"Let's get ready to rumb-ullllllllllllllllllllllllllllll !

Pastor Dan swims back in to my ken, and what brings him to attention is an interesting topic:  a fight between 9 churches in Phoenix, Arizona; although in this case, it's 8 against 1.

It seems the pastor of The Fountains UMC has annoyed several other churches in Phoenix.  I'm getting the story from one of the links in Pastor Dan's post; admittedly, it's the website of The Fountains, but you can find other links there (if you're curious) and there are photos of the banners, the ads, and the article that has sparked 8 churches to preach in unison against...well, against modern biblical scholarship and 20th century theology, essentially.

Pastor Dan professes no sympathy for "progressive" Christianity, but I cannot but disagree with him.  Especially since the cause of this brouhaha doesn't seem to profess any desire for either a fight, or for "victory":

While this all may seem scary, it has already proven to be tremendous publicity for our church that “Prays Well With Others” with Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Open Doors. Our strategy is to not be defensive or argumentative, but to keep articulating the positive attributes of Progressive Christianity and always err on the side of grace as we move ahead. There are many who are hungry for the message The Fountains offers – we look forward to this situation helping us reach more and more of them!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us or Pastor David directly. We’re looking forward to an amazing Sunday with lots of new friends and supporters in attendance as we Reach, Touch, and Teach by living and sharing the stories of Jesus!

The 8 churches make their stance rather plain in the ad.  "Progressive," used to modify "Christianity," is in quotes, and the topic is whether this kind of Christianity is "Fact or Fiction."  In my experience, people so concerned about the statements of belief or understanding of another group are trying to reassert their own boundaries.  They are, in essence, trying to reaffirm who they are, by denigrating someone who looks too much like them.

Sort of like "New Atheists" who think all religion is fundamentalist American Christianity, which they must strain every effort to prove they have nothing in common with.  They doth protest too much, in other words.

What I wish I knew was:  what's going on in Phoenix?  The pastor of The Fountains wrote a book on "Progressive Christianity" (that's part of the title), but that was 3 years ago.  The Fountains supports LGBT rights, but so do several UCC churches here in Houston* (of course, we're too small to notice, here).   There is a UCC church in Dallas which made its focus the outreach to the gay community, and I don't think it prompted an organized backlash like this.  Is The Fountains getting local attention for their stance?  Is it attracting new members who like this theology?  Clearly it represents a threat to these 8 very conservative churches (one of the 8 is a Presbyterian church, which denomination has been beset with battles over LGBT rights; the other mainline, non-Baptist church is a MO Synod Lutheran church, an extremely conservative branch of the Lutheran brand).  The question is:  why?

Pastor Dan worries this is a sign the church is both shrinking and becoming more threatening:  it will, he fears, become "more conservative and more liberal."  Eh, I guess.  Seems to me that trend got started with the publishing of The Fundamentals in the early 20th century.*  Or with shifts in thinking in Europe which frightened immigrants in this country who preserved "the Old Country" in amber and held to an unchanging ideal of Europe which, of course, had to change.  As much as American immigrants were supposed to melt away in America, they were allowed to keep their religious practices as a relic of home (hence we have only had one Catholic POTUS, and he had to reassure the Protestants that he wouldn't take orders from Rome).  And home had to stay the way immigrants remembered it; except it refused to, and that, too, was apostasy.

So this is an old and deep divide, and it's working out, or at least the struggle with it, is inevitable.  This is, as far as Diana Butler Bass can see (cited at The Fountains website, but no further), unprecedented.  But since we can't republish "The Fundamentals" again, I suspect this may become a trend around the country.

Which could have ironic results.  Several years ago a UCC church in Texas, the largest in a small Texas town (yeah, still....), decided the UCC was "too liberal" (I guess now we'd say "Progressive") and it left the UCC to start a new denomination, one more to its liking.  It expected many UCC, and other disaffected, congregations to join it.  I don't know that any ever did.  The other UCC church in the town gained members after that split (those who left that congregation to stay in the UCC), and proclaimed itself the "largest UCC church in town."  And it was, of course.  Was that a split between "progressives" and "true Christians"?  If so, history since Luther nailed up his 95 Thesis is replete with such examples.  I pastored a church that had split, decades earlier, over the decision to spend money re-carpeting the main worship space.  The "new church" was a few blocks down the street.

Same as it ever was.

Could the answer to the question "Why"? be the fight over gay rights and gay weddings?  Yeah:

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher warned that Bush “can’t avoid forever the greatest threat to religious freedom in our present moment: the advance of gay rights.”
.....
According to the trial court’s decision, finding that Stutzman had violated the state’s anti-discrimination law, Stutzman testified in her deposition that Ingersoll “came in and we were just chitchatting and he said that he was going to get married. Wanted something really simple, khaki I believe he said. And I just put my hands on his and told him that because of my relationship with Jesus Christ I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do his wedding.”

Which is funny, because it was Jesus himself who was criticized for associating with prostitutes and tax collectors.  "More Catholic than the Pope" doesn't begin to express it.

Same as it ever was, indeed.

*if you read all of those posts, you'll find that Henry Emerson Fosdick (who I still think gave his name to "Fearless Fosdick."  Al Capp was very conservative.) in 1922 was already questioning the necessity of the virgin birth, or a literal second coming of Christ, as a part of Christian belief.  Neither of those tenets, by the way, have to be affirmed for one to be considered a Christian, according to the accepted definition of "Christian" among the mainline denominations.   The minimal requirements of  of Christianity are baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (even Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, the "inclusive" version of the Trinitarian formula, is not acceptable), acceptance of baptism and communion/eucharist as sacraments, and affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God.  The rest is optional.

But:  1922.  As I say, this stuff is still "trickling down."  No doubt Fosdick was looking at the small number of Americans who were members of a religious organization (it had risen slightly since 1920 or so, but been flat since 1906) and trying to do something about it.  When does it ever change?

Comfort ye my people

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Karl Marx

And if religion is given up, are the people then free to "demand...their real happiness"?  No, not really.

It seems pretty clear that lower income people are more likely to buy this as an investment and not just as a game.....In other words, lotto games aren't merely just another form of cheap entertainment like movies, they're also a prayer against poverty.  And so is this the kind of government...we want to fund, one that asks lower income people who have been hurt by globalization and technology in the last twenty years to bear more of government spending and then to call it a voluntary act at the end?...It seems to me what is happening here is that, because the effective tax rate of lotteries, at 40% or above, is so high, that what you're essentially doing is asking people to give you their prayers, and then taxing their prayers against poverty. 

Give Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's.  And what is that, exactly?  Now, or in the 1st century?

Falling Down

I'm just reacting here, because this is the only "review" of the final episode of "Mad Men" that I've read.  I watched the series religiously (!) when I had cable/satellite.  I haven't seen the last half-season yet because it won't be on Netflix for awhile.  That said, I can live with spoilers.  But I'm intrigued with what I read here.  It captures pretty well the decay of the earnestness of the '60's into a mushy "spirituality" that really had no core, no principles, no precepts, except to feel better about yourself:  the worst detritus of Romanticism, in short.  Apparently the TV series ended, in Auden's felicitous phrase from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, with the brokers yelling like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, and each character in the cell of him/her-self.  And maybe with a very penetrating truth about this all too American story (apologies for the length of this quote, but for it to make sense I have to put the important last two paragraphs of the review in context):

I left this finale believing myself to be disappointed in Don Draper, but I’m really disappointed with myself. Disappointed for this narrative of settling for the modern world—which, along with its many perks, like lower infant mortality and longer life expectancy, comes with a horrifying feeling of emptiness from time to time, as we all seem to strive to live an existence that is not great or searing but just okay, just fine, just good enough to get by. Most of us in the first world don’t go bed hungry anymore—but as Peggy observed to the Burger Chef executives, “you’re starving, and not just for dinner.” Don and Peggy and Joan and Sally can’t really flame out beautifully in “Mad Men” because they are modeled to be people just like we are people, and yes, it is disappointing. Some kind of conflagration, of either the body or the soul, would have been so much more cathartic, so much more satisfying. It would have given voice to the roiling emptiness within. But instead we just get scenes from one more day in the lives of these people. One more day is all any of us ever get, until the day we don’t.


One line from Coca-Cola’s official history of “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” made me laugh. Billy Davis, the music director for the Coke account, had a problem with the idea for the spot when it was pitched to him. He said: “Well, if I could do something for everybody in the world, it would not be to buy them a Coke… I’d buy everyone a home first and share with them in peace and love.” Backer, the creative director, responded with one of the most confident, full-of-shit lines of spin in history: “Okay, that sounds good. Let’s write that and I’ll show you how Coke fits right into the concept.”

The thing is—and maybe this is the whole point of “Mad Men,” from selling cancer sticks to selling world peace—advertising can be lovely, in its own way. Selling a thing and believing it often go hand in hand. “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” is a fantasy, but it’s a beautiful dream: loving families, world peace, multiculturalism, homes shared in peace and love. It’s just that sometimes having that dream and not being able to realize it can corrode you from the inside out. The almost-nameless man in group therapy who starts sobbing while articulating the awful loneliness inside of him describes his life as a failed attempt to feel love: “You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it. People aren’t giving it to you. Then you realize, they’re trying. And you don’t even know what it is.” Advertising is narrative designed to make you feel you need something more to feel complete. The result is that it makes hollow, grasping fools out of all of us.

We have settled for our imperfect but comfortable world, with its complacencies and its blind spots. We have also settled for our fantasies to be nothing more than fantasies, for our fondest hopes to be merely strings within us that can be tugged by TV writers and corporate advertisers. We have settled for a world where our heroes are ad men. Don Draper isn’t real, but the rest of it is all too familiar.

And since I read this on Salon, I couldn't help thinking what sounds rather like a triumphalist thought (and I hate those, but):  What does atheism have to offer against this?  Is this all there is?  Materialism (which is what advertising sells) "that...makes hollow, grasping fools out of all of us"?

The essence of American Liberalism

This is such a clear and cogent statement, it almost alone explains why we are still fighting the fights of the 19th century.

Well, in "popular discourse," anyway.  Even the most atheist of modern scholars and philosophers have long since moved on from the feeble position of Richard Dawkins (who doesn't know enough to be embarrassed by his ignorance):

Up to now the American Reformation was hard to see for two main reasons. The first is the very myth of orthodox American Christianity produced by the evangelical side of the debate, a useful fiction in a country with a sizable Protestant majority but a guarantee of religious freedom instead of an established religion. This myth, adopted by scholars and popular commentators alike, equates religion with Christianity, Christianity with supernatural belief, and Christian belief with a particular faith in the special saving grace of Jesus through his blameless death and glorious resurrection. This evangelical kernel of Christianity had certainly been part of the Puritan tradition— and of other American Protestant sects as well as Catholicism— but the revival movement of the eighteenth century separated this kernel from other beliefs and practices that had grown up with those traditions, delineating the evangelical doctrine starkly so that it became the essence of faith. The myth of orthodox American Christianity gave rise to a distinction between head and heart, or the intellect and the soul, making any departure from so-called orthodoxy appear as a falling away from religion, a decline from faith, a crisis, a move of revolt or rejection or outright warfare on religion that inexorably brings on secularization, which measures value by the merely natural or material rather than the ultimate or divine and is widely associated with modernity. Christians who deplore secularization and humanists who applaud it have both found this myth useful, but lifting the veil of orthodoxy from the actual complexity of American religious thought reveals that the liberals who departed from this alleged orthodoxy did so in fidelity to their Christian faith rather than in spite of it.  (emphasis mine)

This is a book I think I actually want to read.  I mean, if this doesn't sound like an objection to the stupidity of Dawkins and Coyne & Co., I really don't know what does:

Against those who believed they already knew what was right and pursued policies to reflect this fixed truth, liberals advocated for truths they recognized as provisional and incomplete, and they were committed to listening to contrary opinions for any possible truths the opposition might hold and working dialogically toward consensus.

And this:

Two subtle ironies surround the history of this religion of democracy. The first is that the liberal Christians who set its wheels in motion acquired a reputation for softening their religion into mere morality, as though to focus on ethics were to focus on something other than real religion. From the liberal point of view, virtue is the fruit by which true faith is known. This charge is a by-product of the myth of orthodox Protestant Christianity, made especially potent by what happened during the middle period of the American Reformation. When Romantic ideas about universal inner divinity arose amid an exploding literary canon that was globally inclusive for the first time, Christianity’s claims to exclusive truth started to look like hubris to some liberals. How could an open- minded moral agent be so sure a Hindu did not know God? Transcendentalists and others then left the Christian fold without really rejecting Christ. To the surprise of many faithful devotees of the American Reformation, liberal Christians started battling their own intellectual and cultural progeny, post- Christian religious liberals who discovered the divine not only in the Christian Bible but far beyond it. This post- Christian turn marked the end of the American Reformation and the beginning of the religion of democracy in which no tradition could boast unique revelation but all individuals bore unique inner divinity.

Sounds like the kind of kenosis Vattimo describes.  Close enough to make for a fruitful dialogue, at least.

Gonna have to check my local bookstore on Monday morning.*

I can't leave this out of at least a footnote:

This then highlights another film across this history: the one trend in the history of American religion to resist the myth of orthodox Protestant Christianity is the history of liberal religion, which includes post- Christian, metaphysical, spiritual- but- not religious, and other nonevangelical forms of religion in the genuine and robust history of religion in the United States— and then goes on to treat liberal religion as though it did away with sin, and as though liberal religion had nothing to do with politics. 

Calvinism was not the sole form of "orthodox Protestant Christianity."  That was the Reformed stream; the other great stream was Lutheranism (and the related stream of the Episcopal Church, which is strictly neither Reformed nor Lutheran).  And even by the mid 19th century, the German Reformed and German Evangelical churches (at least) were bringing to America theologies that didn't depend on the Calvinism of the American Protestant majority (i.e, the Pilgrims and, by that time, the Baptists).   I'm not sure when the Lutherans became a major presence, but it may have been before the Evangelical and German Reformed churches got here.  There is a stream of Christianity which is not necessarily "liberal" but is certainly not grimly Calvinistic, and yet very orthodox Protestant Christianity.  The truth, as always, is messy.

"It's your fault I'm so angry!"

I have no comment on this, other than to point out, given the example of Richard Dawkins (“I DON’T give a damn if people find religious belief comfortable or meaningful. I only care whether it’s true.”) and Jerry Coyne*, the New Atheists are clearly interested in only one thing:  not being religious believers.

Which ties them to religion as tightly as one can be bound.

Funny, that.

*Well, and Stephen Pinker, who doesn't get quoted in the article.  Funny, thing, too, that Twitter has become our forum for intellectual exchange.  Who knew you could be so wise and insightful in 140 characters?

Entries for the Commonplace Book

Godel's conclusions bear on the question whether a calculating machine can be constructed that would match the human brain in mathematical intelligence.  Today's calculating machines have a fixed set of directives built into them; these directives correspond to the fixed rules of inference of formalized axiomatic procedure.  The machines thus supply answers to problems by operating in a step-by-step manner, each step being controlled by the built-in directives.  But, as Godel showed in his incompleteness theorem, there are innumerable problems in elementary number theory that fall outside the scope of a fixed axiomatic method, and that such engines are incapable of answering, however intricate and ingenious their built-in mechanisms may be and however rapid their operations.  Given a definite problem, a machine of this type might be built for solving it; but no one such machine can be built for solving every problem.  The human brain may, to be sure, have built-in limitations of its own, and there may be mathematical problems it is incapable of solving.  But, even so, the brain appears to embody a structure of rules of operation which is far more powerful than the structure of currently conceived artificial machines.  There is no immediate prospect of replacing the human mind by robots.

Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel's Proof.  New York:  New York University Press, 9th printing, 1974.  pp. 100-101.

The Biological Assumption

In the period between the invention of the telephone relay and its apotheosis in the digital computer, the brain, always understood in terms of the latest technological inventions, was understood as a part telephone switchboard or, more recently, as an electronic computer.  This model of the brain was correlated with work in neurophysiology which found that neurons fired a somewhat all-or-nothing burst of electricity.  This burst, or spike, was taken to be the unit of information in the brain corresponding to the bit of information in a computer.  This model is still uncritically accepted by practically everyone not directly involved with work in neurophysiology, and underlies the naive assumption that man is a walking example of a successful digital computer program.
....

The Epistemological Assumption

[A]lthough human performance might no be explainable by supposing that people are actually following heuristic rules in a sequence of unconscious operations, intelligent behaviors might be formalizable in terms of such rules and thus reproduced by machine.  This is the epistemological assumption.

Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do:  A Critique of Artificial Reason.  (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1992), pp. 159, 189, 205.

There is also an "ontological assumption."  It is the "assumption that this world can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of context-free data or atomic facts."  Nagel and Newman actually address this assumption in their explanation of Godel's theorem, as a matter of context for understanding what Godel established.  Modal logic arose as an effort to remove context from data and so provide it with a system that would allow understanding free of assumptions that confuse the analysis of logic.  It's part of establishing an axiomatic system from which formalizable information can be derived, and it is a laudable and powerful tool.  However, as Godel's theorem shows, you eventually have to resort to information not available within a formal system to establish the consistency of the formal system (and what makes that new system consistent, i.e., incapable of producing contradictory conclusions)?

Post-modernism has been working on the "ontological assumption" for some time now.  It has been weighed and found wanting.

Stephen Hawking needs to stop watching so many science fiction movies.

Sam Harris is a terrible horrible very bad no(t) good thinker

Mostly, I wanted an excuse to use this picture....

I should have paid a little more attention to the e-mail exchange between Chomsky and Harris.
For example, I caught the "good intentions" defense of America by Harris; what I missed was the moral superiority based on, you know, exceptionalism:

For Sam Harris, “not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development.” Yes, he admits, the U.S. has committed atrocities at a larger scale than many of our enemies, but we have higher moral standing because these were mistakes. Harris likens the U.S. to a “well-intentioned giant,” whose aims are good even if it occasionally blunders.

Yikes!  "Same state of moral development"?  What you mean "we," Kemosabe?

I'll leave the "thought experiment" Harris constructs from that premise for Chomsky to rebut (you can read it easily at the link).  I'm still stuck on this "some cultures are morally superior to others."  I knew modern-day atheists were still pretty much on the cutting edge of the 19th century.  I had no idea they were stuck on the bleeding edge of 19th century empire.

This is not a passing fancy with Harris; it is his raison d'être, indeed, it is his reason, period.

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris accuses Chomsky and other leftists of “moral blindness” towards the important differences between “the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence [perpetuated by Muslim governments].” Harris argues that there is a qualitative moral difference between the U.S. and the Muslim world, which leftists like Chomsky cannot see.

Because, you know, we're at a different stage of moral development.  Can I just say, at the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, that this was the reasoning used by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, and any other classification of people they could come up with?

Because, really, it was.

I can understand why Harris' argument is appealing.  I can also understand why it sells books.  But even in America, popularity and profits should not equal moral authority.  Or good sense, for that matter.

"Who looks out for shit kickers like you?"

I have, in my vast and yeasty archives, pictures like this.  That's the President of the United States with those people.  Ever seen a picture of Barack Obama in similar circumstances?  Neither have I.

Here's Robert Kennedy:


And here's President Obama at least talking about poverty:

Granted, that last one is a bit unfair, but even that appearance alone was too much for the delicate sensibilities of FoxNews and Joe Scarbrough.

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Imagine if Obama had dared to show up in pictures with actual poor people, so we had to see what they looked like. Eh, we'd just hear about how they had refrigerators and cell phones, again.

Update:  one other thing to notice about that stage in Georgetown:  no women.  Which, honestly, is a glaring omission, and I'm ashamed I didn't notice it myself.

Being and Time and Comedy Central

The weakening of Being (Heidegger) has made "Christianity" once again a legible, credible story, one that we can take seriously, and secularization has transcribed that story from unreadable myth into legible history. In secular culture the old religious narratives are published in a new edition, translated into the secular vernacular in an affordable paperback. There they are no longer tales told about transcendent transactions in eternity but stories about the saeculum, the historical time in which real people live. There is thus a "family resemblance" between the weakening of Being and the rebirth of religion, an essential correlation. With the withering away of metaphysics, which was given ample opportunity to prove its worth and whose only result was an arid and reifying rationality that turned the world and human life into objects for instrumental reason, we are free to return for nourishment to the old religious narratives.

 I was going to pull apart this long passage by Caputo, in order to focus on certain passages.  Then I got sidetracked by this interview with Reza Aslan:

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For the record, what Aslan is talking about here is hermeneutics; i.e., everything is interpretation. Scriptures are right because I say so, and because of how I interpret them.  There's also something to be said about Christmas there, and in Caputo:

For example, for Vattimo, the commonplace complaint that the secular world has taken the Christ of to Christmas and transcribed it into "Happy Holidays" is to be viewed as still another success on Christianity's part. For now the Incarnation, a theological doctrine accepted in a strong or robust form only within confessional limits, has been translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails. During the "holidays" this attenuated if wispy "spirit" of love becomes general among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually "means," its application in the concrete reality of lived experience.

So I gotta postpone that discussion a little longer....

Gianni Vattimo relates a funny story

In one sense, it is exactly because of the loss of a unified religious authority that there is a sort of rebirth of religiosity.  Real religiosity relies on secularization because religion is no longer single or uniform and there is no longer a central religious authority.  On the other hand, secularization and the new religiosity are also related by a sort of therapeutic connection because if I am ready to accept literally the return of religion in Italy, I would say that this religiosity tends again to be a sort of resecularized religiosity--that is, a religiosity that lives only as a consequence of secularization.  For example, John Paul II made great use of the media, his message was communicated via television, and, as his death showed so well, he was a legitimate global media star.  There is a sort of false universalism promoted by the media, which is very contradictory.  People are more interested in the religious show than they are in religious engagement.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the Roman Catholic Church's celebration of the Year of the Jubilee in 2000.  Many young people came to Rome to see and hear from the pope.  This was perceived by many as an example of the rise of religiosity among today's youth.  But, after they had left and when it came time to clean up the area where the youth had spent the night, they found three hundred thousand condoms.

After the Death of God, pp. 95-96.

Elsewhere in this dialogue Vattimo notes the Church of Rome would prefer a return to the Middle Ages when it was the absolute power in Europe.  But anyone who has read Chaucer knows that, if medieval Europe could have gathered 300,000 youth and provided them with condoms, there would have been just as many condoms left behind in any mass pilgrimage to Canterbury or to Rome.  And my church history professor told of people racing from church to church in medieval Europe to catch the epiclesis, the moment the priest raises the elements of the Mass and blesses them, and they become the body and blood of Christ, revealing the true presence of God.  It was commonly thought that to look upon this glory of God would leave one struck dead, but as churches ran without a central time system, and so had services at different times on a Sunday morning, there were people who raced from church to church to catch just this moment, hoping to see God.

I'm not sure how much religiosity either Chaucer's pilgrims and their stories, or that bit of historical lore, reveals.

Same as it ever was, in other words.  We return, as ever, to gone away.

Don't change the facts, change the outlook

Mornings with John Caputo:

Above all, I am inclined today to organize everything I think about postmodern thought and about postmodern theology in particular around the figure of weakness, a figure forever associated with [Gianno] Vattimo's brilliant articulation of what he calls weak thinking (pensiero debole).  On an analogy with Vattimo's weak thought, I speak of a weak theology.  Such an expression, which is also to be found in Jeffrey Robbins and the Dominican theologian Ulrich Engel, does not refer to intellectual spinelessness but, in the first place, to a weakening of the militant dogmatic tendencies of the confessional theologies, which in modernity fused in a lethal way with the Cartesian paradigm of certitude.  As Engel points out, were the great religions of the Book to look to their own teachings about humility and to their traditions of mystical theology, which stressed that the truly divine God is the Godhead that eludes our comprehension, it would give them pause to so militantly pursue their purposes.

....

The Christian church should accordingly reconsider its critique of an increasingly secular culture, and, instead of lamenting defeat at the hands of secularization, it should declare victory and march home in triumph.  For what else is Western culture than the translation of otherworldly Christianity into terrestrial structures, the conversion of its celestial currency into the coin of the more benign ethical, social, political, and even economic institutions of the Western world?  The weakening of Being (Heidegger) has made "Christianity" once again a legible, credible story, one that we can take seriously, and secularization has transcribed that story from unreadable myth into legible history.  In secular culture the old religious narratives are published in a new edition, translated into the secular vernacular in an affordable paperback.  There they are no longer tales told about transcendent transactions in eternity but stories about the saeculum, the historical time in which real people live.  There is thus a "family resemblance" between the weakening of Being and the rebirth of religion, an essential correlation.  With the withering away of metaphysics, which was given ample opportunity to prove its worth and whose only result was an arid and reifying rationality that turned the world and human life into objects for instrumental reason, we are free to return for nourishment to the old religious narratives.


For example, for Vattimo, the commonplace complaint that the secular world has taken the Christ of to Christmas and transcribed it into "Happy Holidays" is to be viewed as still another success on Christianity's part.  For now the Incarnation, a theological doctrine accepted in a strong or robust form only within confessional limits, has been translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails.  During the "holidays" this attenuated if wispy "spirit" of love becomes general among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually "means," its application in the concrete reality of lived experience.  The tolerant, non-authoritarian and pluralistic democratic societies in the West are the translation into real political structures of the Christian doctrine of neighbor love.  When the transcendent God is "weakened"--or emptied--into the world, it assumes the living form of Western cultural life.  Vattimo shows that this schema, which modernity first learned from Hegel and Schelling, and was deployed by Altizer and the 1960s [Death of God] movement, is found in its earliest form in Joachim of Fiora's millennialist doctrine of the "three ages," that of the Father (Judaism), the Son (the New Testament), and the Spirit, which is the unfolding of the Kingdom of God on earth from the year 1000 on.  Western history for Vattimo is the Wirkungsgeschicte of a "classic" in the Gadamerian sense, of the New Testament, its unfolding life and application, its developing revelation and realization, translation and transcription. But in Vattimo the age of the Spirit is not a version of metaphysics, not the biography of the Absolute in time, as it is in Joachim, Hegel, and Alter, which is strong thinking, but an interpretive schema, a way to put the realization that we have always to do with conflicting interpretations whose only measure is love without measure.


The task of intellectuals today is therefore twofold.  On the hand, they must move beyond the old reductionism and objectivism of the nineteenth century and take the hermeneutic turn.  In such a world the old religious narratives have once again to be taken seriously as irreducible language games or forms of life that uniquely instruct us about the meaning of our lives.  On the other, the task of the intellectual is firefighting, that is, to see that while the flame of such religious narratives is kept alive it does not burn out of control.  While the stories are to be taken seriously, they are not to be taken literally, which would issue in the worst sort of fundamentalism, the worst hardening of theology into authoritarianism and dogma, as opposed to its weakening into pluralism and hospitality.

After the Death of God, pp. 73-76,

"Where's all the people?"

Southern Beale insists Christianity is "dying" (because the only Christians in the world are in America!) and the headline writers at Salon are driven to hyperbolic hyperbole (if that is, indeed possible).  A "record number of Americans consider themselves religiously unaffiliated," declares one. "Fewer Americans than ever identify as Christian" says another.  And all because Pew has released another poll.

As Charlie Pierce might say, this is all my balls.

First, 41% of Americans considered themselves affiliated with religion at all in 1906, so the "record decline" Pew has announced is actually a return to the peak of the last century, in 1998.  That year  70% of Americans declared a religious affiliation, actually a slight decline from the peak for the century just a few years earlier, although an increase from the immediate past.

And then, as Sarah Posner points out:  no.  Just:  no.  She makes 5 points:

1. The  Pew data "does not include its analysis of respondents’ religious intensity or orthodoxy, nor of the respondents’ political and social attitudes." That will come later.

2. "A different Pew survey out last year found a 'growing appetite' for mixing religion and politics, particularly among conservative religious respondents.  Per Posner on that poll, it found “those affiliated with a religion, particularly evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, ‘have become significantly more supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out about political issues and political leaders talking more often about religion.'”

3. Evangelicals, especially white evangelicals, "have been highly politically organized for decades."  And they still think liberals "stole" America and that they must "take it back."

4. Which is important because "the unaffiliated lack such a cohesive political identity."

5.  Speaking of organization:  "While the percentage of white evangelicals who voted in the 2014 midterms outstripped their share of the population as a whole, as Pew noted in its post-election analysis, “despite the continued growth of religious ‘nones‘ within the population as a whole, the share of the electorate with no religious affiliation also is little changed compared with other recent midterms (12% in both 2010 and 2014).” Political organizing and turnout matter far more than numbers."

So everybody take a deep breath.  Christianity is not coming to an end.  Religion is not coming to an end.  And America is not on the verge of becoming an atheist utopia.  And the real issue of faith is not really how it affects American politics.

Believe it or not.*

*And what's interesting is how much faith we have in polls.  The latest British elections left pollsters with egg all over their faces.  This was excused, however, because people don't respond to polls truthfully, or don't answer their phones, or something.  The poll cannot fail, it can only be failed.  The same excuses were trotted out a few years ago when pollsters got a major U.S. election completely wrong. In polls we trust.  God?  Who's God?  How does God poll, that's the question.

Readings in "Spectral Hermeneutics"

My thesis is twofold.  1.  In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the "Kingdom of God" are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called that "world," resulting in what I call a "sacred anarchy."  Consider but a sampling of its more salient features.  In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system or privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed.  The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men [sic] of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in freeness, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved.  In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field.  If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved.  In the Kingdom one should hate one's father and mother but love one's enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek.  There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom.  If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by the Kingdom, you should sell all you have and give it to the poor.  Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself.  If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count.  If you host a party--even a wedding for your children--you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by.  There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine.  Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from their grave.  All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from "repentance" to "being of a new mind and heart," being turned and attuned to the new being that come of belonging to the Kingdom.

2.  The event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force.  Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event that is harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls "the weakness of God."  Saint Paul puts this thesis about weakness very powerfully, even paradigmatically, in a veritably Deleuzian discourse on the "logos of the cross (logos tou staurou)," the mark of which Paul identifies as "foolishness."  Here, in a virtuoso performance of the interweaving of sense and non-sense, of a logos that is the offspring of moria, Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world:  God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who "are not" (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be.  The "weakness of God," Paul says, is stronger than human strength.  (I Cor. 1:25).

John Caputo, "Spectral Hermeneutics," After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2007). pp. 61-62.

Fillin' out my bucket list

I also went here over the weekend.  It was not the spiritual experience of a 400 year old place of worship, but it was a great geek moment.

The view I had was more like this, though.

The best part was, while standing next to one (there's a walking tour, you actually get to stand by one of them.  In that picture above you can just make out some buildings on the right; that's there the tour takes you) as it readjusted its position.  All the others moved synchronously (the dishes, not the actual antenna base; those are moved manually).

We decided it was contacting the Mother Ship, and that it was time to go.  Besides, it was very much a "wind-swept" plain, and even in the mild New Mexico spring, the temperature was a bit brisk."

(And no, these are not my pictures.)

Thanks, Obama!

There is, here, a valuable reminder of just how stupid our Governor is (in that he stands in a long line of Texas Governors, let's be fair):

Fears about the upcoming, multiple-state “Jade Helm 15″ war simulation being a preamble to martial law have circulated on social media and conservative websites for months. After a packed town hall meeting last week about the training exercise in rural Bastrop County, Abbott wrote to the State Guard and said measures would be in place to make sure civil liberties are not infringed upon.


“Frankly, I gotta tell you, I think the cause of the underlying concerns is that we see instances, like a shooting in Fort Hood by a terrorist, that the president labels workplace violence. We see the president come to the border in Texas and say it’s safer than it’s ever been,” said [Texas Governor Greg]Abbott. “And so I think it was a misplaced perception by people in Texas who have problems with the Obama administration and connected that trust with the Obama administration to the military.”  (emphasis added)

That preamble to the quote is the key.  This "outcry" didn't come from the whole state of Texas; it came from a handful of cranks in Bastrop County, which used to be rural and is now the outskirts of Austin's city limits.  Between a Black President and the push of "too cool for the room" Austinites, it's small wonder some in Bastrop are feeling like an invasion is underway.  Of course, there were people at that now infamous meeting who thanked the military for explaining Jade Helm 15" to them.

“I’m thrilled. I was glad to hear the presentation today,” said Don Nichols, a Bastrop resident and Vietnam resident. “We’re training the military and specials operations people specifically to go out and defend our country so we can have that right.”

Nichols and his wife Barbara sat through the entire two-hour long meeting. They said they believe no matter what, people will believe what they want.

“For me, today was kind of painful to watch the disrespect I saw to the lieutenant colonel during the presentation and I personally went up to him and apologized to him for other people and their
rudeness,” said Nichols.

 But sane voices get lost in the hysteria, hysteria Gov. Abbott (who is already on his way to a special wing of the Texas Governor's Hall of Shame) poured kerosene on, again and again.  So now "all of Texas" is upset by "Jade Helm."

And that's Obama's fault.

After all this, what's the impact on Bastrop County?  Less than the traffic going down 290 into Austin:

Sixty. That’s the number of troops Lastoria said would take part in Jade Helm 15 in Bastrop. When it comes to the town and impacting people, Lastoria said there will be two Humvees and water buffalo, a tank used to carry water, that people may see around the city.

Thanks, Obama.  Or, rather, thanks Gov. Abbott, for making everyone in Texas look like fools.  I think you're going to find that's not a winning political strategy.  Just ask Rick Perry.

Out on the Weekend

So I went here over the weekend, among other places.  This is San Miguel de Socorro, in New Mexico.  The stained glass you see above the door there is St. Michael the archangel.  There is a legend connected with the church being protected (and protecting those inside) from an Apache raid by a vision of St. Michael defending the church.  Make of it what you will, but that's the reason for the name.

The Catholic church recognizes a mission/church has been on this site for 400 years (they have a lovely document issued by Pope Francis honoring their anniversary this year).  This building is about 200 years old, which shows more on the interior than the outside.  There is a balcony just above the entrance; the heavy beams of its floor show the marks of being hand-hewn, and are easily eight inches on a side (and if somebody looks up the details and tells me I'm wrong, this being the internet and all, I'll gladly accept the correction; I'm going from memory here).

We arrived after closing time, but a lovely person was there who opened the place for us (five minutes later and she'd have been gone).  It reminded me of my church in Hecker, Illinois, with ropes for the two bells (one in each steeple, in this case), and a sense of both age, and reverence, and purpose about it.  People had been coming to this place for centuries (and to this site before that) for worship and fellowship.

That leaves impressions on a place, and on those who go there.

A pleasant time was had by all.

Thinkin' Geekin' Out

Yeah, it's a gimmick.  But I have a 3-D chess set, a Staunton set I've had since pre-teenagehood, a set made out of nuts and bolts glued together according to directions I got (IIRC) from "Boy's Life" (and if you even remember that publication, you are old!), as well as some figurative sets from Europe and China.

So I think I need this,  Besides, I gotta know how the pieces move when they get to that circular center.....

Robert Browning: 7 May 1812

Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith "A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'' 

Not that, amassing flowers, 

Youth sighed "Which rose make ours, 

Which lily leave and then as best recall?" 

Not that, admiring stars, 

It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars; 

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulling youth's brief years, 

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without, 

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

Were man but formed to feed 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: 

Such feasting ended, then 

As sure an end to men; 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? 

Rejoice we are allied 

To That which doth provide 

And not partake, effect and not receive! 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

For thence,—a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks,— 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me: 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

What is he but a brute 

Whose flesh has soul to suit, 

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 

To man, propose this test— 

Thy body at its best, 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? 

Yet gifts should prove their use: 

I own the Past profuse 

Of power each side, perfection every turn: 

Eyes, ears took in their dole, 

Brain treasured up the whole; 

Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?" 

Not once beat "Praise be Thine! 

I see the whole design, 

I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man! 

   Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!" 

For pleasant is this flesh; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 

Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! 

Let us not always say, 

"Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" 

As the bird wings and sings, 

Let us cry "All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage, 

Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 

From the developed brute; a god though in the germ. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next, 

What weapons to select, what armour to indue. 

Youth ended, I shall try 

My gain or loss thereby; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weigh the same, 

Give life its praise or blame: 

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 

For note, when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the grey: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots—"Add this to the rest, 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

So, still within this life, 

Though lifted o'er its strife, 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

This rage was right i' the main, 

That acquiescence vain: 

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, through acts uncouth, 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made: 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife, should know, than tempt 

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! 

Enough now, if the Right 

And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 

Be there, for once and all, 

Severed great minds from small, 

Announced to each his station in the Past! 

Was I, the world arraigned, 

Were they, my soul disdained, 

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! 

Now, who shall arbitrate? 

Ten men love what I hate, 

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 

Match me: we all surmise, 

They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called "work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 

So passed in making up the main account; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 

All I could never be, 

All, men ignored in me, 

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— 

Thou, to whom fools propound, 

When the wine makes its round, 

"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be: 

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent, 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves, 

Which ran the laughing loves 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

Look not thou down but up! 

To uses of a cup, 

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, 

The new wine's foaming flow, 

The Master's lips a-glow! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who mouldest men; 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I,—to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colours rife, 

Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 

So, take and use Thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 

My times be in Thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned! 

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 

Advancing age makes me appreciate these lines more and more.