least this- antibiotic era. The irony is that the scientists are doing their best to explain to the general public that antibiotic resistance is evolution in action, and therefore cannot be avoided, whilst the people who claim to believe in evolution are resolutely ignoring them.
I most certainly do believe in evolution, the real kind, but then my lungs are colonised with a hyper-mutating pan-resistant strain of mucoid pseudomonas aeruginosa, which concentrates the mind wonderfully. Bacteria in general, and those carrying the NDM-1 gene in particular, do not give a toss about the topics raised at Skepticon; Croft et al can be an oppressed minority to their hearts’ content but it isn’t going to do anything for their life expectancy…
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Alex SL
December 1, 2011 at 6:31 pm
Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie. Ihr, Faust.
Out of curiosity, could you tell me where this quote comes from? Everything after “wieder” is just gibberish. (FYI, I am a native speaker of German.)
They are the sorts of things that put the sapiens (twice) in the name of our species.
Actually, our species name is just Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens sapiens would be a subspecies name, if we consider the Neanderthals to be another subspecies of the same species instead of their own species. (FYI, I am a taxonomist and systematist.)
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steph
December 2, 2011 at 4:32 am
A native speaker? Really? “FYI” I reckon that’s odd. The separable verb wiederkommen means come again, just as zuruckkommen means come back; and homo sapiens sapiens is indeed the name of our subspecies, which is a kind of species. But I reckon you didn’t get it, did you.
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Iskadrow
December 2, 2011 at 11:28 am
The sentence “Bitte kommen Sie wieder” is well formed, if a bit unusual in employing the formal ‘Sie’ when addressing God. What follows, though, smells of machine translation. I get what it is intended to mean, namely something along the lines of: “Wir bedauern, an Dir gezweifelt zu haben”, but as it stands it is indeed nonsense.
rjosephhoffmann
December 2, 2011 at 11:27 pm
A few grammatical notes for atheists who were too busy babblefising the fake “Faust” citations to read the article: Those of you who said (!) you were native German speakers missed out the day your teacher discussed separable verbs: wiederkommen is such a verb. wieder goes to end of the sentence and kommen doesn’t come. The use of ‘Sie’ is dictated by the epistolary style. This is a letter addressed to Dear Sir, not a prayer where the more intimate you (Du) would be used. The use of Ihr is perfectly usual: what would you say to God? Bis bald or Herzliche Grüße? If it’s a little archaic, so was Faust. The use of “daran zu zweifeln” is a very conventional expression meaning “about all of these things.” But I thank you all for this very tedious and hugely irrelevant and wrong round of speculation because when I think about it the sentence doesn’t say quite what I wanted Faust to say so I have a new one for you to look up! And no, it’s not in Faust I or II.
Stewart
December 2, 2011 at 2:48 pm
I’m also curious, having by now seen a lot of the speculation about it on other sites (is it a quote, if so from where, is it made up, what was the real intention of using it, was the phrasing that made it look like a machine translation from English intentional?). Though I do consider myself part of the group of which this blog post is so critical, please note that my question does not focus on those disagreements and is being politely put. I hope I will be able to receive an equally civil reply; steph’s reply to Alex SL did not relate, even obliquely, to the main question of the quote’s origin, was distinctly sarcastic and I am genuinely not fishing for sarcasm here.
steph
December 2, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Stewart – Sorry, I laughed at it – it’s supposed to be a joke I think. Dear God, Please come again. We’re very sad to doubt you for this reason. Your Faust. It’s a joke, not meant to be taken as a quote.
Iskadrow
December 3, 2011 at 6:24 am
@rjosephhoffmann Es ist ja sehr schön zu erfahren, dass Sie wissen, wie mit zusammengesetzten Verben umzugehen ist; der betreffende Satz ist allerdings nie moniert worden. Wie ich sagte, er ist – beziehungsweise war – grammatisch wohlgeformt. Dasselbe ließ sich allerdings nicht von der folgenden Konstruktion behaupten. Korrekter wäre es hier gewesen, unter Beibehaltung des Honorificum, zu sagen: “Wir sind sehr traurig, an Ihnen gezweifelt zu haben”, d.h. “We are very sad to have doubted you.”
Ihre Neuformulierung ist soweit in Ordnung, mit Ausnahme des ‘Gottheit’ (godhead, godhood), das vielleicht besser durch ‘Göttlichkeit’ (divineness) zu ersetzen wäre.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 3, 2011 at 8:33 am
Dear Sir:
One would never translate ““Wir sind sehr traurig, an Ihnen gezweifelt zu haben”, d.h. “We are very sad to have doubted you.” into proper idiomatic English as “sad” even though “traurig” bears that meaning in another context, but it is dative [lit., to have doubted in you] and just means sorry. I think we are stuck with “Wir bedauern sehr…” or something like that. Also, it is not correct to say “mit Ausnahme des ‘Gottheit’ (godhead, godhood), das vielleicht besser durch ‘Göttlichkeit.’” The latter expression might be used of the divinity of Jesus but you cannot talk about the divinity (godliness/Göttlichkeit of God). Ihr (smiling) Joseph Hoffmann
There goes the neighborhood | Butterflies and Wheels says:
December 2, 2011 at 1:01 pm
[...] saw Joseph Hoffmann’s post saying how tiny atheism and atheists now are a few days ago, when it was new, and decided to ignore it*, on the grounds that it was little [...]
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Stewart
December 2, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Thanks. Since it didn’t seem to be from any version of Faust I could find, a joke appeared to be the most likely option. Despite the problems with the German, I got the surface meaning (my German is not as good as my English, but it’s actually my first language). Obviously, explanations are fatal for jokes, but if I were to try to reverse engineer it, I would assume the German is there to provide mock-authenticity for Faust, who is there because his bargain with a darker power is a turning away from god, but beyond that I do get a bit lost as regards what was really meant – unless, perhaps, no god was really intended and the contrast between god and darker powers is supposed to reflect the contrast between “old” atheists with some respect for religious ideas with which they disagreed and the “new” who have broken off dialogue and resort only to mockery. I trust you can see why it wasn’t necessarily obvious that it wasn’t meant to be taken as a quote. The movie poster, which, when I search for “Faust,” comes up in the second row of images, was presumably just there as an atmospheric illustration, but it conjured up a specific, rather than a general, connotation not just for me (I have an 8mm print of it on a shelf about two feet away from where I’m sitting), but for others as well.
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steph
December 2, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Lieber Gott… Ihr Faust?! Of course it was a joke. It was the first laugh launching into a hilarious parody. I think it got even funnier the more miles they got out of taking it literally, avoiding the lateral (or lacking the ability to think laterally) and in their extraordinary efforts to criticise the author, they didn’t get it. And they tried so hard to remain so solemn and self righteous. It doesn’t really demand a great deal of sophistication to get it. Of course the best way to attack an essay that claims that atheists are under-educated is to claim the author is over educated – a ‘pompous elitist in his ivory tower’ – and then attack his learning as wrong. They complain it isn’t Faust when it isn’t supposed to be and then claim the German is wrong but need a translating tool, which doesn’t know it, to translate it, and appeal to someone who claimed to be a ‘native German speaker’ who apparently didn’t get it either… it just seemed so ludicrous.
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What’s the big idea? | Butterflies and Wheels says:
December 3, 2011 at 5:25 pm
[...] for the sake of argument, or exploration, let’s take seriously this claim that atheism is a little idea and god is a big one. Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important. And [...]
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Ken Pidcock
December 3, 2011 at 8:16 pm
I grew up in a secular little world without labels, aware of different faiths around me.
Not everyone did. Many grew up in worlds where they needed to believe in order to be accepted as a decent human being. When they finally accepted that they could not believe, they also had to accept that they were alienated from the world in which they grew up. In such circumstances, the value of realizing that there are voices in the public sphere who speak in support of one’s understanding is tremendous. When I was a kid, I found Julian Huxley, and I remain grateful. Today, that might be Ophelia Benson.
I don’t expect the author to appreciate this perspective, nor to cease disparaging those who offer support to those who can no longer believe. After all, it’s not his world.
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steph
December 5, 2011 at 10:10 am
Exactly – I distinguished my world as little from the rest of the greater world because I am acknowledging the far more difficult experience of growing up where individual freedom and thought is restricted. I am distinguishing the difference because I acknowledge the pressure placed on so many people to conform to the religious beliefs of their families and communities. I acknowledge the difference between living in a multi cultural diverse society and one in which one particular religion saturates politics, education and society, for example. I know of the types of rejection received from entire families, friends as well as workplaces and society, when individuals ‘come out’ as ‘atheist’ or no longer believe. Deconversion experiences, especially in more conservatively religious environments, can be emotionally and socially crippling in so many different ways. We all live in and share the same world. The author is one who is particularly aware of this, and he does empathise.
Help and support comes in many shapes and forms and is thin on the ground in religious societies. Julian Huxley was a treasure to find and you are to be congratulated for taking him on board and fortunately he is still vitally relevant for unbelievers today. He was a profound and sensitive thinker. You have an independent mind and are free to choose the support you find most helpful. Support can be found in all shapes and forms and some is more constructive than others and more understanding of history, diversity in culture and people. Best wishes for the future.
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Dan Gillson
December 4, 2011 at 1:37 am
I posted this over at B&W. What do you think?
December 3, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Pretty watery stuff, Ophelia. I mean, as long as it’s up to you to cut the God-pie, you can decide how big or small the pieces are. If your slice of God-pie is too small, that’s because you cut it that way. If you think the pie tastes boring, that’s because you made it that way. That’s the thing about the God-pie: You get to pick the recipe and cut the pieces. You shouldn’t make and serve yourself a God-pie just to complain about it — that’s tacky. (I think I’ve found my way to a fair restatement of Joe Hoffmann’s point.)
I think that Joe was trying to get at something else. Pre-modern religious history has been a succession of debates about the right recipe for the God-pie; people fought and died about what ingredients go in it and in what proportion. Then the Renaissance raised the awareness that we have a surfeit of ingredients for God-pie. Then during the gilded Enlightenment, we tried making different kinds of pie out of the same ingredients (Fascism- and Communist-pies were horrible variations of Hegel’s God-pie.) Then Post-WWII, we realized, after the horrors wrought by Fascism and Communism, that we are fated to make God-pies — even if it is just to complain about how small the pieces are or about how boring it tastes — because we aren’t left with the ingredients for anything else.
Religion has made some horrible God-pies; toxic, bitter things that are best to be rid of. The response of atheism, however, shouldn’t be to offer sugary cereal in place of bad recipes. We should be offering real intellectual nutrition. As long as atheism doesn’t take the concept of God seriously, it won’t be able to do it. That is what I believe that Joe is trying to point out.
I agree with him.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 4, 2011 at 8:02 am
Dan, I like cake better than pie until I read your amazing assessment. I’m glad you agree with me, but you also get the fact that atheists are in a terribly self destructive spin, spastically fighting not just religious fundamentalism and godism, but using ridiculous commando tactics to make what is essentially a concept into a liberation movement. I have never said that atheism is for pointy headed intellectuals. Ever. But it would not exist (as you comment) without them. The really destructive idea that atheism is a conclusion forced on us by science, or civil rights or (fill in the blank) is something that needs to be considered; but what I do know is that the study of religion and not science is what forces us to accept a worldview without God. It’s a bit like wanting dessert before dinner, isn’t it–or pie before you finish your vegetables. Thanks.
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Dan Gillson
December 5, 2011 at 12:25 am
I’m glad that you liked it. I expected my comment to be roundly criticized over at B&W, but so far I haven’t seen any impressive objections to it. So far, I think that the analogy is a keeper.
On to a different matter. Would you ever consider turning your Ph. D. dissertation into a blog post? I, for one, would be incredibly interested to read your arguments in support of the thesis that Marcion was the author of Mark.
steph
December 5, 2011 at 7:47 am
They probably misunderstand the purpose of analogy Dan, because they read it literally, and don’t read in context or think laterally. Even the Faust is taken literally and not seen in context of the essay so they miss the point of the joke. I never believed in gods or religions but the whole reason for my choosing to study history and the history and evolution of human ideas, religions and the human search for knowledge and meaning in life, is to understand the world today. I’ve never eaten pie that I can remember (or MacDonalds) – I’m a fruiterian. But I learned to cook and love to cook for others. I cook all sorts of things from pie to cake to roast beef in puff pastry with bacon and brandy.
The (outstanding) 1982 Oxford doctoral thesis on Marcion is 373 pages long (not including endnotes) and the second edition will be out in 2012. I don’t think even the conclusion could be summarised in a blog essay, and even if it could it would compromise argument and evidence which is what makes the thesis so convincing. I’m looking forward to the second edition. :-)
Greg. Tingey
December 4, 2011 at 10:10 am
Dear Sir,
Are you just seriously deluded?
Or do you really believe all the tripe you have just written?
OK, try this for size, since you are so keen on Invisible Big Sky Fairies, and claim to be phiolosophical is some form or another:
A set of testable Propositions
1. God is not detectable (even if that “god” exists)
2. All religions are blackmail, and are based on fear and superstition.
Corollary: 2a ] Marxism is a religion.
3. Prayer has no effect on third parties.
Corollary: 3a ] There is no such thing as “Psi”.
4. All religions kill, or enslave, or torture.
Corollary: 4a ] The bigots are the true believers.
5. All religions have been made by men.
All the above are testable, by both observation and experiment.
Unless and until they are shown to be false, they must be taken as true, or at least valid, statements.
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steph
December 4, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Dear Sir,
Did you seriously not read the post? Perhaps you could try reading it and then read this post:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-tomtens-discover-god/
and then discover yourself in this:http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-sure-fire-atheist-rapid-response-manual/
As for your propositions
1. God is not detectable (even if that “god” exists)
It depends what is meant by the term “god”
2. All religions are blackmail, and are based on fear and superstition.
Prejudiced and subjective claim devoid of any comprehension of historical evolution and nature of religions and ideas.
3. Prayer has no effect on third parties.
Knowledge by third parties that people pray can sometimes help give them emotional comfort.
4. All religions kill, or enslave, or torture.
No religions are capable of such things. People exploit religious traditions and ideologies to justify all sort of evils.
5. All religions have been made by men.
True.
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Stevie
December 5, 2011 at 11:49 am
Number 5: All religions have been made by men.
Well, no; I’m fairly sure that Mary Baker Eddy was a woman.
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steph
December 5, 2011 at 2:09 pm
I couldn’t be bothered quibbling over archaic or politically incorrect language – it generally doesn’t bother me greatly. Human beings, men and women, have created and developed religions.
Greg. Tingey
December 5, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Steph
Thanks – a THINKING response!
What happened?
I usually get rabid ad hominem attacks, and weaselling-out to that list….
1. “god” normally defined as some form of omniscient (how do the messages transmit to-&-fro?) being or entity, apparently posessed of some intelligence, usually thought capable of “intervening” (unspecified – how convenient!) in the natural world. And often thought of as “supernatural”.
Unfortunately, there are NO attested cases of supernaurality evident, anywhere (or science, and sciemce-based machinery and techniques – like these computeres we are usong – would not work – oh dear, err, now what?)
2.
No.
Based on simple observation of the behaviour of religions.
The fear of “going to hell” the real fear of the inquisition/Calvin’s spies/the NKVD/social ostrcism/burning at the stake etc … the list is VERY long.
3.
So?
They are deluding themseleves.
Please note the original phrasing:
“No effect on third parties” – people out of hearing, unaware of the prayer.
All I’m saying is that “prayer” is a form of “psi” – afraud, in other words.
4.
Weaselling, I’m afraid.
All the major religions have done this, the moment they have acquired any sort of political power ..
Persecute all the OTHER sects and religions, and institute a reign of terror.
A very short read of history will comnfirm this.
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steph
December 5, 2011 at 4:26 pm
1. You’re out of touch. The concept of ‘god’ has evolved for many religious people. You’re not alone though. An atheist blogger wrote something today or yesterday: “But this is the usual cheat, which relies on pretending that all or most believers don’t really believe in Official God [whatever that ever was - compare Buddhists, Hindus, different religious denominations etc]. As Julian is finding out, that just isn’t true.” If it’s Julian Baggini she’s referring to, he is a journalist anyway. And apart from atheist readers of this essay having missed the point of the big idea of ‘god’ being a big idea historically, the social sciences are drawing upon research today in the UK and even in America, and concluding that the idea of ‘god’ (or not) and religion is very broad in scope. Theologians in the Antipodes (Lloyd Geering, James Veitch etc) have been aware of it and writing about it for decades. There is a very broad spectrum of ‘god’ ideas among ordinary religious people today and belonging to a tradition means different things to different people. Try these interdisciplinary studies and researchers for example.http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199577873.do
http://www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/guidingpapers.asp
You have limited your criticism to conservative religion, still clinging to literal interpretation of biblical imagery. God for many people in the world is a metaphor, an expression, to realise life in nature, love and beauty in human existence etc, but the god idea is no longer a noun for an omniscient being, or an intelligence. The idea of a god intervening in the natural world is based on a fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts. Most ‘religious’ people do not believe in the supernatural. Supernatural is not even a term used in critical approaches to the social sciences. In fact the idea of ‘existence’ or ‘non existence’ of ‘god’ ideas, is irrelevant to many modern religious people’s lives today. The evidence of science doesn not contradict ideas and beliefs held by many religious people today. Try reading some modern theology, natural theology, studies about secular religion and Christianity without ‘God’. Lloyd Geering is an easy read.
2. That ‘All religions are blackmail, and are based on fear and superstition’ is a completely biased and false claim. Buddhism is a religion. Religions are fundamentally codes of living for human beings, created by human beings in order that they can co-exist and survive together. As religions evolved through history, ideas developed and beliefs in ideas also developed. The idea of hell did not develop in Jewish tradition until the later Jewish texts. As the sciences emerged and then the Englightenment happened, many perceived realities dissolved for some religious people and many Christians now do not believe in a literal hell. Of course this is not true for biblically illiterate fundamentalists and ultra conservatives who make up the majority of Christianity in America.
3. If those being prayed for are unaware of the prayer, then the only comfort is for those praying, who believe they are helping with their prayer. But while prayer has no proveable benefit on a third party, it is not fraudulent. It is more often a reflection of hope or belief and if it is mistaken, it is not fraudulent. Fraudulent implies that there is deliberate deception which there is not. Fraudulent is an anachronism, just as your interpretation of religion (which seems limited to Judeo Christian traditions) is anachronistic too.
4. I’m afraid you’re being selective, as is your reading of histories which is far too short. Political power is the problem, not religions. Some people in power use whatever tools they have to justify killing and torturing people of other beliefs and ideologies and cultures. You appear to be ignoring non religious and even anti religious bigotry. This is not just mildly ironic.
Finally:
I’m not surprised you usually get rabid ad hominem attacks if you respond to essays and blogs in the way you did here. You were extraordinarily rude when you responded to this essay, and attacked the author with ad hominem, with the irrelevance and rudeness of your comment clearly demonstrating that either you had not read the essay or completely misunderstood every word. I suggest you read some critical studies of the history and evolution of religions and ideas before you next ‘weasel out that list’, and make rhetorical broad brush slanders against all religions and religious people.
And by the way, human beings, not just ‘men’, created and developed religions and ideas.
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Dan Gillson
December 5, 2011 at 1:26 pm
I think that I won the argument that I started over at B&W. It’s amazing to see people — not Ophelia, but her readers — who are unable to argue for sport. I suppose one of the downfalls of the internet is it dulls peoples capacity to analyze arguments in anything other than an emotional register. Oh well.
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Stevie
December 6, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Dan
I’ve already written 2 replies to you this and trashed them because, whilst kicking people when they are down is indisputably more efficient than giving them the chance to recover their feet and kick you back, I still feel a degree of pity for the people on B&W who cannot argue for sport.
Many of them are profoundly ignorant of the way the world works; they have been indoctrinated in a worldview that says they are indisputably intellectual giants, and they don’t even have to do anything at all to prove this since the mere statement that they are atheists proves that they are indisputably intellectual giants.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that they cannot string words together in a coherent sentence and that they believe multiple exclamation marks is a sure fire path to the Nobel prize; nobody told them any different…
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steph
December 6, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Old Mack’s posts are hilarious (he’s written a third one now referring to Berlinerblau). As for the second, it made me cringe and feel embarrassed for him. He did bleed so publically. But his introduction is funny – it’s farcical and full of contradictions. He seems to talking about himself in all three posts – “a kind of showing off, with very little substance at the centre, something squishy and unpleasant.”
“The biggest problem with R. Joseph Hoffmann, if it isn’t his pretence that he’s a sophisticated academic, and we, poor dears, are just scum in the gutter, is that he nearly always gets it wrong. I won’t go out of my way to show that, but practically everything of his that I read seems to be a kind of showing off, with very little substance at the centre, something squishy and unpleasant. The name of his blog really gives the game away –well, after all, the New Oxonian! All one need do is point to the presumption in the name — and to the fact that Hoffmann probably banks on the idea that most people will not connect ‘Oxonian’ with ‘Oxford’, thus showing how hopelessly puny, pathetic and puling they really are. (He probably depended on people not knowing what ‘puling’ means either!) What’s in a name? A rose by any other would smell as sweet. Possibly. But a blog by any other name wouldn’t, you might think, have set itself up so self-preeningly, like a peacock fanning its ridiculously luxurious tail, angling for praise and adulation, as one that uses (or abuses) the name of a great university, and covets the standing that actually speaking of and for the real Oxford, not his new one, might give him.”
“Pretence … nearly always gets it wrong … showing off … presumption”? Who? Mack, with crooked pretention, gives his game away, knowing nothing about Oxford!! He can’t write, but he can toffee waffle. So what? The author of this essay has a doctorate from Oxford, the “great university”. But why else would The New Oxonian be called the New Oxonian? So nobody would guess? Does Mack think people haven’t heard of an oxonian? Maybe Mack hadn’t. Yet the author, whom Mack claims to have “almost forgotten, most pleasantly”, irritates him so much, he’s desperately plucking out things to pick at, from an essay he apparently doesn’t understand. He embraces a suggestion by Alex, that the author got it wrong, in a nonquote from Faust.
“Ah, yes, Alex. I too am a bit surprised with what I read over at Hoffmann’s place. I still don’t get the joke, which makes me unsophisticated too, but since Hoffmann has a clone, there’s really not much point in commenting over at his grandiosely styled blog, so I keep it to myself. But why, with a picture of Faust nearby, we are not to think that the words, ill-formed as they are (and I feeling that I must try to make sense of them, though I couldn’t), were written by Goethe, I cannot say. And as for it being a joke, what was funny about it, other than the fact that Hoffmann apparently doesn’t speak or read German any better than I?”
Perhaps he really should have kept it to himself, but instead he read it literally. “But why, with a picture of Faust nearby…” he says, but misses the parody directly following. How on earth did the author teach the complex topic of classical philology to his German students while teaching at Heidelberg? He’s multi lingual, and he’s taught all over the world from the Antipodes to the UK, into the thick of the Middle East and down to Zimbabwe. Of course he speaks German fluently, and far too rapidly for me. He even writes and reads it too. Yet old Mack thinks he can speak German as well as the author, when Mack hasn’t got the intellectual capacity (sorry – sophistication) or wit, even to understand a joke, in German, which is a mock Faustism, because of his narrow view of language and logic. And someone said the author is “angry” because he’s “pissed his life away” with religion. But maybe that was an inference to wine in the colloquial sense. Maybe the old Mack was trying to be funny suggesting the author “apparently doesn’t speak or read German any better than I?”. That is, after all, a pretty hysterical idea.
Puzzling over the archaic address “Ihr”, they’re totally oblivious to the obvious fact that the author deliberately put it on the lips of a long dead Faust. You’d think they’d twig. Faust’s tongue wasn’t a twenty-first century American one. And then there is a string of suggestions that the author, who “pretends to be sophisticated”, hasn’t read Faust because the “quote” (which isn’t one), isn’t in Faust. If they’d read Faust they’d know Faust wouldn’t have said it, and as the author has read Faust in German, it’s easy for him to make up a Faustian ‘quote’ to fit an essay or rather parody, that the author, not Faust, wrote. It’s such a pity his pretence at sophistication is almost convincing.
Dense old Mack sounds so utterly confused: “I assume the quote is from Goethe’s Faust, and it is not completely gibberish. … But perhaps a German speaker could help us out.” It’s a joke Mr MacDonald! Yet he has claimed to have read all the books mentioned and then he quotes Philip Larkin to prove what a widely learned intellectual he is. Old Mack manages to squeeze in the simplest Shakespeare (he’s very sophisticated really), much to Shakespeare’s despair, who seems to attempting a suicidal leap out of the text. Trapped in the waffling toffee text, poor Shakespeare feels stickily out of place.
As an ex bible bleating church leader, old Mack continues to read things literally. He doesn’t think laterally or recognise things in context. It obviously wasn’t Faust but he must have forgotten his Faust. After all, some books he claims to have read “many years ago” so what would the much older Mack remember.
Old Mack thinks because the author didn’t laugh at the axial tilt and seasons thing, he didn’t “get it”. Why does he think the author included the tilt in his parody? It’s a typical anti-religious ‘blasphemous’ sneer, and it’s so dull, it just makes our eyes roll. That’s why it’s included. It’s hahaha not clever or funny. Maybe the author lacks the sophistication to think it funny. Or is he over sophisticated? Is he just too sophisticated to think it’s funny? What a discombobulation.
Old Mack’s suggestion that the author lives in a bubble is amusing. Isn’t it the ‘gnus’ who exist in a transparent bubble, posing noisily on a stage so we can view them? Isn’t it the gnus who are the ‘atheists’ so despised by everyone? The gnus despise everyone except the reflections of themselves in their bubble. They’re dying but it’s OK – they think they’re terribly popular, swelling, and vitally important. Nobody understands them, old Mack complains. They miss a sociological understanding of who the gnus really are. The way to make friends and influence people, is not by being gnu. Most people have twigged. The gnus haven’t a clue.
PZ has a doctorate, but who knows how his thesis is rated or who gave him the doctorate. His writing is appalling and his ‘science’ is lame – he seems to market to the popular audience. Does he do a lot of scientific research to advance human knowledge? He lives on the internet. He did well to proclaim himself the Paris Hilton of atheism.
As for the other two, Old Mack and O.B., in the irritated triad of atheist bloggers, do either have advanced degrees? O.B. admits she doesn’t, but she still considers herself a “pointy-headed intellectual” despite not having advanced degrees. And indeed, she concedes that she does “define intellectuals pretty broadly”. She appears to include a lot of her minions who haven’t the – something – capacity to understand the difference between literal report and parody. Their lack of appropriate analytical skills suggest they need a little more of the pointy headed intellectualism.
O.B. says “God is almost never a character in literature, and when it is it’s boring.” Eh? So she’s dismissing poetry, and Shakespeare, not to mention Shelley who really was an atheist? Allusions and appeals to ‘God’ and gods, saturate classical literature and new. She says “The only way to make it not boring is to make it like a human – which just shows how boring it is as itself.” Fair enough, if that’s a self-referential allusion. “God is nowhere near as interesting as Hamlet”. Despite Hamlet’s Ophelia dying, where would Hamlet be without God? And then she says, “And I’m still not a bit sure Hoffmann believes a word of what he wrote, himself”, which demonstrates she just didn’t understand a word.
The other thing is – it really doesn’t take a great deal of sophistication to read things in context and apply a little lateral interpretation, simultaneously. But there is something about ‘atheism’, the sort that appeals to gnu-dom, that finds it too demanding. In fact it seems for them, to be quite impossible. It seems such a shame their appreciation of humour is limited to nifty crass little slogans like ‘seasonal axial tilts’.
That’s entertainment in Atheblogville.
Signed: the slobbering, fawning, clone. :-)
rjosephhoffmann
December 6, 2011 at 9:24 pm
I need some time today to decide whether I am overeducated and overbearing or undereducated and overbearing. Either way, I am overbearing and that is something to cling to. Important if you are a peacock fanning its ridiculously luxurious tail. But wouldn’t the peacock need a fake tail to keep the image straight? or a really small tail that he just screeched was a really big tail. It make a lot of sense to count on people not knowing what an oxonian is in order to abuse the name of Oxford. My original plan was to enroll in the university of Arkansas program in dairy science and call the post the New Kentucky Review, but this works just as well. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to figure out a way to put my tail away so that I can go an angle for praise and adulation, and failing that I’ll buy some sweet smelling roses by any other name.
Dan Gillson
December 7, 2011 at 9:42 am
Thank you for your replies, but I left that thread feeling quite in tact. Ophelia thought she could weasel her way out of losing through chopping logic: “Sure, the idea of God has a wide effect, but considered in itself, the idea is tiny.” Nice one, OB. One can say the same thing of the idea of chairs, or the idea of poetry; one can throw as many ingredients into those ideas as one wants, or cut them as small as one wants. She has by her statement only proven my point that the ways we construct ideas correspond to our uses for them. If she wants to continue arguing, she can go to my first comment and proceed from there in my real absence.
The idiot named Sawells can claim victory all he wants. He was frothing at the mouth to pull me into a debate. Even after I pointed out that his since argument relied on denying the antecedent, it was a bad argument, he still insisted that I answer it. What was that George Santayana quote again?
Dan Gillson
December 7, 2011 at 9:44 am
The position of my most recent comment doesn’t make clear that I’m responding to Stevie.
rjosephhoffmann
December 7, 2011 at 11:58 pm
“God is almost never a ‘character’ in literature and when he is it’s boring.” Let’s assume for the minute she really means what she says. Then let’s limit our discussion to the God she means and not other gods, like Zeus, since then we’d have to include the Iliad and the Odyssey and most of Greek drama. Not a good place to start if you’re saying god is boring.
That leaves us with: The Bible, The Divine Comedy (implicitly throughout, Paradiso explicitly), Paradise Lost, most of the medieval religious lyrics cast as prayers (oh that she says: really boring), and leaving aside the fact that Pilgrim’s Progress and tons of other literature are about journey’s to God who is indispensable even without a speaking part, I can’t see the relevance of saying this. Maybe the relevance of saying it is that she is pre-committed to the idea that God is little, so that a retroactive overhaul of his influence on ideas includes a need to remodel western literature, which (how can I have missed it) has nothing to do with him. A premise like (a) god isn’t a character is insupportable enough until you define character as a center stage role, but the rear-guard action (b) when he is it’s boring is just poisoning the well: for fans of informal logic, Johnny only played two games last season and when he did the team lost. I’m not sure that the Godot is who’s being waited for in Godot is God–Beckett was mischievous about this–but the play is certainly about his absence. God is not a character in Portrait of the Artist, but imagine Stephen Daedelus without him. God is a character in Marc Connelly’s delightful 1926 play The Green Pastures, which is anything but boring: it’s the one where creation begins with a fish fry and God tastes the custard, deciding that to be just right it needs more ‘firmament’–not just a little bit a whole lot. I could carry this on for a long time, but life it short, and it may be that the atheist would rather re-write history than learn it, or simply go on making bumbling statements and generalizations about how pointless it all is.
The Political Future of Atheism in America: Don’t Go it Alone - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education says:
December 6, 2011 at 10:21 am
[...] If I were in charge of American Atheism–which I am not, but then again who is?–I would ask myself the following questions: Why does poll after poll indicate that we are one of the most disliked groups in the United States? Why are there so few self-professed atheists among 535 congresspersons and senators? Why have all three branches of the federal government turned their backs on the vaunted mid-century policy of Church/State separation? Why has atheism—a once formidable intellectual tradition—become such a “little idea” as R. Joseph Hoffmann memorably put it in an important recent essay [...]
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Being human in a world without gods « Choice in Dying says:
December 7, 2011 at 9:17 am
[...] This post is really about Jacques Berlinerblau and his new article over at the Chronicle, but since he highlights Hoffmann’s essay on “Atheism’s Little Idea”, asking: Why has atheism—a once formidable intellectual tradition—become such a “little idea” as R. Joseph Hoffmann memorably put it in an important recent essay? [...]
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Sean Patrick Santos
December 7, 2011 at 7:23 pm
What I find odd about this piece, and many others I have encountered like it, is the pervasive nature of this suggestion that atheism is inherently depressing, and thus that there has to be something wrong with, or something irrational or shallow about, people who don’t recognize that within it.
I found atheism to be tremendously freeing, something that evaporated much of the angst (to use that mundane term mundanely) that I had felt about a world in which human beings were merely actors in God’s play. When I look at religious practice, contemporary or traditional, “liberal” or “literal”, on the grand or the small scale, I see much that is trite and shallow. I see much pettiness, on both the individual and tribal levels. And I see conceptions of God that reflect that consistently shallowness.
And those conceptions of religion that come from the religious are invariably self-serving. There is much hemming and hawing about mystery and purpose, even these do not actually, inherently follow from traditional supernatural beliefs, except via tradition itself. When reading about atheists who felt that giving up God meant giving up these things, that doesn’t strike me as a solemn appreciation of the human condition. It strikes me, rather, as an expression of an internalized prejudice against disbelief, an inability to rise above the pervasive assertion that God adds something special and unique to human life, and that if there is a God, one’s cultural practices become justified, and the threat of nihilism evaporates.
Well, the world has seen black men who claimed they were happier as slaves, women who claimed they were happier when forced to be housewives, and gay folk who feel that being gay was the worst thing that could have happened to them. But at least in those cases we have the good sense to recognize this as a difficulty in adaptation, not a measure of profundity. Not so, it seems, with atheists who, losing the belief in an actual God, still attributes an unqualified and poorly examined meaningfulness or reassurance to the God concept, or who thinks that it can act as a stand-in for some aspect of the human condition to which it is only incidentally linked.
But it is is no less rational to feel that God is Terror. To me, there is no form of despair that compares to the idea of a world that is merely a plaything in the hands of a mad tyrant, a tyrant with whom no meaningful disagreement is possible, however bizarre his actions or demands. And a mad tyrant who styles himself as “loving” is, if anything, more terrifyingly alien, and more inescapably withering. It is the strict father who ages and ages, immortal, from whose presence you can never remove yourself for even an instant. It is the leviathan upon which we are parasites, from which we must feed or perish.
That is the being that monotheists hold as the greatest good. This is the “big” version of the God idea. That is the being that I grew up worshiping, and that I once spent all my philosophical efforts on trying to justify, defend, and rehabilitate into some semblance of rational and moral and emotional acceptability. The closest I came to succeeding was when I stopped thinking of God as a person, or being with any intentions at all. At that point I was more or less an atheist in any case.
I have never actually hated God, insofar as I have never faulted any particular conception of God and believed in that entity at the same time. But I wouldn’t be caught dead wishing that there was one. The tiny, “hobgoblin” sort of god would perhaps be acceptable, but not the abstract, omnipotent, omnipresent, vast, looming thing that theists gesture at, subtly glinting behind the veil.
Leaving religion was not a disappointment, and not merely because I’m too ignorant or shallow or haven’t read enough to have bought into this prejudice that God is such a big idea that it is tragic to lose it. Leaving religion was not a disappointment because I found something better.
I found a conception of the human being as a flawed but ultimately noble creature, something that I could appraise objectively and not merely discount as falling short of perfection. I found ethical systems that were far more nuanced and reasonable, the problem not being moral nihilism, but rather too many different types of ethical reasoning to choose from. And I found that, in fact, I was vastly more comfortable with the responsibility of choosing my own purposes, than the slavery of justifying my every desire by referencing someone else’s.
This may sound cheesy, but that has no bearing on whether it is valid or sensible to value such changes.
Whether one calls oneself an “atheist” or not, living without constantly attributing one’s values and experiences to God is a quality of adulthood. Growing up may be uncomfortable and unpleasant for many people, but there’s very little to respect about someone who grieves about not being able to remain an infant forever.
As for these slights against the atheist and skeptical communities, well, yes, they are centered around politics, social welfare, and, yes, entertainment. Is that such a bad thing? Is that even slightly unexpected? The world is full of Old Codgers (usually not so old) who see moral and aesthetic decay in every bit of light-heartedness, and in any new habit or practice that is not filled to the brim with solemn intellectual quality. To look at a popular social and political movement (any movement!) and complain that they have unfunny bumper sticker slogans is to be comically over-judgmental. To look at a largely grassroots movement, which has experienced rapid recent growth, and which is defined primarily by the beliefs that its members don’t share (and implicitly one’s willingness to disagree with others), and complain that they lack a single, unified, intellectually coherent message? Ha.
Why should they? Are you sure that this is even a major goal for those involved? For most of the people who attend these sorts of conference, skepticism is a hybrid between a personal interest(/hobby), a (type of) personal philosophy, and a political movement with a narrow focus. Perhaps that’s not as good as if every one of those people demonstrated exceptional intellectual capability and dedication and seriousness at all times. But it seems rather better than a much smaller movement that has even less lasting impact.
If we’re going to make some comparison to a older conception of secular humanism that has “failed”, why not talk about why, exactly, it failed? What are we supposed to get nostalgic about when discussing a social movement (if it was, in fact, a movement, and not a purely academic program) that apparently was too unappealing to grow and accomplished so little as to be labeled a failure in the first place? Why should we credit an Old Codger who seems to hate everything about a movement that reflects its popularity, while wistfully yearning for the days when a related movement was so unpopular and so unsuccessful that only dedicated intellectuals were visible within it?
You can explain how, realistically, a popular social movement can live up to certain standards, or you can admit up front that it’s unlikely that any such movement will. But if you try to do neither, and then gripe about inadequacies, the “Have you done any better?” question arises. It comes off as uninformed and petulant, if not reeking of outright disdain for those who are vulgar enough to be politically involved despite not really being “thinkers”.
Of course the piece ends with the actual comment about atheism having a stage but not having thinkers. I suppose it would sound absurd to resort to grade-school insults, but the conclusion here is effectively the same thing. It would be equally informative to close with: “But these atheists can’t do anything right! They’re just stupid loudmouth jerks!”
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rjosephhoffmann
December 7, 2011 at 8:04 pm
“What I find odd about this piece, and many others I have encountered like it, is the pervasive nature of this suggestion that atheism is inherently depressing, and thus that there has to be something wrong with, or something irrational or shallow about, people who don’t recognize that within it.”
Did you read this at all? The word depressing is not used. On the contrary, I think there is something very exciting and exhilarating about atheism, and I share that with other unbelievers.
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Sean Patrick Santos
December 7, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I mentally fit you into a pattern that you probably do not rightly belong in due to the section surrounding this sentence:
“Atheism until fairly recently has been about a disappointing search for god that ends in failure, disillusionment, despair, and finally a new affirmation of human ingenuity that is entirely compatible with both science and art.”
There are still advocates for this view of atheism today, and more than a few theists who claim that not only is this the only intellectually honest way to discuss atheism, but that in fact the last step is not even possible. The implication is that if you have never felt a deep and yielding despair about atheism, you haven’t understood it. I don’t, in re-reading, get the impression that you were actually promoting the same line of thought, and I retract that implication.
Nonetheless, in my rambly irritation, I did have two more central points. Firstly, many theists don’t seem to have any “bigger” of an idea of God than the hobgoblin one. Even an ostensible omni-being can be portrayed as a petty and foolish being (albeit with the petty foolishness ignored and relabeled). Someone is used to interacting with such views may have never had a reason to discuss any more sophisticated view than this.
Secondly, for many of us who did or do take a “big idea” version of God seriously, this view of God is actually the less charitable one. A limited God is less dangerous and less responsible than the monumental arbiter of all reality.
Also, I did have another point I neglected to make, which is that you seem to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there’s a problem with atheist prejudice or that coming out can be hard. You don’t say why, and as someone who has received threats and harassment (in real life from people I know well, not anonymous strangers), I think I have every reason to condemn a dismissal that just sort-of-assumes-in-passing that there’s no real problem and that atheists just have a victim complex.
rjosephhoffmann
July 14, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
puff de led
September 10, 2012 at 12:13 am
Hello there! This article could not be written much better!
Reading through this article reminds me of my
previous roommate! He always kept preaching about this.
I’ll forward this information to him. Pretty sure he’s going to have a great read.
I appreciate you for sharing!
Reply
James
June 30, 2013 at 7:41 am
thank you for sharing. great article
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response Manual
by rjosephhoffmann
Posted on December 1, 2011
When I wrote Atheism’s Little Idea I said atheists were small. But (and this is embarrassing to confess) I had no idea how clever.
There’s a species of ant in Papua New Guinea that is so small you need a magnifying glass to see that they’re insects and not swirling grains of sand. But drop a crumb of cheese on the ground and an army of ten zillion will appear out of nowhere, through the floor cracks where they live invisibly, and devour the cheese before you can retrieve and pop it subtly into your mouth. They are truly amazing little creatures. I think they are called siboyeki. I’m not sure there is a singular, and there doesn’t need to be, because they are never alone. They don’t believe in God either. I assume they have short memories because they don’t seem to mind eating the same sort of cheese crumbs day after day.
When the atheists had grown tired of my “endless harangues against atheism” last year they swarmed at me, Jacques Berlinerblau, and Michael Ruse all at once. We said, in different tones, that they were playing too rough, were turning people off (including fellow unbelievers) with their flatfooted tactics, and needed to behave like adults with real arguments and day jobs.
The atheist swarm may actually have eaten the other two because I haven’t heard from them in a long time.
But it was then I learned their strange language and breeding habits: Like all small things, their safety is in numbers. One atheist alone is hardly a match for his (or her) natural enemies, the Christian Nation, the low-wattage Dims and flabby franks like me who send mixed signals about what they really believe. But one thousand atheists on a single mission can take down a faitheist, an accommodationist and a Associate Reformed Presbyterian pre-Millennialist going through a divorce in about a minute. I’ll tell you this: if Osama bin Laden had ranted about atheists and not “the West” (where is that exactly?) he would have been cheese crumbs in October 2001.
Of course the real advantage atheists have over ants is language. Siboyeki can’t talk, but atheists can and some of the older ones can read, as one of them amply demonstrated to me recently by quoting a poem. This greatly unsettled me, because until this event I’d thought that Rachel Rubinowitz, my girlfriend in college, and I were the only people in the world who had ever read Philip Larkin. She said it inspired her to become a librarian.
I have come to be a huge admirer of how the atheists organize for their own protection and what they are able to accomplish on a low budget. I have wondered how this is possible ever since I was almost eaten last spring. But now I know.
Almost miraculously, about a month ago, I happened on a used copy of the Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response and Defense Manual and Cookbook at You’re Mama’s [sic] Bookstore in Sausalito, complete with marginal notes and exclamation points. It was selling for only a dollar and the owner said it had been brought in by a distraught undergraduate only days before. The student had said he didn’t have time for the meetings anymore and had decided to become a biblical scholar.
The manual is pretty short–less than a hundred pages of double sided photocopy paper–and has only one illustration, which is a little murky. It seems to show an atheist eating a baby between hamburger buns while a little old lady with white hair tied in a not-unseductive knot says to her husband, “I told you so.”
There are too many treasures in the Manual to describe them all, so here were my favorites:
Part One
(1) The Atheist Pledge. ”We believe there is No God. That’s it. Full stop. End of Discussion. Move on.”
(2) The enemy does not believe this. He will say things like, “But…” or “Have you considered…” or “I don’t know.” This kind of talk must be discouraged because it overthinks our position. Overthinking is dangerous. Good men and/or women have been lost because of overthinking.
After a few good recipes in Part Two(I intend to try the Skeptical Chicken tonight) The Manual moves to specifics. naturally, I was curious about what it might say about people–I mean overthinkers–like me. I was delighted to find that complete training is provided in how to manage just the sort of situation I’d confronted them with in Atheism’s Little Idea.
(1) Never mind what the enemy has written: it has no merit.
(2) Never say it has no merit; say it has no point. Better yet, say it has no argument. Argument is a word that implies logical development. Say it has no logical development. Other words to use: baseless, yawn, load of crap.
(3) If the enemy uses quotations or historical reference points, ask him where he got them from. Be careful, because he might have got them from somewhere. If he responds, say “Like you know everything, right?” Or, “Who agrees with you?” Remember: the point is to fluster, disorient and win.
(4) Multipurpose Global Utility (Straw-Man) Argument: If you think he and or she does have an argument but you can’t quite understand it, go to page 33: “How to Use a Straw Man.” The Straw Man defense is a sure fire destroy-all toxin that will paralyze the enemy. Basically, it is the same as a six year old saying “You made it all up,” but sounds much better. Plus, you don’t have to explain anything about where he uses it.
(5) If you don’t understand the Straw Man Defense, resort immediately to one of the following:
(a) Call the enemy arrogant. Our enemies are all arrogant or they wouldn’t be blogging against us so this is bound to work. Words like “pompous,” “misguided,” ”pathetically out of touch,” “incredibly uninformed” and similar expressions will work just as well. Try to avoid “full of shit” and if you use the word “erroneous”: remember there are two r’s. (see also spelling tips under accommodation/accomodation/akomodation).
(b) Call the enemy ignorant. This is basic because anyone who disagrees with atheism is ignorant. You can also use some of the same words: incredibly ignorant, unbelievably ignorant; I don’t know how you’re able to tie your shoes-ignorant.
(c) Call the enemy unimpressive Make any really important points look like insignificant points. There are various ways to do this: ”lol, r u serious”; “omg, I can’t believe how ridiculous when you said…,” ”When’s your next appointment with your psychiatrist” or “U BLEEV IN CEILIN CAT DOAN U?”
(d) Call the enemy boring. ”I tried to read this but I fell asleep at the first comma.” Better yet, “I would have fallen asleep at the first comma but I had to stop for a pee at the verb.”
(e) Say that the enemy hates science and reason. See p 98: “What are Science and Reason?”
(f) Say that the enemy is confused. ”I don’t know where to begin discussing this cartload of doodie and unless I knew in advance there was gold buried in it I don’t think I even want to try.” This one always works, and you can use other words besides doodie.
(6) If you find that a website is “moderated” say that it violates the fundamental right of Free Speech guaranteed to atheism in the Constitution. It is what our atheist forefathers like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and probably also Abraham Lincoln and Shakespeare fought and died for, or would have died for if they’d had to. Not publishing our comments is a form of defamation (p. 67) and discrimation, which is forbidden by all relevant anti-discrimination laws: see p. 80, “All Relevant Anti-Discrimination Laws).
Accuse the enemy of running his blog site like a Gulag. Badger the enemy repeatedly saying “Where is my comment?” ”You don’t believe in free speech, do you, you arrogant stuffed pork pie, ” or “No wonder your pitiful little site gets so few hits; you run it like North Korea.” If he shoots back some irrelevant comment about all your exampes coming from atheist states like North Korea say “That’s just what a pompous, boring, pork pie would say.”
(7) The art of the quibble: Throw the enemy off balance. Coordination is everything. Nothing is too small for a quibble (rhymes with nibble). And almost anything counts as a quibble: For example asking for page numbers, correcting grammar, and wondering if the enemy is jealous of Richard Dawkins’s unparalleled success as an atheist writer are good starts. But if he gets scrappy, move on to statistics, as in “You say that atheism is in decline; I’d like to know how you know this?” ”You say that religion is responsible for the preservation of learning traditions and the rise of universities; can you give me an example?” Be ready to say “I didn’t think so,” or “Gotcha” while he’s thinking.
Atheist dramatist William Shakespeare
Atheist dramatist Shakespeare
(8) Limited Purpose Fake Fallacy Multipurpose Argument: The Courtier’s Reply: Remember that since God does not exist, anybody can be an expert on God, which is like being an expert on nothing. Scientists can be more expert on God because a majority of scientists don’t believe in God. The more you know about God the less you know since God does not exist: don’t be afraid to say this. If someone believes in god, or knows someone who does, that gives them no right to say you don’t know what you’re talking about just because you don’t. In fact, just the opposite. The enemy will pretend to know history and all kinds of other irrelevant stuff. Remember: history is for losers, but winners write history.
The flipside is that context is nothing. We are factualists and factuals are factuals. The enemy might say, “Atheism really didn’t crop up in a big way before the eighteenth century.” This is not true, as our Big List of Famous Atheists proves. String together some quotes from our Big List of Atheist quotations (mostly made up or paraphrased, but who cares) to embarrass him. As Socrates once said, “Winning is not about research.”
Also remember, this is a cause: Since atheists are a minority it follows that we are persecuted because all minorities are persecuted. The enemy might say something arrogant such as, “Unlike religious dissent and heresy, atheism has largely been beyond the purview (pûrvym n: scope) and concern of religion, and atheists as atheists have seldom been persecuted by the religious establishment.”
Start with “This is a straw man.” Then say, “How do you know this?”, and then, “I can’t find page 76 in the book you quoted,” or “This is incredibly ignorant.” If the enemy becomes argumentative, say he is using his knowledge to discredit you and accuse him of using the Courtier’s Reply and zing him with the information that the Bible isn’t true or say something in lolcat. It never fails because we have the factuals on our side.
a Courtier getting a reply ready
See also: p. 67: “Tricks the Enemy Might use to Confuse Us” and p 43: A Short Guide to History for Atheists].
P. 43 A Short Reference Guide to History for Atheists
1. 0 God doesn’t create the world, hello?
2. Big Bang, maybe 13.7 billion years ago. Awesome.
3. Later: We climb out of the slime
4. Early on: Greece and Rome. Socrates killed for being a atheist.
4. Later: Christianity invents Jesus. Bible finished.
5. Not much later: The Dark Ages. Nothing of any importance happens.
6. After that: The Renaissance: a bunch of painters paint god and Mary and Jesus. Things r rly gettin borin.
7. Not so long ago: The Enlightenment. Gud mornin.
8. Then: Darwin, beginning of the messianic age. Evrythin iz kewl nao.
9. Finally: Everything from Darwin to Us.
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Published: November 30, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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28 Responses to “The Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response Manual”
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Scott
November 30, 2011 at 10:44 pm
They forgot my personal favorite: “Colossally Ignorant”. I used it once on a hard-head atheist, haven’t seen nor hear from her since.
For most of the non-dogmatists, it pretty much comes down to epistemic limits, or as someone from the realist camp said not too long ago “we can’t do or know everything”
Reply
Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response and Defense Manual and Cookbook | eChurch Blog says:
December 1, 2011 at 4:29 am
[...] Read all [...]
Reply
Joe Agnostic
December 1, 2011 at 5:19 am
Hilarious, well done.
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steph
December 1, 2011 at 6:18 am
I just woke up my cat reading this! Déjà vu – but where is the elitist pompous pontificating professor and the ivory tower? I love those. I’ve read everything everything! I’ve read everthing and more – even Shakespeare who was SO an atheist – they all were. All the good ones. Somebody said so, somebody who knows. “What a load of jaw-droppingly stupid bollocks”. I bet you don’t post this LOL!! :-)
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Hunt
December 1, 2011 at 7:58 am
The deal with you is you’re, what? in your late 50′s, or 60′s now, have pissed your whole life away studying religion, and it just eats the crap out of you that anyone can have an opinion without having squandered his life as you have. Deal with it, Hoffman. Go to your fucking conferences, cash your fucking checks and deal with it. Stop passive aggressively attacking people with fake, mealy mouthed unctuousness. And fucking fake civility!, you piece of shit. It doesn’t play in the USA. At least have the guts to attack people openly and truthfully. The Courtier’s Reply is descriptive and it is valid. If you weren’t such a pompous, stuffed shirt Brit, you’d be able to admit it.
Reply
steph
December 1, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Hey Mr Hunt, who are you talking about? Your comment doesn’t resemble the author. You seem to have taken full advantage of the Rapid Response and Defense Manual and Cookbook, though. You must have a copy – do you? The author is not a ‘Brit’ although he does have an outstanding Oxford doctorate. Stuffed shirt? Filled sufficiently and quite slim, I think – he leads an active life you see. Pompous? What happened to the ivory tower? I like the idea of including an ivory tower. Who cares about PZ’s ‘courtier’s’ analogy except you and his legion of minions? The author goes to conferences? Really? Cashes cheques? Really? Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. You clearly don’t know do you! Mealy? He has quite a nice mouth, generally smiling and not eating too many meals. Are you hungry? Is this parody not direct enough for you? Does he leave out too many names in his critiques? Passive aggressive? This is a parody. Would you prefer something more physical? Kick boxing? But then again, perhaps those billboards could fairly be described as passive aggressive. Fake civility? How can he be fake when he’s not trying to being civil? A parody isn’t civil. Religion? Yes he has expertise in religions but he’s so broadly learned he is also a first class historian, an expert philologist, he writes and publishes, and has a wonderful life all over the world. But far too sophisticated for you. You sound very wounded, knickers knotted. What do they say where you are? Get a life – that’s it. Get a life.
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Dan Gillson
December 1, 2011 at 10:10 am
Ha! (lolz.) Great post!
When I replied to pseudonym on a previous thread, I was going to explain gently that the Strawman Fallacy is an *informal* logical fallacy, so it is not a good way to challenge an argument (but it is a good, all-purpose way to raise a protest when you don’t like one!) I like your explanation more. Do you mind if I include it in my repertory?
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Michael Wilson
December 1, 2011 at 1:51 pm
I was impressed when I saw the American Atheist recruitment drive at campus that they have their own little icon that can now be squeezed on to a CO-EXIST bumper sticker. Personally the use of the atomic structure reminds me of the movie, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” where all the mutants are worshiping the atom bomb. Speaking of mutants, I was talking with the MSU’s AA chapter’s only female member the other day about how uncomfortable it is to be the only woman at AA meetings.
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Dan Gillson
December 1, 2011 at 2:24 pm
I just read Eric MacDonald’s response. What a humorless windbag! It’s like he never left the episcopacy! The closest he comes to arguing with you is when six paragraphs in he introduces the circular argument, “God is not a big idea, therefore God is not a big idea.” What a clown shoes.
At any rate, I found a gem from George Santayana’s *The Life of Reason* that I think aptly describes the hostile response to “Atheism’s Little Idea”: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you forget your aim.”
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Writing your own “Atheist manual and cookbook” at Roger Pearse says:
December 1, 2011 at 2:45 pm
[...] scholar R. J. Hoffmann is getting a little fed up with some of his atheist co-religionists. In this post [...]
Reply
robertb
December 2, 2011 at 3:28 am
Another interesting article. The problem being, once again, that this really has nothing to do with atheism, which is simply a lack of belief in deities. This, regardless of how some would wish to label their socio-political agendas.
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steph
December 7, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Robertb: You made the same claim, that atheism is merely a lack of belief in deities, on the essay ‘Atheism’s Little Idea’. As was pointed out there, your comment was interesting but suggested that you hadn’t actually read the essay. Your comment is less interesting, the second time, and I wonder if you’ve read that essay beyond its title. Atheism has become a very little idea, which ceased to be a big idea when atheists made God a little idea. The rejection of God was a big idea, once upon a time, as has been described.
As to your claim that this essay has nothing to do with atheism, you miss the point entirely. It’s absolutely irrelevant whether these responses are specific to atheism or not. They are simplistic responses atheists choose to use. Why would they need to be ‘unique to atheism’? None of these responses are fit for use if a discussion is intended in any context, atheist or otherwise. That’s precisely the point. The atheist responses are rhetorical.
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Dominic
December 2, 2011 at 9:31 am
where does that book come from….can’t find it anywhere…did you make it up like your ancestors “god”?
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steph
December 3, 2011 at 2:34 pm
It was published in 1611 by the press at The Universitie of Oxforde. I imagine Shakespeare, the “atheist”, probably grabbed a copy of that, and the King James, at the same time down at the corner shop before he died. ;-)
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Mark David Dietz
December 8, 2011 at 9:45 pm
I have seen a copy, which I could not afford, with the imprimatur of the Bodley Head — printed, no doubt, by the head Bodley himself. I wish I had picked it up — it must surely have doubled in value now that it is back in vogue…
Dan Gillson
December 2, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Have you read MacDonald’s teary eyed second response to “Atheism’s Little Idea”? — My gawd, get that sniffling wimp a crying towel. — Eric whines that you are too pretentious and showy, then prattles on like a pompous windbag, and then blubbers on about how *traumatic* his religious experiences are. Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo-hoo.
What a joke.
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steph
December 2, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Yes, interesting. It, and other blog post responses in that ‘circle’ (or ‘diminished triad’) are predictable despite the irony that these people profess not to care. Predictable too is the content of the blog post responses, including extraordinary and inaccurate presumptions like, for example, presumptions about intentions with the weblog title. Predictable are the number and contents of their minions’ rollicking comments, including illusions about comments mysteriously disappearing?! and also including the usual personal attacks and insinuations. Nothing is new under the sun. They all seem obedient to the recommendations and prescriptions outlined in the Manual. ‘Everyone’ despises us, but ‘everyone’ is all of them. That leaves us in the right company, people who aren’t gnu atheists, fully despised. Seems fair to me. “It’s important to make the right enemies” someone once said.
Deconversion tales can indeed be dramatic affairs, particularly when most of the ‘victims’ are from very conservative forms of belief. Often they assume their own former religious experience is an accurate reflection of belief systems generally. Experiences can be sometimes quite crippling emotionally according to victim accounts, leaving bitter memories with regrettable consequences.
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Dan Gillson
December 2, 2011 at 11:12 pm
I have no doubt that deconversion can be a dramatic affair. However, Eric’s account of his religious victimization is so maudlin — “I can still feel the shroud of fear…” etc. — and melodramatic — “There are victims and victims — that it reeks of insincerity.
It’s all trash. I don’t know why I bother to read it.
Scott
December 2, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Steph,
I’m almost in tears over your reponse to Hunt.
Thank you for the comic relief! (:
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ken
December 3, 2011 at 10:30 am
I read some of the predictable responses to the article over at Pharyngula.
It’s like watching a flock of chickens when a fox sneaks into the hen house.
Reply
steph
December 3, 2011 at 8:08 pm
There is a third blog in that triad. That third blog has written a second post about ‘Atheism’s Little Idea’. The Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response Manual’s recommendation applied in that post, isn’t included in the favourites list of this post above. The manual suggests that you pretend your enemy’s idea is so silly, that they probably didn’t mean it. So the blogger suggests that the idea that god is a big idea is so silly that Joe didn’t really mean it. The trouble is, avoiding the idea that god was a big idea, you have to lack imagination, genuine inquiry, knowledge of the history and evolution of ideas and cultures, artistic appreciation, human compassion and empathy, history of scientific ideas and more. But I would dream of suggesting the blogger who wrote that post didn’t really mean what they wrote in it.
Reply
Clinton
December 3, 2011 at 5:38 pm
All of this is a Poe, right? Right?
Reply
Steve Jeffers
December 4, 2011 at 8:34 am
Your argument depends on these responses being particularly ‘atheist’ in origin, in coming from that particular mindset.
Please could you show which of them is unique to atheism, and not just a general strategy that any opponent might employ in a discussion?
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steph
December 4, 2011 at 10:23 am
But this misses the point entirely. It’s absolutely irrelevant whether they’re specific to atheism or not. They are simplistic responses atheists choose to use. Why would they need to be ‘unique to atheism’? None of these responses are fit for use if a discussion is intended in any context, atheist or otherwise. That’s precisely the point. The atheist responses are rhetorical.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
December 8, 2011 at 12:08 am
If the enemy cannot be dissuaded from attacking us by pointing out how pointless he is, refer him (p. 43). Remember, this is a cause, not a classroom. It’s not about ideas, it’s about winning. Usually referral means sending out the name and address of the offender to ARAW (All Relevant Atheist Websites). Strength in numbers means that when one of our number has been attacked, we have all been attacked, and as freethinkers we must act in absolute conformity to the cause. The simple rules are these:
1. If E (enemy) attacks A, begin by following basic principles.
2. If enemy persists, refer to B (another atheist blog)
3. if enemy will not relent, refer to C.
4. B and C will reproduce in substance A’s attack on E, reproducing large chunks of A’s criticism verbatim and adding juicy words of their own..
5. A, B, and C together proclaim consensus and victory.
Case closed.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 8, 2011 at 12:09 am
A new page for the Atheist Manual: If your opponent criticizes you, say his criticism is pointless and that in addition to all the other pointless things he says you especially cannot understand the point he is trying to make in relation to you. Why? because it is so pointless. Remember: there is no defense like ignorance, especially when you are claiming that the ignorance is induced by the pointlessness of your opponent. It will be practically impossible for your opponent to say he is making a point when you have say he has not. If he does, say you haven’t understand that one either.
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Mark David Dietz
December 8, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Is there a hymnal that goes with this? Because, you know, it really makes me want to sing.
“With Factuals On Our Side”
Oh my game it is silly
My learning a mess
The country I come from
Is called the big guess
I’s taught to love reason
And God not abide
Cause the clan that I run with
Has factuals on its side.
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News from the Freethought Ghetto « The New Oxonian says:
April 29, 2012 at 5:53 am
[...] tactic”–designed to hide his manifold errors (cf. Courtier’s Reply in the Atheist Sure Fire Response Manual) (2) Hoffmann is Crazy: I can prove it and Ehrman better keep his distance if he [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Tomtens Discover God
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 4, 2011
Once upon a time in the dark Norwegian forest a clan of tomtens were busy at work making straw men for their screed patch.
The tomtens had been doing this for so long that they had forgotten who had made the first straw man or why.
The oldest of the clan, Leif Gunderson, said that his father, Gunder Leifson, had told him it was because of the trolls who raided the patch to steal the prickly pompouskins.
The screed patch was the only field in the north country where pompouskins grew freely and the maker of the tomtens, Bradi Boddason, had made it their sacred duty to protect the pompouskins at all costs–even if it meant losing their red hat or having their beard tweaked.
a clutch of pompouskins
Olaf Olafson, who was a November younger than Leif, said that his father, Olaf Olafson, had told him it wasn’t the trolls they needed to fear but a band of marauding courtier gnomes who had learned to read and write–and had learned magic.
‘They were spreading their teaching in something called ‘books’ said Olaf.
“They have invented a way of drawing the runes on bark, to teach their ways.”
But the last courtier gnome had left the forest a hundred Novembers ago, and the old tomtens said he was more than a thousand Novembers old at the time.
Some of the younger tomtens doubted this, and they were punished for their rudeness by having to make ten extra strawmen every day. Over time, the tomtens were running out of room for the strawmen, and had even discussed starting a new screed patch.
None of the tomtens had ever seen a troll. They only knew the stories their grandfathers had told them and the commandment:
The tomten law is to use straw
The trolls to scare: Ye thieves beware!
ne day, while gathering straw for their straw men, Sven Svenson saw a curious thing poking up from the ground just next to his haycart
Sven took his spade and began to dig carefully around the object, which looked very old and very delicate to him. It had a hard cover, like a box, but was unfinished on three sides, and came open and was filled with sheets of the thinnest bark. The sheets had been marvelously sewn together and fastened to the box.
The bark was finer than any Sven had ever seen, and covered with black signs on both sides. ”I will take this to Gunder,” he thought and turned to join the other tomtens near the screed field.
Just as he turned, a voice behind him said,
“Give me the book, Sven Svenson. It is not for the likes of you.”
A Troll from Screedhagen
Sven turned to see an enormous troll–the kind his grandfather had described–at least four feet tall with mere whispets of hair and enormous hands and bare feet. He wore a filthy tunic and carried a heavy wooden club.
Sven’s tomten heart was racing: he knew he was the only tomten in the northland who had ever seen a troll. But he knew as well that if the troll became angry, or hungry, he would eat him.
“The what?” said Sven, clutching the object more tightly. ”What do you call it?”
“Don’t play with me little tomten. You haven’t the wit. The book. Let me have it. Tomtens cannot understand it. Even trolls cannot understand it. Only the courtiers.”
“Who are the courtiers,” asked Sven.
“They are taller, taller even than me. And they have fair skin, fairer than ours. And they do not smell like us. They have made this story. They have made this book. It is about the gnome who made them.”
Sven Svenson
“Oh yes, like Bradi Boddason made us,” Sven said eagerly.
“Give me the book Sven,” said the troll more impatiently “It is not for the likes of you. It has great thoughts and we are small, you smaller even than me.”
“Tell me, sir, because I see you are a man of learning, unlike us tomtens who spend all day making straw men to keep your kind from our pompouskins, what is in the book?”
The troll sighed.
“I do not know exactly. My grandfather Harrald knew a courtier. He told me that the gnome they believe in is called God–something like that. They say he made sky and earth and the forest and the deer. They say he lives in the sky and had a son. I reckon his name would be God Goddson.”
“Is his wife a wealth-sucker like Hrungnir? How many daughters does he have?”
The troll shook his head in annoyance, his tiny eyes glowing red, startling Sven.
“No, no. There is no wealth-sucker. There is only him. He makes by himself. He makes everything–all the trolls, the gnomes, the forest. Then he grows tired of it and washes it away in fury, in a great rain. Then he remakes it but becomes unhappy with it. So he promises to set fire to it one day.”
“Not even the hags are so vicious!”, said Sven.
“The courtiers do not see it our way. They say he is good and merciful. They pray to him.”
“So as not to set fire to them?” said Sven.
“I am not sure,” said the troll. ”They say he likes prayer.”
“Our skald, Bersi Skaldtorfuson was captured by Olafr Haroldson and sang many sad songs about us, but none as sad as this. I feel sorry for the courtiers.”
“As well you should, Sven. And that is why I say: the book is not for the likes of you. It is why we drove the courtiers away, and without the prickly pompouskins we could not have done even that.”
“The pompouskins,” said Sven, a glimmer reaching his eye. “You pelted them with pompouskins.”
“It is all we had,” said the troll. ”Now, of course, we would use arrows.”
“So, you do not want the pompouskins from our screed fields.”
The troll looked suddenly amused. “We have no need. We haven’t come near the screed field in many Novembers, not since we learned the secret of the long bow and how to sharpen sticks. But, my father said, how the courtiers hated being pelted with prickly pompouskins by trolls. His stories always made me laugh.” The troll’s face relaxed. It looked almost kind.
Sven handed the book to the troll. The troll turned to go his way.
“Where will you take it?,” he asked, “To the courtiers?”
“No,” said the troll. ”I am going to bury it somewhere else, somewhere where it will never be found. –A desert perhaps, far to the south and east of this forest.”
“I pray it will never be found,” said Sven.
“You are a wise little tomten,” the troll said as he strode away.
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Published: December 4, 2011
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6 Responses to “The Tomtens Discover God”
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steph
December 4, 2011 at 12:54 pm
I do love a good fable. This is absolutely, quite simply, the cleverest strawman fable ever told.
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Ed Jones
December 4, 2011 at 3:37 pm
TThis is not a comment to this fable. It is a word caution for the post Atheism’s Little Idea, its penultimate statement: “But for a think tank you need thinkers”.
You necessarily do not want thinkers like: Einstein, Schreodeinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, dr Brogue, Jeans, and Plank – all found God.
Eddington may speak for the group: “We have learnt that the exploration of the world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetraating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousnress — the one centre where more might become known. Here (in immediate inward consciousness we find other stirrings, other revelations then those conditioned by the world of symbols … Physics must strongly insist that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spirtual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that ,,, which science admittedly is unable to give,”
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Richard Hull
December 4, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Do your straw men have their own arguments? Perhaps about the existence of philosophers? Do they call them hu-man arguments?
RTH
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Endre Fodstad
December 5, 2011 at 4:39 am
Swedish tomter in the lands of the norwegian nisser? They wouldn’t last a fortnight :)
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rjosephhoffmann
December 5, 2011 at 5:43 am
I agree, if this weren’t fantasy. But even as it is, Norway (noth country) had hegemony over the whole Scandinavian peninsula until the 9th century and after and the mythologies are intricately interwoven even to this day. ‘Twas Christianity making inroads that changed the map after 1000. Long ago and far away tomtens had dinner with trolls. But the national pride in tomtens is much appreciated by your Swedish forbears I am sure!
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Joe Agnostic
December 5, 2011 at 8:56 am
Quick question, is Kai E Nielsen communicative? Think he might clarify parts of http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/40634/atheism ?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Big Idea
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 7, 2011
hristopher Hitchens is, of all the atheists I admire, the one I admire the most. I want him to live forever. But as that is impossible–for any of us–it’s his voice I will miss the most.
He is a journalist, a polemicist, a bad boy. But he is also a keen observer. And, though he may hide it, a well-trained philosopher. All of the so-called “New Atheists,” except for Harris, whose star sets, were Oxonians. In a group so small, you have to admit, that is unusual–until you think “Shelley.” I would even say Wycliffe, but it would take too long to explain why.
Hitch’s atheism is almost an accoutrement of his personality. He has always reminded me of the cynicism of a young Malcolm Muggeridge who would have hated the old Muggeridge, when the old Malcolm got religion. Hitch and I are the same age. His current condition is one I watch with dismay, but (I’m sure) there will be no final turning here, no retreat as the forces of life and death fight it out in his body, no confiteor at the end.
Malcolm Muggeridge
That is because he is brave. In Five Good Things About Atheism, I gave as reason number one that atheism is probably “right”: there is no God or “supernatural” force that can explain the world as efficiently as a natural force or process. It would be cheating to call that process God. It would be the equivalent of the Grinch strapping a tree branch to a dog’s head and calling it a reindeer.
I also said that it takes a certain amount of courage to make this claim–saying I do not believe in God–not medal of honour courage, perhaps–but the simple courage that could be described as principled and honest. When people say to me proudly, “I have never believed in God. I was an atheist when I was five and saw my mother putting presents under the Christmas tree,” I smile and say, “Right.” If you fit this description read no further.
eligious folk often cling to an improbability argument that permits them first to claim a “supernatural” cause of the universe and then to make many more specific claims about the nature of this cause.
They point to the improbability of life, then intelligent life, or moral life, arising in an “accidental” or non-purposeful way. The whole basis for Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity is a version of an improbability argument, though it lacks a sufficient explanation of what an intelligent designer might “look like” at a moral- and thus at a purpose-level, which some over-educated people call “teleology.” It is nonetheless nonsensical from a philosophical and (yes) a theological point of view.
Why? Because the the improbability of anything cannot be educed as probability of something else. It’s a point as familiar to philosophers and theologians as the principle that “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.” The simplest known version is Why a bee can’t fly, a problem solved by John Maynard Smith by looking not at improbability but how bees manage to do it.
I suspect many atheists know that axiom even if they don’t know many others. It is dangerous, however, to rely on it exclusively, because to assert that the universe “happens” without cause, despite a massive amount of physical evidence and probability on its side, has to be “interpreted”: t=0 is simply a statement–that everything we are familiar with came into existence: protons, neutrons, stars, galaxies–even space and time. What is difficult for ordinary (and ordinary religious) people to understand is that in addition to physical things the properties, laws and impressions of physical things–left, right, up, down, cause and effect, the stage for all physical laws–emerged in the same event. The question of cause and effect does not arise about the big bang but because of it.
At the same time, long before physics and astronomy captured the imagination of hard-headed empiricists, Saint Augustine ponders just this point and wonders about its relationship to his forming idea of God: space and time do not exist before creation but as a result of it. Time especially is a paradox for him. But if this is true, “cause” and “effect” cannot exist either, because what is causally related is temporally related. What then would it mean to say that God is a “cause” of the universe when the conditions for causality did not arise until it existed?
His solution was to locate God outside the order of creation. Now we know better. And we know better in part because Augustine raised the question in relation to the Book of Genesis, which he could not take as a factual description of time and creation. Would such questions have arisen apart from the idea of a sufficient being (ens necessarium) cause-all, multi-purpose God? It is hard to say: the history we have is the history we have. But one thing (as I’ve said repeatedly): There was no clutch of atheist scientists scrounging out a meager existence in the hills above Rome waiting to come on board and set the church straight.
To the extent they know anything at all about these discussions, or have any interest in them, it may strike my hardcore atheist opponents as strange that this principle dominated attention during the Middle Ages, when “God” was all about proofs and much less the Bible. But they need to come to terms with the fact that something went on in the two thousand plus years between Jesus and us, or the three thousand between the Old Testament and us, and it wasn’t all dark, not even before Darwin, not even before the Enlightenment, and not even within the many-splendored Church. Which, by the way, wasn’t one thing but many things ranging from a political state to a souvenir factory to a patroness (the sole patroness) of higher education.
hen I say that contemporary and largely American-vintage atheism has made God a little idea, I mean atheists frankly have very little idea of the idea. In fact many who responded to my previous essay, and some in sentences that parse, have said that atheism isn’t about ideas: it is a settled “conclusion” about which there should be not discussion but enforcement and action. Anyone who can read a t-shirt should join the army, or a billboard that assures them that that they are worthy and loved and accepted, even if there is no big old Sky Fairy to magic them into immortal beings.
Two postings deserve mention as proof positive that Atheism’s Little Idea is getting smaller: A certain Jason Rosenhouse (who can’t spell Hoffmann and probably doesn’t care much–Rosen-house–really?) has written an especially imbecilic rejoinder which never engages and so never rejoins, following a recent riveting post where he asks the following seductive question: “We might wonder… why the Bible contains so much awful stuff.” And an especially obtuse and humourless man named Eric MacDonald has once again filled a balloon with gas and let it sputter around in my direction hoping it would hit me in the eye. It didn’t. For the elucidation (5 syllables, thus pretentious) of the latter, I offer Samuel Johnson’s essay “The Bugbear Style” which, as he quotes Shakespeare from memory, he will know by heart.
The atheists have convinced themselves, on the basis of reading dubious statistics badly, that they are an enormous underground movement waiting for a messiah who will lead them to Canaan, or at least to Milwaukee. They believe they are “results-oriented” political movers whose time has come: they have their evangelists and epistle-writers already, and unsurprisingly, just like the early Christians, they all agree with one another. As Jacques Berlinerblau writes, their behavior is all the more baffling when you consider they are “a cohort that prides itself on empirical precision.”
They are appreciative of science for “opening their eyes,” but they need to use them more to explore other kinds of literature, especially serious history, and not the fake atheist history of the websites and the Big Book of Atheist Quotations. It is no good accusing Christian fundamentalists of only reading one book with its skewered view of the world if the response is going to be equally false to the facts of human civilization. A few of their magi accused me of “making up” a quotation I made up from Faust, then (in quick succession as the egg dried on their face) getting the German wrong, then missing the point, then saying the joke wasn’t funny. A number of respondents accused me of “making up” the Sure-Fire Atheist Rapid Response Manual, which even as satire was pretty thin, transparent stuff. Not since Jonathan Swift offered his solution to the ‘Irish Problem’ has an audience been more willing to take seriously what is offered in jest. The new atheist troupe is proving two things, day by day: (1) They are resolute; (2) They don’t know what they are doing. There is a corollary to (2): If they do, they are doing it badly.
ut I do not want to give aid and comfort to the religious zanies simply because I expect more from my atheist comrades than they have so far been able to deliver. I know I will be stretching religious tempers to the breaking point when I say that the the idea of an all-good, all-powerful, self-sufficient being “needing” to create less good (or bad), dependent, and contingent organisms is more absurd than the irreducible complexity argument. As far as I am concerned, no matter what data proponents of ID can produce, the absurdity of the improbability argument is incontrovertible.
Most religious people prefer the idea of a “smart” and good god (“omniscient” might not come easily to their lips) with smart ends in view creating smart people like them for his smart universe.
Not the only problem with this view is that this scenario is not attested in the book they use to prove their case: The Hebrew God looks shortsighted and at times thick as molasses: a deal-maker like the merchants, priests and politicians who made him up; a crook; a powerful performer, but limited to a few physical tricks. His “smart” creation is likewise disappointing: small and unworthy rather than savvy; disobedient but persistently repentant; politically corrupt, murderous and disloyal. The Bible is not about how smart people are–and, actually, Christians and Jews used to know this. It is about how bad and ungrateful they are and how big and merciful (within limits and with exceptions, like the flood) God is. It took until the renaissance for people to face up to the idea that in moral terms, Adam was superior to god, a calculation depicted in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” where God–the very image of God atheists most love to make fun of–is geometrically reduced in form to Adam’s size and becomes Adam’s older image.
So, I reject the biblical God with some personal satisfaction. His evolution has been an ideological evolution in the way people thought about him and have been able to recast him in our improving self-image. That is what humanism in the sense most people still understand the word was all about. There is a proud “atheistic” convention of rejecting non-material causation from Leucippus to Feuerbach. It was there during the scholastic period, and emerged from the medieval period–slowly and painfully–as science. There is a proud humanistic tradition–extending from Socrates to Abelard and from al-Farabi to Leo Strauss–of taking moral responsibility away from the gods, who cannot serve as models, and turning the project over to men and women who can design them.
he biblical picture of God is not a coherent view of God. No ancient view of any god is. But it is consistent enough–sufficiently integrated–that to reject a single aspect of his description calls the whole picture into question. Rejecting the whole picture is easily the most efficient way to deal with the biblical god at a literal level, and millions of people are “atheists” in relation to this god and his story.
Some of these people, if we could look beyond the comparatively flat landscape of American atheism to the secular European world beyond, still celebrate religious holidays, light candles, give presents, and may even go to church once or twice a year. The biblical god is not part of their day to day life. Custom and tradition are. They would, I suspect, find the American debate over “Christmas” a little peculiar, jaundiced, perhaps even “typically American.” American atheists on the other hand would argue that the amount of attention given to religion during holiday seasons is oppressive and inappropriate–though this is largely a political rather than a philosophical discussion. It is a reaction to the suffocating influence religion of the most banal variety exercises over American life and political culture.
Like many soft unbelievers (I know what the paralytic expression “accommodationist” means) I regard people who still clutch their childhood god and saints tightly to their breast as superstitious. They are clinging to illusions. Many of them are not very curious about life, and many of them are not very brave about the future. They are the true servants of a god who wanted his people to be “faithful,” not very smart and not very brave, like a jealous husband his bride (Jer. 3.14). But their basic human need for consolation is none of my business; I understand it because I am human, and I need consolation, too. I have no license to rip the saints from their arms, unless they tell me to bow down and worship them too. I know as well that in the evangelical-political arena, this very thing is happening, and when it happens–when I am told that I must believe, act or think in a religious way–unbelievers, secularists, atheists and religious people have a duty to push back, to say, This far and no farther. One other thing: his chosen people were Jews, Clearly, therefore, God is not omniscient or he would have chosen some other people to be his obedient, unquestioning servants.
But my opposition to (even) organized conservative religion is also conditioned by modern reality: If someone cries “Rapture!” in a crowded theatre, no one will budge. Some people will laugh, many will tell the shouter to shut up and sit down, most people will think he is merely crazy. “Modern reality” is really shaped by the gnawing sense that even believers–not just atheists–lead skeptical lives. Religion will be lost to better ideas or it will not be lost at all. No amount of shouting, skewered statistics, contrived blasphemy or insult will kill it off.
o, the God of worship and faith, the God of the priests and mullahs and bishops and conservative rabbis, enjoined on followers by “religion” in its organized form is a god I live without as a moral presence or rule-giver. I’d be hard pressed to do without his story, however, because it is one of the most fascinating stories human beings have ever created. I would like to shake the hand of the man who put the finishing touches on the tale of God’s conversation with Abraham in Genesis 18 (16-33). What a sense of humour.
I can also live without the God of the philosophers: the diminished God of a Voltaire or a Diderot, of Paine and the coffee house agnostics, but I do so recognizing that that God had been reassembled not from premises but from slivers left over from biblical criticism and criticism of the Church, both protestant and Catholic. Even the most acerb critics were fond of making a distinction between God and his Church, until it became clear that this God was in many theological particulars the creation of the church, and aforetime of the Church’s religious ancestors, the Jewish priests. When that happened, he could not even hide behind the laws of nature where Spinoza wanted to stash him.
It’s possible to develop, as Gaskin has done, a taxonomy of unbelief that shows how atheism is not one thing but differs according to “where” one has come from in the religious system and when the atheism occurred. But atheism as an ideological position (a position with respect to an idea) doesn’t ask its holder for his or her credentials (I’m sorry to diosappoint my critics who think that’s what I have been arguing) but only for their reasons for holding that position. Saying “Because religion is stupid,” is not a reason for anything. Saying “Because people who are religious don’t understand science,” may have some general merit, but it’s pretty indirect to the question. If atheism is a defensible intellectual and ideological position, it has to be defended and advocated in the way other positions are defended. Christian apologists became adept at philosophy specifically for the purpose of defending the premises of a faith that seemed ridiculous to their philosophical opponents. Given the upper hand they say they have intellectually, isn’t it time for atheists to become better at argumentation and more aware of the sources that exist for constructing such arguments? To quote Mr Tipton (My Cousin Vinny): “No self-respecting southerner uses instant grits.” So must it be with ideas and arguments.
healthy disbelief in the god of book tradition, theological extrapolation and defense, and philosophical rescue is a good place to start developing an atheist apologetics. But it’s going to take a lot of work from the billboard and bumper sticker crowd. The god of J L Mackie and the God of Alvin Plantinga are incompatible ideas, but the dialogue between the two is an important and patient discussion of how two thinkers can come out on separate ends of a debate. Both (Mackie died tragically in 1981 at the age of 56) take the idea seriously–not meaning that they give any premature credence to the idea, but that they give the idea the respect it deserves for purposes of discussion. They do not lessen the discussion by grounding their ideas in personal experience, for or against religion, or cheap shots at people who think differently.
As serious professional philosophers, of course, their discussions are a little heavy: Mackie, especially, has an Oxford feel to his language, which makes it both crisp and complicated whereas, as an analytic philosopher, Plantinga can at times be merely complicated.
Most of all, however, they know the history of the idea, the history of debate and discussion, the twists and turns of opinions, and above all, the arguments.
In a strange salute to Mackie, Richard Dawkins wrote, “The atheist philosopher J L Mackie gives a particularly clear discussion of [the ontological argument] in the Miracle of Theism,” and then says of the argument itself, “I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won’t take common sense for an answer”(God Delusion, p. 107). I remember thinking two things simultaneously when I read the passage: First, how would it be to introduce Dawkins in the last sentence as “the atheist ethologist Richard Dawkins.” But that is a minor point.
Dawkins’s major point is an important one: he is saying that common sense doesn’t get us far enough into the analysis of anything in order to be able to draw conclusions, and scientists since the Middle Ages have been wary of unexplicated sensory data for just that reason. If our senses lead us astray in ordinary ways, think about the extraordinary–the cosmos for example. One of the most elegant treatises on the subject of sense-deception was the al-Munqidh min ad-Dalal written by the Persian thinker Al-Ghazali in the eleventh century. It is one of the most remarkable early treatments of perception and cognition ever written; the west had nothing like it at the time. It was written as theology.
A great deal will depend on when we come into the theatre when the main feature is Common Sense–Aristotle, Locke, Paine, William James, or later. The cheap definition–that common sense is “paying attention to the obvious”–seems to be guiding atheist discussion these days. Yet the science that is being invoked against belief in God could never have arisen if we were not fundamentally skeptical about sensory detail–unless we rejected certain axioms that were held to be true for thousands of years. Common sense is not the same as skepticism; skepticism is the correction of common sense:
If common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and activities into laws of ‘functional variation’? Vainly did scholasticism, common sense’s college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his ‘new philosophy,’ gave them only a little later their coup de grace. (William James, Common sense and Pragmatism, NY: Longman Green, 1907, p 73)
do not believe that the non-existence of God is self-evident or obvious. In fact, I think that the existence of some sort of god, based on our ancient perceptions of cause and effect, is common-sensical–that is, it makes sense to ordinary people. But atheists have a responsibility to reject the self-evidentialism that has made its way down the totem pole to people who think the existence of God is an established “conclusion” and that philosophical discussion (along with history and a few other encumbrances) is a waste of time. God, it seems to them, is not worth arguing about any more. The only work remaining is to get other people to see it their way. As a Zen master, a goomba packing heat, or a spirit-filled Christian might say, Don’t even think about it.
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Published: December 7, 2011
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9 Responses to “The Big Idea”
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Scott
December 7, 2011 at 2:27 pm
It must be difficult for the hard-cores to realize that the very criticisms(many of them) of theism were actually preserved through time in the very church institution they so despise.
Part of Christian theology is much like Coleridge’s description of Secondary Imagination: taking what’s learned for the past, the Greco-Roman tradition along with Jewish cosmology and synthesizing the two traditions into a new one, Hellenized-Judaism.
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Veronica Abbass
December 7, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Since you pointed out that some of the people who responded to your “previous essay,” responded in “sentences that parse,” it is obvious that you admire sentences that are grammatically correct and unambiguous. Please clarify your message in the following sentence:
“Anyone who can read a t-shirt should join the army, or a billboard that assures them that that they are worthy and loved and accepted, even if there is no big old Sky Fairy to magic them into immortal beings.”
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rjosephhoffmann
December 7, 2011 at 6:38 pm
“Should” can be used to express the continuous, passive or subjunctive: how do you think it’s used here? On a different subject: “Since you pointed out that some of the people who responded to your ‘previous essay,’ responded in “sentences that parse, it is obvious that you admire sentences that are grammatically correct and unambiguous,” Can you tell me what is wrong with your sentence? Go to “it is obvious,” your main clause. Now scan back to “Since,” in your adverbial phrase. Is it [?] obvious that [I] admire sentences that are grammatically correct and unambiguous,” because [since] I pointed it out or [ever] since I pointed it out? It [state of affairs] wouldn’t matter would it, since [because] what you want to say is “You seem to like sentences that are grammatically correct and unambiguous. Please, then, explain this one.” The high school teacher who told you you write well should have spent more time on modification sequences. Why is “previous essay” in scare quotes, by the way? But you are right: I admire sentences that are grammatically correct and unambiguous.
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Bojan
December 7, 2011 at 7:46 pm
I have been combing this blog for the past few days, and I have to say – I feel at home here… Thanks!
One question… you talk about Protestantism and Catholicism, but you never seem to mention Eastern Orthodoxy. What is the reason for that?
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steph
December 8, 2011 at 12:48 am
Read no further if you say “I have never believed in God. I was an atheist when I was five and saw my mother putting presents under the Christmas tree.” That’s bright. I bet it’s been said too, and I can imagine by whom – almost. Atheists really do have very little idea of the idea. So here you elucidate the idea very succinctly with all the usual wit and cynicism, historical and contemporary analyses. Let those readers who didn’t, now understand… but they won’t, they didn’t, I’ve seen.
It’s the best evaaaahhh,
Ihr doting fawn.
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Scott
December 8, 2011 at 8:48 am
Re-read the last sentence, it’s a good one: “don’t even think about it”. As the philosopher Neil Diamond said, “don’t think, feel”! This is sage advice if one wants to be lead around by one’s nose for a lifetime.
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Stevie
December 9, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Whilst I entirely agree that becoming like the the older Malcolm Muggeridge is a fate too hideous to contemplate with any equanimity, I am not absolutely sure that a last minute conversion to, for example, Christianity from atheism inevitably represents a chickening out. After all, to those who believe in reincarnation, around a billion of them, the claim that this life is the only one we’ve got looks remarkably like wishful thinking.
I think you need to add a page to the Sure Fire Guide to cover this; one never knows when some Hindu is going to laugh him/herself silly at the claim that we are just facing up to reality…
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Scott
December 12, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Come to think of it, God could have chosen an entirely different species. To make things much better, he could have chosen dogs; after all, they’re very obedient and prefer moving around in packs, like us humans
He also could have done much worse and chosen domesticated cats. Cats are loaners and don’t take orders from anyone; in fact, they just come and take everything over and become gods themselves, somewhat like humans in the political profession.
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steph
December 12, 2011 at 9:17 pm
“Everyone has observed how much more dogs are animated when they hunt in a pack, than when they pursue their game apart. We might, perhaps, be at a loss to explain this phenomenon, if we had not experience of a similar in ourselves.” David Hume, clearly ruminating the modern atheist phenomenon.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
An Essay on Criticism
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 8, 2011
”The right question is whether it is rational for the religious man himself, given that his religious experience is coherent, persistent, and compelling, to affirm the reality of God. What is in question is not the rationality of an inference from certain psychological events to God as their cause; for the religious man no more infers the existence of God than we infer the existence of the visible world around us. What is in question is the rationality of the one who has the religious experiences. If we regard him as a rational person we must acknowledge that he is rational in believing what, given his experiences, he cannot help believing” (Hick, Theology Today, pp. 86-87; quoted by Flew, The Presumption of Atheism)
One of the interesting things about the atheist response to criticism is that it apes the tactics of the anti defamation league of B’nai B’rith and the Catholic League, set up at a time when American nativism was at a high pitch and when anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiment was rife.
So far I’ve been lighthearted about the tactics of the atheist commandos, comparing their choreography to ants, which I know is not flattering but also not altogether mistaken. Look at how their comments cluster around the cozy campfires of their top ten favorite bloggers. How their comments create a cushion of like-mindedness and encourage the renegade to return to mother. They can smell a picnic a mile off.
The anti-defamation movements had a nose for “slander” that eventually went beyond the limits of protected self-interest. Remember, WASP religion in 1912 needed no such protection, and fundamentalism, while it was embryonic, was nothing like as powerful as it is now. Even Unitarians hated Catholics. Who could have foreseen the day when Catholics and fundamentalists would vote the same ticket and the Bible belt would stretch from sea to shining sea?
A conference I chaired more than two decades ago at the University of Michigan on Jesus and the Gospels included a speaker who was on the ADL hit-list. Three days after the conference adjourned, I received an official looking letter from the organization saying that they were “looking into certain things that were said” at the meeting and would let me know in two weeks whether they would pursue a further investigation. I had no inkling what these “things” were, but as a young and terrified assistant professor at the time I wrote a quick apology, revised it, then found some courage, tore it up (yes, before email) and wrote another letter saying “Who do you think you are? This is a university and we do not promote religious orthodoxy here–only free inquiry.” I’m glad I did. I never heard from them again.
I am not suggesting that atheists don’t know who they are or even that their current cluster-bombing of critics is (necessarily) deliberate. They may honestly feel besieged–that they are the last best hope for a lost and errant humanity. They know at least enough to know when they feel they have been slighted or misrepresented, or that someone has built a straw man and called it them. Keep in mind, however, that one man’s straw man is another man’s exact replica.
But to really understand the swarm methods of the atheist minim and its need to defend itself from scurrilous critics (who aren’t even coming at them from the religious side), you would expect to find the same sort of doctrinal consensus you’d find in a religion. I mean, to quote Robert Frost, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out/and whom I was like to give offense.”
If you can’t say exactly what property you’re defending, why get so upset when someone trespasses on it? Clearly, brothers and sisters, I have trespassed. I just need to know on what. According to my critics, I am too busy examining my plumage to really care. But I do care. So tell me.
True enough, freethought is not the same thing as atheism, at least not this kind of atheism, and a thousand miles or more distant from humanism, at least real humanism. But given the claim of some to want engagement with me (though many more just want to ventilate), it is truly surprising that they don’t try to find the common earth beneath our feet. Instead, they mark positions they can’t quite define with rhetorical poison. If there is a position here, it seems to be equivalent to whatever is the opposite of what their critics are saying.
Can atheism be defamed? Judging from the responses I’ve seen it certainly would appear so. Especially from the group that tells me that I don’t get it, don’t understand it, and therefore am misjudging it. Naturally, I disagree with that–but not just because it’s the position I would be expected to take. I am told that atheism is not a little idea, that it is not an idea at all, and that the idea it repudiates is small as well. (Presumably the logic is, How can anything that doesn’t exist have volume or weight?) Those are assertions that we can argue. Argue them.
But even leaving aside observations like big and small, it seems to me that if atheism is a coherent idea, a set of (sorry for the word) beliefs and principles that can be stated economically in the way religions have stated their sometimes incredible, brain-busting beliefs, then we would have a starting point. ”Not getting it” doesn’t tell me what it is. Saying that I am missing the point seems to mean just that you have moved the target–if there is one. Or is that the point? Telling me (a thousand times) that atheism is “just not believing in God” (look back over my posts; you’ll see I’ve been there and written it) is like saying football is a game that just isn’t tennis. Help me: what do YOU think atheism is. Define it, explain it, defend it.
f you won’t then the idea is not just small and elusive, it has become microscopic. The more you trivalize the claims (and identities) of critics the more insignificant it is likely to be.
There’s a tragic side to this discussion. Jacques Berlinerblau mentioned it in spring of 2011 and was promptly thrashed for saying that atheists seem determined to self-destruct by alienating heretical voices from within, even the voices of people who share 80% of their views. I agree with that, profoundly: this primal urge to be unpopular because you hold a view that is, in its most radical form, unpopular will guarantee that atheism will remain a pitifully small and intellectually marginal movement for decades to come.
This will show up mainly in the political sphere, where already a discourse is developing of atheist victimization. And partly this is true: atheism and atheists are disliked and few have a shot at public office. Now: look in the mirror, and look at your language, your tactics and your movement. Questions?
Atheists can’t have it both ways. If atheism is a proud tradition of unbelief with ideas and science and history and everything but God on its side, then act as though you have the upper hand and try to take criticism on the chin.
Be charitable to the ones history will leave behind–because they will be left behind. Work on developing the next act of your drama: we’ve seen this one. It isn’t very good.
If atheism on the other hand is a recovery group of people who have felt isolated, rejected, and abused by self- righteous God mongers, so be it. If it’s a little of both and then some, making allowance for the village atheists, angry old men and women, bitter ex-priests and clear-headed ex- ministers, and people who just need an ideological–we won’t say spiritual–home that isn’t a church, then the problem isn’t the need for a strong atheist movement. You have that, or seem to. It’s a problem of bringing these voices together into one choir. I apologize for the ecclesiastical analogy.
What I see right now is a discordant movement that can only come together as a pretext for attack, and so needs attackers. I do not see a movement with anything worth promoting anymore, except a vacant belief that religion is bad and no religion is good. Please don’t say duh.
There is no history in that kind of judgement. There is no nuance, philosophy or real sense of the past. There’s not even a keen sense of the present or of where you want to take this after the Peoria billboards come down. My critics have said that I want atheism returned to the senior common room at Oxford where it can’t do so much damage. That’s rubbish: it hasn’t been there for a long, long time, and it isn’t doing much damage in its current state except to itself.
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Published: December 8, 2011
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17 Responses to “An Essay on Criticism”
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barrettpashak
December 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm
So why do you say that atheists who don’t want to “let go” of Christ are gutless? Aren’t you, too, trying to impose some kind of atheist monoculture?
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rjosephhoffmann
December 8, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Where do I say this exactly?
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barrettpashak
December 9, 2011 at 12:14 am
“It is an act of courage, an act of moral bravery, to let go of God, and his only begotten Son, the second person of the blessed Trinity whose legend locates him in Nazareth during the Roman occupation.”
Why don’t you consider at an act of courage and moral bravery for an atheist to embrace the life and doctrines of Christ? Why is that you believe that he has nothing to say to people today? Why don’t you acknowledge that many people have never seen him as a god, and yet pay him full honour as a man?
steph
December 9, 2011 at 4:12 pm
The author doesn’t say what you accuse him of saying, ie: “atheists who don’t want to “let go” of Christ are gutless.”
When I read your first comment yesterday I wondered if you were making inferences from ‘Letting Go of Jesus’ reposted here three weeks ago. I checked it and wondered if it was that exact sentence you quote above, from which you were making the inference and assuming the opposite was implied, ie that embracing God and Jesus and the whole trinity wouldn’t be ‘courageous’ and/or therefore that not letting go of God and Jesus was necessarily demonstrative of cowardice in some way. That is, you inferred an idea from the essay that is neither explicit nor implied, and was irrelevant to the idea discussed in the essay in any case. The author did not say what you accused him of, and there was absolutely no suggestion of any ‘gutlessness’. The essay was as the title suggested, about letting go of Jesus, not embracing religion.
However I suggest you read the latest essay, Genetics 101. Changing one’s mind can go either way, or swing. There are equivalences between the two different directions, ie the direction from believing to no longer believing, and coming to believe from not believing. “Atheists have, theoretically, the ability to become believers. Believers have the power to become atheists. I know people who have gone in either direction and swing, like me, both ways. That’s the routine.”
rjosephhoffmann
December 9, 2011 at 6:22 pm
@BP:Do you mean why don’t I say this or why don’t I think this. The problem is your word “acknowledge.” Not affirming something is not a failure to acknowledge something is it, much less a denial I would acknowledge it, actually, if you mean those teachings of Jesus associated with peace and love. “Christ” is not the name you want: it refers to the divinity of Jesus. Some atheists have done just this, especially in the 18th century. Modern atheists seem less inclined to do so, probably because their agenda is more profoundly anti-religion and they include Jesus in it. I would personally think that it would take some courage to defend the teachings of Jesus, the man, in the current anti-religion climate–sure. And as a historian with some knowledge of the topic, even harder to decide what those teachings are.
barrettpashak
December 12, 2011 at 11:35 am
“Christ” is not the name you want: it refers to the divinity of Jesus.”
Not necessarily:
Even Jesus’ most familiar role as Christ is a Jewish role. If Christians leave the concrete realities of Jesus’ life and of the history of Israel in favor of a mythic, universal, spiritual Jesus and an otherworldly kingdom of God, they deny their origins in Israel, their history, and the God who has loved and protected Israel and the church.—“What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus?” by Anthony J. Saldarini. Bible Review, Jun 1999, p. 17.
The Jesus-mythers are simply extending to its maximal point the general trajectory of Christian hermeneutics by stripping Christ of his Judaism and substituting it for a pagan godman.
Dan Gillson
December 8, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Internet forums, blogs, and message boards certainly detract from the quality of critical exchanges. In an environment that demands that one show up to every argument ready with a response, it is hard to find the time to reflect properly on what is being said. If you take the time, you end up losing by default. In other words, the internet turns what should be a chess game into Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em Robots: Don’t bother with strategy, just keep punching until you land a good one!
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Ophelia Benson
December 8, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Oh come now. Be reasonable. You haven’t been offering a reasoned criticism, you’ve been sniping. You can’t judge the response to criticism on the basis of the response to sniping.
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Dan Gillson
December 9, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Sniping, Ophelia? — Really? — “Atheism’s Little Idea” was painted with a pretty broad brush. It didn’t capture the opinions of any one person; it captured the general ideas (here they are again!) of a populist movement. The “sniping” started in response to it. (“Sniping” doesn’t seem like a fitting verb, if anything because you know from whom the shots are coming.)
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steph
December 8, 2011 at 4:01 pm
It’s certainly true that not all atheists are former theists and not all atheists who were theists, were fundamentalists. Despite that, ironically, they do seem on the whole, to read like biblical literalists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in lusciously lyrical flowing prose, wrote lectures about great men from Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napolean to Geothe, which are collected in a book of essays, “Representative Men”. In Chapter 4, “Swedenborg, or the Mystic”, Emerson describes Swedenborg’s perception of symbols and biblical allegory, the poetic construction of things, and his interpretation of nature. He writes, “Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand any thing rightly.”
With his ideas on language in his essay “Nature” Emerson writes “[G]ood writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories … the whole of nature is a metaphor for the human mind… [and] The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.” He demonstrates Shakespeare’s command of language and the power he had of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets, and “power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small”. From “The Tempest”, Emerson quotes (yes really quotes) Ariel:
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind … magnify the small to dwarf the great. Like ants to atheists.
Meanwhile, the ant antics plunge to pedantics in their persistent clamour to contradict critique. And as you say in this essay, they can smell a picnic a mile off. “‘Ere, ‘ere, dear, what’s the disturbance!” the chief commander inquired.
Ihr, a Deer.
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Stevie
December 8, 2011 at 5:38 pm
I think that the snipers really do not understand that you are dismayed at the dumbing down of atheism because you can see the inevitable consequences of that dumbing down, and they aren’t pretty. Andrew Brown, in similar vein, charted Richard Dawkins’ Big Idea of substituting ridicule for reason; once you abandon reason there isn’t anything left to attract anyone with an IQ which reaches 3 figures.
Add to that the bizarre cultural status in the USA of victimhood as apparently somehow desirable and those of us in the secular world of Europe roll our eyeballs and pass on by. We are not going anywhere which requires ritual purity; in a rather neat transposition the ritual purity is now required by Ophelia Benson and her ilk, which is why you are being excluded from the ranks of the chosen…
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Ian
December 8, 2011 at 6:58 pm
New atheism is memetic rather than rational, which is why it’s so small. And also why it actually has a shot at competing with mainstream religion.
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Ed Jones
December 10, 2011 at 12:06 pm
TThanks for the Hick quote. I find it to be irrefutably confirmed in the thought of “the founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddingington, Pauli, de Brogue, Jeans, and Plank. As Eddington crefully esplains: ‘Briefly the position is this. We have learnt that the explanation of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – the one centre where more might be known. There (in immedate inward consciousness) we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols… Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spriitual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by intimate cONtact transcending the methods OF physics, supplies just that which science is admittedly unable to give”.
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steph
December 10, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Very nice Ed. This reminds me of John Keats’ theory of negative capability, which he expressed in relation to natural beauty and mystery in his early nineteenth century world. Negative capability was something he claimed Shakespeare possessed and Coleridge, whom he thought sought knowledge over beauty, didn’t. He described this theory in a letter to his two brothers (1817): “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”, as if while the artist is receptive to the world and its natural phenomena, he was rejecting those, who try to formulate theories or categorize knowledge, rather than being content with beauty and mystery which cannot be explained but which the poet can translate into art. Arthur Eddington, philosopher and physicist was writing in the early twentieth century.
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Ed Jones
December 11, 2011 at 2:32 pm
It must go without saying that Eddington is describing the experience of Ultimate Reality, that of a God of universal love that is the origin and end of all that is or ever wil be”.
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Ed Jones
December 14, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Joe, Steph,
For related Developments which involve the name R. Joseph Hoffmann click on .
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Ed Jones
December 14, 2011 at 3:32 pm
See Ed Jones Dialogue.
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Genetics 101
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 9, 2011
A recent response from a reader aptly named “Hunt” about atheist criticism and tactics quotes one of the mavens of the movement (now that new atheism is not new they seem to want the name back), Greta Christina, who runs a site called Greta Christina.
I am taking Hunt at his usually impolite word when he says she says,
“People don’t dislike atheists because of our tactics; they dislike atheists because of who we are”
I don’t have any idea of what that throwaway line means either (“I don’t like you because you’re a mean and nasty old bugger Uncle Crank. I dislike you because you’re an uncle”). But giving Ms Christina the benefit of a doubt, since I have occasionally smiled at her postings, let me just say that “Hunt” has ripped another page out of the Atheist Surefire Response Manual (send $750 to me for your free copy along with prayer request), while totally belying everything Ms Christina is vouching for–because Hunt’s tactics are a lot like Uncle Crank.
Uncle Crank
In the history of fighting for basic human rights, from which Hunt’s “rationale” is derived, there have certainly been instances where the genetic argument works: African-Americans were not disliked for their actions but for the colour of their skin (who they were). Women and gays were held in contempt by an unconscientized America as women and gays.
At a certain point, however, the dis-resemblance of victimized classes overrides resemblance and the genetic argument becomes a genetic fallacy. America’s first experience of this is when fat people wanted to be considered a civil rights cause: After all, they suffered workplace discrimination, weren’t happy that the racks at Walmart couldn’t accommodate XXX-L in sufficient quantity (though that has hugely changed) and weren’t popular on airplanes.
But whatever the merits of seeing fatness as a socially, genetically and psychologically determined condition rather than an outcome, people still think fat people are fat. And blacks, gays, women and Buddhist monks–probably even atheists–groan when they see a fatty waddling down the aisle toward the only remaining seat, next to them. Me, I’d prefer the fatty to the Buddhist monk. Monks are rude and don’t use deodorant.
That is what happens when you try to make atheists the same sort of “victims” that blacks, gays and women have historically and really been on the basis of suspicion and dislike. The difference of course is that the three latter classes are powerless to control or alter, except through extraordinary means, anything about who or what they are.
Changing your mind is not at all like changing your skin colour. I had a useful discussion about this with Paul Cliteur a few years back in Amsterdam while he was finishing his superb book The Secular Outlook. It should be required reading for every atheist. But don’t bother reading it if you want different information than I’m giving you here. Go on believing what you have believed because you read it on an atheist website.
“Believing” or disbelieving something is not the same sort of thing as being something, even though we use the verb ‘to be” to describe various kinds of conditions ranging from illness to sexuality. Anyone who claims a modicum of philosophical sophistication knows what a category mistake is, so you will know that you can’t shove everything into one box and call it sand when there are sea shells and dead animals and coins and syringes in it. Atheists have the power to change their mind–indeed once prided themselves on this ability.
Atheists have, theoretically, the ability to become believers. Believers have the power to become atheists. I know people who have gone in either direction and swing, like me, both ways. That’s the routine.
which is it
It’s precisely this intellectual motility combined with the methods that you use or choose to get there that define you as an atheist. But to say that people dislike you because you don’t believe in god surely has something to do with the way you externalize that belief. If that weren’t true, we would’nt be appalled at fundamentalism. If radically conservative Christian and Muslims were Quakers or non-voting Amish who would care about them? We care about them bercause they are vocal and in-your-face with their absurd moral agendas.
Consequently, like it or not, the basic reason people dislike atheists is not because of some hypogeal characteristic that makes atheism an essence but the observable things that atheists say or do. The same reason you don’t like uncle Crank.
And like it or not, that makes them (us) much more like the heretics and apostates of yore, our close cousins, than like the victimized members of twentieth century rights-struggles. If, in other words, you choose categories, be careful what you choose.
Never mind. I dealt with this issue a couple of years ago when people were sleeping. I don’t buy the fact that the word atheist is a scary word: that’s something atheists like to think because it feeds the victimization mentality now resurgent in the community.
Have a look:
Who Was You?
The Boston Lowells knew who they were. From their perch on Beacon Hill they enjoyed a perspective that encouraged them to believe in the Unitarian credo: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the neighborhood of Boston. When William Filene opened a discount store in the basement of his father’s store to sell overstock and closeout merchandise through his “automatic bargain basement” (off the rack, serve yourself), Beacon Hill was a swarm of indignation. The son of a (Jewish!) peddler would throw Boston society into disarray. Cheap clothes that looked like finery? Now even Irishwomen who worked as chambermaids could look respectable. That is, if you didn’t look too closely.
Never to be persuaded without a firsthand look, Anna Parker Lowell walked into Filene’s downtown store near Washington Street, coiffed and umbrellad, sought directions “to the so-called Basement” and took the steps with the polish of someone who was used to grand staircases. Once aground she saw women flipping through racks of dresses like playing cards–choosing, refusing, playing tug-a-war, even threatening bodily harm if a latecomer tried to prise her find away from someone with a prior claim. “Disgusting,” Mrs Lowell tsked to herself. “Just look at them.”
Just when she had satisfied herself that Edward Filene’s brainstorm would mean the end of high society in Boston her eyes lit on a beautiful taffeta gown that looked just the thing for the spring ball at Harvard. She moved closer for a better look. As she reached to collect her prize, a woman of questionable pedigree snapped it from the rack and headed for the till. “Not so fast my dear,” said Mrs Lowell. “I was about to have that dress.” “You was,” said the woman without slowing. “I don’t think you understand.” I had chosen that dress. I was just about to collect it.” “You was,” said the woman, unable to evade Mrs Lowell’s pursuit because of a crowded aisle. “Look here, madam. I didn’t want to tell you who I was, but I will if you persist.” The woman stopped, turned, looked Mrs Lowell in the eye, and said “Ok dearie: Who wasyou?”
I have always wondered what people mean when they say “That’s who I am,” but usually they mean something silly and parochial: I’m a Catholic, a democrat, a creationist, a car dealer, an ex-con, a neo-con. It’s the substitution of code for argument, a conversation stopper rather than an invitation to discuss a position or idea. Clearly identity matters, but the twentieth century was distinctive in breaking down the sorts of identities that isolated people from majority communities and power structures.
There are big identities and small identities, weak and strong. Part of this has to do with the nature of language and part with the nature of things. Being a democrat or a used car salesman are weak identities: you can change those things tomorrow if you change your mind or lose your job. Being an African-American or a male, despite the fact that we know a lot more about race and sexuality now than we did fifty years ago, still have a lot to do with properties and are much more difficult to change. To say, “I’m gay,” is not just to say “I’m not straight” but to challenge the idea of straight as normative and authoritative. That’s different from saying, “I’m Catholic,” if by that you mean you’re on your way to heaven and the guy you’re talking to is going the opposite way. Beware of anyone who says “That’s who/what I am” with a smile on his face.
Identities can be a great source of fun, as when Ambrose Bierce (the Devil’s Dictionary, 1925) defines a bride as “a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her” and “Brute” as husband, or a “minister as “An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility.” Too bad that in Bierce’s day the Vegan craze wasn’t what it is in the twenty first century, but he did have this to say about clairvoyants: “A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.”
The weakest identities of all are the ones that have to do with what we believe to be the meaning of life. I can remember in college three distinct phases of change: being a socialist at seventeen, a half-hearted anarchist at twenty, and an existentialist at twenty one.
I recovered from these infatuations by not permitting myself to stop reading and never reading Camus after thirty. With confusion intact, I went to Divinity School and emerged as confused and doubtful as ever. Voltaire (or maybe his aunt) said it was only his skepticism that prevented him from being an atheist. That was me, too.
I can’t doubt that there are “meaning-of-life” identities that one holds passionately and therefore appear to qualify for the “That’s who I am” category of identification. I have known people whose non-belief is as fervent as the belief of a twice born Baptist or Mormon elder, people who say “I am an atheist” as proudly as an evangelical says “I’m born again.” It’s tempting to say, isn’t it, that the difference between these two statements is that the atheist is smart and the Born again needs his intelligence quotient checked. But we all know that identity statements are code for a whole range of ideas that need to be unpacked and call for explanation. An atheist who felt his non-belief in God entitled him to murder children because of the absence of divine commands to the contrary would be no better than a cult member who believed that disobedient sons can be stoned because it says they can in the Bible.
I feel my Atheist Reader squirming, because while you liked the Bright-Dim difference, you don’t like equivalences. When Katherine Hepburn turns out to be an atheist people say, “I just knew it. Such a strong woman.” When Pol-Pot says God is bunk, we think “Well that’s different, isn’t it—and so far away?”
Personally, I don’t like people who say “That’s who I am,” or “That’s what weare,” or “We need to be honest about who we are.” At a crude level I want to say WTF? It’s eerily metaphysical when atheists do it—not only because it’s the language God uses when he introduces himself to Moses on Sinai. You remember, right?: Moses hasn’t been properly introduced and God says, “That’s who I am,” and when pressed after Moses accuses God of being slippery says “I am what I am.”
I reckon what he really means is, “You know—God—the one who does firmament, landscaping, Leviathan, floods, human beings God.” In fairness, however, the Hebrew Bible insisted that God was not just a proposition but an actor on the human stage. I don’t believe that God did any of the things ascribed to him in the Bible, but to believe in a doer and deeds is a perfectly legitimate way to establish an identity—even if it’s a fictional identity. That’s why Jewish atheists begin by denying the deeds and then the doer. None of this silly ontological stuff: too Christian, too mental.
But I find it a lot harder to know who I am or what we are on the basis of not believing something.
“We need to be honest about who we are” coming from an atheist doesn’t translate easily into the propertied descriptions of being black, gay, female or physically challenged–things over which people have no choice and no control.
It’s tempting, I know, to think the things we believe or don’t believe have the same status as the things that constitute us as persons or collectives of persons. But you would laugh at a used car salesman saying at dinner, “Dammit, Mother, I’m tired of hiding from who I am. Tomorrow I’m going right into the boss’s office and say to him, ‘Mr Jones: I am Bill Smith and I’m an atheist.” You would not laugh at someone who said, “Mr Jones: I haven’t had a raise in two years. Is it because I’m black?”
Atheists often complain when religious groups claim special treatment on the pretext that any speech against religion is defamatory while claiming equivalent protection for their own beliefs. But atheists need to be very careful about traveling the road of victimization and minority rights or simply adopting the legal definitions supplied under non-discrimination laws. Especially when racial, sexual orientation and gender provisions do not apply to atheism and the protection accorded to religious beliefs, if embraced by atheists, creates a stew of issues–not the least of which is that there is no settled definition of atheism and if there were a true freethinker would reject it.
Difference is deceptive, especially when it comes to self-definition. Is coming out atheist like coming out gay, an act of courage? On what basis–the fact that terms like “minority,” “unpopular” and “misunderstood” can be applied to both categories? But simply to embrace a minority position toward a “divine being” based on denying a premise is not an act of bravery. It doesn’t make you who you are or what you are. It’s neither race, profession nor party platform—not even a philosophical position or scientific theory. It’s not something to be ashamed of or proud of. It’s just about an idea—even if it’s a really Big idea.
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Published: December 9, 2011
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11 Responses to “Genetics 101”
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Scott
December 9, 2011 at 9:04 am
Dang, aren’t you tired Hoffmann? Do you ever sleep? That makes three articles in three days.
Anyway, thanks for the good reads.
Reply
stillsimian
December 9, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Hmm… I do not have the benefit of either your intellect or your knowledge, but I feel impelled to say “That depends…”.
As a very green 19yr old, newly in charge of a platoon of soldiers in Northern Ireland at the height of ‘The Troubles’, I really struggled with the naked hatred that my very presence provoked amongst people that looked and sounded remarkably like me, and who I had never personally offended. I thought of myself as a liberal and somewhat naively as a peacekeeper. But all these people hurling rocks and bottles and worse at me could see was a figure to be abused, representing something for which they had a visceral and profound hatred. If only they could see the ‘real me’ I thought… Needless to say, I grew up fast…
About the same time I decided I could not believe in a God. And yet I felt very reticent about telling anyone. When I eventually told my parents, they seriously considered sending me to see a psychiatrist, and my mother asked in all seriousness, whether I was a Communist. Sounds laughable now, but at the time this was a commonly held view in the back of beyond where I grew up.
And there was no way I could declare my views in the Army. It was one of those things that had the potential to be significantly career limiting, particularly if one had a religious Commanding Officer, as I had.
So I would argue that, yes, it did take courage to ‘come out’ and face the consequences.
Even now, many years later it’s not the sort of attribute I can bring up in conversation outside academia without risking a visceral reaction in a similar way that declaring myself a religious fundamentalist might cause. I regard myself as an old fashioned atheist, and I have little time for the so called new-atheists – and yet to say that I am an atheist is to be indiscriminately branded, in the same way that as a young officer I was branded.
Actually I think of myself as a Humanist who happens also to be an Atheist, but so few people have any idea what that means. Thinking back to my dear old late mother again, I can just hear her saying “Does that mean you’re still a Communist then…” So what are we to do?
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Scott
December 9, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Stillsimian,
If you find the time, you may want look at some of his other articles, particulary, “5 good things about atheism” where he does state that Atheism takes courage.
Reply
dwomble
January 3, 2012 at 8:35 pm
I found the 5 good things posting very interesting. It was enlightening regarding the author’s views which I have been struggling to really comprehend. What I don’t quite follow are what appear to be contradictions between it and this post.
Being an atheist takes courage, coming out as an atheist is not a courageous act.
From my naïve perspective it seems that if being an atheist (in a religious environment) takes courage then coming out (telling others of your disbelief in such an environment) must be a courageous act. This is born out by the experiences of those who have found discrimination and ostracization after having come out.
It is befuddling to believers how such a position (Atheism) deserves tolerating at all. However the basic reason people dislike atheists is not because of some hypogeal characteristic that makes atheism an essence but the observable things that atheists say or do.
Believers being befuddled as to why atheism should even be tolerated seems eminent grounds for them to dislike atheists purely for being atheists rather than for specific acts (beyond sharing that they’re atheists of course) since befuddlement commonly engenders dislike.
But maybe I’m reading this all too simplistically.
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J Grass
December 10, 2011 at 2:44 am
“I’m convinced that the nation……needs a person of faith to lead the country”–Mitt Romney, Feb. 2007
Hours after declaring Sunday that he expects to be running for president within a month, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he’s worried the United States could be “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists,” –CNN, March 2011
“You sitting up there talking to a dude and he tells you he’s an atheist, you need to pack it up and go home. You talking to a person who don’t believe in God… what’s his moral barometer? Where’s it at? It’s nowhere”–Steve Harvey, comic actor.
Google the names of the Republican candidates for President with the word “atheist” or “Secular socialist”, and then try to make the argument that the word “atheist” isn’t a scary word to many people.
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steph
December 10, 2011 at 10:48 am
I just google “Mitt Romney”, “Newt Gingrich”, “Rick Perry”, “Sarah Palin”, “George Bush”, “John McCain” and the idea of fundamentalism is pretty scary to me. I google “American politics” and American predominant Christianity is pretty scary to me. I google “Dave Silverman and the American Atheists” and I wonder at their stupidity. Such ignorant reaction to fundamentalism with such overtly stupid public performances is likely to reinforce fundamentalist convictions – on both sides. I google “American education creationism”, and the idea of children being educated in America is pretty scary to me. I google the “Critical Study of the History of Religions in American Education” and the lack of hits is terrifying.
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steph
December 10, 2011 at 3:27 am
Did I ‘come out’ as a fruiterian: No. I never thought of myself as one until someone ordered for me in a restaurant and said ‘she’ is a ‘fruiterian’ and only eats fruit. That was only six years ago. I had been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember since I realised the sheep in the paddock were for dinner. As a fruiterian I think I’m in an even smaller minority. I’ve never met another one, and there isn’t a church or a facebook page or a support group that I know of. I don’t believe in Apples or Blackberries but I eat apples picked off trees and berries off the vines. I gradually stopped eating everything except fresh fruit just over a couple of decades ago. I eat a few green veg. Even better when it’s from my own garden but nothing grows where I’m living now – except tomatoes in pots and strawberries in troughs. As far as labels, I’ve never worn them, and I change my mind. I like the idea of swingers.
Ihr a deer.
Reply
steph
December 10, 2011 at 3:36 am
Really just want to say I really like this essay. A lot. But you know what they say, the hunters in packs, the antalikes, when I say that… so I’ll say it.
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stillsimian
December 10, 2011 at 7:01 am
But how much choice do I really have over what I believe or do not believe. Can I make myself believe in God? Can you? I can say that I believe. I can behave as if I believe. But that does not change me.
And, yes, ‘coming out’ as an atheist was helpful to me. I felt a huge sense of relief, of being able to stop holding my breath, of no longer tip toeing over broken glass.
Reply
steph
December 10, 2011 at 10:51 am
Isn’t that the point? What you believe doesn’t make you who you are, it’s how you externalise that belief and what you do. New ideas as a result of changing minds in any direction can give a sense of relief especially when the new ideas are held with such strong convictions.
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Scott
December 10, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Yup, wanna know a person? Watch what they do and pay less attention to what they say.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Elegies
by rjosephhoffmann
December 10, 2011
All said and done I had rather spend my time discussing what I believe than what I don’t. My plight is a common one for cynics. It is much easier to deny than to affirm, and especially easy to deny what other people affirm.
In such straits, I usually turn to poetry. I used to write it, and then was convinced by many well-wishers to give it up before one accidentally got published and set the literary arts back several hundred years.
The last poem I wrote was an epitaph for Antony Flew which is hidden away at New Oxonian somewhere and may be marked private. As I don’t have access to New Oxonian here in China, I’m not sure. But in any case it wasn’t about the old, confused Flew but the young tousle-aired Flew who could quote modern philosophy and Horace as though they lived on the same block. I think what I wrote was sentimental to the point of being mawkish, but you can get by with that kind of thing in “elegies,” to a point.
Auden’s epitaph on Freud is a terrible poem on an ambitious and elusive, maybe even an impossible, subject. He seems to know that, and strains throughout to make the poem detached and accessible at the same time:
Such was this doctor:/still at eighty he wished to think of our life from whose unruliness / so many plausible young futures / with threats or flattery ask obedience,/ but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes/upon that last picture, common to us all, / of problems like relatives gathered / puzzled and jealous about our dying.
Primarily, the poem is famous for being one of the only poetic memorials of Freud, who not only loved poetry himself but had inordinate influence on poets of the twentieth century, not least Auden.
When the subject is a fellow poet, Auden’s restraint is real and his melody line is sure. ”In Memory of W. B. Yeats” links the death of the Irish bard to the collapse of civilization.
It seems extravagant until you listen to the question Auden poses: What is left of us if there are no more true poets? Who will sing our story when we are left only with the “importance and noise of tomorrow/When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse”? Poetry doesn’t come into this battle against anarchy fully armed; it “makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its own making where executives would never want to tamper.”
Auden’s face was a living description of this mid-century despair about the future of the poetic word “that flows down (south) to the raw towns that we believe and die in.”
Auden came to America to find poetry in the land of Whitman. He thought it had died in England, but found it dead here too. Eliot went the other direction, to England, to escape the Harvard philosophy department. (He refused to return to Boston for his viva after he finished the PhD thesis on F H Bradley). He may be the only true philosopher-poet of the twentieth century, but even if there were other good ones no one had Eliot’s ear and grace. Eliot did not share Auden’s intensity about writing epitaphs, but there are elegiac moments in many of his poems, like this from “Little Gidding”:
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue. (IVQT, Little Gidding, iii)
People who don’t like Eliot usually realize that he is using words to hypnotize them into learning ideas. He is easy to resist and the ideas are rife with metaphysics.
I personally find Theodore Roethke’s poetry more lyrical, and I have tried a hundred times, without success, to imitate him without letting on. The ascendancy of American poetry in the late twentieth century has many explanations, but one of them is the preference of German-American poets for the strict sounds of English as a germanic language. Eliot, a typical New Englander, though reared in St Louis, is full of classicism. assonance, but (to be fair), controls it as Henry James, his near-contemporary Boston expatriate did not in his prose. But Roethke subordinates the idea to the sound without sacrificing the idea.
Unfortunately, all of my attempts to sound like Roethke sound just like Roethke. His German father was so much like my German father that I can see my whole childhood in “My Papa’s Waltz.” And I remember writing an elegy for my own father that was nothing more than a paraphrase of his.
Roethke wrote one of the most beautiful elegies ever done about a tragic, uncommon incident in his teaching career.
Every professor, male and female, knows what it is to fall in love with a student. When it happens, it can be, I think, the pure φιλíα (philia) that exceeds friendship but does not lapse into sexual love–which is one definition of eros. For Plato, this is one of the risks and effects of knowledge.
Knowledge is hardly risky anymore, and in a “coarse” age, these sorts of relationships have been sexualized to the point where knowledge hardly factors. But in “To Jane: My Student Thrown by a Horse,” Roethke ponders the anguish of not knowing how to express grief when someone he loves has been killed.
Let his be the last word on how to write an elegy:
remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
O, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover. (1950)
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Published: December 11, 2011
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3 Responses to “Elegies”
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steph
December 11, 2011 at 6:35 am
I remember the image you painted, a moment in time. I remember his wild unruly hair, and those corridors, because I liked it so much. I remember it disappearing within days. I also looked for it now and can’t find it, not even disguised as something else. Why did you kill it! You didn’t, I hope. Freud won’t be happy with Auden’s for him but Flew could have been very happy if you’d let yours live. My Donne arrived today, the final in my seven replacing ones on the other side of the world. He wrote 20 elegies at least, obviously 300 years earlier than Roethke, and this one rather erotically, ‘to his mistress going to bed’:
Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy ;
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet, and show
The hairy diadems which on you do grow.
Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Revealed to men ; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven-like Mahomet’s paradise ; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite ;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee ;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views ;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;
There is no penance due to innocence :
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
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Dwight Jones
December 11, 2011 at 10:38 am
If a purpose in poetry is to move others, be it hearts or minds, then please – do play on.
When you mention “All said and done I had rather spend my time discussing what I believe than what I don’t.” – as an authority on religion you no doubt have to reduce every argument to its simplest assertions and stark words, they being the bones of thought.
Whereas, as a poet, you can release images from your hands that, like the wren, do make the shade sing.
Would that humanism and poetry came alive again together, its raiment and rhetoric reclaimed.
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steph
December 11, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Yes indeed Dwight! Perhaps it is the essence of humanism. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (wonderful) essay defending poetry:
“Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the Imagination:” and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accomodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.
…Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Faith, Practice, and Religious Illiteracy
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 14, 2011
“Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it.” Friedrich Schleiermacher (Addresses on Religion, 1799)
WO THINGS caught my attention last week. One was the total lunar eclipse, which was magnificent to see. The other, not so nice, is a post by someone whose work I have often enjoyed, Julian Baggini, in an unfortunate piece in The Guardian that probably wouldn’t survive a fact-check in an American newspaper.
It concerns what even he says is an unscientific survey of “beliefs” held by British churchgoers in Bristol, UK, using the following procedure:
“The online version [of my survey] was taken by a self-selecting sample of 767 churchgoers, the majority of whom read Comment is Free [his Guardian blog] at least occasionally and who are mostly aged 18-35. This is not a representative sample of typical practising Christians. The paper version was completed by 141 churchgoers in Bristol, again not randomly sampled.”
And with this vote of self-confidence in the result:
“These apparent limitations in some ways make the results even more interesting, because you’d expect the sample group in both instances to be more educated and liberal than the average. We can then be fairly confident that the surveys would not overstate the extent to which people held conventional, some might say more simplistic, versions of Christian doctrine.”
Leaving aside the improbability of anyone taking (or bothering to take) an “I go to church”- survey in England being unrepresentative of an “I go to church”-sample, but more “liberal than the average,” the study is very strange at a number of levels, which already disqualifies it for global significance. It absolutely disqualifies it in America, where religious knowledge is at an all time low, but (predictably) constantly mapped and charted in more empirical ways.
But it also is, as Jonathan Chaplin says, a non-starter in England, a country of smart but lazy people who generally like Christmas but don’t generally like sermons. Chaplin notes the procedural and methodological shortcomings of Baggini’s survey, but focuses most of his attention on the “Four Articles” which the author proposes as a way forward in creating atheist-religious dialogue. Unfortunately, Julian seems intent on wanting religious people to come to the bargaining table naked, presuppositionally speaking. While I applaud his effort to get atheists talking to religious people who are open to a sane view of the world, I’m not at all sure that this survey helps the conversation along.
HE following ORB (1999) Poll tells the story of religion’s decline in the UK, and all subsequent polls show similar southward drift for all religions except, of course, Islam. (The Empire bites back).
About Jesus Christ:
14% do not know who he is.
Less than 50% “believe in Christ”. This probably means that they do not believe that he is the son of God; the exact meaning of the question was not defined.
22% believe that he is “just a story.”
Church affiliation:
49% identify themselves as affiliated with a religious group.
27% belong to the Church of England (Episcopalian, Anglican). This is a drop from 40% in 1990.
(The latest YouGov poll cited by the British Humanist Association notes that by 2015, the level of church attendance in the UK is predicted to fall to 3,081,500 people, or 5% of the population.)
9% are Roman Catholics, unchanged since 1990.
Church attendance:
3% of the population goes to church only at Easter and Christmas.
46% say that they have never gone to church at all.
Baggini’s upshot, if that is the word, is that he thinks that given the choice between Christianity being all about practice or belief, belief wins. He is writing as a philosopher of popular culture whose interest in the subject is correspondingly tentative:
So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.
Remember the silly game everyone played five years ago ending every sentence with the non-sequitur “in bed,” and how much you wanted it to be funny but it almost never was? We need to finish that paragraph with, “In Bristol.” Actually, its parochialism doesn’t begin to suggest the problem with the survey: its problem is inherent to the very questions that the surveyor posed. But more on this later….
AGGINI’S survey may play well with atheists who are looking for any reason, any at all, that church-going is eo ipso irrational, but it is embarrassing for those of us who pore over serious literature and surveys of the morphology of belief. Not that everyone needs to have read everything on the topic, but it beggars imagination that he does not bother to know any of the recent literature on faith and practice in its wider context: Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy (2008) and his American Jesus (2003) for starters, but even (the work of someone with whom I rarely agree) Rodney Stark’s What Americans Really Believe (2008) is statistically important, and University of Chicago sociologist of religion Alan Wolfe’s superb book The Transformation of American Religion (2005). If on the other hand he intended his survey to be limited to Bristol, why call the survey, grandly, “The Myth that religion is more about practice than belief”? Them’s fightin’ words.
While the professional God-haters try to persuade us that religion is the same old bugaboo that it always was (All the better to melt your brain my dears) serious researchers like Wolfe have come up with a very different picture: American culture, he says, has come to dominate American religion to such a point that “We are all mainstream now.” The stereotype of religion as a fire-and-brimstone affair is obsolete. Gone is the language of sin and damnation, and forgotten are the clear delineations between denominations. They have been replaced with a multi-dimensional God and a trend towards sampling new creeds and doctrines. “American religion is less radical, less contentious, and less dangerous than it is generally perceived to be.”
I am not entirely convinced that every part of Wolfe’s assessment of the transformation of religion in America is dead-on accurate, especially in political terms, but the trends he discusses are real enough and the transformation of evangelical Protestantism shows that it has been as much affected by being “mainstreamed” as it was effective in influencing the mainstream. A part of this transformation has been doctrinal accommodation, the process first described by Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy and much revised in his 2008 study, Religious America. Berger was surprised that the process of secularization was not irreversible (i.e., does not lead to the eradication of religious belief) but transformative: religion learns to live within and to transform a culture. The prophetic version of the same idea was put forward in 1951 in H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.
The larger question is implied by Baggini’s verdict that religious practice is a discrete matter, separate from faith or at least from certain metaphysical propositions. As a philosopher he is undoubtedly thinking of the Kantian tradition where this bifurcation is normative. Practice is the realm of the senses, and usually means à la Schleiermacher and his successors, doing good or doing what duty (Pflicht) requires. If it can be shown that religion relies heavily on irrational propositions offered as “claims,” however, then the do-good part of religion might be rendered comparatively minor, which, of course, is where a certain kind of atheist might struggle to keep it–in the chambers of some discredited rule-ethics hell. But this approach, even in Bristol, would require us to turn the clock back on the understanding of faith and practice three hundred years, dig up Bishop Ussher (or Michael Wigglesworth if you prefer), parade him through the streets and say, “Scary, isn’t he?”
Most Christians experience faith and practice as two prongs of the same fork. More important perhaps, the terms “faith” and “practice” are theological conventions going back to the fifth century writer Prosper of Aquitaine, not scientific ones. Anthropology since the late nineteenth century has operated on the assumption that doctrine and to a lesser extent dogma are rationalizations of religious behaviour: practice precedes doctrine (belief in a systematic and codified form) and liturgy (codified behaviour) and also modifies it. The ritual (practice)-myth (story) relationship has been a topic since E. B Tylor first studied indigenous cultures in the late nineteenth century, though he thought ritual came second in the order of religious culture. The myth/belief- first and the ritual/praxis-first debate has been lively and inconclusive, but it is increasingly rare, as Melentinsky surveys the relationship over a number of decades, to think of belief and practice as separate domains. Proclaiming “faith” the winner over “practice” on the basis of what 700-plus Bristol Christians think about Jesus is fatally vulnerable to scientific critique and edges near to being a false dichotomy. The late archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie recounted a sermon he once gave at a Yorkshire parish on the divinity of Jesus. It was, he said, like the belief, a bit obscure. Following the service, an earnest old parishioner shook his hand vigorously and said to him, “You’ve convinced me sir, but then I never had a doubt, that Jesus were a very nice man.”
Bp Ussher
In previous work Baggini has at least acknowledged that religion can be relatively benign. If Jews and Christians acted out their faith in ways that a troubling number of Muslims still do, Christianity would be a monstrosity. But (to parse Bultmann on why he didn’t believe in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus) it’s not in the newspaper. The Christian-right moral agenda is a monstrosity. American Christians meddling in politics and attempting to leverage political outcomes is a monstrosity. The attitudes and personalities and self-righteousness of extreme-right Christian organizations, not towards just unbelievers but towards other believers is a monstrosity. But, marvelous to note, these things, collectively, seldom add up to catastrophic outcomes. The stories of Waco and randy Mormon elders with fourteen year-old child-brides are only newsworthy because they are exceptional–and (I have to say it) not the kind of thing that happens in Bristol.
T’S POSSIBLE, of course, to reduce Christian belief to the presumed “absurdities” that historical Christianity has embraced over the centuries–everything (one can argue) from the trinity to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy (which is not the same East to West) to the doctrine of the Real Presence for Catholics, which is not literally maintained outside the Roman tradition. It is also possible to embrace a more radical solution to the matter: since all of these beliefs have the same source, they differ only in degree of irrationality and can be dismissed tamquam idem.
But to equate the most absurd things Christian extremists in the Bible Belt [see postscript below] believe with what the vast majority of Christians believe is simply statistically false. Most Christians in Bristol (though fewer of them) are a lot like most Christians in Milwaukee. They go to church to worship God, it is true; but that their going to church expresses a robust commitment to the irrational isn’t true. They may well go to church, as William James would have calculated, because they regard churchgoing as a “live choice”– an action with an internal and subjective appeal, not a rational or forced appeal. Or as Schleiermacher wrote in 1799, out of intuition and feeling.
Most troubling of all is Baggini’s notion that asking questions about the divinity of Jesus is of the same order as asking about the weather–ripping a first century nomen out of context and asking a naive parishioner whether he “believes” it. Countless surveys in America show that religious knowledge is at an all time low. And assuming that there is some correlation between what I know (i.e., what I can define) and what I believe, “at face value,” to quote the Baggini criterion, it would appear that the real story is that many Christians act without direct reference to anything in the doctrinal treasure chest. Ubi ignorantia ibi nihil, as a Benedictine teacher of mine used to smile when I didn’t do my homework. All I can assume is that Julian’s teachers weren’t Benedictine, but I know they were Catholic.
I DON’T KNOW how you can take anything at face value if you don’t know the face value: Catholics in America don’t know by 50% that their church teaches that the bread, in the Eucharist, is transformed into “the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ,” the central doctrine of the Real Presence. The corollary of that is that they don’t know much about the sacrament of ordination, which confers this mysterious power on a priest. This might imply similar gaps in their knowledge about even more esoteric things, like the Immaculate Conception, which their grandmother probably didn’t quite get. No wonder they don’t know whether to genuflect or bow politely on entering the pew. When they did know, they bent their knees.
More startlingly, a number of studies have shown the reverse of Baggini’s conclusion: that believers throughout the Catholic world do not know or do not accept their Church’s teaching on abortion and contraception–the effect of years of disinformation and irrelevance, ignorance and indifference as to papal infallibility, and skepticism about the authority of the church in general in ethical matters. The Pew Forum Poll showed that only about half of those questioned could name the four gospels, and only 16% knew that Protestants, rather than Catholics, teach that salvation comes through faith alone. It is difficult to imagine, given this intellectual lassitude, that anyone in America can be trusted to define the larger doctrinal issues and warrants: trinity, the divinity of Jesus, salvation and atonement, and justification even at a depreciated value. Other polls have described the enormous elasticity not only of specific beliefs, but also the core beliefs of the Christian faith, including those associated with God and the divinity of Jesus. Belief in God is not a constant even among worshipers who have a strong belief in god, and definitions and ideas of God differ dramatically from denomination to denomination and region to region. Yet, many continue to “practice” their faith, perform works of kindness and mercy, and act charitably towards each other as Jesus commended.
MODEST PROPOSAL: Reactive and Non-reactive Beliefs
It is pretty clear to anyone who studies the nature of belief and doctrine historically that Christian teaching can be divided into two categories: Reactive belief and Nonreactive-belief. Think of reactive belief as radioactive: it has the potential to do harm because it invites defensive and aggressive behaviour from its proponents.
Nonreactive belief is the essentially harmless and deradiated form of beliefs that are harmful and toxic: it is the tribute money Christian faithful pay to the tradition, without being adamantly committed to any of them or especially knowledgeable about any of them to any significant degree. It is not that they are entirely negotiable, but they are subject to the form of negotiation called interpretation. Many Christians are not especially curious about them, though some are. Most reactive belief is dogmatic. Most nonreactive belief is intuitive, though sometimes it is expressed in doctrine.
In the Reactive category, I would put the following:
◾The plenary inspiration or uniqueness of a sacred text, whether the Bible or Qur’an
◾Any ethical or moral system derived from that doctrine
◾Doctrines and theories of war or social practice based on the theory of inspiration
◾A political system or theory of the state, church or mosque that took its guiding principles from a scriptural perspective, or understood that perspective as normative
◾Any claims that scriptural teaching possesses historical, humanistic or scientific authority over scientific inquiry, experiment, and investigation
◾Eschatology (a “lively” belief in the end of the world, punishment, reward); especially the doctrine of satisfaction, or the physical pleasures of the elect, as in Islam and some minor sects of Christianity
It would be interesting to see a survey in which only questions about these beliefs were asked. Anyone who holds such beliefs could not be expected to have a serious conversation with a non-believer; nor would he be likely to have a very long conversation with most Christian believers.
In the Nonreactive category, I would place all intra- and supra-biblical doctrines that (even if they claim scriptural warrant) have no practical implications and no clear relevance to ordinary life. These beliefs have largely been rendered harmless through millennia of development and, especially, interpretation. They are the core beliefs of Christianity in an “honorary” or traditional sense, and are therefore irrelevant to any discussion between atheists and Christian believers.
◾Belief in God and interpretations of that belief
◾The “divinity” of Jesus, including the story of his resurrection
◾Much of the non-apocalyptic teaching of Jesus (e.g., love of neighbour)
◾The doctrine of merit earned through human achievement
◾Belief in the special status of the human person
◾The mortal existence of the human soul as an expression of humanity
◾The worship of God as a communal expression of faith
◾Many parochial and specific doctrines of a largely devotional nature, e.g, the eucharist
I cannot help but notice that Julian Baggini’s survey largely focuses on questions about the non-reactive and “honorary” beliefs of the faith. (Respondents could hardly have been counted on to endorse the most reactive ones.) There are connections between the two lists, of course, and anyone not wont to make distinctions or explore the process of theological development can be forgiven for putting a pox on both lists. I understand categorical rejection of religious beliefs; I just do not support it.
But categorical rejection isn’t as easy as it looks. It is not as simple as saying, for example, “The divinity of Jesus is based on the doctrine of plenary inspiration” and is thus reactive. In fact that is not true. The divinity of Jesus is an interpretation that cannot rely on the “clear and obvious sense” of the Bible. It isn’t the case that the belief in revelation entails plenary inspiration, or that salvation entails doctrines of heaven and hell–not even in their biblical form. The resurrection of Jesus, like the account of the creation of the world in Genesis, are stories rather than beliefs or doctrines. Neither appears to be ‘reactive’ to me, though at a literal level they are false..
The disjunct between reactive and nonreactive doctrines is also clear from the practice of most Christians: the Christianity most critics of fundamentalism deplore consists of attempts to export and impose reactive beliefs. The essentially irrelevant Christianity that bothers almost no one and seems to interest fewer and fewer people, except hardshell atheists, is essentially nonreactive.
__________________________________________________________
POSCTSCRIPT: The Bible Belt
NATURALLY when it comes to religion, context matters. I once heard a “British evangelical” described as someone who still believes church services are held on Sunday. Pollsters have operated for decades now on the knowledge that Christianity is really “Christianities,” to remember Oxford religionist Peggy Morgan‘s famous caution about “religious ethics.” Christianity is stratified by doctrine, first of all, but then geographically as well. ”Geographically” moreover does not mean just London, Paris and New York, but sectorally across the United States. H. L. Mencken was the first person to use the term Bible Belt as a description, but he was simply being attentive to what later sociologists would graph as “audience” for religious radio (later TV), and core traditional-conservative protestant values and beliefs. BB-Christianity tended to be poor, white, southern or southwestern uneducated and defensive–almost isolationist–rather than aggressive. Core beliefs included the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, salvation by faith-experience (born againism), and of course the source of all of it: the inerrant authority of the Bible. Two early, and still readable, basic studies were George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (1980) and S.W. Tweedie’s seminal article “Viewing the Bible Belt” in the Journal of Popular Culture (11; 865-76). The worst study of the subject, alas, because he was a first-class biblical scholar in other ways, was Oxford’s James Barr’s crack at understanding it in his 1978 book Fundamentalism.
Since those studies, conservative Christianity has grown wildly, and the Bible Belt like the rest of America has become fat. In the map following, the areas usually associated with the Belt are shown in red, but by all accounts, even Tweedie’s study, it has both a northerly and westerly direction. Some studies identify it closely with the beliefs of about 24 conservative protestant groups; others see it more strongly and organizationally tied to the Southern Baptist Convention, which recently went on record as wanting to change its name because of “bad press” and misunderstanding of its goals.
To complicate things, there are export Bible belts as well as indigenous ones in Australia, Canada, and even the U.K. (for some reason, in Surrey, southwest of London). Moreover, the term is often applied outside the United States to areas which simply show a statisticaly higher than average degree of church- attendance, and which blend familiar anti-science rhetoric with socialist politics. The Free Churches in the United Kingdom, for example (for historical reasons) are associated with Unitarianism and have a very low doctrinal profile, but their belief would be completely out of line with the agenda of the Unitarian community in North America.
File:BibleBelt.png
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, Barna, Baylor 2006, Butterflies and Wheels, catholic church, Comment is free, Jerry Coyne, Julian Baggini, Pew Forum, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Religion polls, The Guardian (UK), why evolution is true. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: December 14, 2011
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12 Responses to “Faith, Practice, and Religious Illiteracy”
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Dan Gillson
December 15, 2011 at 12:13 am
On the plus side, Julian’s piece exposed the confirmation bias of the “Gnusies”. So much for being hard-headed empiricists, eh?
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Stevie
December 15, 2011 at 5:28 am
One wonders whether Julian Baggini has any clue as to just how silly his observations look; the answer is probably not. Anyone familiar with Guardian Comment on Belief who believes that they are going to get an honest response from the anonymous ranks is, to be blunt, deluded.
There are some interesting questions, which he naturally does not tackle, as to the tensions between what one is supposed to believe and what one does believe.
The New Atheists do not believe in evolution in much the same way as the massed ranks of devout Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation; neither group knows what it is they are supposed to be believing.
They are, therefore, not examples of that tension; they are merely ignorant.
Bach, on the other hand, was not ignorant. He was perfectly aware of the theological view of Good Friday as it was decreed at the time when he was composing St Matthew’s Passion; the words are exactly those prescribed.
But the music says otherwise, and the music wins…
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Herb Van Fleet
December 15, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Greetings from the Bible Belt. Right here in good ‘ol Tulsa, America. Having lived in this area for more years than I care to admit, and having a family that includes several “born-again’s,” and living as I do only a few blocks from where Oral Roberts, the acknowledged father of televangelism, created his namesake university, I believe I am fully qualified to discuss the “Faith, Practice and Religious Literacy” issues that you have brilliantly described above.
First of all, here in the Bible Belt, we don’t intellectualize about much of anything, much less wander around in the metaphysical forest looking for religious self-analysis (as opposed to analyzing self-righteousness). It boils down, as I have said many times here and elsewhere, to gut reactions, emotional responses, psychology. Listening to the choir, smelling the candles and the flowers, speaking the words that came from on high, produce many more pheromones than trying to figure out the difference between Pure and Practical Reason. (Yawn) Evangelical orgasms trump intellectual pundants every time.
In my blog next door, “The Humanist Challenge,” I wrote the following in Part 3 of my series. “The Alchemy of Religion and the Quantum Theory of Humanism” that seems pertinent here, sans the pictures:
“On May 22, 2011, my hometown of Joplin, Missouri, was savagely attacked by an EF-5 tornado, with wind speeds estimated between 261 and 318 mph. Several of my family members live there and, thankfully, none were hurt. However, my niece and her family lost their home, or, as shown in the adjacent photo, most of it. The pictures and video of the extensive damage, about one-third of the city, were painful for me to see; childhood memories made unrecognizable by the fury of wind. The city will no doubt recover, as most cities do after natural disasters.
“From recordings made during the storm, and in interviews after it had passed by, almost all of the victims invoked some reference to prayer, with the occasional mention of “a miracle” thrown in as they stood amidst the terrible destruction. Of course, what they really meant was that they, and their family and friends, had pleaded for and were granted safety from physical harm, or even death. This, they attribute to Devine intervention. Their prayers worked, miracles happened, and they survived.
“Being a Humanist, I found myself empathizing with these folks. They were, after all, looking for an explanation for the inexplicable, while, at the same time, trying to shield themselves from the anguish and grief that always attend such tragedies. I could feel their pain and it was made more intense because this city was my home for the first eighteen years of my life. And that pain was intensified after I saw the extent of the damage up close and personal.
“But I was not always empathetic. When tragedies like this had struck in other places where, with declarations of prayers answered and miracles performed, I was more of a mind to mock and ridicule. After all, I knew what the religionists were afraid to admit, that there is no supernatural force that answers requests to perform magic tricks, no wizard behind the curtain. I’m not too proud of that now. A non-theist with attitude is a New Atheist, I tell myself. The intolerance and disdain of religion by the Gnus are not desirable attributes for a Humanist; not this one anyway.
“The bigger question here is what causes an almost ubiquitous appeal to some greater power in times of tragedy and thereafter by those affected. Superficially, the cause seems to derive from the local culture, a tribal kind of thing; the nurture aspects. But I think it runs deeper than that. I think it’s an integral part of human nature and that it rests on the cusp of the physical and the psychological.”
I would only add that since that tragedy, there have been no less that 86,500 volunteers from all around the country who came to Joplin, a city of only 50,000, to volunteer their time. I would guess the vast majority were from the religious community–church groups mostly. But they didn’t come to proselytize. They came to work. They had no interest at all in deconstructing religious dogma much less trying to figure out whether they were reactive or nonreactive. Religious literacy doesn’t heal or help to rebuild . . . in bed.
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Aw, shucks! You thought I was serious about that? « Choice in Dying says:
December 15, 2011 at 1:33 pm
[...] not to respond. The key to the issue lies in the following words taken from his post, “Faith, Practice, and Religious Illiteracy“: It is pretty clear to anyone who studies the nature of belief and doctrine historically [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
December 16, 2011 at 8:24 pm
MacDonald’s blog lives up to his name: a crap diet at discounted prices with no nutritional value and volumes of waste that disintegrates slowly and pollutes the environment. I thought at first his blog was just the meandering of a senior citizen with an arthritic conscience. Now I realize it is the work of an old man who can’t read.
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Ophelia Benson
December 17, 2011 at 7:09 pm
That’s a disgusting thing to say. Last spring you called him a “smeg-head”…but you eventually apologized. Now you’re jeering at him for being old. Pathetic.
rjosephhoffmann
December 17, 2011 at 8:23 pm
I do not recall using the term “smeghead” to refer to MacDonald. It’s not a term that comes naturally to me–but I can’t deny I said it. If I did I apologize. However, there is plenty of proof that he can’t read, and that is not my fault. When the most someone can offer from their word hoard is “bullshit” it doesn’t doesn’t suggest much about his powers of observation. He only adds to this that he had a liberal, episcopalian theological education which he seems to have got over. If there is even a tangency between that biographical insight and his inability to respond to a statistical argument, let’s know it. Otherwise, I have to conclude he cannot read or is not reading. This looks like a clear case of –what is it lawyers say–If the facts are on your side argue the facts, and when they’re not [paraphrase] use the word bullshit. I have yet to see a constructive response from him to any critique, which gives him the unassailable rightness of a man playing his own game.
steph
December 15, 2011 at 7:59 pm
Schleiermacher’s wise words to religion’s cultured despisers selected here, are immortal, compassionate, and true. Religion’s despisers are are little less ‘cultured’ now, and wising them up is more of a difficult task but probably just impossible. The contemporary trends are expressed with lucidity and clarity in this essay, and the reactive and non reactive proposal is the most efficient model and suitably sufficient to describe the two distinct flavours in religious belief today.
Reply
Ed Jones
December 15, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Steph
What is going on over at the king of critical blogs might be of interest. At: Ed Jones Dialogue Vridar
Reply
steph
December 15, 2011 at 11:24 pm
What? Who? KCBs and that, be an oxy moron, Ed. ;-)
Ed Jones
February 6, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Ed Jones Dialogue on the ‘Genesis Problem’ – Comment 2/6/12 Steph FYI
“A major paradigm shift – a Copernican revolution of sorts – a radical new scientific Discovery which posed serious threats to existing understanding of the universe”. Such announcement took place at a conference held at Cambridge University to honor Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday, entitled “State of the Universe”, a Meeting of some of the most notable minds of the scientific community. A New Science editorial: Why physicist can’t avoid a creation event, made the comment: “You could call it the worse birthday present ever” (forcing so much mind changing).
A prerecorded message from Stephen Hawking who was ill unable to attend: “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.” What really broke down was Hawking’s Grand Design, his M-heory caiming that with gravith there was no need for a Creator.
Then Cosmologist Vilarkin introduced mathematical formula that basically imply the universe was created ex-nhilo, a singular beginning. Unlike Hawking, Vilarkin was able to swallow some humble pie and admit that his previous solutions regarding the universe were wrong. His numerous papers supporting the possibility of Multiverse and ;arallel universes, but new equations refute these theories.
Scott
December 15, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Surprised to see Baggini venturing a bit below the belt. For a better sample of his thinking, one might want to try “Making Sense: Philosophy behind the headlines”, or “The Philosopher’s Toolkit” with Peter Fosl.
Moreover, he’s almost always right on target when he talks about Hume.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Christopher Hitchens
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 17, 2011
Christopher Hitchens
HERE is no reason to eulogize Christopher Hitchens except that, had he stuck around to read the tributes, some of what is being said might have amused him. So we will read each what the other writes knowing he would have said it better, except he probably wouldn’t say it at all.
Hitchens in many ways belongs rhetorically to another era, which is why the twentieth and twenty-first century, what little he lived in it, is privileged to have known him. His verbal style was self-conscious, but seemed effortless, driven by the “true wit” (what Alexander Pope described as “nature to advantage dressed”) that was perfected in Restoration and eighteenth-century England coffee houses and left Thames-side by the sober English migrants who came to America to escape the kind of ridicule his sort had represented back home. Hitchens’s choosing to live in America, the world’s second most religious country, was proof that original sin will follow you wherever you go.
It has always struck me as odd, but encouraging, that Hitch found so many fans in America. He was personally everything the American Everyman was supposed to detest: He was a creature of the Balliol junior common room and assorted Oxford clubs, an intellectual elitist, an omnipartisan despiser of political folly and individual power-holders, sharp-tongued and aggressively literate. In his New Yorker remembrance, Christopher Buckley writes,
“When we all gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few years later, to see William F. Buckley off to the celestial choir, Christopher was present, having flown in from a speech in the American hinterland. (Alert: if you are reading this, Richard Dawkins, you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) There he was in the pew, belting out Bunyan’s “He Who Would Valiant Be.” Christopher recused himself when Henry Kissinger took the lectern to give his eulogy, going out onto rain-swept Fifth Avenue to smoke one of his ultimately consequential cigarettes.”
The best way to remember Hitch is simply to admire what he did–what almost no one else could do. Because he was the touchstone for a certain kind of eloquence, all of the obituaries are affecting to reproduce that eloquence. I expect he would find that amusing too. His brand of rhetorical power is difficult to describe, so difficult that I saw yesterday his ease of expression compared to Norman Mailer’s. Whereas in fact their styles represent two entirely different kinds of combativeness: The “sports mad Mailer” as Hitchens called him, was a boxer who happened to write, and Hitchens was a writer who happened to fence. The latter’s contempt for going mano-a-mano (to quote a former US president described by Hitchens as “abnormally unintelligent”) was common sense; why do that when you can put a sword between you?
Less well known is Hitch’s passion for getting his facts straight. While he’ll be remembered as an interpreter, he was passionate about getting the basics behind the interpretation correct. I told him once he would have made a good thirteenth-century theologian, except that he quoted the texts too literally. In 2007 he was in a “discussion” with Alister McGrath who had accused him of misquoting a famous statement attributed to Tertullian, “Credo quia absurdum est” (“I believe because it is absurd”). He was genuinely agitated over the prospect that McGrath might be right; and the statement is sometimes thought to be important because it’s considered foundational for “fideism,” the belief that faith provides a kind of epistemological certainty. We had had dinner and he asked me if I could track down the quote for a response. Tertullian’s exact words are “Certum est, quia impossible” (“It is certain because it is impossible”), but the passage is problematical–just the kind of thing a theologian could pounce on, I warned him. “It will do.” he said. “Almost as good. I got him.”
HRISTOPHER HITCHENS was our Dr Johnson–though “our” is not an inclusive term. Not accidentally, he knew almost every detail of Johnson’s rich and lexical life and one of his famous statements about his diagnosis of cancer is actually a spin on Johnson’s comment on a condemned prisoner: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A week ago, as fate would have it, I reposted his review of Peter Martin’s superb book on Johnson, which is one of his finest critical pieces for the Atlantic. Johnson, as much a Christian as Hitchens was an atheist, did not write “novels” and was anxious about French anti-clericalism sweeping into England. His picaresque novella called Rasellas, about the adventures of the “Prince of Abissinia” contains the following narrative meditation:
That the dead are seen no more … I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.
Hitchens was a caviller at such ideas. The final hypocrisy is to live your life as though you will be seen and heard from again. There are no second acts in American politics or anywhere else. He was also content with the life he led, with its inconsistencies and nasty habits, and with the offence he gave, in the name of sanity, to the ignorance he saw surrounding him. That last sentence does not mean he thought he was fighting a moral battle, except insofar as his atheism was a steady compass, especially in the last decade, in a world where traditional morality had become a dark and superstitious sea. America, with which he had a pragmatic relationship rather than a love affair, was the last testing ground for the possibility of a new enlightenment, a place where the monsters of unreason reared their heads every day and needed to be beaten back.
Not altogether unrelated to the death of Christopher Hitchens, I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about life, death and elegies. A few weeks ago, I came across a poem I had hand-copied in my middler year at Harvard Divinity School onto yellow legal paper. Even the paper tells me how old I am, but the thought lives on and it says something that Christopher Hitchens has said just as well in prose about the blunt, rude ordinariness of death. Death is nothing special.
HAT I expected was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long.
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch
The fading of body and soul
Like smoke before wind
Corrupt, unsubstantial.
The wearing of Time,
And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
The pulverous grief
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth—
These, I could not foresee.
For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust;
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem
Or the dazzling crystal. (Stephen Spender)
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, Christpher Hitchens, death and dying, English writers of the twentieth century, God is Not great, language, new atheism, R. Joseph Hoffmann, religion. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: December 16, 2011
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3 Responses to “Christopher Hitchens”
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Dwight Jones
December 17, 2011 at 10:48 am
“..Like smoke before wind,” gone like a cigarette, perhaps.
But we all waft away, and Hitch took a lifetime to “not go gentle”, last-minute histrionics long since not necessary.
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steph
December 17, 2011 at 2:01 pm
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
(Dylan Thomas)
It’s ironic that MacDonald sandwiches two brief posts about Hitchens yesterday, between his own sermons extolling euthanasia and attacking religion for promoting life. It’s suffocating. Hitchens himself loved religion not, but he loved his life. He struggled to hang on to life and suffered immensely until the end. He did not choose to die.
My father was not a believer but he too loved his life. He suffered for years with osteoporosis but wanted his life to continue. In his last years we talked alot about theology and philosophy, facing death, dying and grief. He did not want to die. He had new seeds to sow, he relished the seasons and he had crops to harvest and a wife to love forever. She cared for him doubled over in agony, til he died. She loves him still.
My mother was not a believer. She didn’t want to die. She used to tell me all her plans. I know what she wanted. But she died last year. And I know her plans.
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Scott
December 17, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Interesting how one writer wrote of a bed-side conversion. Frankly, I would have had to be there myself to believe about Hitch.
Interestingly, almost as soon as the blurb appeared, it mysteriously disappeared.
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Merry Christmas from China
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 25, 2011
Mother and Child
AM in China this year.
I love China. Food, people, culture, history. Public toilets, not so much. When I was in America I loved “Chinese” food. Now I love Chinese food. There may be things to criticize about China, but on average, I think it’s one of the finest countries on earth. That is an opinion, not an assertion. Believe me, I know what counts against my opinion.
Once I thought that America was the best country on earth. Then I turned fifteen. Between John Kennedy and Barack Obama, forty five years if you’re counting, there isn’t much to brag about.
But America is no longer the finest country on earth.
That’s because Americans on average are becoming dumber and dumber. The political system has become the equivalent of a hamster’s treadmill: vote ‘em in on a whim, vote ‘em out on a notion. Then vote no confidence in the congress you just elected. It’s a system designed for a country of 2.5 million disgruntled colonials made nervous by authority and power, not a country of 300,000,000 unhappy taxpayers. On November 6, 2012, a new president will be elected. On November 7, 2012, the 2016 presidential race will begin. This is no way to run a democracy. It’s a way to run a trifecta.
The educational system is broken. Not just broken but as Rosanna Pittella has shown broken because it was legislated and reformed step by step to be the broken system it is. The question isn’t just, Where is the next generation of engineers going to come from? It’s can we maintain the sixth grade reading level of high school graduates or should we aim lower?
Higher education used to be the exception, especially graduate education. And while congress, looking for cold comfort, will always point to the American university system as a world-beater, that is not what most people mean by ‘education’ and more and more colleges and universities are following broken business models that ensure the mediocrity of their faculty and teaching programs. And (not to be cynical) it is possible that the best universities are the best because they are following better models: compare ‘recruitment budgets’ at Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech to those at Mercy College or Meadville.
So don’t worry too much about the evils of a one-party state when the glories of a two party system are far from clear on this side of the Pacific. Some things are worse than limited choice.
HAD lunch with a qīn’ài de tóngshì (“dear colleague”) today in the linguistics faculty of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has recently come back from two years in Boston. I had just had my first taste of duck feet and was, as instructed, spitting the extraneous bits (most) into the plate. The taste, and texture, needs getting used to, so we started talking about lobster, bad marriages, and then Christmas.
I’ll bet, he said, you’ve heard more Merry Christmases here in China than you ever would in America. I spat and thought.
Yes, I said. It’s true. My students have all wished me Merry Christmas. I have wassailed them back. I have watched their gentle, intelligent faces go from non-expressive to inexpressibly happy just at the sound of the phrase, like some supernal “Hello! Very glad to see you.” In notations to final exams, they have Merry Christmassed me, and in power points, often with angels, Santas, or nativity scenes as their last slide. No Happy Holidays, no Seasons Greetings, no Let your Light Shine this Solstice Season, no Axial Tilt is the Reason for the season (a joke that is both “in” and wrong at the same time) . While writing this, a third year doctoral student in animal ecology sent me a Merry Christmas showing two goitered gazelles in China’s far north. Beautiful creatures, beautiful gesture.
Yet another example of failed wit from Atheist America
My friend paid the tab, beamed “Merry Christmas,” and we parted. The shopping districts are festooned with lights; Christmas music is blaring from every speaker. At first I thought I was imagining that people seemed happier, friendlier, even kindlier–but No: Christmas in China is the real thing, and American merchants would kill to have a share of their shopping extravagance right now.
+++
I have never been the kind of person who wanted non-Christians and atheists to feel uncomfortable at Christmas. But living in an “officially” atheist state has taught me a few things that atheists and even happy holiday inclusivists need to consider.
Prudence: China is a country of well over one billion people. Perhaps 30% regard themselves as belonging to a “traditional” or ethnic religion, though good statistics are hard to come by in this under-researched land. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism (prevalent among the Han) command general respect as conveyances of traditional Chinese values. These include “essentials” like filial piety, duty, honor and intellectual rigor–the primacy of knowledge and a respect for scholars.
Christians are at about 3% of the population (about 4,000,000), but the statistic is far from certain. At various points in Chinese history, Judaism and Islam, but not Christianity, enjoyed favoured status. Some Chinese worry that Tibetan Buddhism overstresses “holiness” the importance of doing without, and thus can’t be reconciled with the new Chinese economic program (the world’s second largest economy, after all). But other values, like harmony and proportion, are vigorously accepted by most Chinese, young and old.
Chinese indifference to religion is not an indifference to particular religious values that are regarded as markers of China’s civilization: filial piety is real piety, just as it was in the first-century Roman empire out of which religious hierarchy, with its stress on obedience, developed. Chinese concern about religion is a worry that religion can be used as an instrument of dissent and insurrection against these values and the (ever-changing) political status quo; accordingly, since 1949 missionary Christianity has been tightly controlled. (The evangelical house church movement–zhōngguó jiātíng jiàohuì–in my opinion an especially repugnant intrusion into the Chinese spiritual realm–has recently come under scrutiny.) Going back two thousand years, China’s approach to religion has been prudential and “indigenous” (what in religious terms is the good of China?) rather than arbitrary, while in the west it has been driven by a power struggle between the temporal and spiritual domains, and by necessity, protectivism and intrigue on both sides.
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Beijing
MATURITY : From a distance, American atheism’s war against Christmas looks puerile. I also happen to think it is puerile, driven by passionate collective intensity rather than by cool-headed logic. True enough, given the persistent failure of religion to mind its own business in political seasons, it is hard to believe that the First Amendment to the United State Constitution was designed to ‘fix’ potential encroachments by religion on the state. Some pushback, though not necessarily “atheism,” is needed to keep religion in its Constitutional place. But it’s also hard to imagine that anyone thinks “In God we Trust,” banal as the newly reiterated “national motto” is, or “One nation under God” in the Pledge are serious encroachments on the public good. –The latter should be excised because it breaks the rhetorical flow between nation and indivisible. (Frankly, I think indivisible should go too. It reminds me of arithmetic.)
Matteo Ricci’s Impossible Black Tulip Map; original 1584; copy (rice paper) 1602
China however has been around as a continuous civilization for four thousand years. It has had its dynastic wars and bloody rebellions, like the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century and the civil war ending in the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. But in broad perspective, China’s encounter with Christianity is ancient, more than 1300 years old–as old as the earliest introduction of Christianity to Scandinavia. Christianity arrived in the 7th century with Nestorian missionaries to the Tang dynasty. It was banned by emperor Wuzong, along with Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, in the 9th century, re-established in the 13th by the Mongol emperors, some of whom were eclectically and some fiercely Christian themselves. Under the Ming emperors, western Christian influnces in China underwent an uneven patch until in 1582, the Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (Li Madou or Taixi to the Chinese) arrived in Macau and made his learned way slowly but steadily toward Beijing.
A linguist, cartographer, astronomer, musician and mathematician, Ricci was one of the first Europeans to master the Chinese language and classical script. He translated Euclid’s Geometry into Chinese and astonished the emperor by precisely predicting a solar eclipse. He became a paid scholarly adviser to the court of the Wanli emperor and was permitted to build a church (now, much modified over the centuries, a cathedral) near the Forbidden City. I will be in the cathedral on Christmas morning where every Sunday at 6 AM a Latin Mass is celebrated. China has never forgotten Ricci, perhaps the single greatest conduit for western learning to China before the colonial period.
ECAUSE it has a deeper and more holistic understanding of culture, China is not lost in the feckless secular versus religious divide that afflicts western discussion. There have been many enlightenments, not only one, and many of them were fueled by religious and philosophical movements, in a land where those two terms have a symbiotic relationship.
I have often tried to explain to Chinese academic friends that many American atheists and secularists deplore religion as being anti-learning, anti-science, and anti-education. They can’t quite understand this: It would be enough, they say, to point to the scholar-priests–the clerks, from (clerici=clergy)–of the Renaissance like Ricci, but the sharpest rejoinder is one I have been repeating for two years now on this site–something no Chinese or Indian professor would need to be reminded of: Where do you think the books came from? Even in China, with its rich literary history, the basis for both the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets was the Syriac alphabet of the Nestorian Christian teachers. Christianity did not invent the dark ages, but it did preserve, east and west, glimmers of intellectual light in its love for the word made flesh: the written text.
Nestorian Christian Stele (781) commemorating the spread of the “Luminous religion,” now in the Beilin Museum
OPENNESS: China now suffers from its economic miracle. The pace of development is too fast. The scope of construction (and thus demolition) is immense. In Beijing we suffer the consequences of dust and fumes every day, even inside our apartments. The air is not good. The traffic is terrible and likely to get worse, as China has moved from an “Everyone with his own bicycle”- policy only two generations ago to today’s “Every family with a car.”
Xidan shopping scene
To hop off the subway at Xidan or Fuxingmen station is to enter a world of Extreme Shopping so vast and crowded that it will send you running for the nearest corner of the nearest, ubiquitous, Starbucks for a little peace. Divorce is on the rise. Property prices are so high in Beijing that young workers and junior professionals can’t compete with nouveau riche executives and profiteers for space. The educational system is cramped. Competiton for jobs, as everywhere, is vicious. When in 1982 China officially opened its bronze doors to the outside world, it took a risk that few other countries have ever taken. ”Openness” is not organic to China’s development and some would say not a feature of the “Chinese personality,” a reality that is reflected in its control of information and news. Openness is the unavoidable consequence of its modern history, a concession to planet- sharing. At the same time, China’s openness is real: Mother China is a Chinese mother after all: she would never do anything she did not think she could do well, so she is determined to win at this game.
The Chinese therefore are open to western history, western ideas, and western values–especially open to learning English–any form of English. The teaching of English proceeds here at a frenetic pace, with every student from the streets of Shanghai to the plateaus of Tibet required to begin the study at age 10 and carry it through in high school, college, and graduate school. The practical effects are not entirely visible: the rationale for learning English is often presented in dominant-power terms (English is a world language so you’d better learn it if you want to get ahead). Officials do not seem to realize that this pretext combined with pervasive laments about threats to national culture and the rapacious designs of the West, especially America, do not provide a coherent incentive to learn a foreign tongue. The result is that English is often not pursued enthusiastically, taught well, or learned well.
By the same token, however, my impression is that Chinese students are eager to know the history of Europe and America, to make comparisons and chalk up differences. They find it remarkable that teachers in the west are considered low-status professionals, since teachers in China are revered and respected at all levels. The phrase “dear teacher” (Qīn’ài de lǎoshī) is virtually one word. Many are vaguely aware of differences in instructional methods in China and America, and many would like to see some elements–not all–of the famed “student centered” approach (as distinguished from the teacher-authority, rote memorization style) introduced to China.
As a result of its own long history, Chinese students could not accept–and would not understand–some of the parochial and special interest histories now occupying blog space in the United States. They would want to know about the Inquisition and the condemnation of Galileo, maybe the Scopes Trial–the festival dates on any atheist calendar. They are shocked to learn that some Americans in high places do not “believe” in evolution or know very much about cosmology, but believe that a sky god created the universe in six earth days.
But as the world is much bigger than America, they are looking for a comprehensive picture of how western values have been transmitted, and inevitably this is in part a history of classical civilization, Christendom, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment and the modern period–a history of ideas. These are also periods that are not taught well by badly prepared and sometimes intellectually vacuous teachers, or known well by American students. In 2010, only 12% of American high school students scored at “proficiency” level on the history section of the National assessment of Educational Progress; only 2% could identify correctly what the significance of Brown vs the Board of Education was with the answer in front of them. America has become, in a word, a country of historical illiterates content to live in a monoculture of expanding technology and shrinking ideas.
For the Chinese student interested in western studies, no phase in the evolutionary history of western society becomes the whole picture. That is because the Chinese are used to dealing with puzzles and complexity, but they do not like oversimplification, a legacy of the Confucian tradition where appearance and reality occupy different levels of meaning but not different spheres.
The art of asking the right questions is as significant as getting the right answer, which may indeed be another question. Americans by contrast seem to be enthralled by either-or judgements and prefer black and white to the full palette of real history: religion or science, faith or reason, secular or sacred, liberal or conservative–a modal planetary view that almost requires oversimplification, a “bottom line.” The idea of many traditions thriving together has never been able to capture the American mind. Blame it on Abelard, or maybe Nietzsche
Three laughs at Tiger Brook (12th cent): Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism are One
And roundabout this is also why no ground is to be gained, no heavenly powers offended or assuaged, and no political points scored here by saying “Happy Solstice!”–secular versus religious problem solved. It just makes no sense. It’s Christmas. It doesn’t matter what it was two thousand years ago: it’s been Christmas for a long time. It has a special meaning within a particular historical context. It is about peace, love, brotherhood, charity, generosity and new life–which are secular as well as religious values. If Christians see these symbolized in the birth of a child in some distant Roman province a little more than two millennia ago, the Chinese “get it.” What they might not understand is why a festival of joy and goodwill should have to be tiptoed around, apologized for, celebrated apart from the the cultural values it has embodied for at least 1800 years.
Musing in the year 110 or thereabouts, the Syrian bishop and martyr Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Christians at Ephesus (Turkey),
Hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord — three mysteries to be cried aloud — the which were wrought in the silence of God. How then were they made manifest to the ages? A star shone forth in the heaven above all the stars; and its light was unutterable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star; but the star itself far outshone them all; and there was perplexity to know whence came this strange appearance which was so unlike them.
From that time forward every sorcery and every spell was dissolved, the ignorance of wickedness vanished away, the ancient kingdom was pulled down, when God appeared in the likeness of man unto newness of everlasting life; and that which had been perfected in the counsels of God began to take effect. Thence all things were perturbed, because the abolishing of death was taken in hand.
In 386 John Chrysostom (the ‘golden tongued’) preached as though seamlessly from Ignatius what is regarded as the first Christmas morning sermon. He said,
Come, then, let us observe the Feast. Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the Nativity. For this day the ancient slavery is ended, the devil confounded, the demons take to flight, the power of death is broken, paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sin is removed from us, error driven out, truth has been brought back, the speech of kindliness diffused, and spreads on every side, a heavenly way of life has been implanted on the earth, angels communicate with men without fear, and men now hold speech with angels. Why is this? Because God is now on earth, and man in heaven; on every side all things commingle.
Unlike Santa Claus, this is powerful mythology, but its fundamental matrix is the belief that goodness and new life are horizontal possibilities for every one in this season of renewal and re-dedication. You can learn a little about this spirit in China.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged agnosticism, American politics, American secularism, arts and culture, atheism, China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Government, Christmas, Graduate University, Humanism, Nestorians, R. Joseph Hoffmann, war against Christmas. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: December 27, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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6 Responses to “Merry Christmas from China”
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Ed Jones
December 27, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Joe, Your essay was interestiing and informative. You might like to see what Neil Godfrey is doing with that letter I wrote you about TJP. Click on Ed Jones Dialogue – Vridar.
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steph
December 27, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Merry Christmas to you and your students and colleagues and thank you for a wonderful story of a real Chinese Christmas. The rest of the world could benefit greatly from Chinese culture. As Joseph S Wu writes, humanism, unlike Western ‘movement’ humanisms, is intrinsic to Chinese culture. He descibes it as an individual’s natural feeling toward his parents, humanistic feelings, because they are the product of purely human beings, not of gods. Confucius agreed: “Filial piety is the foundation of morality.” Chinese culture celebrates wisdom and learning, respecting parents first as teachers and then those who educate and pass on wisdom. Hsiao, filial piety, as you reflect, is at the heart of Chinese culture and way of life. The Chinese way of looking at life, appears artistic. A student will learn to cook by imitation of a master rather than a book of recipes. There is art in the making and drinking of tea. Man is the measure of everything, and the ancient traditional ‘religions’ Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism are from teachers – men of wisdom – not gods. And traditionally agricultural and naturalistic, rural culture is in harmony with the seasons. What a wonderful world China is. I’m not sure about duck feet. Chewy I imagine, like leather perhaps. Sort of intriguing but as a fruiterian I don’t know if I’d dare. I’d like to watch them being eaten and spat out. You’d need plenty of good local wine to moisten them. (Poor ducks).
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Dwight Jones
December 27, 2011 at 3:00 pm
A wonderful view from the very core of our species. As you imply, the world’s eyes are not only moving away from America, but away from religious acrimony as well…the sure cure for Christian fundamentalism is any small course on Chinese civilisation. Merry Christmas in toto.
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jsegor23
December 27, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Hi Joe. As usual, your Christmas essay is thought provoking. I have been meaning to reply to several of your essays, but Argie has been ill for many months and i have just not had the energy to write. Fortunately, she has recovered and we look forward to good health for the new year. The axial tilt button got a smile out of me and probably many others who are knowledgeable enough to get the joke, so I’m not sure why it fails as humor. The earths axial tilt causes the angle of the sun above the horizon to vary as the earth moves in its orbit. This is the primary cause of the seasons. In the 56 or 57 years since I took a geography course, reference to the angle of the earth to the plane of its orbit has been a shorthand way of referring to the whole process. So the joke is incomplete, not wrong. Poking a little gentle fun at people who break into hysterics at the persistently wrongheaded notion that humans have descended from apes seems to me a permissible activity even in a season supposedly dedicated to good will.
Having been born and raised Jewish, I viewed Christmas as an outsider, even before I became an atheist (not my preferred personal description). I think that this gives me a bit of perspective. If Christmas in this country was mostly about the good things that you mention, I would probably appreciate it with some degree of enthusiasm, but it appears to me to have degenerated into a giant national potlatch upon which a significant portion of the economy depends. There is much preoccupation with whether the stores will beat last years numbers. The holiday is not yet entirely divorced from doing good. The Miami Herald features each day some poor person who needs special help and readers do respond to the call for generosity. Of course, the structural defects that prevent the need from being routinely ameliorated is ignored. Getting to the Chinese, I don’t see why they have to celebrate a holiday that in its current form was developed in the United States where it has now lost a good deal of its humane meaning. I hope that the current prosperity of a portion of the Chinese population does not lead them to ignore the meanings that you emphasize and magnify the gift giving.
Anyway, a belated Merry Christmas to you.
Joe
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steph
December 27, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Joe: Please give my best wishes to Argie. I’ve been thinking about her as I’ve noticed her absence and wondered how she was. She used to like the same art and poetry as me. I’m very sorry she’s been ill.
Like many antipodeans your knowledge of America has been determined by post-World War II categories, which are unhelpful in the extreme for real background. Accordingly you tend to generalise everything going on as “American” as if that term had some mystical explanatory power. It doesn’t. It is beginning to show in your replies. http://americanhistory.about.com/od/colonialamerica/a/colamoverview.htm
I have a slightly different perspective. I’ve never been religious but where I come from pretty much everyone, whatever religion, including the non religious, greets each other with “Merry Christmas” and celebrates the day in some way. For some people it’s celebrated at the beach as it’s the middle of summer, for most it’s at home, and some people, mainly Christians, go to church. We all seem to do the Christmas tree thing, the food (or beach barbeque) and wine, making Christmas cards. But everyone knows, whether it’s believed to be true or not, that Christmas is about a Christian story. That story is what the carols sung by candlelight are about. But Christmas isn’t about a season, it’s about a story with a tradition.
Chinese culture is far wiser than ours – or ‘Western’ culture. It has a far more mature attitude towards humanity, traditions, culture, and religion. They don’t have to celebrate Christmas. But they do. And they seem to celebrate the best part. The ‘spirit’ (metaphorically) – the ‘merry’ in the Christmas, without leaving the ‘Christmas’ out of Christmas, because it’s a tradition. I don’t even think they have the day off. It all flows, balance, refinement, etiquette, filial piety. They are intrinsically humanistic.
But then compare P.Z. Myers, who is apparently a former “Humanist of the Year” and apparently has a doctorate in science. His blog post today is titled “Next year, we must wage the War on Christmas harder”.
Peace love and goodwill to all, Merry Christmas.
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rjosephhoffmann
December 28, 2011 at 11:44 am
Joe, I am not challenging the reality of axial tilt but the word “reason”. There is no reason for axial tilt. It’s what it is. But there is a historical reason for Christmas that has nothing to do with it. Last I knew, people in Perth are sweltering right now and still celebrate Christmas. What in the world does the slogan mean? That there is a solstice – that there were solstice celebrations among pagans? That early Christianity tapped into rituals that were familiar to the early adherents? This is not news. But the fact remains that Christmas is the sum and total of a story–and that story is not given a date in the NT. I happen to think that no religion has a more profound story than an angelic message of peace and goodwill. Not Judaism (sorry, Joe), and certainly not Islam. I am not a Christian triumphalist, but I do think best story wins. What if a guy named John Dawson wrote a play in 1589 called the Sad Tale of Mirabelle and Jason in which two families went to war over the love affair of their children and utterly destroyed each other. A few years later, some one named Shakespeare comes along and writes something called Romeo and Juliet: the families survive to reap their folly, but the children die. Get my point? I’m sorry the nativity story is so offensive–really–but there you are.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
A Free Man’s Worship
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 29, 2011
Happy New Year!
Religious folk have the advantage of hearing their sacred texts read out, as in a story, during a liturgical year. Unbelievers and humanists have no such advantage, because we believe that no story is so sacred that it demands endless repetition.
Bertrand Russell’s life as a philosopher, logician-mathematician and social reformer can be summarized in one biographical detail: In 1894 he married the American Quaker Alys Pearsall Smith, one of a generation of wealthy buccaneers who propped up British aristocracy through “economic” marriages from Kensington to Blenheim. ”Their marriage began to fall apart,” says Wallenchinsky matter of factly, “in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while he was cycling, that he no longer loved her.” What could be simpler?
A few texts of the atheist tradition deserve to be enshrined in memory if not in a tabernacle. As we approach January 2012, here is one of Russell’s best.
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
“The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge germ springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death’s inexorable decree.
“And Man said: ‘There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.’ And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.
“But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.
“Yes,’ he murmured, ‘it was a good play; I will have it performed again.’”
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called — is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates, God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false “recognition of facts” which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world — in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death — the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature.
HE more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy’s country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be — Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity — to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, Betrand Russell, christianity, freethought, freethoughyt, new Year’s Day, R. Joseph Hoffmann, religion, science, unbelief. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: December 30, 2011
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4 Responses to “A Free Man’s Worship”
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Richard Hull
December 30, 2011 at 9:33 am
Joseph,
My wife and I are in the midst of our 49th year of marriage, the 51st year of our mutual commitment. We have never felt the need of some kind of either divine or secular mentoring of our love. The commitment to understanding and affirming one another has always, even through trials and tribulations, sufficed.
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Stevie
December 30, 2011 at 1:47 pm
It was going so well, and then I got to the bit about the unthinking Mother…
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Franklin Percival
December 31, 2011 at 3:23 am
Your writing speaks to me and also for me in a manner I shall never master. Thank you very much!
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Against Atheism 2.0 « Ned Resnikoff says:
January 22, 2012 at 3:33 pm
[...] anything from Jewish humanism to Zen Buddhism to the ideas outlined in Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship.” Jewish humanists, Siddhartha and Russell all have different ways of finding meaning in a world [...]
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
A Bright New Year
by rjosephhoffmann
by admin Posted on December 31, 2011
The scholars of the history-of-religions school realized, in the nineteenth century, that most religions were organized in cyclical patterns. The arrival of a new year was the pivot for these liturgical rotations and was always commemorated by fasting and reflection (symbolic of the passing order) followed by feasting and celebration at the hope of what the new year would bring.
The early Mesopotamian creation epics were essentially new year’s hymns about the destruction of the old order and the making of a new world. It has been theorized that the book of Genesis, or some prototype of its first chapter, embeds a similar Hebrew liturgy. The Jewish feast of yom kippur was organized on a sabbatical pattern to stress the need for renewal (kaphar: atonement). The secular evolution of the idea gives us the notion of new year’s resolutions.
More solar than lunar in their preferences, the Romans developed several solstice rituals, the best known being Saturnalia, the festival of light (associated with the quest for knowledge, symbolized by candles) and the feast of the dies Natalis in honor of the “birthday” of the Unconquerable Sun.
Christmas day, as most people know, is essentially the literal christening of the familiar Roman feast by fourth century emperors, and retains many of its new year’s elements–especially those (like the star in Matthew’s gospel or the angelic voices in Luke’s) associated with the lord of the heavens.
The “pagan” beginnings of Christmas are not news; the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century were so much aware of the associations that they wanted to abolish the holiday completely.
In puritan New England, it was forbidden to celebrate it and the fine for violating the prohibition was five shillings. In 1680 the only holidays permitted in the New England calendar according to Stephen Innes were the sabbath,election day, Harvard commencement day, and “periodic days of thanksgiving and humiliation.”
New year’s poems come in many shapes, but none is more subtle than Ranier Rilke’s hymn to Apollo. Here it is in the original German, with a translation by Stephen Mitchell:
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht wie Raubtierfelle;
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
———–
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. (S.M.)
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Christmas, history of New Year’s, new Year’s Day, R. Joseph Hoffmann. Bookmark the permalink.
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Published: December 31, 2011
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3 Responses to “A Bright New Year”
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steph
December 31, 2011 at 3:13 pm
This is so crisp and refreshing. Traditions are put in proper historical perspective so precisely, on the threshold of a new year. And not without Rilke’s exhilarating and particularly poignant behest, “You must change your life”. Rilke is consumed by the luminous beauty of Apollo’s archaic torso. It strikes you so vividly you feel transparent as it seems to glare through you. And then, apparently with an elevating and life-changing epiphany, it delivers the most profound new year’s resolution, yes. Happy New Year to you.
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Franklin Percival
December 31, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Thank you again.
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rjosephhoffmann
January 1, 2012 at 4:35 am
The Axial Age is the reason for the Season.
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