Holy Hand Grenade

"In god we trust; all others bring data."

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:05:50 -0400

“In god we trust; all others bring data.”

- W. Edwards Deming

The luxury of reason

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:04:00 -0400

I haven’t been writing here much lately because I don’t see much point in doing so. That probably sounds like any of a number of my earlier rants on nihilism and existentialism, but I think of this less as facing the gaping maw of meaninglessness in our world, and more as a sort of lighthearted futility.

I’ve recently come across a couple things that illustrate this well. Today, a post by Peter Singer at Guardian Limited, basically stating that there is no God and that theists can’t rationally argue that there is. The article is titled, “Good God? Religious people are still unable to provide a satisfying answer to the age-old question of why God allows suffering.”

My first thought was, How on earth is that news to anyone? But I guess to some, that’s evidence that you should not be believing in God, and an opening to make others believe the same. And so Singer attempts to convince the misled masses of the wisdom of his thinking, going on to describe how he totally wasted some “conservative” dude in a public debate (Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great About Christianity?).

One by one, Singer lays waste to D’Souza’s points with the unbeatable recurring points of difficulty in theology: Why does God allow so much suffering? Why do we say that we can’t question God for suffering in the life He gives us, but we do hold a mother accountable for doing drugs while pregnant? And why reason through anything at all if you’re going to ultimately give up and say that God is too complex to understand? Singer concludes, “If … we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the God who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.”

And here we return to my initial point, the lighthearted futility with which I have been regarding theological thinking. I don’t deny that Singer has a point — several points, even. I can’t prove that believing in God makes more sense to the rational mind than denying said belief. But I also do not feel “forced to admit” anything at all. Rather, all I feel, as I walk away from this article, is that this guy is kind of a dick.

Singer is the kind of very smart person who cannot fathom why others can’t seem to be as smart as himself, but insists upon trying to enlighten them anyway. In this way, he’s kind of like Northern liberals who think that “What’s the matter with Kansas?” is a question about intelligence. The book of that title addresses a question on the lips of many such Northerners, who are repeatedly puzzled that so many poor Southerners would vote people into office who work against the economic interests of the poor. However, the author of that book, I believe, points out that this is misguided on the part of those who would ask such a question; rather, the issue is not what’s wrong with people in Kansas, but what liberal Northern intellectuals don’t understand about the culture of conservative Southerners. And the answer to that question is that some people really do prioritize issues of ethics and morality over economic policies that would benefit themselves.

What Singer does not understand about theists is that plenty don’t feel “forced to admit” anything because they value faith over reason. Singer calls the concept of Original Sin “repellent” because of the implication that “knowledge is bad,” but he fails to understand that not everybody actually finds that so problematic. It is possible to be a good Christian without being a smart Christian. To some extent, this is even supported by the Bible, which so many trust as a source of truth and wisdom over all other sources.

Take a look at the Gospels. The Pharisees — the supposedly learned men, who are constantly trying to trap Jesus in logical and theological puzzles — are clearly the bad guys. Jesus, meanwhile, hangs out with the hookers and criminals, and reassures everyone that the greatest person in God’s kingdom isn’t the strongest, the richest, or even the smartest, but the humblest, the one with faith like a child. Jesus repeatedly makes clear that you don’t need to understand the ways of God to be a righteous person — you just need to love God, avoid sin, and forgive the sins of others.

To some extent, then, for Christians, ignorance is bliss. Some of us are better trained as critical thinkers than others, and for us, faith and reason may sometimes feel in conflict — and so many of those become the market for D’Souza’s book, and thus invite criticism for claiming that you can explain faith through reason. But pretty much by definition, faith requires no reason.

This presents a quandary to me personally, of course. I’m the kind of fellow who feels the need to explain everything about his world — but I can’t seem to explain my own faith in progressive Christian morality, even as some of the finer points of theology implied within that fade away for me. And, what’s more, I’m not even sure that I need to explain it in order to do it right. Over-thinking it might even make it harder to do it right.

In the end, I feel like it’s more important for me to feel like I’m doing a morally right thing than a logically right thing. That’s why my own powers of reason sometimes feel like a luxury I can’t always afford.

"The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all."

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:10:59 -0400

“The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all.”

- A fascinating oxymoron from an article about atheists who crave their own church. From “If God is Dead, Who Gets His House?” New York Magazine.

The "cool" factor and another kind of sacrifice

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:22:10 -0400

I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times just now about NYC’s recent shortage of Catholic priests-in-training:

An increasingly secular and materialistic culture, reluctance among the young to accept lifelong celibacy, and anger over the church’s handling of sexual abuse scandals have all contributed to the precipitous drop, the officials say.
Vocational directors recognize that the public’s confidence has been shaken by the scandals. They have chosen, however, to focus their marketing campaign on an upbeat message.

The Rev. Luke Sweeney, director of vocations for the archdiocese — which covers the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island and seven counties west and north of the city — says the church must make its case if it hopes to reinvigorate a priesthood that is increasingly elderly. “How do we get the ‘cool’ factor back into the priesthood?” Father Sweeney said. “If we don’t sell the priesthood, we can’t legitimately ask a young man to consider the priesthood as a vocation.”

Speaking as someone who once considered and ultimately abandoned the idea of pursuing a career in the priesthood, I think the answer is simple.

First, let priests marry. The prohibition against marriage for priests was not mandated by Jesus (see a few Biblical examples to the contrary), but added somewhere along the way by the church. You can commit yourself to the Lord and his flock without giving up the desire to “be fruitful and multiply,” one of the most basic human urges.

Second, let women be priests. You want to slow declining admittance, open up the ranks to the 50% of the population you’ve traditionally shut out.

In other words, if the Catholic church wants to continue to exist in this country, at least, it probably needs to start copying from the Protestant denominations a little bit more. I’m not sure what’s so uniquely and necessarily Catholic about rules that are arbitrary and exclusionary, but if those things are essentially Catholic, then maybe the Church needs to make some sacrifices of its own.

(Not too) many ways to find God

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:20:37 -0400

Something — I’m not sure what — reminded me tonight of a post I wrote here awhile back about how I write more about religion on this blog than about God. I went back and reread that post, and I was pleased to find it (in my opinion) relatively coherent and honest. I reread the follow-up post as well, and, as I suspected, it was rambling and kind of confusing. I feel like there was a nugget of something still relevant to me in there, though, so I wanted to dig that out and explain what I meant (maybe even more for myself than for anyone else who might read this). So, here I go.

A friend of mine once read the first post linked above and told me that he appreciates the idea that there are “many ways to find God.” I’m not sure how he meant that.

Maybe he just meant it the way I meant it myself. In the blog post I originally wrote, I described a passage from the Bible that suggested that “The Righteous” meet up with the Almighty after death, not even realizing that they were working for the God Squad all along. So, perhaps my friend just meant there are many things you can call yourself so long as you’re being righteous — whether you see it as service to God, or to Allah, or just “doing what’s right” without even thinking of it as a religious obligation. (In some ways, I find that third one even more impressive than doing something because you feel religiously compelled to do good.) The important thing is being good, or rather, doing good.

When my friend said what he said, though, I immediately became concerned about another way one might mean (or interpret) such a phrase. Specifically, I was concerned that one could suggest that there are “many ways to find God” as a way of saying “there are many ways to be righteous,” and I actually disagree with that interpretation.

I mean, there are plenty of ways to just be a nice fellow, but to be truly righteous — like, so righteous that if there is a God, that God would want to shake your hand when all is said and done — I can’t imagine that just being a nice fellow would cut it. I wonder if saying “there are many ways of finding God” is a way of justifying one’s own lack of moral convictions — or, more importantly, one’s own lack of difficult, moral actions.

When a poor guy asks for a buck on the street and we walk by him, perhaps pretend he’s not there, we’re not being The Righteous. We tell ourselves, “Well, there’s more than one way to be a good person” — to go to Heaven, to find God — and we keep walking. We’re fooling ourselves. We are not going to be shuffled into the Meeting God line. That line is for people who care about their fellow humans so much that they feel compelled to do God’s work.

At least, that’s what I think. I realize that places me squarely in some theological traditions and not in others. (Search around for “faith, works, grace, salvation” for more info.) I can’t claim any special knowledge of the divine; but, just like how it feels impossible to me that anyone could be denied entry into Heaven for being born into the “wrong” religion, I simply cannot believe that those of us who live in a friendly but ultimately comfortably selfish manner will get to be among The Righteous.

Let me be entirely clear: When my friend said what he did, I became concerned not because my friend is a dick (he is not) but because of my own sense of unworthiness. I feel like I constantly justify my own actions (or inaction) in the world by thinking of getting by as good enough. That’s just how I feel about me, but I sort of suspect I know others who will relate to this if they think hard enough about it.

Maybe getting by is good enough, depending on what you want to get out of life. But I can’t imagine it’s how you find God.

Social sins and institutional duties

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:36:31 -0400

You may have heard the somewhat recent news that the Vatican (to quote CNN) “has listed drugs, pollution and genetic manipulations as well as social and economic injustices as new areas of sinful behavior.” And, while not directly related, BBC reported right around the same time that the Southern Baptist community “said evidence of man-made global warming was ‘substantial,’” thus advocating church involvement in the quest to “stop climate change.”

I wonder if this will be a new trend in the immediate future, with Christian churches increasingly and officially focusing on bigger-scope issues. I don’t know much about the Southern Baptist community (despite it being “largest protestant group in the country”), but a few things jumped out at me from these stories.

First, reading about the Vatican’s announcement, I figured, well, that’s nice. It’s good to see them recognizing that there are a number of different problems in the world, and we shouldn’t just ignore certain ones because they have only arisen years after the Bible was written.

Second, still reflecting on the Vatican announcement, I thought, wait, why the hell should I care what random-ass list the Catholic church comes up with? I mean, I agree that pollution and “social and economic injustices” are pretty bad, but why lump that in with “genetic manipulation” and (later) compare it to abortion?

It’s not that I don’t think that spiritual leaders have a place in directing discourse about ethics and society, but the Catholic church’s way of formalizing and enumerating what we should feel guilty about sometimes seems antithetical to actual consideration and discussion. And honestly, I find it hard to accept a list of “social sins” from an institution that was so deeply implicated in a massive pedophilia coverup.

And finally, just now, it occurred to me that the Baptist message describes the fight to stop climate change as a duty in stewardship to the earth, whereas the Catholic message describes pollution and such as sins. And here we get to one of the Catholic church’s lasting hang-ups: insisting upon phrasing religious obligation as “you’re doing bad stuff” over “you have the power to do good stuff.”

Blame is a tool for judgment, and I’m pretty sure that judging people is a no-no according to Jesus. I’d like to see fewer official lists of sins, and more positive, willful action.

"Doing something everyone should do shouldn’t make me a saint."

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:38:56 -0500

“Doing something everyone should do shouldn’t make me a saint.”

- Elissa Montanti, in Psychology Today

What we mean when we say "I was raised Catholic"

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:00:00 -0500

The New York Times recently reported on a survey about religious affiliations in the US. I found the results really interesting:

If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations. […]
The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.” […]

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.”

Those three portions jumped out at me the most (plus a bit noting that Catholicism is having the greatest net losses despite the influx of Latin immigrants, which help slow that loss).

I remember I was in a class once, with a Jewish professor, and I noted that we mean different things when we say “I’m Catholic” and “I was raised Catholic.” Another woman in class, a Folklore student I think, turned around to look at me and gave an emphatic, “Yes.” My professor looked around kind of stunned, as I suppose no one had ever described this distinction to her.

I tend to tell people “I was raised Catholic” for just this reason: It’s true, and it contains a nuance of meaning that other Catholics (and perhaps other Christians?) might pick up on. But it’s not so personal and messy-sounding as some gushing profession of lost faith — or, in my case, bitter recollections of scandal in the archdiocese of Boston, and resentment towards a bishop refusing communion to a presidential candidate who had supported abortion rights. I can’t support a religion that protects its powerful members over its weakest members, or that is structured in such a way as to give a single figure unilateral power to (claim to) deny a believer access to God.

I suppose I would have ended up in “Christianity” if I had been on that survey, though I still feel so disconnected from most Christian denominations that I’m just a step away from “unaffiliated.” I’m finally understanding why some of my friends back in college and high school made a distinction between “religious” beliefs (which I suppose has something to do with organized movements, community, and cultural belonging) and “spiritual” beliefs (which I suppose implies not much more beyond personal belief about right, wrong, and the nature of our relationship to the universe). I thought it was a cop-out then, and I kind of still think it’s a cop-out now — a failure to commit, giving oneself a free pass. But how can you not cop out when you’re not really impressed by the options you find laid out before you?

Neo-Gomorrah is going to E-X-P-L-O-D-E

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:15:00 -0500

Would you believe that there’s not just one, but two manga versions of the Bible? I can definitely see precedent for throwing some giant robots into the Old Testament — it was the Hebrew people, after all, who brought us the golem — but I am kind of bummed to read this:

The Sermon on the Mount did not make the book, though, because there was not enough action to it.

Ah. See, for people who actually pay attention to the parts that kind of define Christian morality, that’s an important part.

Revisiting nihilism

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:22:02 -0500

I had a conversation with a friend last night about the big question I keep hitting up against on this blog: If there’s no such thing as universal Truth, Morality, or Meaning (note well the capital letters!), then isn’t our existence, by definition, meaningless? And if that’s the case, why don’t we just take our own lives and be done with it?

My friend doesn’t see it that way. She kind of likes the idea of believing in a god, but can’t really bring herself to do it. She feels like she’d be fooling herself, and she’d rather not do that.

If there is no real “Right” way to do things, though, I’m not sure why she’s so tied to a belief system that makes her less happy than she could be. Why not just pick the one that fits best with what you want? I realize it’s not easy to just completely upend everything you’ve ever believed, but it’s certainly not impossible. I do know people who have done it. And they do seem happier afterward (eventually), I must admit — whether we mean the religious convert who is so happy to be freed from sin, or the former fundamentalist who is happy to be freed from hypocrisy.

I was tired during last night’s discussion, but even if I had been fully awake, I’m not sure I could have defended my position. Why is it such a horrible thing if all morality is relative, socially and personally constructed? Why must there be anything more? I’m honestly not sure. I had answers at the time, but I can’t even remember them.

Now, after having a really, really crappy day, I think I am realizing part of my answer to that question, at least. A sense of right and wrong, or at least a sense that life could be meaningful, is what keeps us from just offing ourselves when everything about life seems pointless.

It’s been a long time since I seriously considered that as a possible course of action. Sitting here tonight, I know I am in no more danger than normal of even harming myself, let alone killing myself. What I’m writing now is not a suicide note or a teenage cry for help. I’m just processing my thoughts here. And my thoughts say:

Contemplating the meaningless of existence when I already feel lonely and depressed, as I do today, makes me think that suicide might be a perfectly legitimate and even sensible decision.

It doesn’t have quite the poetry of “to be, or not to be” and further musings on “what dreams may come,” but it’s honest, anyway. If there is no point … well, then, what’s the point? Even living a relatively coddled life can often feel like it involves more pain and sadness than happiness and fulfilment. Unless there is something more to this existence, our options seem to be to give up or to occupy ourselves with things we trick ourselves into thinking might matter. Despite my friend’s assertion about why she can’t choose to believe in a god, how is the individual quest for meaning, or the social construction of meaning, anything but self-delusion?

Please don’t read this and kill yourself. (I’m certainly not going to.) I’m just thinking out loud here.

His murky materials

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:44:00 -0500

I recently read Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, curious about the first book and the movie based on it, The Golden Compass. I had heard rumors that Pullman is like C.S. Lewis, but insistent that God must die and religious people are nuts; that fans were disappointed that the (anti-)religious aspects of the book had been toned down for the movie; that this was destined to be recognized as the next big fantasy series. Personally, I think all that’s a bit overly inflated, but there was some food for thought in the series.

First, the basics of the series, summed up in one paragraph (and leave now if you fear spoilers): There’s a girl named Lyra, who has a golden compass that will tell her the “truth” in response to any question. Later, there’s a boy named Will, who can cut holes between worlds. A bunch of adults and angels are engaged in a war to overthrow the Authority (also referred to as “God”), who is the oldest angel, but not really the Creator he purports to be. The adults want Lyra and Will to kill God. In the end, though, God is more of a senile figurehead who blows away in the wind, and His right-hand man/angel, the Metatron, is the real villain, who wants to establish a permanent inquisition on every world. Acting independently from these is Dust, which is what scientists call dark matter, which is what theologians might call fallen angels from the first war in heaven. Dust is what tells Lyra the truth through her compass, what gave intelligence and free-will to humankind, and what needs to be … well, it’s never really clear, but Lyra needs to fall in love with Will in order for Dust to flow properly or something. This sucks for them, because they’re from different worlds, they’ll die if they stay in an alien world too long, and all the windows between the worlds need to be closed up or else Dust will die and soul-eating specters will roam freely.

Next, regarding the adaptation: Aside from major pacing issues in both forms (Pullman foreshadows clumsily in the book, and the movie just feels sped through), I don’t see what fans were all up in arms about. There were old, creepy guys dressed as Catholic priests saying stuff about “heretics” every five minutes. It was pretty clearly a critique of religious institutions, even if the little story about Adam and Eve from the book never makes the cut.

And finally, regarding the theological argument implicit in the book: It’s weak, but not entirely useless. The church is an easy target to pick on in Western society nowadays, I think — you just say that it’s better to think for yourself than to follow rules laid down by old white guys who want to maintain world power — but Pullman stumbles into murkier territory when he implies that God isn’t really worth worshipping at all.

I found it particularly weird that a certain irony never seems to go explicitly recognized: The war against heaven is all about free will versus slavery, but the good guys seem just as manipulative and pushy as the bad guys, just more idealistic about it. Everyone’s telling Lyra and Will that they have no choice, they must go and do this thing. The Dust itself admits that granting free will on humanity was an act of “vengeance” against God, which you’d think would make us feel kind of used. I guess maybe Pullman gets around this by making his protagonists so willful that they do as expected, but on their own terms. Still, it’s weird that Dust is kind of cast as the “good” supreme intelligence in contrast to God, the “bad” supreme intelligence, and there’s no recognition that the Dust is giving orders here too.

As I said, though, this is not without food for thought. For me, this series provided an interesting exercise in pondering the nature of God. See, there are several functions theologians and believers typically ascribe to a single Judeo-Christian God, but those are broken up into various agents in this series. In “His Dark Materials,” we have no idea who or what created everything; an old angel going by the name of “God” hands down cold and arbitrary moral rules via the church; the afterlife is presided over by characters from Greek mythology who are inexplicably ordered by God to be jerks; and fallen angels are the ones who really granted consciousness and free will to hominids, which is arguably the creation of humankind. I’m not sure that there’s anybody taking over the job of answering prayers, though, unless you have a golden compass handy.

This is interesting to me. I’m not sure if you’d call it a polytheistic view of the universe or what. It also got me thinking, of course, of one of the main points I return to repeatedly on this site: How do you explain morality as something true and universal, rather than culturally subjective, without considering some force outside ourselves? In Pullman’s world, there are a couple directions to look to explain morality, but the one deserving our thanks and worship just happens to not be the one called “God,” getting all the attention from the church.

I think I would be satisfied with this explanation, if you could offer it to me in real life. I am less concerned with the specific name or nature of the divine than with the idea that Right and Wrong are more than just products of our imagination. I’d appreciate if the divine were some force that actually gave a darn about my life and might be able to offer some decent conversation (mental or otherwise), but I don’t mean to ask too much.

Ultimately, I’m of the understanding that Pullman’s conception of God is just a reflection of (his understanding of how) the Catholic church has constructed “God.” He doesn’t seem entirely atheistic, though, despite having been championed as the atheist fantasy author. He seems comfortable with the idea that there might be something else out there, and maybe even embraces the idea of a real, human soul. I don’t quite see why some religious people seem so up in arms about him, aside from his books being a little overhyped for what they are.

"4.how come we cant speak monkey"

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:51:03 -0500

“4.how come we cant speak monkey”

- coolstylinstud, christianforums.com (quoted on Fundies say the darndest things Top 100)

The Dawkins delusion

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:02:00 -0500

I was sitting across from someone at the coffee shop yesterday who was reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It reminded me that I have been meaning to read it myself, sort of in the same way that I have been learning more about the beliefs of religious fundamentalists: I disagree with both, but I feel that it’s wise and appropriate to be knowledgeable about their central arguments so as to understand where they’re coming from.

I have suggested here before that Christian fundamentalists and scientist, absolutist atheists are basically just two variations of the same kind of closed-mindedness. This basically comes down to a complete lack of humility or perspective: I am right, all who disagree with me are wrong, and can’t they see that I am just trying to save them?

Actually, while searching for something unrelated this morning, I came across Dawkins’s website and was fascinated by the slight similarities in his rhetoric to that of evangelical fundamentalists in one of his posts:

Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people […] need religion. I want to cultivate more respect for people than that. […] On the contrary, I am tempted to say “I believe in people …”

On the face of it, I can see this is a fair criticism of those who say “people need religion” or “like it or not, religion is here to stay.” By the same token, I’ve heard the same sort of thing spun by Christians regarding (say) premarital sex. You think sex is just part of who we are, that it’s always going to be a problem? Well, we think better of people than that. We are capable of anything through Jesus….

Back to Dawkins:

[Some say,] I’m an atheist, but you are only preaching to the choir. What’s the point?

There are various points. One is that the choir is a lot bigger than many people think it is, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out.

This is the line of thinking that spawned the term “Moral Majority” (and, even more appropriately, equally misleading, but admittedly less related to religion, “silent majority” as applied to supposed Vietnam War supporters).

Actually, hardline atheists are a very, very tiny minority in this country. I recently attended a lecture where the presenter (discussing the lack of atheists on fiction TV) recalled survey data indicating just how tiny a minority this is — and also that Americans would rather have a gay president than an atheist president. (Stop and reflect on that for a moment.)

I’m not saying that’s evidence that atheism, as a belief, is wrong, just that Dawkins’s approach to proselytizing atheism seems eerily familiar to me.

Of course, I also have personal concerns — both practical and theological — about the validity of his (and Sam Harris’s, and Christopher Hitchens’s) mission.

The practical concern is quite simple, and rests on a rejection of their core assumption that “religion poisons everything” (to refer back to the title of Hitchens’s book). Here I refer briefly to a short, smart piece by Lee Harris, reflecting back on a time when the author was asked: “Are you for or against religion?”

Suppose I had answered by saying that I was for religion. Would this imply that I approved and admired the blood-thirsty rites involved in the worship of the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochti? On the other hand, what if I had said that I was against religion. Would I thereby commit myself to condemning the ethical teachings expressed by the prophets of ancient Israel, with their stern injunction to protect the weak and defend the downtrodden?

Harris’s specific example of the latter involves Christian fundamentalists who aided Jewish people during the Holocaust because they felt it was their religious obligation to do so.

I could go on and on regarding my practical concerns with the “religion poisons everything” argument, but really, you only need one good counterexample to disprove a claim involving the word “everything.”

As for my theological concern with Dawkins’s argument, I refer back to the post I was quoting before. At one point, he quotes (and notes agreement with) Nicholas Humphrey, who suggests how we would be rightly outraged if a television documentary celebrated Inca human sacrifice:

“The message of the television programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention – another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism … […] How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?”

The key word in there at the end is “immoral.” If there is no God, no truth in religion whatsoever, how can we explain anything metaphysical as universally human? If we can agree on nothing outside of human invention as universally moral, then can’t any human culture invent its own morality? And if so, where does Dawkins get off saying that anyone else’s action is immoral?

Of course, I personally agree that human sacrifice is wrong. But if this reflects some real, universal morality, if it isn’t just an arbitrary cultural standard or a meaningless quirk of biology — a common social product of natural selection — then what is it?

I suppose that is the question I keep returning to as I write here. I suspect some philosopher or theologian or another has pondered this for me, but I don’t really know where to look to think on it further.

Zen kōans and contemplation of existential horror

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:33:42 -0500

The other day, something inspired me to answer one of those presumably unanswerable Zen kōans. You have probably heard some variation of it: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Fully aware that I am foolishly disregarding the purpose of asking such questions, I have always figured that the answer of that might as well be, “Yes, and we know this because the sound waves might have other effects on the environment that would be observable after the fact.” But the other day, I realized it could have a different answer. It sounded something like this:

Q: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A: Life alone is purposeless.

There’s a couple missing steps in there, I suppose — one in which you answer, “Well, the falling tree doesn’t matter” and another in which you make the logical leap, “And therefore, nothing matters unless it is grounded in social reality.” I soon decided that my ultimate answer can also eventually be arrived at from the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

I’m not sure what prompted me to come up with this answer. Perhaps I was contemplating the t-shirt I just designed, and thinking that I needed to show it to my girlfriend — that, somehow, her knowledge of my actions made those actions count more. Or maybe I was just feeling lonely. I don’t know. The point is that contemplating these kōans has helped me understand myself a bit better, whatever their original purpose was supposed to be.

I used to be either restless or depressed when I had to spend time alone. In the last few years, I got more used to being alone without being lonely. I still feel a bit purposeless, though, if I don’t get to occasionally share my life with people. Social contact is what reassures me that my existence isn’t a solipsistic nightmare.

This may be related to why I insist upon believing in some sort of God — a sort of macro-level version of this, anyway. If humanity is all that there is, then our existence is a sort of solipsistic nightmare. If there is something outside of us, though — watchmaker, heavenly father, earth mother, whatever — then what we think of as “the right thing to do” or “important” or “wise” aren’t just arbitrary cultural values or concepts born from natural selection, but Meaningful in a much broader sense. Either there is Meaning or the world is meaningless beyond what we imagine for ourselves. I don’t see the point of existing without a point, which makes a meaningless universe the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

"I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then,..."

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:15:28 -0500

“I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to Hell” — and tore it up.”

- Huckleberry Finn, deciding to help free a slave rather than do as the church would have him do. By Mark Twain; reminded by Slacktivist.

The spectrum of Christian thinking

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:14:26 -0500

I’m not sure how I found it, but I recently stumbled upon a 2006 book review in Slate titled “Jesus Nation.” As the author of the article states, “These two books disagree profoundly about how to approach Jesus, demonstrating that in America, opinion about Christ cannot be summed up as liberal versus conservative.” The authors “both qualify as liberals,” but the only area where they seem to find common ground is in taking umbrage with how the major Christian churches have used Jesus for misguided ends.

Of the two books discussed in the article, I think I’d be completely uninterested in the one about a Da Vinci Code-style search for a historical Jesus and subsequent Church coverup. (I never did read The Da Vinci Code myself, and I find Dan Brown’s conspiracy theories hard to take seriously when he can’t even be bothered to do basic research on his antagonists’ organizational structure or the departmental offerings at his protagonist’s university.) I am not at all offended by the possibility that Jesus is important as a philosopher and reformer, not as a divine figure — I often consider this myself — but I’ve given up on any hope of proving one theory or the other.

I’ve gotten a lot of personal mileage out of Jesus’ message from the Gospels, so no matter which way we consider Jesus as a figure, I’m not willing to dismiss Him/him as irrelevant to contemporary life. Perhaps I’ll read the other book covered in the review, which is more concerned with the Jesus of the Gospels and an Emersonian view of “Jesus is divine, the rest of us could be too.” That author is more concerned with the reality of sin than Emerson was, though, which also kind of resonates with me.

Mostly I just wanted to post this because I’m interested in keeping track of readable articles that give a sense of just how variegated this religion — which is so often reduced to self-declared fundamentalists — really is. Both of the authors described in this article draw upon and interpret Scripture to make their rather opposite points. As this article demonstrates, fundamentalists don’t have a monopoly on the Bible, and other religious thinkers tend to have a lot more to say about Jesus in particular.

"My Jesus would use nunchucks on Osama bin Laden. Or maybe rip his still beating heart out, Temple of..."

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:26:00 -0500

“My Jesus would use nunchucks on Osama bin Laden. Or maybe rip his still beating heart out, Temple of Doom style.”

- “How many Christians understand Jesus’ teachings?” The Blog of Lon. (I am more inclined to agree with the quote that follows this one.)

Mormons are here to teach us a lesson

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:12:36 -0500

Fred has an interesting discussion going in the comments at Slacktivist on the difficulty in classifying Mormons as Christian (or not). The long and the short of it is that Mormons do consider themselves a type of Christian (the one correct type, in fact), but just about every other branch of Christianity seems to consider Mormons another religion entirely: They have an extra book, they have extra rules, they have special undergarments, etc.

Personally, after reading the first comment by “Jesurgislac,” I just did a search on the page and followed the rest of that person’s comments. Jesurgislac basically pops up every now and then to dispute other people’s theological/philosophical definitions of Christianity by pointing out that there are much bigger differences between various denominations and sects than most people probably realize. Quakers especially challenge the notion of ‘Christian’ being defined by adherence to certain practices or beliefs: They refuse to take oaths (like the Nicene Creed, which one commenter suggested unites all Christians), they believe every meal is sacred (so no Holy Communion), they let you keep your original belief system if you want to convert (so Buddhist and Muslim Quakers are A-OK), and so on. Actually, the whole conversation probably convinced more than a few people that Quakers are just as much outsiders from Christianity as Mormons. But why doesn’t this occur to Christians sooner, when a Quaker is not around to remind us how broad our range of beliefs can be? Jesurgislac has what I read as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek guess:

That Fred has never asked whether Quakers are Christians is probably because the Quakers he knows appear to be nice, likeable, peaceful, untroublesome people.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

This is really only half-joking, I think. The simple fact of the matter is that, if you’re a Christian yourself, Mormons seem a little more weird and in-your-face than other Christian denominations/sects.

Not that Christians don’t try to convert one another to their own, presumably more correct form of Christianity all the time; I’ve read many calls by Protestants to forgive and attempt to save their misled Catholic brethren. (They think we all actually believe in papal infallibility and transubstantiation. They don’t realize that lots of us are probably more like Reform Jews than what they think of as Catholic—more charmed or guilt-tripped into tradition than convinced of divine importance.) Still, I get the sense that intra-religious evangelizing efforts are much less widespread, sustained, and coordinated than inter-religious (or simply blanket-approach) efforts.

Basically, I think that getting a religious come-on from a Mormon probably gives other Christians a sense of what it’s like for atheists and agnostics to get a religious come-on from just about anybody with a holy book in hand and an imagined halo atop one’s head. I’m only barely familiar with the teachings of Mormonism, and I have only a passing academic curiosity in learning any more, but I still think Mormons have something important to teach their fellow Christians: This is what it’s like to be weirded out by a religious person.

Kicking ass and talking flames

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:54:37 -0500

A bunch of sites I read regularly are all excited about this post on (Mad Magazine knockoff) Cracked’s website about the 9 most badass Bible verses. That is because parts of the Bible are actually pretty hilarious, and if you’re inclined enjoy jokes about video games, action movies, and Smokey Bear, these writers have made it even more hilarious.

I saw one site link to this with a comment that it was funny yet theologically suspect, but honestly, I was struck by how genuinely informative this was. No, seriously. I mean, sure, there’s some exaggeration in there, but I think the difference is pretty clear between stuff that was actually in the Bible (e.g., Moses killing an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew) and the stuff that’s embellished (e.g., Pharoah had been using the Hebrew slaves to build a giant robot).

This may not be a lesson in theology and world religion, but hey, the Bible has some surprising stuff in it that plenty of people don’t realize. Just teasing out those little bits and bringing them to light is a good way to encourage some discussion and reflection on what this text is supposed to mean for us. You’ve got to consider the good alongside the bad, the well-known alongside the utterly bizarre.

Humor is a fine way to do this, I think. Back in high school (maybe college?), I would occasionally get into conversations with friends and family members about some Bible story or another. I have no idea what brought these conversations about, but there you go. I found that the easiest and quickest way to get everyone else up to speed with how I was interpreting those stories was to paraphrase them using modern slang. One of my friends dubbed these “Ghetto Bible Tales.” This is probably because during high school, my friends and I ironically appropriated the slang of the popular crowd, who in turn had unironically appropriated it from Black youth culture. We did not mean to actually make phrases like “word,” “wack,” and “this shit is ill, yo” part of our daily vocabulary as anything but a joke, but somehow they kind of stuck.

Anyway, the result was that a quick summary of a Bible story put some words into Jesus’ mouth that don’t generally get attributed to Jesus, and that’s funny.
Sometimes I have thought that it might be worth writing up some of these for a blog or a publication of some sort, but I suppose I have other things to do, and I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be sharing that kind of joke with people who don’t know me personally. Fortunately for us all, sometimes people who know the Bible in greater detail than I go where sensitive liberals (like myself) fear to tread.

Some musing and some clarification on beliefs

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:06:00 -0500

I recently stumbled upon an article in the New York Times by Paul Davies about how faith in science is still a type of faith. I realized it sounded pretty similar to what I have been writing around here, such as in The religion vs. science debate is stupid” and “How to make your kids think like you do.” This worried me somewhat because I don’t want to sound like this article sounds. The Edge’s “Reality Club” hosts a number of responses to the article.

I think I can basically sum up the article like so: Belief in science requires faith that there is some orderliness to the universe, some consistency to its laws. Belief in this orderliness raises the question of why things are the way they are, and what “meta” law must be behind all this to explain its purpose (e.g., God).

There are many responses, so I don’t want to summarize them all. When you get right down to it, though, I think this is basically just a bunch of people replaying the lengthy debate of foundationalism vs. antifoundationalism. Davies, the foundationalist, suggests that to believe in the laws of science, we must have faith — or hold a philosophy, if you will — that there is something behind those laws. Some of the respondents include antifoundationalists who suggest that we don’t really need to engage in this meta-level thinking to describe the way we live our lives; rather, we can really just respond to our past experiences as we live our lives (and practice our science). As Lawrence Krauss suggests in his response on the Reality Club,

But this kind of faith [in science, described by Davies] is like having faith that because the sun rose at 6:57 this morning, it will rise at a predictably close time tomorrow. It is almost an insult to religious faith to suggest that this faith is on the same plane as faith in a divine presence who has endowed the universe with purpose and design, and in the case of most modern religions, is also vitally concerned with the day to day tragedies of humanity. It also misrepresents the scientific process.

I am personally concerned with the foundationalism vs. antifoundationalism debate, but I must admit I don’t understand it well. Because I don’t feel like participating in the replication of a long-standing and contentious debate in a field I know very little about, then, I’ll leave their argument where it stands.

The reason I brought up the Davies article and its responses is that I want to contrast what I’ve been saying about faith, science, and atheism with what Paul Davies is saying. I suppose I want to do this because his argument makes me a little uncomfortable. As Reality Club respondent PZ Myers says, “His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it’s just like religion.” You know, that is a tired and familiar claim.

I don’t mean to argue that subscription to science is just like faith in religion. We’re talking about different sorts of beliefs here, I think. Rather, I mean to argue that people who profess a belief in science (or atheism, or rationalism, or whatever else that is offered as an alternative to religion) can be just as hard-headed and resistant to self-reflection as people who profess a belief in religion. This is what I meant in the “religion vs. science debate” post when I said that “an unwavering belief in scientific truth, in the abstract, is remarkably similar to an unwavering belief in religious truth” — not that science is like religion, but that the way people believe in science is like the way people believe in religion (i.e., some people are cool about it, and some people are real dicks about it).

Further, I mean to argue that “science” is an abstract ideal, and perhaps harder to pin down in some scientific fields than in others. The scientific community is to science as organized religions are to God: Even if you have faith that everything can be explained through science (or God), you may still be let down by the human agents who profess to be the experts in such matters. Yes, scientists really do falsify data. I used to naively think that this had to be very rare, that academics and researchers at universities — not even working for corporations! — surely must prioritize the quest for knowledge over their own personal and professional agenda. Many do. Turns out that many don’t, too, but it was awhile before I knew of real examples up close, or saw statistics suggesting how rampant such falsification could be.

And finally, I mean to argue that being a “believer of science/rationalism/whatever” is socially constructed and not necessarily any more right or wrong than being a “believer of religion/God/whatever.” This is what I meant in the “how to make your kids think” post when I wrote that rationalism and “free” though are no less “myths” than religion. The woman I quoted in that post implied that religious beliefs are myths, and “stick[ing] to the evidence” is a rejection of belief in myth. She was referring to myths as old stories starring characters who might be no more real than Little Red Riding Hood. I am referring to myths, however, as ideologies that we take to be real and natural, perhaps failing to recognize how our ideologies are a product of our cultural context (similar to Roland Barthes’s take).

The woman quoted above speaks of “evidence” as if she (or any researcher, really) has been toiling away in a lab, disproving the existence of God. The stuff about ethics that her kid is learning in atheist Sunday school may be the exact same stuff that they taught me in Catholic Sunday school, except that her kids color in pictures of Frederick Douglass instead of pictures of Jesus. But there is no “evidence” that any of the ethical guidelines taught in either Sunday school is True or Right.

I totally agree that Frederick Douglass was great and that slavery is bad, but that’s not a belief you come to through “evidence.” It is a culturally agreed-upon belief. Some cultures have (or have had, but I believe some still do have) the more or less agreed-upon belief that slavery is a necessary component of the national economy, and is acceptable. I do believe wholeheartedly that one of these takes is Right and one is Wrong, universally. But there is nothing in science that says which is which. That is not a failing of science — science is not ethics, just as your pants are not a hat. You wouldn’t blame your pants for not keeping your head warm. This does illustrate, however, that science is not necessarily the only system of knowledge production and belief that we can rely on in our lives.

I set out to clarify my opinions, both for myself and for you anonymous readers, though I do wonder whether I’ve actually confused things more. I didn’t mean to conflate rationalism with scientism, but the two do seem somewhat jammed together in what I’ve been reading at times (similar, perhaps, to how theism is conflated with fundamentalism). I’ll just post my thoughts as written for now, then, and reserve the right to keep thinking.