On Judgment

I wanted a picture for this, but given where I ended up, this video is the best representation of what I'm talking about here.

This is the problem of getting your information from secondary sources.

According to Religion Dispatches, this is what Jean-Luc Marion wrote:

In a piece published in Le Point on January 12th (translated and reprinted in Sightings on January 30th) eminent philosopher-theologian Jean-Luc Marion declared, “France is at war; we can no longer doubt that this is the case.”

This war, according to Marion, has three fronts: first, the defense against terrorist attack; second, the war to defend secularism (laïcité); and third, the urgent need for Islam to “open itself to critique.”

Well, at least on the latter point:  close, but not a cigar:

The situation can be summed up in this way: the religions demonstrate their excellence only by allowing—and even better, by choosing, for themselves, to undergo the ordeal of self-critique—tests of their religious validity. Religions that do not do this either disappear or degrade ideologically.

Islam has not yet opened itself up to a close analysis (including philological analysis to understand how its texts came into being, an assessment of the interpretations of these texts, in-depth research into their actual religious history, etc.) for historic reasons which themselves would be worthwhile to examine.  

To be fair, what Marion is calling for there is a Western critical analysis of Islam such as Christianity has been undergoing for the past 150 years.  It is an analysis which lead to the creation of Christian fundamentalism, so I'm not as anxious to see it applied to Islam as the French theologian.  There's a cart before the horse feel to the argument, in other words.  The kind of analysis being argued for is what prompted fundamentalism in the world.  Islam, at least in the Middle East, has a surfeit of modernism to deal with; hair of the dog is not the cure for the hangover Islam is currently suffering.

But what he doesn't say is that Islam is not open to critique; my first response to that line was to think that, neither is Christianity, if the reaction to President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast is any indication ("verbal rape"?  Really?)

Then again, American Christians are not the entirety of worldwide Christianity, any more than Islam as pronounced by ISIS or any imam in the Arab countries is Islam in Africa or Asia.  Where, indeed, are the Boko Harams and ISIS's of the Pacific Rim, where the majority of the world's Muslims live?  Then again, Mr. Marion is more interesting in what he says, than in the reduction of what he says:

However, “French-style secularism” has too often tended to understand itself and to comport itself like an army fending off the religions (especially Catholicism), behaving as if it were another religion, substituting itself, in the name of Reason, for the historical religions. Today, this tendency reveals itself in so-called “social” reforms, more or less imposed on people who are more or less in agreement, manipulated or simply ignored.

But let's put that comment in context:

The second front comes into view as soon as one considers that the attack targeted a political and satirical newspaper that caricatured (I underscore this point) all of the religions, based on the principle that one can laugh about anything “and mock everything else.”

If this newspaper was tolerated and even supported by the public, although it was often shocking, it owed this to a fundamental and ancient trait of French society—the freedom to think and to speak—first secured under the Ancien Régime. It rose to the level of principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, took effect when all legislation against blasphemy was abolished at the beginning of the Nineteenth-Century, and was reinforced by the law separating Church and State.

In a way, this crime targeted a central tenet of French society: secularism. Here the second front opens out. What is secularism worth today? We must recognize the ambiguity of this concept and its application. Because, if the State is secular, society is not.

More exactly: the State must be secular (it must refrain from showing favoritism for any particular religion, permit them all to exist under the protection of the law, showing a preference neither for religious belief, nor for unbelief), a stance that I hope no one contests.

But society is not secular and cannot be secular, because upon becoming citizens, men and women do not lose their freedom of conscience—their religious freedom—but, on the contrary, exercise it fully. Besides, the neutrality of the State must never be based on neutralization, forced or tacit, of the religious dimensions of the real men and women who make up society.

This strikes me as theology the way Reinhold Niebuhr practiced it:  taking on secular society from a religious perspective, without being reductionist and insisting on a narrow Christian point of view from which to judge all has having sinned and fallen short of the glory of the believers (yes, I substituted "God" there intentionally).  "If the state is secular, society is not" could have easily come from Niebuhr's pen; or at least aroused a ringing discussion of the differences in their theologies.

Marion here carefully takes the Jeffersonian wall away from those who think Jefferson meant to display hostility to religion (both atheists and true believers in religion, I mean).  The state must be secular; but society is people, and that means they have a freedom of conscience which must be freely exercised.  It does mean the State should not favor Christianity over, say, Islam; but neither must it neutralize religion among individuals.  Go in that direction and all you are doing is substituting one religion for another, even if your "religion" is "reason."

By the way:  challenge the reasoning of Aquinas; or Augustine:  go ahead.  Take them seriously, and attack their reasoning on their home turf.  That'll keep you busy for the rest of your life; and much good may it do you.  I do not agree entirely with the theology of Aquinas or Augustine; but their reasoning is subtle and yet supple enough to have shaped the foundation of thought in Western civilization, no less so than Plato or Aristotle.  Who is going to say the same for any avowed atheist, whose every argument for the abolishing of religion is a reductionist screed?

Marion's conclusion on this point seems equally applicable in America as in Europe, but with a twist:

The second front consists of, and is much more difficult to secure than the first front, a reformation of the secular pact in France (and thus in Europe). To defend secularism, an emergency no one debates, we must redefine it, in positive terms, and not as a constraint. Because we can’t require all of France’s citizens to emasculate themselves religiously.

This is a problem with which we’ve struggled for the past twenty years. Will we know how to address it? It seems to me doubtful that French politicians, still extremely ideological and rather ignorant on the question of religion, are capable of this today.

I don't think American politicians are any more capable than French politicians to handle the problem Marion identifies.  But the willingness of Americans to even handle it is the problem I see (I cannot speak for the attitudes of the French).  President Obama delivers a wholly unremarkable speech at a prayer breakfast (compare what he said to the Easer Sermon of Gregory of Nyssa (excerpted here, here, and here) and tell me who is more enduringly controversial and founded in Christian principles in their words.)  If he'd simply read aloud the words of Basil, or Ambrose, or even the Beatitudes of Jesus in Luke; what do you think people would have said?  His mild remarks and unremarkable observations brought down calumny on his head, mostly from American pundits.  Can we defend secularism and religion any better than the French?  From what I see on bits of the internet, even private citizens are no less "extremely ideological and rather ignorant on the question of religion" than French politicians.

I think Marion is even right on this point:

The situation can be summed up in this way: the religions demonstrate their excellence only by allowing—and even better, by choosing, for themselves, to undergo the ordeal of self-critique—tests of their religious validity. Religions that do not do this either disappear or degrade ideologically.

But I don't think that insight gives me a privileged position from which to judge other religions; or other philosophies, for that matter.  I can adjudge their weaknesses for me; I cannot stand in judgment over them and declare them too infirm until they rise to the level of my preference.  Yes, extremist opinions, like those of Christian white supremacists, can be rejected as inimical to human society.  But from what position do I judge Islam, and it doesn't call into judgment my own Christianity?

Jesus told me "Don't judge, and you won't be judged."  Seminary taught me that means I have to stand outside of any system of judgment, because I cannot judge others without calling myself into judgment.  I will not stand with violence and mayhem as a tool for anything except inflicting violence and mayhem:  but that calls in to judgment violence in the name of reason, nation, religion, even family or tribe.  If I think Islam is in need of greater self-reflection, it means what I most need to reflect on, is my own ignorance and limitations.  Maybe even at a National Prayer Breakfast.

Rendering unto Caesar

Some probate judges in Alabama are following the order of Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore to defy the federal court order finding same-sex marriage cannot be banned under Alabama law. According to Slate, Americans United for Separation of Church and State is encouraging the recalcitrant judges to back down by encouraging potential plaintiffs to sue to enforce the federal court order.

I mention this because the Executive Director of AUSCS is a UCC minister.  Which either means not all things connected to religion or bad, or that Christians who agree with AUSCS are not "real" Christians.

According to people who think there is no such thing as a real "Christian," because all religion is delusional.  I dunno; apparently it makes sense to them.

I give up on Christmas, but....

What have we done to Valentine's Day?

I think after seeing this, I need a live chat with a Bear Counselor.  Or just a counselor....

Seriously.

Mirror, mirror

I'm really tired of the "religion is the source of all evil" argument that's making the rounds of the ignorati (I consider Sam Harris a dangerously stupid man), largely because it's yet another attempt to move responsibility from us, human beings all, to some abstract which, if we can just eliminate "it," all our problems will be solved.

In concreto the argument is that we just need everyone to think like, say, Sam Harris; and then O what a paradise it will be!  Or we could all just think like Richard Dawkins and, like the true Brit he is, lord it over, if not still rule over, the benighted peoples of the world who aren't clever enough to have won as many Nobel Prizes as Englishmen have.  Because in the end, what's a better marker of  superiority, eh?

So when I read something like this, I simply have to quote it with approval:

Obama’s comments about Christianity were much more reserved than they could have been. In the winter of 2015, we should not lose sight of the vast and gruesome horrors rendered in the name of the Christian God following 1615. Arrogance reigned, anxiety soared and the people of Europe died in huge bloody numbers. The source of terrorist acts in our era is not Islam any more than Christianity was the cause of the thousands upon thousands who died in the Thirty Years War. The source of such religiously motivated violence is a volatile mixture of intolerance, ignorance, fear, economic disadvantage, and political machinations. The president's comparison between Islam and Christianity is important: any religion can be used to promote crimes against humanity.

You could remove "religion" from that last phrase, and say "any damned idea at all."  It wasn't exactly a religious crusade that sent Hitler on his quest for a "Final Solution."  There was an old religious element to the anti-Semitism he exploited, but he acted in the name of the Aryan race and the thousand year Reich, not in the name of the God of Abraham, or even of Martin Luther (who, as the professor points out in that linked article, was no choir boy.  Luther's anti-semitism was particularly ugly, of a piece with his anti-Roman attitudes, attitudes which continue to infect Protestantism almost 600 years later.  Ideas are indeed bulletproof, more's the pity.)  Economic disadvantage, fear, ignorance, political machinations, intolerance:  sounds like the major themes of the rise of the Third Reich, to me.  Do we blame Hitler on Christianity?  Or on being all too human?  We don't like the latter, but I've seldom heard anyone seriously conjecture it was the former.

Science?  Science:

brought us eugenics and the Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known but don’t look that great. 

Yes, some those were abuses of science, (even though eugenics was part and parcel of the law of the land of these United States, at least until the Nazis embarrassed it out of us), some just failures to think much about consequences; but no less was the violence done in the name of the God of Jesus an abuse of religion.  And science didn't reach out and compel Harry Truman to bomb Hiroshima with atomic fire; or whisper in the delicate shell-like of Oliver Wendell Holmes that "three generations of imbeciles is enough!"; or tell the Nazis "Why not use gas?  And why not on people?  Think of the efficiencies!"  Any more than religion said "Chop their limbs off!  It's the best way!"

Science and religion, you see, aren't animate objects; they aren't even animals, much less people.  They are human frameworks; human ideas; human categories.  Ecce homo.  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

And ashamed of that mirror, we keep blaming the mirror for the image it shows us.  I'm not sure what science and empiricism have to say about that; but I know what Christianity has to say.  And if Jeremiah Wright had been heard saying what Obama said at the prayer breakfast, he would have been no less scorned for saying it.

Mostly because he, too, would have been right.  And we really cannot bear very much reality.

Family Resemblance

Jeb Bush:

“I would like to see more people marching in the streets for rising student achievement,” he said in a speech in Detroit on Wednesday. “Less people marching in the streets for things that might be important to them, but rising student achievement should be the highest calling for all of us and we should be outraged that it’s not happening to the degree that it should.”

George W. Bush:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.  They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Unless Jeb thinks student achievement is akin to flood waters, I think he meant "raising" student achievement.  But either way, it's unclear exactly what he means:  should people be in the streets demanding students study more?  Or teachers grade easier so students can achieve?

Where, exactly, is our outrage supposed to be focused, and how?

UPDATE:  Turns out there's another problem with "rising student achievement," coming out of Jeb's own backyard:

[FL. State Rep. Charles] VAN ZANT[R.  Of course]: These people, that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you.

The $220 million is money to be spent on Common Core education in Florida.

These are your people, Jeb.  Maybe they understand what "rising student achievement" means.  Maybe it's code for "gay agenda."

I dunno.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

No, it wasn't an accident that I chose that picture for a previous post.  For some reason the nickel finally dropped, and I realized what a profoundly disturbing and depressing film "2001" was.

It's a Kubrick film, so you can't expect an uplifting lesson about the progress of Man, or some such.  But the opening sequence ends with the apes, progenitors to man, discovering the effectiveness of violence.  They can kill a tapir; they can kill the other tribe; and of course it's no accident the bone hurled into the heavens in triumph becomes a satellite orbiting the earth; a satellite bristling with missiles.

The second sequence ends with the madness of HAL-9000.  Except HAL is not mad; HAL has become sentient, has become intelligent.  Just as the apes learned intelligence, and found it linked to violence, the effective violence of self-preservation (which made the bone become a military satellite), so HAL learns intelligence and tries to turn effective violence to self-preservation (Why?  Because HAL has been exposed to knowledge of the slab, a knowledge which sparks HAL's all-too human (?) intelligence).  HAL's only problem is he's up against an intelligent ape who understands self-preservation even better than HAL does, and who effectively "kills" HAL in order to prove it.

The third sequence, then, also ends with incipient violence.  Now Dave Bowman has been exposed to the slab, too; and the Star-Child orbits the earth, where we last saw the whirling, unfinished space station.  He folds his hands together, fingertips just touching, gazing open eyed at the blue marble before him.  If I remember correctly, Arthur C. Clarke ended the novelization of the movie story with the Star-Child first extinguishing the military satellites orbiting the planet.  Nothing like that happens in Kubrick's version, but it is clear the Star-Child is the supreme power on the planet now; that it has learned a new intelligence.  What is not clear is whether this new intelligence precludes the lesson that intelligence=a more effective violence.  But given that the former human being is now an embryonic Star-Child, there's no reason to believe (or hope) the indifference to suffering of others by human infants won't be replicated in this infant.

And if that is evolution, or progress, or any kind of improvement at all, I'm hard pressed to see it.  All we are really spared in the movie's ending is the series of nuclear explosions that concluded "Dr. Strangelove."  But then, it wouldn't have been funny a second time around; and there's nothing to indicate in this vision of humanity that we'll all meet again, anywhere, ever.  And while I have problems with the film's version of "human intelligence," it is also of a piece with the reasoning of the secular world.

Only because I'm not on Facebook

And so can't comment at Charlie Pierce's place:

At 91 years old, the former secretary of state, national security adviser and intellectual-cum-celebrity has come to occupy a unique place in the foreign policy firmament. Though some historians blame him for countless deaths in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh, Kissinger is more revered than ever in Washington. He has become a Yoda-like figure, bestowing credibility and a statesman's aura to politicians of both parties, including ones who may not actually share his worldview.

"Thou hast committed fornication
But that was in another country
And besides, the wench is dead."

--Christopher Marlowe

We get most of our political culture from Britain, to whom the rest of the world is "another country," and so what you do there doesn't really matter.

Besides, the wench is dead.  How many votes do the dead have?

And in other extremely disturbing news

I will freely admit that when I heard about the ISIS prisoner burned to death in a cage, I would have supported a massive air strike that leveled everything ISIS controls, and all its encampments, to molten glass.

And then I read this:

“We have had reports of children, especially children who are mentally challenged, who have been used as suicide bombers, most probably without them even understanding,” Winter told Reuters. “There was a video placed (online) that showed children at a very young age, approximately eight years of age and younger, to be trained already to become child soldiers.”

The committee condemned “the systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by the so-called ISIL, including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.”

And I don't feel any less that such people should be exterminated:  violently.  Until I read this:

In September, the United States launched a bombing campaign targeting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. intelligence officials told the Daily Beast this week that since the U.S. began bombing Islamic State targets, an estimated 4,000 new fighters have joined the group. (emphasis added)

Which violence is the good violence?  Which violence will stop the violence?  Which violence will dissuade such people from being violent?  Can we truly eradicate such malevolence, as we did smallpox?  Or might we just as well try to eradicate cockroaches?

This fire cannot be allowed to burn; but are we pouring water on it?  Or kerosene?

Pilate's Question

Last chance for gas

There are two critical points to be drawn from the Thomas Lessl essay.  This is one:

Religious culture, by contrast, must then be shown to exhibit features which make it unsuited for survival in a changing human environment.

This is the other:

...the values that are championed in the Galileo legend are shared with the broader culture of modernism.  Modernity looks to the scientific culture as a kind of moral exemplar which upholds in some ideal fashion its values of rationalism, liberalism, and individualism.  The more general culture of modernism is similarly unlikely to protest such aberrations of historical consciousness because it shares with science a belief in binary oppositions between reason and faith, knowledge and authority, and between Scripture and the light of nature.

Part of the historical irony here is that the very idea of rationalism was one promoted and preserved by the church through the so-called "Dark Ages."  The survival of Plato and Aristotle, the two pillars of Western civilization to which all Western philosophy (including science) is still just a footnote, is due to the church.  Two of the fundamental scientific theories today, genetics and the Big Bang Theory, originated with Catholic clergy.  Even the atheist Bertrand Russell had to acknowledge the supreme reasoning ability of Thomas Aquinas, a man whose work, it has been fairly said, we are still catching up with.  All of this, of course, must be swept aside in favor of the narrative that religion=superstition, and science=truth.

Rationalism, liberalism, and individualism, are all products of Christianity in Western culture.  If you doubt it, read Socrates' argument for why he must be executed in "Crito."  Consider the arguments against Antigone's actions in the eponymous play.  There was no room for the sacred individual, the Thoreau defying a poll tax, the MLK accepting arrest to prove a greater moral point, in ancient Greece.  The idea was not only unthinkable, it was anathema.    If Socrates is an heroic figure in Plato's telling, it is because he accepts the death sentence of Athens, not because he nobly escapes what he knows is an unfair verdict (even the citizens of Athens say so).  It was Christianity which taught us the virtue of the individual, however lowly.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath is notable because she isn't noble; and yet her virtues make her laudable.  It would take Thomas Gray and finally William Wordsworth to overturn the Great Chain of Being more suitable to monarchic rule and to usher in the Day of the Individual, the Byronic hero:  but without the groundwork of Christianity, the emphasis on the worth of the least among us, the example of the Creator of the Universe born in a manger, that shift in emphasis is almost unimaginable.

It certainly didn't happen anywhere else in the human world.

The idea that man is set apart by virtue of reason is a Greek ideal, but it was championed by the Church throughout the collapse of civilization after Rome fell, and carried on into the Renaissance, where the Church was the greatest patron of both the arts and the sciences.  Why else is all the greatest Renaissance art religious art?  As for liberalism, what is more "liberal" than the Protestant Reformation, which began the turn toward local control, first with the princes in Germany who supported Luther, and then with the cities like Geneva, and even the Puritans of the 17th century who wanted to be free of the British crown to worship as they saw fit, and live as they wished.   The American experiment didn't spring from the brow of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison: its roots were in Christianity as much as anywhere else.  If it was reason that guided the "Founding Fathers," it was a form of political* reason championed by Protestantism for centuries before the Enlightenment caught up with it.

But it is the "changing human environment" which is the most interesting part of the narrative.  That changing environment, at least since the Industrial Revolution, is largely the product of science.  Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, industrialization which has exacerbated poverty anew in large portions of the world and made weapons as ubiquitous as sunlight; all can be laid at the feet of science, the triumph of modernism.  Fundamentalism itself is a reaction to modernism.  To think even more modernism is needed to eradicate fundamentalism is to think what will extinguish the fire  is more kerosene.

Which returns me to the question:  what is science doing to alleviate the conditions of poverty?

E.O. Wilson thinks it's all about "the meaning of existence."  E.O. Wilson is a fool.  His argument is rooted in the very ignorance and false dichotomy Lessl examines.

I think it’s time to be audacious. The central questions of religion and philosophy are three in number: Where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going? Usually these are just the beginnings of long discussions, but that’s no longer the case. We now have a pretty good picture of how humanity arose in Africa, what intermediate forms existed, the rate at which these forms evolved, and the circumstances in which they evolved.

So I can say, right now, that of those three great questions, we have most of the answer for where we come from. And in this book I take up the question: What are we? We’re starting to close in on that one. We need to know where we came from and what we are to have the self-understanding to sensibly plan where we’re going. Right now, we don't have any idea where we’re going.

First, if you're going to be audacious, know what you're talking about.  His idea of "the central question of religion and philosophy" (notice how he dismisses both by lumping them together. Away with abstract thought!  Science has acquired truth, and banished ambiguity!) wouldn't survive contact with an Introduction to Philosophy course at a community college (I know; I taught that course for a few semesters).  Starting from a definition that favors his conclusion, he quickly erects a structure we used to call "Castles in the Air."  We used the term derisively, and always attached the warning:  "Don't try to move in!"

Mr. Wilson, of course, does.  After all, like Daniel Dennett who has already explained consciousness, in one short summary of his trilogy of books, he explains that science has, or soon will, answered all of those questions.  QED!  Empiricism ergo sum!  Thus did Samuel Johnson refute Berkeley!

Nobody except a few places on the internet is taking Wilson seriously.  He is right about one thing:  we don't have any idea where we're going; and if he is going to be our guide, God help us.

Remember the Dove ad from the SuperBowl about caring Dads, which gets us to "Dove Men Care," the line of products being sold by Dove?  If it were being presented for humor, that kind of confusion of definition would be a pun.  English is an enormously flexible language:  we use the same word, despite the huge fund of words available to us, to mean different things in different contexts.  Care for your child is not quite the same thing as care for your skin.  We know that.  Here Wilson argues we all want to know "where we come from."  His answer?  Africa.

Next question?

If I point out that's not exactly what the question asked, Wilson undoubtedly will dismiss my question as irrelevant and return to insisting the only valid answer to the question is:  "Africa." He doesn't continue the confusion; he doesn't answer that "where we are going" is back to Africa; or to any point in space or time at all.  He plays the game of words as it suits him, but pretends he's not playing any game at all.

Not exactly what Wittgenstein meant about "language games," but close enough; and at the same time, precisely the problem.  Wilson is apparently as ignorant of the work of Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers, as he is of religion.  In fact, he's proven himself ignorant of these two great realms of human thought.  Knowing nothing about them, he doesn't need to know anything.  His knowledge is complete, and being complete it is supreme.  Like Dawkins, Wilson is content to believe what he knows is all that needs to be known, and all other human knowledge is just so much nonsense which he doesn't need to clutter his beautiful mind with.  But leaving his mind so carefully uncluttered, he makes mistakes which would doom a student in that Intro. Philosophy class; and in fact, mistakes that make his entire argument farcical.

Did I ever tell you the story of a doctor who bought some land in the country, to build his second house on?  It's a true story; the lawyer who the doctor had to come to told it to me.  Doctor went out to the property, pointed to a lovely spot on his land that would be perfect for the house, and ordered construction to begin.  Construction duly began, and when it was finished, the property owner of the contiguous lot brought maps to the doctor proving at least half of the house was on the next lot.  The doctor came to the lawyer, desperate to know what his legal option were.

He didn't have any.  He either got the landowner to sell that much of his lot to the doctor; or he tore down at least half of his new house.  He was a very good M.D.  He was a very bad land surveyor and lawyer.  Had he spent 10 minutes consulting people with knowledge he didn't have, he'd have saved himself a lot of grief.

We don't know where we're going; and we're in a rush to get there.  I've seen the wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels denigrated as "Bronze Age thinking."  The same people making that argument rely on Plato and Aristotle to even construct a kind of thought they consider "reasonable."  They also use a lot of the thinking of Aquinas, from the 13th century, without realizing it.  The Renaissance designated the "Dark Ages," but without the scholasticism and the monks and the Church, the Renaissance would have had no knowledge to rediscover; it would have been as lost as the library of Alexandria (and let's not forget it was the Muslims who saved Aristotle for the 13th century to rediscover).  I used to think it was peculiarly American, this rush to consider the generation before us ignorant and benighted, and to believe true knowledge only began with our ignorance.  I've come to see it's universal, and the very idea of "progress" is laughable.

Where are we going?  With people like E.O. Wilson and most of the chattering classes of the world to guide us, we're going around in circles.  The truly radical nature of the gospels and the Hebrew scriptures those gospels are rooted in:  the unbrokered kingdom, the first last and the last first, freedom for the captive and release of the prisoners, the year of Jubilee and care for the widow and orphan; justice beginning with how much care we show to the least of us, and how we are all in this together, strangers and aliens all:  that nature is rediscovered in pockets every generation, by people who really do read the Bible.  Not just the "Biblical stories" or the stories of war and slaughter, but the whole magnificent record:  that is how it is known, and it is known in the community for whom it is valued, to whom it speaks.  If it is rooted in the Bronze Age, then so are we all, even in the Atomic Age or the Internet Age.  The environment has changed only on the surface:  just beneath that surface, nothing has really changed at all.

If that truly radical nature of the Scriptures is hidden again and again, perhaps we should ask why.  Perhaps we should examine deeply why the preferential option for the poor disturbs us so.  Perhaps we should reconsider what justice really means.  Perhaps we should think more about what we can do for others, and less about what we can do for ourselves.  Perhaps we should think about why it is so hard to think about that.  It's a much more important question than Pilate's question:  and that is the question E.O. Wilson, and so many others, are asking.  Just by asking it, they cannot get the answer:  because truth is not known or defined:  truth is lived.

That's the great secret of the scriptures.  "How should we then live?"  Ask that, and you are nearer the truth than anyone who thinks truth is reducible to three silly questions that are, in fact, just more abstractions.


*Political in the sense Aristotle meant:  having to do with the "polis."  Not "political" in the common modern sense:  having to do with partisanship.

Going back to the Super Bowl

Yeah, this was a whole 'nother kind of weird....

...because I'm too tired to think.

Ads.  Didn't see absolutely every one of them, but the stand outs were the truly bad ones.  Back when ads were getting "edgy" to appeal to "younger viewers" (more and more of those every year, it seems), there were clunkers that seemed offensive just to be offensive (because offensive=edgy; or something).

Now edgy is being replaced by maudlin?

Dove won if only because it came on before Nissan's ad (and you can see all the ads I mention here).  A montage of "Dad" scenes so affecting I almost started tearing up (especially the ones with little girls saying "Daddy!"  Or maybe it was the beer.  Yeah, that's it; the beer).  Just when you think you'll need an insulin shot, or at least have to check your blood sugar, and you're sure this is a Hallmark Card ad or a PSA, you find out it's about Dove's Men Care line of products, because...men care.

Seriously.  That sound you hear is the transmission falling out of your car at 70 mph.

Nissan would have won the boobie prize except, as I say, they ran after the Dove ad.  The Nissan ad went on so long (I think it was the full version of "Cat's in the Cradle," but if it wasn't, it seemed to be), with shots of a race car dad fulfilling every bitter syllable of that song, that nothing could have saved it in the end.  But the ending was bizarre:  Dad finally shows up, apparently in a Nissan (you find that out by the logo at the end) to pick his kid up from school at, what, 10:00 p.m. ? It didn't seem the kid was out dancing or clubbing, so why was it so dark when Dad got there?  Jr. goes to night classes in high school?  And anyway, this makes me want a Nissan because....?

Nationwide wins for grimmest image I'll never get out of my mind:  a huge (must be 50" or better) flat screen TV fallen off a stand, supposedly pulled over by the young child beneath it, who is pancaked so flatly the TV is resting solidly on the floor.  The kid went through the floor?  The kid is disintegrated by the massive flat screen?  Even putting a mannequin under there would have been too grim?  I dunno, but it was mighty disturbing.  Made me think I should bolt the TV to I-beams and set those in concrete through holes in the floor before my daughter gets around to bringing grandkids home.  And she's not even married.

It was that disturbing.

The rest were just stupid.  I didn't even realize that was Kate Upton in those "Game of War" ads.  Her acting/voicing is so bad I figured it was some nameless blonde hired for her implants.  The Snickers ad was cute:  once.  I'm afraid I'll see it ad nauseum now.  The rest left no impression, except the Budweiser horse/dog ads just get more and more threadbare.

And I still can't get over that pass call on second down on the 1 with 1 minute left to play.  I don't think I'll ever get over that; and I didn't even really care who won.

This I (don't) believe

Well, really, it was the one play that never had a prayer....

I believe many remarkable things.

I don't believe that final offensive play by the Seattle Seahawks in SuperBowl XLIX.

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.

How should we then understand?

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Or if they would just renounce Islam

...I'm sure E.O. Wilson would welcome them into his tribe.

White responded to criticism of her Texas Muslim Capitol Day plan in the comments on her Facebook post.

 "I do not apologize for my comments above," she wrote in one comment. "If you love America, obey our laws and condemn Islamic terrorism then I embrace you as a fellow American. If not, then I do not."

Well, since her objection is based on nationalism and not based on religion, that's okay.....

The Problem of Evil

"human kind Cannot bear very much reality"

It was Jan Sobrino's observations that, I later realized, brought the issue to mind.  There is so much discussion of evil in the world, and what causes it.  Too little, however, do we bother to examine the question of evil itself:  that is, what is "evil"?  Because reflexively, we think of evil as what is done to us; which excludes evil as something we do.

Let me give you a perfectly mundane example:  I walked into the kitchen as I was writing this.  The radio is in there.  NPR was running a story about business meetings, and it noted that the people who run meetings often don't realize they aren't doing it well.  But the people who attend the meetings report the meetings are not run well.  The problem, the story reports, is a lack of self-reflection by the people in charge of so many unproductive business meetings.

Not exactly an "evil," perhaps; but it nicely (and serendipitously) illustrates the point:  evil is what is done to us (bad meetings by poor leaders), not something we do (those who lead meetings don't think there is a problem).  What is missing is any sense of self-reflection, any sense that you and I are participants in the world, active agents rather than acted upon.  We shun, in brief, responsibility (which is, oddly, the root of "too many meetings":  multiple meetings diffuse responsibility and delay the need to make hard decisions).

So ISIS is evil, and Al Qaeda, and religious belief in general, because all true religious belief is fanaticism (the Sam Harris postulate, let's call it).  But nationalism is not evil, nor a source of evil, not even when it destroys social orders and leaves other nations open to the predations of fanatics, religious or otherwise.  Tribalism is good so long as it is our tribalism, because then, of course, it isn't tribalism at all (and so E.O. Wilson imagines we would all be holding hands and singing "Kumbayah" by now (with no reference to God, of course!) were it not for religion (which has made absolutely no moves toward ecumenism in the last century or so, right?.  Honestly, if these people would just read the scholarship on fundamentalism alone, they'd understand fundamentalism is a response both to the modern world and to ecumenism, which is part of the modern world.).  Tribalism itself is evil, and we are not evil:  they are!  Nationalism is the assertion of privileges for our tribe.  Seldom do we see it as the excuse to inflict evil on others.

We see our support of the systems which "reinforce present structures of injustice, oppression, and exclusion" as evil only if we pay attention to what our support does; so we don't pay much attention.  Instead, evil is the fault of someone else:  corporations; the Koch Brothers; Republicans; FoxNews.  There is always a catalog of evil-doers, and we are never in it.  So whatever Stephen Weinberg does for his family is not evil but merely ethical, because Stephen Weinberg couldn't stand one moment of self-reflection on the consequences of what he thinks is an ethos, at all.  He cannot bear it, so he will not do it; he pronounces himself good, and is done with it.

But how different is he from the rest of us?

Some of this is what can be fairly labeled "boundary work," and is well explained this way:  "This is who we are, and that is who you are--behave accordingly."  To do this we create "artificial boundaries in a field which is 'naturally' continuous."  Distinctions between religious fanaticism and the demands of either nationalism or capitalism are actually hard to maintain; the fields can be said to be "'naturally' continuous."  But we can't have that, because that implicates us in evil; so we must establish boundaries.  And any attempt to break down those boundaries, disturbs us.

So in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free:  but there is forgiven and unforgiven, and that is something that must be earned.  Why else do we read the anointing in Luke as a story of a woman weeping over her sins, rather than trying to seduce a customer?  Do we find it easier to participate in a movement for her empowerment (and so release from the forced life of prostitution as the only option for a woman with no family support?), or do we demand she earn our forgiveness, and God's?  Ah!  Are we evil now because we condemn this woman?  Or are we simply insisting she "behave accordingly," and entering a roomful of men and touching one of them, indeed washing his feet with her tears (body fluids!) and drying them with her hair (which Paul tells us should be bound, not free!) is not appropriate, and certainly not Godly,  behavior?

How easy it is to say:  they are evil, but we are good.

The Log and the Speck

Something about Danish figurines just completes this post....

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the mujahideen who resisted the invasion caught the attention of Charlie Wilson who decided they needed U.S. help.  Did the Soviets invade in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church, or Christianity?  No, of course not; the Soviet Union was officially atheist.  Did Wilson support the mujahideen in the name of Christianity or Islam?  Of course not; the United States is officially without a national religion or church.

Much later, George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan.  Did he do so in the name of Christianity or the Methodist church?  No, he explicitly stated the conflict in Afghanistan was not with Islam or on behalf of Christianity.  He invaded to eradicate Al Qaeda, the successor group to the mujahideen.

Bush also invaded Iraq, an officially secular nation, in order to avenge his father, or because of WMD, or just because.  Reasons didn't much matter for that one, except in no case was the reason religious.  In each case, in fact, the reason was nationalism: the Soviets wanted to tighten control over Afghanistan, the U.S. wanted revenge for 9/11, and the U.S. well.... just wanted to knock off Saddam Hussein.

And now we face Al Qaeda as an international force, where once it was confined to Afghanistan.  And a successor to Al Qaeda in Iraq is ISIS, who fights in the name of Islam; or so it says.  What can be said is that both groups refuse to fight in the name of nationalism.  Huh.  Imagine that.

And yet according to the insights of Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and now E.O. Wilson, the problems in the world are all the fault of religious belief?

How big is that piece of lumber in their eyes?  I think it's blinded the lot of them.

Well, I'm glad somebody finally figured that out!

I am not suffering fools gladly this afternoon.

John Dominic Crossan, a Jesuit priest trained in literary theory, studied deeply in anthropology and archaeology and, at a time when other people would be retiring to rest on their laurels, produced two dense tomes on the life of Jesus of Nazareth, based as much on those two subjects as on historical knowledge, and a book on the early years of the Christian church.  He went on to write two, slightly more "popular" books about Jesus and Paul, resting both more heavily on Biblical archaeology than on anthropology.

Rudolf Bultmann wrote his magnum opus explicating the Gospel of John in a manner thoroughly German in its erudition and scholasticism, a book that is a meditation on that gospel in its place in Biblical scholarship (his footnotes are dense discussion with other scholars at a level the text of most books never reach) while simultaneously holding a discussion with Kierkegaard (he directly cites and quotes Philosophical Fragments several times) and the work of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the last two centuries.  He quite holds his own with Heidegger.

There is an entire branch of sociology, itself a science, devoted to the study of religion.  Anthropology, another science, is equally interested in the subject, from a scientific point of view.  And now comes E.O. Wilson, a sociobiologist, and rather than follow in the footsteps of Dom Crossan and steep himself deeply in the sciences of anthropology and archaeology or even sociology before he speaks, writes a book about what he thinks is wrong with religion in the modern world.

What is is about ignorance that makes people think they are so smart?

N.B.  The Meaning of Human Existence?  Really?  I haven't seen a title that arrogant and ill-earned since Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained.  What is it about ignorance and arrogance that they so often go walking hand in hand?

Let Us Now Praise Non-Famous Men

"What can we do to take the crucified people down from their crosses?"

From a link provided in comments below:

According to Jon Sobrino of San Salvador's Central American University, compassion must have the central place in the life of the Catholic university. College students and universities themselves must learn to embrace the "preferential option for the poor."Sobrino argues that if the Catholic university is to exist in a world of massive suffering and not function simply as an "ivory tower," it must be committed to the poor. Far from paternalistic philanthropy, the preferential option entails solidarity-identifying with the poor, being converted by them, and participating in movements for their empowerment. If the Catholic university does not actively side with the poor in appropriate ways, it will tacitly side with the status quo and reinforce present structures of injustice, oppression, and exclusion.

You want radical thought, there it is.  From a Catholic theologian and Jesuit priest; not from Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins or Stephen Weinberg.  Sobrino's thought is centered on the question "How should we then live?" and his answer is:  in a way that doesn't side with the status quo and reinforce injustice, oppression, and exclusion.  It is a way of thought he derives from his Christianity, not in spite of it.  You want to curse the darkness, you can join the way of the world:  of the Mahers and the Dawkins and the Harrises.

You want to light a candle, you want to truly do the difficult work of effecting good in the world:  you take up the challenge of Sobrino and Gutierrez and Romero and MLK and even Francis I, or anyone else who truly challenges the world as it is at such a fundamental level, and you look at your place in the "present structures of injustice, oppression, and exclusion."  And consider how it is you see them at all, and from what perspective, and why they are there, and what the alternatives are.

You don't have to be Catholic, or attend or work for a university, or even be Christian, to do it.  But it is much harder, and a much worthier effort, than listening to the babble of the world.  Even the Gentiles can do that much.

If only education were a unitary thing....

I'm cribbing this from Charlie Pierce, but if you want a reason to keep universities in the hands of the church (no, I'm no advocating all colleges and universities revert to religious hands, just arguendo), this presents you with a good one:

But it doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Republicans' distaste for the centers and institutes dotting the UNC landscape that were created to explore issues of poverty, civil rights, the environment and energy policy. Places like the Center for Work, Poverty and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. Central University's Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change. The board of governors has 34 such centers under scrutiny. Why? The explanation is found in a paper published two weeks ago by conservatives at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy-a nonprofit named for Art Pope's father. The paper is entitled "Renewal in the University," and it sings the praises of academic centers which "restore the spirit of inquiry." But not centers that look into poverty. No, they are the problem, writes author Jay Schalin, because they threaten "thousands of years of Western thought." What we need instead, Schalin argues, is to replace such disruptive centers with new centers paid for by rich people like Pope-"privately funded academic centers" that reinforce for students the traditional values of "liberty" and "free-market economics."

I would exhaust my day looking for examples in the "thousands of years of Western thought" that are examinations of the problems and solutions to poverty, starting with the Greeks (who were making statues of the poor, to draw attention to the failures of Greek social order), coming up through the work of Dr. King and Dorothy Day (to name just two).  The bulk of those arguments would be from, or informed by, the Christian church, an institution also responsible for the very idea of a university system.  William Buckley famously argued that the university should return to its religious status in order to regain its moral authority.  I never really agreed with him, but at least he was more sensible than this.

Concern for poverty is far more "traditional" in Western thought than concern for liberty; and especially for "free-market economics."  On the latter, the best response I can point to (still), is Dr. Swift's "Modest Proposal."

I only fear Mr. Schalin would miss the satire in it.

"New Styles of Architecture, a change of heart..."

"The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love."--Walter Brueggeman

This clause was enough to make me pay attention:  "In a world of scarce resources...."

And already we're back to Solomon and the theology of scarcity v. the theology of plenty (which alone puts the lie to the atheist chestnut that the scriptures are Bronze Age (or Iron Age, opinions vary) texts with no relevance to modern existence.  Then again, modern atheists are merely evangelicals insisting their position on God is the only one that should be allowed; that it another argument, but its also quite certainly an argument from scarcity, an argument for a theology of scarcity.)

Southern Beale quotes that from the American Enterprise Institute, who uses the opening rhetorical twitch to argue for, of course, limited use of scarce resources to actually help, you know, people.  But that is always the point in the theology of scarcity:  people are too damned expensive!  Other things must be protected first, especially, in the modern worship of the market as a great green god:  money. Because, you see:

In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending. This opinion is not immoral. Such choices are inevitable. They are made all the time.

Especially by the people in power.  Consider these quotes as a partial response to the presumption of AEI:

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization -- Edward Bellamy

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. -- John Dewey

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings -- John Stuart Mill

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play. -- Robert F. Kennedy

We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. -- Martin Luther King, Jr

Start with Bellamy's idea of education that must be something other than an education in buying and selling.  He calls that "an education in self seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization."  No education today reflects Dewey's idea:  "the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality."  Education today is all aimed at getting a job, and being a consumer and a producer of goods, at seeking at the expense of others.  The most desirable lot of human beings is reflected back to us in "The Wolf of Wall Street" or the celebrity of Donald Trump and the Kardashians.  As Robert Kennedy points out, the GNP does not allow for the health of our families; indeed, the AEI says it can't:  resources are too scarce.  Triage must be performed.  Some must die, and so decrease the surplus population.  People are too expensive; the are just too damned many of you!

As my friend at Thought Criminal never tires of pointing out:  what atheist position is going to champion the ideals of Bellamy, Dewey, Mill, Kennedy, or King?  Stephen Weinberg fancies himself a moral avatar because he is brave enough to admit his selfishness, that he cares first for his family and then for his friends and really not at all for society at large.  Ethics understands this as an entirely unethical stance (has Weinberg even read Crito?); Weinberg proclaims it the new basis for ethics.  O brave new world, that has such ignorant creatures in it!

Let not the wise boast of their wisdom,
nor the valiant of their valour;
let not the wealthy boast of their wealth;
but if anyone must boast, let him boast of this:
that he understands and acknowledges me.
For I am the LORD, I show unfailing love,
I do justice and right on the earth;
for in these I take pleasure.
This is the word of the LORD.

You may want to dismiss that because it is a religious text that makes a religious claim.  But tell me what Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris has written that is of greater moral value than that; tell me what Bill Maher has said which contributes more to the moral discourse of humanity than those words.  Is it better to be anti-religious, or to show unfailing love and do justice and right on the earth, and to take pleasure in those things than in one's own sense of cleverness?  Which is better: the pronouncements of AEI on how to deal with scarcity, the ramblings of Stephen Weinberg on what he imagines ethics are, or this "Bronze Age" text:

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly;
all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain,
set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

Both texts from the same book of the Bible; both rest on the authority of God, but not on presenting  the commands of God.  The king who dealt justly and fairly proved he knew God; but the world rewards the king who sets his eyes and heart on gain alone, ignoring the innocent blood he sheds ("In a world of scarce resources....") and the cruel acts of tyranny such greed must perpetuate.  Justice and fairness, after all, require constant self-reflection, constant regard for the other and constant evaluation of one's motives and actions.  Stephen Weinberg's ethic starts and ends with regard for himself.  The cause of the lowly and the poor is of no importance to him whatsoever.  How does he deal justly and fairly with anything?

The theology of scarcity is that there isn't enough now to go around, so we must hoard what we have and protect it from other claimants.  We must regard them as savages who have to be eliminated.  The theology of scarcity is that we cannot share, because to share is to lose.  The widow who fed Elijah during the famine should have saved her oil and meal for herself and her son; even though it probably would have run out, and they would have starved to death.  But who can know the future, and who can trust in a world that is actually abundant?  Better to trust that there will never be enough.

Better?  According to whom?

After a while the stream dried up, for there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go now to Zarephath, a village of Sidon, and stay there; I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ He went off to Zarephath, and when he reached the entrance to the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks. He called to her, ‘Please bring me a little water in a pitcher to drink.’ As she went to fetch it, he called after her, ‘Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well.’ But she answered, “As the Lord your God lives, I have no food baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask. I am just gathering two or three sticks to go and cook it for my son and myself before we die.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elijah said, ‘go and do as you have said. But first make me a small cake from what you have and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself. For this is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of flour will not give out, nor the flask of oil fail, until the Lord sends rain on the land.’ She went and did as Elijah had said, and there was food for him and for her family for a long time. The jar of flour did not give out, nor did the flask of oil, as the word of the Lord foretold through Elijah. 1 Kings 17:7-16 (REB)