Religion and Us

European horror at American religiosity. The usual scandal

Five centuries later, the United States, responsible for more than four-fifths of the world's scientific research and still a land of plenty, can show the world an abundance of opinion polls concerning its religious convictions. The litany will be familiar. Ninety per cent of Americans say they have never doubted the existence of God and are certain they will be called to answer for their sins. Fifty-three per cent are creationists who believe that the cosmos is 6,000 years old, 44 per cent are sure that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years. Only 12 per cent believe that life on earth has evolved through natural selection without the intervention of supernatural agency.

Which, this time, refreshingly, has the necessary caveat:

To the secular mind, the polling figures have a pleasantly shocking, titillating quality - one might think of them as a form of atheist's pornography. But perhaps we should enter a caveat before proceeding. It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.

Poll numbers always deceive to the degree that their statistical precision comes from the calculation process only, and can be as phony as a grid of light projected onto a cloud of smoke.

Value Vacuum

In some ways, I am the least qualified to write about such matters. There have been, and are today, many eminent people in public and academic life who have a far greater claim to reflect on these issues than I have. Perhaps my only justification for even venturing into this field is to be found in Kipling when he wrote, “What should they know of England who only England know?” It may be, then, that to understand the precise relationship of the Christian faith to the public life of this nation, a perspective is helpful which is both rooted in the life of this country and able to look at it from the outside.

Michael Nazir-Ali's remarkable piece on Britain's broken faith. Do read.

Hagee-Pagee

See, this is what comes of me being a sad example of free thought. John Hagee never was my kind of man of God. He's one of those Christian fundamentalists with a creepy obsession with Israel that isn't necessarily for the good of Israel or Jews.

But when he says the Holocaust and Hitler were done according to God's will, isn't that the necessary consequence of having faith in the existence of an omnipotent and omnicient divine being? Isn't grappling with that situation incumbent on all Christians, all monotheists, not just a portly TV preacher from Texas?

It's a tough row to hoe and I don't envy them. I confess I find it easier to believe I live in a world without an omniscient and omnipresent god than to try to reconcile the 20th century (or the life cycle of certain wasps) with the assurance that a just and loving god is in charge everywhere and foresaw all this from the first flare of creation and not a sparrow falleth and all that.

As for the rest of it, he's trying to make sense of it using only the book he's been given. Which, again, a lot of people do about a lot of things. Creationists do it. I think they're nuts, but that's just me. The book is the central difficulty of Christianity, to an outsider like me, and it seems to be the foundation and consolation of it to many believers.

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.

Church and Estate

Churchgoing and divorce. A Michigan appellate judge counts one parent's churchgoing as a factor in favor of the parent's custody claim.

More here and here and, uh, here.

Food for Thought

From a book review:

The first freedom of the First Amendment reads like this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those 16 words were subject to only modest debate or litigation until the 1947 Everson decision when Justice Hugo Black, writing for the Court majority, held that they mean that "Neither a state nor the Federal Government ... can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion to another." This came as a great surprise to students of American history. In his magisterial 2004 study, "Separation of Church and State," Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger underscored the ways in which Black's long-standing animus toward Catholicism led him to turn the Religion Clause on its head. "Liberty of Conscience" is a determined defense of Black's stratagem.

In discussions of the Religion Clause, it is common practice to speak of an Establishment Clause and a Free Exercise Clause. In fact, both grammatically and in intent, there is one clause with two provisions — no establishment and free exercise. The first provision is in the service of the second: The reason the government must not establish a religion is that having an established religion would prejudice free exercise by those who do not belong to it. As numerous scholars have pointed out, however, the end of the Religion Clause, i.e., free exercise, has been subordinated since Everson to the means, i.e., no establishment. The result is that "the separation of church and state" (a phrase of Jefferson's that is not in the Constitution) has come to mean that wherever government advances, religion must retreat.

There is a school of constitutional law that holds that the entire fuss over the Religion Clause is misbegotten. The Founders intended nothing more, in this view, than to assure the states that the federal government would not interfere with the several state establishments of religion that existed at the time. The last state establishment (Massachusetts) was dismantled in 1833, so that's that, and the Religion Clause is no more than a historical artifact. This view is charmingly straightforward, but Ms. Nussbaum does not address it, and just as well, for, like it or not, the Religion Clause has, since Everson, been deeply and confusedly entangled in our law and politics.

The review may be more worth your while than the book itself, Martha Nussbaum's "Liberty of Conscience":

In contrast to "originalists," such as Justices Alito and Scalia, Ms. Nussbaum is an unapologetic defender of "the living Constitution." And, if you want to know what we now know about history, human behavior, and plausible accounts, you have only to ask Martha Nussbaum. There is an insouciant tone of being above partisanship in her distinctly partisan answers to all the aforementioned questions in the dispute. Her apodictic style aside, however, she has read broadly and imaginatively, with the result that there are more than occasional ideas of genuine interest.

More the pity, then, that for all her stressing the need for civility and mutual respect, she caricatures the views of those with whom she disagrees in a most unseemly manner. Again and again, they are described as acting out of fear, insecurity, ignorance, a theocratic desire to undo the Constitution, or all of these in combination. The chief villain, of course, is the hated "religious right." America is "under assault" and "facing a huge threat." "An organized, highly funded, and widespread political movement wants the values of a particular brand of conservative Christianity to define the United States." She ominously observes that "the current threat is not, or not yet, violent." Did someone mention fear and insecurity?

And then there's this, which is bound to raise blood-pressures, from the trouble-making Heather Mac Donald:

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.

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.

Religion and Magic

This isn't new, but it will stand as my provocative quote on religion and magic for the Halloween season:

Is there a difference between magic and religious practice? Those who say such a difference exists point out that magic does not require a community. Many witches, for instance, are solitaries. Magic has less firm doctrine than organized religion. It requires no conversion experience and--perhaps most marked--it requires no humility or repentance. The magical practitioner may worship, but he is likely to see himself as summoning the gods or evoking powers through actions rather than through any purity of heart or righteousness of petition.

I have found far less bad or black magic being performed than I expected. Western magical traditions and Wicca seem to hew pretty close to Christian ideas about pursuing good and eschewing evil. As Cat Yronwode put it, “Wicca is just Christianity with a goddess.”

Go Right Ahead

[Posted by reader_iam]

Launch away, I say; how about sooner rather than later? Salutary effects could be had all the way around, intended and unintended.

Not to mention that it sure beats hijacking and blackmail.

St. Nietzsche

[posted by Callimachus]

Roger Scruton, philosopher, points to a pair of unlikely archangels -- Nietzsche and Wagner.

Were they heroes of religion in the late 19th century? That struck me at first as odd, since they perhaps are better known as icons of the brutal Germanic secular religion of the 20th century. But you can't always blame a saint for how people behave later in the shade of his stained glass.

Odd, too, though, because Western faith seemed to be in full retreat through the whole 19th century, a tide ebbing under the sun of the Enlightenment and everything from Darwin and Lyell to Marx and Margaret Sanger. Titans of religion seemed to shrink as the century wore on -- from a Wilberforce to a Henry Ward Beecher: "The rattle of pebbles on the shore under the receding wave."

But that confuses "religion" with "conventional Christianity." And Scruton is seeing a bigger picture than that. To twist the Yeats image a bit, the receding tide exposed the primeval rock Christianity was built upon, and stripped off centuries of sand to show us not our specific Western religions, but the furious human urges that they were created to control. That was the eruption of the century between Wagner's and ours. If Scruton is right, there were warnings.

"[T]he intellectual enterprise" of Nietzsche and Wagner, he writes, "is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us through the experience of sacred things."

He rightly notes that most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment, though they stripped the cloak of reason from belief, generally didn't try to flay the naked skin of it. Today, in media-molded America, we tend to experience only thuggish religion -- in which category I include secular fundamentalism and evangelical atheism. Such an approach blinds us to the Enlightenment, and to the American Founders who were its students. The notion and necessity of "civil religion" (Rousseau's term) is as central to them as is their loathing of pious superstitions and holy bigotry.

You cannot enlist a genuine Jefferson or a Rousseau in a modern U.S. political dispute between fundamentalist Christianity and aggressive secularism. You will never understand the role of a John Witherspoon in the Declaration of Independence. People who memorize the Voltaire quip about God often don't know the context of it: "I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. ... If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

George Washington, the practical plantation-manager among the learned Founders, often spoke about the political importance of religion. He did so in his "Farewell Address" (based on a draft by Hamilton), where he named it along with education and public credit as things productive of "public felicity." He was not talking about government-sponsored religion or the Pledge of Allegiance. He was talking about the people and their faiths.

Jefferson, the deist/Unitarian who so riled the pious Christians of his day, understood this, too. One Sunday morning, as president, he was walking to church service, prayer book in hand, when a friend accosted him and said, "You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it." [Americans were more familiar with their presidents then]. Jefferson replied, "no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."

(Of course, he never denied that he didn't believe a word of it.)

Jefferson, Rousseau, Voltaire, even Washington saw the situation more plainly than we do. We tend to try either to reassert the full societal grip of traditional Western religions or else sweep them away as the root of all modern evils. As though religion was the apple in the Garden instead of a set of imperfect channels for deep, dark human urges.

Religions are structures which draw destructive internal poisons and cure them, mostly, into constructive and calming rituals. Only a fool would think we can dispense with any such structure when Cambodia still reeks of corpses and we are only a few geological ticks out of the Ice Age.

The American Founders had the confidence of believing Western religion generally was on a firm foundation and sustained by the evidence of nature. Nietzsche and Wagner, by contrast, lived on the other side of that confidence, when the receding tide had eroded the Bible as science and perhaps even as history. They looked down instead on the bare foundation under the cathedral: the chthonic rituals of the ancients. Scruton writes:

The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim.

And so, though the fact is not much promoted, Scruton writes there are alternative to repressive Christians and politicized fundamentalists who are not relentless God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. There is, for instance, René Girard.

Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.

The Senate Is Not A Temple

[Posted by reader_iam]

Clearly, some people are confused on this point.



Perhaps these protestors fancied themselves as Jesus in the temple, scattering the money-changers desecrating a holy space. But the Senate chamber is not a temple. In fact, it is a great deal closer to a marketplace, which in turn is far closer to the ideal set forth by our Founding Fathers, in my estimation, their recognition of and even support for a role for religion in society notwithstanding.

I am highly skeptical of the notion that our founders meant "freedom from religion" (in other words, that the people were to be protected from unwanted or disliked references to or displays of religion, much less the mere presence of religious people) as opposed to freedom of religion , etc., as a sizable number of people appear to believe today. But I have not an ounce of skepticism that the founders were forbidding the establishment of an official federal religion and eschewing a government that would be presumptuous enough to micromanage an individual's conscience, practice of religion or soul (whether someone believes in that concept or not).

Here is the text of guest chaplain Rajan Zed's prayer:

Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental Glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the Heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.

Lead us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we work together with great vigor. May our study be enlightening. May no obstacle arise between us.

May the Senators strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world, performing their duties with the welfare of others always in mind, because by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. May they work carefully and wisely, guided by compassion and without thought for themselves.

United your resolve, united your hearts, may your spirits be as one, that you may long dwell in unity and concord.

Peace, peace, peace be unto all. Lord, we ask You to comfort the family of former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Amen.

Here is the protestors' basis for objection:

The protesters' concerns, according to the website of a Mississippi group that was trying to mobilize opposition to Zed's appearance, were based on the fact that Hindus worship multiple Gods.

Yet the prayer above was in no way advocating that others worship multiple Gods. In fact, it made no reference to multiple Gods, instead using "Deity Supreme" and "Lord." Anyone in that chamber could choose to direct his or her internal joining in prayer to Jesus, Yahweh, God the Father Son & Holy Ghost, and so forth. Or not. Or he or she could substitute a prayer of his or her own and offer it silently to God. Or not. (Or contemplate the performance of the Washington Nationals, for that matter, or anything else that strikes a non-worshiper's fancy.) Demonstrations such as the one sponsored by Donald Wildmon's American Family Association do their "cause" no good: it is no more likely that that they will inspire conversions to Christianity than Rajan Zed's prayer likely inspired conversions to Hinduism. On the other hand, the protestors' display handed yet more ammunition into the hands of those who would like to paint, with broad brush, all Christians and all Christian denominations as fanatics conspiring to establish a Christian theocracy from sea to shining sea.

But all of this really avoids the issue. Simply put: It is time to stop opening sessions of Congress with official prayer representing any particular religion, and to discontinue paid government chaplaincies.** If individual legislators wish to pray before the opening of a session, who's stopping them? (For that matter, who's stopping them from "praying without ceasing" at any time, before, during or/and after?) If they want to do so in personally organized groups beforehand, have at it. I have no objection to that occurring even in public facilities, so long as attendance isn't compulsory and the type of prayer or religion isn't prescribed (or proscribed). To my way of thinking, public facilities no more exist for the exclusive use of the non-religious or the anti-religious than they do for the religious. And if senators or representatives want a more formalized, corporate experience overseen by official clergy, it seems to me that there is no dearth of churches in the D.C. area. Clergy have even been known to make "house" calls, if asked (and sometimes when not).

As for the chaplains, I understand that opening sessions of Congress with an invocation is "deeply embedded in tradition," and that this is the basis on which it passes constitutional muster. But traditions are not, in and of themselves, Holy, and they certainly aren't inherently universal, nor should they [have to] be eternally binding, at least in the public sense. By necessity, chaplains on the government payroll must strive for a certain universalism, a certain lack of edge and juice, a certain omitting and smoothing over, which renders the particulars of individual religions (such as Jesus, for example) squishy for their followers and relatively opaque, if not annoying in some cases and insulting in fewer, for those who are of other religions, agnostic, uninterested or atheist. So what's the point, beyond "tradition"?


***I would make an exception for military chaplains, or those in similar positions, who are serving people who can't exactly pop out to the church of their choice in the wider community. Context counts.

Clarification: I fully understand that Zed was a guest chaplain.

[Note: This post has been lightly edited to restore the inadvertently dropped end of a sentence, a skipped word and the letter "s" at the end of a word intended to be plural.]

Yeah, Yeah, I Know I Am A Sinner

[Posted by reader_iam]

You'll just have to forgive me for finding this site to be an absolute hoot. If, when and where the parody fits, it's fit to be worn.

So, go ahead, bring on the fits.

A fitting hat tip.

The Word

[posted by Callimachus]

They're making another big-deal audio recording of the Bible, and casting the voices is trickier than you might think.

Eve Tushnet has some suggestions and wants to know yours. Her pick for Satan -- John Malkovich -- isn't bad at all. [Most of her others are dead, though, which might present a contractual hurdle.] Satan seems like the ultimate Jeremy Irons role to me, though. Since George Sanders (who did Shere Khan in the Disney "Jungle Book") is out of reach.

Of course he has to be British! Or German, but apparently there are no German actors, or else why do the Nazis in the old movies so often speak with British accents?

Then again, thinking about "Jungle Book" made me think about transfering the whole cast over. Phil Harris as Peter; Louis Prima as Herod; Sterling Holloway (a.k.a. "Winnie the Pooh") as Judas.

Or, the current events choice: Alec Baldwin. Who, it should be noted, is such a hero among the Americaphobes at Huffington Post that they were eager to circle the wagons around him even before he apologized. Progressive, indeed.

Unreasonable

[posted by Callimachus]

By a curious reversal, it is now the atheists who thump the tub for their non-faith, as if it were they who were the preachers.

... I feel that atheism may be acquiring precisely those characteristics that atheists so dislike about religion - intolerance, dogmatism, righteousness, moral contempt for one's opponents.

When you hear or read people like Richard Dawkins, you have to admit the force of many of their arguments. Religious people do often say extraordinarily indefensible things about their faith, and can be astonishingly evasive or confused. Very few of us (certainly not I) can competently maintain the standard arguments for the existence of God against a determined onslaught.

And yet the Dawkinses and Graylings, the Hitchenses and the Parrises, seem somehow to be missing the point. What they say is dry and unnourishing. I think one reason for this lies in their underlying conception of what it is to be human - they think that the highest quality is to be clever.

I hasten to say that I am not arguing against cleverness. Intelligence is a great gift, and should be cultivated, if possessed, by all possible means. All these atheist thinkers I have mentioned are conscious of possessing big, bulging brains and I share their admiration for them. They are the mental equivalent of bronzed body-builders on the beach, kicking sand in the face of us seven-stone weaklings.

But what are we to make of Richard Dawkins's point, in The God Delusion, that Mensa, the society for people with high IQs, has published an article concluding that, of 43 studies of the relationship between intelligence and religious belief since 1927, all but four have found an inverse relation? Or of his statistic that only 3.3 per cent of the Fellows of the Royal Society believe that a personal God exists?

You probably know some people with high IQs. You may even have met members of the Royal Society. Does it strike you, brilliant though they are, that they have a deeper understanding of truth, beauty and all that you need to know about life than the rest of us?

Dawkins also tells us that "there are very few atheists in prison". He suggests that "atheism is correlated with higher education, intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counteract criminal impulses".

What begins to emerge - and it lurked strongly behind the anti-religion side of the Intelligence Squared debate - is the idea that atheism is an elite state, a superior order of being, a plane of enlightenment denied to thickoes.

This seems to me to present certain problems. A religious faith is not, primarily, a set of propositions, although it will contain such propositions and must use all human intellectual resources to understand and explain them. It is a belief about what governs the whole of life, indeed the whole existence of everything.

It therefore matters not only how we reason, but how we feel, how we act towards others, how we speak, sing, dance, laugh, cry, eat and wash, how we die, how we pray and how we love.

... And what sort of a belief system is it that asserts the superiority of Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, over the woman who toils in paddy fields, or the child who begs in the dirt, or the prisoner in his chains?

Faith and belief are two of the most interesting words in English, to me, and they embody different ideas. Neither is, at root, a religious word.

The oldest sense of faith is "duty of fulfilling one's trust," and the root runs through Latin fidere "to trust." Among its relatives in Latin is foedus "compact, treaty," which is something you agree to for the sake of a future from which you have no evidence or proof. The native equivalent is trust, which is not etymologically related to faith

At the root of believe is love. What you believe is what you would love to be true. Human love is unruled by reason or argument, as the most ancient poems will tell you.

The most irritating Christians, in my experience, are the ones who try to reason you into faith. As if! "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into," as Swift wrote, and it's equally absurd to do the reverse. Like trying to convince someone by argument to fall in love with you.

By the same token, I sympathize with a modern Christian of intellect and learning, who attempt the feat of standing on faith alone. I long ago stopped seeking pleasure in tipping them over.

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. One who swims in logic and employs it like a Swiss knife to solve life's problems is forced to lay it aside when crossing into religion, for faith makes no concession to reason.

It's In There

[posted by Callimachus]

From one who knows:

And as long as we, as Muslims, do not acknowledge that there is a violent streak in Islam, unless we acknowledge that, then we are gonna always lose the battle to the militants, by being in complete denial about it.

It's in the holy book. Like dietary restrictions are in Judaism and ascetic otherworldly perfectionism is in Christianity. That doesn't mean it rules the faith and motivates the faithful. But it's in there. You don't start by pretending it's not or attacking those who notice.

Just Once

[posted by Callimachus]



"Can I get a 'yeah!' "

Just because the baby and I've been listening to Aubrey Ghent's slide steel version of "Amazing Grace" this afternoon.

Secular Fundamentalists

[posted by Callimachus]

Some of the vegans I know are easy-going people, mellow, fun to be around.

And some are not.

Though the word “vegetarianism” was coined only in the 1840s, Stuart shows how Western civilization evolved through the values and views of eccentrics, missionaries, doctors, poets and philosophers, all of whom fervently went the way of no flesh. Pythagoras was often cited as a spiritual and dietary model as the debate over vegetarianism entered the West’s philosophical mainstream through such figures as Descartes and Bacon. But religion seems to have provided the main counterpoint. After discovering the laws of motion, Newton obsessively sought a primal ur-religion out of which current beliefs developed; had he succeeded in discovering such a law of religious motion, one crucial element would have been vegetarianism. Stuart writes: “Newton passionately wanted his scientific revolution to be accompanied by a bloodless revolution.”

By the middle of the 18th century, in fact, vegetarianism had become a secular religion. Stuart describes it as a “countercultural critique” advocated by “medical lecturers, moral philosophers, sentimental writers and political activists.” By the 19th century, it had also become linked with French revolutionaries, British nudists and Romantics from across Europe. By the middle of the 20th, fascists were added to the mix. Hitler would interrupt political meetings to lobby for vegetarianism. Heinrich Himmler was an advocate. Rudolf Hess was so strict that he wouldn’t eat the nonorganic vegetables cooked by Hitler’s chef — whereupon the Führer, according to one witness, “bluntly informed him that in that case he should take his meals at home.”

This is a conservative skeptic talking: Any religion is a sort of hydraulics system, a Tennessee Valley Authority that channels sprawling rivers -- on their own alternately raging and sullen, aimless in everything except getting to the coast as soon as possible -- and channels them into vessels that can temper and tame the erratic power, and direct it toward a purpose.

Doesn't matter to me if you consider those hydraulic designs to be man-made or divinely ordained. It's the work that interests me.

And when you tear it all down you find, not natural rationality, but a return to fetid meanders, river channels carved by natural rages, and the fixation with the cold sea.

My Own Wow Of The Day

[Posted by reader_iam]

It appears that epiScope is willing to post posts which could lead one to think that it intends to be actually bloggy, with a bloggerly 'tude (at least sometimes). Witness this link to an extended cartoon about the meeting of Primates currently under way in Tanzania. (Note that the cartoonist has a particular weekly gig, and the context that the Archbishop of Canterbury is, and has been, rather between a rock and hard place, etc.)

What my title said.

Deadly Fun

[posted by Callimachus]

OK, so we all know the Seven Deadly Sins -- though slower types like me have to resort to a mnemonic to get them all (PEWLAGS). But you know, they rarely hunt alone. No, they're out there in pairs. And here's a handy tip sheet for recognizing the couplings.

Immoral Equivalence

[posted by Callimachus]

Thought for today:

Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

From a book review which also includes this observation, which, apparently, will come as news to a great many of our friends in Europe and elsewhere:

The spread of religious toleration provides evidence of the weakening of religious certitude. Most Christian groups have historically taught that there is no salvation without faith in Christ. If you are really sure that anyone without such faith is doomed to an eternity of Hell, then propagating that faith and suppressing disbelief would logically be the most important thing in the world – far more important than any merely secular virtues like religious toleration. Yet religious toleration is rampant in America. No one who publicly expressed disrespect for any particular religion could be elected to a major office.

Even though American atheists might have trouble winning elections, Americans are fairly tolerant of us unbelievers. My many good friends in Texas who are professed Christians do not even try to convert me. This might be taken as evidence that they don’t really mind if I spend eternity in Hell, but I prefer to think (and Baptists and Presbyterians have admitted it to me) that they are not all that certain about Hell and Heaven. I have often heard the remark (once from an American priest) that it is not so important what one believes; the important thing is how we treat each other. Of course, I applaud this sentiment, but imagine trying to explain “not important what one believes” to Luther or Calvin or St Paul. Remarks like this show a massive retreat of Christianity from the ground it once occupied, a retreat that can be attributed to no new revelation, but only to a loss of certitude.