Who Can It Be Now?

What is quoted here is from two blog posts at Thought Criminal; they are linked separately below.  What follows is in no way a reference to anything TC has to say about these passages.  I'm just "stealing" his work insofar as he has transcribed this.  Otherwise, the faults are all mine, and the direction of my comments is toward the material quoted, and nothing else.

A Confused State of Scholarship

"Confused" is the key word there; because this analysis is too simple by half.

In a simple version of the culture war, hostile criticism would be pitted against belief, and each position would be located in the appropriate social settings.  Criticism would find its home in the academy, and belief in the Church.  But the reality is that the social locations of biblical scholarship are diverse,  and the question of its precise purpose very much an open one.   To properly locate the present situation, a rapid review of the development of critical scholarship within and outside the Church may be helpful. 

Start with that "simple version" of the culture war.  It is the simplistic version that the "culture war" proponents prefer, be they political warriors or ideological/intellectual ones.  The very concept of a "culture war" is itself a reductio ad absurdum that posits a simple culture (the "right" one) against another simple culture, but one more nefarious and tentacled like an octopus (always a metaphor for evil), one that must be fought by striking at the head, not the many nasty, insidisous arms.  Yes, the simplistic version of any analysis of religion in the West today is dominated by the cretinous dichotomy that criticism is housed and welcome in the Academy (although not among the pointy-head elites!) and mere belief ("believin' what you know ain't so!"), i.e., credulousness, is lodged firmly in the church.  Flapdoodle.

Are the "social locations of biblical scholarship" diverse?  Yes,  But they are primarily located in the Academy, and carried out by criticism as rigorous as any scientific analysis is (well above the standard of the pop science and pseudo science of people like Dawkins and  Pinker, or the paltry philosophizing of Dennett, which is all as rigorous as "belief" is usually defined to be).  But you won't get that here.

Before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, biblical scholarship was carried out exclusively in service of the Christian faith, within its framework in the canon (the official collection of biblical writings)  the teaching authority of the church, and the creed.  Much of patristic and monastic interpretation in fact, took the form of homilies to be delivered at worship.  Even when the medieval universities developed out of monastic schools as independent centers of learning, biblical scholarship was done within the framework of theology the "queen of the sciences," and the threefold norm of church, canon and creed held sway.

Accurate so far as it goes, but it clouds the differences between groups, too.  Franciscans were hardly fans of the Thomistic scholars; Jesuit scholars took their own tack, and the Augustinians were as fundamentally important as the Thomists, but were no more in control than any other group.  This kind of fractiousness i often papered over; and the analysis of Protestantism that follows ignores the divisions between Calvinists, Zwinglists, and Lutherans, as well as the rise of the Quakers, the Methodists, the Mennonites, the Campbellites, and so on.  Too much for the brief sketch intended by Johnson?  Perhaps.  But sola scriptura and individual interpretation didn't give rise to anarchy in the churches in the 15th century. and weren't even the dominant ideas of Protestant movements.  For many churches control of the interpretation shifted from the monks and priests to the congregation.  Many Protestant churches in America were run by the elders of the church, who sat in the pews immediately before the pulpit, and critiqued the preacher and corrected him, later, on his doctrinal and scriptural views, the better to keep him in line. The "free for all" was tightly contained in some denominations, even as it led to an explosion of them across Protestantism.  But that was largely because the central control of the Pope and the church hierarchy which supports the Papacy was not recreated by Luther or any other non-Catholic, and therefore by definition, Protestant church.  Within the Catholic (i.e., "universal") church various sects thrived.  In Protestantism, each sect set up it's own denomination, even if that denomination was ultimately only a few scattered churches.

The Reformation, especially through the work of Martin Luther changed everything.  Luther opposed Catholicism's emphasis on tradition as norm for Scripture by elevating Scripture to the exclusive font of revelation (sola scriptura).  This made the key to right living dependent on the right reading of Scripture. The context of ecclesial interpretation was weakened further by the principle of individual interpretation,  for the first time made practical by translations from the original and above all the invention of printing, which made Bibles readily available to the laity.  Now the New Testament is not heard mostly in Latin within the liturgy and as expounded by clergy, but can be apprehended directly in one's native language and is open to private interpretation.  It was a combination filled with potential conflict.  Everything essential rested on the reading of a text, but that reading could be carried out by individuals!

So, yeah, a bit more complicated than that.  As is Luther, who is not just "a passionate lover of the texts," but an excommunicated Augustinian monk.  Augustine's works run through Luther's teachings like pure gold runs through a golden ring blended with other metals so it is strong enough to hold its shape, but can still be called "gold."  Luther didn't throw over the Roman church, he took much of it with him, including Augustine's emphasis on sin.  Yes, Calvin took that further than even Luther did, but the point is the "revolution" was in some ways fundamental, and in some ways just a continuation of what Christianity had been doing for a millenia at that point. 

As for that line "the recovery of original Christianity," that was the goal of the Reformed movement, which means primarily Calvin.  Luther wanted to reform the Catholic church, which is why Lutheran worship to this day is so nearly like Roman Catholic liturgies (the Anglican church, likewise, kept most of Catholicism's worship practices).  Calvin and his spiritual descendants discarded Roman liturgies, even Roman religious holidays, in their efforts to return to "original Christianity."  Again, Protestantism is more diverse and complicated than this summary is admitting.

As for the recovery of the original Greek texts, that was largely a factor of scholarship.  The Vulgate replaced the original texts and became the standard text in churches.  The Protestant churches couldn't adopt the Vulgate, which after all was a translation into the common tongue of its day (hence the name), so they had to make their own translations.  Where better to start than the original texts, which have only become more available and reliable thanks to centuries of Biblical scholarship.  Open the Nestle-Aland, the accepted standard Greek New Testament, and you'll find notes to almost every verse noting variant readings in "original" texts.  Those variants are known only because of Biblical scholarship.

Then again, until recently many Protestant churches thought the KJV was the standard text for worship.  Most people still recite the "Our Father" (most Protestants, anyway) in the KJV, or a slightly updated RSV (not the newer translation, the NRSV), and who recites Psalm 23 in any version but the 400 year old KJV translation?  If you know it at all, I guarantee that's the one you know. The Vulgate persisted longer because there were fewer resources for printing other translations, and less interest in doing so.  Bibles became popular in common tongues because of Gutenberg.  Luther translated the scriptures into the German of his day (I have a copy, a 40 year old or so printing, on my bookshelves).  But the history of that change is another fraught with complexity and, sadly, soaked in blood.  Again, it wasn't a straightforward move from the 95 theses to Tyndale's English translation.  And Tyndale's reliance on the Hebrew and Greek scriptures was more a rejection of Catholicism than it was an urge at "purification" and "reform."  Even the Puritans were less defined by their "purity" than by their animosity toward anything they thought "Papist" or just not in agreement with their ideals.

Luther was from beginning to end not only an interpreter of the Bible but a passionate lover of the texts and of the One to whom those pointed.  Nevertheless, his approach to the New Testament (which was to prove overwhelmingly influential in the development of critical scholarship) was deeply if unconsciously affected by the intellectual climate of the Renaissance.  This can be seen not only in his preference for the recovered Greek text over the Latin Vulgate proclaimed in the Church (note here the implicit authority of the Greek reading scholar over the latin dependent clergy).  The recovery of the original text was the key to the recovery of original Christianity.  Just as Renaissance scholars, once classical texts were recovered, could measure the inadequacy of late-medieval society against the grandeur of Greece and Rome, so could the theologian measure the inadequacy of medieval Christianity against the norm of the primitive church, or even better, the figure of Jesus, himself.

The "grandeur of Greece and Rome" is a Renaissance notion, not an absolute historical one.  There is much to criticize about medieval Europe; there is equally as much to criticize about the "grandeur of Greece and Rome," especially as Greece included everything from the city state of Athens, where only male Greek citizens had any political or legal power (and young boys were subject to pederastry the better to prove the men were above their "animal desires".  That's where the Greek love of reason went, in part.), to the military barbarism of Sparta.  And the "grandeur" of Rome included the gladiatorial games around the empire and in the eternal city itself.  Blood sports in which slaves and gladiators (who were slaves, too) died for the entertainment of the masses.  Panem et circenses.  It's not a phrase that calls up a governin, or even social, ideal.  There is a great deal to admire about Greek and Roman culture; and a great deal to criticize.

And "the figure of Jesus himself."  Pray, tell, who is that?  The tall handsome white man with flowing chestnut hair I grew up seeing pictures of in my Sunday School classes? (Somehow Jesus always had long hair and the disciples all had shorter hair.  Never did figure out why they went to the barber on the regular and Jesus didn't.)  The Jesus of Calvin, who waits to judge us all as damned, save for the small number of the elect which none of may know until it's too late?  The Jesus of compassion versus the "God of the Old Testament" bloodthirsty warrior?  But isn't Jesus God, and God Jesus?  How does that work?  Is Jesus the guy who can't stop talking in John's gospel, but can't say much that is clear because you either "get it," or you don't?  Or is he the teacher who explains his parables to his disciples, in Matthew?  Jesus has been the central focus of Christology since the earliest days of the church, literally since the letters of Paul (which focus far more on the nature of the Christ than on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth).  What is this "figure of Jesus," after all?

This seems to be where Johnson is going with this:

Two important assumptions remain implicit in this commitment.  The first is that the recovery of origins means the recovery of essence; the first realization of Christianity is naturally the best.  It follows from this premise that any "development" of Christianity must be seen as a decline.  The second assumption is that history can act as a theological norm for the reform of the church; the recovery of "original Christianity" made available through the recovery of the "original Scripture" should naturally serve as measure and critique for all subsequent forms of Christianity.

So widely are precisely these assumptions held - and taken for granted - that it is perhaps necessary to pause in order to assert that they are, in fact, assumptions rather than necessary truths.  Only a little thought is required to realize the problematic character of the first premise.  Indeed, in most matters, we now assume that earlier forms are perfected by later development. Likewise, it is by no means our automatic instinct in other matters to measure the adequacy or integrity of present behavior against the norm of earlier behavior. Rather, we tend to measure adequacy and integrity in terms of other criteria. 

Which is sound, as far as it goes; well, the first paragraph, anyway.  What he's critiquing is strands of Protestantism, whole denominations in Protestantism, in fact, which think "original" Xianity was more pure and therefore both more virtuous and more authentic.  Think of the Puritans in all their overzealous glory.  I know a number of contemporary (as in, still around, though mostly grounded in the 19th century where they had their origins) Protestant denominations which claim to be the "purer" expression of "true" Xianity.  MO Synod and WI Synod Lutherans, who in that order think themselves more pure than ELCA and any other "Lutherans" and therefore closer to the "truth."  It's a good way to keep people out of your church.*

That's an idea among lay people and the pastors who lead them, however,  It has bugger all to do with Biblical scholarship.  Recovering "original scriptures" is the same nonsense, with the same application to scholarship.

As I mentioned, the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament lists every available variant  to the words of the canonical gospels and letters.  You can even find these kinds of notes in many annotated translations, where a footnote will direct you to "other sources" which have the word (or words)..... at that point in the scriptures.  I'm literally at a loss to know which "original scriptures" Johnson is referring to, since scholars don't recognize such a chimera.

His second paragraph is an insult to the scholarship of Dom Crossan or Rudolf Bultmann, or even Raymond E. Brown.  Brown is a Catholic priest and scholar whose work is closely in line with traditional Biblical exegesis; but his scholarship is quite modern and impeccable  He has, in other words, points where I disagree with him, but I do so with respect because his work is solid and if I think he has blind spots, it only reminds me I have my own I don't see.  Neither Crossan nor Bultmann are truly in the German historical/critical school from the 19th century, which is another problem for me.  Johnson is writing in the 21st century, and I assume the bone he has to pick is with Crossan and the Jesus Seminar.  Of the members of that group known to the public or who became familiar (briefly) for their popular works. Crossan is by far the most scholarly.  Bultmann is the German scholar without peer; his works are so densely packed with information it's like reading three books at once just to read one.  None of this means these scholars are without error; but you don't take them on with vague and glittering generalities and a few vague sentences explaining that "it's all like this!"

I've seen enough of that "school" of analysis on the internet and in recent Supreme Court opinions (draft and published).  I don't need any more of it.

Let's take up historical criticism for a moment.  It's pretty much the founding "school" of modern Biblical criticism.  As such, it is too prone to dismiss the work of saints and scholars before them (much as the Renaissance declared the time before it the "Dark Ages".  Nice work when you get to determine the definitions, isn't it?).  But historical criticism was trying to clear away millenia of mythology and mistake in order to read Scripture with fresh eyes in the 19th century.  That century must be remembered as the era of "God's Funeral," as Edmund Wilson put it at the end of the 20th century.  Historical criticism was not trying to return Xianity to its "pure" form; it was trying to find a way to understand scripture in what were then "modern times."  When I was young the vogue was to translate the scriptures (or just update the RSV) into more contemporary language.  There were the "Cottonpatch" gospels," and "Good News For Modern Man," and I think some versions in what was then called "Black English." Yeah, these all sound painfully condescending and clueless 60 years later; but this was partly due to the focus, frankly, on sola scriptura.  What was missing was a new focus on interpretation, which was the purpose of historical criticism in the 19th century.  When that school of analysis (and others; so many others) finally began to penetrate into the pews in the 1960's, it prompted people like Francis Schaeffer to explode in outrage.  Literally the first time I heard of Rudolf Bultmann was in a diatribe by Schaeffer (I tell a lie; I first encountered Bultmann in Robert Short's two books on the Christianity in "Peanuts."  He referenced Bultmann and Barth liberally.  Schaeffer got me interested in reading Bultmann; if he was so against him, Bultmann must be on to something.  Alas, it was seminary decades later before I finally started that reading.)  I've frankly forgotten the many schools of criticism that came out of German scholarship in the 19th century. Formalism was another; the analysis of stories to find "structures" in them (Structuralism came out of French anthropology in the 20th century, not coincidentaly because formalism became a tool of anthropology, folklore studies, and literary studies and criticism.).  So today even English teachers identify a fable, a parable, and a tale based on certain elements including length of story, complexity, and types of characters (talking animals, for example; or the realism of a Gospel parable).  After Jung, there is archetypal criticism; and so on.  There are several schools I learned something about in seminary, but never used for exegesis, so frankly I've forgotten them.  Picking on historical criticms now is only because the Jesus Seminar championed a new version of it late in the last century.

The Jesus Seminar was actually a fairly loose collection of Biblical scholars with one unifying principle:  to provide grounds for rejecting as much of Biblical literalism as they could.  It's a bit of an ambitious goal because ideas are both invisible and bulletproof, as well as being damned near immortal.  Consider Augustine's concept of original sin, one Paul himself probably wouldn't recognize. But more people recognize Augustine's framework (even if they don't know Augustine by name) than even know of Stendahl's work, so...there you are.  Still, the JS wrote and worked in opposition to literalism that tried to establish every word of the Gospels (especially, but also the words they liked from the Hebrew Scriptures. Literalists and fundamentalists tend to be a lot more selective about which words of the Law Matthew's Jesus says he came to fulfill, actually need to be fulfilled.) as true and meant just as they are written (i.e., translated) and especially as they are interpreted by modern fundamentalists and literalists.

This is where I say, now:  "Fine, fundies and literalists; you read it your way and I'll read it mine." And so I appreciate the tools scholars like the JS have given me.  But they are only tools.  Interpretation is, as ever, the contentious matter.

So the Jesus Seminar set itself a particular goal.  The infamous "red text" version they came up with, for example.  The Seminar publicized its practice of meeting to vote on the words of Jesus in the gospels:  red for historically accurate, gray for possibly the words of Jesus of Nazareth, black for words invented by a community or the gospel writer (the consensus among scholars is that the four canonicals are the products of a community of believers, not one scribe working feverishly under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or just the need to make a record as a modern journalist or even diarist would today.  One hand may have written, but undoubtedly many voices had a say in the final product.).  My NT professor proudly regaled us with tales of being among the "skeptics" who dropped a black marble (that's really how they did it; colored marbles in a bowl, which were then counted) for almost all the words of Jesus in all four gospels.

Were they right?  Were they historically more accurate?  That depends on what you make of their arguments.  I would argue you have to go to those sources for that discussion, and not take the third-hand report of Mr. Johnson, who wasn't at the table and has his own axe to grind.  It's really a rather simple principle of scholarship:  to examine a subject and critique it, you have to start with the subject itself, and get as close to the original or accurate form as possible.  If you're understanding of historical criticism is drawn from Mr. Johnson's diatribe, I contend you don't understand the subject at all.  Which doesn't mean you have to agree with me, or disagree with Mr. Johnson.  But honestly, his generalizations bear very little relationship to reality, in this case.

As for the aims of the Jesus Seminar:  they didn't really alter the trajectory of fundamentalism or Biblical literalism in America.  They published their Scholars Version (which I still admire), and then the band broke up.  It had pretty much stopped functioning by the time I was in seminary, and it's just another footnote now, if that. I understand now that, in academic circles and seminaries, it's already old news and considered quaint, at best.

So it goes.

Now, is Johnson wrong?  I just think his argumentsa aren't very good.  I have my critiques of Crossan.  He started out using literary critical tools and some tools from anthropology (formalism, mostly) to analyze the parables.  His The Dark Interval was especially important to me the first time I read it.  But Crossan was never of the majesty of Bultmann, whose The Gospel of John I could study for years, even as I disagree with much of it (Bultmann is dismissive of the canonicals.  I find Luke the most theologically subtle and humanly engaging of the four.  Go and please the world.)  Crossan abandoned biblical exegesis in favor of historical analysis, and not the stuff that came out of Germany in the 19th century.  This pursuit pulled him deeper and deeper into both Biblical historical studies and anthropology, and frankly he almost didn't come out the other side.  Both of those disciplines are deeply complex and not for dilettantes to play with (think Dawkins, with no genetics training at all, teaching the world about the "selfish gene," an idea no geneticist would touch with a club).  Crossan wasn't as shallow as Dawkins, but I always wondered what anthropologists and archaeologists thought of his work on the historical Jesus and the early church.  He teamed up with an archaeologist for Excavating Jesus and In Search of Paul, and I think those books are the better for it.  His books on Jesus and the early church are quite rigorous, but I'd welcome the support of an archaeologist or two (as well as an anthropologist) to be able to assess their rigor.  I don't, by contrast, doubt the rigor of Bultmann's scholarship; but he stays firmly in the realm within which he did all of his work.  Indeed, Bultmann's more "famous" work on "demythologizing" is, I think, his weakest, because he's almost literally out of his field (and treading on anthropology, psychology, and even sociology.

Historical criticism began as an attempt to understand scriptures and the "Biblical world" as we understand the rest of human history and historical experience.  It is a tool for exegesis; nothing more.  It does not determine the validity of interpretation, it provides another set of understandings and methods for interpretation.  Subsequent schools of scholarship, as they came along in the 19th and 20th, and now 21st centuries, have primarily the same goal.  Fundamentalism is literally a reaction to historical criticism, as is literalism (at least in its contemporary form). I don't mind having the tools to refute them; at least for my own satisfaction.  There are many ways of exegeting scripture; there is no one "right" way.  Mr. Johnson is quite right to have his own opinions about the validity of methods, even of outcomes.

But jeebus, dude, know what you're talkin' about, huh?  You're embarassing the rest of us.  Yes, we do "measure adequacy and integrity in terms of other criteria."  But those criteria exist in reference to other criteria.  You are free to disagree with the latter, but you first have to give them their due.  Lazy denunciations based on faulty representations don't feed the bulldog.

*The first church I pastored was literally next door (i.e., on the same lot with no road between us) to a MO Synod church. I was told not to introduce myself there as I would not be welcome, despite the fact the UCC has historical roots in the Lutheran branch of Protestantism.  MO Synod remains "pure" by not associating with any other churches.  WI Synod remains pure by not associating with MO Synod, whom they think aren't "authentic" enough.) 

Forbidden Knowledge

New summer course announcement: "Forbidden Hand Gestures." pic.twitter.com/Os9MStDdjD

— University of Austin Classics (UATX) (@uaustinclassics) November 9, 2021

I’m still not sure this isn’t a parody site. Except the Texas Tribune tells me Stephen Pinker is on the board of advisors. And this says he'll be teaching the class.

So maybe they just aren’t in on the joke.*

I'm kinda surprised they haven't offered Glenn Greenwald an adjunct position yet.

And because I can't seem to post comments again (Blogger hates me on a regular basis):

I would have thought those courses a joke had I not gotten wind of this project already. The place’s FAQ’s paint it as a place of radically free inquiry. The course descriptions belie it.

Waiting for “The Truth about Why Progressives Haven’t Stopped Beating their Wives.”

Can’t believe you passed over Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdiches.

I thought it was a joke; but apparently these people are this clueless?  They brag they have "thousands" of professors seeking to flock to their light, which sounds pretty Trumpesque as they don't have a campus or even the money for more than a paltry faculty.  Texas Tribune reports they've raised $10 million already, but they need $250 million to really get rolling.  Oh, and they won't have all the "amenities" you and I missed out on; it's going to be a school like we attended, in other words.  A cafeteria, not restaurants or a food court on campus.  I presume no handball courts and climbing walls, etc.  You and I would recognize it as normal; students today will consider it primitive and stone age.  Which is not exactly a good marketing strategy.

And honestly, these course descriptions.

*I've looked again.  I'm quite sure this is a very well done parody twitter account.  For one thing, the tweets say they are preparing for summer 2022 classes.  The Tribune article says they won't be ready for undersgraduates until 2024.  Still, the whole thing strikes me as a supremely dumb idea.  What the world does not need is one more college.  OTOH, the statements from people associated with this "institution" are people mentioned in the Tribune article, and their quotes are real.  So in some sense this really is a joke they aren't in on.

Oh, well, it provides the world with another Twitter parody account.  I'm not sure we can have too many of those.  Not yet, anyway.

"Let's See If You Can Spot A Pattern"

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
https://t.co/YtmRG9TkMP

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 8, 2021

 I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

The beam in your eye, the splinter in your brother's eye:

Let's see if you can spot a pattern: 

Hang on to that quote; it's going to be an important one.*

(When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) 

I dare say even a child can see the problem there; and the contradiction.  Not with Harris' thinking (only), but with the argument of this article.

But be careful: Shermer has also acknowledged, in writing, that he's fantasized about murdering people. "Or, if not actually killing the particular bastard," he reports, "at the very least I imagine dislocating his jaw with a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich that sent him reeling to the pavement." This comes from his book "The Moral Arc," which received an extended, glowing blurb from Steven Pinker.

Let me connect that to this:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

What moral clarity is there in an adolescent fantasy about violence, one that reveals the dreamer knows "a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich" only from pulp viction or action movies?  What did happen to the "moral clarity" of "New Atheism?

Let's ask that question again, with the example of Lawrence Krause and the "she looked 16!" defense of child rape:

[Krause] was dismissed from his job as director of the Origins Project after an investigation found that he had violated the sexual harassment policy of the university "by groping a woman's breast while on an ASU-funded trip in late 2016." He has also repeatedly and vigorously defended his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, who "donated $250,000 to the Origins Project over a seven-year span." According to a 2011 Daily Beast article, Krauss claimed, "I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it," adding that he didn't believe the "beautiful women and young women" surrounding Epstein were underage. 

Not much moral clarity there.

The best comes (almost) last:

Richard Dawkins: Once a heavyweight within the world of evolutionary biology, Dawkins energized atheists the world over with his book "The God Delusion."

No, sorry; Dawkins is a zoologist who wrote a book about genetics, a subject he knows nothing about, which wowed non-scientists who thought he must be writing about "evolutionary biology" (a subject I doubt any of his fans could define any better than a random GOP politician can define Critical Race Theory today).  Dawkins was a "heavyweight" among people who thought he sounded clever; people who knew no more about the field of genetics than Dawkins did, in other words.  The same ignorance and appeal to the credulous was true of his “God Delusion” 

Over time, though, it became increasingly clear that he's neither an adult-in-the-room nor a particularly nice guy. For some bizarre reason, he obsessively targeted a Muslim teenager in Texas, who was arrested after a homemade clock he brought to school was wrongly thought to be a bomb. He also flipped out over what came to be called "Elevatorgate," which began with Rebecca Watson calmly asking men to be thoughtful and considerate about how they make women feel at conferences — for example, in the enclosed space of an elevator. This resulted in a flood of rape and death threats directed toward Watson, while Dawkins mocked the situation by writing a shocking letter addressed "Dear Muslima," in which the first line was "Stop whining, will you." More recently, he's made it clear that he isn't bothered by the allegations against Krauss, and posted seemingly anti-trans comments on Twitter. When asked why Twitter has caused him so much trouble, he claimed: "I love truth too much." (For Dawkins' troubling views on aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome, see this.)

I had forgotten Dawkins' catalogue of sins.  And attacking a Muslim,again; imagine that. But Dawkins was never the adult in the room; that was his British accent and Oxonian attitude of superiority.  Nor was he ever a “nice guy.” This tweet, by the way, is still up:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Classic British snobbery and condescension. Not much insight, though.  The pattern cotinues here:

James Lindsay: Once a promising young atheist, Lindsay published "Everybody Is Wrong About God" in 2015 and, three years later, "How to Have Impossible Conversations," co-authored with Peter Boghossian (below). Referring to himself as "apolitical" but boasting a profile page on the right-wing, anti-free-speech organization Turning Point USA, he is now one of the most unhinged crusaders against "critical race theory" (CRT), an idea about which he seems to have very little actual knowledge. (This is unsurprising, given that Lindsay has literally argued that he doesn't need to understand "gender studies" to call for the entire field to be canceled. See #10 here.) 

There are other people referenced in the article, two more I've never heard of, and Stephen Pinker, whose intellectual accomplishments are on par with his apparent racism (I'll leave that evidence to the original article). We have to get back to "religion":

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

The metaphor highlighted there means, of course, a movement devoid of reason and based wholly on unexamined ideas which don't bear the weight of the simplest of critiques.  William James' oft-cited definition (which he rejected) that the young boy knows "faith" is "believin' what you know ain't so" is actually meant to apply here, with "religion" replacing the term "faith."  But that's too easy.  The people listed in this article know that what they think IS so, and they can't understand the benighted ones who don't see it that way.  Then again, that was the "pattern" in New Atheism:  how could anyone believe the foolish ideas they attributed to the religious, from the racist anti-Islam thought of Sam Harris (who was always that way) to the snobbery of Dawkins (ditto), to the rest? If anything, time only revealed them for what they always were: weak thinkers who fall back on vague and glittering generalities.  You can see the pattern here, too:

What ties these people together is an aggrieved sense of perpetual victimhood. Christians, of course, believe that they are relentlessly persecuted (note: they aren't). The IDWs similarly believe that they are the poor helpless victims of "CRT," "standpoint theory" and other bogeymen of woke academia. But really, if "Grievance Studies" studies anything, it should be how this group of extremely privileged white men came to believe that they are the real casualties of systemic oppression.

I've read about a lot of people who display their "Christianity" quite prominently, using it to build their personal and financial power.  They've learned, rather recently, to present themselves as victims, especially in a world where church attendance (the only measure that seems to count in the media) is not what it once was.  Big deal.  When 41% of the American population regard themselves as regular churchgoers, we'll be back where we were in 1906.  Deal with it.  I've never met a "Christian" yet who thought they were "relentlessly persecuted," so spare me the baseless generalities.  They have no more application to reality than the white supremacist rhetoric of most of the "New Atheists" the article critiques; but that's the pattern, isn't it?

To conclude, let me bring things full circle: At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are "markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian" than religious people. It's a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Most of Phil Zuckerman's analysis is based on work by:  Phil Zuckerman (I followed the link in the original).  He misinterprets Psalm 14, too, and cherry picks statements by philosophers whose work I am familiar with, probably taking them wholly out of context.  It'd be in keeping with most of the work of "New Atheists" who don't really know anything, but who know what they don't like.  Hmmmm....rather like Trump, eh?

New Atheism wasn't "swallowed up" by anything; it became what it started out as.  And it did it because it was never about overcoming prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, close-minded and authoritarian ideas: it espoused them.  What else was New Atheism but deeply prejudiced against anyone who didn't think as the individuals identified here did, who were dogmatic in their ignorance? None of them betrayed the least knowledge of philosophy, theology, anthropology (which includes the study of world religions), or philosophy of religion, much less compassion.  Who needs that, when you are closed-minded and authoritarian?  Ideas get in the way of righteous and ignorant rants!  Compassion is for wimps. Just ask Donald Trump!

I could end this with my own righteous screed.  But I came across these words from Pope Francis during a visit to Philadelphia in 2015, and I can't improve on them:

In this place which is symbolic of the American way, I would like to reflect with you on the right to religious freedom. It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own. Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families. Our religious traditions remind us that, as human beings, we are called to acknowledge an Other, who reveals our relational identity in the face of every effort to impose a uniformity to which the egotism of the powerful, the conformism of the weak, or the ideology of the utopian would seek to impose on us. 

I don't see even a ghost of that idea in the work of the "New Atheists," nor of the writer so disappointed that they turned out to be what they always were.  What, indeed, in atheism, was ever going to produce such a change, or "reveal[] our relational identity"?

Just asking for a friend.

*You may notice I skip blithely over the critique of Harris from the article, contenting myself with only two sentences.  Harris actually sets the rule for the New Atheists:  he’s been a rabid Islamophobe and generally an ignorant and uninformed thinker ab initio.  I wouldn’t say Harris influenced the rest of them, but they are all cut from the same bolt of cloth.

Responsibility; or nothing at all

When does this cross over from imagination to historical reality?

The "Middle Ages" are the time, in popular imagination, when the Church dominated European life.  Part of the bad rap on "the Church" stems directly from the Reformation, more directly from the Reformed movement than from the Lutheran side of the Reformation.  But a great deal of the image of the "Dark Ages" comes from the Enlightenment, and yet stems from the same root as the disparagement of the Roman church by the reformers.  Both disparagements continue to this day, but that's the way history works, isn't it?

I've told the story before, about the lawyer who came to the car wreck I was a party to, and told me I couldn't have the tow truck driver move my car until the police arrived.  She (the lawyer) was much younger than me, so I'm confident in saying I left the practice of law before she entered law school (or probably high school, for that matter).  I was also old enough to remember when car insurance went from adjudging liability to "no fault," and when police officers went from detailed analysis and records of an accident as if it were a CSI crime scene, to simply getting names and proof of insurance and giving everyone an accident report number to give to their respective insurance agents.  I knew the police wanted the cars out of the traffic.  They weren't going to be drawing diagrams of the collision, much less dusting the scene for air bag powder residue.  She, however, working in an area of law far outside her skill set (who keeps a personal injury lawyer on speed dial?), knew not what she'd learned in law school, but what "everybody knows."  She knew history, but not very well.

That is an example of how we all "know" history; especially when we don't.  Let's apply that to medieval torture devices, which we are all sure are both historically accurate, and reflective of an absolutely historical indifference to human suffering once upon a time (yes, I'm looking at you, Stephen Pinker!):

And what strikes us most in considering the mediaeval tortures, is not so much their diabolical barbarity, which it is indeed impossible to exaggerate, as the extraordinary variety, and what may have be termed the artistic skill, they displayed. They represent a condition of thought in which men had pondered long and carefully on all the forms of suffering, had compared and combined different kinds of torture, till they had become the most consummate masters of their art, had expended on the subject all the resources of the utmost ingenuity, and had pursued it with the ardour of a passion.

Only one problem with that assessment, and it's a doozy:

However, when one takes a close look at books like these, it soon becomes obvious that very little of the tortures they describe took place in the Middle Ages. Instead, they recount various events from the 17th to 19th centuries, with perhaps a few anecdotes from previous eras (and in some recent books, noting the use of modern tactics like waterboarding). The authors will mention various torture devices, and usually add in some statement that while we first hear about it in the 17th century, it was ‘undoubtedly’ or ‘would have been’ also seen in medieval times.

The "Pear of Anguish, for example, doesn't appear until the 17th century, and seems actually to have been an early form of a speculum.  It was too weak in design or construction to inflict unendurable pain, but instead designed as a medical aid.  The infamous "Iron Maiden" doesn't appear in Europe until the 18th century, where the mention of it is what we could reliably call today "fake news."  It was invented out of whole cloth, in other words, during the "Enlightenment," with pretty much the purpose of proving how superior to "them" "we" are today.  Or they were, since we are a different set of people 3 centuries later; or maybe not so different, after all.   As Eric Weiskott sensibly puts it:

Take it from a professor of medieval literature: calling things you don’t like ‘medieval’ is inaccurate and unhelpful. It’s inaccurate, because we don’t live in the Middle Ages. The things that most anger, disgust, or offend us are relatively new in the grand scheme of history. And it’s unhelpful, because the ‘medieval’ label reinforces our overconfidence in ourselves and our modernity. That attitude goes all the way back to the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Not coincidentally, the Enlightenment is the movement that cemented the idea of the Middle Ages as a distinctive—and distinctly regrettable—period of European history, spanning roughly the 5th to the 15th centuries.

I'm not trying to denigrate the Enlightenment (pace, Pinker!) to say it dabbled in mythology as great as any urged against medieval Europe, but to point out humans are humans, and one of our strongest and most misguided efforts is to denigrate some group, in history or ethnicity, in order to make ourselves feel better, if not superior.  And this presents me with a thesis for another day, but one I've been mulling over for some time, just looking for the right context to present it in.  That context could be this:

If things seem especially precarious lately in Europe and the Anglosphere, it’s because our high opinion of ourselves, which we inherit from the Enlightenment, has been bumping up against reality, in ever more painfully obvious ways. No wonder. Perfect confidence in the legacy of Enlightenment achievements is impossible to reconcile with their worst consequences: colonialism, racism, economic domination, climate catastrophe. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating a return to the Middle Ages. But an ideology of inevitable progress is always going to make enemies for itself wherever ‘progress’ is experienced, instead, as violence.

Or where "progress" doesn't seem to be solving all our problems for us.  The modern spiritual dilemma seems to be the "problem of suffering," a "problem" itself that comes from 18th century Europe (and suffuses 19th century Europe, in Romantic anguish that moves to post-modern angst).  It was Leibniz, after all, who gave us the concept of "theodicy," the question of God's justice, the issue upon which Voltaire broke after the earthquake in Lisbon (but oddly enough, humanity's predilections to be violent and, well, overall "human," did not cause Swift to renounce his priestly vocation.  Gulliver's Travels, by the end, makes Candide look like a children's fable.  Interesting, that.)  Today we despair because God will not save us from ourselves, and nothing else, not politics or ideology or elected officials or Academy Awards, will either.  (Spike Lee is entitled to his opinions and reactions to an industry he works in, but honestly the brouhaha over the awards for the last several years, culminating in the show last night and who won and who lost, is downright comical.  First world problems, indeed.)  I'm intrigued by this modern idea that avoiding suffering is the raison d'etre of human existence and the summa of the "good life."  It's always "my" suffering that is most important, for one thing; and then how we define suffering (chronic pain; childhood trauma; inconvenience?), that are not subject to much examination.  The suffering is the thing!  And we will not have it!  O, why must we suffer so?

For the same reason MPAAS voters won't vote the way we want them to?

I'm making light of a serious topic now, and at some point I'll reflect more seriously on this question of suffering.  But for now, I'd wish that we looked a little more plainly at ourselves, and consider that the mirror we need to be looking into, is the one that reflects us back at ourselves:

In the end, it is both more accurate and more rhetorically effective to admit that the bad things around us belong to the same history as the good things. Mass incarceration, the scientific method, terrorism, the automobile, fascism: these are irreducibly modern responses to modern conditions. No person, event, or movement can take us back to the Middle Ages, because history only points in one direction. We can learn much from the violence of the past, but not by wishing away the violence of the present.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.  No wonder we want to run away.

Addendum to the Pinker Post

School shooting in Texas. Early reports not looking good. God bless all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

More to the point:  what he hell does he mean by it?

I teach composition and rhetoric, and one of the things I teach is rhetorical analysis (in one week!  No, we don't cover it deeply).  I usually focus on the phrase "God Bless America," asking my students to consider what it means and what it even is.  Is it a command, an imperative, requiring God to "bless" America (I'll explain the quotes in a minute)?  It is a plea, with the "Please" or "May" implied but unspoken?  And what, I always ask, does "bless" mean?  We use it almost entirely in a religious context.  Christians churches  ask for the blessings of God, or speak of the blessed poor, the blessed meek, the blessed mourners; but what does "bless" mean?  Good things from God?  That's one.  But how are the meek "blessed"?  Or the mourners?

Or is it even perforative language, meant by the expression to create a state of affairs?

Outside the religious context, does the word "bless" have any meaning at all?  "Bless your heart" is a Southern phrase that is meant both as a benediction and as a euphemism.  In the right context it is the most polite way of taking pity on a fool that one can muster; but it can also mean to be a comfort, and it's sometimes hard to be sure which is meant.  But there isn't necessarily a religious connotation in it, especially when its used as the most anodyne of insults.

Which brings me, in far too roundabout a fashion, to this:

Of course, Pinker’s confidence in the righteousness of his own cause may come across as similarly beatific (he’s an atheist who’s confident enough to use the word “blessed” without a hint of irony), but as he repeatedly tells us, the evidence is on his side.

I do wonder what Pinker means.  I don't have the context.  I presume it's in his new book.  I understand the reference to irony, but is it essential?  I understand the idea of a blessing; but I have to say I find "Congratulations!" a lot more straightforward and understandable.  The more I think about "bless" or "blessed" or "blessing," the more I wonder if I know what I should be expecting, or if I've just been told I'm a benighted fool who doesn't even understand the insult.*

*I was reminded last night of the other use of "blessing," that given by an authority figure (a father, The Godfather) to those under that authority.  Which is the real irony of Pinker's use of the word.  Where does the blessing he thinks has been dispensed (he uses the past tense) come from?  The Enlightenment, one presumes?  Huh.  You know, real philosophers are more careful about their language than that.

The Counter Counter Counter Enlightenment

Stephen Pinker apparently imagines he is on a crusade to save the Enlightenment.  To those who disagree with him, he has this (among other things) to say:

Some [of the vitriol] is turf-protective: some highbrow pundits, cultural critics, literary intellectuals, humanities professors, and other members of C.P. Snow’s “Second Culture” resent the incursion of science, data, and quantification into territories traditionally fenced off and claimed by them. And a surprising number are cultural pessimists who despise the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. They prefer hermeneutic [textual interpretation] to analytic reasoning (one of the reasons they are sympathetic to religion even if they are atheists), valorize the consumption of elite art (as opposed to the well-being of the mass of humanity) as the highest moral good, and believe that Western civilization is on the verge of collapse and is so decadent and degenerate that anything that rises out of the rubble is bound to be an improvement.

The title of that article is "Counter-Enlightenment Convictions are 'Surprisingly Resilient'".  So yes, he really does believe he's defending the ivory towers of the Enlightenment from the barbaric hordes of postmodernism.

(A true story from my days in graduate school.  I took a class that met at night, which meant many of the professors came and many graduate students doing their doctoral work came to pontificate at each other.  I know how prone I am to do that, but I am still a piker compared to those who remain in memory green around that table.  One night the talk turned to what we are all doing there, as students and professors, and one professor, waving his hand in the direction of the football stadium, declared we in that room were defending the treasures of civilization from the barbaric hordes, meaning the people who filled that stadium and most of the students on campus.  It was a state school, not a private one, so it wasn't exclusive enough, I'm sure.  I don't remember now, 40+ years later, his precise words, but I remember the tenor, and I burst out laughing.  I was sure he meant it as a joke, it was such a cliche.  No one else laughed, and I might just as well have shit on the center of the table for the effect my laughter had.  Any idea I had of taking a Ph.D. in English ended that night, a decision I've never regretted.)

Let me first say Pinker doesn't understand C.P. Snow's argument at all, and second point out that even "analytical reasoning" is a hermeneutic (and not a unitary one; there are many kinds of analytical reasoning, but I'm sure Pinker insists there is only one true "analytical reasoning," much as Robert Jeffress would insist there is only one true Christianity, and he is the judge of it.).  To call it a hermeneutic, of course, is to remove it from the pantheon of Truths, or even from the pedestal of The One Truth, which he clearly thinks it is.  Part of the problem of scientists with no background in the humanities imagining they don't need to understand the humanities  but can just dismiss it in the name of Science, Truth, and Analytical Reasoning (which are a holy trinity, since they are all the same thing, right?  Funny how that works out.)  I don't resent the intrusion of science, data, and quantification into the humanities (has this guy ever studied prosody?  History?  Textual analysis?), but he clearly seems to resent the intrusion of hermeneutics (philosophy) into his science and quantification.  Maybe I should introduce him to Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness; it is, after all, based on mathematics, and is practically the underpinning of postmodernism.

I know I'm sidestepping the rest of his comment, for the moment; I'll come back to it.  Maybe.

The funny part about this conversation, prompted by Pinker's new book (and it turns out he's a psychologist?  I'd have sworn he was a linguist.  Well, that explains a lot, too.) that I stumbled into via Vox.  Pinker himself wrote this second book because the first book, about the "angels of our better nature," didn't actually bring the entire world to acknowledgment that Stephen Pinker had Figured It All Out.  No, really:

“I had thought that a parade of graphs with time on the horizontal axis, body counts or other measures of violence on the vertical, and a line that meandered from the top left to the bottom right would cure audiences” of their delusions and “persuade them that at least in this sphere of well-being the world has made progress,” he recalls near the beginning of “Enlightenment Now.” But Pinker’s inability to “cure audiences” and “persuade them” doesn’t mean he has reconsidered his rhetorical approach; 300 pages after bemoaning those poor souls who read “Better Angels” and weren’t bowled over by his panoply of statistics, Pinker doubles down with still more data. “We have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting the ways in which the world has been getting better,” he writes.

Being a teacher of composition and argument, my first thoughts on reading this go to Aristotle's four elements expressed in the rhetoric:  Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos.  Of the four (Ethos relates to the character of the speaker; Logos to the reasoning of the argument; Pathos to the ability of the speaker to connect emotionally to the audience, and Kairos, the current situation the audience is most interested in), only one rests on charts and graphs.  As I tell my students, the most logical argument in the world would appeal to robots (theoretically) or sentient computers (again, theoretically), but not to human beings.  3 of Aristotle's 4 elements concern audience response; without those three, logic is useless and ineffective.  Of course, Aristotle is not part of the Enlightenment, and his ideas of rhetoric don't take account of the power of science, data, and quantification; so what does he know?

I mean, really, this isn't rocket science.  And for all its accomplishment, the Enlightenment didn't reinvent the wheel.  Then again, I suspect Pinker's education not only didn't include humanities, but anything regarded as "the classics" (i.e., Greek and Roman writings).  One reason "if Voltaire or Leibniz or Kant stepped out of a time machine and commented on today’s political controversies, we’d think they were out to lunch."  More likely Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant would regard Pinker and those who think him intelligent as uneducated boors.

 Part of the argument here is carried on in the Vox article, albeit rather weakly (especially as the author there identifies himself as a scholar, and dismisses the NYT review of Pinker's new book as the work of a "generalist"), that argument being that  SURPRISE!  SURPRISE! the Enlightenment was not a unitary thought project of Europeans who all thought as one because "analytical reasoning" can yield only one conclusion, and that conclusion = TRUTH!*

Who'da thunk it?

I was going to carry it on a bit and straighten out some of the weaknesses of the Vox article (IMHO, of course), but why bother? (Indeed, having read the NYT review of his book, I think the writer at Vox made the cardinal error of taking Pinker and his argument too seriously).  Pinker is a flyweight, a Sam Harris with tenure and minus the blatant racism; he's Jordan Peterson with better credentials than a YouTube audience provides.  But Immanuel Kant would have only been a university professor without his writings to leave behind, and despite Pinker's veiled swipe at people who are more highly regarded and likely to be better remembered than him, like Jacques Derrida (Derrida, not exactly an atheist but not exactly a confessing believer, was a professor of philosophy of religion; I think his "success" stings Pinker, so he alludes to Derrida as preferring hermeneutics, a common subject of Continental philosophy, over "analytical reasoning," the hallmark of Anglo-American philosophical schools.).  The examples of Kant and Derrida point up Pinker's failing:  he hasn't established anything worth discussing, nothing really lasting.  Daniel Dennett explained consciousness, and no one seems to have noticed.  Pinker has assured us, twice now, that this is the best of all possible worlds, but we all keep talking about Candide.  Oh, wait, sorry, that was a novel; no room for science, data, or quantification there, eh?

I all but promised to dig deeper into Pinker's statements quoted here, and I fully set out to do so; but why bother?  It's impossible to take him seriously when he thinks charts and graphs say all that need be said.  All I'm left with is Shakespeare's derisive dismissal, from the mouth of a university student, no less, and a student of human life:  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Or captured in a graph with time on a horizontal axis, for that matter.  But then, "analytical reasoning" that isn't turned upon reasoning itself is not really analytical at all, is it?  I'm sure C.P. Snow would agree with me, just as I'm sure Stephen Pinker would dismiss me as being anti-Enlightenment.  Given Pinker's argument, I'd take the critique as a compliment.  And spend my time watching Wim Wenders documentary about Pope Francis.

*Part of the problem in the Vox article is the defense of the Enlightenment project as being a promotion of knowledge as a good, a benefit.  There is some acknowledgement that "progress" always has its cost, and that too is part of the knowledge that should be promoted; but the very idea that "knowledge" is good is so mundane and anodyne it can't really be called a product of the Enlightenment; at least not without committing Pinker's sin of ignoring the bulk of human history, knowledge, literature, and recorded experience.  Knowledge has always been considered better than ignorance, else why tell stories, why write poems, why invent written languages and methods of preservation?  What kind of knowledge may be of particular interest to the figures of the Enlightenment, but even then too narrow a definition is just putting blinders on.  The better term, in fact, is wisdom; which is considerably beyond knowledge, although not superior to it.  Well, not necessarily, anyway.

"Yesterday all the past...."

Ezra Klein is terribly concerned that there are people who don't think as he does:

Parties were traditionally bulwarks against demagogues rising in American politics — they were controlled by gatekeepers who acted as checks against charismatic demagogues. Trump would never have made it through the convention horse-trading that used to drive nominations; Moore would never have survived a process that required support from party officials.

But in recent decades, we have slowly destroyed the ability of party officials to drive party primaries. What’s more, we have come to see party officials exercising influence as fundamentally illegitimate. Most Alabama Republicans said Mitch McConnell’s opposition to Moore made them like him better.

And now, once a candidate, even a controversial candidate, wins their primary, partisanship takes over, and they consolidate their base, and they can win. Partisanship is so powerful that it will even lead us to dismiss information we dislike, to live in a world of our own imagining so long as we don’t have to support a candidate of the other party.

So is Karen Park:

According to the laws of the state of Alabama, Moore lost the election Tuesday night, and whether or not he eventually demands a recount, he is likely to remain the loser. But his theocratic mindset has not been vanquished, and is shared by far too many American Christians whose idea of government resembles John Winthop’s disdain for democracy far more than it does the flawed idealism of the Founding Fathers.

I can find lots of examples of articles terrified by the people who voted for Roy Moore in Alabama.  Valerie Taricot blames it all on the Bible,with an argument that might as well come from Stephen Pinker:

I’ve said before that the alleged behavior of Alabama Senate Candidate Roy “10 Commandments” Moore toward teenage girls was perfectly biblical. I’ll stand by that, citing chapter and verse.  (Other Christians or former Christians have made similar observations.) The Bible is a mishmash of texts that were written and assembled over the course of several hundred years by men with varied objectives. All manner of behavior and misbehavior can be and has been justified from the contradictory stories and commandments between its covers. Men like Roy Moore who think they speak for God, who think their end justifies any means, play this to their own advantage.

Fortunately, most Christians are better than that. Where the Bible contradicts itself or endorses archaic cruelties or tribal thinking, their own conscience guides them toward something higher. Since the Iron Age, when most of the Bible texts were written, humanity has gotten clearer about kindness and justice and how people in power should behave toward those who are less powerful. We have evolved a more expansive view of who deserves to be treated according to the Golden Rule.

The conclusion is:  we are supposed to afraid of these people who don't think like we do.  We are supposed to be afraid, because our institutions have not saved us, may yet fail us.  Which is precisely the argument Roy Moore has been making, even after he lost the election:

“We are indeed in a struggle to preserve our republic, our civilization, and our religion, and to set free a suffering humanity. And the battle rages on,” Moore says in the video. “In this race, we have not received the final count to include military and provisional ballots. This has been a very close race – and we are awaiting certification by the secretary of state.”
....

“Immorality sweeps over our land. Even our political process has been affected with baseless and false allegations, which have become more relevant than the true issues which affect our country,” Moore says in the video. “This election was tainted by over $50 million from outside groups who want to retain power in their own corrupt ideology.”

Not quite the language of Klein, Park, or Taricot; but certainly the intent.  And if you think I'm missing something, this is the conclusion to Klein's argument:

This is the bug in the American political system, the security flaw in our software. It is why Moore almost won tonight. It is why Trump won in 2016. And we still don’t have an answer for it. We can’t trust that all unfit demagogues will turn out to be predators.

No, we can't.  This is the flaw in self-governance.  Just as, to address Taricot's point, it is the flaw in Biblical interpretation.  I don't read the Bible the way Roy Moore does, but neither do I read it the way Valerie Taricot does, and contrary to Taricot and Klein, that ability to accept varying interpretations I disagree with (in politics or exegesis) is not a sign that I must insist the "system" be saved from Roy Moore or his version of the Bible.  It's a sign we need more voices in the conversation; precisely the answer of the Bible to the question: "Who gets to speak for the living God?"  As many voices as possible, is the short answer.  I can't silence the Roy Moores of the world; but I can join others and overwhelm their voices.

Women were silenced out of the Scriptures, but their voices are still there.  The prophets spoke to kings, but were also "dressers of sycamore trees, and spoke for the widow and the orphan.  There are so many voices in the Scriptures it is practically a cacophony, but they have survived countless systems which have failed.  The solution is not "once voice for all, and that one the RIGHT voice."  The solution is to keep talking, and to keep listening.  If there is a problem with Roy Moore, it's that he doesn't want to listen; he only wants to talk.  He wants to be the only voice talking.

The system will not save us from ourselves, and eventually we will dance too closely to the edge and fall into the abyss.  There is, interestingly, Biblical warrant for this:  it's the record of the Babylonian Exile in that "mishmash of texts that were written and assembled over the course of several hundred years by men with varied objectives."  That very reality is the strength, not the weakness, of the Biblical witness.  And it is the strength, not the weakness, of Democracy; unless you agree with the quote from John Winthrop Karen Park starts her article with:

If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel … A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.  [To allow it would be] a manifest breach of the 5th Commandment.” – John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony

It's a fine sentiment, if you want to be sure you remain in control.  And that issue of control includes ignoring the issue of race, as well as ignoring who Christians actually are:

The takeaway from Moore’s loss, [Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute] says, is not that there’s a shift in evangelicals’ attitudes, but that the wider evangelical umbrella — comprising black, Latino, and white evangelicals — is increasingly fragmented. After all, he points out, Alabama is a “unique” state, in which at least 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike identify as Christian. “So what mattered really was which Christians came to the polls, not whether they would.”

He is critical of the Moore campaign’s narrative that "here is candidate Moore standing up for God and Christian principles against the other candidate who doesn’t.” Doug Jones is in fact a Methodist — a branch of mainline Protestantism. He was, in other words, propelled to victory by Christians, including many evangelicals. Just not white ones.

“What we have on display is this very vivid picture of how far apart black and white Christians are,” Robert Jones said. And he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. Before Trump’s election, he says, the evangelical community had been very focused on racial reconciliation, with major evangelical leaders — like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore — performing outreach across color lines. But, Jones said, "Trump has been a polarizing force between white and black Christians,” just like among white and black Americans in general. He added, “You see it in the data. You see it among leaders. And those divisions promise to get worse.”

And yes, this is about demographics, and about race:

Likewise, while seven in 10 seniors identify as white Christians, that demographic flips to just three in 10 for young adults. Demographic shifting, in other words, means that while white evangelicals might still vote for candidates like Moore, there will be fewer and fewer of them to vote.

Funny nobody is talking about this beyond what black women did for Democrats; and yes, that's an insulting talking point.  Then again, it's not about race, because it's never about race, unless it helps us out transactionally to notice race.  The truth is, this is America:  it's always about race.  And the truth is, the past really isn't over, and it really isn't even past.

And God?  She's black

The Challenge of Christianity

Sometimes Religion Dispatches publishes something truly worthwhile.  This is one of those times:

As for revolutionary impact: embedded within Messianic-Christian Judaism is a significant level of disruptive social, political, and economic content. You can see some of that in the baptismal details given in Galatians 3:26-29. Claims of full equality between female and male or between master and slave (a Christian master could not have a Christian slave) were socially explosive. Thus it is not surprising, if also very saddening, to see how soon such visions of equality were de-radicalized back to Roman normalcy. In Colossians and Ephesians this de-radicalization is already fully evident.

In regard to the anti-sexual dimension, I view Paul himself as a programmatic celibate. I suspect that he was already one as a Pharisaic Jew (like other Jewish celibates in Egypt and Qumran) before he ever became a Messianic/Christian Jew. Bad theology can interpret celibacy to mean that sex is evil (but, of course, if it is evil or depraved, what virtue is there in abstaining from it?).

Paul intended his celibacy to offer personal witness that what civilization treats as “normal” (sex, marriage, children) is not an inevitability of human nature. In other words, if it is possible to abstain from sex, might it not also be possible to abstain from violence? Celibacy (or monastic silence, poverty, obedience) is a witness that the world that God so loved is not necessarily to be equated with the world that we so love.

The speaker is John Dominic Crossan.  And this is where he gets more interesting:

At this point we have to take with equal seriousness both human evolution and the core of the biblical tradition—or either one separately, as I take the same message away from each.

For Jesus and Paul, it is never just about being against Rome. As you can see from Daniel 7, the alternative to imperialism—to the dreary succession of empires—is something the biblical writers call the Reign of God. What is mainly at issue is violence.

If you look at human evolution since our species surged out of Africa 70,000 years ago and announced its distinctiveness with the Neolithic/agricultural revolution, we have never created a weapon we did not use nor one less violent than the one it replaced. Looking at that trajectory, its mantra of “peace through victory” and its vain hope to control violence by more extreme violence, what future do we imagine for such a species?

I want to begin with that question because, without it, the biblical mantra of “peace through justice”—the claim that all should get a fair share of what belongs to us all—comes across as romantic at best and delusional at worst. What I am interested in is the point at which the biblical claim and human evolution intersect: the point where we might break through to a different way.

I do not know how many awakened people are needed to change this trajectory of escalatory violence (the default “normalcy” of civilization) or what we may have to go through if we are ever to attain it at all. I will simply say this, and I think Paul might agree with it: if you are not interested in biblical religion, then at least get interested in human evolution (Paul would call it “creation”).

Put simply, the effective counter to all imperialisms with their wars and violence will come not just from what you call the “counter-imperial valence” of good religion but from the force of human evolution itself. It is not just the moral arc but also the evolutionary arc of the universe that is long but bends towards justice.

Any interpretation of what Crossan means by "the force of human evolution itself" would have to be explained by him.  Sounds a bit too much like Pinker's "angels of our better nature" to me (yes, I know Lincoln coined the phrase, but Pinker tried to make it a part of our evolutionary make-up).  On the one hand, I'm inclined to reject such a reading of history and humanity as bunk.  However, before you decide Crossan is out over his skis there, he also says this in a separate interview:

DOM: Yes, Jesus’ challenge really was about the transformation of this world and this is not some secularism or humanism that I’m trying to push on people. This is based on the theology that this world belongs to God and it is good and can be transformed. That’s right out of the Bible. I don’t think the world ever will work by endlessly fighting wars in the hope that one more war somehow will bring peace. The problem is that, after each victory, the world gets more violent. In the Roman Empire, everyone thought Rome had brought a terrible new level of violence into the world. But, now, we have far more capacity for violence than Rome ever imagined.

Not exactly a vision of humanity moving inexorably toward perfection, there.  I'm not looking to hang Crossan on his words in one interview or another; I'm looking to have a conversation with him, albeit a one-sided conversation.  And yet I understand what he means because he says Paul would consider such talk to be about "creation."  And that's a very loaded term.  Not to mention the metaphor of the arc of the universe comes to us through the Rev. Dr. King, who got him from another pastor.  So the metaphor itself is rich in theological and religious meaning.  So we're not really inviting godless Darwinism into our Christian discussions.  Crossan is offering a radical interpretation of evolution that fits within his Christianity.  Especially since his Christianity is very much about this world, and not some sweet hereafter:

DOM: Yes, that’s right. When Caesar Augustus was called Savior of the World, everyone knew what that meant. It meant that 20 years of savage, devastating Roman Civil War was over. Augustus had ended that. He brought peace, finally. When people began applying that same title to Jesus, they weren’t talking about Jesus simply taking everybody away into some other world. They were saying that Jesus was the Savior of this world. They were talking about Jesus bringing a time of peace here in this world.

If you believe in God’s creation, it’s blasphemous to say that God blew it and that this world is evil and that, in fact, this world is such a bad mistake that it should be called back to the factory. No, Jesus was talking about the transformation of this world. Pilate would not have had Jesus crucified if Jesus was talking about some other world. Pilate would have said: “Oh, you’re only talking about some other world. Well, no problem, then. We Romans are only interested in ruling this world, thank you.” That’s why it was so radical when the same titles used in Roman Imperial Theology got shifted to Jesus. Pilate understood that Jesus really was a threat to the Roman world view.

DAVID: The Romans were saying that the only way to peace was through war and victory. Jesus taught that through God’s plan of justice and compassion, peace could be achieved in a dramatically different way. That’s still a deeply stirring message of hope 2,000 years later.

DOM: Yes, Jesus’ challenge really was about the transformation of this world and this is not some secularism or humanism that I’m trying to push on people. This is based on the theology that this world belongs to God and it is good and can be transformed. That’s right out of the Bible. I don’t think the world ever will work by endlessly fighting wars in the hope that one more war somehow will bring peace. The problem is that, after each victory, the world gets more violent. In the Roman Empire, everyone thought Rome had brought a terrible new level of violence into the world. But, now, we have far more capacity for violence than Rome ever imagined.

I repeated that last answer to put it back into the context of the source.   I also want to directly rebut those who think Christianity is for children afraid of death and seeking assurance about something after death.  Kind of hard to be concerned with transforming this world if you're afraid of death and hoping somebody will meet you "on the other side."  The latter attitude has been the excuse to ignore this world and even leave it to its damnation; but as Crossan says, that's blasphemy, not Biblicism.

The problem here is talking to people like Crossan is not unlike talking to the children of Tama.  Yeah, I know, fictional references are the worst, but the premise of the ST:NG show was an alien species that speaks English (don't they all?), but uses language to speak in metaphors and references to their stories (how they ever tell their stories to each other is another matter).  The references function as a kind of shorthand, like "Romeo and Juliet" or "Jonah and the whale" would in our culture (neither of which means a thing in Asian cultures, for example).  And here's where the comparison works:  We are used to bumper-sticker Christianity, one focussed on the metaphysical in simple phrases like "Jesus Saves!"  Which doesn't mean Jesus is a soccer goalie or the holder of a savings account; but why doesn't it?  Because we know the "story" behind it, whether we believe it or not.  To talk about "savior" as Crossan does, in that context, is nearly to engage in blasphemy.  It can at least seem like obfuscation, because the only way we understand that phrase is metaphysically:  what is "saved" is the "soul," and nothing else.  When Crossan contrasts the Roman pax with the Peace of God, he is keeping them in the same space:  the space of the living.  That can already make us think his ideas are contradictory, or at least contrary, and certainly over-complicated.  However, Crossan is a Roman Catholic (a former candidate for the priesthood, IIRC), and it has never been RC theology that the world is irredeemably evil and the only hope for it is destruction and replacement; again, a metaphysical goal.  And again, a conceptual barrier, especially to those of us steeped in Calvinist Protestantism.

I got into a minor argument with a commenter at RD on the Crossan article, on a similar point.  My "opponent" insisted Christianity made factual claims it could not back up, and accused it's central claim, that Jesus is God and Messiah, to be based on "circular reasoning."  I countered that the claims are confessional, like a claim that you love someone.  You can't prove the "fact" that you are in love, but neither do you have to.  Of course, my "opponent" considered all claims of faith by all Christians to be claims of fact (like the literalists and fundamentalists insist), and therefore the only claims Christians make at all.  Bumper-sticker theology, in other words, is the only "real" theology; except, of course, it isn't.  I can no more prove Jesus is God and Messiah than I can prove I love my wife.  Even if my actions betray my claims, I confess to both.  A confessional claim is not a claim to facticity; but if you don't understand that, you don't understand what Crossan is getting at, either.

And I think part of what he's getting at might be Bonhoeffer's Christianity without religion.  Crossan admits to a complicated relationship with the Church of Rome, but he doesn't seem inclined to abandon religion in his arguments.  On the other hand, the emphasis on the wisdom tradition (it is the state of the world which is paramount) v. an emphasis on a more traditionally Christian metaphysical tradition (it is the state of your eternal soul which is paramount), raises Bonhoeffer's issue.  Essentially, Crossan doesn't want to set aside Biblical claims of peace through justice, "which come across as romantic at best and delusional at worst," so like the project of Bultmann and others in the middle of the last century, he wants to find a contemporary vocabulary in which to speak his truth, which is why he brings "evolution" to the discussion (and threatens to sound more than a little like Tielhard de Chardin).  We don't have to agree with Crossan, or reject Crossan, to consider Crossan's effort and evaluate it.

First, you can't push that too far, or you step away from the confessional claim ("Jesus is Lord," for Christians) and find yourself defending indefensible, and unasserted, factual claims ("Jesus is God" is not a claim subject to empirical proof).  The question is not how you say it, the question is what does it mean to you?  The claim that I love my wife is ultimately mine alone; but it involves people other than my wife, such as our family (her siblings and mine), our child, our friends; it may even involve society, if my behavior radically contradicts my claims (through violence, say).  But it is never a claim subject to empirical proof, and no one expects it to be.  Indeed, the insistence that claims of God's existence or Jesus' divinity is an insistence on empiricism that we don't really live by in most of our lives.  Who are your friends?  How do you empirically establish that "fact"?  Does it bother anyone that you can't?  It would probably bother them more if you tried.  And if friendship does not qaulify as your "ultimate concern," certainly whatever meaning for life you have, does:  even if that meaning is simply to vanquish your rhetorical foes, or to cause them grief as an internet troll.

How do you prove anything truly meaningful to your life, except by proclaiming that it is?  "Believe me," the President insists, time and again; and that insistence is a pitiful cry to be taken as a meaningful person.  We all, to some degree, engage in the same practice, and looking too closely at Trump can make you feel like you are starting to look at yourself.  But most of us aren't quite so empty that we need to be filled by the attention of others to the degree Trump does (or at least acts like he does).  Ultimately we find meaning in others:  in a loving relationship, or in close friendships; success in business, or in family.  None of these relationships rests on an empirical proof, and those who do seem to base their lives on empirically established facts are generally the most pitiful of all.  So it isn't that religion opposes empiricism; it is that religion has almost nothing to do with empiricism.

Which brings us back to Crossan's attempt to use the concept of evolution as equivalent to the Judeao-Christian concept of creation.  Part of the problem there is that the popular conception of creation is what he's invoking; but that conception is ultimately groundless.  Evolution does not describe a process of improvement and perfection; it does not describe a goal, except the goal of survival.  Survival,  in evolutionary terms, is a blind process.  Why are we here and the dinosaurs aren't?  Happenstance, and nothing more.  That, at least, is the answer of evolution.  We are not an "improvement" on the dinosaurs, we just came after the cataclysm that wiped them out (although it took many years to happen; it wasn't brief enough to be the end of "Rite of Spring" in Fantasia.),  It may well be sound theology to say creation is following the arc that bends toward justice, but it is terrible science to assert that.  Trying to sound more than religious, we end up muddled.  It's an unavoidable effort, however; after all, Paul was a Pharisee writing in Greek to Gentiles.  There's a lot of cultural cross-contamination going on there, along with Paul trying not to make any claims that will get him in trouble with the powers that be like Jesus did.*  But the alternative gets us perilously close to the Protestant emphasis on sin, and what's needed to first overcome that (because creation is good but human sin corrupts it, as well as human society).  Lots of needles to still thread here.

And part of the problem is speaking in the language of the world, rather than in the language of theology.  That was the problem with the attempt of Bultmann, et al., to "demythologize" Christianity.  Focussing on the mythology so much, they made Christianity all about the mythology, or what I would call the metaphysics.  Crossan's antidote for that is sound, but threatens itself to go too far, and that's where we run into the "Christianity without religion" aspect again; although I'm less and less sure that's a bad thing, especially if we take the point of Christianity to be "how should we then live" rather than "how should we then be saved?".    Paul was writing in the language (and ideas) of his day, to people who were not born Christians (i.e, did not live in a Christian culture).  More and more the church faces a post-Christian culture, which puts us back almost to the world Paul knew.  Paul adopted the language of his time; can we adopt the language of ours, without adopting also the ideas (like evolution) that don't really fit our concepts ( like creation).

If we do, it could have a revolutionary impact.

*which neither marks Paul as a coward, nor condemns his approach as "impure;"  it's simply a reality we have to take account of.