Rich Men’s Problems with the Kingdom of Heaven

On a subject sort of relevant to my last post of 2013 here, last week the Pew Research people released the results of an international survey that they’ve been conducting for the past few years. Their basic findings, in very simple terms: The more money people have in their pockets, the less they see religious belief to be a precondition for moral goodness. The United States would seem to be an exceptional case in this study, but on closer examination it’s really not.

So who should be excited, threatened or disturbed by these findings?

These results actually shouldn’t come as a surprise in any particular sense, nor should the fact that the United States once again appears to be an exception to the rules of secularism laid out in some of the more problematic reporting on this matter, nor should the fact that the polemics tend to snowball the further from the facts you get on this issue.

First of all let me clarify what I see as the primary non sequitur related to this question: It is not asking how many people believe in God (large or small g), or how such beliefs affect their own lives. What it is effectively asking is, can you actually trust someone who doesn’t believe in any god to still be a good person? In that regard it actually has very little to do with personal faith as such. Pope Francis and I are both strong believers in God, but we are both entirely convinced that the factually correct answer to the survey question is no, you don’t have to believe in God to be a “person of good will” and to treat others with decency. On the other hand, Machiavelli and his followers –– and among the living, Jürgen Habermas –– while having no particular belief in God themselves, have stated that religious belief plays an essential role in keeping “the masses” in line and enabling productive levels of social cooperation, implying that one should have certain suspicions about those who lack the moral restraint which personal faith tends to instill. So while this is an interesting question on a number of different levels, it really doesn’t measure levels of personal faith in any direct way.

What it does measure, however, is probably more relevant to the issue of “secularization” as it is defined by sociologists than personal faith is: It measures the extent to which religious mutual understanding is socially expected of people as a foundation for mutual trust. The current Wikipedia article on secularization begins by defining the concept as “the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious (or irreligious) values and secular institutions.” The sociology section of about.com defines secularization as “a process of social change through which the public influence of religion and religious thinking declines as it is replaced by other ways of explaining reality and regulating social life”. Agreed. In other words what we’re talking about is how much control religion has over society, which is a somewhat different question than the extent to which people personally believe in God.

Peter Berger tells the story of a recently arrived immigrant dentist in the United States starting to work on a new patient’s teeth when the man stopped him briefly to say, “By the way, I’m a Baptist.” The dentist had no idea what relevance this had to the condition of the man’s teeth, or anything else, but for a sociological researcher the message was clear: The patient was saying that he could be trusted to pay his bill afterwards so there should be nothing for the dentist to worry about in that regard; he didn’t want the dentist to be distracted by such concerns while he was working on his teeth. What the new survey results show is that this sort of anecdote could also easily take place in many African or South American countries (perhaps with a different church being named) but among more prosperous “Western” countries it would be unique to the United States.  It says nothing about how well Baptists or other believers actually pay their bills, nor about how non-believers in turn attend to their own financial obligations. Nor does it tell us how fervently people believe that some supernatural power holds them responsible for their actions. It only tells us about how people within the society in question use religion as a basis for their social credit rating schemes.

On one level there would be an obvious correlation between how widespread personal faith is and how much people use that as a standard for determining whether or not they can trust each other: Such faith has to be in relatively widespread circulation to be accepted as a form of social capital. By analogy, legend has it that the southern states of the US originally became known as “the land of Dixie” due to the use of a French (or French language) currency in which the ten (dix) was particularly well known. That would not imply any particularly strong allegiance to France or the French economic system, but it would imply at least some sort of cultural connection in France’s direction which related to the means by which Southerners exchanged goods and services. The personal religiosity of people who trust each other on the basis of belief in God need go no deeper than that.

The social mechanism involved comes back to Machiavelli’s strong belief that religion is an essential means which any ruler should take advantage of in order to do his job effectively. While it may not hold true as a general definition for religion, in the vast majority of cases religion comes down to a social expression of belief in God or gods. Taking advantage of this belief as a means of manipulating those under their power can be a very potent tool in the hands of rulers, whether the rulers in question happen to share this belief or not. Thus it remains strongly in the self-interest of the ruling elites to encourage people to believe that there is some divine power out there which is on the rulers’ side on things, and to sow distrust in those who would question the divine basis for the rulers’ authority. From there it would stand to reason that the greater the polarization is between a nation’s lower classes and its rulers, the more critically important it becomes for rulers to have this tool at their disposal so as to reduce the chance of insurrection. It would also stand to reason that the more economically helpless the people feel, the more likely they would be to base their sense of solidarity on transcendent factors like a shared belief in God. In these regards the recent Pew data merely provides empirical evidence in support of what sociologists of religion should have pretty well surmised already.

What this doesn’t tell us is what sort of a role personal faith plays in people’s lives, and whether or not that faith is an overall good thing in terms of social dynamics. It is a major leap of faith to move from the Machiavellian theory that the religious faith of the people provides an important means of manipulating them to the Leninist theory that religious faith can be reduced to nothing more than a means of bourgeois manipulation. That is sort of like saying that because antibiotics are being fed to beef cattle to cause them to put on weight faster (in turn leading to humans consuming their meet also to put on weight faster, which is a very real problem these days, by the way), we can conclude that the only function and purpose of antibiotics is to cause weight gain.

So what is the purpose of Christianity, and perhaps other comparable religions, if not to enable social control of the masses? Quite simply, to teach us to respect each other as fellow beings “made in the image of God,” and to look beyond ourselves for the capacity to live up to ideals we feel that we’re not capable of living up to on our own. I won’t bother to proof-text that out here, but if there are any fundamentalists out there who wish to challenge this summary of the Gospel message as inaccurate I’m up for the debate.

For any atheists and other skeptics who consider this to be too optimistic a summary of the faith meanwhile, I freely acknowledge that many of my co-religionists have rather missed (or misplaced) the point on this one, but that doesn’t make it essentially wrong. The fact that the Bible itself is full of bitter power struggles (especially in the Old Testament, but really in both testaments) doesn’t take away the essential focus of the teaching of Jesus on the points given here –– commonly known as “the twin commandment of love”. The rest of the essential message of Christianity can be mind-mapped back to these two points, not with absolute agreement on all of the details involved, but with essential shared purpose among “people of good will” within the faith and beyond it. Here too I’m quite open to further debate with anyone who cares to question this interpretation.

In any case, once you accept that there is more to religion than what Lenin was prone to acknowledge, much of the polemic against theism in general that we find in CJ Werleman’s summary of the Pew report on AlterNet essentially falls apart. The reasoning he gives for seeing atheists as in fact morally superior to theists –– based on the isolated statistic of atheists making up a disproportionately small segment of the US prison population –– really proves none of the points he is trying to make. What this factoid rather tells us is that self-identifying as an atheist is far more risky and thus much rarer among those in lower economic classes and minority communities in American society who end up as the basic fodder of the prison-industrial complex; whereas among the upper classes, who have all sorts of means of avoiding imprisonment when they commit evil deeds, publicly acknowledged atheism is a far safer posture to hold.

Salon’s republication of Werleman’s article then added sloppiness to the intellectual carelessness of the original by captioning their Facebook link with the quote, “Without the South’s religiosity, ‘America’ would look like a developed, secular country…” and then leaving out the poorly reasoned section of the article containing that quote from the version they posted.

For a more rational heuristic as to what sort of people should be more readily trusted and what sort of people should be kept more at arm’s length, rather than looking at how strongly different groups are represented within prison populations we should be considering the frequency of psychopaths occurring among them. In those regards theists have a far from spotless record, especially given the ways in which theism is susceptible to power abuse, but power-hungry atheists generate at least their fair share of social tensions and monsters to be afraid of.

But the primary lessons to be drawn from the Pew survey aren’t essentially about whether either theists or atheists are inherently better people. It rather shows us something about people’s reluctance to trust those whose foundational ethical assumptions are different from theirs. Most specifically, it invites us to consider why it would be that poorer people around the world are more likely to consider their religion as an important basis for personal trust, and why this tendency would be particularly pronounced in the United States in general and in the former Confederate states in particular.

On significant factor here is the dynamic confirmed by recent studies that the wealthier a person becomes, the greater the risk is of that person losing a capacity for empathy.  Thus if religious participation is in many respects an exercise in empathizing with others, it stands to reason that the wealthy will place less importance upon it than those whose empathetic reflexes have not been damaged in this way. This in turn would lead to poorer people having a greater tendency to build contacts with like-minded people through religious activities than rich folks do. Probably a minor factor, but still worth noting.

A far more significant causal factor, I believe, would be a lack of basic education among the poor (not only in the South, but across the US), in civics in particular. This aspect of education involves making learners more aware of those outside of their own closed communities; ideally involving actual mutually respectful contact with people who are part of “other” groups –– those of other skin colors, other language groups, other religious backgrounds, other sexual attractions, other cultural norms, etc. If these “other” people can be kept as a distant abstraction and if authority figures are able to maintain ignorance about such “others” within their isolated communities, that makes hatemongering a far easier process for them. From there they can use that hatred as a means of motivating people to do all sorts of things they may have in mind, or to “take their eye off the ball” as they go about fleecing the suckers. Nor does hatred of the other have to be the result an intentional plot to manipulate the haters; it can be an entirely organic and self-sustaining reaction within ignorant and isolated communities. A brilliant example of this is the ways in which the fictitious Eastern European society in the film Borat looks at Jews.

In this regard the social dynamic we see demonstrated in the recent Pew data is as follows: The better off people are economically, the better educated their children become; the better educated each successive generation is, the less ignorant of and segregated from others they are inclined to be; and the more aware of others they are in practice, the more likely they are to respect those others as individuals regardless of differences in race, religion, language, sexuality, etc. The southern states of the US have their own historical reasons for being somewhat backwards in these regards, but there is no credible sociological argument for reducing religion as a means of improving the situation. Color me optimistic, but I believe that improved civics education, including elements of concrete cross-cultural interaction, can go a long ways in eliminating the toxic prejudicial elements of traditional religious cultures, leaving in place a valuable set of societal resources to be exercised in communities of faith.

Southern “Bible Belt” culture and its various spin-offs are a complex problem unto themselves. Besides Machiavellian strategies historically being used by the white aristocracy of the South to control the poor black folk of the region by way of religion (which majorly backfired on them with the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Era), there is a widespread ignorant assumption that white American Protestants have somehow inherited the role of “God’s chosen people” from the ancient Israelites. It is fair to say that Bible Belters are not alone in this regard: many forms of religion irrationally declare divine favor on some in-group at the expense of the human dignity of various out-groups, and that they give religion a bad name in the process. It is also fair to say that this aspect of “Christian culture” runs directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus and the core message of Christianity. This problem needs to be dealt with, but not through the elimination of all religious influences in American culture.

Besides the photo ops and private conversations with President Obama last week, the most recent headlines regarding Pope Francis have had to do with his recent theological statements confirming a personal belief in hell as a real place where wicked people’s souls go when they die –– Mafiosos in particular.  The thing which puts one in the position of deserving eternal torment is not defying the church’s authority as such, but disregarding the rights and dignity of other people –– failing to love in the what Jesus commanded us to. I believe that this sort of “hellfire and brimstone” message, not the moralism and cultural control preached by the “religious right” nor the strict secularism preached by the missionaries of “new atheism”, offers the best hope for curing what ails our failing communities. I challenge any of my readers to try and change my mind on this one.

 

A Theological Alternative to the Creationist Dogma

I’ve been on vacation from my writing here for the past week and some, but during all the time I’ve “been away” I’ve been thinking of giving some sort of response to the Creation Museum’s big debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye this month. That event seems to have served no other purpose so effectively as to drive a further wedge between sincere Christian believers and sincere seekers for truth. I doubt that I can undo such perceptions to any significant extent, but I’d still like to give it a try.

It’s easy to write off Creation Museum front man Ken Ham as a flake on all sorts of levels. He basically holds to a position which states that “true Christian belief” –– an existential reliance on the teachings in the Bible –– requires that we accept the Bible as an infallible all-purpose guide to everything we really need to know about life, the universe and everything; and that any information which contradicts his understanding of the Bible must be categorically false. Among Christians worldwide this is by no means a majority position. The equivalent position regarding the Qur’an is still the orthodox majority position among Muslims, but among Christians Ham’s position is that of a shrinking minority who more or less explicitly self-identify as Fundamentalists. But regardless of demographics involved, the question deserves to be asked: Is it fair for Ham and company to assert that biblical literalism regarding creationism the one true form of Christianity from which all others have drifted? I don’t believe so, and my decision not to believe so is not something I acknowledge to be a retreatist or fall-back position based on the Fundamentalist position being so untenable in a scientific age.

As a theist I’m the first to admit, the slogan “God’s way” has historically been used to market lots of seriously funky stuff!

The fundamental issue is that I don’t believe that authoritative positions of “absolute certainty” about what “God’s way of doing things” is relative to “man’s way of doing things” are what God had in mind to give us. If he had intended for us to have such a perspective I think he would have arranged the world and the history of man’s religious experiences significantly differently. In contrast with this, though the vulnerability of uncertainty is something that many people come to religion (and to science) hoping to escape from, an essential part of the message of Jesus is that this vulnerability is part of the human condition that God has chosen to share with us, and something which we need to have the courage to embrace and to share with each other.

Before going any further here, let me clarify that I am not attempting here to further demonstrate to non-believers why I consider God to be worth believing in. I would ask those who have serious doubts about that matter to address discussions of their differences of perspective to my various essays here more directly related to that question. I have posted a few such essays in recent months, and I intend to further address that matter in the weeks to come, but this entry addresses a rather different topic. What I wish to talk about here is why, on the working assumption that there is a God, I still believe Fundamentalists such as Ken Ham are fundamentally wrong in their approach to determining what sort of character God is, and what he expects of humans who would hope to please him. The sort of dialog I’m hoping for in response to this particular essay is one with folks who would wish to defend different means of relating to and serving God than what I suggest here; perhaps with those who still cling to one particular form of fundamentalism or another. Fair enough? OK, on we go.

Let me start by taking the discussion back to the times when essentially no one attempted to question the premise that the book of Genesis provided all of the foundational information we need to understand the origins of the universe and mankind’s place in it –– what Fundamentalists would call the “good old days”; what many others would call “The Dark Ages” –– roughly from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries of our calendar. The authoritative Christian hegemony of that era was strong enough so that defensiveness against non-believing perspectives essentially became redundant. Thus the intelligentsia of the age, those who managed to build careers out of finding things to argue about between themselves, were more occupied with questions of what we can know with certainty about God’s nature than with fighting off skeptics as such.

In the later part of that era, following the innovative writings of Thomas Aquinas, one aspect of that project was to attempt to harmonize Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between physics and metaphysics with the Genesis narratives, which effectively gave rise to the creationist dogmas so important to Ham and his followers today. It should be pointed out though that this was actually something of a later adaptation of Islamic thought that Christian intellectuals inadvertently picked up on during the time of the Crusades. It is also fair to say that, advanced as he was for his time 2300-some years ago, Aristotle’s grasp of physics and related matters had some significant failings to it that these days any bright school kid can point out, so his ideas are no longer the best horse to hitch our intellectual wagon to for purposes of harmonizing physics and metaphysics.

The Medieval stuff I’m interested in comes from further back, in the more strictly Christian contemplative traditions that were around before the Thomist system of proofs of God’s existence was developed.

Another disclaimer is in order here by the way: my area of specialty is not medieval philosophy or medieval theology as such. My comprehension of the original Latin these documents were written in is pretty basic and rusty, and my own academic research is focused much more on phenomena within the past couple of centuries. So it wouldn’t take much for someone to outdo me in this particular field. What I can claim is that I know enough about that era to appreciate a bit of the wisdom of those back then who laid the groundwork for how we do philosophy of religion still today, and to spot the BS of those who claim to be representing and defending “eternal truths” which have their roots in this era. But beyond that if someone wishes to correct my understanding of the details involved, or dispute my interpretation of the overall trends in question, I welcome your input. Now back to the subject at hand.

To deal with the issue of scriptural certainty we have to take the discussion back at least as far as Peter Abelard. Students find the story of Abelard’s tragic biography and his post-castration love letters to Heloise particularly memorable, but in terms of philosophy he is best remembered for his classic Sic Et Non, where he demonstrates that simply relying on the authority of the scriptures and the sayings of church fathers without stopping to critically analyze what they are talking about is not only intellectually lazy and dishonest, but inevitably self-defeating in the long run. In this regard attempting to discover the true nature of God through authoritative second-hand accounts is a particularly problematic endeavor.

The authority of scripture on this matter is best regarded in terms of what the church fathers originally called it: the canon –– a measuring rod or a benchmark by which to measure other phenomena, in particular the experiences of God’s presence felt in prayer and worship and in serving his people (and among God’s people the poor in particular). From this perspective, worshiping the Bible itself (or any other holy book) rather than using it as a means of building, enriching and evaluating one’s spiritual experiences and practices, is a particularly bass ackwards way of “doing religion”.

Once this is realized, the seeking pilgrim soon comes to understand that if there is one thing God didn’t tend to provide us with, it’s certainty about matters of faith. Functional certainty is a human goal in terms of which we are continuously attempting to reach the point where they can set aside the troublesome task of actively thinking about things.  We hope to settle questions in our minds so that we can forget about them, relax and devote our energy to other things. That is a worthy goal in engineering for instance –– a well-designed device is one where the user can functionally forget about how it works and just move on to the process of using it without having to think about it. When it comes to theology however, God does not give us such a luxury. We can never get to the point of completely comprehending and mastering the divine essence so that we can then functionally just forget about it, or else it ceases to be divine. If we could capture God in a formula he would no longer be God.

Beyond that, the stated point of Christianity in particular (and to one extent or another other religions as well) is to teach us to love and respect each other. (I trust this is self-evident to all who have studied the matter as far as actually having read through the New Testament at least, but if anyone needs me to proof-text this out for them just write and ask.) To this end, as social theorist Jeremy Rifkin points out, uncertainty and vulnerability are essential elements for enabling empathy –– and thereby love –– to function in practice. In this regard I believe that Frank Schaeffer is also entirely right in referring to theological certainty as a “death trap”. Our natural desire to have complete certainty in our understanding of the transcendent, and to dominate one another through some absolute understanding of theological truth, is actually about as opposite to the message of Jesus as any theological concept could be.

The path of searching for peace with God and each other through the words and work of Jesus without pretending to certainty that God never meant us to have –– humbly serving one another rather than using the teachings of the Bible as means of attacking one another –– is one that the Orthodox Church can claim to have followed more consistently than the Western Christian tradition has, but there are plenty of important exceptions to this rule on both sides. Accepting the limits of our knowledge –– even (or perhaps especially) knowledge we claim to have received through infallible revelation –– and living a life proscribed by the humility that this implies, is a tradition that can also be traced as a minority position through the history of Western Theology as well, from the monks who transcribed the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” to the writings of John Scotus Erigena and the meditations of Blaise Pascal, on into the 19th century writings of Kierkegaard and those he in turn inspired. Nor can the east/west cross-pollination seen in and brought about by Dostoevsky’s novels be ignored in this context.  Of course those who have wished to use Christian doctrine as a Machiavellian tool for political manipulation have consistently labelled all of these thinkers as heretics, but that’s sort of beside the point. Their influence has been frequently ignored, but never silenced. (For an interesting overview of the subject, have a look here.)

In contrast to this, Ken Ham, representing the Fundamentalist, biblical literalist creationist perspective, claims that we need to have absolute certainty about everything written in the first book of the Bible in particular as having come entirely by God’s special revelation to Moses, or else we lose certainty about all sorts of critical matters like how marriage is supposed to work, what counts as sin, why people die, why nudity is problematic, etc. Because of the need for a sense of certainty in these areas, Ham and his comrades refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any information that contradicts the world view presented in Genesis. From there it becomes a rather transparent process of looking for viable excuses to interpret the data of the material world according to this ideological perspective. Thus the emotional need for certainty and control within a religious framework is at the heart of his argument. The resulting intellectual dishonesty in the process of interpreting the data of natural sciences is merely a by-product of this problematic ideology.

Ham’s slide depicting his perception of the moral risks entailed in not being a creationist

If we turn the priorities of Christendom around from an emphasis on social control to an emphasis on enabling compassion, as many of us believe the priorities should have been all along, the certainty argument goes out the window. Rather than seeking for a justification to stone those who we consider to be less holy than ourselves, we begin seeking for means of gaining acceptance for them, and ourselves, into the sort of club that by rights shouldn’t have people like us as members. Rather than focusing on controlling other people’s sex lives, we begin to focus on preventing people from being sexually abused and sexually objectified, and beyond that on building the sort of caring community that equips people to experience the sort of personal intimacy in which sex finds its greatest expression. Rather than basing medical ethics on abstract concepts of the value of life, we base our medical ethics on showing compassion and communicating to each individual that his or her life is personally important to us.

Pope Francis was not looking for excuses to set aside creationism when he wrote in his epic letter Evangelii Gaudium of “practical relativism” being a greater risk than “doctrinal relativism”. The pontiff is telling his flock that rather than worrying about losing a sense of absolute doctrinal certainty, they should worry more about the sort of relativism where they end up “acting as if God did not exist, making decisions as if the poor did not exist, setting goals as if others did not exist, working as if people who have not received the Gospel did not exist. It is striking that even some who clearly have solid doctrinal and spiritual convictions frequently fall into a lifestyle which leads to an attachment to financial security, or to a desire for power or human glory at all cost, rather than giving their lives to others in mission.” (§ 80) In other words doctrinal absolutes are far less important to the Church in fulfilling its basic mission than believers having an experience of joy in being able to serve as an instrument of God’s mercy for others.

When the priorities of the Church slip from such a foundation, it amounts to what Pope Francis calls “spiritual worldliness”, based on carefully cultivated appearances and thus, “not always linked to outward sin; from without, everything appears as it should be,” yet far more dangerous to the mission of the church than any outward moral failures. (§ 93) This takes the twin forms of “gnosticism” and “promethean neopelagianism”: a detached form of religious experience without relevant application in serving others, and a trust on one’s own sense of moral power and religious superiority. “A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. […] It is impossible to think that a genuine evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity.” (§ 94)

I am in no way a supporter of any doctrine of papal infallibility, but on these matters Pope Francis comes across as having a far clearer grasp of the essence of the Christian message than Ken Ham does. When we build from that sort of moral foundation described in Evangelii Gaudium motivations for twisting geological and biological data to fit one’s ideological “scriptural” premises are greatly reduced. Our message no longer depends on proving to ourselves that we have the right gnostic code –– the correct system of passwords for getting into heaven and staying out of hell that others need to learn from us in order to have the same hope we do. Nor does it leave us with anything to prove in terms of our having a superior moral code that we can expect everyone else to live up to. Once we reach that point of simply desiring to overcome our selfish barriers to truly loving God and each other certainty about the details of the physical origins of the universe is no longer an emotional issue. If it turns out that the stories in Genesis are based on ancient folk legends which allegorically explain something about how people over 3000 years ago believed that God expected them to relate to each other, nothing about our essential message fails on the basis of such a discovery.

If God’s top priority was for us to keep each other in line in terms of recognizing traditional moral standards as eternal and unchanging, there would be no point in the message of a suffering savior. God would merely have sent a team of angelic messengers with official declarations of the divine will and flaming swords to deal directly with those who resisted their message. There would have been no need to dignify human vulnerability and frailty with God taking on such a form. On the other hand, if God’s top priority were to convince us to treat each other with love and respect regardless of one’s status within various human power struggles, he would have driven this point home for us by himself taking on the form of a humble servant –– sort of like Jesus…

Thus I conclude that the message of Christianity is not about guilt, justice, retribution and forensic certainties; but rather about embracing frailty, experiencing empathy, showing mercy and finding redemption through deep, undeserved interpersonal connection. In order to communicate this sort of message it is not necessary to pretend that we have an absolutely reliable technical understanding of the prehistoric origins of the earth and the universe which must remain impervious to all evidence to the contrary. On the contrary, such an assumption of certainty tends to be rather counter-productive in that it entails a belief that certain people have a God-given right to dictate to others a set of standards regarding every area of life for them to live up to, which in turn goes directly against the Gospel message of humble service.

Good news: One does not need to believe that the event depicted here, happening roughly 5000 years ago, explains the existence of the worlds great canyons and the limits of biodiversity that we find among humans and animals in the world today in order to have a capacity to accept forgiveness and to forgive and care for others in return. Just in case you were wondering…

Thus to reject the Creation Museum’s theological premises is not a matter of submitting to the superiority of a non-theistic premise; it is a matter of putting the teachings of Jesus ahead of a lust for power and an emotional need for certainty. I would encourage all who wish to be counted as followers of Jesus to adjust their perspectives accordingly: “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.” (Philippians 3:15)

Is there an Alternative to Secularism and Fundamentalism?

In trying to be a good little boy and use my summer vacation from teaching productively in terms of my doctoral studies, over the past week and a half I’ve been reading a fair amount of theoretical literature about the sociology of religion. Part of what I have realized in the process is that there are effectively two paradigms that dominate the discussion in the field: secularization and fundamentalism.

The sad narrative goes something like this: Starting in the late 1700s a series of revolutions started to seriously weaken the political authority of churches within the western world. Priests were allowed no role in government in the United States, the power of the cardinals was demolished with the collapse of the monarchy in France, and the political authority of the papacy became a thing of the past in southern Europe in general. This led to Copernicans being allowed to come out of the closet, and other ideas that would have previously been considered dangerous heresies to develop and advance –– the most infamous being Darwin’s theory of evolution. By the mid- to late 1800s the Vatican states had collapsed entirely; Comte, Marx and Freud were each predicting the complete demise of religion as a force within society; and Nietzsche was declaring that God was already dead. A concerted effort to phase out traditional Christianity and to realize a new, “more advanced” sort of social structure started to take shape among western intellectuals.

Within Christianity some German theologians in particular started working on developing new variations on the faith which would be less at odds with these modern ideas, but rather than making Christianity more relevant this merely made it more relative: rather than putting the faith in touch with new realities these theologies had the general effect of making it harder to see how there could be any distinctively Christian message left. It sort of helped the secularists prove their point. Other Christian leaders, however, particularly in the United States, went to work with great vigor on trying to defend the traditional understandings within their various branches of Christendom as eternal and unchangeable truths. They declared that there are certain basic ideas which are absolutely essential, or fundamental, to anything which could dare to call itself “Christian”. Thus within this sort of siege mentality the social phenomenon of “Fundamentalism” was born.

Over the course of the twentieth century secularism and fundamentalism continued to do battle with each other. After starting out as a Protestant Christian reaction to modernization, variations on fundamentalism began to spring up within other religious traditions as well, most notably within Islam. Effectively those religious movements which remained “mainstream” and interactive with the modern world have become less and less relevant culturally and politically, while those who have been seen as taking a strong stand in promoting the implementation of God’s will –– sticking to “eternal truths” regardless of how unpopular they are with the mainstream –– have managed to draw significant numbers of new converts continuously. While these new, radically conservative religious movements have not been able to establish anything like the sort of power base that the Medieval Catholic Church had –– or even the sort of pull that the first generation Protestant Reformers had within central Europe –– they have progressively become the most politically significant forms of religion in the world today. Particularly intimidating in terms of world peace over the next generation are the Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian variations on Islamic fundamentalism, and the US “religious right” variations on Christian fundamentalism together with some of its radical off-chutes in developing countries.  

The information revolution of the past generation has further intensified the battle between these trends. Anyone can find as much reinforcement for their extreme positions as they could hope for, 24/7 –– telling you why you should ditch all religion as nonsense, or telling you that you need to stand and fight against the global conspiracy to destroy your faith, whatever your taste may be. The question is, is there any alternative left between these two extremes?

Before taking this question further, I think it is useful to unpack one current distinction in terminology: between secularism and secularization. Secularization is a matter of sociological theory which addresses the fact that religious institutions do not have the sort of power that they did a couple of centuries ago, or even a couple of generations ago. This much is in many ways self-evident in most western societies, even in the United States. This is not necessarily an indication of a victory for a group of politically and intellectually anti-religious activists who can be referred to as “secularists.” Such activists undoubtedly exist, and have a significant audience, particularly in Europe, but they don’t really deserve much of the credit or blame for the reduced role of Christianity in, for instance, determining what hours shops will be open, or determining which children are “legitimate” these days.

What I am talking about here though is the ideological battle between secularism –– the socio-political effort to phase out religion as a factor in public life at least –– and fundamentalism –– the religious belief that the teachings of a particular faith tradition need to remain unchanged and unquestionable as a social norm, with subsequent claims over all aspects of public life. For both of these ideological movements the social realities of secularization make up the essence of the cultural environment in which they function.

So is there some viable middle ground to be found between secularism and fundamentalism then? To address this challenge we have to stop to consider what we regard as the basic point of religion is to begin with. There are a few alternatives to be considered. It seems that most secular sociologists are making a combination of two assumptions on the matter: the point of religion is either to enable social control or to secure magical help in day-to-day life, or both. On the first account it could say that a cultural assumption of a religious or biblical standard being binding in society was once useful as a means of creating cultural solidarity and mutual trust and the like; but this also had its down-sides in encouraging things like gay bashing and witch burning as accepted social practices. The second consideration puts Christianity on even footing with Shamanism: rather than worrying about pleasing God or building an ethical code for its own sake, it implies that people are worried about God sending the rains so that their crops grow. Then if they get beyond worries about this life then maybe they’ll start worrying about life after death as well, needing magical assistance in securing a favorable position for themselves there as well. As far as the basic purpose of Christianity goes I believe both of these assumptions are fundamentally wrong, but in terms of understanding portions of the social dynamics within particular societies they are worth taking seriously at least.

Knowing where you want to go is an important part of getting there. If what you really want is a safe, comfortable and controllable life in the material world, and that’s really all you want, then a secularized technological perspectives on life is probably the most effective means of getting you there. Not that prayer and use of technology are mutually exclusive. If I were to become seriously ill I would definitely use both, and I really don’t think I’m alone in that matter. But I would not substitute prayer for taking medication or whatever else a trusted medical professional would recommend on a purely materialistic basis. In many very fundamental respects we all depend on modern technology to keep our lives functioning safely and dependably. In the western world one important fruit of this technological perspective is that, unlike just a few generations ago, having a few children in each family die of disease before reaching adulthood is no longer the norm within society. Another significant effect of the technologically driven world that we live in is that I can sit here and write this in my low budget teacher’s apartment, with no significant financial backing for my ideas, and with minimal skill in using publicly available technologies I can send out this essay realistically expecting it to be read in 50-100 countries. So overall I think it’s fair to say that rather than depending on prayer as a means of magical control of our environment we can more reliably turn to technology to help and protect us in practical terms.

Sports technology company Suunto came up with a pretty funny ad about technology replacing rituals to improve our luck. If improved luck is the point of religion for you…

This deserves two important qualifications though: First, our technological approach to life can have many horrible unforeseen consequences, which we need to be watching out for continuously. We have not yet mastered the art of using our technological skills and possibilities in sustainable ways. We as humans have burned out many habitats where we have set up shop, sometimes successfully moving on to other places afterwards; sometimes dying out en masse as the result of our mistakes. The only thing that’s really changed about that dynamic over the generations is that we’ve got fewer and fewer alternative habitats to move on to when we burn out our old ones these days, and our impact on the planet as a whole is more something we need to pay attention to than in the old days. So in this respect we need to limit the faith we put in technology as we now have it, carefully insisting that it serves us and not visa-versa.

Secondly, there are many aspects of faith healing –– involving feeling a sense of purpose and in our lives and a sense of connection with forces beyond ourselves –– that really do work in terms of helping our bodies to heal at times and helping our technical operations in this world to function more efficiently. Praying really does help people to be more successful on all sorts of different levels. Regardless of your understanding of why that might be, there is really no point in trying to deny this fact. This is not to say that prayer is as effective as modern technology in terms of realizing many basic goals, but as a factor operating in conjunction with technology, or in the absence of technology, there is plenty of evidence that it really does work somehow. At a bare minimum it reinforces a sense of being loved, which any medical doctor can tell you is not something to be belittled.

In any case, on the other end of the spectrum, if the strongest possible sense of social control in society is really what you are looking for, then fundamentalism is probably the most effective way of getting there. As one old agnostic acquaintance of mine on line pointed out some years ago, “Just look at the pyramids. Religion gets s**t done.” The less you allow religion to be questioned, the more s**t it is able to get done. There are a number of more politely expressed and politically accepted variations on this theme, ranging from the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli to those of Francis Schaeffer, with the common theme that if people can be assumed to share certain religious values, you need far less authoritarian brutality to keep them in line. And when you do use authoritarian brutality, if you do so in the name of a god that everyone trusts in they are far less likely to revolt and make a (literally) bloody mess of things as a result.

Beyond that, as a matter of temperament many people do not want to live in a state of uncertainty about any more than is absolutely necessary. They want things to be cut and dry and simple; clearly understood by all as operating according to “proper principles”. If that’s the way things have to be for such people, an absolutist understanding of religious tradition is the most tried and true means of keeping things that way for them.

But such pragmatic considerations aside, these aren’t the most important aspects of religion –– or “spirituality” –– to be considered. Part of the broader perspective necessary has to do with the qualifications stated above regarding the usefulness of prayer at times, but more to the point would be the consideration of the enduring role of some traditional religious practices even in secularized societies: rites of passage, the most important of which are affectionately known as “hatching, matching and dispatching.” What is it that continues to make baby dedications, church weddings, and religious funerals –– and to a slightly lesser extent coming of age ceremonies of various sorts –– within religious settings popular even with essentially non-religious people? It could be argued that these rituals have been used as means of controlling people and bringing good luck to those participating, but neither of those explain why people want to keep doing them these days. There’s obviously something more to it than that.

Why is it really that church weddings continue to mean so much to so many people?

These rites are means of marking out times when the overall meaning of life is most profoundly being considered and open to question –– when people are thinking about why we’re here, what it means to be human, what we might hope to accomplish in life, what meaning our lives have to others, what makes someone a “good person,” and the possibility of something more “out there” that ties all of this together. It is in its capacity to consider these matters that religion distinguishes itself from being just an expedient of politics or a crude form of control to be replaced by technology.

The essential Christian answer to these questions of the meaning of life is in what Jesus taught were the most important commandments given by Moses –– the Twin Commandment of Love: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. We must first find a way of relating to the transcendental principle that gives our lives true meaning, and embrace it fully and without reservation; and once we have that established we must recognize that each of us is essentially connected with all of those around us, and we need to treat them accordingly. It is the process of developing this sort of meaning in life, not the politics or the luck improvement rituals, which is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian –– perhaps what it means to be a religious or spiritual person in general.

It must also be recognized, however, that while there is a very generalized seeking and vague awareness of the challenge of finding meaning in life, that makes particular religious rituals at different phases of life feel particularly comforting, it has always been a small minority within the population who truly “get it”. In this regard I believe that Sören Kierkegaard was on the right track –– in the generation before secularization and fundamentalism became significant social dynamics in northern Europe –– in saying that the religious mob mentality that was dominant in his time had little to do with the message of Jesus. True faith is a matter of individual connection with a power beyond ourselves, in a way that is not intended to win popularity contests. What the masses are into as means of establishing social acceptability is never going to be a matter of loving God with one’s whole being.

From Kierkegaard’s perspective then secularization is hardly to be regarded as a threat to true faith; quite the opposite. It is only when faith can be seen as a matter distinct from social respectability that it can truly have significance as a dynamic unto itself. This does not mean that Kierkegaard would have been happy about the program of secularists –– those whose political agenda includes the elimination of religious observance as part of everyday social interaction. He would have wanted God to remain important in people’s lives in ways that these folks have made it their mission in life to deny. But secularization as a progressive historical trend towards less mass religiosity within mainstream culture is something that Kierkegaard certainly would have received as very good news.

Fundamentalism would have been a greater problem for Kierkegaard. Trying to distill the essence of Christianity down to a set of doctrinal standards intended to provide a safe basis for social identity and a valid criteria for controlling and judging others is precisely what the gospel is not about. In fact this is a greater threat to the processes of learning to find meaning in our lives through loving God and truly connecting with our neighbors –– believers and non-believers alike –– than either secularization or secularism. But I believe that Kierkegaard would believe that in spite of the Fundamentalists who attempt to dominate religious dynamics these days, those who truly seek God with all their hearts will still be able to find him.

There is still something to be said for the argument that human beings have a near universal sense of spiritual craving, unfulfilled and ignored as it may be for most people. But somewhere deep down inside, almost everyone wants to find a sense of transcendental purpose and social harmony based on connecting with factors beyond themselves. In our secularized age many people turn to experiences other than religion to fulfill these longings. In this regard, while reading up on the passing of “Funky Claude” Nobs this year, I was rather struck by a quote from Deep Purple front man Ian Gillan, saying that for 40 years he’d never done a concert without Smoke on the Water because “it’s almost a spiritual experience. The song no longer belongs to us… we just accompany the crowd.”

That sounds about right actually. Rock concerts involving standard anthems enable people to experience a sense of transcendent connection with those around them in ways that few other things do these days. If religion fails to enable people to find such experiences they will seek them elsewhere… with varying degrees of commitment and success in finding what they are looking for.

I’m not really sure how important it is in the big scheme of things, but I’d sort of like to see more sociologist of religion actually get this point.

And to the Republic…

Earlier in the month I was looking at the stats of where blog readers here were located, and in the shortened screen of my mini laptop I saw hits from four different countries with names beginning with “United”. I honestly didn’t know there were that many, and I had to expand the view to see what they were. Being as I myself am originally from the United States of America, of course that was at the top of this list. Having strong connections to “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” it was no surprise to find that second. I have also taught people who have later moved to the United Arab Emirates, so that was also to be expected. The fourth, which taught me something new, was that Tanzania is officially a “United Republic.” That got my curiosity going and I searched the web to see what other “United” countries there are. In fact there is officially just one other: the United Mexican States, better known as just Mexico.

This also got me curious about what other common terms are used in the official names of Countries. Those of you who are fascinated by such trivia might enjoy the following list. Among the official names (in English) of the 193 member nations the UN, the following terms are repeated most often:

Federation, Independent, Principality, Socialist and Union – 2 times each

Commonwealth – 3 times

Federal and Islamic – 4 times each

People’s and United – 5 times each

Democratic – 8 times

State(s) – 12 times

Kingdom – 16 times

and Republic – a whopping 123 times

(This doesn’t count the general terms “confederation,” “sultanate,” “abode,” “grand duchy” or “city” in  such names, which each appear just once.)

So what is it about the idea of a “Republic” that makes the vast majority of countries in the UN want to identify themselves as such? The history of political philosophy isn’t really my strong suit, so I had to poke around a bit to look up answers on this one.

I know that Plato’s greatest work is called “The Republic” in English, but that is not really faithful to the idea of the original Greek name. I know that in the movie “Gladiator” wise men debate over the idea of turning the Roman Empire back into a Republic, only to be foiled by an ignorant evil tyrant; but I know that is a questionable Hollywood interpretation of history. But from those references I can see how Medieval political idealists may have nostalgically taken Athens before Alexander and Rome before Caesar as ideals to imitate, though it is unlikely that the people of those societies would have recognized the modern republican ideal as something based on their own form of government.

After a bit more poking around I found that the origin of the term “republic” as we use it today –– indicating a government without a monarch of any sort, ultimately responsible to a larger group of voters –– goes back to early renaissance Italian authors in general, and Machiavelli in particular. How very interesting. Machiavelli wasn’t much of one to promote the virtues of non-hereditary forms of government, and he also believed that atheism should be outlawed, so there are limits as to how much can be said for his forward thinking in republican terms.

It’s probably fair to say then that “the republic” as an ideal that the majority of the autonomous nations in the world today subscribe to really comes from the mix of political theories behind the American and French revolutions in the end of the eighteenth century. It is old news to say that both of these had their serious moral imperfections as well as being radical leaps forward in political thought.

A. Rand

V. Hugo

Recently and randomly I have been looking into this latter revolution by way of Victor Hugo, and I’ve been rather fascinated by what I’ve found. In my last weeks in the Republic of South Africa this year I came across a collection of old paperbacks on a sidewalk vendor’s table that included a copy of Victor Hugo’s “Ninety-three” with an introduction by Ayn Rand. I hadn’t heard of this particular work before, and the sheer irony of the creator of Quasimodo being introduced by the creator of Alan Greenspan convinced me that I had to fork over the equivalent of 25 US cents to get it. Nor was I disappointed. There was a fair amount of crap in the intro and a fair amount of dull editorializing within the novel itself, but overall it was a fascinating thought stimulator.

Hugo’s most famous character

The essential theme of the book is the various moral justifications given on each side for the atrocities of the Vendée conflict –– which wiped out somewhere between a quarter and half of the population of the region in question in the early years of the French Revolution –– and in the establishment of the “Committee of Public Safety” and the “Reign of Terror” in that same period starting in 1793. Apparently this novel wasn’t very well received in its time –– a couple generations after the events it describes –– because as it happened Paris had just gone through yet another mini civil war and no one was interested in reading anything about justifications for such atrocities.

Rand’s most famous creation

Rand’s introduction to this novel is all about praising the Nietzschean superman styled characters that Hugo creates, even if she doesn’t care for the politics of compassion he promotes along the way. In many ways this reminds me of the talk I heard by film maker Ilmar Raag about his tragic drama Klass (“The Class”) about the evils of school bullying. Raag told of how it disturbed him to find out that when this film was shown to younger audiences many of those immature viewers expressed particular admiration for the character of the leading bully. I imagine that if Hugo were to read Rand’s introduction to his novel he might feel much the same way.93 also shares one of the features I most appreciated the Paul Haggis film Crash: each of the main characters has such a combination of moral flaws and underlying moral goodness that you can’t really pick out any ultimate good guy or bad guy.But what I see is something entirely different: an examination of how strategically cold-hearted we can be without destroying all that is worth fighting for within ourselves; a consideration of what needs to be done for “the good” to survive when it is surrounded by competing groups of psychopaths. And beyond that there is the question, why is it that some people fight so hard to protect systems which go against all of what might be assumed to be their best interests? All of these remain very relevant questions to this day.

To start with we have the “Red bonnet brigade” of republican revolutionaries from Paris, working their way north through the French countryside looking for leftover royalists to stomp out. On their way through a forest they discover a starving young peasant widow and her three young children hidden in the bushes. They didn’t have had any serious qualms about killing royalist women and children, and this widow clearly had little interest in supporting the revolution per se, but  their canteen lady talked them into adopting this little family anyway. Later they are practically annihilated, and their surviving handful of fighters struggle to get as much revenge and die with as with as much glory as possible, ready to die to defend those children.

Then there is the Marquis de Lantenac, who earns the respect of those smuggling him back into France from England for his icy cool demeanor in killing one of his own men who fails at his duty; who is ready to die for his own cause, but equally ready to slaughter whole villages for his cause without flinching. He promises a peasant who saves his life out of sheer pity that he will not go out to do evil, and he promptly breaks that promise and wreaks havoc across the countryside. But then when it is least expected he somewhat redeems himself with a self-sacrificial move, not for his political cause, butto protect the innocent (whose lives were endangered by his actions to begin with) as a matter of honor .

Then there is the commander Gauvain, nephew of the Marquis as it turns out, who is ideologically committed to the ideals of the Republic in spite of his aristocratic family connections, and who is a profound military genius in his own right, but who is suspect among his fellow republicans for all the mercy he is willing to show to their enemies. In the end Gauvain might or might not be justifiably branded as a traitor to the Republican cause.

And then there is Cimourdain, the former village priest who first instilled Gauvain’s sense of social conscience into him when he was but a school boy. Cimourdain is now an embittered revolutionary, disillusioned with the goodness of mankind and ready to do anything whatsoever to stomp out the enemies of the Republic. His only sense of human sympathy lies in trying to protect Gauvain from all forms of harm as far as possible.

All of these characters are given their own extended dialogs and soliloquies in which they consider their own inner conflicts. Then as further reinforcement of the moral problems involved, Hugo tosses in an extended, heated debate between the historical characters of Danton, Robespierre and Marat –– each with their own clear vision of what should be done for the good of the Republic, to the exclusion of both of the others’ viewpoints –– each destined to die within the next year and a half, not due to attacks by royalists or foreigners, but as victims of the infighting between the republican fractions. Between these various speaches you find justifications for all sorts of political opinions of the day, giving the impression that Hugo doesn’t really fully support any of them.

The grand finale includes a very visually evocative verbal image of the sunrise revealing a medieval castle tower and a hilltop guillotine rising next to each other –– the symbol of the old evil and the symbol of the new evil side by side. The tragedy lies in the way each of the characters were forced to choose between these evils, not allowed the luxury of neutrality in the matter. And in standing with either the tower or the guillotine they are just as likely to be killed by their allies as their enemies. They must each navigate their way through the varieties of evil on either side then, doing their best to keep some resemblance of personal integrity intact. In the end it can be nothing but a tragedy.

Yet it was out of that mess that the concept of the republic that achieved prominence in the twentieth century politics arose. Well… that and the American Civil War. These late eighteenth century experiments in pure representative democracy –– with no kings, no state church, no automatic privileges for the aristocracy and radical new discussions going on over how determinant one’s sex, skin color, parentage and/or land of origin should be over one’s rights and role within society –– were incredibly messy. Those revolutionaries made many mistakes that we need to make every possible effort to learn from and not repeat. That would have been Hugo’s main point in his final novel.

One of those mistakes is to pledge one’s allegiance unquestioningly to either the tower or the guillotine, and to the system of control for which it stands. Neither a conservative dogma insisting on the preservation of all of the ancient traditions of abuse at all costs, nor revolutionary fervor to do away with all traditions and leave nothing standing, is a recipe for a just and productive society.

Beyond that we should not depend on our ideological ends justifying our barbaric means, but we should rather try to make our noble means a source of dignity for our ideological ends. And in terms of the realization of these ends we should dare to believe in “somedays,” when the political and logistical problems of the current generation will no longer stand in our way. There’s a lot to be said for pursuing certain kinds of utopias, but at the same time being willing to compromise on the incremental steps it is currently possible to take in the right direction. If you’re able to get a hold of a copy of Ninety-three I recommend taking some time to savor the final dialog between Gauvain and Cimourdain there in this regard.

I had actually planned on finishing this essay much sooner, but as it happens that just yesterday the US Supreme Court upheld President Obama’s health care law, I’ll take that as a sign that the timing here is as it should be. Thank God for little steps that bring us closer to a more just, sustainable and harmonious world.

“Long live the Republic!”

 

To my Non-believing Friends

Believe it or not, I used to hang out with a bunch of people who were actually proud to call themselves Fundamentalists. Some of them were even pretty nice people; they just got a bit narrow-minded on issues that were of emotional importance to them. These days fundamentalisms are my pet peeve, in my roles both as a teacher and as an amateur diplomat between folks of differing convictions. It seriously bothers me when someone starts to insist that they have a (literally or figuratively) God-given monopoly on “proper understanding” of some significant aspect of metaphysics or the human experience, and that everyone who doesn’t see it their way must be either ignorant or stupid or evil or self-deceived. And yes, I see this among both religious believers and zealous anti-believers.

More times than not this “proper understanding” comes by way of a collection of authoritative statements made by some great leader or council on the matter, and this set of “scriptures” serves the function of saying to the followers, “Look, we know that these are difficult for you, so we took the time to sort them out for you properly. So now you no longer have to worry your little heads about them. Just trust our basic perspective and everything else will be fine.”  That in itself isn’t necessarily a problem. We all need to rely on trusted advice every now and again, and we all need to just functionally accept certain things we are told as true in everyday life. There are many areas in which continuous argument over basic issues can be counter-productive. The problem comes when these ideas become so emotionally charged as “final truths” that any serious questioning of them is taken as a form of blasphemy.

Let’s take a non-religious example of a socially accepted majority understanding that could still be subject to some dispute: DUI. A few generations of experience with motor vehicles have given people in industrialized countries in general an awareness that consuming significant amounts of alcohol before operating such machines is generally a very bad idea. Thus almost all cultures having automobiles also have laws against driving them while drunk. What counts as a “significant amount” varies somewhat from culture to culture, as do the means of determining when someone is guilty of violating this prohibition, but the basic principle is well established. The particular local and national laws enforcing this restriction are not subject to debate, particularly in the practical case where someone is trying to decide whether or not to drive home after having a few at a party (even though inevitably such debates do happen). Rather than arguing about it, it is by far the simplest and most socially beneficial approach to say, “If you drink, don’t drive; if you drive, don’t drink.”

It’s worth explaining the rational arguments behind this to those who are genuinely unaware of how alcohol affects the central nervous system, and how that can lead to unnecessary risks and even death for intoxicated drivers and those on the roads they drive on.  But there will always be those skeptics for whom rational argument won’t work, who consider themselves physiologically exceptional. Once the general principle has been established, sometimes compliance –– if not agreement –– needs to be forcibly required.  For this we have police patrols.

A separate matter, however, is whether those who don’t believe in the dangers of drunk driving can be punished for speaking about their beliefs. Should their heretical views on this matter be punished? Are they endangering the lives of others with their claims that drinking and driving should be more socially acceptable, even if they are not actively driving under the influence themselves? Or for that matter what if someone is honestly able to prove –– in driving competitions or any other scientific test that you care to put them through –– that they still have better reflexes behind the wheel after 5 or 6 shots of booze than any competitor with less than 5 years’ driving experience does cold sober? Does that justify their ignoring the laws in the matter? And what if we were in some place where there actually weren’t any laws in force regarding the matter –– if we only had our awareness of how these things work, but no higher standard to appeal to? How emotional should we allow ourselves to get about such arguments? How angry could non-believers in the dangers of drunk driving get in return? How far should we go in trying to prove to the world that the other side is entirely wrong?

Obviously there’s room for disagreement between intelligent people on what the most productive approach to such disagreements might be. My suggestions:

1. Stay as close as possible to the demonstrable facts of the matter (things that both sides can actually agree on and practically check up on if necessary).
2. Keep honest communication open over what is practically at stake in the disagreement (in the DUI example primarily danger to life, limb and property vs. potential loss of stimulation and liberty to seek adventure in life) and over which side it would be better to ere on in cases involving less than perfect certainty.
3. As much as possible avoid demonizing the other side and making the argument deeply personal. Assume sincerity and basic human virtues on the other side whenever possible.

Now, can we try to take these principles over to debates between religious people and atheists? I would like to hope so.

I have posted at length in previous blogs about both why I personally chose to believe in God and how I would ideally like to see religions function. I won’t go back over that territory here. What I’d rather like to do is to pursue a mutual understanding with my religiously non-believing friends over definitions of terms and principles of good taste in discussing these matters in what we might call a philosophical manner.  As a reference point for the views of “the other side” on this I’ll be addressing myself to “QualiaSoup’s” on-line video presentation on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sNDZb0KtJDk, but presented in such a way as to make sense to readers who haven’t taken the time to watch the video in question.

The first matter to clarify here is the basic use of the word “belief.” There is a certain common tendency in everyday language to use the phrase “I believe so” to imply equivocation about the final certainty of the matter in question. If I were to say that I believe Portugal will be the next FIFA world champions in soccer, as bizarre as the statement might sound to someone who’s watched Ronaldo’s ice cold performances this week, I could in good faith get away with saying so, because of all of the uncertainty implied in saying it that way.  In the world of sports, so long as it is not controlled by bookies, no one really knows what the results of coming years’ competitions will be. I’m not really sure; I just believe so. Atheists tend to assume that this same level of uncertainty is built into religious belief, and that this contrasts with their own perspectives, which are less “belief-based”.

The problem here is that this equivocates from the more philosophical use of the word belief, based on the use of the ancient Greek word “pistis” or “pisteuo”. Quite the contrary to the everyday use of the term given above, belief in this sense is a very foundational trust, of the sort you put in a rope bridge when you step out onto it to cross a canyon. It is something that you are convinced of enough to stake your basic personal security on the matter. In this regard what you know is a sub-category of what you believe –– specifically those beliefs that that you have “valid evidence” for and that in the long run turns out to be true. So if we stick to this sense of the word “belief” or “believe”, it follows that if you know something you also believe it, and you need to believe things in able to know them. To claim you have no beliefs thus logically implies that you have no knowledge either.

This in turn relates to the question of whether those who claim to be uncommitted as to whether or not there is any supernatural force “out there” worthy of being called God should be called “weak atheists” or “agnostics”. The argument here is essentially that agnosticism refers to a lack of what the Greeks called “gnosis”: knowledge, not “pistis”: faith or belief. To say that these are unrelated, however, is a bit of a misrepresentation of the terminology, since pistis is a fundamental precondition for gnosis.

The point of the term “agnostic” is not to say that one reserves the right to have beliefs regardless of their lack of justifiability, but rather to say that one isn’t going to take a stand one way or the other with regard to the issue of a supernatural world. Someone who takes a stand for the existence of a supernatural world can properly be called a theist of some sort (including monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, etc.) or a deist under some circumstances. Someone who wishes to take a stand against various understandings of the supernatural –– to whom it is important that the implications of such ideas of the supernatural would be excluded from life as he or she knows it –– who is willing to stake his or her sense of safety, purpose and well-being on a premise that no such supernatural force is going to involve itself in his or her life –– is an atheist. That is a form of belief, and as long as the atheist does not take “belief” to be a term of derision –– to imply the sort of uncertainty I have towards Portugal’s soccer success –– there really shouldn’t be any problem with that.

If someone objects to “agnostic” being used as a description for a lack of faith in the supernatural, the implication is that just because a person lacks knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean that they lack beliefs, so agnostic might be too broad a category. They don’t want to be called agnostics because they don’t want to be grouped together with those who have beliefs one way or another, but who still lack confidence in their ability to justify their beliefs. Thus they might want to use “atheist” to imply a lack of supernatural belief, not just a lack of certainty about their beliefs.  In other words they are trying to re-define atheism as inclusive of hyper-agnosticism: total cluelessness in religious matters –– not only can they not prove their theories; they don’t have any idea as to what might or might not be out there. If that’s what they mean though, then it would make more linguistic sense to just call themselves “hyper-agnostics” –– or to coin a term literally meaning to be “against belief,” they could call themselves “apistics.”

To refer to oneself as an atheist really does imply opposition to some particular collection of theistic ideas, however broadly that concept is to be applied in the given case. It does apply an active metaphysical stance, and when you have an active metaphysical stance –– even in the negative –– you have a form of pistis. If, on the other hand, the atheist is effectively saying, “Oh, I have knowledge. I just don’t have any beliefs,” all that means is that they really don’t know what they’re talking about.

From there it does go with the territory to note that negative beliefs inherently involve negating something more specific. Since I am posting this on what the US celebrates as Father’s Day I’ll use that as an example: if I were to categorize people in terms of those who believe that fathers are important in child rearing, those who believe that fathers are not important in child rearing and those who refuse to take a general stand for or against the institution of fatherhood, both those on both the positive side and those on the negative side would be rather likely to have some childhood experiences regarding particular father figures which strongly color their views. If nothing else on the negative side this could be a conspicuously absent biological father, without whom they may feel that they did just fine. In this sort of sense opposition really does imply the existence of a mental construct of some sort to be in opposition to. So when someone is convinced that they should stand in opposition to theism –– that in everyday language they are justified in saying, “I don’t believe in God” –– it is not at all a silly question to ask, “Which God is it that you don’t believe in?” The video linked above really ties itself up in knots in attempting to deny this fact.

The narrator there makes the statement: “I worked out as a child that if there were any gods none of them were bothered about using  their supposedly awesome powers to provide direct dramatic evidence of their existence.”

Again, I won’t take this space to explain again why I do take the idea of a supernatural world seriously, since those who are interested in my personal take on the matter can find it in my previous essays here, and since I really don’t think that anything I might say to convinced opponents of the supernatural here would make any real difference to those of the opposing camp. But in reading between the lines of the above quote, it seems to very much have to do with early experiences of prayers not being answered, be they his own or someone else’s. So in other words there was some very specific god or gods which as a child he decided not to trust or believe in, and a generalized rejection of the supernatural seems to have spread in his mind from there. I admit that I don’t know this person well enough to make a conclusive psycho-analytical statement, but based on the data given this is a highly plausible analysis –– certainly at least as plausible as any of his analysis of theistic thought. For him to in turn to accuse those who point out such psychological considerations of “convoluted thinking,” as this video does in its own crude way, is thus a bit of a swing and a miss.

It’s also a bit of a swing and a miss for this representative of atheism to claim that the biblical God is “multiply self-refuting” of the basis of him “needing worship”. Nowhere in the Bible is that listed as a “need” of God’s, nor is it even implied in mainstream Christian theology. To present that as evidence against the concept of God is a classic example of the “man of straw fallacy,” and I would encourage those on both sides to avoid such tactics. If the claim that the biblical God is self-refuting is to be advanced here it will need stronger evidence than that.

Overstated condemnation of the other side’s views is frequently combined with overly optimistic summaries of the virtues of one’s own group’s thinking. The summary of atheistic thought, as opposed to theistic thought, implying that it has a “scientific” base, and that as such the point of its theories is “not to convince people that they are true, but to account for available data with the model which has the greatest explanatory and predictive power” is a case in point. Thomas Kuhn’s work has adequately proven that this has never been the case in science –– converting skeptics has always been part of the “scientific community’s” enterprise. A fortiori, a “faith-neutral” perspective has never been the case among those promoting (or defending) atheism as such.

The video closes with a defense of atheists’ defensiveness based on the abuse and religious intolerance that they have been subjected to over the years. In some regards this brings up a legitimate point: There is a strong human tendency to seek ideological consensus and to eliminate ideological difference within societies. Historically speaking the vast majority of human societies have reinforced such ideological homogeneity by religious means –– brutally punishing and torturing anyone who dares to believe differently from their official state or tribal religion. This happened to Jews in particular within state church dominated countries in Europe up through the time of the enlightenment; it happened to doubters of the word of the Sangoma in pre-colonial African cultures; it happened to those who challenged the official state ideology and personality cult for the leader in Maoist China, the Stalinist Soviet Union and the last three generations of North Korean leadership; and it continues to happen to various sorts of “infidels” in would-be Islamic theocracies around the Middle East today. In each of those cases persecution has given rise to an ideological cult of respect for martyrs. In the case of atheists within Western societies there is the legend of men such as Galileo attempting to stand up for secular reason against the authoritative dogma of the Catholic Church, and suffering for it; and then there is the evil figure of Machiavelli, suggesting that the only ideological and religious persuasion which should never be trusted (and should always be punished) is atheism, since not believing that they are ultimately responsible to any force beyond themselves makes these people inherently dangerous to the state. So does this history of facing opposition explain and/or justify the zeal and confrontational character of some atheists we see in the media these days? In my opinion, yes and no.

What this tendency towards the persecution of atheists does show is two things really. First of all it is clearly more the rule than the exception for societies to be religious, and thus on the issue of “burden of proof” towards breaking with the starting position or the status quo, it falls to atheists to prove that societies can operate in a healthier fashion without their religious underpinning. This in turn involves proving that their fundamental premises in this regard are false. Beyond that though, it shows that when it comes to individual men of conscience standing up against abuses within societies, it is the courage of the individual to defy the collective that is at the moral heart of the matter; not whether that individual (or that society) has a religious or non-religious motivation for the moral principles in question.  Both love and compassion on the one hand and fear and violence on the other can be motivated by religious conviction or by an atheistic self-centered orientation.

All that being said, there are a few things which this atheist presenter and I might agree upon. There are clearly abuses which take place in the name of various understandings of God. There is a fair amount of problematic black and white thinking that religious people are prone to. There are very personalized attempts at demonizing the other going both ways in these sorts of debates. Thus the challenge of establishing a respectful dialog here is never going to be easy.

Among both atheists and theists of all stripes, one of the on-going challenges will continue to be what some call the Dunning-Kruger effect: The principle that the less competent a person is to express an opinion on these matters, the more confident they will be in doing so.  Or as Bertrand Russell put it, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” This happens among both atheists and theists. If it happens that one side or the other has a higher concentration of cocksure idiots in any given society it will have to do with which position is overall more socially acceptable, thus requiring less thought to subscribe thereto, not which position is inherently more sensible.

As with drinking and driving, there are some things about a dogmatic atheism that I consider to be potentially quite dangerous –– particularly among those who sincerely believe that “without God all things are permissible” and that it is part of the natural order of things from there for the strong to pitilessly dominate the weak. But just as I reserve the right not to be painted with the same theistic brush as Spanish Inquisitors and Muslim terrorists, I am willing to allow my atheist friends to disassociate themselves from the more sociopathic elements within their movement. I still believe that among intelligent people who do not consider their own perspective to be the final word on the matter there is room for debate and improved mutual understanding and cooperation in relation to these questions, even in the twenty-first century.