Revolution Day

NTodd tells me today's the day Galileo got himself in hot water with the Church, which sent me looking into what New Advent had to say.  It's a bit long but, not unsurprisingly, there's a lot about the story "we all know" which is simply made up, and a lot of the complexity is lost in the re-telling:

In regard to their history, there are two main points to be considered. It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all.

It is likewise contradicted by the history of the very controversy with which we are now concerned. According to a popular notion the point, upon which beyond all others churchmen were determined to insist, was the geocentric system of astronomy. Nevertheless it was a churchman, Nicholas Copernicus, who first advanced the contrary doctrine that the sun and not the earth is the centre of our system, round which our planet revolves, rotating on its own axis. His great work, "De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium", was published at the earnest solicitation of two distinguished churchmen, Cardinal Schömberg and Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated by permission to Pope Paul III in order, as Copernicus explained, that it might be thus protected from the attacks which it was sure to encounter on the part of the "mathematicians" (i.e. philosophers) for its apparent contradiction of the evidence of our senses, and even of common sense. He added that he made no account of objections which might be brought by ignorant wiseacres on Scriptural grounds. Indeed, for nearly three quarters of a century no such difficulties were raised on the Catholic side, although Luther and Melanchthon condemned the work of Copernicus in unmeasured terms. Neither Paul III, nor any of the nine popes who followed him, nor the Roman Congregations raised any alarm, and, as has been seen, Galileo himself in 1597, speaking of the risks he might run by an advocacy of Copernicanism, mentioned ridicule only and said nothing of persecution. Even when he had made his famous discoveries, no change occurred in this respect. On the contrary, coming to Rome in 1611, he was received in triumph; all the world, clerical and lay, flocked to see him, and, setting up his telescope in the Quirinal Garden belonging to Cardinal Bandim, he exhibited the sunspots and other objects to an admiring throng.It was not until four years later that trouble arose, the ecclesiastical authorities taking alarm at the persistence with which Galileo proclaimed the truth of the Copernican doctrine. That their opposition was grounded, as is constantly assumed, upon a fear lest men should be enlightened by the diffusion of scientific truth, it is obviously absurd to maintain. On the contrary, they were firmly convinced, with Bacon and others, that the new teaching was radically false and unscientific, while it is now truly admitted that Galileo himself had no sufficient proof of what he so vehemently advocated, and Professor Huxley after examining the case avowed his opinion that the opponents of Galileo "had rather the best of it". But what, more than all, raised alarm was anxiety for the credit of Holy Scripture, the letter of which was then universally believed to be the supreme authority in matters of science, as in all others. When therefore it spoke of the sun staying his course at the prayer of Joshua, or the earth as being ever immovable, it was assumed that the doctrine of Copernicus and Galileo was anti-Scriptural; and therefore heretical. It is evident that, since the days of Copernicus himself, the Reformation controversy had done much to attach suspicion to novel interpretations of the Bible, which was not lessened by the endeavours of Galileo and his ally Foscarini to find positive arguments for Copernicanism in the inspired volume. Foscarini, a Carmelite friar of noble lineage, who had twice ruled Calabria as provincial, and had considerable reputation as a preacher and theologian, threw himself with more zeal than discretion into the controversy, as when he sought to find an argument for Copernicanism in the seven-branched candlestick of the Old Law. Above all, he excited alarm by publishing works on the subject in the vernacular, and thus spreading the new doctrine, which was startling even for the learned, amongst the masses who were incapable of forming any sound judgment concerning it. There was at the time an active sceptical party in Italy, which aimed at the overthrow of all religion, and, as Sir David Brewster acknowledges (Martyrs of Science), there is no doubt that this party lent Galileo all its support.

In these circumstances, Galileo, hearing that some had denounced his doctrine as anti-Scriptural, presented himself at Rome in December, 1615, and was courteously received. He was presently interrogated before the Inquisition, which after consultation declared the system he upheld to be scientifically false, and anti-Scriptural or heretical, and that he must renounce it. This he obediently did, promising to teach it no more. Then followed a decree of the Congregation of the Index dated 5 March 1616, prohibiting various heretical works to which were added any advocating the Copernican system. In this decree no mention is made of Galileo, or of any of his works. Neither is the name of the pope introduced, though there is no doubt that he fully approved the decision, having presided at the session of the Inquisition, wherein the matter was discussed and decided. In thus acting, it is undeniable that the ecclesiastical authorities committed a grave and deplorable error, and sanctioned an altogether false principle as to the proper use of Scripture. Galileo and Foscarini rightly urged that the Bible is intended to teach men to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that, while there was as yet no sufficient proof of the Copernican system, no objection was made to its being taught as an hypothesis which explained all phenomena in a simpler manner than the Ptolemaic, and might for all practical purposes be adopted by astronomers. What was objected to was the assertion that Copernicanism was in fact true, "which appears to contradict Scripture". It is clear, moreover, that the authors of the judgment themselves did not consider it to be absolutely final and irreversible, for Cardinal Bellarmine, the most influential member of the Sacred College, writing to Foscarini, after urging that he and Galileo should be content to show that their system explains all celestial phenomena — an unexceptional proposition, and one sufficient for all practical purposes — but should not categorically assert what seemed to contradict the Bible, thus continued:

I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.

By this decree the work of Copernicus was for the first time prohibited, as well as the "Epitome" of Kepler, but in each instance only donec corrigatur, the corrections prescribed being such as were necessary to exhibit the Copernican system as an hypothesis, not as an established fact. We learn further that with permission these works might be read in their entirety, by "the learned and skilful in the science" (Remus to Kepler). Galileo seems, says von Gebler, to have treated the decree of the Inquisition pretty coolly, speaking with satisfaction of the trifling changes prescribed in the work of Copernicus. He left Rome, however, with the evident intention of violating the promise extracted from him, and, while he pursued unmolested his searches in other branches of science, he lost no opportunity of manifesting his contempt for the astronomical system which he had promised to embrace. Nevertheless, when in 1624 he again visited Rome, he met with what is rightly described as "a noble and generous reception". The pope now reigning, Urban VIII, had, as Cardinal Barberini, been his friend and had opposed his condemnation in 1616. He conferred on his visitor a pension, to which as a foreigner in Rome Galileo had no claim, and which, says Brewster, must be regarded as an endowment of Science itself. But to Galileo's disappointment Urban would not annul the former judgment of the Inquisition.

After his return to Florence, Galileo set himself to compose the work which revived and aggravated all former animosities, namely a dialogue in which a Ptolemist is utterly routed and confounded by two Copernicans. This was published in 1632, and, being plainly inconsistent with his former promise, was taken by the Roman authorities as a direct challenge. He was therefore again cited before the Inquisition, and again failed to display the courage of his opinions, declaring that since his former trial in 1616 he had never held the Copernican theory. Such a declaration, naturally was not taken very seriously, and in spite of it he was condemned as "vehemently suspected of heresy" to incarceration at the pleasure of the tribunal and to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years.

Under the sentence of imprisonment Galileo remained till his death in 1642. It is, however, untrue to speak of him as in any proper sense a "prisoner". As his Protestant biographer, von Gebler, tells us, "One glance at the truest historical source for the famous trial, would convince any one that Galileo spent altogether twenty-two days in the buildings of the Holy Office (i.e. the Inquisition), and even then not in a prison cell with barred windows, but in the handsome and commodious apartment of an official of the Inquisition." For the rest, he was allowed to use as his places of confinement the houses of friends, always comfortable and usually luxurious. It is wholly untrue that he was — as is constantly stated — either tortured or blinded by his persecutors — though in 1637, five years before his death, he became totally blind — or that he was refused burial in consecrated ground. On the contrary, although the pope (Urban VIII) did not allow a monument to be erected over his tomb, he sent his special blessing to the dying man, who was interred not only in consecrated ground, but within the church of Santa Croce at Florence.

Finally, the famous "E pur si muove", supposed to have been uttered by Galileo, as he rose from his knees after renouncing the motion of the earth, is an acknowledged fiction, of which no mention can be found till more than a century after his death, which took place 8 January 1642, the year in which Newton was born.

If you wade through that (sorry; New Advent is not known for brevity!), the first thing that stands out to me is that this happened after the Protestant Reformation.  That is not a small point, and if you like your history dramatized, look to the film "Elizabeth" for some idea of how seriously the Catholic church took its claims to English souls (and property; Henry's crimes included not just leading people astray, but taking all the ecclesiastical property and giving it to his friends).  The film nicely dramatizes the politics and violence that Henry's break with Rome produced.  My point being not to praise a movie, or declare it a documentary, but to point out how politically treacherous the post-Reformation era was in Europe, as people drew up sides and decided who was in, who was out (a recent biography of Shakespeare points out his parents may have been Catholic, but hid their beliefs in order not to run afoul of Good Queen Bess; to be Catholic in England in the 17th century was to be a traitor to the Crown.  You don't get much more political than that.)

 This isn't to justify the reaction of the Church to Galileo, but to examine it a bit more carefully.  Similarities to Creationists and fundamentalists in general may be made, but only glancingly.  Rome in 17th century Europe had real political and military power.  Ken Ham may have the power to persuade states to include Creationism in public school curricula, but he lacks the power to imprison scientists or contain ideas.  And, given that today, not quite 400 years later, about 1/4th of the people in "First World" countries still admit to geocentrism when it comes to the solar system, the fear of the church in the 17th century that "the masses...were incapable of forming any sound judgment concerning" Galileo's assertions is not an entirely unreasonable one.  Unless you're going to argue the people of 17th century Europe were far more enlightened than the people of 21st century Europe.

I'd prefer to argue they were no worse.

There was clearly an attempt, at the time, to assert the supremacy of Scripture, but that was a point upheld by Luther and Melanchthon as well.  It was misguided, but it was the 17th century, and the very foundations of Church authority were being challenged; not so much by Galileo as by Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, and people like that "active sceptical party in Italy."  And Luther and Calvin were trying to establish their own authority, not to release authority altogether.  The reaction to Galileo was not to behead him or torture him or excommunicate him, but simply to gain control over a fractious problem.  Galileo, in other words, was within the Church's reach (as he acknowledged by going to Rome.  He probably could have joined Luther in Germany; except Luther probably wouldn't have helped him.).  And the problem the Church faced was one of order, and of control.

Which is where Creationism treads now:  it wants to recover the social control the Church once had, and had through Protestantism, not just before the Reformation.  The real desire of Ken Ham is to recover a past that never existed.  The Roman church was trying to stop a changing world; Creationists want to turn that entire world back; back to a world that never was.  Try as they might to do that, they have no chance of success, or even of a minor victory.  I don't even think it's a real threat to scientific inquiry. It isn't science. It's so internally contradictory that to espouse it, you have to be as committed to the fundamentalist literal view of the Bible as Ken Ham is.  And that's not a matter of "compartmentalization;" that's a matter of adherence to a worldview only a tiny percentage of people are ever going to accept.

So is there a lesson in the story of Galileo?  Only a lesson in the complexity of reason; that reason is not positivism or empiricism or unitary and reducible to one result which excludes all others. 

And that history is never just one story we can easily tell to children.

How should we then understand?

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Let us now damn infamous events

I was right! There is a bigger world out there!

 You know, I sometimes think that if you can't get history right, how can you possibly understand the present?

The first episode of the new Cosmos graphically illustrates this with the story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century monk who argued that the sun was a star like all the rest, and that every star had its own planets and its own living beings. Bruno wasn’t a scientist, as the show makes clear: his cosmological views flowed from his mystical, pantheist theology, not from evidence. But that made no difference to the Inquisition, which imprisoned and tortured Bruno, and when he refused to recant, burned him at the stake. His statue still stands in the Campo dei Fiori where he was executed, facing the Vatican as if accusing those who murdered him.

Um:  no (Well, the statue is probably there, but the rest is not accurate at all).

There’s also Bruno’s contemporary, Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered the moons of Jupiter and argued for the heliocentric solar system. As a reward for his revolutionary scientific work, he was judged suspect of heresy by the Inquisition and forced to abjure his own work under threat of torture; his books were banned and he was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. The story of Galileo’s persecution is so well-known that I’d hesitate to retell it yet again, if it weren’t for the fact that church apologists like Jay Wesley Richards are still defending and soft-pedaling it. 

That could be because Richards understands history better than you do.

In fact, even Bruno’s torture and execution still have their defenders, like the creationist site Evolution News and Views, or professional outrage-monger William Donohue of the Catholic League, who ludicrously claimed that the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing. A Catholic cardinal, Angelo Sodano, likewise said in 2000 that the inquisitors who condemned Bruno “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.” 

Donohue is an idiot; I will gladly so stipulate; and creationist are by definition for shite.  As to the views of the Cardinal, perhaps you want to start by taking them seriously and considering whether they have any validity, rather than rejecting them because, well, he's a cardinal, and obviously a very ignorant man.  Right?

And from Carl Sagan’s original series, one more cautionary tale: the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who lived in fourth-century Egypt in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Christianity was on the rise and bent on stamping out pagan ideas, and Hypatia was despised by the local bishop, Cyril of Alexandria, who hated her for her friendship with the governor and the different worldview she represented. Despite the personal danger she was in, she continued to study and to teach until, one day, she was assaulted in the street by a mob of Christian fanatics who dragged her from her chariot and hacked her to death with tiles. Her works were destroyed, her books lost. Cyril was made a saint. (Hypatia’s life and death were dramatized in the 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz.) 

I'm sure, whatever quality the film is, it's also a font of historical accuracy and information, as so many historical films are.  As for the rest, as usual, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Here is an historical account, which I do not offer as the final word on the fate of Hypatia; but I do point out the sources I am confronted with here are Carl Sagan's TV show, and a movie starring Rachel Weisz.

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the  philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and  science, as to far surpass all the  philosophers  of her own time. Having succeeded to the  school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop [i.e., Cyril]. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Cæsareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril's episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius

This is from the Church History of Socrates Scholasticus, a man who was not a fan of Cyril's, as you'll note from some of the passages there.  He doesn't praise Cyril, and in fact holds him accountable for the conditions that led to Hypatia's death.  I won't praise Cyril, or defend his actions in Alexandria (the Jews were driven out, for one thing; kind of hard to justify that, even by the standards of the 4th century).  But the death of Hypatia came from the mob, not Cyril (how much he did to quell, or encourage, the mob violence is another matter).  And it came in the midst of a power struggle over who would control Alexandria (did I mention the Jews were driven out?  Does that give you a clue as to what was going on?)  The history is that Hypatia was killed by a mob based on a groundless rumor, and the church history accepted by the Roman Catholic church clearly states this was an undeserved death, and makes no mention of hostility towards Hypatia's views on philosophy, mathematics, or astronomy.  You might still say that's a biased account.  Fine; got anything besides a TV show and a movie to base that on?

But this kind of persecution isn’t just a relic of ancient history. While we’re thankfully past the days when scientists could be stoned in the streets or imprisoned by church tribunals, the anti-science spirit is alive and virulent in the world today,  waving away facts that disagree with its ideology and seeking to silence or intimidate those who speak inconvenient truths.

 Uh, you might want to remove that log from your own eye, before complaining about the speck in theirs. Just saying'....  Because unless there are mobs rioting in the streets of American cities and church leaders driving out Jews or other groups from those cities (the "sundown cities" are not so far back in our rearview mirror of history), or murdering people because of wild rumors, then yes, this kind of persecution is precisely a relic of ancient history.  Nobody is put to death for perceived heresies anymore (Bruno) or locked up in order to control the dissemination of their views (Galileo), by the church or the state, and no one is going to be.  Even in thoroughly insane (in many ways) Texas, members of the State Board of Education were so extreme they lost their races to be re-elected in a GOP primary.  Granted, the Board is still extreme to my way of thinking, but persecution?

Really?

Just stop, please; you look as silly as the fundies who claim acceptance of homosexuals comes from Satan and God is going to punish us for respecting each other.

The Myth of Fingergprints

So, is it raining, or not?

I am old.  I am cranky.  I like fine distinctions, the kind most people can't be bothered to make.  So be it.  But I'm also intrigued by the loose threads, by the corner of the paper that won't lay down, by the wrapping we put on
Call me a closet chaos believer; call me a throwback to that Greek notion that the origin of the universe was in chaos, that logos imposed order, but that chaos was never vanquished, and will one day prevail again.  Go ahead, call me that; I'm practically there.

I think of it as a metaphor for humility; something sorely lacking in this all-too modern world.

So I'm intrigued, not by the new TV show "Cosmos" (I'm about to disconnect my satellite anyway, and go to Netflix for movies; it's almost all I watch now.  If I could stream Turner Classic Movies, or have that alone on my TV, I'd be perfectly content), but about the reaction to it.  According to two articles at Slate, it began with the story of Giordano Bruno, and this somehow, it seems, has something to do with "faith."

Because we know "science" and "faith" cannot possibly coexist.  Except, of course, in the mind of Giordano Bruno; in the 16th century; where he really just made lucky guesses (and what, Neil Tyson, Einstein was tapped into the true reality of the universe, because he was Jewish and non-religious? Don 't answer that.  It doesn't matter.)  And then of course we set aside the monk Gregor Mendel, who made it possible for Richard Dawkins to be famous for something vaguely science related before he went on to seek greater fame and fortune.  Or the Big Bang Theory, to get back to matters cosmological (although, technically speaking, everything is subsumed under the idea of "cosmos," which means "everything."), first proposed by a Jesuit priest.

It's that presumed rub that fascinates.  Religious people must betray their beliefs, or scientists must deny their science, in order for the twain to meet in one mind.  Part of this is an insistence on re-writing history so it has only one side:  science good, Church bad.  It's actually a peculiarly Protestant reading of history, not an "objective" one, because Protestants so insisted the Roman church was filled with "superstitions" that it insisted it, alone, understood the true divinity of science (even when science eventually led to empiricism in the 18th century).  To this day presumably educated people insist the Church in the dim past was virulently anti-science ("Look what they did to Galileo!"; except the ones saying that don't really know what "they" did to Galileo.) when it clearly wasn't, else many more Catholic religious would have been persecuted for their "sins."

For example, "Cosmos" apparently (or perhaps this is just Slate) thinks Bruno was burned at the stake for the "heresy" of suggesting the stars are suns like Sol.  Uh...no:

In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the  secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.

You see the irony?  Bruno wasn't a man of "faith" at all.  At least not a faith the Roman church would countenance in 1600, by which point the Church of Rome was having more than a little political trouble with the Calvinists (who excommunicated Bruno sometime after he joined them in Geneva), the Lutherans (who also excommunicated him when he joined them in Germany) and the British (whom Bruno managed to piss off, too; though they didn't excommunicate him).  The execution had everything to do with Church authority, and precious little to do with teachings about other worlds and other suns.

The more we re-cast the past as just the present redux, the more we misunderstand everything worth understanding.  And the first thing we really need to understand in this supposed "battle" between science and religion, is that Hamlet was right:  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Oh, and science is just another "philosophy."

You could look it up....

The New Fabulous Invalid

Woolgathering, mostly, and apropos of nothing except this article at Salon pricked this flow of words out of me.  I don't take it very seriously, but this bit is my favorite:

Anthropologists have often stated that religion evolved to help early man cope with anxiety and insecurity. Barber contends that supernatural belief is in decline everywhere for the fact that ordinary people enjoy a decent standard of living and are secure in their health and finances. “The market for formal religion is also being squeezed by modern substitutes such as sports and entertainment. Even Facebook is killing religion because it provides answers for peculiarly modern narcissistic anxieties for which religion has no answer,” observes Barber.

Yeah?  Name two; from within the past 100 years, and exclude any like Fraser who aren't really widely esteemed anymore.

Honestly, when are atheists going to get out of the 19th century and catch up with the rest of the world?  And religious belief is in decline because of the Industrial Revolution?  No, what's in decline is superstition.  Even in the era of "biblical Israel," the idea that God was responsible for all your comforts and conveniences was never a central teaching of the Torah.  "What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?"  What in that question speaks to worshipping God so you will be profitable, prosperous, and never know want for all of your days?  Does anybody even read the story of Job anymore?  The story is not just about the problem of evil, it's about the relationship of prosperity to piety.  The Hebrew scriptures are shot through with such stories.  When the widow feeds the prophet, she doesn't do so because God has spoken to her and reassured her she'll survive the drought; she does it because of simply human decency, because of the value and importance of hospitality; because she is a good person.  She doesn't become rich from it, either; she simply survives. Which reminds me the greatest blessing offered in the Christian scriptures is "life into the ages."

If few of us today want to take a lesson from a story that involves surviving on oil and flour until the drought is over, it isn't because we no longer need to cope with anxiety and insecurity.  I'll accept that the "market for formal religion" is being squeezed by sports and entertainment, but I'd also ask when it was every any different?  Theater in Europe was recovered, not by a Greek revival (of which the Renaissance was the first of many) but by the Church.  And you can draw a straight line from theater to movies to TV today, without any real effort.  Did the church wither in the Elizabethan age, when the theater was a rising power?  No, it withered more because it was attached to the state, and as the state stopped letting the church tend to the poor with it's help (Oliver Twist asks for more in an orphanage run by the parish council) and started doing the thing directly, Europeans who associated the church with such charity (as they had associated the church with the law.  There's a reason British barristers wear robes in court, and US judges wear robes as well.  It's the same reason the common law adopted from Britain has a side of equity included.  Equity came from the ecclesiastical courts, where standards of justice were more tempered with mercy than the common law was wont to do.) soon associated the church with things they didn't really need.  Was this the triumph of the Enlightenment?  Or the failure of the Church?

Probably both and a little bit of neither.  It isn't true, though we largely take it as gospel today, that the Church opposed the advance of science via Galileo or Bruno or others, because it superstitiously feared the advance of empirical knowledge.  The Church was much more involved in the politics of the age(s) than it is today, and was more concerned perhaps than it should have been with social stability (on that criticism I will stand with the critics, especially since I never say my ministry as one of upholding the status quo either in society or in the ecclesia).  It sought to control ideas in order to assure stability just as 19th century British intellectuals (at least) sought to tamp down the idea of the "death of God" (they agreed with Nietzsche, so to speak; they were just afraid to say so) for fear the populace would lose their fear of the controlling powers (if the Great Chain of Being is not topped by God keeping all in order, what might the masses think of the monarch and the landed gentry supported by and in turn supporting the monarchy?).  Mendel, after all, was a monk; and a Jesuit priest (as I've said over and over again) formulated the Big Bang theory.  The conflict between Christianity and science is not what it is said to be.

If the Church went wrong in its position on ideas we accept today, we have to acknowledge it didn't try too effectively to suppress genetics or modern cosmology.  And if people have taken a basically heathen position towards Christianity, an idea that God is a cosmic slot machine who is supposed to pay off when they put enough spiritual coins in and pull the lever often enough, is that the fault of religion, or the Church at large?  I think there are better explanations, and I've found most people have rather intractable beliefs about what the Church should do for them, or what God is supposed to be for them.  It lets individuals rather lightly off the hook to say the Church has simply failed or people have simply "outgrown" religion.

And as for anxieties and insecurity being quelled by this modern age, tell that to the families still mourning their losses from 9/11.  Or the Malaysian flight lost at sea; or the mudslide in Washington state.  Or the school shootings, mall shootings, theater shootings of recent memory.  Or the poor living in poverty and inner city squalor or invisibility in the rural areas of just this country.

Have people "given up" on religion?  True, they've taken to mega-churches which preach a very light form of Christianity, if Christianity it is at all.  Other mega-churches thrive, though,  on that "old-time religion," even if it isn't the church of Jerry Falwell anymore, even if they aren't proclaiming their moral majority but just their conviction in some strange new form of Calvinism.  As I've said before, I've heard this refrain before.  In the 1970's, just as I was getting old enough to decide for myself whether to go to church in college or, toward the end of the decade, in my married life, the predictions were coming hard and fast again that young people were leaving the churches and organized religion was doomed.

And perhaps as a social organization it is, but the fault is not in religious belief nor in acceptance of evolution as a scientific theory (Oh, yeah, that's a reason, too:  "With an increasingly majority of younger Americans accepting evolution as fact, Christianity for many under 35 is becoming a watered-down hybrid of eastern philosophy and biblical teachings."  This assumes, of course, that prior generation, mine included, rejected evolution, and so kept our Christianity.  It's a stupid assertion with no basis in anything except knee-jerk atheism.  But I digress....); it is in sociology and even in the Industrial Revolution.  Sociologists have identified reasons for the decline in church attendance, even as they identify reasons for church attendance; and the primary factor has more to do with how we see ourselves as individuals in society now, than it does with our scientific beliefs, or lack of them.  Church is first and foremost a community, but that is increasingly an odd thing in a society that values "bowling alone."  And communities are hard to maintain in a world where people don't live where they grew up, and don't stay long where they are living.

I pastored a church which was built around a farm community that left vestiges of its existence despite the fact the area around the church was now urban/suburban, and plants existed only between the streets and the buildings and the parking lots, rather than the buildings among the plants.  That community was one homogeneously white and largely German; by the time I got there the community was black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Korean; and "Hispanic" is just an umbrella term for people from many countries in Central and South America.  Whites were a minority, and many who grew up in that church now lived so far away, or were so old, they couldn't attend anymore.  But even those who hadn't darkened the church door in decades were still "members," and even though the community of that church had decayed to a bare remnant, that community still determined who was, and who was not, permitted there.  I see a lot of churches around me now comprised of small groups of common ethnicity:  Korean, Vietnamese, "Hispanic."  Are they in decline, too?  I wonder if they are even counted, yet.

Are mainline denominations in decline?  Yes.  The world they were once a part of is gone.  Is that a failure of religion, or a failure of the institution to adapt?  The Roman Catholics seem to have adapted better than the Protestants, or at least seem to be more adaptable.  Protestantism was always an expression of the culture more than of the institution; the former gave rise to the latter.  Now that culture is changing away, and the old orders will not prevail against the change.  There is even, in the wisdom of the church, an expectation of this:

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

Will the Church withdraw into a remnant of what it once was?  Only to the extent it stops serving the people.  This may be what Bonhoeffer meant by a "religionless" religion; not because the culture had become atheistic, but because the Church no longer served the needs of modern existence.  There's a great deal of effort going into responding to those needs, and a great deal of it is being accepted.  It may be the reports of the death of Christianity have been greatly exaggerated.  It may be, as Evelyn Waugh (IIRC) predicted, that European-American Christianity will be saved by African missionaries.

In any case, it is far too soon to be triumphantly driving nails into Christianity's coffin.  It may be Christianity just needs a new Reformation; that the "end of Christendom" has finally come, and it is a necessary one to move the Church into the third millennia.

And ain't it funny, again, how nobody ever mentions Judaism in these discussions?  I wonder why that is.....*


*don't tell me it's because of percentage of the population.  The article mentions (and I accept the statistic arguendo) that 1% of the US population is Muslim.  What percentage is observant (v. ethnic) Jewish?  And why isn't that ever raised to make one point or another?

Filling the gaps with Silly Putty

This is, in part, moving in tandem with what Anthony is posting just now.  It is also, in part, just my reading of Armstrong's The Case for God.  Last night I got to the section on Newton, which makes me want to research a question I'd never thought before to ask:  "When did God become omnipotent and omniscient?"

Because the answer may end up being:  Newton.

That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.

That is not Newton speaking of Newton; or Newton speaking of the scientist.  That is Newton describing God, a God he asserts because it explains the mechanical universe Newton has "created."

First, a word of explanation.  Newton, in Karen Armstrong's telling, unified the theories of Kepler (on planetary motion), Descartes (on physics) and Galileo (on terrestrial movement).  He understood gravity as "the fundamental force that accounted for all celestial and earthly activity."  (Armstrong, p. 202).  Mechanics, argued Newton, was the model which explained all the functions of the universe.  But to be truly universal, mechanics must explain ALL the phenomena of the universe.

Though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves by these laws.

Newton, quoted in Armstrong, p. 203.

Newton was a genius, but he wasn't omniscient.  Still, he wanted an answer to all questions, and he thought he had it.  See if this doesn't sound familiar today:  "When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme, I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe in a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more than to find it usefull for that purpose."  The mathematical balance of the universe "forced [Newton] to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary Agent...very will skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry."  Gravity "may yet put ye planes into motion but without ye divine powers, it could never put them into such Circulating motion as they have about ye sun."

Inertia held the planets in motion, yet they "must have required a divine power to impress them."  And what put the Earth so perfectly placed around the sun and set it spinning on its axis so well that the planet neither burned from too long a day, nor froze from too long a night?  The only answer Newton had was:  God.  Newton was less interested in establishing a scientific explanation of the universe, than he was in establishing what we would now deride as "intelligent design."

None of this is to say Newton got his theology right. In fact, he got it all wrong, because he reduced God to the universe humans could find an explanation for. As Armstrong puts it:  "God's existence was now a rational consequence of the world's intricate design."

Before we go much further, let's just consider what this has to do with God's omniscience and omnipotence.  The latter is a consequence of God's presence in the universe.  God, said Newton, is "omnipresent not virtually only but substantially."  Gravity was not just a force of nature, but the action of God.  Moreover, the God who "continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity," and who "rules all things," is a God of dominion.  This is not a God who is other, or kenotic; this is a God whose primary characteristic is "Dominion," (Newton's term), and such a God must have "intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience and omnipotence."  (Armstrong, p. 204.)  Because without it, how can such a God keep the universe operating?

(Sidebar that belatedly occurs to me:  I remember a seminary professor talking derisively of people who imagined Jesus of Nazareth being both human and God, eating and drinking while also busily keeping all the planets spinning in their courses.  I only know understand the concept he was mocking was Newton's, not Christianity's.  Well, not until Christianity adopted it; which soon after Newton, some did.)

It's easy to retroject this back onto God in the Scriptures.  The problem is, God is not omniscient in the Hebrew scriptures, and it's unclear whether even Aquinas thought God to be as Newton required.  Two examples from the Hebrew Scriptures will suffice:  "The heart is devious, beyond all fathoming. I, God, test the heart," says Jeremiah.  The other, and perhaps most famous, example, is God finding Adam and Eve in the Garden and learning, belatedly, that they have eaten the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which, if ever a story in scripture was meant to be an allegory based on a metaphor, surely this one is it!).  Literalists will tie themselves into knots trying to explain how an omniscient God can be surprised.  But maybe the problem is in our concept, not in the story.  Maybe the problem is, as Karen Armstrong argues, that we decided God was not "other," but was so familiar he could plan out our lives for us, and even give us what we ask for if, like Joel Osteen, we just ask for wealth and happiness (which comes from wealth, apparently, first and foremost).

It seems the "God of the Gaps" was born, not from theology retreating before science's approach, but from science's encroachment into theology.  And when that went sour, science blamed theology.  Nice work if you can get it, and get it science pretty much did.

I'm beginning to reappraise my discomfort with Bultmann's efforts to "demythologize."  I still agree with Armstrong, that mythos (as she defines it, and she doesn't define it all that well) is essential to human existence, because we are religious beings (religion is innate to human beings, not imposed upon them.  Jefferson will get a rather thorough trashing before we are finished, if only because he is the poster child for many modern atheistic misunderstandings.  By the way, per Armstrong, Jefferson was a Deist, not an atheist.  We'll get back to that, because there is a thread from Newton to Jefferson we have to follow.).  But to understand mythos correctly, it may be that we need to demythologize in order to get there.

Those comments may seem a leap, but Armstrong goes on to describe the God of Newton, and more importantly, the Christianity of Newton.  Nature replaces revelation, the Book of Nature replacing (almost) the Scriptures.  In The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, Armstrong says Newton argued that "Noah had founded a faith based on the rational contemplation of nature.  There had been no revealed scriptures, no miracles, and no mysteries." (If you can't already see the connections to Jefferson and the Deists, be patient; connections will be made.)  This faith had been "the true religion till ye nations corrupted it," and science was the only means for properly understanding the sacred:  "For there is no way to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by ye frame of nature."  The fundamental religion had been corrupted with "Monstrous Legends, false miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, and their intercession, invocation & worship and other heathen superstitions." (Newton, quoted in Armstrong, p. 205).

Do you now hear Newton echoed in Jefferson and the other Deists of Revolutionary America?

Such things were superstitions not just because they offended scientific reason, but because they offended the clockwork universe.  Miracles are, by definition, disruptions in the natural order.  The God who is the mechanical universe cannot disrupt the natural order; that's asking God to violate God's self.  The idea offends reason.  Which explains why Jefferson cut all such stories about miracles out of his "Jefferson Bible."

But Newton didn't accomplish this by overwhelming the theologians.  The church, or some leaders of it, embraced this idea as the new and rational theology the world needed. Not surprisingly (well, unless you think of Cotton Mather as the caricature of a Puritan rooting out sexual desire and witches his entire life*), Cotton Mather took to Newton's theology.  Puritans were already strongly anti-Papist (they were "Puritans" because they wanted to purge, or "purify," the Church of England of it's liturgical trappings and Roman Catholic ideas).  He liked it because it seemed, like the Puritans themselves, to return the church to an original state; and because Puritans liked nothing more than to condemn anything even vaguely connected to Rome as superstition (and so they banned Christmas celebrations, or even the observance of Christmas, for as long as they could).

Intelligent design, springing from Newton, became the standard of science itself.  Robert Boyle, physicist, chemist, and founding member of the Royal Society, thought the mechanistic universe proved the existence of a celestial Engineer.  Richard Bentley, in his Boyle lectures, argued that:

almost everything in the World demonstrates to us this great Truth; and affords undeniable Arguments, to prove that the World and all Things therein, are the Effects of an Intelligent and Knowing Cause.

(Quoted in Armstrong, p. 207)

The problem is obvious.  As Armstrong observes:

Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton, Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we need to know about the divine.  God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts.  As Clarke had shown, his will and attributes could be charted, measured, and definitively proven in twelve clear and distinct propositions.

(Armstrong, pp. 207-208)

If I wanted to look at this from a distinctly historical perspective I'd link these Newtonian theologians back to the Scholastics of the late medieval period, who made much the same claims, only without a clockwork universe to base them on.  That these claims have fallen apart, thanks to the very science they were based on, is obvious.  The question now is:  with what Renaissance will we recover from these neo-Scholastics?

* a corrective for that which even Armstrong overlooks is the work of Mather himself.  It seems rather clear from his accounts of life in Salem that the witch trials, much as he may have helped foment them, took on a life which controlled his rather than he controlling them.  It's likely Mather learned a few theological, and pastoral, lessons from those events.  It's clear he wasn't a McCarthy-esque figure, rooting out witches until some finally shamed him into standing down.

Schoolyard bullies and other holiday myths

Why not celebrate the season by being obnoxious?

 ("Reasonable since 1963"?  And before that you were just....?)

I'm spending too much time in comments at other sites, such as Salon.  The latest is a perfectly reasonable post which calls American Atheists to task because they're making atheists look like assholes.  The author has his bona fides in the area; he's the author of both Crucifying America and God Hates You, Hate Him Back (his idiosyncratic reading of certain portions of the Scriptures).  But the comments are uniformly negative, 99% trotting out the favorite trope of those who know precious little about rhetoric or logical fallacies (which I still contend is an oxymoron, but that's my lonely battle):  that the author has created a straw man.

Sure:  because atheists couldn't possibly be doing anything to offend anybody, and really aren't interested in actually providing any kind of material benefit to humanity.  Apparently.

Anyway it's depressing to see such supposedly reasonable people be so unreasonable.  The knee jerk reaction to criticism of any kind is typical of internet commentary.  I'm sure believers can be as reactionary as atheists, so we all stand under indictment.  Or something.  Anyway, it leads me to mention it (!) and to clear out the mental attic of other barely related matters in one fell post.

Here goes.

 Remember when you were a product of your childhood traumas you couldn't remember, caused by unresolved sexual desires?

Ah, those were the days....

Graham Lawton: You compare revelations in neuroscience with the discoveries that the Earth goes around the sun and that the heart is a pump. What do you think these ideas have in common?
Patricia Churchland: They challenge a whole framework of assumptions about the way things are. For Christians, it was very important that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Similarly, many people believed that the heart was somehow what made us human. And it turned out it was just a pump made of meat.

I think the same is true about realizing that when we're conscious, when we make decisions, when we go to sleep, when we get angry, when we're fearful, these are just functions of the physical brain. Coming to terms with the neural basis of who we are can be very unnerving. It has been called "neuroexistentialism," which really captures the essence of it. We're not in the habit of thinking about ourselves that way.

"Neurophilosopher" Patricia Churchland makes me long for the days of Sigmund Freud, who at least knew Electra from Oedipus.  "For Christians, it was very important that the Earth was the center of the universe"?  When?  Does she mean the political fight to suppress Galileo because the Church wanted to maintain its hegemony on knowledge (another example of a blessing becoming a curse; the monasteries preserved knowledge and even disseminated it; Aquinas felt obliged to absorb Aristotle into Catholic theology, not disregard him as an errant pagan)?  Or is she referring to the schoolbook version of history, similar to taking "Inherit the Wind" as a documentary?  But wait, as they say, it gets worse:  "Similarly, many people believed that the heart was somehow what made us human."  Well, the Greeks thought it was the liver, so who wins?  And yes, people thought the heart made us human; most people still do, though they don't mean the muscle in your chest that does make you animate. I'm not sure realizing the heart was a metaphor as well as a muscle was a revolutionary moment.

But I suppose if you're going to make a reductio argument, you have to be consistent.

I think the same is true about realizing that when we're conscious, when we make decisions, when we go to sleep, when we get angry, when we're fearful, these are just functions of the physical brain.

Just as Sigmund Freud said, on a scientific basis, that we are all driven by sexual impulses, and the problem is we don't want to recognize that.

Freud's example is instructive here.  It's not that Churchland is wrong, so much as she makes no attempt to prove she's right.  Human beings as basically sexual creatures, an idea we accept  today as we accept that we are mammals and walk upright,  was the New Big Idea in late 19th century Vienna.  Being the New Big Idea it was obviously finally the Answer to What It Means to be Human, and so it had to be right.

And now, 100 years later, it's neurology, and Freud has been consigned to the dustbin of history (even as we all speak of our "egos" and our "unconscious").  The more things change.....

Unsurprisingly, for Churchland at least, this is all a matter of replacing one set of nonsensical ideas with another set:

GL: Are there any implications of neuroscience that you feel unsettled by?
PC: I'd have to say no. It takes some getting used to, but I'm not freaked out by it. I certainly understand the ambivalence people have. On one hand, they're fascinated because it helps explain their mother's Alzheimer's, but on the other, they think, “Gosh, the love that I feel for my child is really just neural chemistry?” Well, actually, yes, it is. But that doesn't bother me.

By and large I find neuroscience liberating because it allows us to see our connections to other biological things, and because it's not full of metaphysical junk about preparing your life for the great beyond. Of course it's possible we're wrong. But it doesn't seem very likely, and that lack of likelihood is sufficient for me to not want to organize my life around this possibility. I want to enjoy it now. I don't want to make useless and meaningless sacrifices, and I don't want to trash this planet because I think a better one awaits me.

I'm not sure what "useless and meaningless sacrifices" she's talking about there.  Maybe it's just her addled brain chemistry.  But as a Christian I'm not preparing my life for the "great beyond" based on a lot of "metaphysical junk."  I know of people who are; but I'm able to not think like them without throwing the baby out with the bathwater; or jumping to absurd conclusions that I really am just a walking test tube of chemical reactions.  And, in fact, that "metaphysical junk" I do ascribe to is precisely what allows me to see my connection to other biological things.  And the only sacrifices I'm interested in are giving up those things that keep me from being a compassionate human being who recognizes in others their humanity , which I do through Christ who makes all things new in me.

So maybe we're coming at this from simply different magisteria, Stephen Jay Gould?  Or maybe once again we see that the idea of such magisteria is neither a solution, nor really descriptive of  anything?

 GL: You accept that we don't have satisfying neural explanations for a lot of higher functions, including consciousness, problem-solving, decision-making, sleep, and dreaming. Are we really ready to declare that we are our brains?
PC: True, we don't have adequate explanations yet, and it's important not to overstate where things are. But that's where the evidence is pointing. Everything we're learning in neuroscience points us in that direction.

Once it was sex.  Then it was existence (Fromm).  Soon it will be our brains.  Which may explain the popular idea of what zombies want to eat.  But so long as it's important not to overstate where things are, we can still say that you are simply your brain chemistry, and absolutely nothing more.  That idea that your love your kids is just your neurotransmitters firing.

You're welcome.  I'm sure you feel very liberated now.

And it always comes back to the derp:

GL: Some might say the idea that you are just your brain makes life bleak, unforgiving and ultimately futile. How do you respond to that?
PC: It's not at all bleak. I don't see how the existence of a god or a soul confers any meaning on my life. How does that work, exactly? Nobody has ever given an adequate answer. My life is meaningful because I have family, meaningful work, because I love to play, I have dogs, I love to dig in the garden. That's what makes my life meaningful, and I think that's true for most people.

Fair enough, but everything she just described is apparently just a process of brain chemistry; and yet she finds that meaningful.  How does that work exactly?  Especially if one day, through war or sickness or calamity or economic failure or just aging you lose the family, the meaningful work, the dogs, the garden?  If that stops making life meaningful, or if her brain chemistry just tells her that's no longer good enough, then what?

Is that all there is?

Not necessarily:

 The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.

Now one immediately identifies in all evolutionary based arguments the initial exclusion of purpose.  Purpose is the nature of theism, the argument goes, and therefore is antithetical to the scientific enterprise, especially where biology is concerned.

But that leads to problems:

The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

This may actually be irresoluble.  Empiricism, upon which science is based as a structure of reasoning, lead the greatest of the English empiricists, David Hume, to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion; the result of sensory impressions mingling in the brain.  Hume, however, could not identify a "self" in the brain (a ghost in the machine, if you will) observing and making sense of this data, so he concluded the notion that someone must be doing so was an illusion created by the very inputs themselves.

And you can't find something that can't possibly exist.

Nagel comes to a different conclusion:

This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.

There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.

(a) is basically the conclusion of neurophilosophers like Churchland.   (b) is Hume's conclusion, and Nagel has the same problem with it I have.  If the brain (in a modern metaphor) is a series of TV screens (think of Neo's encounter with the Architect in the second Matrix movie) receiving information through the senses, are the screens watching each other?

So must mind be an addition to the physical world, the "ghost in the machine"?  No need to leap to that conclusion; but if you are going to deny (a), (b), and (c), you're going to have to go back to Hume and find a new beginning point.

And frankly, the Continental philosophers have been working on this one for about 150 years now.

One last bit, since it is tangentially related.  Brian Appleyard relates the following anecdote:

In the early 1990s I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue. If, in effect, God could not live up to the standards of scientific proof, then He must be declared dead.

Existence is a scientific issue?  Really?  Can Dawkins define the parameters of existence?  Can he give it a precise definition, the way we can define an angstrom or a light year or a gram, or a "selfish" gene, for that matter?  Can he give the empirical principles that support it?  Can he give us a scientific explanation of being?  Can he prove, with science, his own existence?  Or can he do no more than establish his identity, based on his works and the fact everyone associates that face, body, and voice, with that name, so that by convention we agree he is "Richard Dawkins"?  Then again, what does that mean?

Can he establish his own existence?  It would be quite a hat trick.

These issues have been dissected and examined for the past century and a half by people ranging from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein to Sartre to Heidegger to Levinas to Derrida.  These ideas may make your brain cramp, or agree with Wittgenstein that they are language games and confusions arising from misunderstanding the way to play; but the questions are legitimate nonetheless.

I honestly think that Dawkins, once again, simply doesn't know what he's talking about, and he's too ignorant to realize just how ignorant he is.

Those who cannot learn from philosophy are doomed to look like prattling children in the schoolyard.

A Palate Cleanser

I think the market is a great green god....

Because I have more to say about Thomas Lessl and Galileo and science and modernity.  But as an interlude, a word from Charlie Pierce:

Sooner or later, it's up to the voters to decide to stop being stupid about their own self-interest, and to stop falling for scams about how the Poors and Browns are the ones stealing all their money.

Yes, but since that particular scam has been run since at least the days of Reconstruction, and since even now the "preferential option for the poor" is to make them rich (or else blame them for not being rich, because morals), and it is still news to people that Dr. King was murdered during his leadership of a march for economic, not just racial, justice....

Well, don't expect that situation to change anytime soon, despite the very best efforts of Senator Professor Warren; who is, after all, only one Senator.

The fix is in; and animus towards the poor and against the minorities (now "illegal immigrants" represent that rising tide which will swamp all our boats; but even that term is not about race, because it's never about race) is bone deep in America, and digging deeper every year.

The prospects for peace are awful.

What does Advent get us ready for?

So, I got into this church discussion with Mahanoy at Street Prophets; none of it really new, I suppose, but interesting enough I wanted to bring it over here. His original post is here. This is my comment, Mahanoy's response, and my answer:

I haven't read this from Tillich, so I'm grateful for the reference. I'll have to look it up.

I'd come to much the same conclusion myself, on separate grounds: ecclesiological grounds, actually. In brief, the culture once supported Protestantism (think Calvin running a city in Switzerland, or Milton working for Cromwell's government, or even the Puritans running New England and banning Christmas, among other things).

I don't quite agree with you that 'evangelical Christianity' is the third way, btw. That's just Protestantism wed to the enterpreunerial culture of late 20th century America. It's already starting to come apart as it doesn't meet the needs either of parishioners or of the changing world.

But back to the point (if I can): all of what you quote there I would say is simply sociology (and I've discussed it at length elsewhere, though I'm too busy to look up the links just now). The real issue is the identity of the church: having once identified itself with the "public square," and now being pushed out of that square (just as RC was by the Reformation), the church naturally either acquiesces, or fights futilely, the rising wall of separation that began to be built in earnest by Justice Douglas only 40 years ago.

Now church has no "place" except as yet another option among options in our culture. The "growing churches" more and more resemble TV shows or dinner theater, which is no accident: Protestantism knows nothing so well as how to ape the culture. But it is no longer a pillar of the culture, just an appendage.

The real question is not: "Is there a third way?", but: where to now? I think the only alternative is to go "counter-cultural" (how sixties of me!) which means abandoning the Constantinian model like the fossil it is, and moving (spiritually, if not phyiscally) back to the desert with the 4th century monks.

That time, IMHO, has come 'round again.

Post-Constantian [sic] Era

We're there - we've been there for about 30 years, if not more. I completely agree with you there. But I disagree about the need to "return to the desert." Completely disagree, in fact. If anything, the church needs to be more involved in the world in all its ugliness and brokenness and suffering. The church still has a word to proclaim. I agree with Melanchthon that the church is constituted by its proclamation and its celebration of the sacraments. The church exists, not for itself, but for others. It is called to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, and that means involvement in the public square. There are many ways of proclaiming the gospel, of course, and I'm not advocating a militant evangelism (far from it - that's the very last thing the church should be doing, in my opinion). And the church shouldn't give a damn if it's growing or not - that's not the point. The point is proclaiming the gospel. If the church grows, that's great. If not, that's fine too. We made a fundamental and perhaps fatal mistake when we started equating faithful ministry with more people in the pews. But the church has to proclaim the gospel to the world and be the body of Christ in the world - otherwise its just another civic organization.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo

by Mahanoy

I would have disagreed with myself only a few years ago. Took me a long time to recognize the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, because retreat to the desert is not retreat from the world, although it's hard to see that without first accepting that it isn't.

Full immersion in the world can end up with Ted Haggard and James Dobson and Pat Robertson preaching on TV while operating a diamond mine. That's one extreme which a retreat to the desert corrects.

I don't advocate this as an absolute stance, in other words. I don't mean the only place for the church is in the wilderness. But John went there because people needed to leave the city to hear God's word. Jesus went there because John was of God. Jesus went back to the cities, but was never part of them. He walked where he wanted to, ate what he wanted to (his disciples gleaning the wheat), ate with whom he wanted to ("Do you see this woman?"), and generally taught in ways that turned all our expectations upside down. And there is a strong case to be made that Jesus' preparation for that ministry, a ministry in the world but not of the world, began in the desert.

The usual translation is 'wilderness.'

So when I say withdraw, I don't mean as a permanent condition, world without end, amen. I mean as a recognition that Protestantism is dead, that it was part of the culture of the world but is so no longer, and God is doing a new thing, and we need to go out to the wilderness where God is making straight paths, so we can see it coming.

When we are ready, we can return to the city. When we are ready, we can bring back what we have found in the wilderness. There is a pattern here, dare I say a tradition?

by Rmj

On that business of Christianity and culture, a few more notes. first, the "War on Christmas, which makes Mr. Eskow particularly eloquent this morning:

Here's your idea of martyrdom: Some business people asked their staff to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." You heard about it. And that made you feel bad.

As trials and tribulations go, it beats getting stoned to death like St. Stephen. These businesses are only trying to be considerate toward the feelings of others, but the airwaves are ringing with your howls of anguish.

The truth is you cynical hacks (yeah, you, O'Reilly and Gibson) are exploiting faith, getting political and financial mileage out of a faith you claim to follow. Yet I must admit you guys look genuinely aggrieved - even as your checks keep clearing the bank.

Even rich ministers like Jerry Falwell , the kind who like to bellyache about secular self-indulgence, want the whole country to be organized around their emotional needs.

Tell me: How is this "Happy Holidays" business making you suffer, exactly? Do you depend on the greeters at Wal-Mart for your theological guidance? Does the absence of the Savior's name in the Sears catalog leave you spiritually adrift in a hostile cosmos?

Nah. You're just falling back on the worst kind of Me-Generation, touchy-feely, self-pitying behavior. You're complaining because it makes you uncomfortable. It's Christian Dominionism for the "feel good" crowd.

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned stoicism?

And let's see - what else has got you o'riled? What's the latest tragedy? Did some Town Council in Connecticut take the Nativity scene out of that folksy little gazebo in the plaza?

Let's all sing together: "Feelings/nothing more than feelings ..."

St. Peter was crucified upside down, and Polycarp was stabbed to death. You didn't hear them complaining. But you guys live in wealth and privilege under the most powerful nation in history, and yet with all your political influence you can't stop mewling like kittens.

And if it isn't about my feelings, it's about my need for power. Then, the latest in "Christian video-gaming," introduced by Hecate, in comments at Eschaton:

I predict the Left Behind Game will be a huge seller. Kill a non-believer and then say a prayer. Yeah! God gives you more points! It's as if everything that's wrong with our culture has been distilled down into one video game. And it will make its creators rich. But then, I repeat myself.
Hecate, Runnymeade Conspirator

That was in reference to this game:

In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story.

When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game.

"That is so obvious," he said.

Left Behind is a real-time strategy and adventure game. Players don't role-play like in Grand Theft Auto -- it's more like the board game Risk than Clue.

Part of the "action" of the game requires the player to convert non-Christians, or to kill them. But it's okay, because it's actually a non-violent game, and if it is violent, it's all for a good cause:

Left Behind Games' president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is pacifist because players lose "spirit points" every time they gun down nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by having their character pray.

"You are fighting a defensive battle in the game," Frichner, whose previous company produced Bible software, said of combatting the Antichrist. "You are a sort of a freedom fighter."

Frankly, if these two examples don't represent the end of Protestantism, its eschaton, that is, certainly not its telos, they should. The only valid response to this kind of "Christianity" is a retreat to the desert, because a Christianity that produces this vision of the world is so co-opted by the world it needs a fresh slate to start over with, and a spiritual examination the likes of which would make even Ted Haggard blanch.