Being and Atheism

God: Plato’s good, Israel’s Lord, the Christian’s redemption, Porphyry’s (and St John’s and Augustine’s) Perfect Love, Anselm’s supreme being, Aquinas’ Cause, Paley’s watch, Newton’s great mechanical, the unseen Intelligence and Designer. Etc.

I am an atheist in the sense that I do not believe a singular unseen X stands behind any of these formulations. I don’t deny their importance as intellectual events in human understanding. They are simply ideas. They are expressions of how thinkers have thought about their world. I think that their interest or importance cannot depend on their rightness, because they are, as far as I can tell, mistaken views.

I do not need an unseen lover to experience love, or a super-dad to experience security, anxiety, a need for approval, a sense of falling short.

Satan, sin and death

I do not need to boil things down to a “singularity that explains complexity” in order to comprehend the workings of my world or my feelings about it. Thales was wrong. Aristotle was wrong. The Hebrew writer of Genesis was wrong. The Rig Veda was wrong.

Human things, finite things, physical things, historical things cannot be adequately understood through lumping them together as the work of an unseen power. When I say there is no God, what I reject is the shallow and sometimes cynical attempt to simplify cause, meaning, and experience: to reduce it to an unseen indissoluble essence.

It’s true of course that not all causes are apparent to the naked eye, but it is not correct to say that these causes can serve as analogies for the existence of a supernatural cause: the wind that blows the branches off trees in a hurricane in Kingston can be clocked. DNA can be mapped. The velocity of a hydrogen atom can be tracked. Science, as a form of inquiry, suggests that as we learn more about the universe it will be on the same terms as the way in which science has progressed in the past—on the basis of falsifiability.

The only revelations therefore are revelations achieved through hard work and discovery using the methods appropriate to investigating the world around us, the universe beyond us. Religion and theology are not suitable to that investigation. They are not grounded in science, they do not conform to science. They are grounded in myth, namely the myths of the human past.

There is nothing wrong with myth. But it is not science, and whether we are speaking of the Bible or of the Koran, or any book thought to come to us through revelation, the accidental insights of myth do not constitute a science.

True, we tell our students that god is not falsifiable because the basic criteria for falsifiability are missing. But what we really should be telling them is that the criteria for God are missing, the need to resort to an invisible explanation of the visible world is missing. It is a fool’s dilemma to fall back on axioms of ancient logic, which in any event don’t work here.

It may be the case that the vague God of the Philosophers cannot be negated because his defining properties have receded to an Archimedean dot; but it is not true that the God of the Bible cannot be disproved. History disproves him in the same way it disproves Marduk, Isis, the Monster Humbaba, and Vishnu.

If god is a being who is only worth knowing as a postulate to explain why the universe arises to look the way it looks, then he is not a god that we need to concern ourselves with–because he wears none of the clothes history dressed him in and has none of the attributes of the god of classical theism. “God the postulate” cannot be a god of the Bible or any other scripture: he cannot love, ask to be loved, be offended, forgive us our trespasses, save from sin, or create the situation whereby people would need to be saved from it in the first place,

That ancient God, the God of the Bible, is a god from whom I ask to be saved intellectually and possibly also morally.

The Dilemma and the Definition:

“Either God caused the universe or something else did.” Apologists in freshly pressed white shirts love to begin “discussions” and debates that way. It is a variation on the Jesus was “mad, bad or God” bear-trap they sometimes set for unimaginably stupid sophomores.

They go on to say that while they know what caused things to come out the way they did, the atheist cannot know because the atheist has no more proof than they do. (My cause has no personality; theirs lives in a book.) I have tried saying “Look around you: that’s my argument.” (I haven’t had much success with that one.) So, it is easiest to say confidently, “Something else did.”

And like the mad, bad, god MCQ, this is a false dilemma, since in most formulations theologians merge God with this something else: X=X by any other name. They begin by eliminating the god of Genesis and all later attempts to domesticate the tribal and biblical gods and the gods of early Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) theology.

What you are left with is a god from whom all defining characteristics (perhaps Aristotle would have called them accidents, substrates?) have been removed. A decerebrated God whose will, moods, and mobility have been stripped away by the surgeons who were trying to save him.

I have no trouble imagining a god who is not great, or kind, or merciful or compassionate or steady of purpose, or immutable. And I won’t go into the absurdities of arguing a “philosophical god” who is changeless and a biblical god who changes his mind rather often (it is like the Eddie Izzard “Cake or Death” shtick, except it’s God holding a shamrock and saying “Redeem or damn, damn or redeem?”).

But I think most Christians—especially those in freshly pressed white shirts-would not be satisfied with a god who has been emptied of attributes, the All-Nothingness, the Eternal Absolute (I’ll take my math with tea, please, not incense) and I consider it dishonest to go on calling this being or axiom or hypothetical something god, just as I would have trouble calling a horse a horse if you forbid me to use ears, tail, hooves, mammal, four legs and oats as part of my definition.

In any meaningful definition that is not pure nonsense—and here the scholastics had a great deal to tell us—we need a genus, we need what they called differentiae. But what is the genus of God? God? Supreme being? All-Knowers, Creators, Flood-senders?

No good; there are no other members of this class, and as we found out from Anselm, supreme being is to god as boy is to young male. It doesn’t define it; it restates it. So I ask again, What are god’s differentiae?

The defining attributes of the God Christians are interested in knowing, loving and serving are all historical, time-bound: anger, wrath, mercy, compassion, punishment, salvation, forgiveness, knowledge, pure awesomeness. And did we mention, good at making universes? They will not worship a God who is, did or does none of these things. Why should they? They will not die for a postulate or march for the right to life in honor of a God who does not create individual souls.

In this case there is no baby to toss out with the baptismal water, no dead body that points to atheists as murderers. Theologians in ages gone by used to talk about god using certain modes: the via positiva—god the all-knowing, for example—or the via negativa—God as impassible (devoid of passion and emotion)—or the via eminentia, God as higher than our highest concept of god–whatever that means, but surely a shut down strategy for rational debate.

But as every first-year divinity student knows, the study of theology is the study of the problems theology created for itself: a god who cannot feel passion and is changeless cannot easily be the same God who so loved the world that he took pity on the world and sent his son to save it. The jealous and angry God of the Old Testament cannot be the same God who went from a solo act to playing in a threesome.

My argument is this: the God of Christian theism, Islamic theology, and Jewish scripture does not exist, and the God who is left over when that theology is scrubbed–as postulate, variable or merely “unknown”– is so useless as (in John Wisdom’s great phrase) to amount to the same thing—useless to move, love, inspire, create.

I have no reason to imagine such a being, neither as a piece of intelligent cosmic protoplasm filling the interstices of what we call space, a flying spaghetti monster, or a vastness beyond the vastness. There is no way to disconfirm any unobservable absurdity, and hence there is no reason to believe in it.

Notice I say no reason to believe it. Theologians have given us no reason to believe, and to be blunt, their affirmation of science and willingness to sacrifice the god of history for the god of guesses should alert everyone to the nature of their profession. There is more reality in any exhibition of Hollywood special effects than there is in theology.

To the theologians who have rejected the God of the books. To the theologians who have created the false dilemma of asking us to choose between X and X–a God who is not the God of revelation, but is a God in some irrelevant sense–who requires neither prayer nor sacrifice nor petition nor good behavior. To the theologians who in conscience must know that they are dabblers in unreality and illusion. To the theologians who have created a god less real than the God of the Bible, who for a couple of millennia had, at least, time and faith on his side. To the theologians who have lost faith like Bo Peep lost her sheep, but talk on and on.

The New Oxonian

None of That

Dear Faithful or Discreet Reader:

The moniker above is chosen to reflect the fact that I am opening the site-door to short essays, reviews and opinion pieces other than my own short essays, reviews and opinion pieces. I will also consider poetry, if it is better than mine, and not-more-than 1500-word short stories, if they remind me of Guy de Maupassant.

Naturally, this is a happy day for everyone.

However, I still intend to dominate content and space, and your views must be so harmoniously akin to my own or so unalterably opposed as to merit my sharing the blanket.

Please send your work to me and, if approved, I’ll try to have it up in 72 hours, or let you know why it isn’t.

The theme of this site is “religion and culture,” which includes a lot but not everything. I am especially interested in pieces about humanism, atheism, religious trust-busting, good books, bad books (about religion) and books that need to be written. Imbecility is a frequent theme on these pages. I’m against it.

No human interest stories, paeans to favorite birds, and nothing strictly political or about Paris Hilton. In general, nothing that appears here should make people feel better about themselves. Jesus saves but the truth hurts.

Unreasonable Belief

By Solomon Schimmel*

Solomon Schimmel in Action

In addition to the philosophical critique of evidentialism, there is another ground for questioning the priority of reason in deciding what we should believe and how we should live our lives. The human capacity to use reason is, after all, nothing but an evolutionary adaptation that enables our species to survive. Moreover, human reason is far from perfect. We make all kinds of logical errors in a variety of contexts.

Reasoning skills do not come naturally, but require disciplined training, often of many years’ duration, and for numerous people they never come at all. Most human beings believe things that do not meet the criteria of logical deduction or scientific induction, or even plausibility.

We frequently make inferences about events of the past, or predictions about the future, which on strictly logical or probabilistic grounds do not make much sense, and we act in accordance with these erroneous assessments or expectations.

Ancient and medieval philosophers pointed to the deficiencies of human reasoning in ascertaining “truth,” and modern experimental psychologists have demonstrated these deficiencies in numerous contexts. Simply put, human “reasoning” doesn’t live up to all that its devotees have claimed for it. It is nothing but a flawed, imperfect evolutionary tool that has been conducive to our survival as a species until now. There is no guarantee that it will continue to serve this function in the years ahead (just as our affinity for sugar helped us survive in the past but might not be conducive to our health today). Indeed, some of the most impressive products of human reason, such as nuclear physics—one of the pinnacles of reason’s achievements—may yet prove to be the instrument for the destruction, rather than the survival, of humanity.

Consequently, if at times non rational, intuitive, experiential, emotional, or even irrational beliefs and behaviors are more effective than “reason” for a particular individual or group in enabling them to survive, physically or culturally, then “reason” has no a priori claim on how they should lead their lives.

Reason is only an instrument to be used when it is the best instrument available. If falsehood, self-deception, and psychological mechanisms of denial are better for certain purposes, so be it. “Reason” is not divine; it is not more or less “human” than are emotions, or self-deception. If self-deception, or denial, or faulty reasoning, or deliberate lying can, for example, make an individual less depressed, happier, more fulfilled, and even more humane, whereas reason would lead to nihilism, despair, depression, or inhumanity, then we need not assume that one should blindly follow reason and logic and empiricism to wherever they might lead.

Why not take a Jamesian pragmatic approach to the “truth” or to religious experience and apply them to beliefs and doctrines as well? Whichever worldview bears better fruits is the one that we should, or at least can defensibly, adopt as “truer.” An argument can be made that in some circumstances and for some people, for some of the time, the “objectively false” myths and assertions of religions serve mankind better than do the fruits of “critical thinking.”

There is no reason, therefore, that the presumed “truths” discovered by “objective reasoning” should have a favored status in guiding our lives. Naturally, because reason has evolved as a survival mechanism, it probably is in our interest to use it frequently, when it is shown to be advantageous to do so.

Most religious fundamentalists are not averse to using modern technology and modern medicine, the fruits of reason and science.

However, it is not appropriate to challenge the desirability or the utility of religious beliefs simply because they may be implausible or irrational. One would have to demonstrate that such beliefs are in the long run detrimental to human welfare, relative to the human welfare that would result by following only well-established “facts” and indisputable “reasons.”

So, by acknowledging the limitations of reason, have I conceded defeat to the fundamentalists who are anti rationalists or limited rationalists? No. The issue is not whether reason, scholarship, and science are flawless tools for understanding and interpreting reality, and for living in and controlling reality for human benefit. It is rather whether, all things considered, they are preferable to a non rational or irrational fundamentalist religious approach to life and reality.

One must make a cost-benefit analysis comparing the effects on human welfare of maintaining a non-rational, or a-rational, or implausible religious worldview, with the costs and benefits of maintaining a non-fundamentalist worldview, whether religious or secular, in which reason and empirical evidence are given priority over other alleged sources of knowledge and insight.

The rationalist need not claim that reason and empiricism are the only sources of valuable human knowledge and insight. Art, music, poetry, fiction, and religious myth — much of which are not generated by, and do not appeal to, reason or to the empirical for their value to humanity — can be deeply appreciated by the rationalist for the richness they endow on human experience and the emotional and psychological insights and wisdom that they often convey. Imagination is a natural human faculty no less than is reason. Only when the humanities, including religions, make assertions about human nature, or about reality, in a propositional form, which can be subjected to rational analysis or empirical test, and those assertions fail to withstand that analysis or to meet that test, does the rationalist give reason and science epistemological priority over the humanities and religion.

We need to ask, does a particular fundamentalist religious worldview enhance the welfare of the individual believer or of the believing group? What is its impact on the welfare of people who do not subscribe to it? The same questions would have to be asked of the “rationalist,” empiricist worldview. There are no single or simple answers to these questions.

Solomon Schimmel is professor of psychology at Hebrew College and the author of The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth” (Oxford University Press, 2008 from which this excerpt is taken by the author.

Skepticism as a Human Value

Snow en route

Skepticism is a funny thing, even among the Greeks – especially among the Greeks. The “original” skepticism would have been completely palatable to modern religionists, because it challenged pre-Socratic efforts to attain a true picture of the world and stoic claims to have the map to true knowledge. To the early practitioners of skepticism Thales’ notions just didn’t hold water, and if Heracleites was right today, he might well be wrong tomorrow. “‘What I may think after dinner is one thing,’ returns Mr. Jobling, ‘my dear Guppy, and what I think before dinner is quite another thing.’”

A little healthy skepticism never hurt anyone, except those with fixed and final positions, those who claim to possess the whole and unvarnished truth, or the careless throng who pride themselves on leading an unexamined life. The Greek word skepsis has about a dozen definitions in the big Oxford Greek Dictionary, the most common being “examination,” or “inquiry,” though it can also mean “doubt,” and “revision,” – as to revise an opinion – like Mr. Jobling at dinner time, but for cause, not whim or indecision. It always implies a certain restlessness or impatience with answers and “positions.” According to an unreliable tradition (and most ancient traditions are) it was Plato’s nephew and “successor” Arcesilaus who revised (Diogenes says “meddled with”) the teacher’s system by stressing the importance of arguing both sides of a case, giving weight to evidence and argument. How this was “new” is not clear from the reports; the sophists did it; Socrates did it.

Even Arcesilausian “skepticism” seems to have come from Uncle, who had said that “nothing can be known with certainty, by the sense or by the mind,” a conclusion which taken to its limit means that the conclusion cannot be known with certainty. So there we are. Skepticism always lands you in the solipsistic mud and solipsistic mud exists only outside the mind, and hence cannot get you muddy. But in paving the way for what academics like to call Academic skepticism, Arcesilaus paved the way for an important development. Take those arrogant troglodytes, the stoics. The followers of Zeno were the reductivists of the ancient world. This means they only believed in mud puddles. Sensory impressions or rather katalêpsis – a mental grasping of a sense impression) – guarantees the truth of what is grasped, or in this case, fallen into. If one assents to the proposition associated with a kataleptic impression, i.e. if one experiences katalêpsis, then the associated proposition cannot fail to be true. To put it simply: for any sense-impression S, received by some observer A, of some existing object O, and which is a precise representation of O, we can imagine circumstances in which there is another sense-impression S’, which comes either (i) from something other than O, or (ii) from something non-existent, and which is such that S’ is indistinguishable from S to A. Questions?

So the definition of truth, which Plato had made an Idea (call it I if you want), fell on the knife of the stoics’ claim that only kataleptic experiences are true and that the true stoic wise-man (who was seen to be a more perfectly developed type of humanity—a bit like Aristotle’s megalopsuchos except taller) is capable of infallibility.

For Arcesilaus, this is folly: first because we can be mistaken about sense impressions (as the Arab philosopher Al-Ghazali noted centuries later), and second because the world and life-in-it that we experience is more complex than our senses can grasp, and also because our sense experience fails to de-code the world of value that is also an essential part of human perception — lived experience. It is all, as a teacher of mine used to say, about our epistemic limits — a nice way of saying that to some people a palm tree is a cycad within the genera palma and to others a meeting place for an evening rendezvous on a deserted beach. Not either – or, of course, but when – then.

Why all this about skepticism and a nephew of Plato, barely visible in the footnotes? There is a confused idea that modern science has vindicated the stoic view of the world by refining and redefining what constitutes a kataleptic experience. True, the skeptics were correct to suggest trickery, hallucination, error, and deceit weighed heavily against the infallibility of the senses. But hasn’t modern science improved the thoroughgoing empirical model espoused by the stoics, to the extent that the skeptical caveats now count for much less? Freud deciphered the dream state; Einstein the continuum of time and space. –Jews since Moses have been busy wondering what was so promising about the Promised Land.

Even if the media insist that there are two sides to every story, isn’t it really the case that there is only one — the kataleptic one? And didn’t we all learn to be self-effacing about this when we learned the scientific method? The motto of false self-effacing irony. Science deals with facts, not truth; probability—(heaven forbid) not certainty. After all, a thousand bits of experimental corroboration can be falsified by one patchwork-colored elephant. In the treasury of scientific knowledge, the holy grail is the principle that the limit of the epistemic quest is the possibility a fact can be un-facted. (“Not bloody likely,” is not to be said out loud, especially by Nobel laureates). In this way skepticism has been deflated and subsumed into scientific method. Research professors have given it its own room at the back of the house, like a troublesome grandparent, and invite it to dinner every time a new discovery is announced. C.P. Snow and Karl Popper may quibble with these metaphors. But a true reductivist will bristle. A true reductivist will say that an essential element of the modern outlook — a condition of being modern, indeed — is to enshrine the scientific as the only appropriate way of viewing the world we see. The cultures of those who know a little and those who know better–the “two cultures” debate of the 1950’s–has reemerged as the “Brights| vs. “Dims” scientism of the twenty-first century.

Snow touched on this in his 1959 Rede lecture recalling a group of Cambridge dons (“educated men”), who were speaking contemptuously of the illiteracy of scientists. He comments, “… if I had asked [them]…What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.” The Snows of the twentieth century insisted they had not forsaken the verities; goodness, truth and beauty were alive and well, and living in the apartment next to a reprogrammed skepticism. But now the good was grounded in the goodness of a particular “way” of knowing particular kinds of things; truth, the basic axioms we need to refine that knowledge, and beauty the beauty of the cosmos – in its deciphered and intelligible form. But this is not a postmodernist screed against science. It is a question looking for an answer, and not just in the scientific arena. Has skepticism no separate voice in the understanding of the world? If it does, is it limited to stabs at religious dogma, debunking miracles and visions, looking for Chiye-Tanka’s poo in the Oregon woods or space debris in New Mexico? –The kind of skepticism that (it seems to me) gives back to credulity as much as it takes away.

The humanist intellectual tradition was shaped by a healthy respect for epistemic limits — not derived from a particular stance toward the infallibility of method and experience. The biblical God (which is not to say “God”) fell to skepticism (not science) only a few centuries after Anselm announced His discovery. Biblical infallibility did not fall to Darwin but to Erasmus and to Luther’s German successors in theology. Church authority began to tumble when Lorenzo Valla went to work on the claims of Pope Stephen II in 1440, not when Galileo was proved right. None of the perpetrators of these designs had any notion of the scientific method; what they did have was a healthy sense of the disconnect between what was claimed to be known (or true) and what a liberal application of skepticism discovered to be the case. Later on, biblical scholars would call this the hermeneutics of suspicion. It’s a phrase worth remembering.

And in the world of human values? Skepticism has done yeoman’s service in a non-scientific sort of way in freeing us from the taboos and stereotypes of tradition. If we point to the “achievements” everyone agrees are politically salutary—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, you name it, we ordinarily hear in the background the voices of skeptics who doubted the prevailing orthodoxy and the way a social world was interpreted. Is this the same as demythologizing the cosmos? Yes and no, but mainly no. It’s not just that social worlds are made by fools like us, but only Process can make a tree. It is that social worlds are provisional in a way the physical world is not, and to the extent “laws” operate in both nature and society, they are different sorts of laws. Doubtless, ideas whose time has come, come—but not without nursemaids. Skeptics have undeniably been good nursemaids for every liberation movement of the last three centuries: only a Bible rendered politically ineffective by the growth of democratic secularism could be non-instrumental in maintaining the slave trade. Only a secular government could keep in check and (mainly) out of power those who want a Christian America, or for that matter a talibanized Pakistan. with all that might imply for social justice, conscience, and the environment.

If skepticism is defined as a kind of heresy, heresy applied to repressive, cruel or dogmatic social orthodoxies, then it has done a pretty good job in those areas where it has been able to do its work. Skepticism has been less good, however, where it might do the most good. Arcesilaus taught that no intellectual position can be fixed and final. This was not a statement about truth, directly, but about the infallibility of knowing. The two-sides dialectic was not a doctrine about giving equal time to opposing viewpoints—that is an American media obsession not Greek philosophy. What skepticism entailed was the obligation to test good arguments against each other—“The fire of argument is the test of gold.”

The real crisis of skepticism is reflected in a skeptical deference to those who feel that science can provide answers to all questions of value, serve as its own guide in questions of ethics, and is ultimately compatible with a species of Truth completely different from the lowercase truth one arrives at in other enterprises. Sometimes, as Snow recognized, humanists abjure the sciences out of ignorance—a real, persistent, and inexcusable ignorance. Sometimes they abjure the sciences because they see through the false modesty to the methodological conceit that locates both the nature of the universe and the meaning of life in the house that the stoics built. Whatever the anatomy of the problem the two cultures still exist, much the same as in 1959, complicated in America, at least, by the fact that outside the circle of educated men and women who cannot define acceleration and energy, there is a subculture of yahoos who defend such ignorance on religious grounds and reductivist humanists who define the epistemic limits as what science can teach us.

A consistent skepticism, like a good sense of humour, includes the ability to turn a critical eye on your own assumptions about the sources of knowledge and truth. It is far easier– as Mr Jobling knew–to be able to define exactly what you mean and to regard everything else as nonsense. Changing your mind after dinner, as long as it doesn’t happen every day, isn’t such a bad thing.

Teach Yourself Humanism

By Mark Vernon*

Humanism is not a specific doctrine or a unified system of thought. Rather it is a tradition that starts in the Renaissance, gathers momentum during the Enlightenment, and becomes a key feature of the modern world. During this development it embraces a range of possible meanings, principles and practices. It is fundamentally an attitude or spirit that values learning, curiosity and imagination aimed at engaging with the questions of life – personal and political – that human beings face and indeed that make us human. There are therefore many flavours of humanism, many philosophers that can be used to underpin it.

The Renaissance is an inspiration, though not because it was a period in which human beings supposedly awoke from a dark age: the medieval period was one of extraordinary invention and accomplishment. Rather, it is because the Renaissance humanists were able to make something wonderful of their times – in their joy of discovery, embrace of the new, cultivation of character, political reform, critical questioning, passion and potential. This still speaks to us, half a millennium later.

Then came the Enlightenment, and it is the intellectual giants, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who impress me most. For Hume, scepticism was the natural position for the Enlightenment thinker – scepticism about religion for sure, but scepticism about the fundamentals of science too. Hume was also sceptical about what he called enthusiasm, defined as ‘presumption arising from success’. That could apply to triumphalist rationalism and scientism as much as religion.

Kant found Hume’s scepticism profoundly unsettling. He wanted to put things on a firmer foundation. And he did so, but only by writing Critiques. In these Critiques, the key issue was understanding the limits of human knowledge. When Kant said that Enlightenment was maturity this is what he meant, being able to live with this finitude and not reach out for false certainty. So we have Enlightenment humanism as scepticism and grappling with the reality of human knowledge and experience.

This I would actually relate to a tradition within religion, though it is one lamentably in decline today. It is called the ‘apophatic’, meaning ‘negative way’. It stands in marked contrast to the ‘cataphatic’, meaning ‘positive way’, the strident assertions of indisputable religious dogma and divine truth.

The apophatic is a way of approaching what is ultimately unknown by identifying what that unknown cannot be. In religion it says God is not mortal (immortal), not visible (invisible) – note, saying nothing positive about God. Its spirit is captured in the biblical story of Moses climbing the mountain. As he went up and symbolically got nearer to God, he did not ascend into greater light and clarity, but deeper cloud and unknowing. Thus, at its core is a sense of the sacred – that which is far greater than you and so takes you out of yourself and into the unknown.

In a way what the apophatic theologians explored was similar to what the sceptical Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Kant articulated: both identify limits and seek intuitions of what lies beyond. It was called ‘learned ignorance’ by the first Renaissance humanist philosopher, Nicolas of Cusa, and he got the idea from Socrates. Socrates annoyed his fellow citizens in ancient Athens because he showed that the key to wisdom is not how much you know but is understanding the limits of what you know. This dimension reaches back right to the antecedent origins of humanism. It runs right through any honest study of what it is to be human.

It is also this dimension that to my mind is needed to combat contemporary fundamentalisms – religious and scientific – particularly if you want to avoid becoming a humanist fundamentalist in response. It is a kind of committed agnosticism – a juxtaposition of words that only sounds strange, if it does, today.

Echoing the same spirit, the last word can come from a famous humanist and agnostic, the anti-Christian though never quite atheist, Bertrand Russell. Towards the end of his History of Western Philosophy, he reflects on how human beings across the centuries have related to their potential and powers. Sometimes, he believes, they have been too humble. In other periods, too hubristic. And today? He worries that we are at risk of thinking of ourselves as gods.

‘In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check on pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication with power… to which modern man, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.’

This ‘cosmic impiety’, the greatest danger of his time, shows no sign of passing. Humanists must ensure that they help mitigate it.

————–

*Mark Vernon writes regularly for the Guardian, The Philosophers’ Magazine, TLS, Financial Times and New Statesman, alongside a range of business titles, including Management Today. He also broadcasts, notably on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London and has degrees in theology and physics from the Universities of Oxford and Durham.

The Problem with Humanism

The incoherence of contemporary humanism is usually ascribed to its free thought origins. Not so. Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn’t know what it believes, so much so that it doesn’t know what “it” stands for. Humanism has become the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules. It has ignored or rejected its renaissance origins (too religious?) in favor of a free-base approach to whatever grabs its attention on a given day: a Vatican blunder; an ignorant school board’s pronouncement on creation; a victimized child asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance; a pro-life television ad; an evangelical minister’s excoriation of atheists, and in the broadest sense (think Yul Brynner as the King of Siam) et cetera. It is betimes conservative, libertarian, progressive, socialist, apolitical, pro-gay, latitudinarian, anti-war and anti-Muslim,thus sometimes pro-war, 98% atheistic and 100% philosophically messy.

In part its recent history explains its lack of a following.

The American form of secular humanism evolved out of disparate sources and position-papers, now dubbed statements but in the grandiose social language of the 1930’s and 1970s once called manifestos.

They weren’t altogether bad as marching orders for a motley crew of liberal ministers and dissident academics who refused to walk in a straight line. Humanist Manifesto I (1933) was a modest document, chiefly concerned with redefining religion, rejecting the supernatural, and inviting men and women to look for fulfillment and emotional satisfaction in life rather than in some mythical hereafter.

Its “theology” was the Boston Unitarianism of 1911, already a bit yellow when it was implemented in the 1933 format, and probably unread south of the Mason Dixon line or West of the Mississippi (not counting California).

For example:

Seventh. Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation-all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

Eighth: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man’s life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist’s social passion.

Ninth: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a co-operative effort to promote social well-being.

Tenth: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.

Eleventh: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

For all its breadth, it was an eloquent, underwritten–or spare–and important statement of what a very few people, at the time, believed to be true, but felt they had a right to say. Its authors, Roy Wood Sellars–whose philosophical position was termed critical realism–and Raymond Bragg, a Unitarian divine, were primarily interested in containing the frontier extravagance that was suffusing most of American culture during and after the Great Depression. No matter how religiously backward religion in America looks in 2010, it was immeasurably more backward when these brave voices issued their call to a kind of commonsense idealism. One way for the necessary change to happen, Sellars believed, was to call America out of its isolationist, woodsy stupor and money-worship to an awareness of society, the world, other people’s problems (and beliefs), and the need for global cooperation. Some of the highest ideals of the gospel, the authors believed, but did not state in the document, called for the same moral compassion.

The second Humanist Manifesto (HM-II,1973), penned by philosopher Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson was designed to correct and supplement the earlier document. In several ways it was reflective of changes already percolating in American society, either as controversies or proposals: women’s rights, birth control, abortion, human rights and an international court of justice are endorsed; the primacy of secular education over religion-based dogma and ethics is asserted.

More problematically, for religious onlookers, the manifesto had a profoundly un-neutral stance toward religion. Where the first manifesto saw elements of religion as benignly relevant to social and moral improvement, the word used repeatedly in reference to religion in HM-II is “harmful.” Where the original Humanist Manifesto took an almost indifferent position toward religion, the 1973 document went after religion and religious adherents with crusading zeal–not coincidentally at a time when the first Christian tel-evangelists were showing up on television screens from Biloxi to San Francisco. The Preface laid down the challenge in an unmistakable way:

“Traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.”

Asserting that “no deity will save us from the perils of the modern world,” the authors went on,

“We believe…that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. Any account of nature should pass the tests of scientific evidence; in our judgment, the dogmas and myths of traditional religions do not do so. Even at this late date in human history, certain elementary facts based upon the critical use of scientific reason have to be restated. We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural [order]; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity.”

HM-II focused its attention largely on two worthy objects: the pocked and deteriorating intellectual landscape of American society, which had come to believe (and propagate the absurd idea) that education and enlightenment made no claims against how you viewed the world, lived your life, or understood the universe. And the belief that this toxic state of affairs would right itself through the magic of religion and democratic process in happy concert. HM-I had been an idealistic paean to common sense and high morality; HM-II was grittier, more engaged with the enemies of reason, wordier to be sure, but a battle cry for a more progressive stance and a deeper understanding of what humanism compels the citizen-thinker to do in an Empire of Unreason.

But there was a dark side to the second Humanist Manifesto. While HM-I did not (perhaps could not) go far enough in describing religious excess, HM-II contained sections that were merely reactionary, overblown and rhetorical. The second clause under the rubric “Religion” is a case in point:

Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful. They distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization, and from rectifying social injustices. Modern science discredits such historic concepts as the ‘ghost in the machine’ and the ’separable soul.’ Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body. We continue to exist in our progeny and in the way that our lives have influenced others in our culture.

In sections like this, a reductivist impulse takes hold of the document (“the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context”) and tosses out not just God and religion, but the higher self that would make any humanist program defensible and worthwhile. If HM-I was fuzzy, HM-II was didactic, at times dogmatic, and artificially pugnacious.

In its march toward the brave new world of science and reason, it clumsily trampled over the strong and sinewy root between religious developments that were socially and scientifically dictated by real changes in the global context and the beginnings of humanist thinking. It failed to see religion as a rapidly changing force whose historical record showed its ability to adapt itself to change and influence and thus change more quickly than unbelief and secularism could manage to do. Religion had changed through a mechanism of self-criticism; humanism, at least of the atheistic variety, regarded religion as a sufficient end for criticism and failed to develop its own methods for correction. Religion in the twentieth century had become introspective and discontent; humanism, extrospective and self-satisfied. HM-II confidently looked to a religionless future without glancing back at the religious past and rapidly changing present.

In short, HM-II told it like it was, or seemed to be in 1973, and in doing so put itself in a perpetually defensive position: Locked into defending claims it thought to be true, article by article, unable to acknowledge that its adversaries could sometimes be right, insightful, or forward-seeing. It did not shy away from using the word non-theists, code for those who believed in evolution and rejected supernatural as natural allies of this form of humanism. But it did not succeed (and did not perhaps envision) forms of “faith”, “belief” or religion that were equally scathing about the supernatural and equally dedicated to the ethics of commonsense and reason without God, Jesus or Muhammad at its center.

Like all critiques, HM-II had the immediate value of identifying problems and adversaries. Like all critiques, it gave those problems and adversaries a notional status which history had the power to alter or rescind. It was zealous, time-bound, and needed at the time.

But we have to ask whether we are living in a post-Manifesto world, where a truly progressive humanism will not provide–either in articles or in outline–a statement of what humanism is, or what humanists believe or should do.

Progressive humanism resides in exploration rather than definitions and statements.

I reject them in the same way Luther rejected the pope’s authority and Galileo (at least mumbled) his rejection of the Inquisition’s findings. Both humanists, according to the broadest definition, anyway–both opponents of tradition and authority.

Ultimately a progressive humanism will be the freeman’s and free woman’s dissatisfaction with the answers you are given and any suggestion that a problem (moral or mathematical) that you cannot solve can be solved by someone who knows “better,” even if they do not know more, or how, or why.

It is confidence in the self, informed by learning and imagination, that makes you a humanist. It is not an easy thing to achieve, but insofar as religion is involved in the calculation, the humanist also knows this: God will not get you there.

Eden Gardens

The community was advertised as the best landscaped in south Florida.

Not only did the faux-Moroccan gate provide security from nonexistent intruders and drug-dealers, but every condo nestled in a tropical array of bougainvillea, hibiscus (coral pinks and striated reds), fiddleleaf figs, palmetto and assorted ferns.

Adam Feinstein loved the fact that the small yard was mown on a weekly basis by a Mexican boy named Donnie who spoke no English but smiled broadly and sang as he raked the shorn blades into neat piles.

Promptly at 4.45 on Thursdays, when the Feinstein lawn had been cut, Adam waited on the front patio with a large glass of iced tea for Donnie. The Association didn’t allow tipping, but a libation of iced tea or water was permitted. It made Adam feel that he had contributed something to the process.

The Association dealt with everything, trimmed everything, fixed everything (outside) and arranged to have things fixed (inside) by calling plumbers and electricians, even drywall specialists and exterminators, when any problem arose.

You didn’t even have to pay on the spot. It came as an itemized addition to Association dues.

Eve Feinstein loved the fact that no pets of any description over thirty pounds were allowed. She had had a cat once, as a girl. She let it run away after it scratched her. And she lived in mortal terror of dogs. She could not understand the bond between human beings and their pets and would cross streets to avoid being sniffed, eyed or followed by anyone’s animal.

Eve Feinstein was not much better with human beings. She had not married Adam until she was thirty five. They had decided that they had a relationship based on disliking the same things, mainly the same people.

After thirty years their marriage was like two steel marbles rolling around in a matchbox. They traveled in the same direction whenever life tilted and ended up in the same corner. They did not look at each other anymore. They looked at the TV together. Their souls had long since retreated deep into their bodies, so deeply that nothing peered out from within.

In her first six months at Eden Gardens Eve Feinstein had only seen one violation of the Pet Rule–Mrs. Schopke’s poodle Fritz, who bolted the car when Mrs Schopke paused to retrieve a bag of cookies and a can of Old Milwaukee that had fallen from her grocery sack.

The dog had gone yipping wildly around the circular drive looking for a permanent escape route, stopping only long enough to water every bench and scrub oak on the property, including the one closest to Eve Feinstein’s driveway. He had been detained by Donnie and returned to his sobbing owner.

“My God, Fritz, I could have lost you, schnuepel,” Mrs. Schopke cried.

On that occasion, one call from Mrs Feinstein to the Association President, Daniel Weingarten, was all it took for a letter of reprimand to be sent to Sophia Schopke.

“She needs to be more careful,” said Eve to her husband at dinner.

“I don’t have to lift a finger here,” said Adam Feinstein a bit non-responsively. “My God, this is heaven.”

“Rules are rules,” said Eve, smiling at the thought of Sophia Schopke opening an official letter and taking a rolled up newspaper to Fritz for his indiscretion.

They sighed a mutual sigh, reposing in the thought that buying their condo in this paradise of flowers and rules was the best investment of their life. No snow to shovel. No curbside slush in March. No leaves to rake, drains to plunge, leaking roofs to repair.

***

It was Saturday morning. Eve and Adam Feinstein had just come from a study circle where the rabbi’s talk had been “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?”

Rabbi Jerry had been in summer stock productions of Broadway musicals and liked to give his lessons the titles of show-stoppers. Eve smiled and sang all the way home, getting the lyrics out of order. Adam corrected her. “You shouldn’t say ‘now‘,” he said, pronouncing it “neow,” which is how Eve pronounced it. “The song doesn’t say ‘neow’.”

“I’m just a victim of time, Obsolete in my prime
Out-of-date and outclassed, by my past” Eve sang lustily.

When she did, she thought of Rabbi Jerry. Tall, elegant, bespectacled, learned, funny–gorgeous neckties–always. If she was only ten years younger, she used to think, maybe twenty, this was a man whose head she would like to turn, maybe have coffee with. But then she would feel guilty. And then she would think about his long fingers and manicured nails. Why shouldn’t she think about him?

Still, she thought, a woman her age shouldn’t have feelings like that. And there was poor Adam, poor, dull, predictable, overweight Adam with his stubby fingers and colon issues, whose life had shrunk to the act of offering a Mexican boy a glass of tea on Thursdays.

Adam punched the access code and the gate opened, barely enough to let the car through. It needed adjusting again. Pat Gibson kept nicking it with her bumper because it didn’t open fast enough, and Pat at 89 was nearly blind.

Adam plodded to the front door, swift to be clear of Eve’s dramatic finish to the song. Eve stayed behind and stretched, just like she did after any car trip.

Her attention turned to the dense foliage that surrounded the house. At times like this she made a face. It was the face of judgment and registered instant accord or disapproval. She drew her lips down in grumpy old man fashion and said “puh.”

It meant “This won’t do.”

She was thinking there were definite signs of brown on the fiddleleaf figs and even the crotons looked dispirited, and since it was Donnie’s day off, what could it hurt if she unrolled the hose and gave them a drink?

After all, there was no specific rule against watering plants, was there? Just rules about dogs, noise, keeping your car clean, not doing anything called “private landscaping,” keeping your garage door shut except on recycling day when it could be open long enough to allow bringing the bins to the curb. Those sorts of things.

There was also a rule about trespass.

The Weingartens who owned and developed the land that became Eden Gardens and now owned a double-condo had arranged the sale of the property in such a way that it enclosed a small leechee grove. It was off limits to residents.

Dan Weingarten cultivated in this small space the biggest, reddest, spiniest and sweetest leechees in the southern states–they had won international competitions in Puerto Rico–and he sold them to a New York export company specializing in exotic fruits at a handsome profit every year. But he didn’t do it for the money. He did it because he thought the nut of the leechee tree was truly the most wonderful, stickily succulent, miraculous and ancient thing in the world.

A gate behind the Weingarten’s house let on to the grove, but only Dan Weingarten himself had ever been seen going through it. Whatever mystery surrounded the Leechee Grove, in the Association Bylaws, in bold print, under the rubric “No Access to Residents,” was a clause that read,

Residents of Eden Gardens are hereby notified that the Weingarten Leechee Grove (hereafter Grove) located adjacent to 1 Eden Gardens is off limits to owners and residents at all times. It is forbidden to all residents to enter the Grove or to pick fruit from the trees for sale, profit, or personal use. Failure to abide by this notice will constitute criminal trespass. Residents of Eden Gardens acknowledge that any violation of this rule will lead to expulsion from the Homeowners Association, loss of voting rights, and disqualification for continued residency.

Signing on to such a ridiculous, possibly even illegal and unenforceable rule seemed a small, almost absurdly small price to pay for living in a floral wonderland. Everyone who signed the agreement would initial the clause with a shrug, as if to say, “I think I can just about manage to stay out of his godamned leechee grove.”

That’s just what Adam Feinstein had said.

* * *

After surveying the plants, Mrs Feinstein decided it would be nice to do something useful, like back in Brooklyn where she watered the geranium trays on the fire escape every day, July to September, with a big aluminum sprinkler-can.

She looked right and left to find the garden hose.

But then she saw it slink away–when she stooped to turn on the spigot.

It moved quickly, invisibly, its position known only from a faint rustle of the ground it disturbed, staying close against the house, and not far away.

She stood up, straight and startled. Her stomach was pounding. Jill Hong had seen a small alligator a few months ago when the drought had been officially proclaimed on Cable 7 News. It was small enough to squeeze under the security fence. But it was an alligator.

Eve quickly abandoned her plan to wet the foliage and turned to scurry to the front door.

As she turned, a very clear and polite voice said from behind,

“Eve Feinstein! It can’t be you.“

She stopped cold. The voice was familiar–it might have been anyone she’d known over the past fifty years. It sounded a little like Mel Lippman, but sexier. Mel had a lisp. She turned. She saw no one. But then, squinting to shade her eyes from the late afternoon sun, she saw him. Just in front of the crotons and hibiscus–a snake–coiled, its head raised–but not to strike. Its jaws were open. It was speaking.

His tongue quivered in a red flurry as he spoke–softly, mainly pleasantries. She couldn’t put together all the words at first because he seemed to have an accent. She put her wrist to her forehead in the way people do who have been overwhelmed by events, and she thought she might be crazy to notice that a talking snake sounded a bit like Sean Connery, her all-time favorite actor.

He was green and yellow with red diamonds that seemed to appear and disappear depending on how the sunlight played on his skin. Anyone who liked snakes would have said he was beautiful. His head was the perfect shape of a guitar pick, but a little more wide than sharp at the mouth. The yellow of his back streamed into pure gold around his black eyes and red fleck immediately above gave him the appearance of deep intelligence.

“Well, all I can say is you look fantastic. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

He was long, at least three feet, and easily able to intercept her at the sidewalk if she tried to make a run for it. Where was Adam when you needed him, she thought? Always having his midday snooze or watching basketball on TV, or sometimes disappearing for an inexplicable hour into the bathroom.

“I hear Disney is starting an extension of some kind nearby–are you some kind of robo-snake that got dropped off a truck? You are very realistic.”

She emphasized very to see if he would respond to a compliment.

The snake tossed his head back, looking a little as though he was poised to strike; Eve gasped. But the snake returned to full upright posture and said, a little disappointedly,

“My dear Eve, I am a coldblooded 100% viper of the order serpentes, an ectothermic amniote vertebrate. There are no coils, springs, memory sticks or warranties in any part of my gorgeous body. I exist to delight the eyes and to start conversations–sometimes to negotiate. It all depends.”

Eve found the July sun especially oppressive all of a sudden. Sweat was steaming down her ample back and finding its way over her broad cheeks. “On what?” she asked.

“First things first,” said the snake, loosening two coils and adjusting himself from an introductory to a more conversational posture. “Do you not find me lovely?”

“Well, said Eve, “I’ve never been this close to a snake, except maybe at Busch Gardens, but they were behind glass. I’d have to say you’re the prettiest snake I have ever seen up close.”

The snake bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, dear. I was designed to be. But it’s always nice to hear it from someone who’s a connoisseur. Your ancestor was a connoisseur. A little thinner than you perhaps, but she ate mainly fruit and veg.”

“I’ve been cutting back,” said Eve, lying. “I like nothing better than a nice salad and a glass of water for lunch. I do eat little more ample at dinner.” She thought immediately that ample was not a good choice of words when discussing weight. Maybe she should have said “amply.”

“A little more?” said the snake. “Do you call that prime rib, baked potato swimming in sour cream and fresh buttery rolls you had last night a little? And I do wish you’d learn to drink something besides iced tea–or rather iced treacle by the time you finish loading it with sugar.”

“You have a lot of attitude,” Eve said, slightly surprised at her bravery in the face of what might be her doom. “And how for godssake do you know what I had for dinner. Were you spying on me? Slithering around the garbage sacks?”

The snake waggled his head. He gave a little chuckle. It had the tone of a wise uncle who’d heard it all before. “My, no. I don’t need to spy and I would find it personally repellent to slither around anywhere, especially your rubbish. But I know you Eve Feinstein. And I know your other half too.”

Eve had never encountered such a well-spoken creature. A match even for Rabbi Jerry. His poise was like nothing she had ever witnessed. “You mean Adam, my husband?”

“Where is the old sinner–digesting lunch in a metabolic trance in front of the television, I expect, or having a long pooh while trawling through your copy of Cosmo? Gracious, if he gets any bigger you’ll be trading that car of yours for a truck.” The snake said this without flinching, as if he was asking the time of day.

It was true. Adam was addicted to anything chocolate, especially if it came wrapped in cellophane. He counted his postprandial calories not in units but in the number of “servings” he devoured. Both he and Eve loved roasts and potatoes and their avatars: fast food hamburgers and french fries. Like all true citizens of the great republic, they washed their fare down with flagons of diet drinks when being watched and beakers of sweet ones in private.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Eve, but you act like you know me. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember that. And you’re very rude.”

The snake paused and a contrite look immediately came upon his sharp countenance.

“Oh my goodness. It isn’t my intention to offend you. I came here to do you a favor. And Adam too.”

Eve thought she understood what was happening now. The day had been hot. She had either had a sun stroke or perhaps was dehydrated and was simply hallucinating. She was probably in a hospital; soon the snake’s voice would fade away and she would hear a nurse talking to her.

In any case, she felt certain that this was some kind of a dream and that she would wake up at any minute. To make it happen faster, she turned in the direction of the front door and began to walk away from her curious guest.

In a flash, he was in front of her, blocking her path.

“A favor, I said.”

Eve thought she should say something to the persistent creature.

“The biggest favor you can do me is go away.” A little startled at her bravery, she folded her arms in a defiant way and waited for the snake to react.

He glanced at her sternly.

“Are you happy Eve?”

She gave a little laugh. “Of course. We have everything we need. We have more than we need. You know, this place costs a pretty penny but it’s worth it. Must be pretty cushy for a rodent like you, too, with all these plants and shade.”

“I am a serpent, Eve, not a rodent. You were never much good in school were you? Anyway. As I see it, you don’t like your neighbors, you hate their pets, Adam–well, a clod at best, you live behind a wall that protects you from all the excitement of life outside, and you dream of sex with your rabbi. I’d call that unhappy.”

Eve waited for a moment. No one–especially Adam–would have said these things to her. Adam was the last to say anything insightful or sentimental.

“I don’t want to have sex with my rabbi,” she said at last.

“Well, whatever you people are calling coffee these days. But you have to admit, this is as dull as it gets: predictable weather, an endless blooming season, workers who do your gardening for you, and rules against everything and…”

“There have to be rules,” Eve said quickly, interrupting him. “That’s what makes it all bearable and why we love our Association and our little community. We don’t have to worry we just have to ask.”

Her conviction was thinning as she spoke.

“Just like your grandmother, eh? Quote the rules to me. And just as I told her, rules don’t make you love anybody. Do you love Adam because you took a vow to do it?”

He pushed his head forward in a way that urged her to answer.

“Well, no. I love Adam because he’s very kind. He’s a good man. He’s as honest as the day is long”

“Really?” said the snake. Did he tell you about his first wife?”

“I am his first wife,” said Eve with a trace of scorn. “He’s never been married before.”

“Yes he was,” said the snake. “He’s never told you. He used to think it would matter to you, and now when it doesn’t, he’s waited too long.”

“You are a liar Eve said abruptly.

“I am, but mainly I tell the truth. Because in my game, I’ve found the truth destroys so much more. But no, I am not lying about this–just ask him. It is his darkest secret and his worst fear that you might find out, even though he doesn’t love you any longer. And of course, you don’t love him, either. I have never understood why such secrets should amount to a cobbler’s fart when there’s nothing to make the truth matter anymore. You humans are really a desperately idiotic lot.”

Eve looked even more confused. And she knew from the sweat pouring down her back that she was not dreaming. Everything the snake said might be true. And it might not. It had been years and years since she had felt any passion for Adam. That’s the way she liked it–it kept everything in equilibrium, quiet and easy.

The idea that Adam could have kept a secret from her all these years, maybe even have wooed her thinking that a previous marriage would have scared her off–the dishonesty of it–the preternaturally dull Adam Feinstein a man with a secret? She had lived most of her adult life with a man with a past. That was exciting. He lied to her and kept things from her that she had a right to know. That was unacceptable. Maybe he was a criminal. Maybe his day job at Pawtucket Tool and Dye was a cover for government work. It didn’t seem likely, considering his spelling, but anything was possible. Adam Feinstein had a secret. Strange feelings were stirring in Eve’s ample bosom.

“That’s why I say,” said the snake, summoning her out of a reverie, “that’s why I am here to do you a favor.”

“Are you sure,” said Eve. “Are you sure he was married. So, what was her name?”

“He called her Lilly. She was beautiful–everyone thought she’d go to Hollywood. People didn’t talk about it in those days, but Lilly was something of a man-eater. She had a huge appetite. Didn’t say no to anyone, women either. She drove him crazy, and one day she just left him. He was living in Trenton at the time. That’s where you met him, isn’t it?”

Eve was suddenly sure that the snake was telling her the truth. Her heart was pounding when she said, “What kind of a favor?”

“You need to put this behind you. You need your own secret. Something that you can keep in your heart, so to speak, that Adam doesn’t know about, but something that would affect, perhaps even sting him a bit, if he did–just like the news about Lilly.”

Eve thought she knew where the snake was heading with this suggestion.

“Rabbi Jerry wouldn’t look twice at me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said with assurance. “There was a time, of course, but that was years ago.”

“No,” said the snake. You must do something dangerous, something he doesn’t know about, but you have to calculate a risk factor. There has to be risk.”

Eve Feinstein screwed her large face into a puzzle.

“You are as thick as your grandmother. No thicker. What does Adam love more than anything?”

“Chocolate,” replied Eve, “any thing fudgey.”

“No,” said the serpent. “He loves living here. He loves doing nothing. he loves watching his grass cut. He loves watching other people do his work for him.”

“True,” said Eve, “He loves this place. I think he loves it more than I do.”

“And what if you were to play a little trick on Adam. Something he would never know about. Something that no one but you will ever know about. But–just so you understand–if anyone ever did find out about it, your life here would be over?”

Eve’s face dissolved into a slightly wicked smile.

“The leechees,” she said. “You want me to pick leechees.”

“I don’t want you to do anything Eve,” said the snake in a slightly offended tone. “But this is what you want to do. It’s what you must do.”

***

Eve glanced down the street. She knew that Daniel Feinstein visited his son in Coral Gables every Saturday. He often returned on Sunday, so the time was right.

And the snake was right. The snake was brilliant. That silly Leechee Grove clause, the joke of the Association (under everyone’s breath, of course, not to offend Dan). And if Adam knew what she was going to do! If Adam had any inkling that Eve Feinstein, a woman without secrets, was about to enter Dan Weingarten’s Leechee Grove and come out with a pan full of leechees, he would hit the roof.

And then it would be done, and no one would know. Not Dan, not Adam, not anyone else in the community–just Eve, and the snake.

This time the snake did not block Eve’s path when she rushed into the house, into the kitchen, and located a Tupperware cup in the bottom cupboard for the task.

To her surprise, when she emerged again, the snake had disappeared. She half expected him to be waiting for her at the Leechee Grove gate. Eve felt even more exhilarated because it was now 3 PM, broad daylight. The residents would be incubating or napping in air conditioned comfort, away from the lawns they didn’t have to water and the hedges they didn’t have to prune. This wouldn’t be a stealth operation. Darkness would not hide her, and to her advantage the security lights wouldn’t switch on to reveal her unmistakable form.

Eve Feinstein felt almost lightheaded, almost noble. This was the right thing to do. She just knew it.

And it was all so easy. She walked toward the Weingarten double-condo as though she was heading for the mailboxes. When she got to their driveway, she headed toward the side of the house, as though on an errand, and spied the gate. There was no sign to identify its precious cargo. No signs saying “Keep Out” or “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.” No lock on the gate, which swung open easily when she undid the latch. No barking dogs. No alarms. “My God,” she thought to herself, “What has ever been easier than this?”

Eve gathered a heaping load of the reddest and fattest berries from the lowest branches of the tree.

She had never tasted a leechee and she was amazed at how easily the nut yielded at a little pressure from her fingers, virtually offering itself as a fruity sacrifice. She ate hungrily. They were sweeter than she imagined, a little acid, and she wasn’t sure she liked the texture. She ate another.

Her plan was to take the remainder, transfer them to an almost-vacant strawberry container she’d bought the week before, and leave them in the fridge for Adam to eat. Adam would ask her in all innocence, “What’s that great thing I just ate?” and she would say, “It was on special–I think it’s called mini-ruby-mango.”

She was thinking this as she shut the gate and saw Dan Weingarten standing in front of her in Bermuda shorts, caressing a nine iron.

***

The letter came to Mr and Mrs Adam Feinstein by certified mail and was signed by the Association lawyer.

Adam’s hand trembled as he read the short paragraph:

“It is my duty to inform you that you are in violation of Section III.1 of the Association Rules, subheading 4A, ‘The Leechee Grove’. The penalty for this violation is stipulated to be a fine and disqualification for residency status in Eden Gardens. The Association therefore requests per Section I.1 [Qualifications for Ownership and Residency Status in a Condominium] that you vacate the premises within 30 days of this notice. Your property will be advertised ‘For sale.’ Proceeds of the sale of the property will be distributed following the payment of all dues and penalties owed to the Association.”

Eve explained everything to Adam–the beautiful talking snake, how she had learned about his first marriage, how she had needed to do something secret, something to keep close to her heart because of what he had done and what he hadn’t told her.

She explained it calmly and as logically as possible under the circumstances, as Adam began to sob great sobs until he couldn’t catch his breath, and she thought she ought to call 911 before he had a heart attack.

“Never been married before,” he was saying between gasps. “Never.”

God Reads…

And knoweth the hearts and minds of all his creatures.

God at His Computer

Well, no–not what this is about. This is about the new genre in religion (not religious) non-fiction which I have decided to name, for lack of an original thought, “God Reads”–books that are affecting to make a new case for God, or to restate old ones.

Actually the genre goes back a few years: Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism (2005) was a little premature when it was published, barely a year before the atheist best-seller The God Delusion (yes, that Dawkins) appeared (September, 2006) and seemed to suggest an atheist sunrise instead. It was dutifully followed by McGrath’s less poignant The Dawkins Delusion (2007) which (nonetheless) is a far better read than its nasty title suggests.

Besides, the former Master of Wycliffe College, Oxford and the sometime Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science had slugged it out before, several times in fact–McGrath having the distinction of having trained as a scientist (which shows) and Dawkins having the good fortune, or sense, never to have trained as a theologian (which also shows.)

And so the back and forth was born, God’s defenders giving in equal measure what his detractors were at pains to inflict on his holy name. What was also born was a minor canon of celebrity atheists, variously called “New,” “Fundamentalist,” “Brights,” “Militant”–or merely Annoying depending what side of the line you were standing on and whose book you had read most recently.

I recall visiting the home of a kindly retired atheist couple in Tallahassee in 2007 where I had gone to debate the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne on the “God Question.” On their coffee table was displayed the whole array of new atheist titles, of which they professed to have read “only a little of Dawkins.” Still, as a Victorian mother might have the Authorized Version of the Bible handy in the parlour, a new generation had arisen who had embraced new authority and were prepared to use it (or at least allude to it in the absence of actually having read it) –In other words, just like the Bible.

In reviews and popular media, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett were dubbed, and basked in the glow, the “Four Horsemen” of a new age of scientific thinking–knights on a mission to debunk the claims and pretensions of religion. A few wannabes such as Victor Stenger (God, the Failed Hypothesis) made their literary votives to the cause as well; in some cases, their books were actually slightly better than the canonical ones. But essentially the ranks were closed, like the book of the gospels at only four.

The voice of the atheist is still heard in the land. But my guess is, the shine is off the apple and we were out of Eden anyway. Ideas that were considered titillating and slightly dangerous (who says atheism isn’t slightly sexy?) became less interesting when read. I doubt there will be a rejuvenation, a rebirth, of the surprising interest (in some cases bordering on rock star fervor), that greeted the Dawkins Revolution.

The shine was off the apple.

The current spate of God Reads is a bit more interesting, to take only two recent examples. Karen Armstrong’s the Case for God, already reviewed in these pages, is not only lacking in sophisticated theistic argument but also lacks a sophisticated thesis. This hat is so old it’s made of rabbit fur and just as fuzzy. She perpetuates the idea that religion is intrinsically good and that bad people make bad religion.
If only they would grow up, buy a shovel, and dig down to the goldmine of wisdom and niceness that lay at the heart of every faith. Armstrong seems to have bluffed her way through the history of religion for a long time, but in this book she shows a woeful lack of information about history, psychology, and anthropology and pushes a unified-theory-of-religious-thesis that was last fashionable in 1969, primarily in sanghas and disorderly convents.

Robert Wright’s seductively titled The Evolution of God (2009), a far better read than Armstrong and basically naturalistic in its view of religions, nonetheless develops a premise that is hard to swallow, or, to be fair, one that I have trouble understanding. As the New Yorker review enthused, “[Wright theorizes] that religious world views are becoming more open, compassionate, and synthesized. Occasionally, his prescriptions can seem obvious—for instance, that members of the different Abrahamic faiths should think of their religions as ‘having been involved, all along, in the same undertaking.’ But his core argument, that religion is getting ‘better’ with each passing aeon, is enthralling.”

Enthralling, sure. But if that is true, then the tendency of religion to become better must have something to do with either (a) people taking religious doctrine less seriously or (b) the secularization of society that makes religion less appealing and more vulnerable to common sense. That being so, how can anyone say that religion, as opposed to the species, is getting “better.”

Maybe no one is–exactly–and this is a quibble. As John Loftus observes, Wright’s God is illusory from an ontological standpoint: it is our attitudes about God that evolve and change, and a healthy critique of the past–including the sacred books and interpretations that form the story of the human past–are important relics of that development or amelioration. The process affects religion because it affects society in every other area. God evolves, not only man. My own guess is that Wright is being slightly mischievous. These “Abrahamic Faiths” aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, especially the most aggressive of them. Better therefore to convince the slowest to evolve that a compassionate state of acceptance is its future? I am highly skeptical.

Where are we with God Reads? Is anybody likely to have the last word in this contest of words?

Prometheus

Just now, I think, the momentum is with the Defense, the defenders of the God-hypothesis. Not in terms of argument but in terms of energy. Apologists are paying attention to names that may have been missed first time around, prior to the Dawkins Revolution. Names like Scott Atran (In Gods we Trust), Stewart Guthrie (Faces in the Clouds, a superb slightly older work that deserves reading now), Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained), Todd Tremkin (Minds and God), Barbara King (Evolving God). The pro-religion forces are reading works of cognitive science and evolutionary biology and psychology as fast as they can, and it seems to me with more at stake. You always read faster before an exam.

The God Question could not escape this lens indefinitely, and the best modern reads often begin with something like Wright’s evolutionary view rather than with the stale philosophical and theodical questions that were raised by the new atheists. Given the fact that interest in outbreaks of intellectual zeal last about as long at great awakenings in American religious history, the Dawkins phase is already looking a little quaint.

And it’s a good thing that the religious and anti-religious are reading some of the same stuff, even if they have different ends in view. When a team at the University of Montreal conducted experiments on an order of Carmelite nuns in 2005-6 (functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience), we were flabbergasted to learn that while they were subjectively in a state of union with God, “this state was associated with significant loci of activation in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem.” Can you even point to Reno on a map? I thought not.

Carmelite Ecstasy

The study (“Neural Correlates of Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns”: Mario Bauregard and Vincent Paquette) confidently concluded that “the results suggest that mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems.”

In other people, thoughts about more mundane kinds of union, puppy dogs and chocolate will illuminate the same regions. But the analogy that the physical basis of “mystical” experience explodes the reality of mystical experience (and take this from someone who likes chocolate) is a point that apologists for religion are right to challenge: It is argumentum ad superciliarum–a bit of logic based on a naturalistic smirk.

To the extent that the evolutionary and cognitive studies resemble this logic they have a long way to go. I offer the frankly disappointing view and research of Richard Hamer in The God Gene and the (antithetical) hodgepodge of material served up by Rause, Newberg and d’Aquili (all three medical doctors) in Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief as evidence of where science can lead the opposite armies.

But the debate about how God evolves or is biologically, genetically or mimetically engendered is not finally the same question as the question of the existence of God–no matter how much we want to make it that. And even if it were, we still won’t have settled the dispute between people like Hitchens, who think God is a very bad, indeed a poisonous idea, and people like McGrath who see it as the most sublime thought of which we mortals are capable.

Maybe Feuerbach was right: it all depends on what you eat.

Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon

The never-ending story in New Testament studies is first, how the gospels came to be written down (and where, and when) and how they “relate” to each other. The long-suffering faithful have for centuries–since the process of vernacular Bible translation in the sixteenth century got its legs–been encouraged to believe that the canonical order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is also a chronological order.

The belief is somewhat flimsily supported in fairly early references by writers like Papias, whose reputation as a scholar was already challenged by the man who recorded his words, the fourth century writer Eusebius, and the heresy-fighting bishop, Irenaeus–the real father of giving names and legends to the gospels.

Students studying for divinity and graduate degrees across Europe and North America have learned for more than a century that the matter of who-wrote-what-first is endlessly fascinating. The average opinion in the most prestigious and hyperactive research institutions in North America and Europe is that orthodoxy and canonicity are at best provisional ways of looking at the gospels, and, worse, misleading from the standpoint of solving the puzzle of Christian origins.

Many of these neophytes have been treated to professorial displays of source-theory so brilliant and so complicated that they could well be considered algebra. Others, so deceptively self-assured and literally faithful to ancient testimony that they cannot possibly be correct:

The standard model

Armed with only a smattering of Greek and a stash of newly- minted ingenuity, they are urged to go at the problem as though beneath it is buried a secret jewel, the pearl of great price. But it isn’t. What lay beneath the architecture and power-points, alas, are processes that the gospels themselves conceal by virtue of their simple givenness. Looking for the “origin” of a gospel is bit like looking for Jesus in the tomb on Easter morning: it was here just a minute ago.

The theory of Markan priority and the more ambitious but eventually standard “two source” hypothesis (based on the notion that Matthew and Luke embedded Mark’s gospel and must have possessed a written sayings source to account for materials not found in Mark–the variable Q will do) enjoyed sovereignty of sorts for three generations. –Mainly because it had the simplicity that mnemonics have in helping you to remember chemical formulas. {ML} = Mk+Q.

The so-called Griesbach hypothesis, in and out and up or down in favour in each generation, is just as plausible for the diagrammatics of a case: Matthew wrote first; Luke based his story on Matthew and Mark used both. It has its own bad-boy appeal, while theories of Lukan and even Marcionite priority have gotten less attention.

It is notable but unsurprising that in all of this clatter the traditional idea that consistency is not provided by literary dependence but by revelation is not discussed very much among the algebraists. Needless to say, I am not complaining about the end of supernaturalism; I welcome it, and note that in the closest book-tradition to Christianity–Islam—these priority, hierarchy and relational questions are much less important. The point is not that we should use plenary inspiration as a way of solving source- and dependence- issues, but that the complexity of some of the theories make inspiration an almost welcome relief from the haggling. –Especially (dare I say it) any discussion or theory about Q.

In a sense, Christianity brought this dilemma on itself. While divine inspiration was held up as the proof of the integrity of the gospels from very early in the tradition, it was held up in a heresiological context–that is, in the war between orthodox bishops and the religious “others,” the heretics. It involved the book itself (or books), of course, but just as much it involved the question of who can claim to be inspired and who safeguards the process through which inspiration can be validated. What (book) do you trust was inseparable from the question of who do you trust.

The suggestion that the authors were “apostles” or “apostolic men”–friends of the apostles, like Mark, allegedly, and Luke–seems gratuitous even in the context of the age. And the age, by the way, had a habit of attributing a gospel to anybody of any prominence whose legend would win hearts and minds to their cause: that is why the attribution of gnostic gospels to Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Philip, Judas and even to “Truth” sheds light on the general habit of pseudonymity and forgery.

P52

But as we know, if not through consensus, the Gnostics weren’t the first or only ones to play the name game: it was being played on the Catholic side in Paul’s name after Paul was dead, in Peter’s name, and in James’s and in Jude’s and John’s. But why stop with what we know almost certainly: it was also probably being played in the case of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, whose perilously thin legends and reputations were created after tradition (read: bishops) had named the anonymous writings ascribed to them.

Biographical authority and authenticity have to be understood against the backdrop of battles with Marcionites and harder-core separatists. It is finally solidified in Book 4 (8.2) of Irenaeus’s turgid work Against the Heresies where he claims to have compiled a book of all the “legitimate” successors of the apostles and the Lord: γενομενος δε εν ‘Ρωμη διαδοχην εποιησαμην μηχρις ‘Ανικητου…”: “And when I had come to Rome I remained there until Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherus. And Anicetus was succeeded by Soter, and he by Eleutherus. In every succession and in every city that is held which is preached by the law and the prophets and the Lord.”

Irenaeus the Fierce: Scourge of Heretics

The gospels, in this pitch and toss, are held to be locked away in safety from the corruption of heresy through the lawful succession of the western (Roman) bishops. They are “in” the church, he says as money is in a bank; the heretics are outside, “like so many weeds.” There are four of them, neither more nor fewer—just as there are four winds, four corners of the earth, four providing angels.

Irenaeus and his brother bishops were not especially concerned about the relationship between and among gospels, for the simple reason that (unlike most modern interpreters) he theorized that they constituted four independent testimonies to the truth, miraculous, therefore, precisely to the extent that there had been no consort among the authors and no copying of one to the other source. The heresy fighters were concerned with preserving traditions, the origins of which had already been lost in a century-old fog. The question of a copyist tradition only reveals itself when the belief in the miraculous four-fold testimony unravels, a chapter that began to be written at the end of the nineteenth century.

copyist

The Greek lyric poet Anacreon lived in the 6th century BCE. Through the efforts of Aristarchus (2nd century BCE) some of his work, most of its fragmentary, has been collected and survives. He was remarkable for his mastery, in some cases invention, of metrical styles and for his mastery of the Ionic dialect. (If you have not read any Anacreon lately, read, at least, “The Picture” for its lyrical elegance).

I mention Anacreon because he stands at the beginning of a long tradition of preservation through imitation. In a 1958 collection of his work by Bruno Gentili (Rome, Edizioni dell’ Ateneo) the editor for the Classical Review of that year complained that at least 37 of the poems included as genuine–based on his assessment of vocabulary, testimonia, and metrics–were not authentic and should be moved to an appendix or to the nearest dustbin.

There is even a suggestion that the editor tried to smuggle some very obviously non-anacreonic verse into the edition because he thought they were “pretty”—for shame.

What everyone knows about classical tradition, however, is that Anacreon’s name, reputation, style and prestige is preserved through the art of literary imitation. –Through copying.

New Testament scholars are very much more familiar with classical civilization than they used to be. So much so that biblical studies on the New Testament side has matured enormously in the twentieth and early twenty-first century from the parochial theological discipline it was in the nineteenth. But at a programmatic level, it needs to scrap the idea of authorial attribution completely and to acknowledge that the production of New Testament gospels, at least in the case of the synoptics, was an anacreonic process—a process of imitation, based on the desire to imitate and enhance rather than merely to produce or propagate an original. Admirers of the Jesus-story were using a prototype for copy exercises. Whose story it was is of no importance, and remains of no importance well into the second century.

There is no good reason why an anonymous copyist would have done what he did because he thought the copy he was working from was “authoritative”—and indeed it probably came to him without a titulus , that is to say, attribution. Similarly, as with the ancient tradition in letters, some copyists felt moved to add detail, story, to alter, to correct—things that biblical scholars have known to be true about the gospels for a long time–indeed have developed critical methods to cope with them–but have linked to a different set of motivations based not on what we know to be true of classical letters but what we think to be true of a sui generis form of sacred literature..

Paul: a model letter writer for later copyists

The elongation of a source by adding a birth legend or resurrection appearances is completely appropriate to the anacreonic tradition as beautification, as “outdoing” the model. The gnostic gospels which flaunt the model and seem to sing to a different harp, in this way of looking at the process, are simply failed copies. Even within the New Testament, Paul’s “authentic” if composite letters served as models for every aspiring paulinist who wanted to improve on his thought and language, the winner being the author of the letter to the Ephesians.

As with Anacreon, we know enough to know what the essential ingredients—the equivalent of the theme or metrics—would have looked like. I am not cynical about being able to construct, for example, the original narrative structure or gospel prototype. But I am completely unconvinced that any of the current gospels form that structure or that any of the received gospels is that original.

I find it more probable that we possess four of the exercises, and that these exercises have to be submitted to an analysis based not on “redaction” and tendency—fidelity to or departure from a long-gone plumb-line–as much as on the more or less purely artistic intention of the writer in terms of the story he is telling.

In fact, biblical criticism, in some of its operations, does this already but it often does it as though the question of priority is the same as the question of “source.” We do not know who wrote any gospel—not even “John’s” (and the editorial process in the Fourth Gospel is more explicit than in any synoptic). We know only one ancient collector who insisted that the source was anonymous, or more precisely “the true source”– the heretic: Marcion.

It is not surprising that to smother the effect of this radical suggestion, both copyists and fathers insisted on attribution. The gnostic penchant for attributing and the slanders of both Jewish and conservative Roman observers, with their different but equally sharp insistence on literary-historical pedigree is enough to explain the demand for named sources. But the habit, or defense, belongs to the history of apologetics and not to the earliest manuscript tradition. For all we know one such copyist may have been named Mark and another Luke. But if that is so, it is only accidentally so and they were men of no significant personal distinction. They were men who took it upon themselves to imitate, “restore” or amend the lost (or nearly lost) prototype, the master-copy of the Jesus story.

What is Fundamentalism?

I’ve been puzzling about this recently: whether there is anything that Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have in common. I’ll leave the Jews and the Sikhs and Hindus to one side for a minute. Just because I want to.

First of all, you have to have a book to be a fundamentalist. It’s no good trying to say you take your religion seriously if you don’t have a page to point at or a verse to recite.

Theoretically, various gurus can exert the same sort of control that a book can exert over the mind of a true believer. But usually gurus begin by pointing at books as well.

That’s what both Jim Jones of People’s Temple, Inc., and David Koresh of Branch Davidian fame did. They were just the messengers, albeit the ones you had to sleep with to get the keys to the kingdom.

They became convinced that they were the fulfillment of texts they’d read one too many times. In the same way, the music of rote repetition seems to inspire Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar and the late and invidious Baitullah Mehsud as well. Fundamentalists read texts written 1000 years ago as though they were hot off the press–like this from the world’s most famous MIA:

“Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)….The Arabian Peninsula has never–since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas–been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.” (1998 fatwah)

It’s so easy to forget the Crusades, isn’t it? Especially since the last one ended in 1291 with the interlopers in full retreat, barely managing to keep the booty in their saddlebags as they galloped away.

But to review, two things pop out at us immediately when you think of fundamentalism: you have to have a book that you take deadly seriously, and you have to forget that the book has a history. The second point is massively important, because it permits the fundamentalist to ignore science, cultural change, and prevents the possibility of seeing the book as being, in any sense, out of date, irrelevant, or out of touch with current political or ethical contexts. If people had prophets then, who’s to say they can’t have prophets now, say the David Koreshs and Dale Barlows of this world. We say so, say the Omar Bakri Mohammeds and Abu Izzadeens right back. After all, we’re reading different books. We can’t all be right. Fundamentalism is always particular to the truth claims of a group: one man’s fundamentals are another man’s pornography. Both responses to books written a long time ago are manifestations of historical illiteracy.

Revd Hagee

Another thing, an important feature: fundamentalists have to be right. Not in the sense you and I might be right if we scored a Daily Double on Jeopardy. Right in the sense that there has to be a slope-shouldered, humiliated wrong sitting next to it. Right in the sense that there can’t be a middle way between good and evil.

Fundamentalists have no trouble doing this because the world of late antiquity where their ideas were forged in an atmosphere of petty monarchic rivalries and mythic theomachies–mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, by the way–was an easily divisible cosmos. Us and Them, equated easily to good and evil, in political and hence in religious terms. That’s what Mani taught, what Zoroaster taught before him.

Zoroaster

It’s also what Muhammad and his followers preached, what the Qumran War Scroll is all about (1QM, 4Q491-496) and (no good trying to wriggle out of it: read Mark 13.13) what Jesus taught, in his eschatological rhapsodies at least.

The notion that in the end, “all of Darkness is to be destroyed and Light will live in peace for all eternity” is very appealing. But there’s a good chance the person next to you belongs to the other side. At least that’s what you’ve been taught. To be a fundamentalist is to have the religious equivalent of a teenager’s fear of vampires.

That’s what makes the next two characteristics of fundamentalism so important: extermination (in two forms) and conversion. The People’s Temple, the Yearn for Zion (YFZ) Mormons and the Branch Davidian “cults” created or were ready to create manufactured mini-holocausts to vindicate their beliefs.

When the sheriffs’ cars rolled up on the edge of their compounds, the sacred boundary between purity and corruption, they were ready to go home. Everything about the outside world was smutty, dirty, and unchaste–huge horrible spaces swarming with unbelievers who mocked them and raced home in a satanic frenzy to watch smutty, dirty and unchaste television shows.

They had a point of course. The culture is filled with crap and we do tend to regard people who wear gingham dresses (and worry so much about chastity that they will only have sex and babies with a purified leader) as a bit off the beam. It’s a tired observation, I know, but fundamentalism is self-marginalizing:the blessings of secular culture and the contempt of its protagonists for nonconformity serve as proof to every child eight and up that daddy and mommy are “right” because difference is the ultimate distinction.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, self-extermination, a form of martyrdom, is a way in which Christian crazies can vindicate their readings of sacred writ.

Homicidal martyrdom is the trademark of Islamic fundamentalists, a much messier way to do business. You begin with the same premise as the one quoted above from bin Laden, the exemplary coward who has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of his fans, as when he sings the praises of young men who behead unbelievers:

The youths also reciting the All-Mighty words of Quran: Smite the necks…(Muhammad; 47:19). Those youths will not ask you for explanations, they will tell you, singing, there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck smiting….They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same hell with his righteous executioner. (bin Laden, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html)

Pleasure to know moreover that the martyr-fundamentalist does not experience the excruciating pain of his bleeding or burning infidel victims; they have the word of no less an authority than Saheeh Al-Jame’-as-Sagheer, who lived “in the seventh generation” after the Prophet and attributes the saying to Muhammad. “A martyr will not feel the pain of death except like [sic] how you feel when you are pinched.”

The idea that the martyr dies painlessly while others are screeching around him is meant to be reassuring to the half-hearted volunteer, whose rational soul tells him that he has never witnessed a death free from agony and that comrades who have been wounded in engagements with the unbelievers suffer immensely. Still, they have the word of as-Sagheer ringing in their ears: “With the first gush of [your] blood, [you] will be shown thy seat in paradise, decorated with jewels.”

Finally, fundamentalism is all about conversion, heavily infatuated with growth. It isn’t enough that the fanatic kingdom-comers of the world erect temples. They want to put people in them. That requires a recruitment program.

The statistics speak for themselves. In our stunningly up-to-the-minute culture where we can instantly communicate mathematical solutions and the latest groundbreaking article in medical research from
The Lancet around the world with the flick of a key, people who think death can be like a loving pinch or noogie are clocked (in terms of percentage increase since 1989) as follows:

Islam in North America, +25%
Islam in Africa: +2.15%
Islam in Asia: +12.57%
Islam in Europe: +142.35%
Islam in Australia: +257.01%

This is not all “conversion,” of course; but conversion is a geographical and cultural mandate in Islam, and conversion from more lenient to more literal forms of Islam are also on the rise. According to an October 2009 estimate, Taliban numbers of fighters alone–those who are attracted mainly by martyrdom rather than philanthropy and virtue, went from 7,000 in Northern Afghanistan to 25,000. (Reuters, Saturday Oct. 10, 2009).

By comparison, it is becoming more difficult to define what a “fundamentalist” Christian is, potentially because the ground under his feet is more prone to cultural shift. But if we think of biblical literalism, an intolerance of “soft” forms of Christianity (often equated to a kind of mainstream heresy), the importance of conversion (in this case, evangelism), and prophetic fulfillment as the non-negotiables of fundamentalism, the following statistic is, you should pardon the expression, revealing:

Pentecostal and charismatic denominations have grown by 37% since 2001; the Churches of Christ by 48%; the Assemblies of God by 68%. (United) Methodists and Northern Baptist by 0%, Jews, -10% and Catholics, through a healthy infusion of Hispanic and Latino votaries, a mere 11%. The undeniable appeal of taking God’s word seriously is unslaked by contemporary life.

Which causes me to muse: Did you ever stop to think that no matter how many times you read Peter Pan as a child you could never quite persuade yourself that you could jump out of a third story window and fly, just by thinking wonderful thoughts? Maybe you tried launching yourself from the top bunk–just once, but never the window.

I hope I make my point.