States Wrongs

Whenever people talk too long about ur-federalism and returning key powers to state governments, I remember that state legislatures are, if possible, packed with a worse set of fools and blowhards than Congress.

Like this:

Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, "What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous ... it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!

"This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God," Davis said. "Get out of that seat .... You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon."

Of course, the more power returned to the states, the more attentive people would be about who they elect to state legislatures. But until that change happened, we'd have this.

Carting Harlots

Atheists are surging. The churchless militant is selling stacks of books.

The current form of the neverending debate over Christianity and Western civilization interests me because many of the public writers I respect on a range of topics come down on different sides of it.

And I come down on no side of it, seemingly. I'm a more-or-less agnostic (who presumes the answer is "no," but admits he can't be sure of that), lacking the bump of veneration, who generally is happy to live in a Christian society (considering the alternatives, but not under a Christian government) and will defend the bulk of Christians (but not bigots or extremists) from the more vicious fundamentalist atheists while generally agreeing with the worldview of the atheists on other things.

Here, for instance, Theodore Dalrymple, whom I respect greatly, takes on Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, whom I also respect (along with a few others I'm less fond of). And though my intellectual sympathies are with the atheists, I subscribe wholeheartedly to Dalrymple's observation that "Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy."

Meaning it should never be. If reason alone is allowed to guide moral choices, you end up with the sort of mass ruthlessness you get in -- well, creation.

Dalrymple, writing about a Dennett book, notes that the scientist who rails against those who doubt evolution himself lapses into writing about nature as though it has a consciousness and an intent. But all evolutionary biologists do this at one time or another. It's a shorthand way to write the life story. The cumulative effect of natural selection, operating in hundreds of billions of births (most of them wasted) in specific environments (most eventually destroyed) over billions of years has the appearance of deliberation. But it's the appearance of a nasty and unintelligent deliberation.

The stupidest, and oldest, excuse for persecution of atheists is that they lack morality. I seem to be very concerned with morality and virtue -- you have to be especially attentive to it when you don't believe you've been handed a complete manual for it, with every answer for every problem spelled out (in a language you never bothered to learn).

I don't think there is any formula for doing right all the time, but I'm convinced that the innate instinct to know right and do it (conscience) is a great gift -- from whom? I don't know -- and worth heeding.

[Sometimes I read my attempt to describe my moral self and realize I soaked up a deal more of my childhood Quaker surroundings than I realize.]

You start with the knowledge of deep-set human urges and visceral tendencies bred into the species over millions of years of precarious living in hostile turf. As useless now as a full set of flesh-rending teeth numbered for much larger jawbones than ours. But you don't stop there. Morality begins where evolution ends.

It's always a bit puzzling for me to read the Christian view of what an atheist would not think, or feel, in a certain situation. Dalrymple introduces a delightful, forgotten apologist, the 17th century English bishop Joseph Hall. He quotes Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted:"

With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. ... Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

And he contrasts it with some chillingly rational passage from Sam Harris or someone like him.

But I've had that reaction many times. We don't cart harlots anymore, but we have the media equivalent when some prominent politician or celebrity gets caught doing something society loathes. I even feel it without the "Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less." Goats know shame as well as sheep do.

Mill for the Grist

I've been re-reading one of my favorite books, John Stuart Mill's autobiography, which I now see is available online. Free online reading is great, but as a bibliophile, I also lament that online readers miss the full sensual experience of reading a book, such as the quirky little ad on the reverse of the title page of my 1924 edition:



One of the most enduring passages for me in this remarkable book is the one where he describes his father's essential rejection of Christianity:

[M]y father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.

His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabaean, or Manichaean theory of a Good and Evil Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time. He would have regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no depraving influence.

As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies, -- belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind, -- and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression, that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a Hell -- who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment. ...

My father was as well aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. Their worship was not paid to the demon which such a being as they imagined would really be, but to their own idea of excellence.

The evil is, that such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the most obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from every train of ideas which would lead the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence, because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature, and with much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian creed. And thus morality continues a matter of blind tradition, with no consistent principle, nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it.

...

Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title. The liberality of the age, or in other words the weakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes men unable to see what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short of Deism.

Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of those, who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering and so deformed by injustice as ours.

All of which really rang true to me in my essential a-Christianity. Which is not the pure agnosticism of Mill's father, or of Robert G. Ingersoll, who felt much like him. Nor is it a rejection of Christians as such, for it allows, as Ingersoll often noted, too, that the vast majority of them are much better than their creed. And even C.S. Lewis could agree with Mills, there is a sort of manly intellectual honesty in the Manichaeans.

And to bring the Bible to the sort of universalism that would win the approval of Mill's father, you'd have to torture the text beyond recognition. And of course you'd still be left with the world created so that bears have to eat Bambi to survive and certain kinds of wasps lay their eggs in the living but paralyzed bodies of other insects so the host may be eaten alive from within.

To oppose reason to belief is nonsense and an insult to both. It's like applying algebra to love. I have no patience with people who try to use logic to convert me to their faith, any more than I have with those who use logic to try to convert another out of his.

But re-reading this now reinforces another thought, which is that the most zealous partisans of Christianity, and the fiercest scoffers at it, have much in common: Both are fundamentalists, in that they start out with the view that the religion is essentially and wholly what it says it is in its scriptures.

If you limit yourself to that and believe it, you will end up defending positions (on science, say, but also on a great many matters in which the literal sense of the books contradicts itself) that are wholly contrary to reason. And as Mill's father's friend Hume used to note, when reason is against a man's position, the man turns against reason.

But the most ferocious anti-Christians attack it from the same grounds, by picking at the contradictions and absurdities in the texts, and trumpeting them as proof that the whole is worthless, or manufactured without inspiration. I hope I've moved past that.

Mill's father split off from Christianity over the essential contradiction in the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent creator of a universe which is demonstrably wasteful and cruel. It is the same question posed in the Book of Job: why is life so nasty so often? Why is life the sow that eats her farrow? The children of Egypt die of plagues even now, whether it is the work of the Allah, the Baptist God, or Artemis Hekebolos. Like Mill, I can comprehend it better in Artemis, since she at least does not claim to control and rule all, only her portion.

Any religion that offers no answer to this question, or no alternative, is inadequate to human needs. Yet no final answer is possible. If I pretended to be a Christian (which I never have) this would be the sun I could not stare into without going mad and which I cannot see past.

And so I turn the other direction, and see the other aspect of faith: the shadow one casts on the earth. How do you live? What does your love and skill and belief accomplish? Is the world a better place for your having lived in it? And here a Christian and I can find a lot of common ground, moreso than I usually can with a calumnator of the faith.

The Candyass Agnostic

Daniel C. Dennett has written a book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology.

You can read an essay adapted from the book here. And there's a brief Q and A with Dennett on the occasion of the book's publication in the New York Times in which he comes off, in sound bytes, with distilled acerbicity: "Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can. ... Our inability to turn off our people-seer and our people-hearer naturally turns into our hallucinations of ghosts, our sense that they are still with us. ... I certainly don't believe in the soul as an enduring entity. Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul. ... Churches have given us great treasures. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter."

In some of that, he seems to me to make dangerous leaps on very thin evidence.

Dennett is, in one sense, one of my heroes for doing the patient work of explaining how evolution works, and for boldly asserting the central role of biological factors in shaping human behaviors. In so doing, he has crossed swords not only with the more brutish fundamentalists, but with Marxists in the ivory towers, like the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (a hero himself, in his own way) and with stranger ideologues of the left like Chomsky.

I am not a Christian; my faith is a personal matter, none of your business. At times I would have called myself an agnostic; at times you would have called me a pagan. But I will tell you you may count me among the zealots in the cause of separation of church and state (for the good of both), and the sanctity of the scientific method.

But when I watch Dennett walk head-high into the holy of holies, the results, in many places, make me cringe. Dennett falls into the trap, for instance, of equating all fundamentalisms.

But such well-intentioned people are singularly ineffective in dealing with the more radical members of their own faiths. In many instances they are, rightly, terrified of them. Moderate Muslims have so far been utterly unable to turn the tide of Islamic opinion against Wahhabists and other extremists, but moderate Christians and Jews and Hindus have been equally feckless in countering the outrageous demands and acts of their own radical elements.

Robert G. Ingersoll, the great 19th century American agnostic, once said, "The Agnostic does not simply say, 'I do not know.' He goes another step and says with great emphasis that you do not know." Yes, of necessity, he does.

Dennett seems to define himself as an atheist, which is a different thing than an agnostic. He told the New York Times, "Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world - that's a hopeless idea. There is no such thing." Which looks like atheism to me, or deism at best.

Which makes his advice to people who embrace both reason and faith a bit specious:

It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God — in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. Here is what we should say to people who follow such a tradition: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love is worthy of worship.

Having denied that reason and belief in a personal god can share the same head sanely, any more than cancer and health can share the same body, and that religion is a sort of brain dysfunction or atavistic relic, what grounds does he have to offer guidance to people who accept it as authentic and vibrant force in their lives?

If you're an intelligent person of faith, this must seem like the kind of moralistic scolding you detest. Does a person who disavows his own faith have the right to hector you about how to live with yours? Any more than a celibate priest has the right to order your sexual decisions?

You have to work every day to make the irrational and the rational bed down together under the same skull. That's faith. Faith comes a flare through the hollow of the ear, the thing that flows in from beyond what you know and can explain. It takes you where you're afraid to go. It sent Saul into a ditch and Thomas Merton to the Little Flower. It makes your hair stand on end.

I have some sympathy for the struggles involved in reconciling faith and reason. I don't feel that Dennett does, after reading all this, or that he thinks a co-existence is possible.

I would stand against your faith when it tries to enter my son's classroom, or invade my Constitution and my courts. When it perverts science and literature in the name of a prudish morality, I will be against it.

But if your faith tells you you will meet your dead child again in another world, or you will live again in this one and have another chance to overcome what has dragged you into the dunghill, or that your suffering friend is at peace and in a better world than this when he closes his eyes, I have no desire to take that away from you. Not for anything. I don't think Ingersoll would, either.

This critique of a program by Richard Dawkins (another hero of modern biology) suggests he is making some of the same mistakes.

Hollywood, of course, has been a faith-free zone for years. At least for humans who are not villains:

Despite the claims of the anti-religious crusaders - especially in the US - that the Christian right is on the rise, in fact in cultural terms it is increasingly marginalised. Films with a Christian message find it difficult to convey a powerful sense of faith and meaning. Instead, religious values and beliefs tend to be transmitted through non-human anthropomorphic forms. The attempt to endow even the behaviour of penguins with transcendental meaning - in the widely acclaimed March of the Penguins - is symptomatic of this theological illiteracy. The enthusiasm with which Christian organisations embraced March of the Penguins showed up their disorientation, if not desperation, rather than their aggressive confidence. After the penguin it is the turn of another animal - Aslan, the lion in the Narnia film - to serve as a symbol of innocence, sacrifice and resurrection. What beast will Christian filmmakers pick next?

Could you even make "Ben Hur" today? No Oil for Pacifists has some balance sheets on the good and bad that faithful Christans do in the world.