Dual State Theory: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, 1941 Ernst Fraenkel
The War on Science, Shawn Otto 2020
Witches, A Tale of Terror, Sam Harris narrates the audio and has commented on how, once you accept a few basic principles as if they are factual, the men who prosecuted witches proceeded in a scientific manner. They were the "evil" ones, the men, but the managed to get others to believe the witches were working with Satan.
Calling In - It took years for this to come out but it's finally available. Just got the eBook.
I Never Thought of it That Way
Misguided, Matthew Facciani 2024
Which has a massive bibliography and footnotes of studies
Karl Popper
The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
Politics of Meaning
The Ideological Brain
https://www.youtube.com/embed/P6KTCjwmdzs
Daryl Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Recently I have been reading some good analysis of where we
are and how to improve the civil landscape, those places where we meet our neighbors
and try to create a healthy environment for our kids to learn and for all of to
enjoy clean air and water.
There are plenty of sources for how division is created by
media, by rich people, by people trying to make a buck off other’s pain, so I’ll
keep that brief:
The formula for creating division is to speak loudly and
often about common values and claim to be a supporter of that high ground. Then
when the details are being worked on, claim that anyone who disagrees with you
does not support those values. The confusion then feeds on itself as the disagreement
gets the attention and working from the values get lost.
Common values can be found across philosophies and religions
but throughout history we have fought over who has the better religion and the best
philosophy. Sometimes that is peaceful discourse in an academic setting,
sometimes it’s all out genocide. Politicians speak in terms of coming together
as a nation and listening to those who are not being heard and rewarding
everyone for their contributions. When that is translated into complex
legislation, it can be hard to trace the proposed solutions back to those basic
values.
Personally, I don’t care for the political process*. There
is too much about personality and cheering for one side over another. I have my
favorite politicians, and I’ve been to live events. I quickly get tired of clapping
along and uncomfortable as the emotions rise. I have heard the secret to a good
political speech is to present some data, then tell a story or say something
that reflects an emotional response, then go back to data again. Lately I see
more purely emotional speaking.
My interest in finding common ground and looking for
candidates outside of the two major parties began a few decades ago when I noticed
that if I questioned a policy of one of those favored candidates, I would be
questioned. That is, my values, my foundational beliefs would be questioned.
This would happen when I was with groups of people that I agreed with on most
issues and policies.
The same experiences are laid out by Allie Beth Stuckey in
her book Toxic
Empathy. She has a podcast too, of course. Her book is a series of vignettes
about people speaking their truth about political issues and paying a price for
it. She uses the tough issues, like abortion and immigration to illustrate. It’s
sometimes hard to hear the pain she reports. She paints a picture of a world
where we can’t talk about the difficult choices people face without being told
that we aren’t tolerant enough or accepting enough or don’t believe in justice.
I don’t claim to have
all the answers to these difficult issues, but I know we need to find ways to
talk about them. A common value is free speech. But now we are dividing on that
issue. We are mired in a discussion of whether our votes count, meanwhile significant
legislation doesn’t get passed. It is common now for bills to be supported
almost entirely by one party. A President signs an executive action and when
the opposite party has the Presidency an opposing action is signed.
There is some hope when people I vehemently disagree
with on most issues still speak for common values that form the basis for my political
beliefs. Tucker Carlson spoke in the wake of rhetoric around the death of Charlie
Kirk.
“You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in
the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to
this country,” Carlson said. “If that does happen, there is never a more
justified moment for civil disobedience, there never will be.” “If they can
tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, then there is nothing
they can’t do to you,” Carlson said. “They don’t consider you human, they don’t
believe you have a soul. A human being with a soul, a free man, has the right
to say what he believes.”
Charlie Kirk was also good with statements of basic values. I
don’t like interacting the way he did, but I think he was sincere in his belief
that we should find ways to have difficult conversations. He said,
“Free speech is not just saying what you want to say, but it
is having to hear things you don’t want to hear.”
There is also a partial quote from Charlie about empathy.
This partial quote is along the lines of Allie’s book above, but the full context
switches to the term “compassion”. It is similar to how I would critique Allie’s
thesis,
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy
is a made-up, new-age term, and it does a lot of damage. I much prefer the word
compassion, and I much prefer the word sympathy. Empathy is where you try to
feel someone’s pain and sorrows as if they’re your own. Compassion allows for
understanding.”
It’s unlikely that I would have come across all the above if
I was not exposing myself to people and sources that hold wildly opposing views
to my own. Searching for common ground is part of how people have resisted
tyranny and authoritarianism throughout history. It’s the same for communist,
socialist, or corporate tyranny.
A friend sent something to me that included this one item in a
larger plan for creating a movement that embraces the values of free speech,
caring for everyone, and working together. I added a note in parentheses to
clarify the context,
4. Build a coalition bigger than the base (that you are opposing).
They are most powerful when their opponents are divided. Create common
ground between groups that might not agree on everything but share a goal
of protecting democracy, fairness, and stability.
That is from a much longer piece that comes from a
particular political view, so I’m not including it. My point is, common ground
is common, look for it.
* BTW, I’m not moderate. I don’t seek compromise just for
the sake of compromise. I find there are very few people who believe in and
adopt a complete platform of one of the two national parties. Those platforms
change every year at their conventions, so it would be difficult to change
along with them.
Francis Schaeffer is sometimes considered the progenitor of
the Evangelical movement in the second half of the 20th century. In
his seminal work “How Then Shall We Live”, he begins by looking at failed
civilizations and philosophies over thousands of years. Without very much
background or logical connection, something Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers
might call “unencumbered by the thought process”, he concludes therefore, that
there must be an ultimate truth, a source of wisdom beyond human ability and that
must be the God of the Christian Bible.
This offer of an answer to the questions of how to live, to
me, is not different than the offerings of a populist leader who does not
acknowledge the input of the people they are leading. They are the opposite of
the leader who says, “it was a team effort”, when asked how they succeeded.
Examples of that form of cooperative leadership at high levels are hard to
find. Democracy is an attempt to formalize it at a national level but we’re
still experimenting. Mythology passed down to Indigenous cultures might contain
lessons.
One of those is the Seventh Generation Principle. It comes
to the modern Western world from the Iroquois Confederacy of tribes around what
is now Lake Ontario in pre-Columbian North America. Some of their ideas
inspired the United States Constitution but the idea of considering the impact
of decisions on future generations was dumped, overridden by the culture of
Capitalism and short-term gains.
Early diaries of European explorers of North American speak
of settled areas that had been abandoned. Germ theory had not yet been
discovered, so we can forgive them for not understanding where everyone went.
Later however, this was forgotten or more likely changed to the story of how
those Europeans “tamed” the wilderness. The practices of forest management and
hunting that preserved species didn’t result in walled cities and wide roads,
so for centuries European methods have been considered superior. The impending
failure of those methods is finally drawing that consideration into question.
Spiritual practices are difficult to understand from the outside,
so I hesitate to comment on them. I will stick to less controversial
statements. Connection to the land and a reverence for nature is easily
recognized in writing and stories. Some tribes use the term “two-spirit” or
something similar to describe a person with masculine and feminine gender
identities. This is something that is rarely honored in other cultures the way
N.A. culture has. Also, in my recent interactions with American Natives alive
today, I have heard expressions of belief that are unlike other beliefs that
have a hierarchical system, with the most powerful gods leading and demanding
worship. There seems to be more of a recognition that the stories are symbolic,
but this could be just my interpretation.
Overall, my estimation is these ideas and practices were
lost and subjugated when Empires with more effective weapons and battle
techniques took control of large areas of the map. That changed not only who
was in control but how values of how best to survive were passed on. Reflecting
on how much better off we are than the previous generation or our younger
selves was replaced by what general could best the previous ones or what
innovator could create technology to make last year’s model obsolete.
These ideas are not exclusive to Native American but I am
most familiar with them. I’m sure similar ideas could be found in other parts
of the world and in more philosophies. Now that we have connected the globe and
have a better vision of history, including pre-written history, it is time we
incorporate all that knowledge and experience into a global sense of morality.
Religions that have been at war with each other for as long as they have
existed now gesture and speak in platitudes of how we are all praying to the
same God or that their God points to the same beliefs as the others. There is
even recognition lately of moral systems that have nothing to do with Gods at
all. Is it possible to bring all this together and at least talk about the
common ground?
This is a bit a tangent from the main theme of how to create
a moral system, but I sometimes feel Carrier spends too much time critiquing
the people who call themselves moral leaders and not so much on where we could
be looking for real leadership.
Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete
the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it.
Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need
to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers
than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science.
People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here
and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big
question. I’m not out to win the debate.
Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of
science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut
off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is
debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In
industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to
win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.
Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly,
that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A
half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and
buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside
the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had
a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the
state I live in finally caught up to me.
When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways
that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that
human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking
what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that
powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human
and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows
that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and
reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.
I recently listened to a discussion with Coleman Hughes and Douglas Murray on Coleman’s podcast. At times I had trouble figuring out what world they live in. These are not small players and they covered many major talking points, so if someone can explain this to me, maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing. The title is “The Intersectional Crackup with Douglas Murray“, but intersectionality is far from the only topic.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “Intersectional”, it covers the interconnected nature of the categorizations that people fall into. As we began to address centuries old oppression, we addressed them separately, such as women’s issues or rights for people of African descent. Intersectionality recognizes the dynamics when a person is a member of more than one of those groups. It sounds simple when you look at the definition but it gets convoluted when people want to make it so, like in this podcast.
The podcast starts with a commercial, so you can skip that.
Hughes seems to head into an important discussion about leading a meaningful life at about 4 minutes in but he keeps the discussion to how difficult that is in a world of identity politics. He says the current culture has taken on a “religious” like form. From then on he focuses on how not to build a sense of self.
Murray’s first answer to Coleman’s opening question is to agree about the religion shaped hole in society. You can trace this back to Nietzsche, who famously said “God is Dead” and less famously said, “and we killed him”. He (Nietzsche) then went on to speculate what people will use to fill the missing answers and moral judgments provided by religion. Murray says the “intersectionalists” use guilt, atonement and heresy, just as religions have. He does not see a discussion about purpose. He denigrates youth on both the left and right. The conservatives don’t have a “how”. The Left does, but he rambles about some sort of “abdication” by adults that I don’t get.
He says he could give his views on how people found meaning in the past, but then he is vague. He says “literature” without naming much. He says this is a failure of atheists. I have seen him interact with atheists, so I can’t figure out why he doesn’t see them doing this. It was the atheist thinkers and writers, past and present where I did find meaning and purpose. The only purpose I can glean from religion is “read the scriptures, pray, and if you don’t find purpose, you did it wrong.” Anything specific, anything meaningful, can be found in a non-religious source from writers contemporary to those sources. The non-religious ones are usually not only better, but they don’t require you to memorize any names of prophets or their movements. You just need to work through the ideas.
Around this time in the podcast, 10 minutes or so, both of them have started using the term
https://www.facebook.com/WeStayWoke/
“woke culture”. This is the latest term that began with a positive meaning but is used in a derogatory manner. I understand why to some extent. Some people are actually aware and paying attention, thus “woke”, and some are pretending to care about the issues of the day but are really not well informed. Hughes and Murray are going after the latter group.
Coleman then says something I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly it was so strange. He said, “If you are Right Wing, you can’t be unapologetically Christian”. I think he’s saying Right Wing Christians feel they have to hold back on expressing their religion because it is associated with oppression of the past. In the podcast, or any of the other times I’ve heard these two speak, I have not heard any awareness of a liberal version of Christianity. It is a wing of Christianity that has been growing for decades, with roots that go back to the 13th century and early Christian humanists.
Hughes however grew up with what seems to be a narrow-minded sect of liberals that saw themselves as a rebel force, as he says, a ‘resistance’, ala Star Wars. Instead of finding the many more nuanced messages and movements in the country, he has become ‘anti’ to whatever that was.
After the 13 minute mark, Murray pushes this even farther, saying these recent Left ideologies are not based on intellect. Occasionally, he does hit on something worthwhile. He notes that when a group of any kind presents a prepackaged system, it can gain followers, but there is a downside. He cites the Catholic Church and how Ireland, once a Catholic stronghold has lately been divorcing itself from that. I would say something simplistic, like Murray just hasn’t found a Liberal group that he likes, but that’s his job, to seek out and evaluate groups. So something else is going on here.
Hughes makes a similar worthwhile statement, then messes it up. He says he is not comfortable with the idea of “my country, right or wrong”, but then ponders why all those brown people are coming here. He figures if they are coming here, we must be doing something right, and apparently doesn’t figure much beyond that. It does not occur to either one of them that they are coming here for the promises in our Constitution. They come here for the education system we subsidize, the business assistance, the protection of rights, the things they don’t have in their country. The things Liberal politicians vote for and fight for.
Instead, at about 21 minutes, they launch into how amazed they are that we still get excited when another barrier is broken, like a black woman becoming Vice President. Hughes says Obama broke the final barrier and that should have “changed the model”. I’m not sure what that means, but he does not give the slightest nod to what happened to the culture during the Obama years.
Another good point from Murray is that young people, or anyone else, should not “hack into history”, looking for something wrong. Instead we should try to “reconcile” who we are to that past. But he sets up a straw man to knock down. He says people then ask him, “what about injustice”. He accepts there are struggles but dismisses them, giving no examples of one that was fought and won. He does not make a case for why it’s time to put discussions of racism, inequity, or misogyny to rest. He alludes to “rivers of thought” that we should attempt to navigate, but never says what those are. And I’ll repeat that this is not the first or only Douglas Murray I’ve listened to.
At 27 minutes, he makes a comment that he doesn’t want there to be “types” of books or studies, there shouldn’t be “women’s books” for example. He backs this up by citing Bayard Rustin, a strategist for Martin Luther King Jr who was against the rise of Black Studies in Universities. It seemed like segregation, just what the White people wanted. He jokes at something he apparently has heard, that people say there are no gay writers in the canon.
I don’t know who Murray is talking about because he rarely gives quotes or names. Of course
Getty images
there are gay people who wrote books, ancient to current, because there were always gay people. The problem is, many of them hid it, or if they didn’t, the next generation erased it. It’s harder to erase history now, it is not “written by the winners” as it once was. This is an unusual time, when people of all stripes are gaining positions of power, crossing borders easily, working across cultural barriers. The only thing I can make of this is Hughes and Murray don’t want that. They play on the fact that they are each members of a category that has experienced disadvantages, Hughes is black, Murray is gay. They take their own example and claim that it proves these problems are behind us. They see none of the history of changes in norms, they never compare our time to any empire of the past that came close to the level of inclusivity we are experiencing. I can only speculate, but my guess is they see a zero sum game, and they are on the winning the side, so they want change to stop to reduce the risk of losing what they have.
It gets worse but the details are just a different flavor of the same theme. At 36 minutes, Murray calls the Left’s ideas “simple”, saying it’s easy to understand and the Left makes it more complex. The man has a platform as big as just about anyone, but I can’t find this simple message he says he knows.
I’ll give Murray credit for one more item, on the topic of cancel culture. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. It’s when someone who has found fame, position, and hopefully even has said something worth saying but, then says something off the mark. Some group, large enough to get an audience, amplifies that mistake and calls for resignation or demotion or some other form of cancelling. This puts a damper on anyone who is even thinking about speaking up. It takes our open forums where ideas are incubated and encouraged and turns them into echo chambers where everyone fears offending the next fringe group. Murray speculates that this behavior might bring down the “woke” system. I think it might already be happening.
After that he has a couple doozies. The one that tops them all was “we don’t need people to come along and pretend to us that we are things we’re not.” It’s at 52 minutes and 45 seconds. I agree that there are people who call themselves Liberal but don’t bring with it all of the liberal values that go with that label. They bring a set of standards that may not match the values and ideas that got us to the current enlightened era we are enjoying. We should all be vigilant of that. I don’t know how Murray misses that people in history who “pretend to us that we are things we’re not”, are the same types of people he is speaking against. Back in time, they were priests and princes and town constables and local sheriffs. Now they are bloggers and influencers and talk show radio hosts.
What’s missing is, we have to base our decisions to “call out” problems on the values that built our free and open society. “Calling out” is not the problem, it’s what you call out. We can discuss the “how”, but don’t let that bury the “what”.
Deb Haaland. Secretary of Interior Nominee
These two might be tired of people identifying themselves with a traditionally oppressed group. For myself, I am far from tired of hearing about barriers being broken. A Native American in the position of Interior Secretary for instance, is quite meaningful and worth noting. But these guys, now that it’s not just straight white guys getting everything, want to say, “oh yeah, that’s what we all wanted the whole time, see it’s fine, don’t say anything about it now and it will all go away forever”. They are getting paid by the system as it is, and they aren’t interested in why they are despite their intersectionality. Easier to denigrate anyone who does question it or blame them if they have not received their piece of the pie.
What I’m hearing here is that they feel very much the same way that large groups of people have felt in the past. Blacks felt marginalized, and in the South with voter suppression and everywhere with housing red lining, they were. Women were harassed at work and it was portrayed in sitcoms as a joke. I understand that men like this are not treated as special as men were just a generation ago, and that probably feels like they have lost something. But the people they are talking about are not asking to be treated specially, just equally.
I’d like to cover just one more term, “identity politics”. The way Hughes and Coleman are using it here, they are pointing to the people that claim that say you have to be a member of a certain group to understand that group’s plight. They are complaining about people that are asking for something extra based purely on their membership in some group, identified by skin color, sexual orientation, or similar traits. I agree with this for the most part. It should be that equality is just that, equal. I think human beings are capable of empathizing with others and understanding the needs of others, without actually experiencing all possible circumstances.
Hughes and Coleman aren’t limiting their solutions to just this narrow issue however. They are expanding it to claim that no policy should consider any type of identifying characteristics. When evaluating history, they ignore the basis of nations, wars, religions, hiring practices, and budgeting that was the norm until the middle of the last century. There were no black senators. Women could not get high paying jobs or leadership positions. Girls did not have sports programs. These facts matter. People who are born in a system that gives them privileges will rarely change the rules to reduce the privileges. Change requires legislation that identifies those traits that were used to identify those who were barred from those privileges in the past.
Before I go on, I promised back in the 2nd of this series that I’d talk about the problems of the early Catholic Church. I hope I have spent enough time discussing the Enlightenment era and the flaws in Western philosophy in general. But there are good reasons why I still choose them over Christianity. There are a few things that started gnawing at me about Christianity and the more I looked into them, the more I realized they were foundational problems that could not be solved. That is, they weren’t just cracks in the foundation of Christianity; they were demonstrations that there is no foundation.
The first is the consensus on the existence of Jesus. That’s it really. That is, the entire extent of the scholarly consensus on Jesus is that he existed, and maybe that he was crucified. The dates of his life are disputed, his name is in dispute, everything he said is debatable, let alone what he meant, his family life, if he was a spirit or a man who was inhabited by spirit or if he was born God. All of these questions are played out in the scriptures and some of them have led to wars and schisms (John 14). Holy wars are not cool as they used to be. Claims about what someone did in the past are expected to come with data that can be confirmed and facts that are agreed upon by a number of experts. Part of the statement of the consensus on Jesus is that we can’t recreate any of these details from the documents we have, not the four gospels or with the help of the apocryphal documents.
They spent centuries trying to work back to some original theme and what they discovered was there isn’t one. Instead, we get Peter arguing with Paul (Acts 10), Thomas painted as an unbeliever who repents (John 20), and a fourth gospel that is out of sync with the other three. This was expected and normal at the time the scriptures were written. Authors added to and reworked the stories to bring their new insights to them. But now we have modern history which is expected to be accurate and to let us know when something is uncertain. This leads to a confusing mixing of these two different genres. A historical fact like “Jesus existed” is used to claim that everything written using the name “Jesus” is also historically true. It may be true that Jesus died at the hands of the Romans but that says nothing about how that death washed away sins or the details of how he rose or who found him or who saw him later. The truth of one historical fact has very little effect on the truth of most of what is found in the New Testament.
This leads to the second thing, the order of the New Testament. If that collection of books was simply reordered to the order in which they were written, I think we would all have a very different view of the meaning they are attempting to convey. The first book in the New Testament, Matthew, begins with a birth narrative, connecting Jesus back to King David. That makes sense if you are attempting to tell a story that you think is real. But many believe the story of the virgin birth was concocted later to sell people of that time on the idea of Jesus being God. Gods of that time were born of virgins, so Jesus should be too, so you need a story.
If you want to follow how the stories began and were copied and embellished, start with the Book of Mark. It was written first. It has no birth story. It doesn’t have a resurrection story either. Maybe I should say it didn’t have a resurrection story. Many Bibles have footnotes telling you that the last verses of Mark were added on later, to harmonize it with the other gospels. Matthew and then Luke were written after Mark, sometimes copying, sometimes changing stories slightly, sometimes adding a new story. The gospel of John was written decades later.
To further correct the chronological order, all of the works of Paul need to be shuffled to the beginning. All of them were written and its author died before the first gospel was even heard of. Acts talks about Paul, but it was most likely written by the same author as the Book of Luke. Making sense of the different stories and contradictions is hard enough, but if you were to be presented first with a story of a man who only met Jesus in a vision and mentioned virtually nothing of a family or any earthly travels, it would be disconcerting indeed to then find out about Kings hearing of a virgin birth, to read of encounters with priests, of a man having meals, and telling parables. Was Paul unaware of all of this? For me, it’s led me to consider that this is a legend that developed, not a history that was poorly documented.
This project of ordering the books chronologically is complicated by the difficulty of assigning dates to the writings. That is an inexact science, and the authors sometimes attempted to mask who they were and when they were writing. The complete reordering might begin with the “undisputed Paulines”, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These would be followed by Mark, Matthew, Luke/Acts then John. The job would get more difficult after that as we would need to sort out the psuedepigrpaha (like 2 Thessalonians), the works that were falsely attributed to Paul or other figures of the time. These were either assigned authorship in error by people who didn’t know any better, or deliberately claimed to be an author other than the actual one as a way to legitimize the message.
This is not just a New Testament problem either. Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Old Testament, but is now known to have been written much later. Maybe most significant is the story of Eve tempting Adam with the apple. Besides simple facts like no apple appearing in the Bible, the story itself might not be a creation story. It may have been written earlier but it was given its place in the Bible by the people who assembled it, not some original author attempting to write a coherent narrative. It’s a folk tale, probably not intended to be an account of the first man and woman. So the entire reason for Jesus, to save us from the sin that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden, is a mistake of some scholars in the centuries around the Fall of Rome who received a text and did not question its authorship or authenticity. They were told Moses wrote it and that was good enough for them.
With all of these competing narratives and a lack of scholarship, we arrive in 381 AD at the third thing. In that year, soon after Theodosius became emperor of Rome, he declared that he knew the correct version of all of this. Rather than honor other ancient traditions and allow for freedom of expression of a plurality of religions, it was time to get everyone under one system. To do that would require enforcement of these Catholic ideas using his military power and in many cases, the burning of anything and anyone who didn’t agree. This included not just pagan or Jewish places of worship, but Christian churches that didn’t preach the correct doctrine.
“In January, 381, the prefect had orders to close all Arian chapels in the city and to expel those who served them. The same severe measures were ordered throughout Theodosius’s dominion, not only against Arians, but also in the case of Manichaeans and all other heretics.”
It tries to soften exactly what these “severe measures” were but that’s why you shouldn’t get history from only one source, and especially from a source that is biased. By the way, “Arians” here have nothing to do with Nazis. The big problem with them was they were not Trinitarians. They said Jesus was subordinate to God, not part of him. My problem is no one can explain what the Trinity is. Instead of discussing it that though, Theodosius just said he was bored with all the talk and started killing people.
This wasn’t just an establishment of a strong military rule or just a wedding of religion with government it was a closing of minds that had been developing philosophies of democracy and science for centuries. In his book, Confessions, from around 397 AD Augustine wrote, “There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” Granted I’m taking this out of context in this short piece. He was confessing his thoughts as a young man and how they led him away from a more pious life. However, from archaeology we can see that technology stopped advancing around this time and we see less works of literature over the next few hundred years. I’m not blaming the Fall of Rome on Christians, but they didn’t prevent it and didn’t even seem troubled by it.
You should check all of my facts here and draw your own conclusions. Nothing I said here necessarily cancels out everything the Church has ever done. It shouldn’t change your relationship to your favorite parable or the community you consider your spiritual home. For me, it led to questions and it was the reaction to those questions from church leaders that eventually led to my lack of a belief in the divinity of Jesus and ultimately anything supernatural.
Theologians throughout the ages have attempted to straddle the worlds of belief and non-belief, of faith and reason. Thomas Aquinas was banned by the Catholic Church for his writings on this and then given sainthood not long after his death. In the last century, Catholic monk Teilhard de Chardin was told not to publish his thoughts on bridging these two worlds, but not long after he died, a friend published his works, (according to Teilhard’s wishes) and some gave him credit for contributing to the liberal ideas expressed at Vatican II. I find these philosophical thought experiments interesting, and although many do not, and even though I can show they ultimately don’t lead to a conclusion, I also hope to show that having the discussion has brought the people who hold those opposing beliefs closer together so we can work on the common goals.
Chardin became a Catholic monk not long after the turn of the 20th century and then began writing about his thoughts about spirituality. He was rewarded by being sent to a remote monastery in China. That’s sarcasm in case you didn’t catch it. He was also a paleontologist and his work with hominid fossils brought him a degree of fame. Evolution was a big challenge to the church at the time, and here was one of their own making strides in that area. As a contemplative and peaceful man, outwardly it appeared he was at peace with this. We can only speculate how it felt to him to have to choose between expressing his most important thoughts openly and keeping his job and position in the Church that he loved.
Teilhard tried to harmonize evolution and creation by saying that God does the creation thing while evolution builds the physical world. The two are not separate, but happening together all the time. God created and continues to create the world, and evolution is the mechanism that moves that creation forward. Our conscious is part of that evolution, so we have become co-creators with God. There isn’t one without the other, just as exhaling and inhaling are needed for there to be breath.
For him, this helped to solve the problem of evil in the world. The existence of evil is used as an argument that an all loving and all knowing God does not exist, because if one did, it would not allow such pain and suffering. Teilhard said that God does not will that suffering occurs. God is not intervening in the world on a regular basis to cause people pain because of something they did. Rather, God sets the world in motion toward the end, which is a world without suffering, but it is not possible to create that world without going through the suffering. We are part of the creation as it is occurring so we are experiencing what is required for it to happen. Since we are part of it, it becomes our job to prevent or at least reduce suffering, and we evolve skills and strategies to do just that.
I think it’s pretty clear why his ideas were not accepted by the Church. He disrupts the prescribed need to get you to go to confession every week. Less clear is why he decided to remain a monk his entire life and accept their condemnations of his writings and not be able to have them published until he was dead. He obviously wanted his ideas shared even knowing we would never be able to ask a follow up question.
To the scientifically minded, it should also be clear that none of his work comes close to qualifying as a scientific hypothesis. Although there is a certain logical flow to it, he makes assumptions about a need for a creator and endows that creator with attributes that are pulled straight from his theology classes, not his paleontology.
His posthumous following is thus peopled mostly by those who don’t accept the controls of religions, but still desire some sense of a supernatural to give meaning to our existence as well as those who are not too concerned with the rigors of scientific proofs. Many of these followers would consider themselves pantheists, but Teilhard often stated that a Christian sojourner is not a pantheist. He was firmly a Christian and being in the world didn’t mean his life in the world was divorced from his life in Christ. The Christian symbolism of the cross signified this connection and that was meaningful to him.
On pg 116 of the Divine Milieu, he says, “Pantheism seduces us by its vistas of perfect universal union.” But the Divine Milieu is about God and the world, not one or the other, so Teilhard is always working to keep that aspect in his writing, even while acknowledging that evolution is obviously happening and can be observed by us every day and confirmed using our powers of reason and logic. We evolved with animal traits, but we find individual fulfillment in the divine. I would have loved to ask him why he did not find fulfillment in participating in the discovery that we are connected to nature in ways that we have not been aware of before.
He says, “Christianity alone therefore saves, with the rights of thoughts, the essential aspiration of all mysticisim: to be united (that is, to become the other) while remaining one's self.” All punctuation is from the original. This axiom is sometimes expressed by him as “union differentiates”. That is, the essential aspiration of all mysticism to be in union with others, with God, with the world, and yet to be able to be one's self. Teilhard stresses that diving into Christian theology will not cause you to lose yourself, whereas other forms of mysticism or modernism will, “If you suppress the historical reality of Christ, the divine omnipresence which intoxicates us becomes, like all the other dreams of metaphysics, uncertain, vague, conventional—lacking the decisive experimental verification by which to impose itself on our minds, and without the moral authority to assimilate our lives into it.”
None of this works for me. On the contrary, I do find “decisive experimental verification” in metaphysics. They are not vague at all. I can only wonder if Teilhard and I sat down, if we might find we were talking about something different or of the same thing in different terms. But he didn’t leave behind experiments for me to repeat, so I can not verify his findings. Instead, we have physics, which can describe how I came from stars and stars came from hydrogen which was left over after an expansion from a compressed amount of energy. When those explanations fail to explain what came before them, I can still use the same methods to define the boundaries of what I know and what might be true. This “omnipresence” “intoxicates” me. Although there is much left unknown, there is certainty in the mathematical proofs of what we do know so I can “assimilate” that into my life. When combined with biology, we can begin to understand the basis for our morality.
But I didn’t go to the trouble of summarizing his work here just so I could shoot it down. I don’t need to accept his entire thesis to see that he made a contribution, he moved forward the conversation about how we relate to a vast cosmos full of unanswered questions. Teilhard de Chardin was an accomplished scientist and a devout Catholic monk. Many on either side see this as irreconcilable. He could be dismissed as a scientist troubled with cognitive dissonance who came up with some new age answers to explain his faith, or as a man of faith who felt the need to explain his discoveries of the origins of humans in terms of that faith. But as Yuval Harari said in his book Sapiens, it’s in our cognitive dissonance where we find understanding about our cultures.
The question of whether or not Teilhard accomplished his goal of reconciling science and faith, is perhaps the wrong question. What can be shown is that he lived through two World Wars, a time when the future of civilization was very much in doubt, and during a time when churches were struggling with the new theory of who we are and where we came from that began with Darwin, then, not long after he died and his writings began to be absorbed by the culture, the Catholic Church convened a Council, where they said this:
159. Faith and science: "... methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." (Vatican II GS 36:1)
You can enter the reference at the end into any search engine and bring up the full text. Granted it still is hanging on to the idea that God made it all, but this from 1965 and it is written by the Church. You change one word in that first sentence and make it valid from a scientific point of view, “…the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same place.” I changed “God” to “place”. The feeling of faith grew out of culture, which grew out of our biology which is a result of the physical laws of the universe. Whether a faith statement is true or not, it’s true that faith is a human experience.
This statement from the Vatican was a big step from 1859 and they have made greater strides since. Not everyone is coming along on those steps, but that is true of any discipline or culture. The question itself has not changed. That is, the question of how we reconcile the feelings we have of connectedness, of mystery, with the answers that we are getting from research and data, knowing that the data leaves much still unanswered. The amount and complexity of the data has changed, but the question remains.
Having sent probes above the clouds, where gods used to dwell and not finding them, having peered as far into space as the limitations of the speed of light will allow us, and finding nothing, the answer that there is a god out there that made all this is becoming increasingly less likely. Having gone beyond the Newtonian physics of cause and effect, into the quantum world, and still being unable to find how the electronic pulses in our brains translate into complex concepts, we are starting to wonder if there is a limit to how much we can know about ourselves. We’ve managed pretty well without answering either of these questions. Countless gods have been fought over until no one was left to believe in them. Science moves at its own pace, providing us with information, while civilizations move as they need to in order to survive.
All of this has involved a lot of pain and suffering. One of the most important things I take away from Teilhard is that God is not going to do all of the work of alleviating that suffering. A purely scientific approach to these questions would say there is no god at all and it is completely up to us to address the suffering in the world. No matter where you stand on that question, I think we can all see that it’s time to put the question of faith vs science somewhere off to the side and find more ways to work together on alleviating the suffering and less time arguing about where it all comes from.
This is the first time I missed a February for this blog. The Ides of March have already been upon us. No excuses. I even had an idea brewing. I have a few favorite podcasts and I want to relate a couple recent episodes from one of them. It’s Bart Campolo, and he includes something from another favorite, On Being. In fact, I’ll go ahead and start with the poem, rather than try to lead up to it.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
The story doesn’t quite complete the answer to the question posed, can insignificance be liberating? Bart spends about a half hour filling in the blanks. It’s not some simple folksy wisdom. We’re all at different places with regards to how well known we are and how others judge our significance, but our approach to the idea of significance can have an effect on our happiness and maybe significantly more than that. He mentions the Tiger Mom who drives her kids to succeed. Whatever you think about that, it will most likely lead them to more success than if she had not done what she did. What her philosophy doesn’t talk about is that at some point in their lives, those kids will be able to make their own decisions, based on that success, and they will no longer need to be driven to succeed strictly for the goal of succeeding. They will be able to enjoy the journey they find themselves on.
With memes and commercials and self-help books and helicopter parents and just everything that is available to us at any moment, we receive a lot of wisdom in small bites, and a lot of it is not for us at this moment in our lives. Like, stopping to smell the roses is a good idea, but if you are on your way to your final exam, better not stop for too long. People will tell you all sorts of reasons for working hard and others will tell you to spend more time with your family. Others will tell you that you can have it all. What I love about Bart’s podcast is that he’s spent some time thinking about what “all” actually is.
In the story that starts this podcast, Conan O’Brien uses the example of President Calvin Coolidge and Bart has referred to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, people who have changed the world in significant ways. We don’t know much about Roosevelt’s private life, and very few people visit Coolidge’s grave. While they were alive perhaps only a hundred people knew them intimately, maybe less. When Albert Brooks tells Conan, “none of it matters”, he’s talking about his movies and his legacy and even the lives he touched because even those will pass and be forgotten. But of course, something matters. It’s true that all of us will be forgotten, so if we despair our individual inevitable end and dwell on the comparison of our accomplishments to those of great Presidents, we have miscalculated where we should be spending our emotional energy, because in the end, we all end up in that same place.
If you are focused on survival then you probably aren’t reading this. If you need to focus on survival, then do that. Hopefully you aren’t creating a sense of panic where there is no need for it. But if needed, you can find help and get to a place of comfort. There are tribes that have room for more and there are ways to find help, so do that first. If you’re already there, reflect on how that happened, what did your tribe do for you, what do you have to be thankful for? Bart tells the story of a chess mentor who teaches a young man not just to play well, but to love the game. Unfortunately, we don’t all get coaches like that, but we can hear about a story of someone who did. It comes around the middle of the podcast. I won’t spoil the story for you.
In the first one, Bart tried to come up with some analogies, like riding a wave. You don’t control the wave, but you can control the surf board and make it to the end of the ride without getting dunked. He gets a bit dark at times and he apologies for that. He tries to end on a positive note about love. No matter when the end times occur or how, it’s still important to love your kids and appreciate the world we have now. The difficulty of this type of question is a matter of focus. The wave analogy breaks down when you start thinking about where our “waves of life” come from, the things that push us along, some of them are man-made and have levers behind them that we can get control of, and maybe we should try to grab them, instead of just going along for the ride. Or, I’d like to spend time appreciating the world, but there’s a lot of crap going on, and I’d like to fix some of it while I’m here. Bart posits that if the choices we make as individuals lead to a life well lived, then those same values should also apply to what we do as a species, as a whole.
After doing some research and giving it more thought, Bart comes up with some more solid answers to the question in episode 409. One of those is; we just aren’t wired for thinking about the future. Throughout history we’ve survived many disasters, of our own making or not, either by luck or ingenuity and that survival is both due to and feeds back into our optimism bias. I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. You can check out the optimism bias Wikipedia page and TED talks about it.
Josey, the one called in the question, is a student, so she is just learning about this looming disaster and wondering why everyone is not acting like it’s coming and like it’s the highest priority for all of humanity. Her teacher is not wired to act that way and he has other things to teach. We could get hit by a meteor, our economic system could collapse or we could create nanotechnology that gets out of control and destroys everything. He has to teach all of those things knowing that his students understanding of any one of them could cause a lot of worry. He has also known about them for a long time and has continued to keep his job and feed his family throughout, so he might not see them as worrying. I don’t know what he is thinking, but it’s poor reasoning to equate all doomsday scenarios and conclude they are all wrong because we are still here, but that is part of how our brains work.
This is a problem for anyone trying to get others to adjust their actions to actual threats. Some people will respond to fear but many will get fatigued with constant warnings that don’t appear to be near or present. If you can show that people are trying to solve this problem, even if they are failing, you’ve just shown that someone is working on it, and we can hope they succeed. There are other problems, many more immediate, that also need attention. A constant drum beat becomes background noise. Bart didn’t defend this way of thinking, he just pointed out that we do it.
This isn’t just some psychology problem to deal with when you are talking to your friends either. It is built in to our political structure. To solve the problem of despotic kings a few centuries back, we created a democratic system where leaders can be voted out every couple years. This works great for slowing the accumulation of power but it is not designed for a change in climate that is occurring over many decades. We didn’t plan for this because it is only recently that we can predict such events. It’s only the last couple hundred years that we knew the earth was more than a few million years old. It’s even more recently since we have been able to predict the weather, let alone long term climate trends. We survived a long time without thinking on these scales.
It may be that the action we need is not the technological solution, although we’ll need that too, but we won't get to that if we don’t adjust our thinking first. We need to figure out how to accept and understand the science, understand our place in a vast universe and deep time, see our part as cooperative social creatures including future generations, and learn to discuss all of this with a diverse set of people and cultures knowing our survival depends on all of us getting along in ways we have never seen in human history. That’s a pretty tall order.
At the end of this episode, Bart says the answer to the question is to listen to all his other episodes. That might sound like a cop out or a marketing ploy, but I have listened to a lot of them, so I know it’s not. Bart’s theme of building community attempts to address all of these concerns at different times and in different ways. It takes hours of discussion to even begin to chip away at this and Humanize Me is one effort to do that. They answer it from the perspective of providing comfort to each other in difficult times, even up to and including the end of the world and how to be in a world of difficult choices so we can get together and solve all the world’s problems. The bottom line answer to all those is to care and nourish those close to you and do it in a way that helps to expand that caring and nourishing out into whatever surrounds you.
If this [the Mysterium
cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have
reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than
I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from
the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible.
The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.
I am goingto get into the problems of 4th century Christianity and other dark
periods, but first I want to talk about the problems of the Enlightenment.
These are less often discussed. I don’t mean that the Enlightenment was a
problem or that it is at the root of “our” problems today, but there were
aspects of it left incomplete and some of its reasoning was misused. We have
not corrected for these errors and we can’t if we remain unaware of them.
To be clear,
I think this was one of the most significant phases of human development. From
the time of the Buddha and Socrates until into the 15th century if a
person who had absorbed all the knowledge of their day could time travel
throughout those centuries and sit down for a discussion about the universe and
how it works, they would be able to understand each other. Barriers of language
aside. By the end of the 16th century so much had changed that parents
would have trouble conversing with their children. Anyone who didn’t have a
cell phone when they were a child knows this feeling.
Douglas
Adams calls these the first two ages of sand. We took sand and molded it into
lenses and looked out at the stars and realized they weren’t what we thought
they were. We looked closer at everything with microscopes and began to
deconstruct how things were made. We applied first principles and built on what
we could demonstrate to be true. These concepts had been incubating since the
dawn of human tribes but now they were seen not just as tools but as a
philosophy. This new philosophy said we could experiment with everything around
us and learn from it. We could read the book of nature. The concepts and
discoveries from people like Newton led to the third age of sand, the silicon
chip. Formulas developed at that time were used to put us on the moon and
theorize how the universe began.
But I’m
getting lost in the arc of progress and wonders of science and that is perhaps
one of the mistakes I said I was going to talk about. There was an overwhelming
faith in the ideas coming out of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave the
philosophical discussions of what is good or bad about scientific progress for
now and look at the problems created by this shift to rational thinking.
Rationality
was not invented 500 years ago. Even if you are trying to figure out if your
neighbor is a witch, you will use a certain degree of investigative thinking. Once
you accept that there are witches, and come up with some basic ideas about what
they are, the process of working out the logic is very much like that used in a
laboratory. If the experiment you devise involves dunking in water, because
witches float, this could work out bad for the person being tested, so when we
talk about rationality today, we mean a much larger context, one that involves
not just a single test, but proven techniques, repeated trials, and the ethics
of the test as well. But still, the idea of performing an experiment was always
there.
This era
that led us away from burning witches and produced so much of what we now
considered the modern world, also has an end. The effect of it never ended, but
the movements and the people who can be said to be part of it, ended. As Martin
Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of history bends toward justice”, but it is an
arc, not a straight line. What began as a reaction to a bloody 30 years of war
(1618 to 1648) ended with more war and more conquering by people like Napoleon.
One of the last, perhaps the last, philosopher of this age was MarieJean-Antoine-Nicolas
Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
Condorcet
was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His philosophies, like the
“general will” were the inspiration for revolutions against despotic rulers
with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A century before the
abolition of slavery in the United States, Condorcet founded the Society of the
Friends of the Blacks. But these ideas, no matter how noble, still had
detractors and they required enforcement. Other men, like Robespierre did not
have the patience for them to permeate into the world peacefully. The king was
replaced by the assembly and anyone who deviated from what the assembly
determined was the general will would be subject to its force.
This new
idea of laws coming from nature was an early Enlightenment idea put forth by
the likes of Francis Bacon. He felt that our destiny was in our hands and if we
deny that dream we will return to barbarism. But perhaps we didn’t spend enough
time understanding our nature before some decided to start enforcing its laws.
In his final work Sketch for a Historical
Pictureof the Progress of the Human
Mind, Condorcet applied to ethics and morality the idea that there are laws
of physics that are consistent throughout time and space and that principle can
extend to how we operate in the world. But even as he wrote this, the dream
seemed to be dying.
Robspierre
and the Jacobins were in the process of arresting some 300,000 and killing
nearly 17,000, eventually this included Condorcet. These numbers sound terrible
and they are in fact called The Reign of Terror, but as with all such state
sponsored terrorism, they were justified by the political climate. France was
surrounded by monarchies and they were prepared to join forces and restore
Louis XVI. To preserve the newly formed country, they needed to ensure the
loyalty of all of its citizens. A prime focus of this was religious authority
and its ties to the aristocracy. While America was forming around states
founded by religious groups seeking a place to practice their faith freely,
France was stripping power from the Church and killing priests. Religious ideas
that many Americans say their country was founded upon were considered barriers
to the new government of France.
People who
have faith in gods or spirits or anything non-material will criticize
proponents of scientific methods by saying they put their faith in reason. The
above brief look at the history of the movement toward science and reason
demonstrates there is some validity to that sentiment. Much more could be said
about the advancements in our ability to feed and heal the ills of human race,
and that again could be countered by the ills that have been wrought by our own
hands. This is the conversation in which we are currently stuck. The work of
science is not likely to stop any time soon. The answers it provides lead to
more questions and they provide the impetus to keep looking for answers. Faith
is not likely to disappear any time soon. The answers it provides often
resonate with us in a way we can’t necessarily articulate and scientific explanations
for those feelings are not coming quickly.
Religion
spends a lot of time addressing the big questions of meaning. Books like The Purpose Driven Life have been wildly
successful while books by 17th century philosophers continue to
collect dust. This could be more a matter of public relations rather than
actual content. People say they get something from going to church, people who
read philosophy might also say so but not in a way that is terribly
inspirational. Philosophers of course have something to offer in that market, but
they also have detractors and they argue amongst themselves. Comparing and
contrasting philosophers is part of how you do philosophy. Some people shop for
a church, but most go on the advice of someone close to them, and once they
find one they are comfortable with, they don’t keep comparing.
Enlightenment
philosophy and the movements that came with it took power away from the church.
This had the appearance of taking away a moral anchor for society. Friedrich
Nietzsche said, “God is dead”. He on went to say that it was we who killed him
and to note that there was a great danger to this. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he portrays a man who seeks only his own
comfort, unaware of what he has been given by previous generations. Men like
that are subject to those who understand and use their will-to-power.
Interpretations of these characters are endless, but there is definitely a
shift to seeking human will rather than the will of any gods. Eventually, these
philosophies came to be blamed for everything from slavery to Nazis.
Without
going off into a long history lesson, slavery was not invented by Columbus or
plantation owners in the Southern United States. It may have been one of the
longest running and most brutal forms of institutionalized human trafficking, but
the idea of people owning people was around before written language. The oldest
decipherable writing of significant length is the Hammurabi code, a code of
laws that includes slavery. Empires conquered smaller tribes and brutal dictators reigned back in Biblical Times. Separating this warring nature
of ours from our higher aspirations is one of the promises of the Enlightenment
that has been left unfulfilled.
The modern
world can be blamed in part for these ills. Certainly it has provided new and
improved tools for warfare. Strong militaries have always included protecting
trade as part of their mission. The Golden Triangle of tobacco and sugar to
Europe, manufactured goods to Africa, and slaves to America is no exception. But
there are no simpler idyllic times to return to. The Romans had the Pax Romana.
Pax means peace, but what it meant was criminals who interfered with trade
along their roads were strung up to set an example for others who might
consider anything similar. Many examples can be found in between. Any culture
carries with it the baggage of our baser instincts, making it difficult to sell
its ideology as more progressive than any other.
This list of
problems with the Enlightenment is not exhaustive, but I’ll end with the
bogeyman; postmodernism. Whatever you think about religion and its ability to
deliver on a meaning for life, it’s hard to argue its ability to claim that it is
doing just that. The early Enlightenment thinkers made similar claims, but then
didn’t deliver. Philosophers today might be coming together around something
called Moral Realism but of course it has its detractors and it mostly suffers
from a century of more esoteric moral arguments that led to ideas about nothing
having any meaning. And morality isn’t necessarily a reason for being anyway. As
the world has shrunk, cultures have come into constant contact and although you
could say it is progress that we are living next to each other without killing
each other, we are also having trouble figuring what strange behaviors we
should accept in our neighbors and what we should consider just plain wrong.
It didn’t
help that around this time Einstein came up with his theory of the physical
world and the phrase, “it’s all relative” became popular. His theory involves
travel at very high speeds and calculations that only come into play if you are
trying to land a probe on Mars, but no matter. In the past, the realization
that Muslims were enslaving Christians was used as an argument for why
Christians should not be enslaving Africans. Either owning another person is
wrong or it is not. Now, a justification based on a tradition can be dismissed
because it is a tradition in a certain part of the world. It might be wrong to discriminate
against women and not educate them according to people who live in the
Midwestern United States but it is okay in Afghanistan because it has always
been that way. This is not a way of determining what is ethical that can be
traced to any particular Enlightenment thinker or writing, but many consider it
an effect of that movement.
I can’t
summarize the centuries that it took to develop this strange way of thinking,
but it probably has something to do with the sudden unmooring of that anchor of
morality, the Catholic Church. Once that curtain was pulled back, and the
arbiter of all that is good in the world was accused of perpetrating evil, it
could not be covered up again. Once the constant fighting stopped, when we
realized one religion was not going to win out over the others without killing
us all in the process, we had to figure out how we could live together. We’re
still working on that.
There are few ways to go with this. CA’s original statements
stands well on its. Also, in any current form of religions I know, there is no
preferable universalism that I know of. My problem with Randal is, he doesn’t
go far enough with interpreting hell out of Christianity. I think that can be
done, although it strips Christianity down to its Jewish roots, even into some
type of Reformed Judaism, so it probably is not a popular route. My problem
with the Counter Apologist is the use of assuming beliefs by the gospel writers
when it’s convenient while claiming we don’t know what they meant most of the
time. I think this hinders the very reforms we want to see in religion.
Starting with the reforms; I don’t think it’s a stretch to
say the arc of the Biblical narrative is that history has a goal, that there is
some inherent reason for our existence, and it’s something good, and we need to
discover our part in making it happen. This is the MLK thesis on justice and
even if you take the atheist view of meaning created by the individual, it is
compatible with a goal oriented form of utilitarianism as a theory for morality.
To have this discussion across cultures, we need to be reasonable and accept
that neither modern philosophers nor the Bible have a clear sense of what “justice”
and “good” are. Modern philosophy accepts that, practically as a premise. The Bible
has its moments, like Job arguing with God, but for the most part modern day practitioners
of Abrahamic religion believe a supernatural force is the source of “good” and
don’t care if they can’t prove it with scripture.
The above point is somewhat proven in the way Randal
backtracks on his own religion when confronted with a rather straightforward
problem like eternal or long lasting punishment. So let’s look at how CA supports
the argument.
If atheists want to make the point that the Christian
version of hell is wrong, I don’t think they need to stray deep into what the
Bible says hell is. The Bible is not clear on that, that’s clear. Atheists don’t
need to quote Jesus to prove Jesus was saying something. This degrades their
own arguments since they begin with the understanding that the gospels are a
poor reflection of any actual Jesus. This is the consensus of scholars,
including religious scholars, but it seems to get forgotten when atheists start
looking for proof texts. We are always quoting unknown authors and worse we might
be quoting many authors in the course of just one passage.
For example, “torments” and “flame” in Luke 16 might be an
allegory of justice for the rich man who neglected to care for the poor man at
his gate. The thrust of the parable up to that point is about upending the
power structure, and rewarding goodness for goodness sake instead of rewarding the
powerful just because they do their rituals. This passage looks like a Greek
version of hell getting tacked on to an earlier tale. Whether that was for
better marketing of the book or because that belief was creeping into Jewish
culture is debatable and barely relevant to a debate on the reality of hell.
What I think is important here is to recognize the opening
Randal gives us. Christian scholars are quick to say things like Hellenism had
crept into and corrupted Judaism at the time the gospels were being written,
but they are slow to say exactly how. Christian scholars probably won’t lead
those discussions because they suspect or fear they will result in less
believers. This is exactly why atheists should be pushing in that direction. Two passages from Revelation were included in
CA’s list. Maybe Randal is open to eliminating Revelations from the canon. It
has been debated since it was first proposed and is not in some Bibles. If it
is an inaccurate depiction of hell that is incompatible with 1st
century teaching, then let’s settle that and then move on to the next misinterpretation,
redaction or mistranslation.
This might sound daunting, but I don’t think every line of
scripture will need to be addressed before Christian culture begins to change.
This approach to the Bible has been happening for a long time and has altered
many denominations and led to reforms like women and gays being accepted.
Atheists would do well to understand it.
I’ve had one blog about TV, and that was Star Trek. The Big Bang Theory is a show about some sci-fi nerds who also happen to know a lot about actual science. But really, it’s a show about relationships and they tied it all together brilliantly in the season 11 finale with Sheldon and Amy’s wedding.
Later he is getting dressed for the wedding with his best man and they have their moment, then Sheldon’s mother comes in and asks for privacy. They talk about his late father and the subject of the uneven tie comes up again. His mother waxes philosophic about how sometimes it’s the imperfect things that happen that cause a moment to be perfect. Sheldon notes that Amy said something similar, then gets that look on his face he sometimes does, the far off look towards a corner of the room that is focused somewhere further off into a distant galaxy. He says, “I gotta go.” His mother is left standing there alone, a perfect demonstration of something imperfect happening, and she says out loud to no one, “like that.”
Where he goes is to his bride’s dressing room. She is standing alone in her gown looking at a mirror. His first reaction is to be stunned by her beauty. This is unusual for Sheldon. Normally if he has something important on his mind, other people don’t matter. He does do what he normally does when he rambles and stumbles and goes on tangents as he explains why he’s there. Amy is one of the few people who can pull him back into focus and when she does he explains that the bow tie discussion has led him to a breakthrough in his ideas on String Theory. Instead of super-symmetry, it could be super-A-symmetry. The two begin writing out equations on the mirror, using lipstick. In an abnormal moment for Sheldon, he does not mention that he wants credit for this discovery. He says they will publish it together.
The show has science advisers who helped them come up with the super-asymmetry idea. They checked, and as mentioned in the show, no one has published something like this yet. The brilliance of the moment to me is that string theory is an attempt to find equations that unify all of our knowledge of the universe, to find symmetry in everything. Sheldon has believed he could do this since he was a little boy. He makes rules for everything, including relationships, and stresses the importance of sticking to them. The show has traced a long slow realization on his part that people don’t always function as a set of rules. To demonstrate that he is really finally getting this he is taking these lessons for life from his wife and his mother and applying them to his lifelong goal of understanding how the universe works through mathematical formulas. He is seeing the language of love in the language of the universe.
The equations of course are a metaphor. They are not suggesting that you can write a formula for the meaning of life. The science advisers make sure that the math that appears on the show is accurate in some sense, but accuracy is not the point. They know people will freeze the frames and scrutinize them. Sometimes they put math jokes on the white boards. I wouldn’t know. The metaphor is the search for meaning. Sheldon’s very Christian mother thinks she knows the answers and that it’s cute that her son is so smart. She also sees all the problems that it has caused for him. Sheldon sees nothing but problems coming out of his caricatured Texan family. The others on the show have their own approaches and philosophies that all get their time and place. What we saw at the wedding was that all of them are reaching for the same thing, and together, sometimes finding it.
I haven’t done a “spiritual journey” post in a long time, not since I was a church-goer, so it’s about time.
My early years are not that significant, other than to point out that I was not indoctrinated into any particular tradition. My mother left a very religious family when she married my father and my father’s family was more about business than church. My Dad’s brother did get involved with church after he had kids, so most of my church going and church family experiences happened when we visited relatives. I grew up in Mid-West America, so obviously I know about church, but more as an observer.
It was when I was 33 and bought a house that I really started to think about community and church was a natural extension of that. I had some Unitarian and Buddhist friends and a nice young pastor knocked on my door one day and gave me a video tape about the book of Luke. I eventually found a liberal United Methodist church populated by people who had grown up in the 60’s and who were now involved in their inner city neighborhood. We talked about and acted on the social justice aspects of the New Testament.
That was great, until I moved to a small town and found it a lot harder to find that type of community. There were a few people like that but you have to mix with a lot of other personalities if you want to have any kind of social life when there are so few people. This is really more typical of how churches work. Sermons have to appeal to range of politics and personalities. It was happening in my church in the city, but I just didn’t notice it as much since I was in the majority. Now it was very clear, they preach to what the people want to hear.
The church I found was so small, there was no children’s program, until one day a couple kids showed up, and something came over me and I volunteered to be the Sunday School teacher. It turned out to be quite a challenge to find a curriculum that wasn’t all about preparing little souls for the afterlife. 10 year old boys are also the best for asking the tough questions of why they need to go to church. This led me to the internet where I thought I might find some good arguments for the existence of God but instead I found these YouTubes of what began as a cable call-in TV show in Austin TX, The Austin Atheist experience. In my attempt to formulate an argument to call in, I talked myself out of belief.
There were other things going on. I was considering becoming a lay speaker and I found that the education they wanted me to have for that was very different than what those old hippies at the inner city church were talking about. I was also discovering liberal former Bishops like John Shebly Spong and reading their books. And there was this movie Zeitgeist. It had a strange logic against religion that I couldn’t quite refute, so I had to develop my own ability to research and think critically to decide if it was valid or not. In that process, I realized that movie was wrong, but the Christian narrative was also seriously flawed. All my bad reasoning dominoes fell.
So now I found myself in an almost alien world. I needed to figure out how it got that way and where I fit in. I had always lived a little less than a straight and narrow existence, but now I’d let go of the moral system I’d been living with for 17 years. I knew science and the philosophical enlightenment had led to the democratic system I lived in but I knew that system had some major problems. Studying the history of how those things came about has turned out to be much more valuable than reading the Bible and listening to sermons.
Also interesting though is how the two worlds of science and religion have evolved together. I never had the simple anti-evolution thinking of the fundamentalist, but when I started hanging out with atheists, I wasn’t too comfortable with the simplistic notions that Christianity was a barrier to science either. Questions like, why do people still believe in supernatural powers, are much more interesting than simple answers like, religion is all about power. Narrow minded thinking does not require religion. I felt that instead of shutting ourselves off from each other, we need to be asking how to promote open dialog and encourage the generation of new ideas.
So that brings me up to where we are now. I’ve learned from people like Bart Ehrmann that the seminaries are teaching the accurate history of the Bible; that it was written by men, often for political reasons, and it was compiled by fairly random decisions made by just a few people. Also, it is full of misinterpretations, some by accident and some deliberately inserted centuries after the original texts; in other words outright forgeries. Meanwhile, at those seminaries, they are teaching how to preach as if the ancient narratives are still true. There are some updated variations, but basically the same ideas.
You can find some of this out you go to the mid-week adult Bible studies but most of it I’ve learned from non-believers or Jewish if scholars or retired theologians. The sad thing, and believers and non-believers are both missing out on this; the real stories are much more interesting. The Bible is a rare collection of historical documents written by the slaves instead of the masters. How they dealt with being conquered and oppressed as well as their own internal struggles provides us with insight into us.
That pastors aren’t preaching this is all pretty well known if you just pull the curtain back slightly. Pastors I’ve known have tried to keep me at their church by agreeing with me and handing me books but then telling me that the rest of the church was not ready for it. What the rest of the church thinks is a lot harder to tell. They can’t have an opinion on what they don’t know, and I can’t make them read and listen to everything I do. It’s hard enough to get them to read along with the Lectionary on Sunday morning. You can find people who left their parent’s church for a more modern alternative, but they still enjoy the same hymns about the blood of Christ.
Still, I believe a lot of people sitting in pews are closer to what you would call a humanist than they are to being a Christian. They are there because they want to spend at least a couple hours a week talking about something that matters, something that might contribute to a better world. Most of them aren’t keeping track of the questions they have like I did and pursuing them when they can, rather they are having their doubts then just letting them go. Some will probably have the experience that Ryan Bell describes, of trying to fit his modern view of the world into the box he had created for God, until the box had expanded so much that he realized it was his whole view of the world and he didn’t need to call it God anymore.
Meanwhile, I’ll be looking for ways to bring the history and insights to light and hopefully keep some of them moving in that direction.
